----- Original Message ----- From: HistoryPolitics at aol.com To: utopia1 at attglobal.net Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 4:15 PM Subject: Letters - Chronicle - Nov. 10 Issue
Herbert Aptheker in Public Life and at Home To the Editor: I read with personal interest Christopher Phelps's "Herbert Aptheker: the Contradictions of History" (The Chronicle Review, October 6). I was a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963 when Herb Aptheker was invited to speak at the student union. Alerted that Aptheker was a Communist, and spurred to action by a Raleigh TV journalist named Jesse Helms, the state legislature passed a hasty and ill-conceived law against any known Communist speaking on any public property.
Lectures at the student union typically drew around a hundred students. ... Aptheker addressed a crowd of about 2,000 students on the other side of a wall from the campus. Surrounded by policemen ready to arrest him if he crossed the wall, he spoke not about black history in America, as he had been invited to do, but about freedom and the odiousness of any authority's attempt to suppress it. It was a defining moment for a southern white boy from a conservative, segregated farm town. ...
What Bettina Aptheker has revealed about her father is horrible even in light of her apparent courage in getting beyond it. ... But a point to take away from all this is that just as there are contradictions in people of stature, such as Aptheker, there will always be contradictions in our attempts to deal with them.
We try to hold the intellectual in high regard, while loathing the lecherous abuser of his own daughter. And a legislature that tries to protect its people from an evil ideology is capable of becoming the embodiment of that evil.
Joseph T. Barwick President Carteret Community College Morehead City, N.C.
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To the Editor:
Christopher Phelps, writing about Bettina Aptheker's book on her father, states, "Incest is only the most painful of a series of hard truths about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in Intimate Politics." No, incest is only the most painful of a series of disturbing allegations about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in his daughter's memoir.
I would have thought a journal devoted to higher education would have retained some grasp of the concept of evidence.
Michael Neumann Professor of Philosophy Trent University Peterborough, Ontario
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To the Editor:
Over a span of four decades, my wife and I enjoyed a warm friendship with Herbert and Fay Aptheker. The news that Bettina now contends that her father sexually molested her in her childhood years was quite disturbing. What is also disturbing is that Christopher Phelps accepts Bettina's claims on face value, apparently in the absence of corroboration by any other evidence.
Bettina writes that the molestation ended when she was 13, and that she only recalled these events when she began writing her memoirs. This seems to be a case of "recovered memory," a much-debated psychological technique.
Those of us who work as historians are constrained to follow the evidence. Here the evidence is limited to what Bettina now says she remembers. No human witness or documentation, so far as is known, exists.
My wife and I find the accusations quite unbelievable, both in terms of Herbert's moral character and the unlikelihood that Fay, a most perceptive woman, would have seen nothing grievously amiss in the relationship between father and daughter.
What has also been called up in this matter is a challenge to the essentials of Herbert Aptheker's scholarship. If Bettina Aptheker holds, as Phelps writes, that her father was "foolish and condescending" in failing to see that in the African-American experience, weakness and betrayal were just as common as undaunted heroism, what we have is a distortion of Herbert's work. Herbert Aptheker did not ignore weakness, but he found that, as a people, blacks manifested a tradition of resistance to oppression and that this resistance was heroic. This thesis has found wide acceptance in the historical profession.
Herbert Shapiro Professor Emeritus of History University of Cincinnati Cincinnati
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To the Editor:
In his review of Bettina Aptheker's new memoir, Christopher Phelps describes my profile of Aptheker in The Professors as "replete with errors." This repeats a canard that Professor Aptheker herself is responsible for.
Jacob Laksin has reviewed and refuted every one of Aptheker's claims about alleged errors in my text except one. I mistakenly described her as having been expelled from the Communist Party in 1991, with Angela Davis and others. I accept Professor Aptheker's correction that she resigned from the party 10 years earlier.
However, Professor Aptheker has not denied that in 1991 she joined the Communist splinter group, the Committees of Correspondence on Socialism and Democracy, which was formed by Angela Davis and others who had been expelled. This hardly makes my account "replete with errors."
Laksin's article about this is available online (http://www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org/archive/2006/June2006/ ProfessorsDiscountingtheFactsII061206.htm).
David Horowitz President David Horowitz Freedom Center Los Angeles
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The Author Replies:
Joseph T. Barwick reminds us that Herbert Aptheker, simply by speaking to student audiences in the 1960s as a Communist, helped dispel the McCarthyist fog that denied radicals a hearing. Bettina Aptheker also contributed to the overturning of paternalistic restrictions on campus freedom as a Free Speech Movement leader in Berkeley in 1964. The extent to which Herbert Aptheker could symbolize intellectual freedom, however, was profoundly limited by his habitual excusing of repression by single-party regimes cast in the Soviet mold. This moral double standard was tragic, not only for American Communism but for the whole of the American left.
Michael Neumann and Herbert Shapiro inject skepticism about Bettina Aptheker's story. I understand why, but having read Intimate Politics, I find it believable. A specificity of detail about the abuse is accompanied by raw honesty about her own shortcomings, and she states that she and her father discussed this terrible private history candidly in front of a witness, her lover. Furthermore, her portrait of her father is redolent with mixed feelings, including love — not sheer rage or cold vengeance.
Should we dismiss a memoir because private experience cannot be corroborated more than 50 years later? Should we deny testimony of abuse because the abuser had other sides? Disputation of "recovered memory" of child sexual abuse refers, to my knowledge, to suggestive interrogations of children, not to adults who recall their own repressed memories — a widespread experience in therapy.
I used the word "truths" because legalistic terms such as "allegations" do not harmonize well with the generous, tender spirit in which the devastating problem of incest is addressed by Bettina Aptheker. In a curious way, as I wrote, she honors her parents. Ultimately readers must read her deeply affecting memoir — not, as Neumann has it, a "book on her father" — for themselves and draw their own conclusions.
David Horowitz objects to my characterization of his entry on Bettina Aptheker in The Professors as "replete with errors" and says that my source for this was Bettina Aptheker herself. I have never had any contact with Bettina Aptheker in my entire life. I was unaware of any response by her to his book. My judgment was strictly my own.
Here is why I found fault with Horowitz's book. He states that Bettina Aptheker was expelled from the Communist Party; she resigned from it. He declares that this rupture happened in 1991; it happened in 1981. He holds that her father was expelled from the Communist Party; he resigned. He asserts that she joined an organization, the Committees of Correspondence, to which she has never belonged (and whose full name, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, he here botches). In short, the entry is replete with errors.
Christopher Phelps Associate Professor of History Ohio State University Mansfield, Ohio
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