Shortly after my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness was published in 2019, Lloyd Billingsley reviewed it for Frontpage Magazine. John Hamelin commented on his review at the time, but somehow I missed it, and comments are closed. It attempts to defend Aptheker’s scholarly credibility; it warrants an answer.
Hamelin starts off with:
While The Black Jacobins [hereafter, TBJ] is certainly a significant work in its own right and Aptheker’s avoidance in citing it can be considered an example of petty political rivalries, the idea that it somehow demolishes Aptheker’s writings on Black American history is absurd.
It would be absurd, but that’s not what I wrote. It’s not even in the review. The reviewer got it right: “Flood aims to modify the received opinion that Herbert Aptheker was a historian.”
I sure do.
What I argued for in the book, which Hamelin gives no evidence of having read, is that Aptheker’s work cannot be trusted. That doesn’t mean everything Aptheker wrote is a lie. It means that nothing he has written can be taken at face value.
The consensus of the scholarly community, reviewing Aptheker’s work on slave revolts at the time, was that he exaggerated their number by almost a factor of ten. That Aptheker’s work cannot be trusted was what William Gaboury, Gary Murrell’s doctoral advisor at the University of Oregon, told Murrell when he expressed interest in writing his dissertation on Aptheker. Murrell went on to write the biography, which I reviewed for American Communist History. The review is now a chapter of my book.
Philosopher Sidney Hook (1902-1989) justified the distrust. As I wrote, a “Communist should not be allowed to teach, Hook argued, not because non-Communists disapprove of the Communist’s ideas, but because the Communist Party obliged its members to carry out its political line where they worked.”
It is not his beliefs, right or wrong [Hook wrote], 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. (Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness [hereafter, HASIWB] 77. A version of this chapter, with a slightly different title, may be read here.)
Only Aptheker’s membership in the Communist Party explains his suppression of his knowledge of James’s Black Jacobins, which is about an event causally related to the slave revolts in the present territory of the United States, those revolts being Aptheker’s specialty: “Aptheker ignored a ground-breaking study of the slave rising that inspired many of the uprisings he studied.” (HASIWB 17) This suppression does not express “petty political rivalry.”
Stalinists and Trotskyists were no more political “rivals” in the United States than they were in the Soviet Union. They were mortal enemies. There was nothing “petty” about Stalin’s assassination of Trotsky or Stalin’s American mouthpieces cheering on the government’s prosecution of Trotskyists under the Smith Act. Both events occurred in 1940, a year after Aptheker, then pursuing his doctoral studies at Columbia University, joined the Communist Party.
As if to reveal something not hitherto known, Hamelin declares that “Aptheker did include a 1938 work by C.L.R. James in the bibliography of his book American Negro Slave Revolts.” Yes, but anyone who read my book would find that:
In the bibliography [of American Negro Slave Revolts; hereafter ANSR] Aptheker listed James’s 1938 “History of Negro Revolt,” which formed an issue of Fact, a London periodical, but did not indicate that it covered the subject matter of Black Jacobins. Even if he had, to list an obscure booklet is not to cite an acclaimed and widely reviewed book. Aptheker never cited James, and to my knowledge no admirer of both men has ever taken notice of this. (HASIWB, 82n9)
As I demonstrated in “Aptheker’s Willful Blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence,” no one can thumb through that issue of Fact without seeing on page 4 a full page advertisement for TBJ. (See photo on right.)
In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)
The mystery is why academics who admired both Aptheker and James gave the suppression a pass and why it was left to me, a nonacademic, to point it out.
One criticism of Aptheker I didn’t raise has plagued the reception of his work from its inception. As Peter Kolchin summarized the issue:
Slave rebellions and abortive rebellions have aroused controversy, both because the evidence on them is often skimpy and because the subject is ideologically charged. Herbert Aptheker’s pioneering volume, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943), contains useful information but exaggerates the extent of slave rebellion. Panicked whites sometimes saw conspiracies and incipient insurrections where none existed . . . . (Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619-1877, (10th Anniversary edition), Hill and Wang, 2003, 296.)
Kolchin then cites the supporting literature. Aptheker’s alleged exaggeration of actual revolts is arguably “ideologically charged.”
Esteemed historian C. Van Woodward (1908-1999), citing the first edition of Kolchin study, wrote in rebuttal to Aptheker’s letter to The New York Review of Books:
In future editions [of ANSR] Mr. Aptheker should not overlook Peter Kolchin’s book, which says of his 250 “revolts and conspiracies” that “most of them were minor incidents of unrest that were quickly put down with a minimum of local force or were nipped in the bud before they occurred. Other historians have been more impressed with the paucity than with the ubiquity of American slave revolts.” I honestly believe that this view is the one “now widely accepted by the historical profession” rather than the 1943 thesis, as claimed by its author. It is certainly in accord with views repeatedly expressed by Eugene D. Genovese [1938-2012], a scholar who surely would not disavow them, whatever personal affection he may express for a senior statesman. In fact, in the Okihiro volume of 1986 he writes that he and other critics “have criticized Aptheker for exaggerating or for overestimating the incidence of noteworthy insurrections in contradistinction to violent local disturbances.” He adds, “I continue to think that tempered criticism is in order,” in spite of some that has not been tempered.” (C. Vann Woodward, Reply to Aptheker, The New York Review of Books, March 3, 1988)
Hamelin continues:
And is it not possible that James, a Trotskyist, was a bit one-sided or even unfair in his criticisms of Aptheker’s writings on Abolitionism and slavery? James certainly had a political motive in denigrating Aptheker.
Sure, it’s possible, but irrelevant to the issue of Aptheker’s scholarly reputation, which Hamelin seems concerned to defend. His insinuation of unfairness and its political motive is a dodge. Part of James’s critique of Aptheker was published in December 1949, the same month Aptheker debated liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. at Harvard. Aptheker never condescended to answer James, the black scholar fourteen years his senior.
But I didn’t ignore Hamelin’s “possibility”:
Aldon Lynn Nielsen suspects that at least some of what James wrote about Aptheker was “no doubt unfair to the facts of Aptheker’s texts,” but no scholar has yet measured the degree of alleged unfairness. James’s harsh criticism “render[s] in sharp contrast the difference James perceives between Stalinist historians and the Marxist mode of historiography.” (Aldon Lynn Nielsen, C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997, 58; cited in HASIWB 20.)
The parallel I drew between two prolific researchers, Aptheker and WWII German High Command expert David Irving, also bothers Hamelin:
Comparing Aptheker to Irving also makes no sense. Irving has dedicated his life to writing about Hitler-related subjects, and in this field it was proved in court that he falsified sources and knowingly garbled translations to make the Nazis look good.
Again, if Hamelin had read my book, he would know how it makes sense:
Why give a pass to Aptheker [as many of his academic admirers do] but not to, say, David Irving, who is also an industrious researcher and productive writer who admired a totalitarian regime, albeit a militarily defeated one? If we are to respect a writer who undergoes persecution for his beliefs, then we should note that Irving’s expression of his beliefs landed him in prison, a fate that never befell Aptheker. We would be outraged if Irving’s biographer were to regret that, although he changed forever the way historians view World War II, his pro-Third Reich bias had rendered a disservice to the fight for fascism [as Aptheker biographer Murrell lamented about the impact of his subject’s Stalinism on the fight for socialism]. (HASIWB 68)
To which I appended this note:
Aptheker’s corpus of writings has yet to receive the scrutiny to which David Irving’s was subjected during that trial. When it does, it is not certain that Aptheker’s reputation will fare better than his. Ironically, by arguing that the popular anti-Communist revolt [in Hungary] was primarily an anti-Jewish enterprise, Irving’s Uprising! . . . perversely complements Aptheker’s The Truth about Hungary . . . . We are not surprised, however, that Aptheker did not avail himself of this “corroboration” . . . . (HASIWB 75n34; emphasis added.)
In his judgment for the defendants, Mr. Justice Charles Gray concluded that
the Defendants [Deborah Lipstadt et al.] are justified in their assertion that Irving has seriously misrepresented Hitler’s views on the Jewish question. He has done so in some instances by misinterpreting and mistranslating documents and in other instances by omitting documents or parts of them. In the result the picture which he provides to readers of Hitler and his attitude towards the Jews is at odds with the evidence. (HASIWB 76n35; emphasis added.)
“Seriously mispresented . . . by omitting documents.” Sounds familiar?
In his reputation-making book Aptheker, who would later be credibly charged with blowing up hundreds of violent but minor incidents into “insurrections,” had ignored the great contemporary study of an actual slave insurrection.
Which one? The only successful one in modern history, the one that prompted slaves and their masters to flee San Domingo in 1791 to the Territory of Orleans (Louisiana)—twenty years later the site of the German Coast Uprising that Aptheker devoted three pages to in ANSR!
Hamelin’s apologia continues:
Aptheker by contrast [with Irving] wrote on all sorts of subjects, some of his texts evidently more enduring than others. It is entirely possible that his book on Hungary in 1956 [The Truth about Hungary, published in 1957], written shortly after the events, is not a worthwhile source on that subject whereas his American Negro Slave Revolts and his Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States are monumental works recognized as such by everyone studying the field of Black American history.
Which is like saying that it’s entirely possible that Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is not a worthwhile source on that subject.
Not “everyone” has asked whether Aptheker’s “less enduring” misrepresentation of the Hungarian revolution as one, big anti-Jewish pogrom is grounds for reevaluation of his work on slave revolts. A writer who cherished his status as an “historian” should not have risked it by writing about “all sorts of subjects,” especially by composing propaganda for the suppression of a slave rebellion in order to “to make Communists look good.”
Yes, the Documentary History is “monumental,” certainly great in size, but
Aptheker’s seven-volume A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States contains not a word of [C. L. R.] James’s. Was that because he was from Trinidad and therefore outside of the project’s geographical scope? If so, then its fourth volume should not have included an essay from the Trinidadian Eric Williams, James’s one-time friend and jailer, but it did. That series understandably inspired many, yet we cannot trust it implicitly for the reasons Professor [Richard J.] Evans gave for not trusting David Irving’s books.
The same reason given by William J. Gaboury, Gary Murrell’s advisor at University of Oregon, for not trusting Aptheker’s books and therefore for not greenlighting Murrell’s choice of Aptheker for his dissertation.
The Documentary History was edited by a man who penned encomia to Stalin, praised North Korea in 1950 as a democracy (that’s why, he explained, there were “no revolts” there), and denied the anti-Semitic aspect of the Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia in 1953. The Truth about Hungary was no aberration, but continued a pattern. (HASIWB 81)
Informed criticism of my little book, which I’m eager to read, has to be based on what’s in it. I’d be grateful to any reader of this post who could put it in front of anyone competent and willing to provide such a critique.
David Hamelin, to whom I am grateful at least for occasioning this post, is welcome to comment here.