[A shorter version of this was published two years ago under the title “The anniversary of a foolish decision.”]
Fifty-five years ago today, on a muggy Tuesday evening, I arrived at 23 West 26th Street, Manhattan. The Communist Party USA was headquartered there, and I was about to be enlisted in its ranks.
Years later, I learned that in the 1940s, it was also where members of the Council on African Affairs, including W. E. B. Du Bois (chairman), Paul Robeson (vice-chairman), and Alphaeus Hunton (educational director), met to further the cause of Pan-Africanism. Ironically, out of the offices of that edifice and its neighbor, Number 21, built in 1881, the real estate empire spawned by John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) conducted its business.
The diary entry of Xavier High School student and research assistant to Herbert Aptheker for May 25, 1971, reads:
Got over to 23 West 26th Street [headquarters of the Communist Party USA] about 6:45 [P.M.]. Whatta nice place! The meeting was on the third floor, where pictures of famous comrades and covers of magazines and pamphlets were displayed. Gus [Hall, General Secretary of the Party] answered questions very well. He described how the Party operates from top to bottom, about international relations. My questions concerned the time a college student needs to be an active member and about the 2 vouchers + age stipulations [minimum age, 18]. Rasheed [Storey, 1936-2016] and Gus were the vouchers and I was let in even though I[’m] still 17!!!! I really feel like a complete person. As Gus said to me, I’ll never regret it.
The former lumberjack and steel worker congratulated me with a handshake that risked rendering useless my guitar-pick-holding fingers.
I really have commitment and the enthusiasm and the vision. I’m proud of the Party. I want to make the Party proud of me. [See also Anthony Flood, “Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager,” October 25, 2018.]
The building where my formal turning to the political dark side occurred has a storied past. (See “The Astor Offices at Nos. 21 and 23 West 26th Street,” The Daytonian, Saturday, August 4, 2012.) John Jacob Astor IV (1864–1912) was a passenger on the Titanic. His son, Vincent (1891-1959), “commissioned the architectural firm Peabody, Wilson & Brown to give No. 23 a neo-Federal facelift in 1922. Only two years later he sold the building for $30,000 to Frederick Vanderbilt Field (1905-2000), a Communist who wrote for the Daily Worker ….”
Thirty-thousand dollars, a century ago. Today, that won’t buy you a bathroom in Manhattan. And, yes, a Vanderbilt. One of the most intriguing and revealing autobiographies I’ve ever read was his From Right to Left (Lawrence Hill Books, 1983).
Midday on September 18, 1974, I met fellow Aptheker research assistant (and non-communist Civil Rights Movement historian) Hugh Murray for lunch; at six, I’d meet my then-closest comrade and friend, Kurt Stand, who would be convicted of spying for East Germany in 1998, “to discuss a great decision I feel I must make once and for all.”
On September 23rd, internally still a Stalinist, I entrusted my resignation letter, addressed to the comrade who chaired the meetings, to the doorman of her building located at the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street. “Now I can relax and decide more clearly what I’m going to do with my life.”
To resign was a wiser decision than the one it negated, but it could not reverse the latter’s effects.