First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended a Valentine’s Day dance on February 13, 1944 at the newly opened United Federal Labor Canteen in Washington, DC that was sponsored by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Unusually for the time in heavily segregated Washington DC, it was a racially integrated event, a cause that Eleanor endorsed. Folk singer Pete Seeger performed, seen in his Army uniform delighting Eleanor and the other members of the military there.

Two decades later, Eleanor would write about Seeger’s plight because of his alleged political activities in her Jan 15, 1962, My Day column:

Last night I met two young men, Michael and Philip Burton, who had invited me to see a short film called “Wasn’t That A Time?”, which they had financed and produced entirely by themselves. It is a documentary on the subject of what happened to the lives of individual human beings, or members of their families, who had been called before the Un-American Activities Committee. It is in no way an exhaustive study of this committee or of the results of its activities. It simply takes three of the people who have been called for questioning and shows some of the effects on their lives and also on some of the members of their families…. The other case is that of Pete Seeger, the folk singer. He lives not far from me near Beacon, N. Y., and is loved by many people, young and old, who have enjoyed his music. The accusation against him was that he had performed before very questionable, even Communist, groups—although I doubt that Seeger, like most performers, could list the innumerable people before whom he has played and sung. He has refused to take the Fifth Amendment because he felt that could be construed as an admission of guilt, and chose instead to invoke the freedoms of the First Amendment. His case is now in the higher courts.

Seeger had  been convicted of contempt of Congress because he refused to name names and sentenced to prison. These convictions were later overturned.