Otis Q. Sellers: Wellston’s Son, Revival’s Heir

The high school in Wellston, Ohio, which Otis Q. Sellers attended in last century’s second decade.

“I was born in a small town of about 5,000 people [and lived there] for the first fifteen years of my life. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy. This small town shaped my thinking and actions. Sometimes I think that was for the good.” [1]

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 blackened remains of Jefferson Hill, 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.

An octave of days later on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Larger memorial image loading... Sellers, Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. Fellow Ohioan President William McKinley, the fifth of seven chief executives who hailed from the Buckeye State, was felled by an anarchist’s bullet when Otis was a half-year old. McKinley’s successor, Teddy Roosevelt, the leader of the Progressive movement that gave the era its name, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. America’s Philippines adventure would last another year. The era ended with America’s entry in the European war.

But the global carnage was not even on the horizon. America at the turn of the 2oth century was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in the science’s promise. The month before Otis’s nativity, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. On the day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[2] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[3] Bad news, be it local or national, could not dampen the progressive spirit.

Old Wellston Post Office, early 20th century.

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 Ohio was ran deep, back to the country’s founding. John H. Sellers, Otis’s great-grandfather, 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 entrepreneur (and Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman) who founded the city (and named it after himself) in 1873. Otis mentioned Grover rarely, but then he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy.[4] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Wellston’s Son, Revival’s Heir”

Otis Q. Sellers on “fortifying,” and then examining, one’s beliefs

Otis Q. Sellers, 1920. Whereabouts unknown to this writer. Perhaps the bench he was leaning against was in a Cincinnati park. If so, maybe the statue behind him provides a clue.

In 1940 Otis Q. Sellers reviewed the approach to Bible study he had exhibited during his early years as a believer (1920-1921). It was marked, he admitted, by the tendency to study only to validate what one already believes. Today we’d call it “confirmation bias.” He achieved victory over it, but it took about fifteen years.

The following account, first made in The Word of Truth, IV:2, March-April 1940, was essentially carried over into “Early Experiences,” a section of his The Study of Human Destiny: A Testimony and an Appeal, Los Angeles, 1955, 7-12. His reverie’s homespun air contrasts refreshingly with the academic prose I’m used to reading (and, I confess, often guilty of falling into).

The Study of Human Destiny (excerpts)

It has now been almost seven years [1934-1940] since I determined that the entire subject of the nature of man and the destiny of man should be reinvestigated, reexamined, and restudied. This determination became a powerful conviction, that in turn became a consuming passion, and this has kept me steadily engaged at the task throughout the years that have passed. . . . (25)

It is now my earnest desire to lead others over the steps that I have trod, in order that they may see for themselves the things that I have seen, and discover for themselves the things that I have discovered. My reward for doing this will be to see things again for myself, to see them more clearly, and to discover things that I had not uncovered before. . . . It troubles me to hear that those to whom I once ministered the Word of God are saying that I “have taken up with some new belief.” This is not true. The truth is that the student you knew, came as a result of his studies to a place where certain inexorable facts and all their implications had to be faced. I came to a place where a decision had to be made and the results of my own studies in the Word of God had to be embraced or rejected. (25)

. . . I had not known the Lord many months before I was busily engaged preaching on the streets, in mission halls, and in churches. Inasmuch as I went from place to place, such work did not require many messages, and the half dozen that I had developed, on as many subjects, soon became very familiar to me. I was soon able to give them with all the assurance of an experienced veteran. I had no background of Biblical knowledge, but by putting together the things I did know, condemning things that were wrong, commending things that were good, adding to this some anecdotes and illustrations, I was able to satisfy that class of people who have no thirst for knowledge, but who do like to hear a lively and interesting message. (26)

This group was predominant at that time, and it still dominates the religious world today. It is this group that the average minister keeps in mind in all his study and service. They provide the character for the church today. The hireling shepherd feels it is best to go along with them. He does not permit his messages to rise above the level of their superficial knowledge. Neither does he say anything that will disturb them or cause them spiritual exercise. He excuses his own superficiality by saying that all that his people want is just the simple gospel. I remember well how I covered up my own lack of knowledge by claiming to be a preacher of the simple gospel. (26)

As I look back upon my first year of Christian experience [1920] I am both amazed and amused at how little a man can know and yet satisfy the average audience that comes to hear a sermon. . . . [I]n those few messages I had quite a bit to say about hell fire and eternal conscious torment. No hesitation was shown in declaring these things and, since they were in harmony with what the world and religious men believed, they were usually good for some resounding “amens.” It was with some satisfaction that I felt I held men over the pit until they smelled the smoke. I fear now that it was true of me that I spoke about hell with all the assurance and knowledge of one who had recently been there. I am still wondering just where all this knowledge came from. I had never been a student of the Bible, had never sat under the ministry of a Bible teacher, yet my beliefs on the nature of future punishment had already reached finality of truth. At that time I would have readily admitted that I could learn more about my beliefs. but I would not have admitted that I could learn a thing to change my beliefs. These were fixed before I ever began to study. (26) Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers on “fortifying,” and then examining, one’s beliefs”

Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) in the year he was enrolled in Moody Bible Institute, 1921.

This following is from a growing manuscript on the life and independent biblical theology of Otis Q. Sellers.

Otis Q. Sellers’s discovery of the premillennial Kingdom didn’t drop from the sky. Teachers of the Word whom he read and under whom he studied prepared his breakthrough and breakaway. He knew they exposed and resisted the agents of modernism who took over the churches and their seminaries.

“Reactions to this mass of error,” he wrote, “were bound to come, and they took place in the great resurgence of Bible study in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century.”

In this resurgence the “Social Gospel” was assailed and contradicted with many infallible proofs from the Word of God. It was demonstrated to be a perversion of the Gospel of Christ and its programs foreign to the facts of God’s revealed truth. And the great dispensational-premillennial movement came to the forefront to lead and to challenge in respect to a new and honest approach to the prophetic (eschatological) portions of God’s Word.[1]

From that movement’s leaders Sellers learned how not only to negotiate Bible study, but also, when the time came, to justify breaking out of that movement in the name of the biblical truth they had championed. Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: Subversive Heir to the Bible Conference Movement”

C.L.R. James: still Stalinism’s “Invisible Man”

The following review of Gerald Horne’s Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois appeared on Amazon today.

Horne’s ability to amass and organize resources is again on display here — he’s a veritable academic book factory. Also again, but unfortunately, his considerable skills serve the Stalinist narrative. This orientation invites the question of what has been distorted to that end.

Horne refers to C.L.R. James as the “writer” (252), but nowhere as the author of the pioneering Black Jacobins. Horne’s descriptor for James is not the respectful “Trotskyist,” but “veteran Trotskyite,” the slur Stalinists coined for their Leninist rivals. We learn that Stalinist historical researcher Herbert Aptheker was “relieved” when Mrs. Du Bois “terminated” her relationship with James before the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania, but not why Aptheker was relieved or why he “was worried about the James association” or what possible reason she could have had to accuse James—once a denizen of Ellis Island awaiting deportation in 1953—of “unadulterated McCarthyism” (252). That era witnessed, Horne says, the “persecution” of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for “alleged atomic espionage” (146-147). Graham Du Bois made it her business to find someone to adopt the kids whom the spies’ execution orphaned. The right word, of course, is prosecution: the Rosenbergs were convicted by a jury based on evidence that meant nothing to Communists like Graham Du Bois. Since the Venona decrypts settled the matter of the Rosenbergs’ guilt in 1995, no scholar mentioning their case in 2000 should have referred to their espionage as “alleged.”

Should the sympathetic reader share in those concerns? Horne is mute. To have shed light on this, however, might have required him to at least mention James’s published criticisms of Aptheker in his area of specialization, his failure to acknowledge the significance of the aforementioned work by a Black scholar fourteen years his senior, and perhaps defend Aptheker’s passive dissing of James, which is what the Stalinist ethos demanded (and apparently still does).

To acknowledge the horrors of the African slave trade and its consequent evils does not require one to ally with, let alone sing the praises of, perpetrators of equal or greater enormities. That, however, seems to be the bargain the Du Boises were willing to make to advance Pan-Africanism. They were enamored of mass murderers. Yes, Stalin killed millions but, as Horne once encapsulated this attitude, he “was no worse than the Founding Fathers” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2009).

The books by one who believes that need to be scrutinized for other outrages. For example, in his Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963, Horne documents Pan-Africanist George Padmore’s interactions with Du Bois, but Padmore’s friend and fellow Trinidadian James is invisible. (The prolific Du Bois never took literary notice of “Black Jacobins”; Aptheker merely followed suit.)

Race Woman is a work of solid research and serviceable writing. I took off a star because he offended on a point I know something about. Time will tell whether other discoveries would justify deducting another.

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

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 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 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).

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”

Monsignor Hilary C. Franco’s wonderful life

Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers is Monsignor Hilary C. Franco’s memoir, an engaging story only a son can tell, a son not only of the Catholic Church, but also of Italian immigrants. In his telling of that story, it was my privilege to have played the role of scribe.

By God’s grace, Monsignor Franco will turn 89 on July 16th, but he’s by no means retired: the latest item on his impossibly long resume is his current role of Advisor to the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations. But that title doesn’t begin to convey the drama of his life. The stories of the six pontiffs Franco served are reference points along his walk through the corridors of spiritual power in New York, Washington, D.C., and Rome over the past 70 years.

Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers, published by Humanix Books last Tuesday, is Monsignor Franco’s eyewitness account of many of the people, events, and movements that shaped our world and the Catholic Church, including his assistance to Archbishop Fulton Sheen at the Second Vatican Council. There is no other book like it.

A few days ago, Newsmax TV’s Rachel Rollar interviewed Franco on Wake Up America. You can catch the five-minute chat here. During her interview she mentioned the Newsmax page where you can read Six Pope’s first chapter; here the link to that. The book’s introduction is on another Newsmax page. Please check them out, buy the book (hardcover or Kindle), and post a review!

Better late than never: the Jesuits’ welcome, if tardy, application of the natural law

Frank Campbell, Georgetown slave, early 1900s. Campbell was one of the Maryland Jesuit slaves sold in 1838.

“. . . the abolition of slavery remained unfinished, and the seeds of a new revolt have remained to intensify to the present day. Hence, the great importance of the shift in Negro demands from greater welfare handouts to ‘reparations,’ reparations for the years of slavery and exploitation and for the failure to grant the Negroes their land, the failure to heed the Radical abolitionist’s call for ‘40 acres and a mule’ to the former slaves. In many cases, moreover, the old plantations and the heirs and descendants of the former slaves can be identified, and the reparations can become highly specific indeed.” Murray Rothbard (1969)[1]

A century-and-a-half after the Civil War, the Society of Jesus has acknowledged the justice of specific reparations owed to the five thousand or so living descendants of the Black people the Jesuits once owned, an enterprise they had engaged in for more than a century. With a “down payment” of $15 million, the Jesuits have pledged to raise $100 million in private donations (not taxpayer funds).[2] What follows is an edited excerpt from “Lock(e), Stock and Jesuit,” Chapter 29 of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.

Continue reading “Better late than never: the Jesuits’ welcome, if tardy, application of the natural law”

When Herbert echoed Hillary: Aptheker on the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that threatened “fascism” in 1998

Haiti's revolution inspired revolutionary abolitionist John Brown - YouTube — Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), late 1990s.

Some of you may remember when Hillary Clinton told Today’s Matt Lauer about a “vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband [Bill Clinton] since the day he announced for president.”[1] That was on January 27, 1998.

Right to left: Paul Robeson, his son Paul, Jr, daughter-in-law Marilyn, unidentified woman. Soviet Embassy, Washington, DC, 1951

Nineteen days later, on February 15th, the San Francisco Public Library marked the centennial of Paul Robeson (1898-1976), the American singer and actor, Stalinism’s first global superstar. Among the panelists was Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), Stalinism’s chief American propagandist, also revered by the Left as an historian, who reminisced about Robeson.

Near the end of his remarks at the podium Aptheker—W. E. B. Du Bois’s comrade and literary executor—expressed his hope that the U.S. Postal Service would one day honor Robeson with a postage stamp as, two weeks earlier, it had Du Bois—for the second time.[2]

Du Bois and (on his right) wife Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Nikita Khrushchev in 1951. Khrushchev was then one of Stalin’s advisors, not yet First Secretary.

In 1997 Hillary’s husband established by executive order (13050) the “One America Initiative on Race,” headed by John Hope Franklin.[3] “I have great confidence in him and his committee,” Aptheker predicted. “Nothing but good can come of it.” Actually, nothing at all came out of it except another “report.” It was, however, another step on the road to the South African-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” being planned for us in the Age of Critical Race Theory.

Continue reading “When Herbert echoed Hillary: Aptheker on the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that threatened “fascism” in 1998″

Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission

Shortly after my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness was published in 2019, Lloyd Billingsley reviewed it for Frontpage Magazine. John Hamelin commented on his review at the time, but somehow I missed it, and comments are closed. It attempts to defend Aptheker’s scholarly credibility; it warrants an answer.

Hamelin starts off with:

While The Black Jacobins [hereafter, TBJ] is certainly a significant work in its own right and Aptheker’s avoidance in citing it can be considered an example of petty political rivalries, the idea that it somehow demolishes Aptheker’s writings on Black American history is absurd.

It would be absurd, but that’s not what I wrote. It’s not even in the review. The reviewer got it right: “Flood aims to modify the received opinion that Herbert Aptheker was a historian.”

I sure do.

What I argued for in the book, which Hamelin gives no evidence of having read, is that Aptheker’s work cannot be trusted. That doesn’t mean everything Aptheker wrote is a lie. It means that nothing he has written can be taken at face value.

Continue reading “Revisiting Herbert Aptheker’s pattern of misrepresentation and omission”

Murray Rothbard’s libertarian reflections on “The Negro Revolution” (1963)

“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).

Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.

Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.

Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).

Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)

“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher; its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy. Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver, and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).

On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution.

—Anthony Flood

The Negro Revolution

Murray N. Rothbard

In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.

DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sit around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.

Continue reading “Murray Rothbard’s libertarian reflections on “The Negro Revolution” (1963)”