Shhh! Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker

Public talk vs. private talk. If we consider, first, the volume of off-list private e-mail that I have received since History News Network published my "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations" on October 4, and second, some noticeable gaps in what is otherwise more publicly available on-line – all this leads me to the conclusion that a general public silence by Old Leftists in response to the report of Herbert Aptheker’s sexual molestation of his daughter Bettina may be writing another chapter in the strange history of American Communism. Fellow Red Diaper Babies and many former Communists seem to want to sweep this under the rug – or, may I say, airbrush it – as if there had never been a Women’s Liberation Movement, and it had never occurred to anybody that there might be a connection between the personal and the political, or – as Bettina puts it in her memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, Emeryville California, 2006), “the personal reveals the political… relations of power are often enacted in moments of intimacy” (p. 31).

The reeling first reactions to the revelations seem almost a mini-version of the first reactions to Khruschev’s 1956 Secret Speech on the crimes of Stalin. I am also seeing a lot of male gender solidarity: men of all political persuasions, including many historians, are exercising more skepticism towards female than male testimony; some right-wingers are weeping crocodile tears for the unjustly accused Herbert who they otherwise detested. That vixen, Bettina! (Next they will accuse her of seducing Herbert when she was three – as Herbert accused her of attempting at a later point; p. 526 in Intimate Politics.) There is a tendency on the right to rally to Herbert’s support because of an increasingly puritanical sexual politics that sides with the male in such episodes: gender solidarity trumps politics, even solidarity with a Communist. (Very few women have so far taken this position, although Clare Spark derogates Bettina’s claims about Herbert because, says Spark, the claims are congruent with feminist anti-patriarchy. This would be like dismissing a Marxist’s specific claims of experiencing class injustice on grounds that Marxists are always peddling class injustice.)

It should be reported that somebody (not I) sent a copy of Chris Phelps’s article on Bettina’s memoir to Portside around Sunday or Monday October 3-4. Portside, which manages in any case to do a good job of finding things on its own, is the normally fairly catholic and inclusive “discussion and debate” list of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the sane wing of the former CP. As of this writing, nothing about this matter has been posted there, although Portside has posted various items about what we might call merely bourgeois molestation scandals. Famous Red Diaper types have been strangely silent about the important issues raised by Bettina, presumably dismissing it as a merely private matter. It sounds like a case of keeping dirty linen out of the laundromat. A friend who is an ex-CPer sees Portside’s silence as tending “to confirm my sense that the habits of hypocrisy, and the refusal to deal with women’s experience, have survived intact from the CP itself.”
 
          It may shed some additional light on Portside’s action – or non-action – to note that Bettina’s parents and others urged her to join the Committees of Correspondence – which Herbert had named, in imitation of the Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution -- but that, as she writes,  “I had no inclination to do so… I was through with Communist politics…” (p. 495). (One friend, formerly in the Party, speculates that Bettina may have little sympathy among former CPers because she left the Party, as they see it, “too soon” – although it was 1981; p. 406ff.)
 
Here are some of the things pouring into my inbox: 

• Why, I’ve been asked repeatedly, did Bettina wait to say these things until her parents Herbert and Fay were dead and couldn’t answer? This answers itself. The question seems to be rooted in the same sort of emotional deficit that I mentioned in my earlier piece. Although I can see arguments on both sides, I am astounded by criticism of a daughter’s decision not to confront her parents with this. (In fact, Bettina did indeed confront Herbert with it while he was still alive, and according to Bettina, Fay had been unaware of it: p. 522ff.) The situation reminds me of a story about a left organization’s statement about the Middle East which condemned Israel. One member of the group endorsed the statement but asked, comically, whether it would be possible to defer publication until her parents died. There’s no final answer as to which is the best way to handle a situation like this, but it’s weird that people should attack Bettina for a decision that any of us might well make.

• I find myself in frequent dialogue with my dear mother around much milder questions that I nonetheless couldn’t bring myself to ask when she was alive. (“Why was it that the only book you ever tried to keep me from reading was Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic The Well ofLoneliness, and what coded message were you sending in your oft-repeated story of how she and you, ‘Blackie’ and ‘Whitey,’ with your platinum hair, were ‘the cynosure of all eyes’ as you strode down Eighth Street together in the thirties?” Naomi Weisstein tells me that she has heard that Blackie and Whitey are reading this in West Heaven, and saying, “How sad, we didn’t do It back then, and now we are incorporeal.” Later, at about the time when my mother was running for a minor office on the American Labor Party ticket, she protested against the Bayside Communist Club’s consignment of females to a kind of women’s auxiliary, like the American Legion.) The rest of these people who are demanding that Bettina confront her parents in life apparently don’t have this problem, and forthrightly confront their own parents with their various deviances right away, lest the parents die before the children work up the courage. They sit around the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner table, and as Dad carves the turkey, they ask, “Dad, why did you do that to me? Mom, why did you let him?”

• “Recovered memory” is unreliable, these people tell me. Granted. The fine PBS-Frontline Ofra Bikel documentaries some years back about the alleged sexual abuse in child care (“Little Rascals,” McMartin Pre-School) rightly challenged this kind of testimony, and there was much criticism elsewhere in the literature. But I do believe that the agenda of this challenge is sometimes to deny, in a more general way, childhood sexual molestation. Naomi Weisstein, author of “Psychology Constructs the Female” tells me that Freud Himself was back and forth on this, and finally yielded to conservative pressures in denying his earlier claims that such existed, retreating to the position that children only had fantasies of sexual abuse. (Note that with Bettina, we are dealing with an academic in her 60s, and although being an academic is hardly proof against lying, this is certainly not the stereotypical false accusing child, drooling and mewling about night-time visits from Ol’ Beelzebub.) There is no doubt whatsoever that such horrors as this do exist, and in abundance.
  
• “Tell me the truth, Jesse, do you really believe Bettina’s tale?” writes one old friend, again off-list. Should we believe those who make claims like Bettina’s? The recurring denial that has come to me from a range of people from left to right is that it’s another “he said, she said” situation, and nobody will ever know the truth. What is this, Mike Tyson? Deeply confused about the difference between history and the law, historian Mel Dubofsky writes, “Bettina’s recovered memories are less than convincing evidence and certainly would not suffice in a court of law.” (Mel also gives us a left version of an old gentleman’s club argument: “Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Herbert Aptheker whom I met 40 odd years ago was a pedophile, let alone an incestuous one.”) I think what we have here is a case of Molestation Denial, utterly uninformed by feminist values. (Disclosure: like Mel, I was in touch with Herbert on and off for about forty years, most notably in defending him, together with Staughton Lynd, Marv Gettleman and others, in the Aptheker vs. Yale events of 1975-76, and earlier at the 1969 meeting of the American Historical Association where he lectured me fruitlessly over lunch on the dangers of “adventurism” in the organization. I may have met Fay once. I have never met nor had contact with Bettina.)

We seek rigor in the social sciences. Of course, we cannot predict with absolute certainty what the accurate explanation will be in any one particular case. But we do have solid data on the vast under-reporting of such activities, the shame and stigma involved in reporting them (Bettina speaks of her “fear and shame” p. 4), and the pervasiveness of such behavior. (Ask your female friends/relatives, and don’t be too shy to ask about Uncle Hymie’s dandling them on his lap, and how Aunt Rose let it happen, again and again. Oy vey.) Thus rigor in the social sciences dictates an openness to such charges rather than a dismissal which is in fact rooted in the retrograde sexual politics that are floating around like a toxic cloud in these bad times. It’s preposterous – and ultimately ideological – to say that we historians can’t resolve contradictions in the sources: that’s what we do for a living. One historian who has written me has unknowingly put himself out of work with his remark, “I don’t know how this [Bettina’s claim] can be discussed or debated in any reasonable manner when only one party to the past in question may be subject to query.” Wow, if you have testimony from only one party to a disputed past event, you’re on permanent sabbatical. And it’s only October.
 
It’s been my experience in history that expression of methodological concerns, though entirely legitimate, is often a mask for ideologically based political disagreement. People challenge the methodology when they don’t like the interpretation. Yes, I am indeed arguing that it is sound social science to begin with the assumption that claims of sexual molestation have a significant likelihood of being true, and must be confirmed or disconfirmed by other contextual evidence. Selective skepticism of the sort we are seeing is usually ideologically driven. The contextual evidence on Bettina, including her lack of animus, the understanding way in which she presents this, and much else – including the bold-face factors offered just above – all this comes down on the side of credibility. Phelps sees in Bettina’s account an absence of rancor and sees her book as “a mature and, ultimately, redemptive work.” As we have seen, she did confront Herbert with this. After some resistance on his part, he apologized, in his way, and she forgave him, compassionately (pp. 522-529). And as I am about to send this off, I see that Bettina will be giving a paper at the American Studies Association annual meeting this week on “’Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: Keeping the Communist Party Straight, 1940s-1970s.” Good for Bettina, working at the intersection between history and her own experience, and talking about it. We should all talk about it. No more airbrushing.
 
Bettina’s book, available in paperback, is about much more than this. It is moving, dramatic and often comical, an extraordinary memoir both for those who lived through those times and for younger people who will better understand from it what those times and events were about. Nobody, including me, will agree with it completely –  I think her admitted “cold fury” at Herbert leads her to belittle and ridicule some of his positive accomplishments, although he does appear to have been in many ways a terribly mean person. But Intimate Politics is positively gripping, on Herbert as well as Bettina, on the CP, conflict within it, some of it directly between father and daughter (particularly on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), Bettina’s movement away from it, her resignation and the family conflict around it, Bettina’s awakening to feminism and to her lesbianism, the Free Speech Movement and its aftermath. With the re-release of Warren Beatty’s Reds, maybe somebody will see the dramatic possibilities in this and make a movie out of it. Meantime, everybody in the left and feminism, as well as opponents of the left and feminism, should read this powerful book.