FROM MY FORTHCOMING BOOK - HUGH MURRAY

What do Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mrs. Raymond Parks,, and Martin Luther King, Jr. all have in common? Yes, they were all blacks, or Negroes as the more common term used in the earlier era. And many would have had other common experiences, but one I want to stress here – they were all, at some point in their lives, in the orbit of the Communist Party of the USA. My point is that the CPUSA, though a small political party, had influence far beyond its numbers, which at its height, was only 100,000. McKay, a West Indian native who came to the US, in November 1922 traveled to Moscow to present “A Report on the Negro Question” to the 4th gathering of the Comintern (the Communist International). His bitter poem, “If we must die,” had stirred black reaction to continued oppression following victory in the Great War, the war to save the world for democracy. His novels explored race and he then became something of a black nationalist. Four years before his death in 948, Mc Kay was baptized and received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Langston Hughes also wrote some bitter poetry, like “Christ is a n*****,” and a play about the Scottsboro boys facing electrocution because of false accusations of rape in Alabama in the 1930s. Even earlier, in the 1920s Hughes partook in a sit-in in North Carolina. But by the late 1940s, he is denying any connections to the CP. Author Richard Wright, who had portrayed some individual communists heroes in his novels, turned against the party and its ideology, even contributing a chapter to the influential, strongly anti-communist collection, The God that Failed. Robeson had been an all-American football player for Rutgers University in the 19teens while excelling in academia, graduating cum laude. He then earned a law degree from Columbia U., while playing in early professional football leagues. Robeson found limitations in the legal field; he had a bass/baritone voice and sang professionally, performed in the theater more and more, and then in films, singing “Ol Man River” in the 1935 film version of Show Boat. He and his wife lived in Britain as he performed on the stage there, and in British films, where, ruling half of Africa, they wanted films with black stars – and Robeson became one. He met and befriended some film extras, African university students studying in the U.K. But he did not forget America. Robeson and a student, Johnstone Kenyatta, headed the British Scottsboro Defence Committee in Britain. (Somewhat later, Johnstone would later return to his homeland, become known as Jomo, and lead the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in Kenya.) Robeson himself became more political and decided it best if his son grew up without racism, so Paul sent his son to live with his grandmother in Moscow in the late 1930s. The father generally defended anti-colonialist policies, and supported Soviet approaches into the 1940s and during the Cold War.

Lorraine Hansberry used a line from a Hughes' poem as the title of her major play (and film), A Raisin in the Sun. She also wrote for Freedom, the Harlem newspaper founded by Robeson during the Cold War. She became a spokesperson for Southern civil rights activists, when she, other celebrities, and activist Jerome Smith met with Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. Bayard Rustin, from a Quaker family, opposed the war clouds brewing in the late 1930s. When Nazi Germany attacked Poland (usually given as the start of WWII), while most of the West and many Americans supported Britain and the other “democracies,” the CPUSA followed the notions of Moscow, refusing to support the imperialist, colonialist powers (Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, and America). To the pacifist, Ruston, this seemed reasonable, and he joined thethen  anti-war Young Communist League. In summer 1941 Hitler attacked the USSR, and suddenly communist policy changed – the “imperialist” powers had to be helped as allies in order to destroy Nazi fascism, the old popular front with liberal democracy was revived to defeat Hitler. The YCL now became all out for support of war, and Rustin ceased to be a part of it. He would continue to protest in various ways, and eventually organize the influential 1963 March on Washington.

Du Bois had supported the drums of the Great War, but soon discovered that Wilson's notion of democracy did not extend to black people. The new NAACP gave him a platform, and provided some national center to fight violent and overt racism. The organization's magazine, The Crisis, was edited by Du Bois, and he wrote much of the material as well. Still, the virulently black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Assn., founded by a very black Marcus Garvey, won a larger following than did the proper middle-class NAACP. Worse, Garvey made deals with the growing Ku Klux Klan, supported segregation, and even championed a return of Negroes to Africa. Du Bois was certainly not chagrined when the US deported Garvey. In the 1930s Du Bois was critical of the CP, especially in its defense of the Scottsboro boys. Du Bois had hoped to regain control of the defense from the CP, but the boys and their moms chose the communists instead of the NAACP. Du Bois traveled in Germany in the 1930s, and had kind words for the people of color of imperial Japan. But with WWII, he became more anti-imperialist, and certainly more skeptical of the Missouri Democrat, Harry Truman, who became President opon FDR's death in spring 1945. Truman, who had a Confederate heritage, was close to leading segregationists like South Carolina's Jimmy Burns, whom Truman appointed as Sed. of State.  But in 1948, hoping to win another term in office, Truman began to seek black votes, addressed the NAACP, the first President to do so. When Du Bois refused to support Truman and backed a previous FDR VP, Henry Wallace for President in 1948 against Truman, the NAACP fired Du Bois. With that, the NAACP in effect, became a Democratic party front-group.  Truman got further revenge when his Atty. General had Du Bois arrested as a foreign agent in 1950. Just before Du Bois chose to leave the US for the Gold Coast, now independent Ghana, he joined the CPUSA.  Ironically, Du Bois, who had opposed Garvey's Back to Africa campaign of the 1920s, became the most prominent American black to return to Africa in 1961.

Rosa Mc Cauley married Raymond Parks, a barber in Montgomery, Alabama in 1932. The Scottsboro rape cases had become international news, thanks to the International Labor Defense, a CP front organization. Alabama authorities had raided some CP attempts to organize share croppers into unions, and sheriffs and deputies and some of their posses had killed those who dared attend such subversive meetings. Raymond worked with the ILD to bring food and fresh clothing to the 9 jailed black boys. He also had meetings at his home. Rosa was sometimes look-out to warn if any strange cars were coming. With her husband, Rosa Parks also attended some CP meetings.

In 1948 the civil rights movement in the South WAS the Henry Wallace Progressive Party. The 1948 PP was endorsed by the CPUSA. That year, Virginia Durr ran for the US Senate from Virginia on the PP ticket. She and her husband were Alabama natives who had moved to the Washington area when Clifford was appointed to a federal agency in 1933, and they remained during the New Deal era. When FDR sought to gain support in the South (after many in Congress had rejected his court-packing bill), the New Deal sought to promote uplift to the South, the poorest part of the nation. As part of this effort, Eleanor Roosevelt was also involved in the creation of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, and Virginia Durr was on its civil rights committee. Of course, to many Southerners, integration was communism, or often called race-mixing or mongrelization. Harry Truman's Attorney General would place the SCHW on his list of subversive organizations, so it would be targeted for destruction. Durr did not the Virginia Senate seat she sought. She and Clifford then returned to Alabama, Montgomery. She required a seamstress to help, and then she helped the seamstress get a scholarship to Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a “progressive” school where one might learn about protest. So seamstress Rosa Parks went. The rest is history.

Martin Luther King, Jr. also attended Highlander. There was a famous photograph taken of him seated beside a member of the CPUSA. If you drove through the South in the 1950s or 60s, you might have seen the bill boards showing King at the "communist" training school. (They may have been the same bill boards that had earlier displayed IMPEACH EARL WARREN signs after the Supreme Court ruled against segregation of the public schools. King was a young minister, thrust into the fire of the Montgomery bus boycott, with all its dangers. If there were threats, there was also help, and one helper became one of King's chief advisors, Stanley Levison. According to the FBI, Levison was s secret member of the CPUSA, and handled some of its hidden funds. Levison was now fund-raising for King. More, he was advising on tactics, writing some of King's speeches, perhaps chapters of his books. Both Pres. John Kennedy and Atty . Gen. Robert Kennedy told (ordered) King to break with Levison. King lied, said he had split with his advisor, but King maintained his contact with the controversial, and quite influential Stanley Levison.

CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT THAT THE CPUSA HAS HAD GREAT INFLUENCE ON AMERICA?

It was not only blacks who were swayed by the CP. For whites, I shall mention only one name of a person involved in the communist orbit. Some disagree.  However, his wife was a member of the CP; his mistress was also a member of the CP, and his brother was a member of the CP.  Was he in the orbit of the Communist Party?  The man I am referring to is J. Robert Oppenheimer.  With a wife, mistress, and brother all party members, did that color his thinking closer to red?  Moreover, according to an article in the September 2023 Commentary magazine, "Oppenheimer Was a Communist," by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, not only did J. Robert contribute healthy sums to communist front organizations in the 1930s, they contend that he himself was also a member.  Then, which is it; CP leaders told him to drop out of the organization, for he might have to pass an important security check?  Or he heard of the major scientific project, and on his own, decided to keep a distance from the CP?  He did pass the test, and was soon working in the Manhattan Project.  The rest is history, and a movie.

HERBERT APTHEKER'S BIOGRAPHY

“THE MOST DANGEROUS COMMUNIST IN THE UNITED STATES:”

A BIOGRAPHY OF HERBERT APTHEKER (Amherst and Boston: U. of Mass. Press. 2015)

By GARY MURRELL. Afterword by Bettina Aptheker

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            At the rigged CP convention in Cleveland in December 1991, Gus Hall was determined to retain control of the shrunken CPUSA.  Surprisingly, on the second day, the Hall faction permitted Herbert Aptheker, by then a dissident, to speak for 5 minutes.  Murrell, using the speaker’s notes of the convention, includes some of that speech: “That [the secret financing of the CPUSA] was outrageous.  I had spent much of my life denying it,…under oath,…and the party leadership knowing that what I was saying was not true and what the government was saying was true.  But we did not know that.  We denied that…Gus [Hall] knew it, and supported it, and Gus was paid for it.  Gus was on Moscow’s payroll…”(p. 333)  It seems that when Aptheker was called as an expert witness in Communist Party trials, he was not so expert at all.

            Murrell describes Aptheker’s roll in the Smith Act trial of Communist leader Steve Nelson.  On the witness stand Aptheker discussed Marxism and its approach to armed rebellion, and he was cross-examined by the prosecution.  Aptheker was asked to elaborate on the Marxist view of armed revolution.  (102-104)  This 1951 trial is part of the McCarthy era’s anti-Communism, and included in the chapter “Are you now or have you ever been?”  However, in April 1943 the FBI had bugged Steve Nelson’s Oakland, Calif., home and overheard the visit there by a member of the Soviet embassy give Nelson money from the Soviet Union for the CPUSA.  The Soviet official also gave Nelson instructions for the hiring of Communists who would be assigned posts in the newly created Manhattan Project, whose aim was to create an atomic weapon.  This FBI bugging may have provided the agency with its first knowledge of the Manhattan Project and the American attempt to build the bomb, and clearly the Soviet interest was in planting agents who would supply the Soviets with reports on the progress of the atomic bomb.  The bug had provided the FBI with most important information about a conspiracy to commit treason.  When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover then alerted an official high in the Roosevelt Administration about this plot to steal atomic secrets, that high official tipped off the Soviet Embassy that the FBI was on to them, essentially urging the Soviets to be more careful in the future and not be caught!  In the words of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “this was a conspiracy so vast.”  Meanwhile, Aptheker defended on the witness stand a Communist official who took Soviet funds for the American CP in order to place moles in strategic jobs to make it easier to steal American secrets in building the bomb for the USSR.  Murrell praises Aptheker for his enormous courage in standing up against Sen. McCarthy.  But on the big issue of that era, McCarthy was right; Aptheker wrong.  Moreover, about Nelson’s treason, did Gus know about that too?  Did the leadership of the CPUSA?

            Aptheker also appeared for the defense at the trial of North Carolina CP leader Junius Scales.(187)  Despite Aptheker’s testimony, Scales was convicted, served time, and quit the CP.  In his autobiography (written with R. Nickson) Scales concedes that he was never asked, but  wondered what he would have done if asked by the CP leadership to perform a treasonous act.  Aptheker never seems to have raised such serious questions about his own 5 decades of CP membership, in which he accepted and followed the discipline of the party.  This question never rises in his consciousness.  How far might he have gone?  Murrell is certain that Aptheker was totally dedicated to the Party; for him the Party was “everything.”(332)  If ordered, would he have spied?  Or what else?

            His daughter’s autobiography gained publicity when she alleged that Herbert had molested her for a decade, from age 3 to 13; from 1947 to 1957.  Far more damning, Bettina included a paragraph (p. 23 of her autobio) implying that Herbert had gone to Mexico to find the Mexican who had informed for the FBI and caused the capture of Gus Hall, then hiding underground in the belief that the US had turned toward fascism.  The clear implication of that paragraph was that Herbert, a recently discharged major from the US Army, had gone to Mexico to “find” the snitch and eliminate him.  Bettina’s paragraph presents the impression that the scholar, author, lecturer, theoretician Herbert Aptheker may well have been even more for the Party!  Murrell does not address Bettina’s paragraph directly; he simply reports that a couple of comrades had been stranded without funds after Hall was taken by the FBI.  Aptheker was asked to bring money to them so they could return to the US.(100)  So Murrell’s version is far more innocent – Aptheker is a Party bag man, not a Party hit man!  But, could not the Party have gotten funds to the 2 comrades in Mexico easier than by sending such a prominent Communist like Aptheker?  Does this make sense?  Smells fishy.

            As early as 1951 Aptheker was on the FBIs Security Index List of 12,000, and Murrell adds that Aptheker was considered one of the most dangerous – to be arrested in 1 hour if the order were given.(95)  If considered so dangerous, was his home bugged?  Was there anything to indicate a choo-choo train game?  Or any sounds of molestation by Herbert of Bettina?  Was there any bugging confirming why Aptheker went to Mexico?  Hard evidence might resolve the question of molestation far better than speculation about repressed memory or fantasies horrible or otherwise.  And did anything happen to the Mexican who provided information to the FBI about Gus Hall’s presence in Mexico?  If there is no hard evidence to support Bettina’s allegations, at this point, I now think Aptheker innocent of the molestation charge.

            On a short trip to NYC in the early 1960s I found the Jefferson Bookshop off of Union Square and chatted with a young woman clerk – Bettina – who informed me that her father was lecturing that night about a block away.  I went.  Herbert Aptheker so impressed me that I still recall something of that lecture 53 years ago.  His subject was that day’s New York Times.  I had attended Tulane U. in New Orleans, which had a large student contingent from New York, and they all boasted of the reporting in The Times.  Using that day’s newspaper as a text, Aptheker opined out the distortions and omissions on page 1.  I recall he pointed to a smaller article on that page about Vietnam; he said that the headline was not the important story.  What was important was in the 2^nd paragraph, revealing the number of American military advisors then in Vietnam.  What was important, it was higher than the last previous count of American advisors.  The American Government was expanding its military efforts in Vietnam, he warned.  That was the important story.

            Aptheker was a most effective speaker, and he had a sharp mind.  Furthermore, he was a man of great courage.  He was a scholar who pioneered aspects of Black history, challenging the conventional wisdom of his day that slavery, contending that there were hundreds of slave revolts and conspiracies, that Blacks were important to the success of the Union in the Civil War, finding documents to encourage an interest in Black history and protest, writing and lecturing, editing, and finding a suitable publisher for the works of W. E.B. Du Bois.  Aptheker even ran for political office, and he established the American Institute for Marxist Studies, which he hoped might be a popular-front type of institution, providing information for various shades of the Left.  He did this and more even though blacklisted, and was denied any university teaching posts from 1946 (when he exited the army until 1969 when he finally got a part-time post at Bryn Mawr?  He was bitter about being blacklisted, but as Anthony Flood revealed in a recent article, Aptheker basically blacklisted C. L. R. James from all of his own writings.  James wrote Black Jacobins, about the slave revolts in Haiti, a topic similar to Aptheker’s own American Negro Slave Revolts.  But understand, how could Aptheker stoop to mention the book about Haiti?  C. L. R. James, the author, was a Trotskyist!

            Not only was Aptheker not provided a teaching post, he was often denied the right to speak on many campuses.  The FBI sought to prevent and disrupt his lectures, and a young Pat Buchanan also sought to do the same.  Aptheker had his critics in the CP, including some of the Black comrades who were jealous and resented that Du Bois had left his papers, etc. to Aptheker, and not to a Black.  The ex-Communist Harold Cruse vehemently denounced Aptheker in his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.  Murrell reported that Aptheker only thrice answered the Cruse attack in print.(257)  That may be true, but Aptheker, as leader of AIMS, published my booklet on anti-communism and history writing, in which I devoted a section to an attack on Cruse’s intense Goebbelist, anti-Jewish rhetoric and interpretations,

            Once in the early 1970s while Herbert was opening the mail at AIMS, he saw the first page of a North Korean newspaper.  He held it up so I could see how the “dear leader” of that era was shown, almost as a deity.  Aptheker remarked, “There must be something about the Asian mind that wants a god-like leader.”  It was an off-the-cuff remark, and I do not mention this to be politically correct and accuse him of “racism.”  Indeed, a few years earlier in New York’s China Town I had seen a Chinese film that opened, not with a roaring lion, but with a large red background, in the center of which was a picture of Mao’s head, and from all round his head, like rays of the sun, gold flashes emanated.  Nevertheless, what stunned me upon reading Murrell’s book was Aptheker’s criticism of the CPUSA in the early 1950’s – he complained it was not doing enough to show the true nature of the life (how wonderful it was) in the USSR!  The early 1950s.  Stalin!  What even the CPSU would soon denounce as the cult of the personality!  And those cults were evident in all of eastern Europe.  The “dear leader” syndrome may or may not occur in Asia, but it seems intrinsinkly linked to Communism when it achieves power.  It was not “the Asian mind,” but the Communist minds that required such an adored leader.

            The Apthekers were involved personally with Angela Davis and her trials, figuratively and literally, in California.  At one point, in a hurried session with Angela in her jail cell, he proposed a possible line of defense – she was a member of the CP, the CP opposes individual acts of terrorism, therefore Angela Davis must be innocent of any complicity in the murder of the judge and others in the California courtroom.  Gus Hall’s Party leadership staunchly opposed this strategy.  To me it was like a syllogism, John is a Christian, Christians accept the 10 Commandments one of which is “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” therefore John cannot be a murderer.  But life is not a syllogism, and many Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Communists have been found guilty of murder.  Herbert also was more prone to defend criminal actions by Blacks under the notion that they were an oppressed people and therefore could not be gangsters. (279)  It probably made him unable to recognize the anti-white racism in crime when both he and his wife were mugged near their home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  Like Jews who fled for their lives from Hitler dominated Europe, leaving their homes behind, the Apthekers fled for their lives from the Black ghetto in Brooklyn.  Sociologists, infected by anti-white racism, naturally blame white racism for whites abandoning central cities.  In reality, many like the Apthekers had to flee for their lives from Black racist criminals.  Ideology blinded Aptheker, and the academedia complex, on such issues.

            Herbert Aptheker had many admirable qualities, and I did and still do admire him on many levels.  But he had a major flaw.  Even at the end, he seemed not to have gained wisdom from his treatment in the Party.  Murrell notes, had Gus Hall been in power in the US, Aptheker probably would have been executed for his opposition to Hall.(335)  But had Communist Aptheker been in power, how many would he have found necessary to eliminate?

            The flaw in Herbert Aptheker was his faith, his faith in the Communist Party.(300)  It was not simply a god that failed.  Failed?  Communism was a god that succeeded in many nations and the result was the murder of up to 100 million people.   All faiths are not equal.  For example, I now see Islam, with its barbarous sharia law, as a threat to Western civilization.  Communism, in its ruthless, brutal, and murderous demands for equality has also proved itself an enemy of Western Civilization.  Aptheker’s CP opened his mind in many areas, but the same CP closed it shut in many others.
                                           ADDENDUM

            While the mainstream press invariably referred to Herbert Aptheker as the leading “theoretician” of the Communist Party, there seems to be no valid reason for the media’s appellation.  Murrell quotes Dorothy Healy that the leadership of the CP viewed the role of intellectuals as simply to rationalize the Party line, whatever it might be.(143)  In effect, their role was no different from that of the Party troubadours, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie – to present and spread the Party line in artistic or academic formats.  As Aptheker became ever more prominent in defending Communists at trials, publishing Black history, ing lecturing to university gatherings, he became a rock star of the Party.  Perhaps not the best known Communist: the Rosenbergs and other spies made bigger headlines in a negative way.  Aptheker, however, presented a positive picture of the Party.  Gus Hall probably viewed Aptheker like the President views his official spokesman.  Unfortunately, for Hall, Aptheker was more independent than most Presidential spokesmen.

            Does a Presidential spokesman need to know about secret troop deployments here or there?  Clearly not.  That information is for the President and his closest advisors.  The media spokesman has to know only that which will make a more effective presentation of the President’s policy.  Indeed, more knowledge may make it more difficult for the spokesman to lie for the President effectively.

            In December 1991 Aptheker, outraged, whined, in effect, “Gus Hall, you let me lie to the public.  You knew we were financed by the Soviets.  You lied to me and I then repeated the lie to everyone.”  During the speech, Murrell informs us that Hall was laughing at Aptheker.  One can imagine Hillary Clinton laughing if Under Secretary Susan Rice whined about appearing on 5 television networks to lie to the American people by repeating that a video had caused the killing of Americans in Benghazi.  Susan Rice was expected to do her job, and spin and lies were a part of it.

            Why would the CP leaders tell a public relation spokesman that the CPUSA was subsidized by the Soviets?  With such knowledge, would that make him a better spokesman for the Party?  Why would the CP leaders tell a media spokesman that the CPUSA had enabled members to engage in espionage?  With such knowledge, would that make him a better Party spokesman?  Of course not.  So for very practical reasons, keep the intellectuals and folk singers out of the loop.

            Aptheker enters the loop only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of files.  He was the “theoretician”: he thought he was snfluential in the Party, the Party in which he had such faith.  But the Party saw him as just another intellectual, another flunky, who must toe the Party line or be hurled into history’s dustbin.

            But Aptheker might have been aware earlier.  When Aptheker established the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS), he envisioned it as a popular-front organization, open to various shades of the Left.  Hall soon wanted to take control and restrict AIMS to a rigid, orthodox Party approach.  The tension over the development of the organization could have taken another path, if Aptheker were willing.  Aptheker and 2 others inheritied a million dollars.  If Aptheker had kept his third, he would have had sufficient funding to maintain an independent AIMS.  Instead, he gave the large sum to the Party leaders.  Later, he inherited a smaller amount of $58,000, which he did not give to Hall, but kept for AIMS.  With this small inheritance Aptheker kept AIMS independent of Hall for some time, but the small inheritance ran out, and Aptheker had to go to Hall for new funding.  Hall, with his Soviet bankroll, then made AIMS the narrow Party-line institution he wanted.

            There was something quite pathetic in Aptheker’s speech in December 1991.  People lose in politics – that is not news.  But the sudden awareness that the Party leadership used him for 50 years, yet in the end held him (and all intellectuals) in contempt.  The faith and love he had given the Party was not reciprocated.  In his speech, Aptheker was outraged.  Gus Hall just laughed.  Pathetic.