The Mayor of MacDougal Street

by Dave Van Ronk

  The New York branch of the folk revival was strongly influenced by the Communist outlook, and one of the effects of this was that, along with performing traditional material, a lot of singers began composing topical songs based on folk models. Such urban, folk-styled creations were essentially a new music, consciously and often carefully crafted, politically motivated, and in many ways a quite different animal from anything that had come before. (The Industrial Workers of the World—IWW, or “Wobblies”—had done something similar back in the teens, but with the difference that singers like Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim were of the folk and generally set their lyrics to pop melodies or church hymns rather than to anything self-consciously rural or working-class.) It was part of the birth of “proletarian chic”—think about that the next time you slip into your designer jeans.

  The urban folksingers acquired their repertoires from books, records, collecting trips, and one another, and unlike the traditional singers, they made their commitment to folk music consciously, for political and aesthetic reasons. As a result, they generally had to adopt personae not their own, singing and writing about experiences they knew only secondhand. This made for a very unstable synthesis, full of internal contradictions, but in the late 1930s such complications were ignored in the heat of political battle and the joy of musical discovery. (Besides, introspection was a petit bourgeois luxury.) Those were urgent times, and the song for tomorrow night’s rally had to be written now, at once, immediately.

  By 1939 this movement had its nexus in a sort of commune on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village called Almanac House. The residents included at one time or another, Pete Seeger, Alan and Bess Lomax, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Millard Lampell . . . the list is long and impressive. All were songwriters to one degree or another (many collaborations and collective efforts here), but Guthrie was by far the most talented and influential of the lot. Taking pains to conceal his considerable erudition behind a folksy facade, he became a kind of proletarian oracle in the eyes of his singer-songwriter associates, who were, of course, incurable romantics. With Guthrie exercising a very loose artistic hegemony (Seeger and Lampell seem to have done most of the actual work), Almanac House became a kind of song factory, churning out topical, occasional, and protest songs at an unbelievable clip, as well as hosting regular “hootenannies.”

  While the Communist Party played a notable role in midwifing this musical movement—Guthrie even had a regular column for a while in the Daily Worker—it also presented a few problems. For one thing, there were the political shifts that found the Almanacs singing things like “Plow Under Every Fourth American Boy” and the other songs they recorded opposing U.S. entry into World War II during the Hitler-Stalin pact, then having to throw those songs out the window and replace them with “It’s that UAW-CIO that makes the army roll and go,” once Germany invaded the Soviet Union. However, I do not want to overstate the old bugaboo about “singing the ‘party line.’” While the folksingers were certainly responsive to party positions, the Central Committee not only failed to exercise tight control over them but showed a discouraging lack of interest in the whole business. The main obstacle to musical growth presented by the CP was not a matter of committee directives or party discipline but a matter of attitude. Among Progressives of the time, personal expression in music was discouraged. Art was considered to be a tool. (Or a weapon: the famous sign on Woody’s guitar, “This machine kills fascists,” is a perfect example.) As odd as it may seem to us now, many of these people were embarrassed to write a love song, because the Spanish Civil War was going on, or the steelworkers were on strike, or Mussolini was invading Ethiopia. Thus, while the songwriters around the CP had some magnificent moments, they were unable to exploit the full range of their experience, and their compositions ended up being as obsessively focused on one subject (politics) as the commercial music they despised was on another (romantic love).

  My purpose is not to chart the fortunes of the Almanacs and their various heirs and assigns through the 1940s, but only to note that their influence was fundamental and continued to grow. People’s Songs was formed as a sort of central clearinghouse for progressive folksingers, and it published a regular bulletin that was the direct ancestor of Sing Out! magazine. Then, in 1948, the Weavers reached the top ten on the Hit Parade, putting the folk revival squarely into the mainstream of American music. By this time, a good deal of ideological mellowing had been going on, and the group was—dare one say it—fun.

  It is impossible to determine what further evolutions the Weavers’ success might have sparked if the Cold War and its attendant anti-Communist hysteria had not intervened. The Red Scare that began in the late 1940s involved this country in one of the most disgracefully psychotic episodes in its history, and the blacklist damn near killed the folk revival in its tracks. The full extent of the witch hunt is rarely acknowledged even today. Most people believe it affected only public figures—people in government and the entertainment world—but that is completely wrong. Trade unions and the professions in the private sector were all profoundly affected, and for a while no one to the left of Genghis Khan could feel entirely safe. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were harassed by the FBI and threatened by vigilante anti-Communist crusaders. I had to sign a loyalty oath to get a job as a messenger, for chrissake, and I have already mentioned Lenny Glaser being fired from his job as a waiter after the FBI came around and asked the restaurant manager some pointed questions about his political affiliations. The right-wing press—which is to say, almost all of it—was running stories like “How the Reds Control Our Schools,” and the whole country was in a paranoid panic that lasted almost two decades. Leftists and intellectuals were terrorized, many essentially unemployable, not a few in prison, and a couple (the Rosenbergs) executed pour encourager les autres. Thus the cheery atmosphere of the Golden Fifties.

  When I began haunting the Village, I knew from radical politics like a dog knows his grandmother. I had read about the Wobblies and thought of them as my spiritual forefathers, but assumed that the IWW had vanished along with the five-cent beer. (As it happened, I could have found them by simply looking in the phone book: they kept a hall down on lower Broad Street.) The contemporary left was a vague and mysterious concept to me—but with McCarthy, Nixon, and their sleazy band of creeps rampaging across the land, it was clear that whatever radicals remained were in deep shit. This appealed to my contrarian streak, and I could hardly wait to get involved.

  The Communist Party was the first and most obvious candidate for my attention: it had a certain underdog appeal, and its minions were relatively easy to locate—they were as hard to find as Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon. The young CP-ers, called the Labor Youth League or LYL, would be spread out all across the park, five-string banjos and nylon-string guitars in hand, singing what they called “people’s songs.” They were very serious, very innocent, and very young, and except for talking (and singing) a lot about “peace,” their political opinions were generally indistinguishable from those of liberal Democrats. They all seemed to go to Music and Art High School, and their parents all seemed to be dentists. I remember once coming across a covey of them sitting cross-legged around a bespectacled banjoist who struck a dramatic chord and earnestly explained, “This is a song the workers sing when they’re oppressed.” In retrospect, I think they were kind of sweet, but at the time I was scornful: “This is the Red Menace?”

  A few of the CP’s older and more politically conscious people were usually on hand as well, and these I found evasive, dishonest, and ignorant. After listening to them recite their catechism, I concluded that however loathsome and psychotic the Red-baiters were, they had got one thing right: the CP was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no more, no less. They were stolid organization men, and a revolutionary looking for a home might as well have checked out the Kiwanis or the Boy Scouts.

  I was in search of a movement that somehow combined socialism with individualism—a tall order. The mode
l in my mind’s eye was the old IWW, which had no use for government as we know it, but thought the whole shebang should be run by democratic workers’ councils. As a workable blueprint, this sounded pretty far-fetched even at the time, but that bothered me not a bit. The important thing was that the world had fallen into the hands of a bunch of insane greed-heads and obviously needed a thorough overhaul.

  So there I was, sitting in Johnny Romero’s bar on Minetta one night with some of my fellow refuseniks from Richmond Hill, and we fell into an amiable political argument with some people at the next table. “What are your politics anyway?” one of them asked me.

  “I’m an anarchist,” I said. That usually shut them up.

  “Oh yeah? Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Nechaiev?”

  I was caught flat-footed. This was the first I had heard that you had to read anything to be an anarchist. It sounded distinctly unanarchistic. And who were all these Russians he was talking about? They sounded like fugitives from an obscure novel. With patient condescension, he informed me that they were essential anarchist theoreticians, and that all would be revealed to me if I showed up Friday night for the weekly forum at the Libertarian Center, 813 Broadway, third floor. I wrote down the address.

  The center turned out to be a big loft on the corner of 12th Street, which they would set up on forum nights with long trestle tables and folding chairs for about thirty people. I went down that Friday, and within a few weeks was signed up as a full-fledged member of the Libertarian League. (In those prelapsarian days, the word “libertarian” was still in the hands of its rightful owners: anarchists, syndicalists, council communists, and suchlike. The mean-spirited, reactionary assholes who are currently dragging it through the mud were not even a blot on the horizon. We should have taken out a copyright.) The league was a loose-knit anarchist group run by an elected steering committee. Discipline was voluntary—hell, everything was voluntary. It was almost purely a propaganda operation, mainly concentrating on running the forum and publishing an eight-page newsletter, Views and Comments. Unlike the Marxists, who expected “History” to descend like a deus ex machina and pull their chestnuts out of the fire, the anarchists knew how long the odds were, and they went about their business with a kind of go-to-hell, cheerful, existential despair.

  They were quite a group. Of course, there were a few old guys down there who were just lost souls looking for something to do on a Friday night, but there were also genuine firebrands who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, people who had been forced to flee Europe because of their revolutionary activities, veterans of the IWW strikes. “Mitch” Mitchell, for instance, who later got me my seaman’s papers, was the brother of H. L. Mitchell, who had been the main founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. He had fought in Spain as well, and came out of that experience an extremely bitter anti-Communist. He was convinced that he had returned alive only because he had been taken prisoner by the Fascists—that otherwise he would have been purged by his more orthodox comrades. (Tom Condit, one of my young cohorts in the league, recalls meeting a couple of people who felt this way, and if we knew two, there must have been quite a few others.)

  Listening to those guys talk provided a unique education in the ups and downs of the international left. There was a Bavarian named Franz who had been in the shop stewards’ movement in Germany, and he told me about being in Munich when they were storming the parliamentary building. Someone yelled out, “Comrades! We must preserve revolutionary order. Don’t run on the grass.” And all of these guys, with their rifles and whatever, duly filed off the grass and onto the walkways. Meanwhile, down at the other end of the path, the machine guns were waiting. Franz saw this happening, and he just threw down his rifle and walked in the other direction. Went to Hamburg, got on a boat, came to the States. But after that experience, he said, he always had a special place in his heart for the German working class . . .

  There were a lot of amusing stories around the left in those days. Tom Condit tells about going as a delegate of the Young Socialist League to a meeting to plan the 1958 May Day rally. There were people there from all the different factions, and these old guys from the Jewish organizations were getting up and making speeches in Yiddish. Things were dragging on and on, and at one point the chairman got up to say, “I must ask the comrades not to repeat what has already been said.” So Dick Gilpin sticks up his hand and says, “Excuse me, comrade chair, but what has already been said?” It was a fair question, so the chair ruled that from now on everyone must speak in English. The next guy who got up was another of these old characters, a guy named Seymour, who was a Socialist Party right-winger but also a hard sectarian who hated the Democrats and had no truck with mushy stuff. He began speaking in Yiddish, and the chair banged his gavel and said, “I must remind you that we just agreed to speak in English.” So Seymour says, “I am going to speak in English. This is the preamble.”

  Among the older members of the league, the ones I remember best are Sam and Esther Dolgoff, both very forceful characters. (At the time we knew Sam as Sam Weiner, which was his alias in the movement. Esther went by their married name, but they pretended that they were just living together, because they were very hard-line anarchists and ashamed to have gone through an official marriage ceremony.) Sam was a house painter who had taught himself six languages so that he could do translations from the anarchist press around the world. Esther had known Emma Goldman, and the story was that she had been arrested trying to smuggle Emma back into the United States, coming across the border from Canada. They had two children, Abe, short for Abraham Lincoln Brigade Dolgoff, and Dets, short for Buenaventura Durruti Dolgoff. (Durruti was a leader of the Spanish Anarchists.)

  Sam was something of a mentor to me, and would give me long lectures about the history of anarchism. He also presented me with a big, black, wide-brimmed fedora that had belonged to Carlo Tresca, the Italian American anarchist who had been assassinated in New York in the early 1940s, which I wore with great pride for several years. Unfortunately, Sam and I had a bitter falling-out over an attempt by some of us to build an alliance with the ACTU, the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. At that time, there was a whole slew of unions in New York that were more or less run by the mob and did nothing for their members; they existed for the sole purpose of signing contracts with the bosses. The ACTU people were starting a program to organize the Puerto Rican membership of the gangster unions, and some of us thought we should get involved, but Sam vehemently objected to us having anything to do with any Catholic organization, because he was a firm anticlerical. It did not even occur to him—or to us at the time, since we were all hard-core sectarians and hated the Communists like poison—that the real reason not to work with the ACTU was its role in the Red-baiting attack that had destroyed the core of industrial unionism in the United States.

  In any case, Sam hit the ceiling, and he blamed me for the whole thing. He considered me the Judas Iscariot of the anarchist movement, and he would get shit-faced drunk and come into meetings and curse me up hill and down dale. It got incredibly abusive, and there were several times when I had to be physically restrained—all in all, a very ugly situation, which hurt both of us. I remember one night he had just finished denouncing me as a tool of the Vatican or something like that, and he sat down, and then he staggered to his feet and shouted, “And furthermore, I want that fucking hat back!”

  Sam and I finally managed a sort of reconciliation, but only after several years of not speaking to each other. When Terri and I got married in 1961, I called Esther on I forget what pretext, and she asked us to come by. They were living in Co-op Village, on the Lower East Side, so we went over there and Sam gave me a book of posters by Sin, the watercolorist from the Spanish Civil War. Peace was made, but things were never the same. He was getting more and more bitter as he got older, and the liquor wasn’t helping any, besides which by that time I was becoming involved with the Trotskyists—but that’s another story.

  The politics and
the music overlapped in a lot of ways, not all of which have been understood by people who have written about the history of the folk scene. For example, some writers have concluded that those of us who chose not to sing political songs did so because we were apolitical. It is true that in some cases this choice was a reaction to the previous generation and their political affiliations, but for many of us it was a purely aesthetic decision. For myself, I was always ready to go to a rally or a demonstration or a benefit for this, that, or the other cause, and to sing my songs, but I did very little political material. It did not suit my style, and I never felt that I did it convincingly. I just did not have that kind of voice or that kind of presence. Also, although I am a singer and have always had strong political views, I felt that my politics were no more relevant to my music than they would have been to the work of any other craftsman. Just because you are a cabinetmaker and a leftist, are you supposed to make left-wing cabinets?

  That said, a great many of us drew a particularly strong distinction between ourselves and the Stalinist singers. The left was so miniscule at this point that you knew pretty much who everybody was and what their politics were, and there was a very clear split between the singers who were associated with the LYL and those who were not. The nonpoliticals and the non-Communist leftists tended to coalesce, by and large, the exception being Hof Shamir, the Zionist youth group, which was a big element at that time and tended more towards the LYL-ers.

  Overall, the CP was still the dominant influence on leftist politics. In terms of membership, it was probably bigger than everybody else combined, from the Social Democrats all the way over to the anarchists. But it was also extremely vulnerable. The Communists had been slapped silly during the witch hunt, and in that three-year period from the time of the Berlin uprising through to the time of the Hungarian Revolution, more and more of the dirt from the Kremlin was being exposed. In a way, I almost sympathized with them. I mean, put yourself in their shoes: here you are, you’ve spent thirty or forty years of your life peddling poison that you thought was candy—think what that can do to somebody’s head. On the other hand, we could see what was happening in Eastern Europe, and many of us had also had our share of run-ins with authoritarian, Stalinist die-hards in one group or another, and we knew them for the assholes they were. We of the non-Communist left, whether we were revolutionary socialists or anarchists or whatever the hell we were calling ourselves that week, felt that, as Trotsky once said, between ourselves and the Stalinists there was a river of blood. So even though we had a certain admiration for the singers who had stood up to the Red hunters, when you got right down to it we wanted very little to do with them.8