I suspect that Spengler and I grew up about the same time in NYC, and while I was not a red diaper baby, many of my friends were. They had gone to the “Little Red Schoolhouse”...no joke, btw...or to some other hotbed of leftist brainwashing, and in my neighborhood, the Upper West Side, they received more spiritual foundation at the Ethical Culture Society (the Jewish version of Unitarianism). Many of them went to Communist summer camps in New Jersey where they sat around and sang “folk songs,” or at any rate the 1930s leftist version thereof. Pete Seeger revived these for another generation and even added his own silly, clumsily strummed, tuneless propaganda songs.
However, I do have to give him credit for one thing: he used his clout to spearhead the cleanup of the Hudson River, which during my childhood, was an open sewer. Literally. You could barely breathe in Riverside Park when the wind was blowing off the Hudson, and I never did figure out how anybody could go boating on it. Much less fish...I used to see black people standing on along the wall of the marina, dangling their lines among the turds to catch eels. I guess they had inoculated themselves against cholera from years of fishing in this sewer.
There was also a tremendous amount of industrial pollution, so they should have been glowing in the dark, as well!
Many, many people worked on the project to clean up the Hudson, but it was basically Pete Seeger’s fame that got the city and state to finally focus on it and provide money for cleaner sewage systems, enforce better industrial waste disposal, etc. And now it’s lovely and I always go down without holding my nose and have a glass of wine at the café near the boat basin. So I have to give him credit for at least that good thing!
I wish you’d share more stories of your childhood on the Upper West Side. I’m fascinated by it as a subculture.