I came across an article by Al Jazeera-America on Pete Seeger, actually a fairly decent article  titled "In Defense of Pete Seeger, American Communist" by Bhaskar Sunkara a writer whose work I am not familiar with.  Except for one ancien regime red-baiter, who threw in the work of the two leading professional anti-Communists, Harvey Klehr of Emory University and John Haynes of the Library of Congress, who have dedicated themselves to scavenging in Soviet and other archives to  show the CPUSA was a "fifth column" for global Soviet espionage(a continuation of what one might call the HUAC school of History) all of the comments were positive about Seeger. 

But, I found the author's attempt to disconnect Pete and for that matter rank and file CPUSA members from both the Party leadership and the world movement by kowtowing to old fashioned anti-Soviet stereotypes as doing a disservice to Pete and for that matter all CPUSA activists past and present.  Below I have cut and pasted my response to the article.  Readers can I am sure google the article itself if they wish
# norman markowitz 2014-01-29 15:31

There is a serious flaw in this tribute. Peter Seeger continued to sing at CPUSA functions and work with CPUSA organizations. He was a Communist with a small c but he never denounced big C Communists and he always understood that the CPUSA since its founding as been vital force to educate, organize and coordinate working class struggles. The majority Communist movement supported the Soviet Union as a bulwark against fascism and imperialism, which it was and also as the first revolutionary socialist state in history. The demonization of Joseph Stalin as an individual, making him into a Red Adolf Hitler, became a central ideological weapon in the cold war through the world. The Communist parties of France, Italy, China, Vietnam, and South Africa, to name but a few, supported the Soviet Union and continued to do so because its role in the world. The CPUSA, like the SACP, faced with political segregation and outright persecution(the SACP of course at a much higher level) when faced with both institutional racism and institutional anti-Communism, refused to kow tow to their enemies signing the equivalent of an "anti-Stalinist loyalty oath." The various left factions who attacked "Stalinism"(mos tly Trotskyist groups) were unable to gain or accomplish anything much in the U.S.(some later became neoconservatives)
Pete Seeger belongs to the whole left, the broad left. The article in that sense does him a disservice