According to Richard J. Evans, the late communist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) fell in love with nature. Nature’s God, however, found no place either in his heart or his thoughts, at least not his published ones.
In 1935, Evans wrote, Hobsbawm (then in his late teens) “felt a sudden, ill-defined”
. . . longing [Hobsbawm journaled]. For what? Perhaps for the fields, strong, red, deep fields, and broad, warm meadows. Or for the dead-silent woods at night. Or for the great sea, soft, lightly swelling its weight, shining benignly red and silver in the evening. I want to lie down peacefully, very softly, under the great sun. In the wondrous, deep sun. I want to be still, completely still, and lie there until I fall asleep, in the sun, in the warm grass.[1]
Whence, however, the object of this rapturous longing? An explosion of matter and energy indifferent to Hobsbawm and his loves, a happy but accidental product of planetary and hominid “evolution,” one by-product of which was Hobsbawm’s psychological report that has no significance beyond itself.
The heavens—and, by extension, nature—declare the glory of God (Psalm 19), but Hobsbawm’s materialism rules out such expressions of reverence and gratitude. The heavens declare nothing. In nature’s beauty, Hobsbawm found respite from his academic and political toils, but never a reason to question his atheism. It was a brute fact, one to be enjoyed, perhaps, but certainly also taken for granted.
Hobsbawm would be “still,” as God desires us all to be, but never, as far as we know, affirm Him in that stillness. (Psalm 46:10) Hobsbawm knew God, but suppressed that knowledge (Romans 1), even though in it lay the root of the intelligibility of everything he professed to know and love throughout his long life. He had no grounds for proclaiming autobiographically, as he did at age 85:
What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness. “Dialectical materialism” provided, if not a “theory of everything,” then at least a “framework of everything,” linking inorganic and organic nature with human affairs, collective and individual, and providing a guide to the nature of all interactions in a world of constant flux.[2]
“So, Flood, why do you care about Hobsbawm?”
I care, because the questions he raised as a young man a century ago in Europe between the Wars remind me of those I raised half that long ago in the Bronx. The man helping me answer them was Hobsbawm’s contemporary, the American Stalinist historian, Herbert Aptheker.[3] In my case, God countermanded my suppression of the truth; not in Hobsbawm’s.
And that liberation was entirely of grace. It was nothing for me to boast about. (Ephesians 2:9)
[3] When the Soviet Union crushed the 1956 Hungarian uprising, it no more occurred to Hobsbawm to leave the Communist Party of Great Britain than it did to Aptheker to leave the CPUSA. Hobsbawm defended Moscow outright, identifying “fascism” as a clear and present danger. The “suppression of a popular movement,” Hobsbawm wrote, “however wrong-headed, by a foreign army is at best a tragic necessity and must be recognized as such. While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as possible.” (Quoted in Evans, Hobsbawm, 343) At least he didn’t develop his casuistry into a book-length apologetic like Aptheker’s The Truth about Hungary, Mainstream Publishers, 1957. (The link opens a PDF of this book, courtesy of the Espresso Stalinist.) See my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, independently published, 2019.
[Also on Substack] This Christian Individualist’s path from the one man to the other over the past fifty years was paved with books. Yours truly, the young Stalinist, was a bibliophile, but so was Stalin the mass murderer. Geoffrey Roberts’s Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books [1] is surprising me (I’m more than halfway through it) with his description of a life that resonates with me at so many points that I’m forced to reevaluate—not repudiate, but painfully re-examine at some cost to my self-image—the love on whose altar I sacrificed much else of value.
Roberts documents, in a profuse but captivating way, what I had surmised from earlier study: that Josef Dzhugashvili (1878/9—1953) gave himself over to his love of books. Omnivorous reading, which had propped up his familial inheritance of the Russian Orthodox faith, also helped him rationalize and then cement his conversion to Marxism and eventually his revolutionary discipleship under V. I. Lenin.
Roberts’s Stalin is a flesh-and-blood historical actor with strong feelings in all the areas of life that we all know from the inside. I’m grateful to Roberts for permitting me to infer that, even at my most foolish, perhaps I was not willing to cross certain lines (e.g., murder, bank robbery) to prove my commitment to The Cause. The truth of that is known only to God, to Whose mercy I entrust myself.
In the history of professing Christians in this dispensation, there have been romantic idealists who, had they the means, would not have hesitated to use them to annihilate “enemies of the Faith,” that is, fellow believers who interpreted Scripture differently. I’m thinking particularly of the ironically named Pope Innocent III (r. 1198—1216), who wiped out the professing Christian dualist sect, the Cathars, and made outcasts of Jews and Muslims (Saracens) living in “Christian lands.” I shudder to think what he would have done with more effective weaponry. (After all, weren’t those hapless tens of thousands a threat to the “souls” of every Catholic they ideologically infected?)
I’m not singling out leaders of the religious society in which I was raised. The great Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin would not have extended the hand of fellowship to Otis Q. Sellers or to any believer he influenced. Nay, they would have immolated us all or entombed us alive, just as surely as Martin V, let alone Innocent III, would have caused recent occupants of the Papal throne to be incinerated as “heretics.”[2]
In my eighth decade, I view life stages, not as arithmetical deductions, but as seasons I’ve passed through. That’s true for my enemies and heroes alike. As a teenager, I grasped abstractly what it meant to be in one’s twenties, thirties, and so forth. Now I understand those ages viscerally. Things that were merely facts in a biography now represent existential turning points.
The same goes for the loss of friends and the illnesses and deaths of loved ones. Every historical actor I ever read about or personally knew suffered something about which they had to suppress their feelings as they answered this naif’s questions. Lovers live as though they’ll continue along the same lines until some unknown and distant endpoint. No, death may very well overtake one or the other, sometimes when one is in advanced age and grieving the loss unimaginably. My libertarian genius friend Murray Rothbard (1926—1995) left Joey (1928—1999) too soon. Fay Aptheker (1905—1999) predeceased my erstwhile friend and ideological apothecary Herbert (1915—2003) when he was physically and mentally at his most vulnerable.
Stalin’s bibliophilia had no “aesthetic” dimension. It served his commitment to communist revolution and to securing its gains, whatever the cost. The communist vision effectively functioned as his “Absolute,” a pseudo-transcendent object against which he measured everything else. But since the latter cannot function in one’s life as a genuine Absolute, Stalin was bound to distort his relationship to reality—his family, his friends and comrades, and to truth itself.
By contrast, another bookworm, Otis Q. Sellers (1901—1992), consecrated his life, not to the demonic fantasy of communism, but to the God Whose Logos is the Truth and revealed to His people truths of the enscripturated, propositional kind—the One on Whom “Koba” the ex-seminarian fatefully turned his back, just two years before Sellers’s nativity in the new century.[3]
[2] Although Jan Hus was executed in 1415 and Martin V was not elected pope until 1417—both events occurring while the Council of Constance was in session—what Martin did immediately after his election leaves no doubt that he endorsed the council’s ghastly sentence. Before becoming Pope Martin V, Cardinal Oddo Colonna was an influential member of the Roman Curia. On behalf of then-Pope John XXIII, he (Colonna) had investigated the Czech reformer’s writings, branded Hus a heretic, and issued his excommunication, demonstrating a longstanding personal and theological opposition to Hus well before the execution. (That “John XXIII” was Baldassarre Cossa, whom Angelo Roncalli (1881—1963), the “good” John XXIII, r. 1958—1963), later declared an “anti-pope,” thereby settling a five-century “debate” over Cossa’s status and regularizing the papal chronology.) On February 22, 1418, just months after his election, Martin V promulgated Inter cunctas, the papal bull recognizing the decisions of the Council of Constance, including its condemnation of the thirty “heretical” articles of Jan Hus. That execrable screed also mandated that the Holy Inquisition interrogate and hand over to secular authorities any suspected Hussite—the very mechanism that had led to Hus’s being burned at the stake.
[3] In April or May 1899, Dzhugashvili left or was expelled from the seminary in Tiflis in his native Georgia. Officially, it was because he missed his final exams. “Uncle Joe” said it was because he ran Marxist propaganda circles within the seminary walls. By 1899, he had taken on the alias “Koba” (the fictional Caucasian bandit of Alexander Kazbegi’s 1882 The Patricide (მამის მკვლელი, mamis mkvleli) and traded in his mother’s Russian Orthodox Christian faith for Marxism. The ex-seminarian, having abandoned any path toward the priesthood, briefly took a job as a meteorologist, and transformed himself into a dedicated agitator for atheism.
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 Jacobinsand 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.
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
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 the 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.
[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.
[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.
[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).
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.
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”
[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!”
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.
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:
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.]
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]
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?
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!
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.
JoAnn Rothbard, “My View of Murray Rothbard” (March 1, 1986), delivered at the Mises Institute’s celebration in honor of Murray Rothbard’s sixtieth birthday, included in JoAnn’s obituary, “JoAnn Beatrice Schumacher Rothbard (1928-1999),” Mises Daily (Oct. 30, 1999)
Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Murray N. Rothbard at 100,” Brownstone Journal (March 2, 2026; forthcoming)
Notes
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.
“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.”
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!”
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”
According to Richard J. Evans, the late communist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) fell in love with nature. Nature’s God, however, found no place either in his heart or his thoughts, at least not his published ones.
[Also on 
By contrast, another bookworm, 
Last December 15th [i.e., 2029], in 
“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.”
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 
[10]
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) 
[Slightly updated, this was first published here two years ago.]
The following 
