Whose Land?

That is the title of James Parkes’s patient historical narrative. The subtitle is A History of the Peoples of Palestine. “Palestine,” we have collectively forgotten, names a remnant of the Roman Empire, a remnant that has been occupied by many peoples. He wrote it in the late ’40s, long before “the Palestinian people” was popularized by Yassir Arafat in the ’60s to refer exclusively to its Arab inhabitants, a ruse the world fell for and seems stuck with.

Whose Land? came from the pen of a theological liberal. By “liberal” I mean (in part) that he did not believe that the creation of the modern secular state of Israel in 1948 (hereafter simply “Israel” unless the context indicates the biblical House of Israel) fulfilled Old Testament prophecy of the ingathering to The Land of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—simply because he did not think that any event can do such a thing.

Unlike today’s “liberals,” however, he conditionally supported the Zionist response to European antisemitism, the ghoulish rise of which he witnessed in the ’20s and ’30s and which he made the focus of his professional life. In Whose Land?, Parkes affirms the historical and moral right of Jews to national restoration in their ancestral land, but insists that—I’m paraphrasing Parkes—justice and respect for the Arabs with whom the Jews had to deal must (ethically must) inform the Jew in his exercise of his right to, say, purchase a plot of land from a Palestinian Arab. He defends Israel’s legitimacy while warning that Jewish nationalism must never mirror the exclusivism or oppression that Jews themselves had suffered. He bases his non-Scriptural case on commonly shared assumptions—which, in my view, make no sense unless grounded in Scripture. I encourage you to find a copy of Whose Land? and take Parkes’s eloquent, empathetic, and learned historical tour.

I agree with Parkes that Israel fulfills no prophecy, but that’s because I follow the Scriptural exegesis of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). Sellers rarely commented on current events, so what his view on Israel was is a matter of speculation. (I invite his descendants to settle the matter, if they can.) He was neither pro-Zionist or anti-Zionist as we use those terms. Where Sellers and I differ from Parkes is that we accept the Bible’s self-attestation that its words are God-breathed, a proposition no self-respecting theological liberal takes seriously. (My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God-willing, be published in 2026.)

Sellers held that Israel must be judged by the same standards to which one would hold any other nation. In the present Dispensation of Grace, resurrected descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have not yet been ingathered to The Land, nor have Christ’s Apostles been resurrected to sit on twelve thrones judging the Israel’s twelve tribes (Matthew 19:28); Israel is not yet mediating between God’s throne and the nations in the eon of the manifest Kingdom of God. Israel is but one of the nations, on equal footing with them. The status of “most favored nation” is reserved for the time when God will govern all nations.

That is, because the Gospel is freely authorized to all nations (Acts 28:28), they are “joint bodies” (σύνσωμα, sussōma: plural; Ephesians 3:6). As we are living in the pre-Kingdom Dispensation of Grace (and the “Silence of God”), however, we who follow the course of history’s “secular surface” still need to know what trend to promote or impede. We’re left to our theoretical devices guided by biblical precepts, one of which, I’d argue, is the just acquisition of property. Continue reading “Whose Land?”

Wé Ani’s Uncanny Sonic Diversity Revisited

I can never confidently predict the vocal texture that Wé Ani, my favorite singer, will bring to a performance. Please indulge me as I take a break from politics, history, philosophy, and theology (all right, except for one footnote).

Over the past two years, I’ve audited all her music videos, almost a hundred of them, long and short. Some were made in her humble home studio, some professionally scripted and videographed, still others televised for competitions where the magic that only million-dollar budgets can buy enhances her image in a dozen different Wés, I mean, ways.

My oft-muttered rhetorical question is: what resemblance does the artist in Video A bear to the one in Video B (A and B standing for any randomly chosen two items in that collection)?

I documented this in detail over a year ago in “Wé Ani: a protean multiplex of vocal performance.” I won’t reproduce all the links, for only a few of you are motivated to verify my assertions. I conceded that this post’s appeal is probably not much more than that of a stranger’s diary entry.

Since posting that essay, there has been even more corroborating evidence.

My topic is her singing, but she also has a wide diversity of “looks,” each a function of her age, diet, wardrobe, hairstyling, lighting, and so forth.

The problem, as I see it, is one of aesthetic reconciliation: I find it hard to reconcile Wé’s many divergent (and, to me, deeply pleasing) vocal textures as embodiments of a single artist.

Continue reading “Wé Ani’s Uncanny Sonic Diversity Revisited”

“Prove me wrong.”

That was Charlie Kirk’s challenge on campuses across this country and abroad. Those words were emblazoned on the tents where he invited interlocutors, friendly and unfriendly, to approach the microphone to debate him on political, religious, and cultural topics. He would easily show that, and how, those three “fields” overlapped.

He was a political activist, but before that, by his account, he was a sinner saved by grace who would not shirk his responsibility to sanctify the Lord in his heart before, with gentleness and respect, giving a reason for the hope that was in him in the public square (1 Peter 3:15).

For over fifty years, I’ve weighed the pros and cons of philosophical and theological arguments, always eager (and often anxious) to learn what could be said against my position. But could I have done what Charlie did? At this stage, it is clear the answer is no. I write blog posts and books, but compared to Charlie, I’ve always “played it safe.”

I remember Charlie’s first appearance on Megyn Kelly’s The Kelly File on Fox News about a dozen years ago and then followed his career with some, but not great, interest. The recruitment of young people to the conservative cause, however important, was for me a side-show. Frankly, and this says more about him than me, if he hadn’t been murdered yesterday I wouldn’t be writing about him today.

But it was not until yesterday that I realized how important his mission of preparing tomorrow’s leaders is and how much he accomplished to that end, a legacy that millions will build on. I find it surreal that I’m following the aftermath of his assassination on the 24th anniversary of 9/11, when he was a lad of eight years.

I only voted for Trump; Kirk played an indispensable role in persuading millions of younger voters to do likewise. From that perspective, my differences with Charlie over, say, apologetical methodology are neither here nor there. He was a tremendous force for the good of order we call Western Civilization. Read William Kirkpatrick’s “The Civilizational Struggle That No One Talks About,” published a few weeks ago, and tell me America doesn’t need an army of Charlie Kirks. And then marvel at the how far he went in raising such an army.

He was as productive as he was creative and courageous; the more I learn about him, the more impressed I am. (Not that impressing me is a criterion of anything important.)

The Left doesn’t have a Donald Trump but, even worse for them, they don’t have a Charlie Kirk, whose legacy is deep bench of future leaders of a movement which does not depend upon the fortunes of one person. When a young person would ask him, “Who’s the next Charlie Kirk?,” his answer was always, “You are the next Charlie Kirk.”

I look forward to learning more about a man whom, I’m ashamed to admit, I underestimated. My poor words cannot compete with the encomia pouring in from those who knew this husband and father and autodidact who commanded every stage he strode upon and whose life’s work I’m sure I’m benefiting from in ways I cannot yet see. So I’ll stop. (Better late than never.)

Treat yourself to his encounters with the human refuse of our miseducational system on YouTube.com. Read his 2024 book, Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West. You’ll be the better for it.

Prove me wrong.

“. . . for the young man shall die a hundred years old.”

Yes, but because of the eonian (“eternal”) life flowing from the King—from Him Who is Life itself—to His subjects . . . not by organ transplants!

No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the young man shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. Isaiah 65:20 (ESV)

The fiend in the Kremlin—the KGB alum who, we’re told, was “caught” the other day in a “hot mic” moment—fantasized to his equally fiendish Beijing host that “human organs can be continuously transplanted” and “the longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.”

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.” Genesis 3:4 (ESV)

In the future manifest Kingdom of God, the divine dispensation that will follow the present dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2; KJV), death will no longer be an enemy that eventually catches up with you, no matter what you eat, how much you exercise, or how many organs are transplanted from someone else’s body into yours. No infant will die prematurely, and centenarians will be considered boys and girls. If you die, it will be because something you do earns God’s wrath, as Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11), who lived in the “ear stage of the Kingdom” (Mark 4:26-29), earned that wrath by lying to the Holy Spirit. The present dispensation is a “parenthesis,” a regnum interruptum, if you will, between that stage and the “full grain in the ear stage,” the manifest Kingdom of God. Disease and death are outworkings of the curse of the Fall of man, not particular judgments. When God acts today, He acts only in grace.

Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God willing, be published in 2026. In the meantime, searching <Otis Q. Sellers> on this site will provide answers to many of the questions that my dogmatic assertions above may have occasioned. But you can always ask one below.

If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool Ownership

The history of the Industrial Revolution—how feudalism’s serfs became capitalism’s propertyless proletarians—does not make for pleasant reading. It was not, however, the unrelieved tragedy of Marxist propaganda. On the contrary. This Labor Day, I reproduce the 21st chapter of my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic (2022), which, with the help of Nobel Laureate Friedrich von Hayek, highlights that story’s pro-life dimension. (“Mr. Ferrara” refers to Christopher Ferrara, the Catholic Distributist author of my book’s foil, The Church and the Libertarian.)

That chapter’s title came to me out of the blue when I wrote its ancestor post for my now-defunct blog, anarcho-capitalist.com, perhaps in 2011. Remembering as a kid enjoying Trini Lopez’s hit in 1963, I thought it an ironically fitting title: serfs did lose the economic utility of their hammers and other tools, and were left with only their labor to sell using machines they no more owned than they owned the commodities that issued from them. But, I argue, they gained so much more.

“I still call myself a communist,” Pete Seeger (1919-2014) proclaimed as late as 1995.

The opportunities now open to them, not the least of which was seeing more of their children grow up to give them grandkids, mean nothing to Communists, excuse me, Progressives who sang “If I Had a Hammer” around the campfire, at rallies, and on the concert stage. Like “Imagine,” John Lennon’s ode to godless communism, “If I Had a Hammer” was an innocent-sounding, mesmerizing, aspirational hymn to their collectivist designs, starting with its Red composer, Pete Seeger in 1949, and continuing with Peter, Paul and Mary in 1962. With Lopez, the ballad reached No. 3—and my ears. For the rest of the tune’s discography, see the Wikipedia entry.

If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool Ownership

Now, about the “propertyless paupers” of Mr. Ferrara’s solicitude, Hayek wrote in his own contribution to the previously cited volume:

Discussions of the effects of the rise of modern industry on the working classes refer almost always to the conditions in England in the first half of the nineteenth century; yet the great change to which they refer had commenced much earlier and by then had quite a long history and had spread far beyond England. The freedom of economic activity which in England had provide so favorable to the rapid growth of wealth was probably in the first instance an almost accidental by-product of the limitations which the revolution of the seventeenth century had placed on the powers of government; and only after its beneficial effects had come to be widely noticed did the economists later undertake to explain the connection and to argue for the removal of the remaining barriers to commercial freedom.[1]

Self-interested lords may have intended only to assert their own interests against the monarch, but they unleashed a wave of “beneficial effects” that many beyond them enjoyed. The prescient among them, including some economists, thought it would be good to “roll out” the idea of limited government even further. But Mr. Ferrara’s emphasis on tool-ownership—“the few . . . in possession of the means of production”—is a Distributist “tell” that merits a comment.

Continue reading “If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool Ownership”

Susanne K. Langer: The Flood-Van Den Heuvel Correspondence, 2009-2011, now online

Gary Van Den Heuvel, circa 1984. Photo courtesy of Kell Julliard
Tony Flood, circa 2004, Weill Cornell Medicine. A Three Musketeers bar rises from his shirt pocket.

In 2009, Gary Van Den Heuvel (1948-2012), the independent scholar who abridged Susanne K. Langer’s Mind trilogy in 1988, wrote me about the Langer materials I was curating on my old site, and we corresponded about her and Langer-adjacent topics during the last two years of his life. The Netherlands-based Langer Circle recently reproduced my “Langer Portal” on their site, and only this week uploaded our correspondence. Here is their notice of both events.

You might spot a typo or two, but overall, it’s in very good shape, considering we composed it without a thought of publicizing it. Its first two pages are representative; I hope you’ll look them over to see if they don’t whet your appetite for more.

I was pleased to re-read after so many years a paragraph in my first reply to Gary that asks why a Bible-believing Christian like me would be attracted to thought of an avowedly secular thinker like Langer, who grounded human symbol-making in biology. Here it is.

My interest in Langer arose from my study of [Catholic philosopher Bernard] Lonergan , who once raved about her aesthetic theory. When about five years ago [2004?] I finally got around to absorbing every page of my old Mentor paperback copy of Philosophy in a New Key, a world of meaning opened up. That she had been one of [Alfred North] Whitehead’s first American students and an early admirer (and interpreter and translator) of [Ernst] Cassirer (neither of them influenced Lonergan) fascinated me. For help I turned to the writings of Richard Liddy, SJ (several of which I’ve posted), who had studied under Lonergan and chose Langer’s aesthetics as his dissertation topic. I have not read his dissertation (I certainly won’t do that before reading Mind), but I was struck by his ultimate rejection of Langer as a materialist—not surprising, perhaps, given his vocation, but unfair, I think. The evaluation of the effort to root man’s artistic drive in biology depends on one’s view of biology! (March 9, 2009; my italics)

Mine is that it part of the created order (Genesis 1:20-28), not the by-product of a mindless explosion and equally undirected evolution, which backdrop would open a trapdoor under every line she ever wrote. See that Langer Portal for links to some of the writings of the thinkers named in passing above, and my post, Langer Speaks!, from last week.

Susanne Langer, 1895-1985. Harvard University, Radcliffe College Archives

Thank you, Langer Circle, for giving the results of my hod-carrying from decades ago a more permanent home. The Circle’s chairperson, Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, has written a masterly introduction of her life and thought that occupies much of my spare time these days, The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling. I wish I had this twenty years ago. (Dr. Chaplin tells me she feels the same way. (:^D).)

Happy Birthday to me!

Gary Van Den Heuvel, my friend and correspondent, circa 2011.

P.S.: Gary co-authored a scholarly yet accessible introduction to Langer’s thought with Kell Julliard, who provided both photos of Gary: Susanne K. Langer and the Foundations of Art Therapy. Art Therapy, 1999, 16(3), 112–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421656.1999.10129656. I’m grateful to Kell for the PDF and the pix.—Tony Flood

Langer speaks!

Delighted to stumble upon the 48-minute audio of “Susanne Langer on Man & Animal: The City & the Hive,” a 1957 lecture on YouTube—I had never heard her before—I scrambled to see whether there was a transcript of it anywhere.

UPDATE: Dr. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin of The Langer Circle and author of The Philosophy of Susanne Langer: Embodied Meaning in Logic, Art and Feeling, a masterpiece of biography and research, sent me a better site on which the audio resides, namely, that of Cooper Union in Manhattan, where presidential candidate Lincoln delivered a key campaign speech in 1860 and where Langer delivered her lecture on October 28, 1957, and which was introduced by Jonathan E. Fairchild. There is also a link to the booklet for the 1957-1958 season’s events—a wonderful literary artifact— that attendees received, but here it is. Langer’s lecture is listed on page 4.

Well, there it was, right under my nose: I had forgotten not only that it was published the following year in The Antioch Review [TAR], but also that 17 years ago, that is, back in 2008, I had published its text on my old site by scanning the print version I had of that article and then correcting the scan.  Here is TAR’s prefatory paragraph:

Susanne K. Langer, professor of philosophy at Connecticut College [New London, CT], is well known as the author of Philosophy in a New Key, Feeling and Form, and Problems of Art.  This paper, read at the Cooper Union in New York as part of the centenary celebration of the Great Hall, offers a sketch of philosophical work in progress under a research grant received by Connecticut College from the Edgar J. Kaufmann Foundation [which underwrote her Mind trilogy].

So, you may read as you listen.

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was raised in Manhattan, but her mother tongue was German, and it shows. Her command of literary English, however, which she began speaking at age four, was perfect and she deployed it gracefully to light up nearly everything human: science, art, logic, culture in many articles and books. Here’s a taste from that article:

Animals interpret signs, too, but only as pointers to actual things and events: cues to action or expectation, threats and promises, landmarks and earmarks in the world. Human beings use such signs, too; but above all they use symbols—especially words—to think and talk about things that are neither present nor expected. The words convey ideas, that may or may not have counterparts in actuality. This power of thinking about things expresses itself in language, imagination, and speculation—the chief products of human mentality that animals do not share.

Language, the most versatile and indispensable of all symbolisms, has put its stamp on all our mental functions, so that I think they always differ from even their closest analogues in animal life. Language has invaded our feeling and dreaming and action, as well as our reasoning, which is really a product of it. The greatest change wrought by language is the increased scope of awareness in speech-gifted beings. An animal’s awareness is always of things in its own place and life. In human awareness, the present, actual situation is often the least part. We have not only memories and expectations; we have a past in which we locate our memories, and a future that vastly over-reaches our own anticipations. Our past is a story, our future a piece of imagination. Likewise our ambient is a place in a wider, symbolically conceived place, the universe. We live in a world.

As I said, nearly everything. She was a deep-dyed, unabashed secularist whose focus on feeling (not emotion!) and how we variously and promiscuously symbolize it is, with a few important modifications, compatible with the biblical theism I favor. The fellow creatures in my worldview are in hers man’s biological “relatives.” Man is part of the “animal kingdom,” not subject to God’s. She proudly took her stand with the evolutionary hypothesis as the best explanation of the origin of species (not just variation within species).

I myself stand entirely in the scientific camp. I do not argue against any religious or even vitalistic doctrines; such things are not arguable. I speak not for, but from, a naturalist’s point of view, and anyone who does not share it can make his own reservations in judging what I say.

And I have, although not explicitly about her in my Philosophy after Christ. The foolishness of the latter gambit, including the conceit that it’s “not arguable”—would that be a case of “punching down”?—is what her stance commits her to. The brain that distinguishes man from the ape is, for her, an accident of a process that has no regard for her projects. We’re going to die, and the poignancy of her expression of that awareness does not bevel its sharp edges:

Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of Death.  The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact.  It is built on a wide survey of facts, that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one’s own life is a case in point.  Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death.  Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.

About ultimate origins, however, we know nothing and therefore should be silent. It’s not a good use of time to speculate about such things when there are so many empirical studies to be conducted! (Nobody ultimately knows anything, except we all “know” that biblical theism is nonsense.) She cannot but repair to an agnosticism that threatens the very foundations of her enterprise—but that’s a story for another day. Until then, enjoy the lecture. If you’re up to reading more by her, start with Philosophy in a New Key. Or visit my Langer portal on my old site.

Earlier posts on Susanne K. Langer

Susanne Langer’s thesis: stray notes from a new reading of “Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling”

Susanne K. Langer, 1895-1985

I’m experiencing my re-reading of Langer as a rediscovery; this post builds on one from last month, “Making the aesthetic realm a little less mysterious (to me): what I got from Susanne Langer (1895-1985).” That is, I’m feeling both more enlightened and retrospectively more stupid in the light of her patient empirical enquiries guided by a promising insight via her master concept of feeling. My study is self-referentially illuminating: what she did in Mind and what I’m doing by re-reading it are illustrations and examples of, not exceptions to, the rule her insights suggest.

I’m a biblicist; she decidedly was not. Yet I in my way and two orthodox Jesuit philosophers (Lonergan and a student of his, i.e., classical theists) in theirs found her work not only compatible with theirs, but a source of fruitful development.[1] My transcendental critique of philosophy does not give her conceptual framework a pass but, my goodness, how I envision the articulation of the former to benefit from the latter! Langer’s philosophy can and must be translated into theistic “creationese,” if you will, to rescue it from the ultimate unintelligibility to which her “agnostic” posture dooms it, without forcing her insights into alien, dogmatic categories. I would aim for to be a mutually beneficial cross-pollination. Maybe that’s something I can do, Deo volente.

For now, however, no systematic development from me is forthcoming, only suggestive notes. Citations are from Gary Van Den Heuvel’s abridgement of Langer’s trilogy, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.[2] Italics mine.

* * *

Langer’s thesis in nuce: “. . . the entire psychological field . . . is a vast and branching development of feeling.” 9

Langer’s “most important distinction within the realm of feeling” is between what is felt as impact and what is felt as autogenic action. 9 This flows from the “nature of vitality itself.” The pattern of stimulus and response . . . is a simplified schema derived from that natural division.” 9

The organism’s environment is not a system in the same sense as the organism is. There is an asymmetry between it and the surrounding world. 10.

“An organism is a continuous dynamism, a pattern of activity, basically electrochemical, but capable also of large, concerted forms if action with further principles of organization.” 10

Langer’s naturalistic presupposition on display: “There must have been several such turning points in the evolution of our world . . .  the very first genuinely symbolic utterances, speech, which marked the advent of man.” 13

Feeling is the starting-point of her philosophy of mind. “The same concept that raises problems of natural science takes one just as surely into humanistic ones . . . .” 14

Autogenic action and sense of impact correspond to emotivity and sensibility, the subjective and the objective. 13

“By ‘subjective’ I mean whatever is felt as action, and by ‘objective’ whatever is felt as impact.” Those words denote functional properties, not classes of things. They are “two possible modes of feeling, i.e., of psychical phases of activity.” 13

To be continued

Notes

[1] “Insight in musical composition is described by S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York 1953), pp. 121 ff”.” Lonergan, Insight, 1956, 184n; “Not only are words themselves sensible but also their initial meaning commonly is sensible.” Lonergan, Insight, 544; “An accurate statement on initial meanings would be much more complex.” See S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York 1953), pp. 237 ff.” Lonergan, Insight, 544n.

[2] To repeat a note from the previous post on her: Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Johns Hopkins University Press, three volumes (1967, 1972, 1982). She believed that our intelligence and everything we do with it is biology-based, but [speculative] metaphysical questions [before the hard empirical work] is done like ‘What grounds biology?’ were not her cup of tea. A one-volume abridgement by Gary Van Den Heuvel (1948-2012) came out in 1988; when he contacted me in 2009 about my site’s ‘Langer portal,’ we began a correspondence that lasted until a year before his death. The Langer Circle plans to publish this correspondence online later this year. Stay tuned.”

Carter G. Woodson’s encouragement of Herbert Aptheker: a “postscript” that merits a post.

Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) reviewing ASNLH Bulletins.

In the preceding post, I inexplicably, and severely, understated things when I wrote that Carter G. Woodson, the father of Negro History in the United States, “had in 1946 replied to a letter Aptheker had written to him.”[1]

That doesn’t tell the half of it, no, not even a tenth of it, but, oddly, nearly all of it locked itself inside my memory just when I needed access to it. You see, their correspondence and relationship went back much further, about a decade earlier, and deeper. So, rather than lengthening the “birthday” post with an overlong “postscript,” as I had thought of doing last night, let me make amends with a post dedicated to correcting my inadvertent distortion.

US Army Captain Herbert Aptheker, Brooklyn, 1946

In 1946, Aptheker was back home in the States after his World War 2 ETO service. His academic interest in history, particularly the history that Woodson pioneered and in the man himself, had begun to percolate in 1935, leaving his geological studies in the dust.

Biographer Murrell notes that Aptheker was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia University at the age 21 in 1936, “only three years after matriculating” as a teenager and then Black history occluded all else, launching himself headlong into the work that would yield his study of Nat Turner’s Southampton revolt and a Master of Arts degree in February of 1937. At 17 going on 18 and 19, young Herbert had

. . . studied the writings of Carter G. Woodson . . . . They corresponded and met several times in Washington, D.C., where Woodson lived. Woodson evidently liked Aptheker, encouraged his study, and attempted to keep him on the right track. “You ask my opinion also about what Virginia would have done if the Civil War had not happened,” Woodson wrote in his first communication with Aptheker. “This would be invading the field of prophecy, which I do not care to do. My field is history. I have no desire to depart for this sphere.”[2]

Aptheker set down vignettes of his intellectual shift of focus:

In my late teens [1933-1935], I became deeply interested in what we then called Negro history. I was fortunate enough to discover Dr. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and its publications. I wrote to him with questions, and he responded. As a result, when I planned a trip to the Library of Congress, I told him of this; he arranged to meet me at the Penn Station.

We had lunch together; at that time, except for the ghetto, we could eat together only at a counter at the station. We did so, and Dr. Woodson inquired of my interest. I replied I was working toward understanding the Nat Turner revolt; that this was part of my studies at Columbia University. He encouraged me and said that when I planned another visit to the Library, I should let him know so that we might again meet.

We did meet. This time, Dr. Woodson took me to a restaurant in the ghetto. I remember it was below street level. When we were about to enter, he noticed some awkwardness or nervousness on my part. Dr. Woodson touched my elbow, helped me downstairs, and said, “Herbert, you may eat with us; here, there is no discrimination; we are civilized.” Continue reading “Carter G. Woodson’s encouragement of Herbert Aptheker: a “postscript” that merits a post.”