Category: History

The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit

Before the New York Times became the ultraleft rag it is today, one could at least count on its reporting a story’s basic facts. Or an obituary’s. And so in 2003, when I read the paper’s notice of the passing of Herbert Aptheker, whom I knew, I was surprised to see how many easily discoverable facts the Times’s esteemed book review editor, the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, got wrong. To its credit, it published a correction (three weeks later). The New York Times didn’t publish this letter, and neither did I in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness. I do so hereunder, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also in shameless promotion of the book.

—Anthony Flood

March 22, 2003

To the Editor:

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s March 20 obituary of Herbert Aptheker contains several errors of commission and omission.

Aptheker’s Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States runs to seven volumes, not three. He edited and annotated three volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois’ correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography.

 

The obituary fails to mention that Aptheker’s 1937 Master’s thesis was about Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt and written on the basis of primary source research. This should be considered when weighing William Styron’s accusation that only politics motivated Aptheker’s criticism of his novel.

 

Continue reading “The truth about Herbert Aptheker: correcting a New York Times obit”

Diana West: The Conscience of a Conservative

With journalistic skills honed over decades, skepticism toward received opinion, a graceful literary style, and considerable courage, Diana West has been contributing to the preservation of America’s heritage of liberty against its enemies, foreign and domestic. She’s been doing this by defending American philosophy, culture, and history—and common sense—in essays, books and, lately, videos.

Her contribution, unfortunately, is not as widely known as its high literary quality would lead one to predict. The Left have mainly ignored her, but false friends on the Right have vilified her, arrogating to themselves the right to determine how far the defense of liberty may go and whose sacred cows may not be blasphemed along the way.

In the words of ex-Communist journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), West detects a red thread of continuity between his era and ours:

. . . [R]ecounting his experience as a German Communist in the 1930s, [Arthur] Koestler is nonetheless describing the post-Communist, postmodern, post-9/11 American condition. It is the sinister overhaul of language and thought . . . that he personally engaged in, and that was and is the primary tool of Marxist and Islamic subversion. “Not only our thinking, but also our vocabulary was reconditioned,” he explains. “Certain words were taboo.” Certain other words became telltales by which to identify dissenters or enemies. Literary, artistic, and musical tastes, he writes, were “similarly reconditioned” to support the renunciation of independent thought and logic necessary to submit to ideology.[1]

Sounds familiar? She calls for a “cultural reexamination” of the process by which Americans were force-fed one “blue pill” of lies after another and, for the most part, they swallowed them willingly, casting into outer darkness those who spit them out and sought the “red pill” of unpleasant truth.[2] Continue reading “Diana West: The Conscience of a Conservative”

God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages

From March 1-5, 1943, as war raged in Europe and the Pacific, Otis Q. Sellers (whose life and work I’m researching) broadcast five messages on Chicago station WAIT.

The subject was the foundation of his life’s work: the fact that God has spoken to humankind in the Bible, “the greatest fact in the universe.” For Sellers, Scripture was life’s Global Positioning System (a term that was still 30 years in his future): it located him, and his family, his country, in history. “I do not study the Bible in order to get material for messages. I study it because of the needs of my own life.”

As his daughter assured me, Sellers avidly followed the news, which that week probably included reports of the carnage wrought in the Bismarck Sea, Kharkov, and Essen. That we live in the Dispensation of Grace, however, the last divine administration before God assumes sovereignty, dominated his consciousness.

Otis Q. Sellers in 1934 with wife Mildred (right) and daughter Jane (left).

A 42-year old resident of Grand Rapids, MI, having moved there in 1936 from Winnetka, IL, Sellers was married for 23 years and with a daughter in high school. The world was at war. He was not immune to the hardships of the home front: rationing; uncertainty of the return of enlisted family members; dread of what the next few years might hold. (We now see that the die for Hitler’s defeat had been cast at least two years before, but it was not at all clear to Mr. and Mrs. America, who scraped to buy War Bonds as well as food and gasoline.)

 

In a rare reference to contemporary events (which he generally regarded as distractions), Sellers wrote:

. . . I know that the problems that the post-war world must face will be as great as those imposed by the war. Victory will bring its day or week of celebration, and after that comes such things as untold millions of defeated soldiers fleeing back to their countries in dis­order, imported foreign workers and prisoners of war abandoning the countries of their captivity and returning to what was once their homes, the people who were forced to migrate returning to their war ravaged lands. In Russia alone fifty million Soviet citizens will return to the wasted territory of western Russia. Starvation, disease, disorder and chaos is almost sure to have its reign. Our own country may remain untouched by the ravages of war, yet we will not be isolated from the problems of the post-war world. These problems in our own country may be so great that all the combined wisdom of men may not be equal to them. These years are just ahead for us, nevertheless, we can face them with assurance and confidence if we know the personal and the written Word of God. (“Divine Importance of the Word,” March 3, 1943)

1947

Readers should notice in the March 1st message, reproduced below, Sellers’s self-effacing representation as a Christian Individualist. He walked in fellowship with other Christians, but not as members of an organization. In the Dispensation of Grace, Sellers held, God has been dealing with people as individuals, all shut up to The Book. Before Acts 28:28, one had to be divinely commissioned (apostello, traditionally transliterated “apostle”) to herald the Word; on this side of that dispensational boundary line, however, the salvation-bringing message of God is no longer restricted to Israelites within and without the Land of Israel: it is freely authorized (apestole) to all nations. Continue reading “God Has Spoken: Otis Q. Sellers’s Wartime Radio Messages”

Only Light can overcome the darkness

This review of Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America by David Horowitz was published yesterday on Amazon. [Added 04/04/2020: Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella addressed some of the issues I raise below.—A.F.]

DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America - Kindle edition ...

Across Dark Agenda’s dozen chapters David Horowitz (Radical Son; Mortality and Faith; Black Book of the American Left [in nine volumes]) starkly surveys the outrages that the Left has committed against traditional American sensibilities for more than a hundred years. This short book isn’t a treatise on political philosophy, although evidence of his training in it enriches its pages. It delivers the clean, spare reflections of an American octogenarian who once promoted the leftist worldview he’s been exposing for over thirty years.

According to Horowitz, the Left hates Christianity, Western civilization’s dominant religion, and therefore hates America, arguably that civilization’s finest political creation. These mutually reinforcing hatreds take many forms. Leftist denials of anti-patriotic animus are worthless, for evidence of it abounds and is of long record.

For example, there’s the “discovery” of a mother’s alleged right to procure the death of her unborn child. This offends against the first right named in the Declaration of Independence. Then there’s the ban on public school prayer: Leftists seem only to have heard of the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause, not its free-expression twin.

Democratic-led (i.e., Leftist) state and local governments virtually nullify the right to bear arms articulated in the Second Amendment, a bulwark against a potentially tyrannical government. In a health emergency, for example, the government shutters as “non-essential” gun stores along with theaters and restaurants.David Horowitz | Young America's Foundation

Neither able nor willing to build consensus and win arguments in town halls and voting booths—the American way—Leftists, in addition to their slander, rioting, spying and other crimes, have achieved their aims by seeking and winning diktats from unelected jurists.

A moral theologian once aphorized that social engineering begins with verbal engineering, and Horowitz abundantly illustrates that truth. Americans live under a linguistic tyranny against which no charitable appeal to nuance or good will is a defense. (He notes that “‘people of color’ is a term created by people who are at war with this culture” [167].) Dissenters from the politically correct orthodoxy are diagnosed as suffering from one “phobia” or another.

Racism “explains” nearly everything the anti-Christian elites don’t like about America, past and present. Quack psychiatry replaces arguments. “Democratic” American Leftists are not slow to suggest that their political adversaries—mainly, but not exclusively, conservative Christians, and especially those of European descent—are lunatics for whom an asylum is medically indicated. This was, of course, business-as-usual in the old Soviet Union.

Continue reading “Only Light can overcome the darkness”

Black Americans and the GOP: An Inflection Point?

Image result for Coming home: how black americansThe following review was published on Amazon today. If you find it “helpful,” please take the link in the previous sentence and rate it accordingly. 

Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, Coming Home: How Black Americans Will Re-Elect Trump, New York, Humanix Books, 2020.

Mention the Black Republican vote, and a certain smugness (or despondency) almost always colors the conversation: it never cracked 20%, so goes received opinion; it never will. But one liberal pundit on FoxNews confessed that the African-American outreach of President Trump’s re-election campaign keeps him up at night. Coming Home lays out reasons for liberal concern and conservative hope in sixteen engagingly written and information-packed chapters.

Conservative activists Vernon Robinson III and Bruce Eberle, who were at first skeptical of Trump, don’t overstate the increase in Black support for the GOP in general and for Trump in particular. They do, however, show how it put him over the top in 2016 in Pennsylvania, a swing state, garnering 20 electoral votes: 140 thousand Black Keystone Staters gave him his margin of victory. That gets the skeptical reader’s attention.

Blacks may be only 12% of Pennsylvania’s population, but more than 20% of them voted for Trump. That was “not supposed” to happen; he was “not supposed” to be the Republican nominee; once nominated, “not supposed” to win the general election. Should Trump replicate this inroad across America by election day 2020, the authors argue, he’ll win re-election in a landslide. (All things being equal, of course, which COVID-19 ensures are decidedly not). To beat him, Democrats will have to do more than intone, “But that’ll never happen.” Republicans need shave only a few points off the Black voting bloc to reduce the Democrats to minority-party status.President Trump Addresses 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit At White HousePresident Trump Addresses 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit At White HousePresident Trump Addresses 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit At White HousePresident Trump Addresses 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit At White House

“One of you will be president!” Donald Trump, Young Black Leadership Summit, White House, October 25, 2019

Continue reading “Black Americans and the GOP: An Inflection Point?”

In defense of Lord Acton

On the occasion of the birthday of the great liberal Catholic historian John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), I’m publishing not only links to earlier posts about him, but also a 2006 essay. The latter replies to an attack on Acton, one I’d call ignorant if its author weren’t a learned Catholic historian. Like my Christ, Capital & Liberty, whose chapters began as blog posts critical of another traditionalist Catholic, the arguments and evidence marshaled in my essay deserve more exposure than my old site can give them.

The links:

John C. Rao, Ph. D. [Oxon.], Associate Professor of History, Saint John’s University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“In Defense of Lord Acton” was written in January 2006 in response to “A Message from Bethlehem: Lord Acton Tends to Corrupt,” a smear of Acton as a “Gnostic” by Professor John C. Rao of St. John’s University. The Remnant, a traditionalist Catholic periodical, published Rao’s defamation of Acton on the last day of 2005. Its original title of my response was, “Do Illiberals Tend to Smear? Or Is It Just Professor Rao When It Comes to Lord Acton?” The editor not only didn’t publish it, but even after more than one query, wouldn’t even acknowledge receiving it.

In Defense of Lord Acton

The significance of the Incarnation of the Prince of Peace for society is always a timely topic, and never a more welcome one than at Christmastime. It is the motif of Professor John C. Rao’s vast historical studies, and I expected his recent column in The Remnant1 to add one more variation on that theme. He more than disappointed any such expectation by taking the occasion of the season to impute heresy-mongering, if not heresy itself, to Lord Acton, a man who regarded communion with the Church as dearer than life itself. That is, Professor Rao maligned a fellow member of his own profession, a towering figure in European historiography who participated in the unearthing of many official archives. And he did it not by examining any of Acton’s own words, but rather by repeatedly asserting what he “really” meant. Feeling glum2 cannot excuse such a lapse from the standards of controversy. Continue reading “In defense of Lord Acton”

The quadrancentennial of Murray Rothbard’s passing

[NOTE: I hit “publish” too late on January 7th, 2020, apparently, so this post is unfortunately date-stamped January 8th. Murray Rothbard passed away on January 7, 1995, 25 years ago “yesterday.”—Anthony Flood]

Twenty-five years ago the world lost Murray Newton Rothbard; someday, maybe, it will find him. He died pre-Y2K, pre-9/11, heck, even pre-Oklahoma City Bombing. What he would have thought about subsequent events is the subject of educated conjecture, but no more.Image result for young murray rothbard"

I’m embarrassed that this anniversary just struck me. The best I can do last-minute is offer my post from last May, “Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography” and “Murray Rothbard: on my late friend’s lamentable error,” originally published a year ago today (now Appendix A of Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic):

“I was sure I was going to predecease him.”

That’s how my friend Father James A. Sadowsky (1923-2012) confirmed the news of the passing of Murray Newton Rothbard (1926–1995) two dozen years ago today [written in 2019].

It was after Sunday Mass at St. Agnes. Finishing breakfast with friends in a 42nd Street coffee shop, I excused myself to call (using a 20th-century pay phone) my wife who, enduring a cold, couldn’t join me in Manhattan that wintry day.

“Father Sadowsky called,” she said. “Murray Rothbard died yesterday.”

It’s now been almost 36 years [now 37] since the first chat that began my friendship with Murray, which continued through his last dozen years. His writings, illuminated by conversations, formed a major part of my education in economics, history, and politics. His personal influence makes it difficult to make a selection among the many memories.

In 1943 Murray Rothbard, then a high schooler in his 17th year, wrote a 7,000-word autobiography. The Ludwig von Mises Institute made it available about a year ago. Image result for young murray rothbard"I can’t recommend it highly enough to those interested in the formation of a future (six years later!) student of Ludwig von Mises and author of Man, Economy & State,  Power and Market, The Logic of Action (One and Two),  An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (two volumes), Conceived in Liberty (five volumes), and thousands of articles.

In “Anatomy of the State” (1965) Murray summed up his insight into the State, his lifelong object of demystification:

Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area.

In particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.

While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet.

Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects.

One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion; but the miasma of myth has lain so long over State activity that elaboration is necessary.

How ought we evaluate this insight? It seems to suggest, rather un-Rothbardianly, that a collective called “the State” has intentions (and agency to carry them out) over and above the individuals who comprise it. But let’s attribute this inaccurate suggestion to the need for an efficient (if roundabout) way to refer to the State’s constituent individuals. That is, the need for shorthand. There is, however, a less tractable problem with this historical generalization.

To me, it is plain that the same sin-warped mammalian species that has for millennia generated polymorphic structures of compulsion, regulation and dictatorship—parasitic upon free, peaceful and voluntary markets—is unlikely to ditch those structures for any meaningful interval. The same all-too-human material is found both in markets and in their hampering. Or rather, in the individuals who are both market actors and governmental aggressors and/or victims.

The legacy of Murray Rothbard is primarily one of polymathic erudition in the service of the natural right to liberty, suffused with optimism and humor. I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion, however, that his conceit that sustained statelessness is possible—and worth devoting one’s life to achieve—was an error. But it is also my conviction that we can learn more from Rothbard’s viewing of history through that conceit’s lens than from statists who never took that inspiring possibility seriously.

Murray’s error, if error it be, is nearly inexhaustibly instructive.

When George Novack was an “entranced disciple” of Whitehead

George Novack, 1905-1992. Circa early 1930s.

On his way to becoming a Marxist-Leninist philosopher before the stock market crash of 1929, George Novack (1905-1992) was a student of Alfred North Whitehead, to whose writings I once paid a great deal of attention. After noting that the “disconnected writings of C. S. Peirce were then being collected and edited by one of my teachers [at Harvard], Charles Hartshorne” (another erstwhile hero of mine), Novack wrote:

A. N. Whitehead, 1861-1947

However, the attention of the more serious students was drawn toward Bertrand Russell’s collaborator, A. N. Whitehead, the erudite modernizer of Platonism with scientific-mathematical trimmings. He read several chapters of his major treatise Process and Reality to our class. Obscure and enigmatic as much of its metaphysics was, it appealed to my need for a comprehensive, rational interpretation of the universe. For a while I became an entranced disciple of Whitehead, although as an atheist I was disconcerted to hear that my guru occasionally sermonized at King’s Chapel in Boston. This immersion in Whitehead’s system, with its infusion of scientific, mathematical, and philosophical concepts, immensely widened my intellectual horizon. I also learned from his Science and the Modern World that the clash of doctrines speeds progress. (“My Philosophical Itinerary,” Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, Pathfinder Press, 1978, 15-16.)

Philip Johnson in 1933, six years after leaving Harvard.

Philip Johnson (1906-2005), the notable architect whose mailroom I managed in the early ’80s, told me that Whitehead had convinced him that the future builder was not cut out for philosophy. (I had asked him about Whitehead at a firm outing held on the grounds of his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut on June 11, 1982, the last such party he hosted.) Since Johnson had finished his Harvard studies in 1927, he likely crossed Novack’s path in Whitehead’s classes.

Sidney Hook in the 1920s.

Novack mentions having been acquainted with Sidney Hook (forty-five years later my professor) who had studied under Morris Cohen at The City University of New York. I’m interested in whether and how Novack and Hook worked together in the late ’30s with John Dewey’s Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow trials of Leon Trotsky and others. [Since writing this, I’ve realized that Novack and Hook’s collaboration had to have been limited to shared procedural and intellectual tasks. They were united in opposing Stalinist show trials and defending due process for Trotsky, but their ideological trajectories diverged sharply. Hook, an anti-communist by this time, likely took a dim view of Novack’s Trotskyism; Novack would have regarded Hook as a renegade.—A.G.F., December 22, 2024]

I was once attracted to Whitehead because of his nontraditional theism, not, as in Novack’s case, in spite of it, especially the promise it held out to me of meeting the challenge that the occurrence of evil poses for theism. The promise, however, was predicated on a compromise: define “god” down to a universal “lure” of lesser “occasions of experience,” deny this “god” the power to exnihilate, and the result is a superhuman but intra-cosmic agency that, however powerful, cannot act locally within creation to prevent evil. Whitehead’s god is always working to overcome evil, but will never have the victory. Continue reading “When George Novack was an “entranced disciple” of Whitehead”

The “Cinderella century”: anticipating Michael Kruger’s “Christianity at the Crossroads”

In a recent post I challenged readers

to point to evidence that explains how in four score years first-century ekklesiai, made up mainly by the Israel of God (Galatians 6:16), organically devolved into an anti-Semitic racket with whose “wrong division” of the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15) Christians are still coming to terms.

I had quoted from Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s 1861 Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church. From it one gathers that there was much greater discontinuity between the Christian communities of the first century and those of the second than is commonly assumed.

Such discontinuity would partly explain the anti-Jewish aspects of the theology that emerged in the centuries after the events recorded in the New Testament, according which theology the promises God had made to Seed of Abraham were interpreted “spiritually” (i.e., figuratively) and to be redeemed by non-Jewish, often rather anti-Jewish Christians and their churches.

What has been unearthed in the century and a half since Stanley wrote?

Today I ordered a 2018 book (should arrive tomorrow) that, if it doesn’t answer my question, will almost certainly shed scholarly light on the matter. The book is Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church by Michael J. Kruger.

I usually call attention to books I’ve read, but here I’m willing to go out on a limb on the strength of Professor Kruger’s earlier work, especially his 2012 Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books, but also The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (2013) and (with Andreas J. Köstenberger ) The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (2010).

What has occasioned this post was my receipt today of one of Kruger’s. In it he notes with satisfaction the most recent of many positive reviews of Christianity at the Crossroads, this one by Walter Wagner, author of After the Apostles: Christianity in the Second Century (1994). (Kruger lists other reviews here.) Continue reading “The “Cinderella century”: anticipating Michael Kruger’s “Christianity at the Crossroads””

From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.

A Case of Mistaken Identity?

Rooted in κυριακόν (kyriakon), the English word “church” is the traditional translation of the Greek ἐκκλησία (ekklēsia). We may be practically stuck with it, but it’s a mistranslation, one that reinforces a misnomer at least as unhappy as Columbus’s tagging as “Indians” the aboriginal peoples who got to the Americas before he did.

The word κύριος (kyrios) means “lord”; κυριακόν (kyriakon) is the possessive. How one derives a form of kyriakon from ekklēsia is not only beyond my ken, but also that of many scholars who have noted this lexical curiosity. But we can learn from this misadventure: the discontinuity between the Christian individuals designated in the New Testament as ἐκκλησίαί (ekklēsiai, plural of ekklesia) and the historically identifiable societies we call “churches” is considerable.

The ekklēsiai of the apostolic age (roughly A.D. 33 to 70) were predominantly Jews who believed that Jesus was their prophesied Messiah. During that age believers who not of the seed of Abraham (i.e., “gentiles”) were “grafted in” to Israel on a case-by-case basis (Romans 11:17), sometimes to provoke Jews to jealousy (Romans 11:14). “Gentiles,” those who belonged to other nations (ἔθνη, ethnē, thus our word “ethnic”) were exceptions to a rule. In the New Testament we only have the names of three such exceptions: Cornelius (Acts 10), Titus (Galatians 2:3), and Epaphroditus (Philippians 2:25-30).

By What Authority?

Christ Himself was commissioned with authority (apostellō) only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15 :24). He restricted His disciples’ commission to them as well (Matthew 10:5-6). During the period of the Book of Acts is the history, the Gospel was preached to the Jew first, including the Greek-speaking (Ἕλληνι, Hellēni) Jews of the diaspora, such as Rome’s Jewish community (Romans 1:16).

God-fearing gentiles who stood in the rear of the synagogue as Paul preached were guests. His message was not intended for them. They would be, however, welcomed into fellowship with Jewish Christians if they believed that message and adhered to a few moral and dietary rules so as not to offend their Jewish brethren in Christ (e.g., Acts 15:20).

These non-Jews “besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath”—for which “almost the whole city” of Pisidian Antioch turned out the following week (Acts 13:44). When some synagogue leaders took offense at Paul and Barnabas’s outreach, they answered:

It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles (ἔθνη, ethnē, Acts 13:46).

But that decision was restricted to Pisidian Antioch: in the very next chapter we read that they traveled to Iconium “into the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake, that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed” (Acts 14:1).

That was the only way Jews, Greeks or anyone else were going to hear the Good News in the Acts period: hearing required a preacher, and the preacher had to be commissioned:

. . . how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent (ἀποσταλῶσιν,  apostolōsin)? (Romans 10:14b-15a)

Continue reading “From (mostly) Jewish “ekklesiai” to anti-Jewish “churches” in 80 years: Dean Stanley’s questions.”