“That monster!”
Such was Herbert Aptheker’s reaction when I mentioned my having enrolled in “The Philosophy of History and Culture,” a course to be taught by his nemesis, Sidney Hook (1902-1989). That was in 1972. I was a New York University (NYU) philosophy undergraduate. The class would be Hook’s last in an NYU teaching career that began in 1926 (including chairing its philosophy department from 1948 to 1969).
I was checking in with Aptheker, the Communist historian, literary executor of W. E. B. Du Bois and, at the time, my “boss,” at his AIMS office to see if he had research tasks for me. The casual announcement was my idea of chit-chat.
Earlier that year I had dropped into Hook’s office at 25 Waverly Place to ask about the class. As a young Red, I couldn’t pass up the chance to meet this infamous anti-communist in the flesh.
A letter of mine in support of Angela Davis, then on trial for aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder, appeared recently in the student newspaper. I had forgotten about it.
After a few minutes of chit-chat I rose and turned to leave. But before reaching the door . . .
“What did you say your name was?”
Busted. I complied.
“This should be very interesting.”
“Yes,” I muttered.
The first time I saw his name in print was in Aptheker’s “Communism and Truth: a Reply to Sidney Hook,” a 1952 essay I had read sometime in 1971.[1] What particularly got Aptheker’s goat was Hook’s argument that Communists were not ethically fit to teach by reason of their Party membership:
You say [writes Aptheker] that because I am a Communist I must think in such and such a manner, and if I think in such a manner, I cannot be an objective scholar. In exactly the same way teachers are accused as Communists and fired. You say that they must violate the ethics of their profession because as Communists they must think and act in a certain way. . . .
The way to demonstrate a scholar’s lack of objectivity, his failure to adhere to the canons of scholarship is to examine his writings, as I have done with your letter; the way to prove the evil or inefficient or tendentious teaching of a teacher . . . is to examine his or her professional conduct.
Well, examining writings and conduct may be a necessary condition for evaluating a teacher’s professed objectivity, but it’s by no means a sufficient one. What if he joins an organization that obligates its members to carry out its political line where they work, not excluding teaching?
“It is not his beliefs, right or wrong,” Hook argued, “it is not his heresies, which disqualify the Communist party teacher but his declaration of intention, as evidenced by official statements of his party, to practice educational fraud.”[2]
But I wouldn’t accept that argument for many years. As I noted in another post, it dawned on me only a few years ago that Aptheker’s 1943 doctoral dissertation, American Negro Slave Revolts, neglected C. L. R. James’s 1938 Black Jacobins. The latter, widely reviewed book was a study of the only successful slave revolt in the Americas. Black Jacobins supplied a rich context for the uprisings Aptheker did study (the 1811 German Coast Uprising, for instance), yet he did not draw upon it.[3]
But, of course, no self-respecting Stalinist would dream of objectively assessing the scholarly work of a Trotskyist. I studied Aptheker’s writings and noted his conduct. Score one for Hook.
What I didn’t know in the early ’70s (but could have, had I bothered to do elementary research) is that Hook had been an original interpreter and advocate of Marxism (marrying it with Deweyan pragmatism); once married to a Communist Party member (he never joined); and had supported the Party’s candidates in the 1932 general election.
Within a few years of that election Hook broke with all things Stalinist and with the Soviet Union (which he had visited as a student in 1929). And he did so while remaining a socialist.
Such fine print bored me. To my ideologically encrusted mind Hook was an anti-Communist reactionary who had sold whatever radical soul he had for approval of his capitalist overlords.
Over the years, starting during my social democrat days (1976-1979), Hook’s reputation for clear, engaging writing on controversies grew in my mind and, to my surprise, continues to do so. He was, after all, a notable figure in philosophy, my field of study, and I was trying to retain as much of my socialist worldview as I could in the wake of my self-exile from Stalinism.
Even on May Day 1972, where I had rallied in Union Square a few hours earlier, I had jotted in my diary: “Reading Hook’s rather good essay on ‘Modern Knowledge and the Concept of God.’ Makes a good case for atheism.”
I would never have admitted to my comrades that Hook had any redeeming qualities.
On September 25, 1972, I recorded in my diary this expression of affection: “Sidney Hook argues his case well; the class is very interesting. I have to be very concrete when I participate. There will be a paper for this course. I can l earn from his teaching methods, phrases, etc. He’s a nice old sonofabitch.”
Hook taught his last class three months later, on December 20th, his 70th birthday. I took a seat in the first row. Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) sat in the row behind me. Gene Maeroff’s article on this transition appeared in The New York Times the next day. I still have the clipping.
Two weeks later, on January 8, 1973, I wrote: “Hook’s test was hard; glad it’s behind me.” During the summer of 1974 Mike Porco had me sell tickets for the music club he owned the legendary Gerde’s Folk City. (He was a friend of the family. A jazz guitarist, I participated in a few Sunday night jams.) One evening, who peered through the window but Sidney Hook! Still a Red, heavily “into Hegel,” I didn’t rush to greet him. But it still felt surreal.
Sidney Hook once defended me at a conference held at the New School for Social Research. (I’m still ransacking my diaries for that mid-’70s date and other details, but so far unsuccessfully.) One speaker was a Chinese academic. (I think he was a visiting scholar but not necessarily directly from the PRC.) His talk was a tissue of anti-capitalist jargon, which irritated my newfound anti-Communist sensibility.
“I can hear this sort of drivel a few blocks from here at the Center for Marxist Education!,” I rudely protested from midway in the auditorium when called during Q&A.
In the row in front of mine, an elderly man rose to speak.
“What this young man was trying to express, however inelegantly . . .”
It was Hook. He picked up the polemical sword that I had let slip and elaborated upon my intended theme with the skill, learning and (most important) experience I did not have.
I’ve forgotten most what he said, but “however inelegantly” still bounces off the walls of my memory’s cave. 
When the event concluded, I gestured for Hook’s attention.
“That was terrific, Professor Hook. But you should know that I was the last student you failed.”
My words visibly embarrassed him.
“No, don’t feel bad. I deserved that grade! I had handed in propaganda dressed up as a term paper.”
His cheered up. And then he turned the whole thing around.
“You know, the only other philosopher I can remember admitting he was wrong was Bertrand Russell.”
Hook summed up the ancient controversy, citing the journal that recorded it, and ended with Russell’s concession, “You are right and I am wrong.” (If you’re a Russell scholar who can identify through my recollection’s haze the episode Hook meant, I’d like to hear from you.)
Hook didn’t have to compare, even at an astronomical distance, an awkward ex-Stalinist who failed his last course to the distinguished philosopher after whom he had named his first son.
To say that his gracious comeback lifted my spirits would understate things. But as I can’t think of it without also remembering its roots in failure, it will always serve me as a lesson in humility.
Over the years since then I’ve acquainted myself not only with his literary output and record of engagement with opponents, but also with his religious and economic views, which I don’t share. Also, I was never interested in John Dewey, Hook’s revered teacher, except as an historical figure.[6] In short, I could never be a “Hookian” in most of the ways that matter.
But I could never be simply “anti-Hook,” given his zest for intellectual combat, whose only rival of my acquaintance was Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). And as an champion of civilized discourse, he had no superior. When I lost my connection to Aptheker the apothecary, Hook’s writings eased me through withdrawal from Stalinism without my going cold turkey.
There is much more I could say, but this is a post not a book.[4] I’ll end with the words that concluded his introduction to an anthology of philosophical papers[5]:
The continuous disagreements among American philosophers may show that philosophy is still far from being a science or even scientific, but it also proves that American philosophers are free. Ultimately it is more important that they be free than that they agree.
Notes
[1] Masses & Mainstream, February 1953. Reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, The Era of McCarthyism, Marzani & Munsell, 1955, 89-103.
[2] Sidney Hook, “Heresy, Yes—But Conspiracy, No,” The New York Times, July 9, 1950. For Hook’s 1952 letter to Herbert Aptheker, to which Hook was replying, see The Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism and the Cold War, edited by Edward S. Shapiro, 211-215. See also my “Is Herbert Aptheker a Historian? Can a Communist Tell the Truth?,” Frontpage, December 16, 2016; and Harvey Kleher, “Herbert the Red,” The Weekly Standard, November 30, 2015.
[3] See my “C. L. R. James: Herbert Aptheker’s Invisible Man”, The C. L. R. James Journal, vol. 19, nos. 1 & 2, Fall 2013, 276–297.
[4] Of which there are many. I recommend autobiography Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century; Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist; Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom: The Essential Essays, edited by Robert B. Talisse and Robert Tempio; The Letters of Sidney Hook (cited in note 4); Sidney Hook Reconsidered, edited by Matthew J. Cotter; and the book that initiated my quest for Hook (with a bibliography that blew my teenage mind): Sidney Hook and the Contemporary World: Essays on the Pragmatic Intelligence, edited by Paul Kurtz.
[5] American Philosophers at Work, edited by Sidney Hook. New York: Criterion Books, 1956, 13.
[6] It recently occurred to me that I’m but two degrees removed from men born just before and just after the Civil War. Aptheker’s mentor was Du Bois (1868-1963); Hook’s, Dewey (1859-1952). Respectively, that’s Antebellum and Reconstruction. Yes, Dewey hailed from Vermont and “antebellum” refers to Southern American history. Dewey’s birth was contemporaneous with that period, two days after the U.S. Marines put down John Brown’s abolitionist raid on Harper’s Ferry, arguably a harbinger of that War.