Herbert the Red

Apart from his fierce devotion to the CPUSA, the other constant in his ideological life was a refusal to admit that the Soviet Union had any significant flaws. The Russian revolution had been the “greatest event in human history.” When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, Aptheker briefly wavered, but quickly launched attacks on those American Communists who wanted to create a more independent political party. One of them pointed out that, as a historian, Aptheker had a special responsibility to speak out about the falsification of history. Instead, he wrote The Truth About Hungary, a mendacious defense of the 1956 Soviet invasion of that country in which he misused and distorted sources to argue that the Soviet Union had no choice but to intervene to put down a fascist uprising.

Gary Murrell calls The Truth About Hungary “arguably the most offensive and contentious of his books” and admits that it did significant “damage to his reputation.” Murrell speculates that Aptheker’s fear of war and his anger at American policy were responsible. But a much simpler explanation is that a man who, late in life, in an interview published in the Journal of American History, denounced “objectivity” as a goal for historians consciously lied to serve his cause. (He wrote a similar screed about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.)

Murrell has an unfortunate penchant for denouncing Aptheker’s anti-Communist critics as right-wing reactionaries and suggesting that he successfully exposed their distortions about communism. For example, Murrell excoriates Sidney Hook, who insisted that Communist teachers could not be free intellectual agents. In fact, Aptheker’s reply to Hook was thoroughly dishonest, equating anticommunism with fascism, insisting that Lenin and Mao were opposed to conspiracy, and that communism was democratic.

To demonstrate that Communist teachers were not under Communist discipline, Aptheker triumphantly noted that the policies of the party they were obligated to support “are designed to serve the best interests of the masses.” He defended the Soviet imposition of Lysenkoism on biologists because it “was in accordance with scientific truth.” And in the very same article demonstrating just how open-minded Communist historians were, he ridiculed Hook’s argument that there was any antisemitism in the 1952 Czechoslovak purge trials. (He even had the gall to state that the overwhelmingly Jewish defendants had been exposed as antisemites and insisted that the Rosenberg case was rife with it.) Like a good party member, Aptheker knew what the truth was regardless of the evidence.

Aptheker enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor. While stationed in the South, he combed through archives to write a dissertation, later published as American Negro Slave Revolts, arguing that far from being unique, Nat Turner’s rebellion had been one of many such uprisings. Aptheker deserves credit as a pioneer in the field of African-American studies—although his work later came under sustained attack by far more accomplished historians who argued that he had overemphasized the significance of slave revolts and misjudged the militancy of most slaves. Even his fellow Marxist, Eugene Genovese, who praised Aptheker and sought to integrate him into the historical profession, offered a devastating critique of his thesis.

After returning from service in Europe as a major in an artillery unit, Aptheker received a Guggenheim Fellowship, lectured frequently at colleges around the country, and began working with W.E.B. Du Bois. He was, however, unable to get an academic position. While Murrell attributes this failure to anticommunism, he provides no evidence that Aptheker even applied for any academic jobs between 1945 and 1948, by which time his role as a defense witness in the first Smith Act trial made him a pariah and began a lengthy period during which college administrators frequently canceled his scheduled appearances to lecture after pressure from public officials or angry alumni.

As anticommunism faded away, starting in the 1960s, Aptheker taught at several universities, receiving accolades as a trailblazer in the field of black history. There is no doubt that he did make significant contributions to the study of African Americans: Entrusted with control of W.E.B. Du Bois’s papers, he edited and annotated 3 volumes of Du Bois’s correspondence and 40 volumes of his published writings, including a 600-page annotated bibliography. Even as late as the 1970s, however, the Yale history department, with the dean of Southern historians, the liberal C. Vann Woodward in the lead, refused to allow him to teach a departmental course, arguing that he was unqualified. He taught it under other auspices.

Distrust of the Communist party, and Aptheker’s full-throated defense of the Soviet Union, was the driving force behind the academic community’s antipathy to him, but his pugnacious and offensive personal style was a contributing factor. Murrell admits that Aptheker was often “belligerent” and given to fits of rage. A fellow Communist, Lloyd Brown, lamented his “lack of moderation in language and tone.” His primitive Marxism led him to attribute base motives to intellectual opponents ranging from Gunnar Myrdal to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Critics were warmongers, fascists, and paid lackeys of predatory capitalism. The ruling class has

If faith in the Soviet Union was one of Aptheker’s lodestars, the other was subservience to the CPUSA. One of the virtues of Murrell’s book is the wealth of evidence he presents, from Aptheker’s own files and those of Daniel Rubin, a onetime party apparatchik, documenting that, in private communications, Aptheker often pleaded with party leaders to develop a more accommodating policy towards non-Communist leftists and urged them to drop their homophobic policies and to be more open to expressions of black nationalism and feminism.

Almost without exception, his advice was rejected. But as a good Marxist-Leninist, Aptheker remained publicly silent and faithfully carried out the party’s wishes. He had created the American Institute for Marxist Studies in 1964 as a vehicle to promote the study of Marxism among academics, including non-Communists. The party leadership was constantly irritated by its listings of “heretical” Marxists in its bibliographies and newsletters and pressured Aptheker to give the party control over the organization. While Aptheker pushed back—privately—the non-Communist chairman, Robert Cohen, complained as years went by that the Aptheker-edited newsletter had become more and more biased towards the Communist party and “not a useful tool for most Marxist intellectual activists in any field of activity.” Without informing Cohen, Aptheker turned it over to the CPUSA in 1984.

Apart from editing the party’s theoretical magazine for several years, and serving on its powerless national committee, Aptheker did not hold any party positions. Murrell argues that he had no organizational influence: Gus Hall, party leader from the late 1950s until 2000, despised intellectuals in general and Aptheker in particular. He subjected him to constant slights and humiliations, against which Aptheker raged—once again, privately. But Aptheker insisted in interviews that he influenced the party through his connections with Henry Winston, Hall’s second-in-command and the leading African American in the CPUSA leadership. In 1971, this close friend accused Aptheker of disloyalty to the party, attacked his scholarship and understanding of Marxism-Leninism, pronounced him guilty of “petty bourgeois radicalism” as well as “left adventurism.” And Winston offered the ultimate insult: “You unfortunately follow in the wake of the racist oppressors.”

Aptheker refused to appear before the party’s political committee to answer the charges, and even re-established working relationships with people who had denigrated his life’s work, cooperating with them for the next 20 years.

In that same decade, the CPUSA publicly humiliated Aptheker’s daughter Bettina by ignoring her key role in Angela Davis’s defense. When International Publishers refused to publish Bettina’s book on feminism because it contradicted Marxist-Leninist doctrine, her dutiful father wrote a private letter of protest and bravely insisted that he would no longer allow his longtime publisher to print his books. When she resigned from the CPUSA in 1981, he was at first angry—with her—but, Murrell proudly reports, did not break his relationship with her the way he did with other “renegades.” Still, he remained in the Communist party.

One curious gap in Murrell’s account is the question whether Aptheker ever belonged to a party club. Immediately after World War II, he did not, but the book is silent about whether he did so later—and on whether his private disagreements and criticisms were ever thrashed out in this “democratic” political organization, and what, if any role he played in what was, for most party members, their most important link to the CPUSA.

Herbert Aptheker’s world came crashing down on him with the collapse of the Soviet Union. When Gus Hall supported the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, he aligned himself with those seeking to alter party policy. Unlike most of his fellow dissidents who were blocked from attending the party’s 1991 convention as Hall sought to purge the CPUSA, Aptheker was a delegate and even managed to speak, but was brusquely and brutally denounced.

It was the last straw: He left the Communist party after 52 years and became a member of a rump group, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He condemned Soviet brutality: The Soviet Union had been guilty of “massive human extermination.” He also admitted that he had been allowed to falsely testify under oath that the CPUSA was independent of the Soviet Union, that Soviet subsidies had propped up the CPUSA (Soviet money had paid for the establishment of the American Institute for Marxist Studies), and that had the party held state power, people like him “would now be dead.” In short, he confirmed much of what the “right-wing reactionaries” had said about the CPUSA and the Soviet Union for decades. Invited to rejoin the party after Hall’s death, he refused, citing ill health.

Herbert Aptheker died in 2003, but a new controversy erupted in 2006 when Bettina published her autobiography and charged that, through recovered memory, she had determined that her father had sexually molested her for a decade, from the age of 3 to 13. When she confronted him after her mother’s death, Herbert had asked her to forgive him, and she had. In his preface, Murrell writes that he had stopped work on his biography for two years while trying to process this revelation; he does not mention it in the text because, he says, it is historically unprovable. In an afterword, Bettina complains that Murrell thus casts doubt on the truth of her story.

Whether or not he violated one of the most universal human taboos, Herbert Aptheker was a deeply flawed human being who devoted his talents to a murderous and vile political regime and a despicable political party that he himself finally realized had played him for a sucker.

Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory, is the author, most recently, of The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.