Category: Autobiography

“You’ll never regret it!” Gus Hall welcomes me into the Party.

[A shorter version of this was published two years ago under the title “The anniversary of a foolish decision.”]

Yours truly, freshly minted young Communist and Xavier Military Institute (High School) senior, 1971

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.

Decades later, I learned that in the 1940s, members of the Council on African Affairs, including W. E. B. Du Bois (chairman), Paul Robeson (vice-chairman), and Alphaeus Hunton (educational director), met there 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, 1910-2000, 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. That wouldn’t buy you a bathroom in Manhattan today. 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).

May Day flashbacks: Memories of a Communist and working-class leader
Same year, 1971: Gus Hall, in hat (above “MU”), marching on Fifth Avenue in New York City [People’s World Archives]. I believe the bespectacled gent to Hall’s right is Arnold Johnson (1904-1989); James E. Jackson (1914-2007) is the second person to Hall’s left.
On June 9th, two weeks after my induction, I attended Xavier High School’s graduation ceremony at Hunter College (Lexington Avenue and 68th Street). My diary records my regret at missing a talk by James E. Jackson (1914-2007) at the Center for Marxist Education, located at 29 West 15th Street. That building, now a co-op, abuts a 21st-century extension of my pre-Civil War alma mater.

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.

Every Wind of Doctrine: A Former Captive of Philosophy and Vain Deceit Remembers

First Grade, Holy Cross School, 1960

Yesterday, I thought out loud about this question; bit by bit, I’ll begin to answer it: How did an Irish-Italian Catholic kid from the Bronx break with the world of Marvel comics in the 1960s, discover philosophy, come under the influence of a notable communist, and a few years later follow an obscure dispensationalist Bible teacher and then a leading anarcho-capitalist theoretician—all while studying guitar theory under a jazz giant, working as Folk City’s doorman and later for a world-class architect?

A day later, I can think of at least a dozen major influences that I mercifully omitted from that already intolerably overlong sentence.

Sixty years ago, I could not ask, let alone answer, such a question for the simple reason that I was unself-conscious. It’s hard to recall what unself-consciousness felt like because memory tends to impose mature, reflective categories onto what we selectively remember. Yet, I must make the effort. There is a transition from directly experiencing what we enjoy to reflecting on how we might shape our lives and the world around us.

I had a notion that there were struggles, but also that they were all “settled” by authority—parental, ecclesiastical, social, or governmental. That made my world full of interest but, more importantly, safe. Dangers existed, but they were manageable. Unmanageable dangers belonged to movies and comic books.

That romantic sense of safety was hard to maintain after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, followed within five years (from my 10th to my 15th year) by the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. It was bewildering for a pre-teen and teenager to live through. And what I found confusing or unsettling, I put out of my mind. The world as mediated by movies and television was my norm. I vaguely sensed that reality could be different, but I couldn’t work up enough interest to pursue the idea. My unself-consciousness was a blissful state, one I subconsciously knew better than to disturb. It rarely, if ever, occurred to me that one day I would have to make my way in a world beyond the television or movie screen. Continue reading “Every Wind of Doctrine: A Former Captive of Philosophy and Vain Deceit Remembers”

The Challenge of Autobiography

When you write about your life, you have to connect the particular people, places, and events that shaped you to strangers who will view those particulars through the lens of their experiences. For that, there’s no guidebook. To you, they are abstractions: you don’t know them; they don’t know you. All you have in common is your humanity.

You’re not writing to make them care about you. They care about themselves—and about your story only to the extent that it illuminates theirs: their lives, struggles, and fears.

So if I ask, “How did an Irish-Italian Catholic kid from the Bronx break with the world of Marvel comics in the 1960s, discover philosophy, come under the influence of a notable communist, and a few years later follow an obscure dispensationalist Bible teacher and then a leading anarcho-capitalist theoretician—all while studying guitar theory under a jazz giant, working as Folk City’s doorman and later for a world-class architect?,” the likely response is, “Who cares?” or “Sounds like a very confused kid!”

But if the narrator frames his story as a key to unlocking history that they’re curious about—or, even better, lived through—and hints at answers to questions they’ve long asked themselves, then he won’t just attract an audience. He’ll hold them. And if he delivers, they won’t just stay. They’ll bring others to the fire.

[To be continued]

Posts with autobiographical content: