Before the New York Times became the ultraleft rag it is today, one could at least count on its reporting a story’s basic facts. Or an obituary’s. And so in 2003, when I read the paper’s notice of the passing of Herbert Aptheker, whom I knew, I was surprised to see how many easily discoverable facts the Times’s esteemed book review editor, the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, got wrong. To its credit, it published a correction (three weeks later). The New York Times didn’t publish this letter, and neither did I in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. I do so hereunder, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also in shameless promotion of the book.
—Anthony Flood
March 22, 2003
To the Editor:
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s March 20 obituary of Herbert Aptheker contains several errors of commission and omission.
Aptheker’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States runs to seven volumes, not three. He edited and annotated three volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois’ correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography.
The obituary fails to mention that Aptheker’s 1937 Master’s thesis was about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt and written on the basis of primary source research. This should be considered when weighing William Styron’s accusation that only politics motivated Aptheker’s criticism of his novel.
The title of Aptheker’s Columbia dissertation was American Negro Slave Revolts and chosen for its assonance with that of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’ American Negro Slavery, to whose characterization of slaves the dissertation was opposed. By February 12, 1942, when Aptheker enlisted in the Army, he had completed almost all of the requirements for his doctorate: the awarding of the degree was contingent upon the dissertation’s being published, which it was the following year.
Yale University’s History Department sparked a controversy in 1976 when it refused to sponsor Aptheker’s seminar on Du Bois. The reason for the refusal, articulated by Yale Professor C. Vann Woodward, was not that Aptheker was a Communist, but that he “did not measure up to the standard of scholarship desired for teachers at Yale.” But as Aptheker lamented at the time, “If I’m not qualified to teach Du Bois, what am I qualified to teach?” Yale’s scholarly standards were apparently no barrier to Howard Cosell who taught “Big Time Sports and Contemporary America” during the same semester.
Aptheker’s run for a congressional seat in 1966 was not “his only major attempt at elective office,” for he lost to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in New York’s senatorial race a decade later. Aptheker later joked that the F.B.I. was still looking for the 25,000 people who voted for him.
Aptheker’s military career is summarized, but not its inglorious end. After Aptheker declined to answer the Army’s November 6, 1950 letter to him recounting his political activity over the previous decade, his commission in the Army reserves was summarily revoked on December 28. Not listed in the Army’s litany of political offenses, however, was Aptheker’s public support of Communist North Korea in its violent conflict with South Korea and the United States, in whose Army he had held the rank of Major and Instructor at the War College only a few years before.
The obituary gives the impression that Aptheker’s communist politics was all about racial equality, anti-fascism, and dissent from American foreign policy. But one of the books of which, to the very end of his life, he was most proud of having written was The Truth about Hungary in 1956. There he defended, against the sensibilities of even most American Communists, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and crushing of the revolt of its slaves.
A refrain in Aptheker’s writings is that partisanship with oppressors is a reason to suspect the suppression of truth. Tragically, he did not see that precept’s relevance to the reception of his own scholarship.
Yours truly,
Anthony Flood
P.S.: In the early ‘70s Dr. Aptheker employed me as one of his research assistants for his Du Bois projects. He acknowledged the help of many including myself in the Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1973) and The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois: Volume II: Selections, 1934-1944 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976). His recent defense of The Truth about Hungary may be read in his replies to a letter in The Journal of American History for December 2000 and to my letter in the March 2001 issue. My letter, which documents Aptheker’s support for North Korea during the Korean War, was prompted by Robin D. G. Kelly’s interview in the June 2000 issue. In an “Autobiographical Note” preceding the interview, Aptheker gives an account of his discharge from the Army.
