AMERICAN REDS - DISTORTED DOCUMENTARY

“AMERICAN REDS” – Documentary or Distortumentary?   Shown on PBS 2016

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            The American Communist Party is probably the 3^rd most influential political organization of 20^th century America.  In October 2016 Milwaukee Public Television telecast a 1 ½ hour documentary produced and written by Richard Wormser.  Its scope was to cover the history of the Communist Party, USA, from its origins at the end of WWI up to the late 1950s and beyond.  Over a million Americans at some point joined the American CP (hereafter, for Communist Party), and the organization had considerable influence on many areas of American life in the 1930s and 40s.  Interviewed are party activists and leaders, some of whom died several years before the film project was completed.  Also interviewed were historians, interspersed with headlines of the day, magazine covers, posters, old newsreels, and even occasional cartoon recreations of incidents described by the participants.  By 1960 it was estimated that the CP had only 10,000 members, and many of them were undercover FBI agents.

            The filmmakers hope that this documentary will be used in schools and universities to help enlighten students about the CP.  I contend that the CP was among the most influential political organizations in American history, which greatly altered American life and world affairs.  But I also maintain that the Wormser documentary distorts history and is essentially dishonest about major aspects of the incredibly influential CPUSA.

            One activist interviewed at length (perhaps more than any other in this program) was Steve Nelson, who was born in what is today, Croatia in 1903 to Hungarian parents.  He arrived in America in 1919, and was soon working in Pennsylvania slaughter houses and other non-professional jobs.  He looks and sounds like a typical American blue-collar worker.  For the documentary Nelson describes his efforts to organize laborers into various unions at times when unions were barely legal.  Nelson relates one incident when, after his  arrest, he was interrogated by police.  They beat him.  One hit his jaw so hard that Nelson passed out with that question.  A cartoon recreated the scene.  In the late 1930s Nelson, along with 3,200 other radical Americans, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, part of the Communist-sponsored International Brigades to defend Republican Spain against Francisco Franco and his fascist rebels.  Nelson expresses sorrow at the loss of comrades who fell in the fight.  The narrator even interviews Nelson’s adult daughter, who remembers that as a child she was told not to discuss certain topics at home because the family was aware that their home was bugged.  No word is said, but the implication is – how horrible that in America children were not free to discuss things at home because the government was listening in.

            In the case of Steve Nelson, the government was indeed listening in.  But never does the documentary indicate what the government heard in Nelson’s Oakland abode.  Thanks to the release of various government documents, we now know, and thanks to authors like Diana West, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel (hereafter R & B), we can readily discover the workings of the Nelson household.  For example, in March 1943 the FBI bug revealed that Nelson met with atomic scientist Joseph Weinberg.  Nelson instructed Weinberg  to gather and send him information from other Party members working with him on the atomic bomb project at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.  Nelson also told Weinberg to inform the comrades working there to destroy their CP membership books, and refrain from using liquor.(R & B, The Venona Secrets, p. 255)

            In April 1943 Nelson received another visitor, a member of the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC.  The Soviet official instructed the America Communist to establish an espionage network in the American atomic program.  The Soviet counted out specific amounts of cash to fund the project, and told Nelson where he should place reliable Communists for this “special work” in conveying to the Soviets what the Americans were discovering in the US atomic program.(p. 259)

            When in 1980 Nelson was interviewed by two sympathetic academics, Nelson assured them, “I never had any links with Soviet espionage in the United States.”(p. 259)  And what about any such links in Spain?  Because of the release of the Venona documents, we now know that Nelson lied.  We have known this for over a decade.  But the 2016 documentary ignores Nelson’s treason to portray a poster-boy worker and sympathetic CP activist whose privacy was invaded by an oppressive FBI.

            The documentary shows old newsreels of American CP leader Earl Browder addressing large crowds at Party conventions.  The narrator even interviews Browder’s granddaughter.  What the filmmakers overlook is that Browder, leader of the CPUSA from 1931 until 1945, was also vetting American party members to provide spies for Soviet intelligence agencies.  Even after Browder’s expulsion from the CP (when French CP leader Jacques Duclos wrote criticizing Browder’s policies, undoubtedly at the behest of Stalin), Browder continued his connections with the Soviet spy groups.  But expelled from the CP as a heretic, he quickly lost his old dentist, his accountant, and others.  Clearly, they were members of the CP.  Realistically, the CP was like a cult, and anyone expelled, any heretic, was to be shunned, ostracized, smeared.  Of course, in the USSR, heretics were gulaged or executed.  While the film stresses the pressure on Communists during the McCarthy era to quit the Party and become “regular Americans,” it does not emphasize enough the same  conformist pressure by the CP upon its own members to be politically correct (a phrase invented by the Communist movement), and avoid all heresy and heretics.

            In their book on the Venona files, Romerstein and Breindel  drew conclusions relevant to Browder and all CP leaders.  Breindel and Romerstein write: “It might have been ‘common sense’ not to use CPUSA members and leaders in espionage, but that is precisely what happened.  Venona shows that most of the agents working for the NKVD during WWII were members of the Communist Party, some were Party officials.  The top leadership…not only was aware…but it also provided the Party members to the Soviets.”(259)

            The telecast does mention espionage and the anti-Communist feeling that rose following WWII.  But the filmmakers de-emphasize the former while exaggerating the latter.  Just watching the film, one might conclude that the Rosenbergs were executed in 1952 because of anti-Communist hysteria.  The narrator interviews Bettina Aptheker, daughter of Herbert, who was a prolific author, noted historian of Black history, and fierce defender and open member of the CP.  Bettina tells the camera she recalls how her parents took her – she was about 8 - to Union Square where she thought about 100,000 stood, hoping there would be a reprieve for the convicted atomic spies.  But when news of their electrocutions rippled through the crowd, she saw her father cry for the first time, and her mother turned ashen.  But we now know the Rosenbergs were guilty.  They were convicted, and, even in our Constitution, the punishment for treason is death.  So why the emotions?  Did the crowd really believe the Rosenbergs innocent?  Or did they believe it was moral and proper to give atomic secrets to the Soviets?  And therefore, the Rosenbergs should not be punished.

            What is missing from the film are the conclusions of historians like Breindel and Romerstein, based on revelations of the Venona codes and the opening of some files in Moscow.  The R and B interpretation is far less flattering to the American CP.  Those authors maintain that the American CP, like all CPs, was established with a legal and an illegal organization, and that the Soviets were to use the various CPs to recruit those who could provide intelligence and/or those powerful enough to influence major decisions to favor Soviet policy.  This very important aspect of all CPs tends to be skipped over in Wormser’s docufilm, except when discussing anti-Communist hysteria.

            This documentary is more influenced by the title of Vivian Gornick’s 1979 book, The Romance of American Communism.  The film dwells on struggles to organize unions and build the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the struggle to save the Scottsboro boys and end lynching of Blacks in the South in the 1930s, the struggle to prevent evictions during the Depression with the Unemployed Councils, the struggle for higher wages, for women’s rights to equal pay, even to help consumers through a consumers’ union.  By the mid-1930s, the CP often led groups in the fight against fascism, opposing Hitler’s expansion, opposing Franco’s rebels in Spain, opposing Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.  The American CP helped fill the Lincoln Brigade in Spain.  But with Franco’s victory, Italy’s victory, the Western appeasement of Hitler at Munich and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Stalin had second thoughts.

            In August 1939 The non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union was signed.  Thereafter, the Communists maintained the chief threat to peace came from the imperialist nations, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, all with empires.  Germany and the USSR would be peaceful neighbors.  Of course, in September 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the West with its blitzkrieg, and a few weeks later the Soviets invaded from the East.  Soon after, there was no more Poland.  And the non-aggression pact allowed Stalin to aggress against Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and part of Romania.  The Wormser film skips over this period when the American CP suddenly opposed Pres. Roosevelt and his pro-Allied, pro-war policies.  The Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger sang, mocking those who feared Japanese “spies.”  For the film to stress the CP’s opposition to war during this period would tarnish the image of the CP as a leader in anti-fascism.  So the film ignores the CPs attacks on Roosevelt, Churchill, and American re-armament.  When Hitler’s Germany led a European attack on the USSR in summer 1941, the CP changed its line overnight.  One day the Communists were picketing the White House with signs, “The Yanks Are Not Coming,” and the next day they were urging FDR to intervene in the European war against Nazi Germany.

            Strangely omitted from the documentary is one of the most important and lasting of the CPs contributions to American society.  This was the Progressive Party (hereafter PP) campaign of Henry Wallace for President in 1948 – especially its campaign in the South.  I have argued elsewhere that the PP of 1948 was the civil right movement of that decade.  The campaign manager was Paul Robeson, a Black who had been an all-American football player at Rutgers in the 19teens, an attorney, a baritone soloist, a star of several British films, and finally a star of Broadway playing Othello.  In the early 1940s, he was one of the most famous Blacks in the US.  He encouraged young Blacks in the South to change things through organizations like “snick,” the Southern Negro Youth Congress.  In 1948 at a SNYC conclave in Birmingham for the PP, Police Commish. Bull Connor arrested the VP candidate of the PP, US Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, because Taylor entered through the Negro entrance of the building.  Henry Wallace himself, a former VP under Pres. Roosevelt, campaigning in the South that year, refused to speak at segregated venues.  When he spoke at open-air rallies,  Wallace was sometimes greeted by segregationists hurling rotten tomatoes.  W E B Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP decades before, was a prominent supporter of the PP.  When he made his view public, the NAACP fired him, and thereafter that organization essentially became a Democratic Party front- group.  The PP made strenuous efforts in the South to get Blacks registered to vote and even run for office.  Many of the names promoting the PP in the South would re-emerge a decade later, people like Daisy Bates.  This does not mean that all involved in the PP campaign were Communists, but the CP provided many of the resources and skills for the new PP.  These included what the Truman Administration would label as front groups, like the SNYC, the Civil Rights Congress, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, etc.  Most of these organizations would dissolve by the early 1950s because once on Truman’s Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, members could be fired, isolated, and persecuted.

But some of the people who were Progressives would emerge again in the next decade or so.  Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.  But few are aware that she trained to protest before she refused to yield her seat on the bus.  Parks had trained at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which was a popular-front institution.  Communists were welcome.  Indeed, photos were taken of leading Communists with Parks and others at the school like Rev. Martin Luther King.  King would later hire a Communist in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, and King was very close to Stanley Levison, whom the FBI assumed was a financial leader and secret member of the CPUSA.  And “snick” was reborn as the Students Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (now SNCC).  Why does the film eschew discussion of an area where the CP did contribute to American history?  I suspect Wormser did not want to tarnish the image of the civil rights movement.

The liberal historians interviewed for this film obviously dislike Sen. Joseph McCarthy.  These historians give credit to liberal Democrat President Harry Truman  for purging Communists from the federal civil service.  But Truman, and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, both invoked Executive Privilege to expand Presidential powers and deny important records to Congressional committees like that chaired by Sen. McCarthy, investigating Communist influence in government.  The committees were denied access to files that might have provided evidence of treason in the government.  Denied the essential information by Presidential decrees, Congress was frustrated in its investigations, and sometimes Communist agents continued to operate and foil American policy objectives.  Truman and Eisenhower were more determined to expose and fire whistleblowers who were talking to McCarthy’s investigators than in weeding out and firing Soviet agents in the Federal bureaucracy.  Despite Harry Truman’s assurance, Alger Hiss was no “red herring;”Hiss was a Soviet spy.    Eisenhower deflected criticism by firing some 1,200 “security risks,” but almost all were homosexuals; very few if any were engaged in treason.  Truman had used this tactic on a smaller scale.  Furthermore, McCarthy and his aides, Roy Cohn and David Schine, were pilloried by the “tolerant” liberal media, and in Congress itself, liberal Republican Sen. Flanders of Vermont, made a speech comparing McCarthy to Hitler and clearly implying that the Wisconsin Senator and Cohn and Schine were all homosexuals.(M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, 586)

Were there decisions made in the US State Dept. and Treasury Dept. and possibly other departments by Communists that effectively denied financial and military aid to the legitimate government of China under Chiang Kai-Shek?  Some in the American bureacucracy demanded that before Chiang receive US aid, he would have to join in a coalition government with Mao and the Communists.  Chiang had once tried that, and was determined not to do so again, believing it would inevitably result in a Maoist take-over.  Thus, while the US did little to help Chiang’s Nationalists, at the same time, Stalin was providing materiel to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists.  Might the outcome of the Chinese civil war have been different had the US aided Chiang more?  And the related question, might the outcome have been different had there been a purge of Soviet agents from the American State  and Treasury Departments?

At the trial of the Rosenbergs, Judge Irving Kaufman declared that their treason in providing American atomic secrets to the Soviets made the Korean War possible.  There is no doubt atomic spies in the West hastened the development of Stalin’s bombs.  And once he had the atomic weapon, Stalin acceded to North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung’s request to invade the southern half of the peninsula.  A bloody war ensued, a war that might not have occurred if Stalin had not developed (with help from Western spies) a Soviet nuclear weapon.  The Korean War, was a consequence of treason by Western Communists like the Rosenbergs.

A greater purge of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Branch might have prevented the collapse of Nationalist China on the mainland.  But far from helping, in 1950 Trumans’s State Department urged the assassination of Chiang Kai-Shek!  Indeed, there were 2 plots by the Americans to kill Chiang earlier during WWII under Democrat Pres. Roosevelt.   (M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents, 153-54)   The old Republican question of “Who lost China?” was not merely political rhetoric.

Communists did try to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression.  The Unemployment Councils did stop some evictions.  The International Workers Order did help immigrants adjust to American life, while providing insurance policies.  But the CP- dominated IWO also acquired the names, places and dates of birth of its members, and some of this information was later used by Soviet intelligence.  The CIO encouraged unions beyond the narrow skilled and craft organizations of the AFL, and millions of workers benefitted as a consequence.  And the head of the CIO, Miners’ union chief John L. Lewis, credited Communist organizers in forging the CIO.  The CP not only saved the Scottsboro boys, its methods of combining a good court-room defense with agitation and propaganda outside the legal arena, led to two important US Supreme Court victories in the 1930s – when the high court was quite conservative on racial issues.  Moreover, the CPs approach would be adopted and is now commonly followed in today’s racial disputes.  The CP efforts to end segregation and gain civil rights are probably its most successful effort in America.  But its most successful activities internationally were its supplying information to Stalin’s dictatorship.  The atomic spies – and Steve Nelson should be included among them – changed the balance of power in world politics.  It is possible Communist operatives in the American State and Treasury Dept.s helped Mao and Communism win China – another change in the world balance of power.

The American CP vetted its own members to find who could best serve Soviet intelligence agencies.  (They did not have to be atomic scientists.  during WWII, the American Ambassador to the USSR, William Stanley, was stationed in Moscow.  At one point he discussed his views on the USSR with a group of American journalists working in the Soviet capital.  He complained that American aid to the Soviets was being repackaged so Soviet citizens did not know the goods were coming from America.  They were packaged to appear as Soviet-made goods.  Among the American journalists to whom Ambassador Stanley confided was Janet Ross.  Stanley had no idea that Ross was also a member of the American CP.  He revealed his suspicion of Stalin; she forwarded the information to the Sovets who relayed it to the American Reds, who got the word to an operative in Roosevelt’s White House.  Within a few weeks Ambassador Stanley was no longer the American Ambassador to Moscow.[R & B, 441-44] )  It was not all spying; it was also using influence, not to promote American interests, but to expand those of the Soviets.

One cannot discuss the CP rallies, its skills and bravery in union organizing, and in defying segregation, etc., without discussing how American CP leaders took Moscow money, how the leadership scouted Party members seeking a right fit to place “reliable” Party members in “special work” to supply Soviet intelligence with information.  According to Breindel and Romerstein, in the decoded Venona files, when the NKVD refers to an American Red, the NKVD calls the Communist a “countryman.”  By its own terminology, American Communists were no longer “Americans,” but fellow countrymen of the Soviets.  Though Americans, their loyalty was then to the USSR.  This is not really explored in the Wormser film.

The film has been shown on Public Television, and First Run Features advertises the documentary, emphasizing its educational value.  Here are some of the fields that might be interested in the film:” - Educational Interests- African-American Studies, American Studies, Business, Civil Rights, Cold War Era, Communication, Conflict Resolution, Economics, Globalization, History (U.S.), History (World), Human Rights, Jewish Studies, Labor Studies, Law & Legal Studies, Literature, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Urban Studies, Vietnam, World War II.

The advert continues:” Professors of both U.S. and social history will find a valuable teaching tool in American Reds. The program provides a perspective on the past that few Americans are aware of while raising a number of key issues concerning social change, idealism, ideology, and the nature of our economic and political system that continue to remain vital issues in contemporary America.

"'American Reds' is a valuable primer into the tragic turn of events that betrayed the hopes and aspirations of everyday working people during the great confrontation between capitalism and communism in the early 20th century. It's an important addition to public television's mission to throw light on obscured corners of our history and on the forgotten people lost in the shadows." - Bill Moyers

        I totally disagree with Moyers and the website’s ad.  Unfortunately, this documentary distorts, omits, spins.  It omits information that has been available since at least 2002.  This film should NOT be used in classes unless there is additional material or lecturers to counter the film’s one-sided, dishonest presentation.  Not only is the documentary about American Reds, it is an example of American Red propaganda.  Wormser’s film is not a documentary, it is a distortumentary.

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.