In this full-length biography of Herbert Aptheker (1915À2003), Gary Murrell juxtaposes the facts ... more In this full-length biography of Herbert Aptheker (1915À2003), Gary Murrell juxtaposes the facts of Aptheker's political and literary life, but fails to integrate them, especially where doing so would help one evaluate Aptheker's status as a historian. Significantly, Murrell fails to investigate Aptheker's political formation in the 1930s, the decade during which he made the fateful choices that predicted his leaving "history for the pleasures of polemic" (Murrell's words), well before he formally joined the Communist Party in 1939. Murrell's research, this reviewer's memory of Aptheker, and facts not given in the book jointly support my conclusion that Aptheker's confessed "willful blindness" severely qualifies, if not negates, his status as historian. If today Aptheker is known outside of the circles of those who study the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it is as a documentarian of the African American experience. In scores of pamphlets, articles, and books he undermined the view, dominant in the Ã
Aptheker submitted his doctoral dissertation. And yet although Aptheker generally made the acquai... more Aptheker submitted his doctoral dissertation. And yet although Aptheker generally made the acquaintance of Black scholars whenever he could, there is no evidence that he ever tried to make James's. But the expectation that Aptheker would have admired James presupposes a freedom that is psychologically impossible for the Stalinist that Aptheker was. This bias could not be laid at the feet of either the government or politically nervous academic institutions. It was self-imposed. Central to Aptheker's worldview was the claim that the Soviet Union incarnated the Marxian socialist idea. Central to James's outlook was the denial of that claim, which James elaborated upon in World Revolution in 1937, just as Aptheker was wrapping up his Master's thesis. 7 Aptheker's later support for the Soviet Union's violent suppression of the Hungarian revolution would not comport well with his reputation as a partisan historian of uprisings, but his pioneering work on American slave uprisings and his editing of W. E. B. Du Bois's papers and correspondence may have covered a multitude of such sins of commission. For some scholars, it seems even to have covered Aptheker's neglect of James and Black Jacobins. Aptheker ignored a ground-breaking study of the slave rising that inspired many of the uprisings he studied. Having labored to increase the visibility of African Americans, he had ironically rendered James an invisible man.
In this full-length biography of Herbert Aptheker (1915À2003), Gary Murrell juxtaposes the facts ... more In this full-length biography of Herbert Aptheker (1915À2003), Gary Murrell juxtaposes the facts of Aptheker's political and literary life, but fails to integrate them, especially where doing so would help one evaluate Aptheker's status as a historian. Significantly, Murrell fails to investigate Aptheker's political formation in the 1930s, the decade during which he made the fateful choices that predicted his leaving "history for the pleasures of polemic" (Murrell's words), well before he formally joined the Communist Party in 1939. Murrell's research, this reviewer's memory of Aptheker, and facts not given in the book jointly support my conclusion that Aptheker's confessed "willful blindness" severely qualifies, if not negates, his status as historian. If today Aptheker is known outside of the circles of those who study the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it is as a documentarian of the African American experience. In scores of pamphlets, articles, and books he undermined the view, dominant in the Ã
Aptheker submitted his doctoral dissertation. And yet although Aptheker generally made the acquai... more Aptheker submitted his doctoral dissertation. And yet although Aptheker generally made the acquaintance of Black scholars whenever he could, there is no evidence that he ever tried to make James's. But the expectation that Aptheker would have admired James presupposes a freedom that is psychologically impossible for the Stalinist that Aptheker was. This bias could not be laid at the feet of either the government or politically nervous academic institutions. It was self-imposed. Central to Aptheker's worldview was the claim that the Soviet Union incarnated the Marxian socialist idea. Central to James's outlook was the denial of that claim, which James elaborated upon in World Revolution in 1937, just as Aptheker was wrapping up his Master's thesis. 7 Aptheker's later support for the Soviet Union's violent suppression of the Hungarian revolution would not comport well with his reputation as a partisan historian of uprisings, but his pioneering work on American slave uprisings and his editing of W. E. B. Du Bois's papers and correspondence may have covered a multitude of such sins of commission. For some scholars, it seems even to have covered Aptheker's neglect of James and Black Jacobins. Aptheker ignored a ground-breaking study of the slave rising that inspired many of the uprisings he studied. Having labored to increase the visibility of African Americans, he had ironically rendered James an invisible man.
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