Male Speaker: Okay, well good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. My name is David Taylor, and I'm head of Research and Programs at the American Folklife Center, the sponsor of the Benjamin Botkin Lectures. And I wanted to note that this Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series is intended to provide a platform for professional folklorists and ethnographers working both in the academy and the public sector to present findings from their latest and ongoing research. This series allows us to bring to the Library cutting edge scholars in folklife and cultural heritage. And as we do this, it allows us to build our collection, since we're making a recording today of the lecture, which will go into our archive. So it's very useful from an acquisitions perspective as well. Today, it's my honor and privilege to introduce Dr. David Dunaway, today's speaker, who will talk about FBI files of important folk musicians and folklorists that were collected in the 1950s and 1960s. Let me tell you a few things about David. He's Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, and also a Professor of Broadcasting at San Francisco State University. He received his Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied folklore, history, and literature. For the past 30 years, he's been documenting the life and work of Pete Seeger, resulting in the book How Can I Keep From Singing?: Pete Seeger. This biography was published initially by McGraw-Hill back in 1981. It's been republished in a revised and updated form by Villard Press at Random House very recently. In fact, it came out just yesterday. And I've been told that copies will soon be available. Yeah, that deserves a round. [applause] Copies of course will be at fine bookstores around the country, including right here in our neighborhood at Chover [spelled phonetically] Bookstore, just down the street. So you want to look for that. Dr. Dunaway has also been an important donor of collection materials to our archive at the American Folklife Center, giving us the tapes containing the original interviews that went into his book, among other materials related to his research. In addition to his research on Pete Seeger, and writing, Dr. Dunaway has served as a visiting lecturer and Fulbright Scholar at universities all around the world. He is the author of a half dozen volumes of history and biography, specializing in the presentation of folklore, literature, and history via broadcasting. Over the last decade he has been Executive Producer of a number of national radio series for Public Radio International, and his reporting appears in NPR's Weekend Edition and All Things Considered. Please join me in welcoming Dr. David Dunaway. [applause] David Dunaway: Thank you very much. Over the last five years I've benefited from the fine work, which Michael Taft and Peggy Bulger, David Tailor, and Tod Harvey have done at the American Folklife Center. [applause] I'm deeply grateful for the existence of this and at times what I want to think of as the courage. And you'll see where courage comes in in my talk. After all, this in its earliest incarnation, the Archive of Folksong, is where Pete Seeger had his first real job, where he and Alan Lomax and their dads were launching a folk music revival which would touch on all lives. Joe Hickerson, formerly of the archive, was the first person who invited me to prepare my collection of interviews from the 1970s and '80s for the Library. Let me thank him and all the staff for helping me index, transfer, and digitize interviews, which are part of the research here. Before I begin, I have a few personal words that I would like to make. We're here on serious business today. Though to some it might sound like 50-year-old business, it is unfinished business. And you'll hear a lot of evidence today. And my job is not to bore you to death, but to document. It's not to condemn, but to report, and above all, to bear witness. And I hope you will join me in bearing witness to another time. The title of my talk comes from a joke, black humor style, 1950s. One musician says to the other, "Hey, did you hear that UAC, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, is after you? They've sent a subpoena." "After me? For what? I may have signed a petition or two, but all I do is play the violin." "There's your problem. They're accusing you of overthrowing the government by force and violence." [laughter] My intent today is to reveal in public what I unearthed in a six-year legal battle with American intelligence services over their files. I call this the Hootenanny Squad, which was pretty much hard at work at an operation I'm going to call Operation Fifth String. It's a story that had its humorous moments in a Gilbert and Sullivan vein. And if you want to laugh or boo or cheer, feel free. Tragic comic is the way I think of it in retrospect. A lot of the background material here comes from the revised edition of my biography, which looks like this. And yes, it was published yesterday. And it's got a lot of material in here. The basic story is this. For over 20 years, the FBI, CIA, and other agencies conducted surveillance on folk musicians and folklorists organizing the folksong revivals of the 1930s and 1960s. As a result of a successful suit under the Freedom of Information Act, it's now possible to reveal the text of that surveillance and how it affected the fields of folklore and oral history. This is a story of men who came in from the cold into hootenannies and union meetings and the havoc they wrought. It's a story of trash covers, of phone taps, of infiltration of informers into the folksong community. As one example to which I'll return, in 1951 the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee held hearings to prosecute a popular folksong quartet, The Weavers, for singing. What does it tell us of the U.S. government in the 1940s that they found folk music so subversive? What does it say about the power of music itself to move people to challenge a government? These are questions which perhaps we'll have time The originals of the 5,000 pages of intelligence files I declassified I hope to deposit in the Library of Congress, right alongside my collection of more than 120 transcribed, indexed, and digitized interviews on Pete Seeger and his colleagues in America's folk music revivals. This material will be mine for another book, a reflection on the oral history of America's folk music revivals, appearing at the end of 2009 from Oxford University Press. In July 1976, I decided to approach the FBI and the CIA for the documents they had on key singing groups active in America's folk song revivals. My primary focus was Pete Seeger. But because of Privacy Act limitations, I didn't go through Pete Seeger's files, but rather the groups with which he was associated. Now the Central Intelligence Agency complied quickly and released documents on four groups from which I'd requested records: The Almanac Singers, 1941, 1944, Labor Singers before and after World War II, who recorded "Talking Union." That's the first group. The second was People's Songs, a continuation of the Almanac Singers, but on a grander, national scale, a couple thousand people who tried to persuade labor unions to sing together and make song books; People's Artists, the continuation of People's Songs, a booking group from roughly 1949 to 1956. And then the fourth group was The Weavers. Some of you might be old enough to remember The Weavers. They were a folk song quartet from 1950 to 1963. And they recorded a half dozen songs which went platinum. The Weavers had the double distinction of being the first musicians to bring traditional songs to the very top of the nation's pop charts, though there are some contenders I suppose in the 1920s. They were also the first group of musicians in American history to be investigated by their government for insurrection. Pete Seeger was the founder of all these groups, and thus documents on them reflect on his own life. Now, I have here in my hand legal documents -- [laughter] -- extraordinary ones in the great lie tradition of American politics. The first is from Mr. Clarence Kelly, Director of the FBI, and it's dated May 20, 1977, "Please be advised that a review of our central records at FBI headquarters revealed no information to indicate that the group known as The Weavers has been the subject of an investigation by the FBI." That's what he said. "However, our files to contain a newspaper clipping from The Daily Worker, in which the name of this group is mentioned. Enclosed is a copy of that clipping." And down in the corner it says, "Clipped at the seat of government." [laughter] I have other such documents which contradict Mr. Kelly's comments, as you'll hear in just a moment. Now, to start, for you researchers out there who have used or are thinking now about using the Freedom of Information Act for your research, I want to pass along a tip. It's smart to file separate requests with field offices in key cities where the activities took place. So I filed in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. And very often they have files which the central headquarters has already purged, some really good material, too. Well, you wait 90 days for a response, and then you file suit. Or I filed suit. And fortunately, I found an ACLU member, Steven L. Mayer of Howard Rice in San Francisco, who took on the case pro bono. His large and important form in San Francisco didn't do FOI law. But Steve Mayer was a childhood friend and he was willing to stick it through. And it took us five and a half years to prevail. During each of these years, I paid for court costs, and I read depositions, and I reviewed fragmentary and redacted documents, pages with only two lines, and they weren't even good lines in some cases. But after the suit was filed against the FBI, the first half dozen boxes of documents on The Weavers and others arrived. Month after month, we went to court to insist that the government document its deletions on the basis of what is called a Vaughn [spelled phonetically] Index, one that sites specific reasons for each deletion paragraph by paragraph. Another tip for researchers: intelligence officers tend to respond to FOIA suits by denying access to the whole document. But they are technically supposed to release materials that are reasonably segregable. And, well, for several years we sought each paragraph of each document. That is to say, the government had to provide a specific exemption for each paragraph and each document. This is the law. And when you consider the thousands of pages of documents, you can imagine what a task this was, both for us and for the FBI. One day after court adjourned, I stopped in the echoing hall. I filed my suit in San Francisco because I was then a graduate student at Berkeley. I asked the attorney defending the government why the FBI cared so much about these documents. Many of them were 35 years old. I put it to him that these documents probably should not have been classified in the first case, and that perhaps they were in themselves dubious. So why were they fighting so relentlessly? "Look," he told me, "I actually work in water law." [laughter] "They're short staffed around here. I didn't ask for this suit. The reason the FBI's defending itself vigorously is because they fear criminal charges for their staff. Not all of the acts involved here have statutes of limitations. They're worried if they're released, somebody might file a civil suit, particularly against the agents involved." I said, "Hey, wait a second, there's no way to know who those agents are, for goodness sake. That's one exemption the courts never breach." He turned and walked briskly down the hall, his jacket flapping at his side. "What can I say? It's the FBI." Well, by the summer of 1981 we prevailed, and the government paid court costs and my attorney's fees. And Steve Mayer, who attended Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton, does not come cheap. It cost the government better than $20,000, not including court costs, just to defend this, not including their own internal fees. Unfortunately the government delayed so long that in the first edition of my biography of Pete Seeger, it was published by McGraw-Hill with only a few episodes of the FBI's involvement. More material's found its way into the new edition. We don't have books for you today, but we do have a publication announcement, which should be outside. And I understand the books will come pretty soon. I'm now going to give you the data on which my research has been based. The first mention of Pete Seeger in FBI files comes when this tall, lanky banjo player, whose voice had yet to knit [spelled phonetically], was in his 22nd year, playing with a labor song group, The Almanac Singers. The group included a dozen musicians: Josh White, Lee Hayes, Sis Cunningham, Woody Guthrie, Gordon Freeson, many more, in fact, so many of them that when they showed up for one gig, the group that hired them said, "Who are you?" And they said, "Well, what do you mean who are we? We're The Almanac Singers." They said, "But you're not the same Almanac Singers we hired last week." [laughter] "We don't have groups like them anymore," Arlow [spelled phonetically] Guthrie said. "They rehearsed on stage." [laughter] The Almanac's sang in your face, topical songs. On a CIA tour in July 1941, they reached San Francisco to sing for the International Longshoreman's Workers Union, Harry Bridges' union. And this is a quote from Pete Seeger. "When we walked down the aisle of a room where 1000 local members of the longshoreman's union were meeting, we could see some of them turning around in surprise and disapproval. "What the hell is a bunch of hillbilly singers coming here for? We got work to do." But when we finished singing "The Ballad of Harry Bridges" for them, the applause was deafening. We walked down the same aisle on our way out, and they slapped Woody on the back so hard they nearly knocked him over. Well, Seeger didn't know it, but among those pounding Woody was an FBI operative. He didn't enjoy the show. In his report, he characterized The Almanacs as "extremely untidy, ragged, and dirty in appearance." [laughter] Well -- and further, the song leading technique that they used did not escape FBI attention. "After going through the song once, the majority of the audience joined in singing," noted the informant. "They joined in not from their own desire, but were led into it by mass psychology and apathy toward the utter control of the meeting by Communist officers and members." And I think there you have a fairly accurate slice of life for the FBI. The FBI took particular exception to one line in "The Ballad of Harry Bridges," "The FBI is worried. The bosses there are scared." Washington sent out three communiqus warning field officers to watch out for any Almanac Singers in their midst. And from this point on, Pete Seeger's career held great interest After the Pearl Harbor attack and America entered the war, The Almanac Singers were finally singing beat Hitler songs and sort of on the same side as our government. And overnight -- well, within a week -- they were national stars, a ragtag bunch who managed to sing on all four networks at once. But a few journalists remembered their earlier peace songs before we were in the war. And they passed information to the FBI, who in turn stepped up efforts to find the traitors behind the "Songs for John Doe." Well, various field offices tried to avoid jurisdiction. And the New York office lost. And there the file labeled "Gramophone Records of a Seditious Nature" reopened. At this point a year and a half had passed since the records had been issued. When the FBI finally got into the office of Keynote Records, the managed boldly told them the discs were collectors' items. "Things have changed since these were recorded." Satisfied that subversion had been checked, on April 28, 1943, J. Edgar Hoover wrote the New York office to call off the chase. He was mad though. The records that had started the investigation were now broken. "See to it," Hoover sternly noted, "that records are more carefully packed in order that incidents of this type will not reoccur." During the war it was the Department of the Army who kept an eye and ear on Seeger. They called him a subversive. And they actually kept him from shipping out to the Pacific with his colleagues and bunkmates. I've wondered what would have happened if Pete Seeger had gone to fight World War II in the company of an all Southern battalion. Would we now be singing Jimmy Rogers songs? Would we be singing those old southern hymns that they brought to him? In 1942, on the troop ship to Saipan, the FBI added Seeger's first mention to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Now, I have to stop here and say the government justified many of its deletions on the ground of law enforcement. But in defending their actions, they never specified exactly what laws The Almanacs or The Weavers or for that matter any -- had broken. And I think it's important to know publicly that in none of these thousands of pages is there an allegation or a finding that any of these singers had committed any illegal or violent action. I do want to play you a little bit of a song, though, that will give you some sense of what the response was to these investigations. Because these responses -- you know, people knew about the FBI. They knew about the Central Intelligence Agency. They knew about the interest of these communities, and particularly the investigating committees. And here's a song that was made up to respond to it. It's simply called "In Contempt." [music] This is from an obscure Folkways release in the 1950s, a live People's Song hootenanny, that the Smithsonian has in their collection. And it shows that there was indeed cultural resistance to this process. Well, after World War II Pete Seeger came back from the South Pacific and he wanted to start a national organization. People's Songs officially began on January 31, 1946 in New York. It was kind of a reunion of The Almanac Singers, with the idea of making a singing labor movement. It had some initial success. They set up chapters in dozens of cities, and included in their sponsors Leonard Bernstein, Mark Blitzstein [spelled phonetically], Oscar Hammerstein -- that's a lot of steins -- Judy Holliday, John Houseman, Burl Lives [spelled phonetically], Ilia Kazan [spelled phonetically], even humorist Dorothy Parker. But unions in this post-war period proved unresponsive to efforts to prepare union song books and getting people to sing at union rallies. The FBI might have had something to do with this -- this is speculation -- because they had not one but two informants in the group from their very first organizing meeting where Paul Robeson spoke. A few months later, by March 1947, the local offices were filling with reports on People's Songs hootenannies with lines like "They play folk songs where the hoity toity red intellectuals gather." In April, the Los Angeles office sent an agent to investigate the west coast chapter of People's Songs. Here they discovered the organization was run by one Pete Sooger [spelled phonetically]. [laughter] The agent had the misinformation to chat with Boots Cassetta [spelled phonetically], a slim, energetic man, persuasive enough to sell Good Humor ice cream to Alaskans. Boots managed actually to extract a contribution from the FBI man and thrust in his hand the first People's Songs issue. In -- let's see -- in May 1947, the Bureau discovered Walter Steel [spelled phonetically], a man who had the exotic title of Chairman, National Security Committee of the American Coalition of Patriotic, Civic, and Fraternal Societies. And his testimony landed right in the FBI files. What the FBI lacked in accuracy they made up in bulk. And in the next two years the Bureau compiled 500 pages on People's Songs, including stolen and photocopied documents, phone calls recorded without warrants, infiltration of People's Songs board meetings. In fact the FBI took People's Songs more seriously than the labor unions or the Communist Party did. And perhaps in its humdrum way the Bureau was an accurate critic. Its analysts realized more fully than Seeger the limits of song in producing change without a mass social movement. They understood that Seeger sang for Red intellectuals rather than a large section of the working class. Yet the FBI concluded that Pete Seeger threatened national security, for his songs nourished radical community. Now one of the main functions of these FBI investigations was to provide dossiers to the Un-American Activities Committee. The first of these, I believe, to investigate People's Songs, was the so-called Tenney [spelled phonetically] Committee, the Committee on Un-American Activities in California. And after listening to concerts staged by People's Songs, the investigators dissected its Board of Directors, which included a Doctor B.A. Botkin, "until recently archivist of the Library of Congress in the American Folk Song Division," and of course the man whom we honor today in this ongoing lecture series. This report ended up in the field offices of the FBI. And it ended up in the People's Songs file. The next investigation is the 80th Congress's of the Civil Rights Congress, where the composer Earl Robinson is listed. And then the next one was the 83rd Congress's investigation of Communist activities in the San Francisco Bay area. On December 2, 1953 they listed a student at Berkeley as the local leader of People's Songs. And they -- who said, "Well this is really very much along the lines of some of the things that Burl Lives does, sea shanties." To that the FBI replied to the committee in testimony, "Not shanties, but chants, chants in that type of music. But the words in the songs, it was Communist propaganda. Isn't that right?" He later on went on to site the People's Songs as "following the Communist Party line as assiduously as do the people behind the organization. And I suppose there might be some truth to that. By 1954, House investigation into Scientific and Cultural Conference for World Peace sited People's Songs which "time and time again has been used by the Communists as decoys for innocents, for entrapment of innocents." The report sited 21 members of the organization, folklorists Norman Katz [spelled phonetically], Allen Lomax, and B.A. Botkin. The FBI investigations went up to its highest level, with J. Edgar Hoover personally writing to the special agent in charge of the New York City field office about People's Songs in 1948. I'm now going to go on to People's Artists and The Weavers. People's Artists was essentially a booking agency. And from July 2, 1947 to February 15, 1957, they were under extensive surveillance by the FBI. For the first two years they spelled Pete Seeger's name S-E-E-G-A-R. They still hadn't gotten that right. The FBI files on the group include research conducted by the Naval Intelligence Office, the U.S. Air Force Special Investigations Office Security Division and the Department of the Army. Surveillance consisted of clipping The Daily Worker for performances, picking up leaflets at concerts, documenting days, times, and contents of its meetings. I think many of us really have to thank the FBI for its detailed record keeping in this area -- [laughter] -- which is helping researchers document a lot of these activities. On April 30, 1951, a confidential informant observed a contract -- I guess that's in quotes -- between People's Artists and the Communist Party's preparation for May Day. July 21, 1952, a phone tap overhead Erwin Silver [spelled phonetically] discussing a caravan for defense of a political prisoner, Roosevelt Ward [spelled phonetically]. By November 1952, People's Artists had at least one and possibly two members of the FBI or informants for the FBI on their Board of Directors. Not December 7, 1953, J. Edgar Hoover himself telegraphed the FBI's liaison in Ottawa to mention that a Canadian bookstore had been found selling records from People's Artist. Immediately the Quebec government closed down the bookstore. By November 1954, they stole and photocopied documents from People's Artists on contracts and bookings. August 2, 1956, there's a letter from Hoover himself to the Assistant Attorney General of the United States, specifying that a technical installation was to be used on People's Artists. And then a few months later, just as the FBI was completing its investigation to document them as subversive under Executive Order 10540, the organization dissolved for lack of funds. That did not stop the FBI, however. And after their death, they kept going, preparing a brief for the Subversive Activities Control Board to designate the no longer existing People's Artists as a Communist front. Unfortunately, according to the Bureau's files, its informants either wouldn't testify or they decided their evidence wouldn't stand up in court. So what are we talking about during this period? Well, the intelligence agencies conducted trash covers -- that's going through their trash -- phone taps, mail intercepts. Among the scams that were run was to send in a phony typewriter repairman to People's Artists to install a bug in a typewriter; not the best place, I would think, to put a recording device if you think about it. If you're listening, I feel sorry for -- and if all this sounds more like a Cold War spy drama or novel than the government's criminal investigative agencies, it is nonetheless true. I have documents here with me, a few of them that actually list the extent of the holdings. Well, Pete Seeger, after all this happened, was trying to find another way to support himself around 1950. And today it's not widely known that he tried to become a folk song collector. Well, he was a folk song collector obviously, but he tried to get this going. And in 1950 he applied for Guggenheim to study banjo techniques. Turned down. Later in the next year he wrote the Library of Congress to propose they film his banjo techniques in slow motion for the Archive of American Folk Songs, as I believe it might have been called at that time. Fortunately we now have that footage, which Toshi [spelled phonetically] Seeger shot. And it's among the many treasures in the American Folk Life Center. And I guess Michael Taft won't mind if we say that in the next year or so, a Pete Seeger discography may also appear on their site. It's over 200 pages long, because Pete Seeger may be the most recorded musician It will also, I hope, appear in print. But back to our story, because unbeknownst to Seeger, there had been a post war change at the Library of Congress. The former head of the archives, Ben Botkin, had quit, as documented in Peter Bartess' [spelled phonetically] 1982 Penn dissertation, A History of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. There's a cloud of different interpretations about his departure, Botkin's departure. Bartess mentions a "lingering suspicion that Botkin was victimized by the era of McCarthyism." Ray Corsin [spelled phonetically], Botkin's assistant, suggested that the blacklist played a part in Botkin's decision to leave. A folklorist at the 2007 AFS meeting suggested that his dismissal from the Library of Congress raised the issue of anti-Semitism at that time. He, Bartess, writes that the appointment of Duncan Emerick [spelled phonetically] as archive head was "the final step in purging itself of representatives of previous decades of social activism, such as Alan Lomax." Emerick, a military historian under General Eisenhower, began on October 24, 1945. By 1947 his annual report referred to "extending Russian influence." Bartess characterizes him as a man of conservative politics who let it be known he had contacts. In secret, the FBI had been in touch with Emerick, and Emerick had begun volunteering materials to him. As soon as People's Songs ended, he handed the Bureau his file of complimentary copies of the Bulletin. I hope you guys got it back, by the way, at some point. Next, he turned over Pete Seeger's letter to them. He told the FBI of his alarm -- and these are from FBI documents -- "at the efforts of Communists and Communist sympathizers to infiltrate and gain control of folk singing." Emerick worried that these singers "might be unpatriotic." Eventually he wrote Seeger "regretting" that he had no resources to spare in his folk song collecting efforts. Pete Seeger had to find some other way to make a living. Well, many of you know how the story goes from there. As a last resort, [unintelligible] as the French say, he and some friends started singing nightclub. And the world found them. The Weavers were America's most popular singing group in the 1950s. "Goodnight Irene," "Sena Sena" [spelled phonetically], "So Long It's Been Good to Know You," these were heard all over the United States. They played the country's fanciest nightclubs. At one point they were promised their own weekly television show sponsored by Van Camp's Pork and Beans. When the black list occurred, the show was cancelled. But the singers got to keep their complimentary case of beans. [laughter] They need them; nobody was paying them beans for their singing. To understand the lengths to which the FBI went in trying to thwart this popular singing group, it might be worth considering what Pete Seeger said. A lot of people on the left, as on the right, were convinced that there was going to be a full scale war between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, and that in order to prosecute this war, the American ruling class would have to call for a dictator, whether McCarthy or someone else. It's also appropriate to mention that this is the same period in which detention camps, preventive detention camps, were opened in Pennsylvania for American liberals and Communist sympathizers, as they called them. I don't know where they are now. But even the astonishing success of The Weavers would not suffice to stop them -- them being in this case the FBI. Harvey Mattuso [spelled phonetically] on June 16, 1950, suggested to the FBI that The Weavers weren't maybe doing anything wrong, but the FBI should keep an eye on them. Well, the Bureau needed no such prompting. They already had a file on The Weavers before The Weavers had the name The Weavers. Army intelligence reports and particularly files from Counter Attack -- I don't know whether you know that name Counter Attack, but in 1950 you would have. Founded by three ex-FBI agents who hinted of access to confidential files, Counter Attack was half gossip, half conspiracy newsletter, the FBI's unofficial leak. In the 1950s, of course, anti-Communism was big business. Senate and House committees flew in ex-Communist consultants, paying by the day to stretch out testimony. At 24 dollars per subscriber, Counter Attack grossed 100,000 dollars a year. That was money in those days. The editors also operated a clearinghouse, American Business Consultants. That means you could go to them and say, "I repent. I regret. Here's your money." Five thousand dollars was the going rate in those days. And then they would declare your loyalty was sufficient With the help of Counter Attack, the Bureau scored a whole series of direct hits on The Weavers. First, a scheduled spot on The Dave Garraway [spelled phonetically] Show melted away. I asked Dave about this. He said, "Oh, I don't know anything. I was talent. Ask the producer." Then on August 9, 1951, the Governor of Ohio, Frank Lausche, wrote the FBI for confidential information on The Weavers, who were to appear at the Ohio state fair. His request put Hoover in a spot. The requests were clearly confidential. No private individual, not even a governor, had the right to examine them. But Hoover's zeal, I think, got the best of him, and he passed along the information. The Weavers were cancelled so fast that there wasn't time to take their name out of the program. They had no idea what happened. But when they reached Ohio, they were tailed everywhere they went. When they rehearsed in hotel rooms, they were warned not to close the doors, for fear the vice squad would come in. There were three guys and a woman. Of course I should say their names: Ronnie Gilbert was the woman, Fred Hellerman, Lee Hayes, and Pete Seeger. And then they had various other incarnations later on. Lausche promised Hoover not to reveal where he got his facts. And then he sent them off to some reporters that he knew. [laughter] Frederick Waltman [spelled phonetically] of the New York World Telegram published an expose of The Weavers. And they came down from rehearsing in their hotel room one day and discovered these headlines, front, all across the papers, "Weavers Declare As Reds." Can you imagine? It's like out of the 1940s, when they walked down stairs and they see your name on the front page of the paper. It really happened to them, Ronnie Gilbert told me. And this is from the FBI's deposition to me. In August 1951, an internal security investigation was begun on The Weavers to determine whether the organization was in fact Communist dominated or influenced, and whether or not the Department of Justice should term it subversive. The investigation also served to determine if the organization or any of its members were in possible violation of one or more of the following statues; Title 18, U.S. Code 2383, Rebellion or Insurrection; Title 18, U.S. Code 2384, Seditious Conspiracy; Title 18, U.S. Code Section 2385, Advocating the Overthrow of the Government; and they threw in the Internal Security Act of 1950 for good measure. Well, the FBI's interest in folk music did not stop here. The Bureau recruited informants, including some who went on to small and large careers in folk music. The Bureau would approach a singer known to be on the outs with People's Song. Somebody wouldn't do benefits, or missed a political criticism for censorship. The agent would appeal to the individual's patriotism, to his "good reputation," and occasionally to private information at their disposal. The FBI had everything; the date the subject's father Americanized his name, the informer's fear that his name would be made public. Then there were of course the many volunteers that were placed in there. Now, I'd like to tell you a story before I conclude, a short little story here, I guess. It's the day I won by suit and the documents were released. My attorney sent over a courier to pick up the boxes of documents, which the FBI provided to the judge to review in camera. Now judges receive these files uncensored, so they can evaluate the exemptions. The clerk of our district court, though, was new. And he was green. When the courier arrived, he handed him all the files, all the files. And for 24 hours I had more information than I was supposed to, and more than I wanted to know. For the uncensored files included not only all the passages which the government had previously blacked out, they included the names and identify T numbers of informants in the folk music world. Now this is information I cannot share with you. Those involved today are in their 80s. Many of them still perform or broadcast. By and large they were recruited from left wing groups opposed to the Communist Party, such as the independent socialist parties, which definitively split with their Communist comrades. And that I'm afraid is all I can tell you. Because the morning after I received these documents and had finished massaging my jaw from where it had stuck open, I got a call from my attorney. "You shouldn't have those files, you know," he said quietly over the phone. "I know. They're amazing." "There's material here which you can't use. The men in black shoes are on their way over right now to take these documents back and give you the set you were supposed to receive with court approved deletions. And they have an affidavit for you to sign. You better sign it. It says that you will never publicly disclose or otherwise publish the identity of the informants or FBI agents involved. They're really mad. You better sign it." And so I signed it. And I never have. But perhaps when I'm a very old man -- [laughter] -- and there's little that can be done to me, I will write all this information down. But until then, the best I can suggest is to use what one archivist called the evidence in the asterisks. Or you could look at the notes in my biography. In the end all these documents came now just from the FBI and the CIA, but from the Department of the Army, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Navy, the Department of the Air Force, the Department of the War, and from right here at home, the Military District of Washington. Who knew that all these federal agencies cared about folk singing? Were they starting a group and looking for a good banjo player? To this day I don't understand it. There's a postscript to this talk. It wasn't just folk songs that the FBI investigated. They investigated Louie Louie, which some of you know from The Kingsmen, one of the classic rock songs. The day it was recorded, the singer The Kingsmen had a terrible cold and couldn't pronounce all the words completely so they could be understood. And as a result, a set of dirty lyrics began circulating, and parents were sending the dirty lyrics to the FBI. And the FBI opened an 18-month investigation into Louie Louiay. What can I say? Thank you for your attention. [applause] If you have any questions or comments... Male Speaker: I was late. Can I get some papers [unintelligible]? Male Speaker: Sure, we have some for you, I think outside. Do we have some questions? Yes, sir. Male Speaker: I know you can't name any informants, but were there any names on that list that really jumped out at you, surprised you that they would have been an informant? David Dunaway: Yes. [laughter] Male Speaker: Andy. Male Speaker: David, how late did those investigations -- did they continue -- how late into the '60s was that still going on? Do you know? David Dunaway: Yes. At the occasion of the archive's Seeger Symposium, which was held in this building I believe, I took a day off and went to the National Security Archives, were there's a lot of valuable information in the Senate hearings. And I discovered that as late as 1968, the FBI was preparing information. There's a six-page, single-spaced document there on Pete Seeger, which lists every date he sang for every cause. It's great if you're making a chronology of Seeger during those years, because you've got date after date after date after date, six pages, single-spaced. And I suppose I have to tell you the last document in the file -- and this is not a funny story -- but it is the case that in 1968 Pete Seeger was asked to write a song for the 1968 Olympics. He couldn't, but his daughter went. His daughter was, in fact, arrested upon returning from a demonstration. She was put in jail for six months for attending a demonstration in Mexico City. That's all she ever did, six months. Male Speaker: Was that Mica [spelled phonetically]? David Dunaway: That was Mica Seeger, yes. And there's a clipping from this in The New York Times, which found its way into the Center Internal Security Committee files. And in it, penciled in blue is a little final note. And it goes like this. "Save this clipping to start a file on second generation Commies like this girl." And it was signed J, 1968. Yes. Female Speaker: Do you know about other folk singers of the period [unintelligible]? David Dunaway: Well, of course Phillox [spelled phonetically] came on a little later in the scene. And Phillox is deceased. And that means of course that Privacy Act exemptions no longer apply. And a researcher could go through this identical process for Phillox or anyone else. There are a lot of important documents yet in FBI files. I would certainly go field office route as well. Male Speaker: Did any of the investigations or recruiting come into the Library of Congress? David Dunaway: Well, they started from the Library of Congress in the instances that I've mentioned. I don't know. I wasn't of course at the Library of Congress. In some cases, I wasn't born when these documents were generated. I don't know the extent of other forms of cooperation from this institution. But I suppose the Library of Congress has an FBI file, and you could perhaps ask for that. And again, I don't want to restrict this to the FBI or to target the FBI unfairly. They were part of obviously a coalition of agencies who were doing this kind of work. Female Speaker: Is there any connection between the anti-war movement and whether or not the CIA and the FBI were involved? Because I find it very strange that [unintelligible]. David Dunaway: You must understand that I'm really working from a very limited set of data. It's simply four groups. And the last of these groups went out of business in 1957. So the fact that they're still chasing them down and filing material 11 years later suggests that the FBI was long on follow-up. And I would suspect that during the anti war years, there was of course this famous program called CoIntelPro, which did engage anti-war activists for sure. And again, this is something that I have to leave to another researcher to take care of. Well, thank you very much. This is, as I say, tragic comic. But I appreciate your coming. [applause] Female Speaker: David, did you get to say a little about the forthcoming work on the oral history? David Dunaway: Well, I have donated to the Library here 120 oral history interviews around many of the figures were known here. And if you need to leave, just go right ahead, no problem. I know we're running out of time. And I'm going to mine these for volume. We don't have a title for it yet, tentatively, Folk Music: More Than a Song. But it will be from Oxford. It will at the end of 2009. And it will look chronologically at what I consider three folk music revivals, '30s/'40s, '50s/'60s, and now what Rolling Stone recently called The YouTube Folk Revival. Male Speaker: Okay, thanks everybody.