--- Original Message --- John Lacny <jplst15+ at pitt.edu> Wrote on Thu, 12 Oct 2000 20:08:33 -0400
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I'm far too young to know firsthand, but I've heard from people who worked with Aptheker politically (both in and out of the CPUSA) who said that politically, he was one of the most stodgy, dogmatic, and disagreeable people they worked with. Dorothy Healey is not very complimentary about Aptheker in her autobiography, and I'd also heard that Aptheker's daughter Bettina -- who made extremely constructive contributions to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, according to just about every source I've heard from -- had some real disagreements with her dad and that he was a major factor in her leaving the Party.
With all of that said, and with all of the really unappetizing stuff Aptheker was responsible for when it came to apologetics for Soviet conduct (especially in Hungary in 1956), I still don't know where we'd all be without Aptheker's pathbreaking work on slave revolts (it was little more than a catalogue of records of such rebellions, but it was an important start). Not to mention his diligence in organizing DuBois's papers.
And yet all of this is really beside the point, which is that Radosh's article is a hit-job on the history profession and the academy generally for being dominated by lefists -- a charge which anyone who has been a student at an American university for more than five minutes knows is entirely preposterous. It's true that Aptheker was always a bit of a hack, but Radosh also attacks indisputably talented, critical, and thorough historians like Robin Kelley and David Montgomery -- and why?
Because of their leftist politics, which Radosh absurdly claims are dominant in academic circles. And Radosh rehashes these preposterous arguments in the pages of the magazine of the even more preposterous David Horowitz.
Yet the lying shibboleths of the right about the "politically correct" American university are now thoroughly discredited, especially in light of the fact that countless students have found it necessary to sit in at the offices of administrators for the sake of social change -- and that increasingly,
they've been facing arrest, just as they did in the days when Radosh and Horowitz were supporting campus rebellions from the sidelines.
John Lacny
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