Whittaker Chambers: Taking Freedom’s Part, Irritating Everybody in the Process
Hiss and others in government had helped the Russians in the 1930s. They were drawn to the Bolshevik cause during the economic crisis of the Depression, believing capitalism was doomed and state socialism was the wave of the future. At that time, the Kremlin was trolling for security and trade information not so much about the U.S. but about the Soviet Union’s adversaries in Europe and Asia. This it obtained in Washington, through Chambers and other underground party couriers, from the files of sympathetic officials at State, Treasury, and other U.S. government agencies.
New Dealers and liberals were affronted by this belated accusation against polished and articulate Alger Hiss. They believed he 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. Elite opinion scorned Chambers and defended Hiss throughout congressional hearings, grand jury investigations, and two trials at the conclusion of which Hiss was convicted of perjury.
The Hiss-Chambers case formed a partisan and ideological fault line that was to stretch across the generations. Witness solidified this effect. Its grim decline-of-the-West poetry and gripping cloak-and-dagger narrative “may have enlisted more American anticommunists than any other book of the Cold War,” said author Lee Edwards, one of the panelists at the November conference in honor of the book. Edwards, a biographer of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, recalled that Reagan could quote from memory the first pages of the foreword to Witness.
Regnery brought the memoir out in a paperback edition during the second Reagan administration. It shaped the political and cultural outlook of a new generation of readers, among them yours truly. The sufferings of the world weigh upon all of us; that much I knew. What Witness showed me was where this sensitivity could lead. The adventurous young tend to want to save the world, and in Witness, the most adventurous are the most prey to tunnel vision and a distasteful sort of hubris.
Chambers’ sharp portraits of the world-savers he met add up to a meditation on idealism that is without peer in American literature. Violence and repression on the part of Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union dented some people’s – but only some people’s – dedication to the cause. Others were impervious. The book’s gallery of personalities includes more than Bolsheviks. Along with them we meet socialists, liberals, “unclassified progressives” – all people of good will who “share a similar vision [with communists], but do not share the faith because they will not take upon themselves the penalties of the faith.” The project of bringing the Soviet model to America held the appeal of a cult. This, writes Chambers, was “the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.”
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.