Tag: Gus Hall

The anniversary of a foolish decision

Yours truly, Xavier Military Institute (High School) senior, 1971

The diary entry of a Xavier High School student[1] and research assistant to Herbert Aptheker[2] 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![3] The meeting was on the third floor, where pictures of famous comrades and covers of magazines and pamphlets were displayed. Gus [Hall, 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. 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.

May Day flashbacks: Memories of a Communist and working-class leader
Same year, 1971: Gus Hall, in hat (above “MU”), marching on Fifth Avenue in New York City [People’s World Archives]. I believe the bespectacled gent to Hall’s right is Arnold Johnson (1904-1989); James E. Jackson (1914-2007) is the second person to Hall’s left.
Three years and three months later, on September 18, 1974, I met fellow Aptheker research assistant (and non-communist historian) Hugh Murray for lunch; at six I’d meet my closest comrade and friend, who will remain unnamed “to discuss a great decision I feel I must make once and for all.” On September 23rd, 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.

To be continued, as time permits.

Notes

[1]  Two weeks later, on June 9th, I attended graduation at Hunter College, Lexington Avenue and 68th Street. My diary entry for that day mentions my regret at having missed a lecture 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.

[2] Anthony Flood, “Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager,” October 25, 2018.

[3] A holding of the John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) estate, the building 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 ….” 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.

Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager

In the early 1970s, I was an acolyte of Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003). Known for his writings on African-American history he was also, during the Cold War, a theoretician of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). 

While many of my contemporaries became hooked on pharmaceuticals or alcohol, the apothecary for this teenage rebel was an apologist for the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev. Memories of the five years of my Stalinist sojourn are still a source of shame, even though more than eight times that interval has passed.

In November 1969 an ad in the Communist Party’s Daily World newspaper caught my eye. (Why I was reading that rag as a high school junior is a tale for another time.) Later that week Aptheker was scheduled to lecture on W.E.B. DuBois at the Center for Marxist Education (CME), then located on Manhattan’s West 15th Street, on the same block as my Jesuit military high school. (That building, now a co-op, abuts a 21st-century extension of my pre-Civil War alma mater.)

The evening arrived. Exiting the elevator on the fourth floor I made a right turn into the main room. CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall, who would welcome me into the Party in less than three years, addressed the group of about 75. Then he introduced Dr. Herbert Aptheker.

I remember nothing of the lecture’s content. (I hadn’t then even heard of Du Bois.) The lecturer’s command of his material, however, and the aplomb with which he delivered it impressed this most impressionable of young minds. (One can hear how he sounded then by listening  to this February 18, 1968 Du Bois lecture.) Conservative in fashion and demeanor, Aptheker, then 54, had a military bearing and matching haircut. Appearing to me to be more learned than any five of my teachers or adult relatives combined, he held me spellbound for over an hour. 

I bought Aptheker’s books and pamphlets by the bushel by heading east from my high school across Union Square and entering the CPUSA’s Jefferson Book Shop on 16th Street, just east of Union Square. I scooped up everything of his I could and made time to absorb every line. While I now recognize Aptheker’s political essays as essentially propaganda, they then modeled for me the finest prose. They made the power of rhetoric a topic for me. For the first time I thought, “I’d like to be a writer!”

As Director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) Aptheker had an office on East 30th Street. Visiting it one day I introduced myself as a member of the Young Workers Liberation League, the latest edition of the Young Communist League. I took advantage of AIMS’s library of Marxism (mostly its Stalinist subdivision). Whenever school was out, I’d make my way to AIMS and get lost in its shelves. Taking a break from reading, I’d catch Aptheker typing with two fingers, the aroma of coffee and hamburger wafting into the reading room outside his office. With trepidation at first, I’d ask him a question. 

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