Whittaker Chambers: Taking Freedom’s Part, Irritating Everybody in the Process
Whittaker Chambers, 1901-1961
Witness by Whittaker Chambers recently turned 60, and journalists and scholars met at Yale University to celebrate this literary landmark and seminal text of the conservative movement. The discussion brought out divisions on the Right that actually go back to the Cold War.
This classic memoir, about the author’s defection from communism and testimony against one of his former comrades, Alger Hiss, was an instant bestseller in 1952. Chambers pulls the reader into his strange life: his service to Soviet military intelligence, his disillusionment and flight from the communist underground, and the obloquy he faced when the East Coast establishment circled the wagons around Hiss, a veteran of the U.S. State Department.
When Random House published Witness, Hiss sat in prison for having denied under oath that he passed government documents to the Russians. The international context was one of steady gains for communism: the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, Mao’s triumph in China, and the Kremlin’s acquisition of the bomb. This is why Chambers wanted to make his book more than a spy story. Emulating Dostoevsky, he cast his account in dramatic philosophical and historical terms:
The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.
Witness is a fascinating book and Wittaker Chambers is a fascinating person. But he is so gloomy that he makes George Smiley look like one of the Three Stooges.
He wasn’t so gloomy, at least not all the time. Whittaker Chambers had a great sense of humor: http://meadabawdy.blogspot.com/2011/01/inaugural-post-in-which-william-f.html
Chambers came by it honestly, though. And we have as much cause for it as he; maybe we simply lack his stamina.
Whittaker Chambers was right.
Mark my words.
Very interesting article; thank you.
One thing that does not get a lot of play: Whittaker Chambers was homosexual. It is unlikely that he wrote about this to any degree in his book, given the time he was writing, but it would be interesting to learn (if one could) to what extent this affected his attraction to and disillusionment with the Communist Party. The gay-rights movement’s far-left origins extend back to the 19th-century Fabian socialists; Magnus Hirschfeld, the German-Jewish proponent of gay rights, was a communist; Lenin legalized (and Stalin then re-criminalized) homosexual behavior; the gay-rights movement in this country was founded by Stalinists.
Was Chambers first attracted to communism, at least in part, because of its gay-rights rhetoric? Was Stalin’s re-criminalization of homosexual behavior a factor in his breaking with the Left?
Nature or nurture? That is one big question that homosexuals never seem to want to address and the Chambers story plays a role in the question. Chambers father was a married gay man, married to a woman, with children of the union. So was Whittaker who loved his wife very much as he did his children. From his book they seemed to have saved his life and converted him away from Stalin and that madness. And then there was his brother. He killed himself in the 20′s. A younger brother I believe when Whittaker was just past his teens. Was the brother struggling with gay issues. Were the two brothers molested or introduced to the gay lifestyle by their father? Whittaker seems to have shaken loose of it, but Hiss and his legal team thought nothing of using it against him as a badge of shame in the trial. Different times.
I love Whittaker Chambers. He is one of my modern heros. But he will always be a mystery. And his life is shrouded in a cloak of tragedy that he worked like a Greek hero, belatedly maybe, but ultimately without fail, to rise above. We should all aspire to fight like him, even if we do so in our failures.
Whether Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather) was gay or bisexual is an issue raised by research originally appearing in Allen Weinstein’s _Perjury_, based on a photostatic letter in the FBI’s files (copies of which I have). I have to say here on behalf of my family that my elders have told me decidedly: Whittaker Chambers was neither. This is a line of inquiry I am pursuing and about which I may some day publish.
From all my readings and family knowledge, I think it very safe to say that homosexuality as political issue interested him not in the least. Nor did this issue have any affect on his decision to defect. (I would argue further that, like most people at that time, he did not think to consider homosexuality as a poltiical issue at all.) This is consistent with his writings and with the FBI letter that forms the sole basis of claim that he was ever gay or bisexual.
An issue that did fire up my grandparents as well as many people in 1920s, when they formed their first adult political opinions, was racial discimination.
Aside from a book by a psychiatrist (who had testified during the Hiss Case) and those who have latched onto those assertions, there is no indication at all that I know of nothing to indicate that my great-uncle was gay or bisexual, either.
Tudor historian Allison Weir had a great quote that said something to the effect that: ‘historical works that portray Richard the Lionheart as a homosexual say more about the times we live in than those of Richard himself.’ How appropriate that a popular historian can so succinctly put the academics in their place.
The fact that personal attacks on Chambers has become, over the years, accepted truths is lamentable but sadly normal. Good luck with your work and look forward to whatever conclusions you find.
So if there’s no actual evidence, that leaves the interesting question of where the rumors came from. It’s not hard to imagine, considering the enemies he made.
I think we need to take any claim of homosexuality from that era with a grain of salt, especially when the person has powerful enemies.
I consider the tales about Chambers’ sexuality to be a politically-motivated smear and nothing more.
“We should all aspire to fight like him, even if we do so in our failures.”
Except Sarah Palin, of course!
As far as gay or not gay goes, as is usually the case, it was never an important factor one way or the other relating to the guilt of Hiss, nor the truthfulness of Chambers. I read the book, and the idea of Chambers’ possible homosexuality never entered my mind. He wrote as though his wife was the only sure thing and his family was the only valuable thing in his life. In fact, I came away believing that it was his family that led him towards a religious life. He could have been trying to mask his sexuality, but I suspect that you have bought in to the collectivist claptrap on Whittaker Chambers. I do know that the entire confession of “Witness” had nothing to do with anyone’s sexuality. Your concern about his sexuality completely misses the central issue the his testimony and the book. I suggest that you re-read “Witness”. It should give you some insights about Barack Obama and his current staff of Communists. The Democrat Party has unwittingly carried the water for the Communists for 100 years, I say.
I consider Chambers’ Witness to be the best book I’ve ever read. It clicks on every level: literary, historical, moral, and just great story-telling. I first read the book when I was in my twenties, back in the Seventies, and it still affects me in profound ways. Very moving.
I waited until after my own political epiphany to get interested in any writings from the conservative side. I didn’t read “Witness” until 2006, although my abandonment of liberalism happened along side the selection of Bill Clinton’s Politburo.
Witness is one of the most important books of all times. It tells a moral tale of a man heroically grappling first with his own soul and then with that of his country. It ought to be at the top of every reading list, in a class all its own.
It was said of him that “He was not one of those who returned from Hell empty-handed.” What he carried in his hands was this Witness.
I also recommend Cold Friday, a book of his later post-Witness writings, which continue his tale and reflections.
As an aside, I often wondered when it was that the Left first developed its towering hatred of Richard Nixon. Recent study has convinced me that it was the Hiss-Chambers Case. From that moment, he embodied Republican Anti-Communism, the greatest sin the Left could imagine.
This book scared the living daylights out of me. [Witness] Particularly the part when he had to take his family away to Florida to escape the Stalin ice pick brigade. There was one part that was very chilling. He moved the family out of his home in Baltimore and then he remembered that he left something behind. He went back to the vacant apartment. The empty apartment was dark and the phone was ringing and ringing.
That was some scary stuff, StephieClare. But what scared me the most was staring into the gaping maw and dead, remorseless eyes of the left-wing propaganda machine. What conservatives call media bias today was alive and well in the early Fifties. Chambers was villified as if he were a child molester.
E.g., one prominent newsman (he was still writing when I was in high school, some years later) slipped Chambers a note during a hearing, “Are you the same G. Crosley who published a book of poetry in 1905?”
Chambers scribbled on a note and sent back, “I was born in 1901. In 1905, I was four years old.”
Then at a later date, on “Meet the Press” (radio), this newsman accused Chambers of “evading a direct question.”
I think I remember the name of the newsman, but from memory I could be wrong, so I won’t quote it here. But it’s in “Witness”.
That was so cynical, so calculated, so bald-faced, there should be no doubt what we’re up against.
If you’re interested in reading about anti-anti communism during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the best book I can recommend is “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans. Ann Coulter’s book, “Slander”, describes the Evans’ book as the “greatest book since the Bible.”
I agree. Weiner is correct that “[e]lite opinion scorned Chambers,” falsely assuming as an article of faith that Hiss was “innocent – not a spy but merely a whipping boy of anticommunists, a symbol by which the Right could smear the New Deal as subversive.” Those who refused to read Alan Weinstein’s “Perjury” persisted in this error until they became a joke.
Yet Weiner engages in the same kind of ritual abuse against Joe McCarthy. Until she reads M. Stanton Evans’ “Blacklisted by History,” she should stick to writing about what she knows. For those who bother to read it, this book does to the conventional wisdom on McCarthy and his “martyrs” what Weinstein’s “Perjury” did to the conventional wisdom on Chambers and Hiss.