Herbert Aptheker – Page 4 – Anthony G. Flood

The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored

In a previous post I disclosed my interest in George Novack, the Trotskyist philosopher who, but for the accident of geography, might have taken the place of ideological influencer that Stalinist historian Herbert Aptheker held when I began to study philosophy. Today I republish Novack’s review of The Black Jacobins, a magisterial study of modern history’s only successful slave revolt.

That its author, C. L. R. James (1901-1989), was a Fourth International Trotskyist explains not only Novack’s appreciation of this work, but also Aptheker’s lack thereof—even though slave revolts formed his area of scholarly specialization. In my Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I explore in detail the scotosis suffered not only by Aptheker but also, apparently, by many of James and Aptheker’s academic fans.

In this review Novack also refers to A History of Negro Revolt, a booklet of James’s that Aptheker merely lists in the bibliography of American Negro Slave Revolts (his 1943 Columbia University dissertation) without mentioning Black Jacobins. As I showed in another post, the second page of that booklet sports a full page ad for Black Jacobins, virtually eliminating the possibility that Aptheker was unaware of the book.

I post this partly for its historical interest, partly as a personal reflection on my intellectual path. I trust no one thinks I do so to promote the “revolutionary internationalism” of Novack or James. Were they alive, I’m sure that Novack, James, and Aptheker, each in his own way (qualified, of course, by the strictures of “scientific socialism”), would side with the woke mob, which I abominate, and that the mobsters, at least the literate among them, are steeped in their writings. Novack, James, and Aptheker would, if they could, put down their pens and pick up a gun.—Anthony Flood

Revolution, Black and White

George E. Novack

***New International*, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155**

The Black Jacobins, 316 pp. Illus. New York, Dial Press. [1938] $3.75

A History of Negro Revolt, Fact Monograph, No.18. [UK, [1938] ] 6s[hillings]

The Black Jacobins tells the story of one of the major episodes in the great French Revolution: the struggles in the West Indian island of San Domingo which culminated in the only successful slave uprising in history and the establishment of the free Negro republic of Haiti.

Historians have done little to remove prevailing ignorance concerning these significant events. Even such authorities on the French revolution as Mathiez systematically belittle the importance of the colonies and slight their influence upon revolutionary developments in France. Historians of Haiti commit the opposite error of treating its early history without proper regard for its profound connections with Europe.

One of the singular merits of James’ work is that he avoids both forms of narrow-mindedness. Throughout his book he views the class struggles in San Domingo and France as two sides of a unified historical process unfolding in indissoluble interaction with each other. With a wealth of precise and picturesque detail he traces the parallel and inter-penetrating phases of the revolution in the colony and mother country. Continue reading “The history book the philosopher reviewed but the historian ignored”

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”

G. Edward Griffin: Prophet with Honor

I was so impressed by the video John A. Lancaster posted today that I feel compelled to join him in getting the word out. He entitled his post “Is the Current Unrest a Communist Prophecy?,” but I decided to drop the rhetorical question mark.

The presenter is G. Edward Griffin (b. 1931). When he delivered this talk, so calmly, so professionally, the Left called him a “Red baiter.” Today he’s called a “conspiracy theorist.” Both are empty tags signalling the tagger’s determination not to have a conversation.

Griffin’s topic is a conspiracy—the Communist conspiracy, its self-understanding and its exploitation of America’s racial tensions. As you watch and listen, ask yourself whether the violence, mayhem, and frank advocacy of communism you see nightly on television is not exactly what Griffin was warning Americans about.

Color, Communism, and /Common Sense is an eight-minute YouTube video, excerpted from Griffin’s full presentation, also on YouTube, More Deadly Than War The Communist Revolution in America.

The film has the “look-and-feel” of the early ’60s. At the 2.47 mark, Griffin holds up and quotes from The Nature of Revolution, a 1959 pamphlet by Communist Party theoretician Herbert Aptheker (for whom I worked as a research assistant in the early ’70s). That made me think the film is earlier than 1969, the date given for Griffin’s pamphlet on Amazon. (In 1969, would he cite something from 1959?) I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who can settle the date of the original filmed presentation.

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:

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.

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”

Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence

The longest chapter of my book on Herbert Aptheker—Communist theoretician, African American history researcher, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s literary executor (see my previous post)—elaborates upon my claim that Aptheker’s Stalinism is the only credible explanation of his failure to cite The Black Jacobins (TBJ) of C. L. R. James, a Trotskyist.

After all, I argued, Aptheker’s scholarly specialization lay in slave revolts; the subject of TBJ is the 1791 slave revolt in San Domingo (SDR) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, the only successful such revolt in modern times; TBJ was published in New York in 1938, a year after Columbia University awarded Aptheker his master’s degree (for which he had written the first book on Nat Turner’s 1831 decidedly unsuccessful slave revolt) and as he was immersed in doctoral studies that culminated in his 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts (ANSR).

Further, TBJ had been reviewed in periodicals familiar to Aptheker (e.g., The New York Times, The Journal of Negro History, Time Magazine); Aptheker devoted several pages of ANSR to the impact of the SDR on the American slave revolts he studied.

In my book I noted that ANSR’s bibliography listed, not TBJ, but James’s “The History of Negro Revolt,” which essay exhaustively comprised the September 1938 issue of Fact, a London periodical. Aptheker’s citation of the obscure periodical, but not the full-length, widely reviewed book published the same year by a major New York house (Dial) seemed to me to be a deliberate effort not to give James the credit he was due. (Aptheker never quoted James’s words.)

And, as it happens, this move was also ironic, although the irony only hit me the other day. I wish I had noted a few years ago what was right under my nose. Continue reading “Aptheker’s willful blindness toward James: another nugget of evidence”

Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker

As I noted in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (and elsewhere on this blog), I can trace my friendship with historian Hugh Murray to the early ‘70s, when we were Aptheker’s research assistants. His review appeared on Amazon last week, a first for the book. Below is the expanded version he posted on his own blog.

I’ve appreciated his criticisms enough to share them with you. I especially want to know what you think of Hugh’s defense of Herbert Aptheker as an historian, an evaluation I questioned in the book. Henry Steele Commager, Hugh’s counterexample, ignored African American intellectuals in his monumental 1950 The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. Consequently, there’s no mention therein of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright or any of the creators of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Does this neglect disqualify Commager as an historian? Can Commager’s works be trusted despite that neglect? The doctoral advisor to Aptheker’s biographer told him to find another topic, for Aptheker’s works could not be trusted; the judge in David Irving’s libel trial adjudged that Irving’s could not. Since we cannot reasonably make knowing everything the precondition of knowing anything, Hugh argues, we have to live with the fact of bias. How much bias, however, and what kind crosses the line?

Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker’s Blindness as Historian—and Blindness Spreads

Hugh Murray

In his short book Mr. Flood has written an essential work for anyone interested in the many volumes of history written by Dr. Herbert Aptheker. The questions Flood raises, however, are not limited to Aptheker, but concern all historians and indeed all intellectuals who were members of the Communist Party USA (CP), and other Communist parties worldwide. The question simply put, “Can they be trusted?” Continue reading “Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker”

Book Launch: “Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness”

My first book went live on Amazon today. Its introduction and first chapter were originally blog posts, but the rest the book consists of essays published over the past five years. If you can help spread the word, please do. I’ll prepare a paperback version. I now append the book description.—Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), a pioneering researcher in African-American slave revolts, was also an American Communist theoretician. Anthony Flood, who attended Aptheker’s lectures a half-century ago, became his research assistant, friend and comrade. Decades after Flood repudiated the comradeship, it dawned on him that Aptheker’s politics had blocked his research in his area of specialization: he failed to recognize The Black Jacobins, the work of C. L. R. James (1901-1989) that chronicled the only successful slave revolt in modern times. The failure was ideological.

In the course of investigating this silence, Flood discovered scholars who admired both writers, but never at the same time. Doing so would have forced them to address the uncomfortable truth that one of their heroes ignored the other. That is, the white radical scholar ignored the black radical scholar who was 14 years his senior. The only explanation, Flood contends, is that Aptheker, the Stalinist, could not bring himself to acknowledge the work of James, the Trotskyist.

There are other problems with Aptheker’s legacy, of course, such as his uncovering the truth about slavery in the Americas while covering it up in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The “dissing” of James, however, undermines his “anti-racism” reputation as well as his argument that “partisanship with the oppressed” makes objectivity in history writing possible. He was a partisan of too many oppressors. He eventually admitted his own “willful blindness” (his words), yet that didn’t stop him from defending, as late as 2000, The Truth about Hungary, his book-length apologia for the Soviet Union’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness includes not only Flood’s essay on Aptheker and James, but also vignettes of his coming into Aptheker’s life as a high school student and that of Sidney Hook (Aptheker’s nemesis and Flood’s philosophy professor). Also included are a review of the first biography of Aptheker and an inquiry into Aptheker’s status as an historian. Appendices include Aptheker’s first essay (in The American Hebrew) and Flood’s first letter on Aptheker (in The Journal of American History).

Herbert Aptheker expressed the ethos of the American Communist Party in its heyday, an atmosphere that pervades “progressive” American politics today. If you want to look at his role in that “progression,” this monograph is a good place to start.

Sidney Hook: a halfway house for a recovering Stalinist

“That monster!”

Such was Herbert Aptheker’s reaction when I mentioned my having enrolled in “The Philosophy of History and Culture,” a course to be taught by his nemesis, Sidney Hook (1902-1989). That was in 1972. I was a New York University (NYU) philosophy undergraduate. The class would be Hook’s last in an NYU teaching career that began in 1926 (including chairing its philosophy department from 1948 to 1969).

I was checking in with Aptheker, the Communist historian, literary executor of W. E. B. Du Bois and, at the time, my “boss,” at his AIMS office to see if he had research tasks for me. The casual announcement was my idea of chit-chat.

Herbert Aptheker Earlier that year I had dropped into Hook’s office at 25 Waverly Place to ask about the class. As a young Red, I couldn’t pass up the chance to meet this infamous anti-communist in the flesh.

A letter of mine in support of Angela Davis, then on trial for aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder, appeared recently in the student newspaper. I had forgotten about it.

After a few minutes of chit-chat I rose and turned to leave. But before reaching the door . . .

“What did you say your name was?”

Busted. I complied.

“This should be very interesting.”

“Yes,” I muttered.

Continue reading “Sidney Hook: a halfway house for a recovering Stalinist”

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.

Continue reading “Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager”

Revolution, Black and White

George E. Novack

New International, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155

***New International*, May 1939, Vol. 5, No. 5, p. 155**