If you read the entire article in the August 31 issue of The New York Sun by historian (and Friends of Old-Time Music founder) Ron Radosh, you will discover that Pete Seeger wrote The Big Joe Blues in 1982. The condensation in The Chicago Tribune is old news. As other people have pointed out, what Seeger said to Radosh is substantially the same as what he wrote in the first edition of Where Have All the Flowers Gone? in 1993: "At any rate, today I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was simply a 'hard driver' and not a supremely cruel misleader."

That being said, Radosh is the latest in a group of critics who have raised an important issue. That is, why do so many biographers, journalists, filmmakers, and historians tread so lightly (if at all) when dealing with subjects who have a Communist Party past? Not all of the critics who have raised this issue have been on the political right. Some have been independent socialists, Trotskyists, or anarchists. Others have simply been people of all political leanings who feel the issue is important enough to deal with squarely.