When Seeger arrived in Pittsburgh in April 1962, he was out on bond while still in the process of appealing his case in the courts. His stop in Pittsburgh involved two planned events—a performance for WQED on a program titled Dimple Depot and a concert at the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association. Initially, everything appeared to be moving forward without much controversy. On April 10th, The Pittsburgh Press even published a short summation of the intended program on WQED. According to the ad, Seeger would talk about folk music and perform with children from the local Falk School.
Two days later, WQED announced a sudden change to their programming; Seeger would be removed from Dimple Depot. In a statement released to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the network placed the onus for the decision on the public: “From the number of protesting telephone calls and letters we have received, the public apparently does not want to hear him.” After the cancellation at WQED, A.J. Auerbach, the director of the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association, assured the public that Seeger’s concert at the organization’s venue would be a “non-political” performance with “no speeches.” Even though a concert promoter insisted that the performance would have nothing to do with Seeger’s “politics but with his talents as a folk singer,” the show was canceled shortly thereafter.
However, the impassioned response to these two acts of cultural suppression proved that Pittsburgh was no monolith. Protestors surrounded both venues, carrying signs such as “Let Freedom Ring, Let Seeger Sing!,” “Welcome Pete,” and “Don’t Judge Art by Politics.”
Other forms of resistance also emerged. City council member James Craig Kuhn and a group of prominent Pittsburgh figures in the public eye, including faculty from the University of Pittsburgh, issued a formal statement that petitioned WQED “to allow Pete Seeger to perform on Monday as originally scheduled” so as to “uphold American freedom of expression against the few in this community who would weaken it in the misguided belief that to censor music is to defend democracy.” Despite these campaigns, WQED did not retract the decision, and Seeger remained without a venue.
As the debate intensified, some critics of Seeger minced no words as they justified the suppressive actions. An editorial in The Pittsburgh Press described Seeger as an “effective exponent of the Communist Party line” whose “red propaganda” amounted to nothing more than “the party line in song.” In the article “WQED Did Right in Seeger Affair,” Win Fanning of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette offered an apologia for the network, underscoring Seeger’s alleged connections to “Communist front associations” as well as the artist’s refusal to deny his communist beliefs before HUAC. According to Fanning, Seeger should have never been invited in the first place.