The man who was America’s “most dangerous Communist”

Herbert Aptheker

Very few members of the general public remember him now, but in his time Herbert Aptheker (1915 – 2003) was a very big deal indeed, and to this day he is a revered figure in the academy. He is considered a pioneer in the historical study of slavery in America – more broadly, in the general history of black Americans, and, more narrowly, in the history of slave revolts.

But he was not just a scholar. He was a devout Communist. David Horowitz called him “the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual.” J. Edgar Hoover once said that the FBI considered Aptheker “the most dangerous Communist in the United States.” In 2015, Harvey Klehr, the historian of American Communism and of Soviet spying in the US, described him as “an ideological fanatic who squandered his talents as a historian, gave slavish devotion to a monstrous regime, and lacked the intellectual courage to say publicly what he wrote privately.”

Harvey Klehr

Indeed, as Klehr noted, Aptheker “joined the American Communist party (CPUSA) in August 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet pact, just as thousands of other disillusioned Jewish Communists were leaving.” And good Stalinist that he was, he parroted Uncle Joe’s calls for peace with Germany and, when the Nazis violated the pact in 1941 by invading the USSR, immediately reversed his position, calling for the US to fight shoulder to shoulder with the USSR and UK.

Aptheker’s whole adult life revolved around the CPUSA. As a student he was active in CPUSA front organizations, taught at the CPUSA’s New York Workers School, and was a regular reader of the CPUSA’s Daily Worker and New Masses and a contributor to other CPUSA rags. After the war, in which he fought on the European front, Aptheker settled in the American South, becoming an “education worker” (which is something like a “community organizer”) and working for yet another CPUSA front. From 1948 to 1953 he was a staffer at the CPUSA’s literary journal, Masses and Mainstream; from 1953 to 1963 he edited the CPUSA’s ideological monthly, Political Affairs; and from 1957 to 1991, he was a member of the CPUSA’s national committee, on which he was considered was the party’s leading “theoretician.”

Aptheker, Hayden, and other Hanoi travel companions

While the USSR lasted, nothing shook his devotion to it. He was always prepared to defend Stalin’s atrocities, and when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, he wrote a book justifying the invasion. He also penned a defense of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. If the Kremlin was incapable of doing anything of which Aptheker would not approve, the U.S., in his view, could do no right. For him, the Marshall Plan amounted to “renazification.” And of course the Vietnam War was, in his eyes, a pure act of imperialist aggression. In 1966 he and Tom Hayden – the California radical who was then Jane Fonda’s husband – made “solidarity” trips to Hanoi and Beijing.

Eldridge Cleaver

In 1966, while remaining a CPUSA stalwart, Aptheker ran for Congress as a member of the Peace and Freedom Party, whose candidate for president of the U.S., two years later, was Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader and convicted rapist who would later become involved in a shootout with Oakland police and flee the country to escape a murder rap.

Eugene Genovese

Under the pro-Marxist dispensation on post-Vietnam American campuses, Aptheker’s academic career thrived: he taught at Bryn Mawr, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, at CUNY, at Yale, at Berkeley, and at Humboldt University in Berlin. Yet he should never have been considered a serious historian: he consistently twisted or suppressed or invented facts to suit his ideological purposes. (Recall that a habit of focusing on the worst of America, including its history of slavery, was a key CPUSA activity.) Klehr acknowledges that “Aptheker deserves credit as a pioneer in the field of African-American studies,” but notes that “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.”

Bettina Aptheker

Aptheker did not quit the CPUSA until after the Soviet Union had fallen, leaving him without a lodestar. To be sure, once the USSR was dead, and exposed to the world as, indeed, an Evil Empire, he felt obliged to cough up a few public recriminations, admitting, for example, that the CPUSA (contrary to his decades-long claims) had always been controlled and funded by the Kremlin. “In short,” wrote Klehr, “he confirmed much of what the ‘right-wing reactionaries’ had said about the CPUSA and the Soviet Union for decades.”

There was more. After his death, in 2003, it emerged that this man who had spent most of his life celebrating a monstrous tyranny had himself, in his private life, been a monster: his daughter, Bettina, in a memoir, revealed that he had sexually abused her from the time she was a three-year-old toddler until she was thirteen years old.

Evil takes a variety of forms.

Bill de Blasio: marching with a murderer

Oscar López Rivera

It was enjoyable to read New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s livid charge that the defection of sponsors from the Big Apple’s forthcoming Puerto Rican Day Parade – in response to her announcement that the parade would be honoring terrorist murderer Oscar López Rivera – had been “orchestrated” by those “ultra right-wing” types who want Puerto Rico to be a state, not a separate country. (Lopez’s cause, as we’ve previously noted, was and is Puerto Rican independence, Castro style.) Never mind that, as the New York Post pointed out, that “ultra right-wing” fringe of statehood supporters consists of about 70 percent of the island’s population. (Coincidentally, voters in Puerto Rico will have their next chance to vote on their island’s status on June 11, the same day their cousins in New York are marching down Fifth Avenue.) Mark-Viverito continued to insist that López is a “freedom fighter” and former “prisoner of war” and maintained her refusal to say anything sympathetic for those killed and wounded in acts of FALN terrorism.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio

Unsurprisingly, Mayor Bill de Blasio – the kind of far-left politician who is reflexively sympathetic to terrorists like López – still plans to march with the murderer.

Yet as Caroll Alvarado wrote in the Post, also on May 27, many Puerto Ricans in New York have decided to give the mayor the bird and join Jet Blue, Goya, and Univision in boycotting the parade. “I’m as Puerto Rican as it gets, but I can’t support the parade this year,” Angi Silva told Alvarado. “We should be focusing on helping our island, not honoring a criminal.” Jaida Selvenajnole agreed, noting that López “went to jail for a reason.” And Zoraida Vega, calling López a “criminal,” said: “He was in jail for 35 years. Why are we honoring him?…The mayor shouldn’t be going. It doesn’t look right.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton

For Mark-Viverito aide Luis Miranda – who happens to be the father of Broadway darling Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton) – these critics of López are nothing but a bunch of “Trump/right-winger Latinos.” The New York Times,  in a May 29 story about the controversy, managed to find Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans living in New York) on both sides of the issue.

Budet and his banner

Among those in the pro-López camp was Smokey Escobar, age 62, who provided this cryptic comment: “Why not? He earned it, in his way.” Then there was Ricardo Gabriel, whom the paper identified as a 36-year-old “doctoral candidate writing about Puerto Rican activists at the City University of New York.” Gabriel was described as seeing “a silver lining” in the decision of all those corporate sponsors to back out: “The parade has been dominated by corporate sponsors, and I felt like it wasn’t authentic anymore,” he said. “But now, with Goya and others pulling out, I think this is a step in the right direction.” In other words, better a murderer than a corporation. Terrorism may be bad, but capitalism is worse. (Apparently all those years of grad school have really paid off for Mr. Gabriel.) The Times also ran a picture of Puerto Rican artist Osvaldo Budet “hanging a banner in support of Oscar López Rivera at El Puente community center in Brooklyn,” an institution that (to judge by its website) has close and complicated ties to the New York City Board of Education, among other municipal agencies. We wondered how much New York taxpayer money goes every year to this organization that stands with a man who was responsible for the cold-blooded murder of New York taxpayers.

De Blasio’s incredible shrinking Puerto Rican Day Parade

Oscar López Rivera

On May 22, we reported that this year, New York’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade would be honoring one Oscar López Rivera, whose FALN terrorist group killed four innocent people in a famous 1975 bombing at the historic Fraunces Tavern in Manhattan. Although López was sentenced in 1981 to a 55-year prison term, Barack Obama – in one of the very last acts of his presidency – ordered him freed, despite López’s refusal to renounce violence. Not long afterwards, New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito announced that this year’s parade would celebrate López – the supposed objective of whose terrorism was to gain Puerto Rican independence – as a “National Freedom Hero.”

Melissa Mark-Viverito

As we noted on May 22, López is no hero of freedom. Besides, most Puerto Ricans aren’t looking for a hero of freedom. When asked to vote on the question, as they regularly are in plebiscites, residents of the island reject independence from the United States by overwhelming margins. In fact, most of them want their tropic isle to be an American state. It should be noted that what López wanted, and killed for, was not just independence but independence a la Cuba – in other words, another Castroite Communist dictatorship in Uncle Sam’s Caribbean backyard.

Our May 22 piece noted that Goya Foods, the #1 supplier of beans, rice, oil, and other food items to America’s Latino community, had backed out of supporting the parade because of Mark-Viverito’s reprehensible decision to honor a terrorist. Other sponsors, however, stood firm. For a while, anyway. That has since changed. In a May 27 editorial, the New York Post provided a list of some additional defectors from the list of sponsors. Since our May 22 piece, JetBlue, the Yankees, Corona beer, Coca-Cola, and AT&T – all of them longtime sponsors of the parade – had backed out of their association with it. They had been followed by Univision, the Spanish-language TV network, and by New York’s local Channel 4.

New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

On May 26, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo finally yielded to pressure and let it be known that he, too, would skip the event, although he pusillanimously avoided saying why. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman also changed his mind about participating. He was lily-livered too, attributing his inability to participate to a “scheduling conflict.”

More tomorrow.  

Hugo’s fans: where are they now?

The headlines don’t mince words. “Socialism in Venezuela: No toilet paper, TV, or long distance call service.”  Venezuela nearing total ‘collapse.’”  “Venezuela’s Collapse Brings ‘Savage Suffering.’” “Venezuela has a crazy new plan to save electricity.” (The “plan” is to change the country’s time zone.)

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Nicolás Maduro

It was only a couple of years ago – but seems much, much longer – that celebrity fans of chavismo in the U.S. were still proudly proclaiming their support for the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. Consider the March 2014 letter written by a bunch of Hugo’s stateside admirers to members of the U.S. Congress, chiding them for the passage of H.R. 488, a bill expressing support for Venezuelans “as they protest peacefully for democratic change and calling to end the violence.” The letter fiercely defended the chavista government, stating that it “may have legitimate reasons for arresting and detaining” many opposition members, and accused the U.S. Congress of “politicization of human rights.” In a classic change-the-subject gambit, the letter asked why the Congress was exercised about human rights in Venezuela and not, say, in Colombia or Peru? And in conclusion, the letter warned that “Congressional resolutions steeped in hyperbolic rhetoric that portray Venezuela as a repressive government or even a dictatorship threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Congress in the eyes of our Latin American neighbors.”

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Hugo with Danny Glover

Who were the signatories of this missive? The big names were actor Danny Glover, director Oliver Stone, and aging hippie Tom Hayden. But there were also several academics, some of them pretty big names in their fields – George Ciccariello-Maher, a political scientist at Drexel; Arturo Escobar, an anthropologist at Chapel Hill; Dan Kovalik of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law; Miguel Tinker Salas, a historian at Pomona; Sinclair Thomson and Greg Grandin, both historians at NYU; John Womack, Jr., a retired Harvard historian and economist; Gilbert M. Joseph, a historian at Yale; and Gerardo Renique, a historian at CUNY.

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Dan Kovalik

Where are these champions of chavismo now? Where, c’est-à-dire, are the schmoes of yesteryear? A few quick Google searches suggest that, of all these admirers of the Bolivarian Revolution, Kovalik is one of the two or three buffoons on the above list who’ve weighed in most recently on Venezuelan affairs. And what did Kovalik have to say? Scribbling in the Huffington Post in December, he lamented the opposition’s victory in the parliamentary elections: “Ultimately, it is the impoverished people of Venezuela who suffered the biggest loss in the recent elections, for the Chavista revolution has been focused on improving the once-neglected poor of Venezuela.” Kovalik was, at that point, still making great claims for the economic results of chavismo: “the Chavista government has done a laudable job in greatly reducing poverty and in reducing economic inequality.”

Then there’s Grandin. We’ll get around to him tomorrow. 

Heroes, martyrs, saints: reinventing the Rosenbergs

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Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

Although it’s been over sixty years since the Stalinist atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for treason at Sing Sing, a federal prison in New York, they continue to be a cause célèbre for many persons who weren’t even born until long after their deaths. The history of the widespread and perverse loyalty to the Rosenbergs’ memory is very much worth pondering, because it reveals a great deal about the psychopathology of the very many useful stooges for whom the betrayal of a free society in the name of mass-murdering totalitarianism is not only defensible but heroic.

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Ron Radosh

Over the years, some of their champions have argued that the Rosenbergs were totally innocent; others, that he was guilty as charged but she was innocent; still others, that they were both guilty, but it wasn’t a big deal, either because the state secrets they passed to the Kremlin weren’t all that important or because their actions were understandable, and thus forgivable, or even downright praiseworthy – the U.S., in the view of these apologists, being an oppressive nation unworthy of the Rosenbergs’ loyalty and the USSR under Stalin a shining symbol of socialist hope. As Ron Radosh, author of The Rosenberg File (1983), put it in 2011, the case was for a long time “a linchpin of the American Left’s argument that the United States government was not only evil during the Cold War years, but was ready to kill regular American citizens because they were against the Truman administration’s anti-Soviet policies.”

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Tony Kushner

Indeed, for many on the left, the Rosenbergs are nothing less than heroes. The makers of a video entitled “Martyrs for Peace” said the following about them: “Both tried to make the world a better place for everyone. Both were courageous.” The socialist playwright Tony Kushner made the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg a character in Angels in America, his much-lauded, award-winning piece of dramatic agitprop. Kushner didn’t just treat Ethel sympathetically; he turned her into a saint, serving up what one sympathetic writer has described as “a powerful portrayal of [her] strength and humanity.”

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Ethel Sings: a promotional photo

It goes on. As recently as last year, New York theatergoers could buy tickets to a play called Ethel Sings: The Unsung Song of Ethel Rosenberg, in which author Joan Beber represented Ethel as a tragic heroine forced to choose between loyalty to her children (i.e., testify and live) and loyalty to her husband (stay silent and die). In the theater program, the play’s director described the Rosenbergs as “liberals, Jews, labor activists, and communist sympathizers in an era of virulent anti-Communism and anti-Semitism.” (For such people, it’s always anti-Communism, not Communism itself, that’s “virulent.”)

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Robert Meeropol

Among the most dedicated apologists for the Rosenbergs have been their sons, Michael and Robert. For a long time they fiercely insisted on the innocence of their parents – who, in a letter written to the boys (then aged six and ten) just before the executions, begged them: “Always remember that we were innocent.” After the Rosenbergs’ death, Michael and Robert were adopted by a couple named Meeropol and took their surname; when the boys grew up and became political commentators and professors (Michael is a retired economics prof at Western New England College; Robert has taught anthropology at the same institution), they both made a busy side career out of defending their parents, relentlessly smearing the Rosenbergs’ critics, accusing those critics of proffering false information, and charging the FBI with fabricating evidence.

1990 PHOTO OF MICHAEL MEEROPOL, SON OF JULIUS AND ETHEL ROSENBERG AT THE ROSENBERG FUND FOR CHILDREN IN SPRINGFIELD.
Michael Meeropol

Together, the Meeropols wrote a 1975 book about their parents called We Are Your Sons; in the novel The Book of Daniel (1971), E. L. Doctorow presented a sympathetic account of a fictional couple based on the Rosenbergs, whose life is viewed retrospectively through the eyes of their son. (It’s surely no coincidence that in 2011, Michael, who now teaches at the City University of New York, recommended Kushner for an honorary CUNY degree.) Once, in an article, Radosh addressed one of the sons directly: “For your own sake, I hope you are mentally prepared for the inevitable day when the KGB’s own archives reveal that your parents were guilty. Get ready, because it’s going to be soon.”

Well, that day finally came. The relevant KGB records were declassified, and secret Soviet messages that had been intercepted and decrypted by U.S. intelligence were also made public. And they proved what Radosh knew they would. Many major news media, some of which had repeatedly and ardently reasserted the Rosenbergs’ innocence over the decades, did their best to ignore these revelations. The New York Times didn’t cover the story. The Nation, which over the decades had vilified and demonized witnesses who were now shown to have been telling the truth all along, deep-sixed the disclosures – and of course didn’t apologize to any of the people it had smeared.

But not everybody ignored the newly released documents. We’ll get around to that next time.