Category: History

“1949: What were my influencers doing?” Republished especially for the friends I’ve made since 2020.

In only six years, this post already reads like a time capsule. It’s sprinkled with tidbits that friends I’ve made since 2020 might be interested in. For this and other reasons, it deserves another airing. I’ve deleted only the closing section that lists posts to be reincarnated in my Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers.—A.G.F.

Last December 15th [i.e., 2029], in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend, I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

    • President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
    • Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
    • Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
    • The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
    • The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
    • Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence.

Herbert Aptheker, 1915-2003

In 1949 Communist Herbert Aptheker, a 34-year-old World War II veteran and a Columbia University Ph.D. (and my future comrade, friend, and employer), was compiling material for his A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, whose first volume came out in 1951. (The series would grow to seven.) In April, Aptheker received W. E. B. Du Bois’s letter in reply to Aptheker’s request that he testify for the defense at the Foley Square trial of Communist Party leaders. The trial had begun in January; Aptheker himself testified on August 19th.[1]

Anthony Flood, “Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness” (2019). Buy on Amazon.

Du Bois’s letter shows the address from which he sent it: 23 West 26th Street in Manhattan, originally a John Jacob Astor townhouse, built in 1881. In 1924 Astor’s son Vincent “sold the building for $30,000 to Frederick Vanderbilt Field [1905-2000]”—yes, those Vanderbilts—“a Communist who wrote for the Daily Worker published by Political Affairs Publishers, Inc.”[2]

Alphaeus Hunton on his release from prison 1951; Dorothy Hunton; Paul Robeson; W. E. B. Du Bois

The New York State Communist Party expressed interest in buying the building from Field in 1957. This was six years before Du Bois joined the Party. In 1949, however, Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton, and Max Yergen had been meeting there since 1942 as officers of the Council on African Affairs, a Field-funded operation. In 1950 Du Bois ran for U.S. Senate on the American Labor Party ticket (the New York incarnation of the national Progressive Party). Field’s 1983 autobiography, From Left to Right (New York: Lawrence Hill), is a good read.

C. L. R. James (1901-1989)

The month Birdland opened, C. L. R. James slammed Herbert Aptheker’s work in African-American history.[3] But Aptheker the Stalinist wouldn’t give James, the author of The Black Jacobins and Trotskyist scholar, the time of day, let alone answer his criticisms. Aptheker had more in common with James, a fellow Marxist-Leninist, than with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., whom Aptheker preferred to debate. Schlesinger, historian of American liberalism, sparred with Aptheker at Harvard University about the Cold War and “The Vital Center” (the title of Schlesinger’s just-published book).[4]

Genuine believers in free institutions must be anti-Communists, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ‘38, associate professor of History, said last night at a John Reed Club debate which overflowed Emerson D.  Opposing Schlesinger in the discussion, entitled “The Center and the Left,” Herbert Aptheker, associate editor of Masses and Mainstream, charged that the “vital center” of which Schlesinger is a proponent, “only maintains what exists, namely monopoly capitalism.” He called for a unity among all non-conservatives “so that a war against Fascism and capitalism can and must be successful.”[5]

Left totalitarians love to smear their opponents as “fascists,” don’t they.

Murray Rothbard (1926-1995). This was taken in 1943.

Murray Rothbard’s first publication, a review of A Mencken Chrestomathy, appeared in Analysis, August 1949.[6] The author, who became my friend when he was 58, was then all of 23. Earlier that year he heard Ludwig von Mises was going to lead a seminar at New York University in the fall. Murray was already a defender of free markets, but not yet a Misesian. Human Action, the expansion and translation of Mises’s Nationalökonomie, was published that October, intellectually converted the young  man.

I was scarcely familiar with Mises’s name, outside of the usual distorted story of the socialist calculation debate, and was therefore surprised to learn in the spring of 1949 that Mises was going to begin a regular seminar at NYU [New York University]. I was also told that Mises was going to publish a magnum opus in the fall. “Oh,” I asked, “what’s the book about?” “About everything,” they replied. Human Action was indeed about everything. The book was a revelation to those of us drenched in modern economics; it solved all problems and inconsistencies that I had sensed in economic theory, and it provided an entirely new and superb structure of correct economic methodology and theory. Furthermore, it provided eager libertarians with a policy of uncompromising laissez-faire; in contrast to all other free market economists of that day or later, there were no escape hatches, no giving the case away with “of course, the government must break up monopolies,” or “of course, the government must provide and regulate the money supply.”[7]

Sidney Hook (1902-1989) and John Dewey (1859-1952), 1949.

In February of 1949 the New York Times published “Should Communists be permitted to teach?” by Aptheker’s nemesis (and future NYU philosophy professor of mine), Sidney Hook, whose writings served as a halfway house for me as I broke with Stalinism in the mid-‘70s. (A few years ago, I applied Hook’s principles in “Is Herbert Aptheker a Historian? Can a communist tell the truth?”), now the fourth chapter of my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness.)

Anti-Communist demonstrators outside the Waldorf Astoria, March 25, 1949

In March 1949, Hook and other anticommunist academics and cultural figures protested the Communist front operation that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which met at the Waldorf Astoria in 1949 and 1950, revealed itself to be.[8] That year Hook also penned, among many other articles and reviews, a tribute to his mentor, John Dewey.[9]

Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984). This was taken in the 1940s.
Brand Blanshard (1892-1987). This was taken at Swarthmore College in 1941, two years after The Nature of Thought was published.

In 1949 Bernard Lonergan, S.J., whose magnum opus I used to extricate myself from the rationalism of Brand Blanshard’s The Nature of Thought, began to present to small groups papers that would eventually become Insight, his “essay in aid self-appropriation” published in 1953. That year also saw the publication of the fourth and fifth installments in his series, “The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas” in Theological Studies.[10] In 1983, when he was convalescing at the Campion Center (a Jesuit infirmary in Weston, Massachusetts), I spoke with him about Austrian economists. “Well, they’re deductivists. And you know what I think of deductivists.”

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985). Fortune Magazine, March 1945

Lonergan was impressed with Susanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form enough to cite it a couple of times in Insight. That’s how I learned of her work, and around 2008 I finally got around to marking up her Philosophy in a New Key: a Study in the Symbolism of Reason Rite and Art. For the first time, the arts were for me not just enjoyable, but also intelligible. First published in 1942, a mass market paperback edition hit the stands in 1949.

What could Langer, a materialist (or naturalist) in all but name, offer Lonergan a Transcendental Thomist? Monsignor Richard M. Liddy, who wrote his dissertation on Langer after studying under Lonergan in Rome, supplied an answer in “What Bernard Lonergan Learned from Susanne K. Langer.”[11]

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). Early 1930s.

In 1949 Eric Voegelin, another profound influence with whom I had a chance to speak (also in 1983, my annus mirabilis), published a paper on Plato’s Gorgias.[12] The publication of the first volume of his Order and History still lay seven years in the future.

Will Durant (1885-1981), Ariel Durant (1889-1981). This was taken in 1948.

In 1949 Will Durant was struggling to finish the fourth volume of The Story of Civilization. The Age of Faith, a five-year project, was taking six. From its inception, Ariel, Mrs. Durant, had been a partner in this enterprise; her name joined his on the covers of the series beginning with the seventh volume, The Age of Reason Begins.

M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015)

A teenaged Medford Stanton Evans, a future conservative thought leader and author of, among many other writings, the myth-shattering Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies, realized he was a man of the Right in 1949 after reading George Orwell’s 1984. “It was about communism . . . I said: ‘Well, I’m against communism. What am I for?’” As for becoming a writer, “No, it never crossed my mind. I did not even think in that day and age about becoming a writer of any type. If I’d had my druthers in 1949, I would have played left field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.”

 

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). This was taken in 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an early influence, but one from whom I walked away to chase my intellectual lusts and to whom I’ve returned as a prodigal son, was testing his discovery of the premillennial Kingdom of God. He announced this in The Word of Truth, Volumes XI, 1949-1950 under the series entitled “The Order of Things to Come.” He’d develop this idea during the 1950s, but he was ready to present it publicly in that volume’s fifth issue, dated January 1950 and therefore written probably during its last weeks of 1949. Here’s a passage:

 

Many there are who believe that the next great event of prophecy is the rapture or catching away of all living believers, followed by the resurrection of the dead in Christ, this to be followed by the great tribulation upon the earth, the second coming of Christ, the millennial kingdom, then the new heavens and the new earth. This, in brief, is the position held by most dispensational fundamentalists, a position which we have often designated in these pages as the Darby-Scofield system of prophetic interpretation. However, it is my conviction that this system has failed to recognize those prophecies which reveal an aspect of the kingdom of heavens which precedes the millennial kingdom, and, therefore, precedes the second coming of Christ. This I call the premillennial kingdom of the heavens since it precedes the millennial kingdom.

I continue to appreciate the intellectual delights afforded by the scholars named above, especially those who, like Blanshard, had a literary gift. Compared to the joy of grasping Sellers’s insights into God’s Word, however, and reflecting upon the industry and integrity which he brought to his pursuit of that pearl of great price, those erstwhile pleasures pale. I no longer long for the fleshpots of academia.

Notes

[1] Here’s the letter.  For a discussion of the trial, see Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 2015, 76-77.

[2] “The Astor Offices at Nos. 21 and 23 West 26th Street,” The Daytonian, August 4, 2012.

[3] C. L. R. James [“J. Meyer”], “Herbert Aptheker’s Distortions,” Fourth International, Vol. 10, No. 11, December 1949. But see also C. L. R. James [“J. Meyer”], “Stalinism and Negro History,” Fourth International, Vol. 10, No. 10, November 1949.

[4] As Schlesinger recalled the event: “The ever reliable Herbert Aptheker denounced ‘The Schlesinger Fraud’ in the Communist monthly Masses & Mainstream as a program groomed to the needs of a ruling class seeking war and fascism.’ In 1949 Aptheker and I held a debate. Neither of us persuaded the other of anything.” A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000, 519. The Aptheker article had appeared in the October 1949 issue of Masses & Mainstream and reprinted in a collection of Aptheker’s essays entitled The Era of McCarthyism, New York: Marzani & Munsell, 1955, 115-129.

[5] “Aptheker clashes with Schlesinger,” The Harvard Crimson, December 3, 1949. For discussion, see Murrell, 82-84.

[6] For Rothbard’s appreciation of analysis’s founder Frank Chodorov who gave Murray’s “fledgling work” a platform, see “Frank Chodorov, R. I. P.,” Left & Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, 1967; republished here. For Rothbard’s mature celebration of Mencken, see “H.L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian,” New Individualist Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 1962, pp. 15–27; republished here.

[7] Murray N. Rothbard, The Essential von Mises, Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University, 108. The link will take you to an expanded edition of an essay Rothbard wrote in 1973.

[8] Here’s the CIA’s overview: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50. For the impact of this “peace conference” on a cultural giant caught in the political crossfire, see Terry Klefstad, “Shostakovich and the Peace Conference,” Music and Politics, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 2012, 1-21; and Phillip Deery, “Shostakovich, the Waldorf Conference and the Cold War,” American Communist History, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2012, 161-180.

[9] Sidney Hook, “John Dewey at Ninety: The Man and His Philosophy,” The New Leader, October 22, 1949, S-3, S-8.

[10] The series was compiled into a book, edited by David B. Burrell, C.S.C.: Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, University of Notre Dame Press, 1967.

[11] Lonergan Workshop, Vol. 11, 1995, 53-90. I posted the text of this article on my older site. It’s a good introduction to both thinkers.

[12] Eric Voegelin, “The Philosophy of Existence: Plato’s Gorgias,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 11, No. 4, October 1949, 477-498.

[13] Video and transcript of “The Theme is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition,” Booknotes (C-SPAN) interview of M. Stanton Evans, February 5, 1995.

[14] “The Premillennial Kin

“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.

Dispensationalism, Diversity, Dialectic, Part 2

[Also on Substack. See Part 1]

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers who see things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”

According to my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many posts on this site), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.

Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, is neither to prove nor refute but rather Continue reading “Dispensationalism, Diversity, Dialectic, Part 2”

Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?

[Slightly updated, this was first published here two years ago.]

Fifty-six years ago this afternoon, classes being over, I trekked two blocks east from Xavier High School along 16th Street to Union Square Park, where I’d take the No. 6 subway to the Bronx. To my astonishment, the park was jam-packed with people. Thousands of them, in the middle of the day. It had the vibe of an anti-war demo. It was replicated elsewhere in Manhattan and in many other cities around the country, all too familiar to us today in its size and planning.

“What’s this?,” I muttered. “Earth Day?  You gotta be kidding me!”

A newly minted Stalinist (and Jesuit high school student), I knew that that day marked the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Illych Ulanov, known to history as Lenin. Continue reading “Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?”

Slavery and the Catholic Church: Father John Maxwell’s neglected study

The following republishes a post from almost five years ago. 

In a footnote to a recent post, I referred to Father John Francis Maxwell’s vastly underappreciated Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery. Barry Rose Publishers, located in Chichester (UK), published it in 1975 in association with the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights (its name from 1956 to 1990; it’s now the Anti-Slavery International). A foreword was provided by the Right Honorable Richard Wilberforce, Lord Wilberforce, C.M.G, O.B.E., great grandson of the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Ten years ago [i.e., in 2011] I posted a facsimile of the full text of Maxwell’s book on my old site. I hope that someone with the authority to do so will retype Slavery and the Catholic Church either from my pdf or a physical copy of the book and cause it to be published as a searchable eBook.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to discover who, if anyone, has the copyright to the book. Can a reader point me in the right direction? Here’s my homework to date.

Father Maxwell wrote in his preface: “The author wishes to record his thanks to the Most Reverend Cyril C. Cowderoy, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Southwark, who released him from parochial duties between 1966 and 1973 and enabled him to do full-time research.”

Unless there were two Father John Maxwells assigned to the Diocese of Southwark (or I’m overlooking some other possibility), then the author died on August 19, 2007.

Six years later, I wrote to the Secretary and Webmaster of the Archdiocese of Southwark about Fr. Maxwell. I did not hear back. Today [June 10, 2021] I reached out again to that person on LinkedIn.

Barry Rose, who published the book in 1975 when he was 52, passed away in 2005 at age 82. He sold the company; its new owners renamed it Barry Rose Law Publishers Ltd. An internet search yields an address (5 East Row, PO19 1PG, Chichester, West Sussex England), a phone number (01243 783637), and an email address, which I used today to inquire about who holds the copyright. Minutes later I got this bounce-back:

Address not found: Your message wasn’t delivered to books@barry-rose-law.co.uk because the domain barry-rose-law.co.uk couldn’t be found.

If you know anyone who knows how to get to the bottom of this copyright matter, I’d be grateful to hear from him or her. Slavery and the Catholic Church deserves a better platform than my old site (which, like its owner, won’t be around forever). [Given the subject matter, it is ironic that the search for copyright might limit the reach of this study.—A.G.F.]

What reinforced my conviction was a long, one-star 2015 Amazon “review” of Slavery and the Catholic Church by one “Jeri” entitled “The information in this book is biased and poorly organized.” It starts with this sentence fragment—”A biased and confusing book which leaves out the most important historical points”—and goes downhill from there. Continue reading “Slavery and the Catholic Church: Father John Maxwell’s neglected study”

For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press

Otis Q. Sellers, March 25, 1901-February 23, 1992. This is how he looked when he attended Moody 1921.

[Also on Substack] In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The charred remains of Jefferson Hill, his wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.[1]

An octave of days later, on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Sellers Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. A few weeks earlier, on March 9, The New York Times had noted the publication of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. When Otis was a half-year-old, an anarchist’s bullet felled William McKinley, the fifth of seven US presidents to hail from the Buckeye State. Theodore Roosevelt, his successor, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. A month after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt made history by inviting Washington to dine with him at the White House.[2]

America’s adventure in the Philippines would last another year. The Progressive era ended with America’s entry into the European war, but that carnage was not even on the horizon. At the turn of the century, America was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in science’s promise. The month preceding Otis’s birth, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. The day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[3] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[4] Bad news, local or national, could not dampen the country’s upbeat mood.

Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that was Ohio ran deep, even back to the country’s founding. Otis’s great-grandfather, John H. Sellers, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works; another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman and entrepreneur who founded the city in 1873 (and named it after himself). Otis said he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy, but he did mention Grover, if rarely.[5] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.[6]

Continue reading “For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press”

Emil Brunner was no Christian Individualist, but he had Rome’s number, and Otis Q. Sellers took careful note

Emil Brunner (1889-1966)

[Also on Substack]

And Otis Q. Sellers was no Neo-Orthodox. Yet, as I noted in a previous article, he found 1953 The Misunderstanding of the Church by Emil Brunner (1889-1966) valuable for contextualizing his own ecclesiology. So do I.

Brunner was clear about Rome’s conceit concerning its authority: she must ever try to discredit Sola Scriptura, the Reformation principle that affirms the Bible’s final authority, an effort that has effectively meant replacing it with Sola Ecclesia, Rome’s putative “magisterium.”

The following are salient paragraphs from Chapter 4 of Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (trans. Harold Knight, The Westminster Press, 1953, 41-45). I’ve broken up paragraphs for ease of reading and copy-edited them lightly. Annotations are in square brackets.

“Oh,” today’s Catholic might protest, “we don’t believe that anymore!” Really? Then what would be left of Rome’s much vaunted theological unity, her alternative to Protestant “anarchy”?

Who believes that the Jesuits of the 16th century would not have every LGBTQ-friendly Jesuit of the 21st, along with their Vatican allies, burnt at the stake?

Who believes that Leo XIII (r. 1878 to 1903) would not have excommunicated Leo XIV?

I expound the scriptural basis of Sellers’s dispensationalist ecclesiology—non-Darby/Scofield, I hasten to add!—in Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, which I expect to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press. It’s in the interior design phase. Continue reading “Emil Brunner was no Christian Individualist, but he had Rome’s number, and Otis Q. Sellers took careful note”

The Centenary of Murray N. Rothbard

Hoping Stephan Kinsella or Hans-Hermann Hoppe won’t sue me for copyright violation, I can think of no better way for this site to memorialize this milestone than to reproduce this cornucopia of resources from The Property and Freedom Society, whose site I could not safely open. Since maybe you can’t either, I’m grateful to internet argonaut Dave Lull for copying and pasting its table of contents into an email. (Two humble contributions of mine made the list!)

Murray was a lad of 58, I a mere babe in the libertarian woods (only 29), when I first met him. What a powerful, creatively synthesizing mind; what a generous friend! May God grant him eternal life in the Kingdom!

Anthony Flood

Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment

by Stephan Kinsella on January 9, 2026

– Other PFS books –

Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Papinian Press and The Saif House, 2026).

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was one of the world’s greatest champions of the human liberty. In his honor, and to commemorate his 100th birthday, on March 2, 2026, the Property and Freedom Society (PFS) has assembled this collection of tributes to and commentary on him and his work by PFS members, including many who knew him personally.

This book is released in digital form today, March 2, 2026, on Murray’s 100th birthday. Print, in both paperback and deluxe hardcover, and kindle/epub/pdf versions will be made available shortly.

[Note: the links below will go live March 2, 2026, at 12:01am CST, as will this announcement: Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment Published Today]

Contents

Front Matter

Part 1*

Part 2

Appendix

*Part 1 consists of PFS authors who personally knew or met Rothbard

Related

Biographical

Bibliographical

Correspondence

Tributes/obituaries/memories/commentary

Notes

    1. See The Free Market (June 1986), p. 2, listing papers in “Man, Economy, and Liberty: A Conference in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard.” See also: Jeffrey Tucker and Lew Rockwell, “Man, Economy, and Liberty” (17 November 2009) (Tucker interviews Rockwell about Rothbard’s festschrift, published in 1986 in honor of Rothbard’s sixtieth birthday); Rothbard, Man, Economy, and Liberty (1 March 1986) (Rothbard comments and responds to the speakers and papers presented at the “Man, Economy and Liberty” colloquium hosted by the Mises Institute; backup Youtube); Hoppe, Book Review of Walter Block and Llewellyn H.Rockwell, Jr., eds., Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, Rev. Austrian Econ. (Vol. 4 Num. 1, 1989). See also Timothy Virkkala, “Bestschrift,” Liberty (September, 1989), p. 63.
    2. “I prefer to remember him as the charming, brilliant, and joyous friend he had been in Liberty‘s formative years. He was the wittiest man I have ever met, the best man with whom to spend an evening in a bar that I ever knew. I miss him enormously.”
    3. excerpted here: “Shortly before Murray [Rothbard] died, I called him to tell him of my plans to run for Congress once again in the 1996 election. He was extremely excited and very encouraging. One thing I am certain of—if Murray could have been with us during the presidential primary in 2008, he would have had a lot to say about it and fun saying it. He would have been very excited. His natural tendency to be optimistic would have been enhanced. He would have loved every minute of it. He would have pushed the “revolution,” especially since he contributed so much to preparing for it. I can just imagine how enthralled he would have been to see college kids burning Federal Reserve notes. He would have led the chant we heard at so many rallies: “End the Fed! End the Fed!”
    4. Duke is former counsel to the Mises Institute. “Murray N. Rothbard is the most intelligent and informed man I have met in my entire life! He like Ludwig von Mises, refused to speak and write only the truth. This hurt Mises and Rothbard financially their entire lives. They were ridiculed by the mainstream economists, government, new media, academics. But they held to the truth that they knew in their minds and hearts. I knew Murray N. Rothbard personally and he was kind to everyone. He was so brilliant that most people were nervous when they met him. Murray usually told a joke or said something weird, strange, funny or whatever to make people comfortable. He did not laugh; he cackled. He was jovial. I had lunches and dinners with him and spoke with him at the Mises institute. I was the attorney for the Mises Institute in the early years. – JRD”

Unlike today’s “churches,” ekklēsiai weren’t collegia (clubs).

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), his one-time New York rep Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015), and long-time friend (of them and me), fellow Christian Individualist Michael Walko, Los Angeles, December 21 or 22, 1973. Photo courtesy of “Jersey Mike.”—A.G.F.

[Also on Substack]

Almost fifty years ago, I met Gabriel Monheim (1936-2015) on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and soon thereafter read The Bible versus the Churches.[1] Thus, my entrée to Otis Q. Sellers, from whose biblical theology Gabe borrowed while adding his special “street” touch.

As Gabe declared in the book’s last chapter: “What we have just described [in the preceding hundred pages] is Christian individualism.”[2] Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book.

The takeaway from Gabe’s book was that belonging to any of the various social formations we call “churches” (because we’re stuck with that word) is not only not a condition of being saved, but also not even something one needs to do to prove one’s Christian bona fides. And more often than not, it’ll put you at odds with “what the Bible teaches,” something all the churches claim to care about.

You see, I had just left the Communist Party. I was not keen on joining anything.

It took time for me to get to the bottom of Sellers’s ecclesiology and plant my flag on the ground of his interpretation of the Word of God. Over that time, unfortunately, I drifted in and out of various churches. But God’s grace put my nose back in His Word and Sellers’s mining of it.

I must start somewhere. Of Aaron, Sellers noted, it was said, “And no man taketh this honor unto himself, but he that is called (kaleō [i.e., καλούμενος, kaloumenos]) of God, as was Aaron” (Hebrews 5:4). As for the major prophets:

Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel had their positions out of God and could be designated as ekklēsia [ἐκκλησία] men in har­mony with the way the Greeks used this term. The boy David was only a shepherd, but after his anointing to be king of Israel, he had a position out of God. This position is a perpetual one. Death interrupted it but did not end it. David will again be the Shepherd-king of Israel in the day when God governs the nations of the earth. See Jeremiah 30:9; Ezekiel 34:23-24; 37:24- 25; Hosea 3:5.[3]

Sellers brings this to bear on the meaning of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia) in the New Testament:

The disciples of Christ were simply learners. They had no position out of Him. They were not ekklēsia men individually and did not form an ekklēsia collectively. However, at one point in His ministry, after a night of prayer, He called unto Him His disciples. Out of these He chose (or elected: eklexamenos [ἐκλεξάμενος]) twelve, whom also He named (ὠνόμασεν, ōnomasen) apos­tles (ἀποστόλους, apostolous) (Luke 6:12-13; emphasis added.—A.G.F.)

“The full significance of this action,” Sellers continues, “has long been ignored and stultified” by those who insist on reading back into Scripture not only themselves but also the clubs (“churches”) to which they belong and which lack that status.

The very fact that it followed a night of communion with the Father should denote its importance.

In this action, Jesus Christ, who was God’s apostle (Hebrews 3:1), gave of Himself, even of His substance (essential nature) to these twelve men, resulting in each one becoming an out-positioned one, or ekklēsia man.

Indi­vidually and personally, they were an ekklēsia, and col­lectively they became the ekklēsia to all other disciples.[4]

These twelve disciples of His became “the foundational ekklē­sia, the very rock upon which the Lord declared He would build of Himself the ekklēsia.”

In Rome, one did not join the senate as one joins a club or trade union. Membership was a function of status, office, lineage, and recognition by constituted authority. It was conferred, not self-initiated.

In ancient Athens, the ekklē­sia was the assembly of citizens who were called to deliberate. One did not “join” it. If you were a male citizen of age, you were part of it. Your status preceded participation.

The verb καλέω (kaleō) in this context was not a polite invitation. Not a “You’re cordially invited to attend,” but rather a “You are summoned to exercise your political responsibility as a citizen.” It meant to be summoned under authority, convened for deliberation, or having one’s presence required.

It carried legal and civic force. Social ontology asserted itself: it was the enactment of the Athenian polis itself. When it met, Athens was acting.

Thus, ekklē­siai (the plural of ekklē­sia) may mean “those called out,” but “out” does not necessarily mean out from; it could mean out of.

Christ’s “commissioned ones,” his apostles, had positions out of Him, the just as, if you will, your arm is “out” of your body, not out of the world. And so He said “I will build of me (μου, mou; genitive) My ekklēsia” (Matthew 16:18).

The first Christians, who understood themselves to be positioned out of Christ, didn’t “join a church.” The language of voluntary association reflects post-Enlightenment social forms, not apostolic ecclesiology. An ekklēsia was not a collegium or voluntary association.

In ancient Rome, there were thousands of collegia[5] (the Latin plural of collegium), groups of worshippers, religious processions, or cults (often associated with Dionysus). Besides θίασοι, there were ἔρανοι (eranoi, the plural of ἔρανος, eranos), voluntary clubs or “picnic groups” that might provide mutual aid, banquets, or financial assistance to their members.

Does this sound familiar? Thiasoi and eranoi resembled the “clubs” we call churches.

Among collegia were trade guilds (bakers, carpenters, shipbuilders, and so forth), burial societies, ethnic associations, cults devoted to deities like Isis or Mithras. With membership came initiation rites and dues, and vestments that indicated rank. You joined it by applying (or being sponsored), paying dues, and participating in rituals. Membership was voluntary and contractual. And, according to the logic of clubs, you could leave, or be expelled.

To Roman authorities, Christian meetings smelled like illicit associations of dangerous folk who met regularly, shared meals, and imposed discipline on their members. Ironically, those authorities sometimes persecuted Christians just because they didn’t behave like members of a normal collegium.

A trade guild could be regulated; a mystery cult, licensed. But a community claiming exclusive allegiance to a crucified and risen Lord and refusing to regard its gathering as just another voluntary association? Well, that risked destabilizing the imperial order from which all secular blessings flow!

The Roman Senate in session.

Again, one did not “join” the ἐκκλησία any more than one joined the Roman Senate. One was “constituted” into it, whether by civic status (in Rome’s case) or, in the case of Christ’s first disciples (learners), by divine calling (positioning).

Christian identity is ontological, not contractual. It’s about what you are, not how you “identify.” Regardless of century or dispensation, it’s grounded in your being a new person in Christ.

Individuals can decide to form or join a collegium, and that’s what individuals, even Christian individuals, have done since Acts 28:28. These social formations neither effect nor affect (neither bring about nor impact) their salvation.

Christ commissioned ones, His Apostles, identified individuals with Christ, making them ἐκκλησίαι, and they evangelized others. Apostles and evangelists were mediated between God and men, something only Christ does in this dispensation (1 Timothy 2:5). Now we can only “do the work of evangelists” (2 Timothy 4:5). This ontological status had nothing to do with meeting regularly and paying dues.

If New Testament ἐκκλησίαι were not analogous to Roman collegia, then today’s “church” practices are built on extra-biblical assumptions.

Like Roman collegia, churches have membership classes, covenants, voting rights, transfer letters, and ways to opt out.

Churches compete for their members who transfer freely in or out of this one or that. Preference governs the belonging and the transfers.

If the church is primarily a voluntary association, then belonging to this one, that one, or none at all, is a matter of consumer choice.

The forum at Corinth. remains of shops, the western side.

In the first century, however, there was no religious “marketplace”: the ἐκκλησίαι in Corinth constituted what we refer to (at least in English) as “the church” in Corinth.

If, however, the church is ἐκκλησία, then belonging was (and one day will again) be grounded in God’s action.

Today, He’s dealing with us strictly as individuals, regardless into what clubs we sort ourselves.

In support of the (in his view) non-identity of ἐκκλησία and “church,” Sellers favorably cited Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (The Westminster Press, 1953), whose author tantalizingly posed these questions:

Is it a question of a misunderstanding of which the Church is guilty or of a misunderstanding of which it is the victim? Or is that the Church itself, as such, is perhaps the product of a misunderstanding? The author is not responsible for this ambiguity; it is intrinsic, rather, to the theme itself. (Brunner, Misunderstanding, 1951 Preface)

Or perhaps, partly perpetrator, partly victim, partly product? My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press, is in the interior design phase.

Notes

[1] Gabriel Monheim, The Bible versus the Churches, self-published, 1977. I tell the story of this meeting in my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, but you can read an ancestor of its preface on my site: “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette,” July 9, 2019.

[2] Chapter 22, “The Conclusion of the Whole Matter,” 103.

[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “Ekklēsia Men,” Seed & Bread, No. 115, n.d., ca. late 1970s. Emphasis added. Further quotations from Sellers in this article are from this study.

[4] Sellers held “they could not be an ekklēsia collectively unless each one was ekklēsia personally.” That is, the individual didn’t become out-positioned by joining a collective that jointly bore the characteristic of being out-positioned. “The United States Senate (a legislative ekklēsia) is an example of this. It must be made up of a hundred men who individually are senators, men whose positions are out of their states. You cannot become a senator by joining the Senate, and you cannot form the Senate by organizing a hundred ordinary men.”

[5] The Greek equivalent: θίασοι (thiasoi), the plural of θίασος (thiasos).

For Black History Month: Noting a Recurring Fantasy and Remembering Its Promulgator and Bibliophile

I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning. We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided.

So opined Gene Wu. In a 2024 podcast interview that has recently resurfaced, this Democratic state representative from Houston, but born in Communist China in 1978, broadcast this anti-white racialist appeal (while predicting the end of life as we know it were all illegal immigrants in the U.S. repatriated).

Candidate for Texas Attorney General Aaron Reitz thinks that’s enough not only to disqualify Wu for the office he holds, but also to put the truthfulness of his naturalization process in doubt and thereby schedule him for denaturalization and deportation:

He likely concealed his anti-American sentiment throughout his citizenship application process—the details of which are conspicuously absent from the public record. Wu is a subversive whose citizenship should be revoked.

But where and when did I first catch wind of this rhetoric?

In the early ‘70s, as a Communist Party member working for Herbert Aptheker on his Du Bois projects, this Bronx native had reason to walk along 125th Street in Harlem from time to time, past the Apollo Theater, and, a few feet further east, an eye-catching mural. Continue reading “For Black History Month: Noting a Recurring Fantasy and Remembering Its Promulgator and Bibliophile”