"Oppenheimer Was a Communist," Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes proclaim in September's issue of Commentary.
Klehr and Haynes argue that Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin (authors of "American Prometheus," winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006) are wrong to claim that Robert Oppenheimer was not a Communist Party USA member, and "never more than a Communist fellow traveler." I commend the article to anyone interested in just what qualifies as membership; card carrying and the payment of dues are covered in detail.
Klehr and Haynes claim that by writing anti-FDR pamphlets in 1940, Oppenheimer was "parroting the CPUSA's anti-interventionist, anti-FDR, anti-New Deal line." If that is the case, then he was parroting the pre-1935 Party line, but it never hurts to be reminded that the CPUSA initially opposed the New Deal on the grounds that it would prop up capitalism. It calls to mind a story that essayist Joseph Epstein tells about his time in Little Rock.
Epstein, a native of Chicago, first came to Little Rock in 1959 to work as a clerk-typist at the Army recruiting station. He returned in 1964 to be near his wife's family and worked for the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency for seven months before Cal Ledbetter, on behalf of the United Fund, hired him to direct the anti-poverty program for Pulaski County. "The year was 1965," Epstein writes, "and Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, from all reports, had begun in seriousness."
Epstein's job was to map out pockets of poverty in Pulaski County, apply to federal anti-poverty programs for funds, and sell the programs to the community, including would-be beneficiaries. He was having lunch at a Ninth Street cafe with Bill Hansen, co-director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee for Arkansas. When Hansen lay down a few coins as a tip, Epstein, by his own account, said, "Why, Bill, Trotsky never tipped. He felt that tipping only supports a corrupt system, you know." Hansen picked up the coins.
The story is part of Epstein's account of his admiration for the civil rights activists he met in Little Rock: "Now nothing makes a liberal more nervous than not to have the approval of those on his left." For Epstein, those were the young men and women of SNCC. He admired their physical courage, for good reason.
Hansen, a native of Cincinnati, was 25 or 26. Overly serious? Yes, but in July 1962 he'd had his jaw shattered by white miscreants in an Albany, Ga., jail.
By the time he met Epstein, he had led students of Philander Smith College in their efforts to desegregate lunch counters in Little Rock, notably at Blass Department Store (where Samantha's is now), Woolworth's (demolished) and Walgreens (possibly on the floor of the Exchange Bank Building). Hansen's field notes on that effort are available thanks to Sarah Riva's transcription and editing in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly of Autumn 2012.
Given recent attention to Black history as an opportunity for leftist indoctrination, I will ask: Was Hansen a Communist sympathizer, or at least a critic of capitalism? So one gathers, both from his response to Epstein's jibe and from Hansen's later remarks in correspondence to historian Brent Riffel, quoted in Riffel's article on Hansen in the Winter 2004 Arkansas Historical Quarterly: "Arguing that all Americans should be allowed to eat hamburgers wherever they wish, vote just like white people, are issues America is willing to discuss. Questioning the nature of American capitalism is beyond what is considered legitimate discourse."
Hansen is giving his reasons for the demise of SNCC, which dissolved in Arkansas in 1967 after the expulsion of its white members, thanks to the national leadership of Stokely Carmichael. Hansen deserves credit and honor for what he did in Arkansas but Epstein offers a better coda for SNCC:
"The organization had come into being during a time of great moral purity. There were segregationist laws on the books of the states of the South, and they needed to be challenged. Young SNCC kids, at the risk of their lives, challenged them. 'In every social movement,' Bayard Rustin once told me, 'you need people who are willing to go to jail for their cause.' But now the action seemed to be moving elsewhere. Protest itself seemed all but played out. On school integration, public accommodation, voting rights, and much else the segregationist south had in effect surrendered. Yet all SNCC knew was protest."