>From the issue dated October 6, 2006
Herbert Aptheker: the Contradictions of History
By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS
Long ago, when the historian Eugene D. Genovese breathed fire from his left nostril instead of his right, he disturbed the placid pages of the journal Science & Society with a scorching blast at Herbert Aptheker, initiating what would become a legendary controversy in American historiography.
In that year, 1963, Genovese was a mere upstart. Later he would have a decisive influence upon the discipline of history, literally redefining social history (in a famous essay written with his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese) as "primarily the story of who rides whom and how."
Aptheker, for his part, was the most noted Marxist historian in the United States, a distinction of some notoriety. His book American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), published by Columbia University Press, helped shatter the prevailing myth of Sambo, the stereotype that American slaves were docile or happy-go-lucky. Since McCarthyism forbade a university career, Aptheker became editor of the Communist Party's journal, and he served as literary executor for W.E.B. Du Bois.
Two Marxists, two historians of slavery: An outsider might imagine that Genovese and Aptheker would have a lot to say to one another. Did they ever. Genovese's 1963 polemic against Aptheker's essays on U.S. foreign policy carried force even decades later, when I came across it as a graduate student in the University of Rochester's Rush Rhees Library, whose cramped stacks Genovese himself had frequented when he taught there in the 1970s.
Aptheker mystified me. He remained a loyal Communist even after 1956, when most party members quit after Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes. I could not reconcile the Aptheker who wrote To Be Free (1948) in support of the African-American search for freedom with the Aptheker who justified Soviet tanks' crushing workers' councils in The Truth About Hungary (1957).
Genovese's broadside was of no help in illuminating this contradiction, for in the early 1960s he was given to militant, unapologetic Stalinism. No Khrushchevite revisionist, he. Genovese saw Aptheker's commentaries on foreign policy as a hash of liberalism and pacifism, a weak attempt to woo the Democratic Party into alliance with the left. "How pitiable," he sneered, "are these impotent pleas to the liberal imperialists."
Forty years on, it is Aptheker's erstwhile critic from his left who seems the renegade, for Genovese now issues his complaints about liberalism from the quarters of the GOP. Aptheker, who resigned from the Communist Party USA in 1991 when its leaders supported the attempted hard-liner coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, remained a steadfast Marxist until his death three years ago.
One more surprise twist. For many years, Genovese scorned Aptheker for imagining slaves to be always in rebellion. Genovese held that slaveholder paternalism forged stable class rule in the antebellum South. As he moved to the right, eventually to develop a taste for Old South conservatism, Genovese found more and more merit in Aptheker, the Communist chronicler of slave insurrections.
Such are the contradictions of history — or at least the historical profession.
Now we have knowledge of a far more painful contradiction in the life of Herbert Aptheker than his simultaneous defense of black freedom and Soviet authoritarianism, one long buried in silence. Intimate Politics (Seal Press), the stunning new memoir by Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies and history at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will prompt a re-examination of her father, whom American historians now tend to honor as a pioneer in recognizing the centrality of the black past to American history.
Aptheker enjoys at least a fraction of her father's notoriety. She is listed in David Horowitz's book The Professors, for example, which purports to identify the "101 most dangerous academics in America." (The entry, regrettably, is replete with errors, such as the claim that she was expelled from the Communist Party in 1991, when in fact she had resigned from it a full decade earlier.)
Born in the year following publication of American Negro Slave Revolts, Bettina Aptheker was a sole child whose father was at the center of the family's Brooklyn household and of her own perception of the world's possibilities. Her mother, Fay, was her father's first cousin (their fathers were brothers), and she kept his social calendar between the tours she chaperoned to the Soviet Union.
"When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," writes Bettina Aptheker. "Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do."
This powerful evocation of a child's boundless love makes the book's central revelation, conveyed in an indelible paragraph, all the more devastating:
"My father and I played other games too, besides baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing choo choo train. We were in the living room in the apartment on Washington Avenue, crawling around on the Persian rug my mother treasured. Many years afterward, this memory came to me: My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. I was wet and sticky and I remember my father was crying and I was sitting on the floor next to him and he had put a towel down so we wouldn't dirty the rug. I remember stroking his hair and saying 'It's okay, Daddy. It's okay.' And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they always had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we had moved to a new house."
Incest is only the most painful of a series of hard truths about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in Intimate Politics. We discover that he underpaid the family's black housecleaners. We learn that his celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust." We are told that to cope with Stalin, the war, the party, and his family, he "lived much of the time in a fantasy world of his own making."
What makes Intimate Politics remarkable, however, is that none of its damning truths are told with rancor. Bettina Aptheker is a powerful witness to her father's contradictions precisely because of her emotional honesty. Her baring of her own shortcomings makes the book far more shattering than any shot ever fired by Eugene Genovese. Intimate Politics could not have been published, one senses, when Herbert and Fay Aptheker were still alive, but it is not governed by a spirit of vindictiveness.
Self-loathing, self-mutilation, and contemplation of suicide were longtime conditions of Bettina Aptheker's existence. She pushed her memories of childhood sexual abuse deep into the recesses of her mind and forgot them until she began to write her memoir. Repression, in turn, produced dread, tension, anger, paranoia, and depression.
While unflinching about her own faults and her father's misdeeds, Aptheker writes with a remarkable capacity for love, empathy, and wisdom. Her father always spoke of his "perfect childhood," but that is belied when he reveals to her, at the time of Martin Luther King's assassination, that his own brother had committed suicide at a young age. What else happened to him, she wonders, that would explain his later misconduct? This insight — that perpetrators may be victims and victims perpetrators — makes Intimate Politics a mature and, ultimately, redemptive work.
Over many years, Aptheker fights to achieve inner peace, both with herself and her father. She struggles to overcome her compulsion to carry on the family tradition, to be the "perfect daughter," to produce at a ferocious pace, to acquire fame, and to be loyal to her father's politics.
As she sheds the family's Soviet-style Marxism, she enters new realms. She discovers feminism, accepts and revels in her attraction to women, and embraces Buddhist spirituality.
This transformation, however, reflects growth, not simply rupture. She does not abandon so much as refashion the legacy her parents bequeathed to her of personal, political, and intellectual commitment. In its own peculiar way, Intimate Politics honors them.
Recently I visited a highly regarded research center located on the campus of a prominent university. Its library is named for Herbert Aptheker.
Intimate Politics will provoke soul-searching, there and elsewhere, about Aptheker's place in the pantheon. To what extent should disheartening revelations about a scholar's conduct be held against his oeuvre?
We possess no simple answers to that question, variations of which have been asked about many other figures, such as Louis Althusser and Paul de Man. Intellectuals are all too human, flawed and imperfect. Some character failings shock more than others, but to weigh them with fairness against genuine accomplishment is a delicate task without clear guidelines.
One clue lies in the thought of Aptheker himself, who adamantly denied the possibility of "objective" history. "It is intense partisanship on the side of the exploited and therefore on the side of justice," he once wrote, "that makes possible the grasping of truth."
Perhaps only a daughter who internalized that norm could so piercingly identify its author's faults — and I do not primarily mean his abuse of her.
The psychological scars left by her father's violations lent Bettina Aptheker an acute understanding of the traumatic consequences of oppression, allowing her to intuit that the history of black Americans was far more complex than Herbert Aptheker allowed for in his interpretations.
She writes that her father tended in his public talks to portray the history of blacks as one of "undaunted heroism." She reflects on "how foolish and condescending" that was "without meaning to be" when viewed from the "interior" reality of black experience, where weakness and betrayal are just as common.
"I looked back and waved," she writes, describing one of their leave-takings at the Berlin Wall, "and he waved back. He looked very small and distant in the shadows of the wall. It was the first time I had ever seen him in this way. He no longer loomed larger than life."
Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, published last year in a new paperback edition by the University of Michigan Press.
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?%20id=9b1f8zy7jk5zwg4169v9ytwwd6sj79lj
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