The Depression of the 1930s was more than an economic crisis. All of American society was upended, as economically hard times forced people to question their deepest beliefs about America and the American experiment.
Perhaps capitalism wasn't the way to a better society. Millions of intellectuals and ordinary people toyed with the idea that Communism may be a viable alternative economic and social model. This was before the horrors of Joseph Stalin and Soviet Communism were exposed and Communism discredited.
America's left-wing intelligentsia embraced Communism. The Soviet Union's fight against Nazi Germany, supported enthusiastically by American Communists, blinded many of these Americans to the dangers of Communism in America. They refused to believe that Stalin was an evil dictator, even after the evidence was overwhelming.
Most of these "fellow travelers" and innocent dupes had no idea that organizing and guiding the American Communist movement was the government of the Soviet Union. They vigorously denied any Soviet influence in their movement. Then came the release in July 1995 of the "Venona Papers," detailing the extraordinary extent of Soviet infiltration of the American government and every level of society.
The Venona files were decoded cables sent from Soviet agents in the United States to Moscow; they contained the names of dozens of Americans. Not all were spies for Moscow, but many were mentioned as Russian agents.
One of those names mentioned as a Soviet spy was former senior State Department officer Alger Hiss, who, after the war, became the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He had been accused of being a Soviet agent by Time Magazine senior editor Whittaker Chambers in 1948, and that accusation set off one of the first big ideological battles in post-war America.
The trial and subsequent events led to what most scholars see as the birth of modern conservatism. It started with Chambers's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Chambers testified to the committee about his time as an underground Communist in the 1930s and his knowledge of a Communist spy in the State Department, Alger Hiss. Since the 1930s, Hiss had become a great American success story, reaching the upper echelons of the State Department as a senior State Department officer and part of the American delegation at Yalta in 1945 before becoming the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chambers testified to personal knowledge that Hiss was a Soviet spy, as Chambers himself was involved in espionage as a member of the “Ware” group, which had moved from Communist infiltration of the American government to spywork over the course of the late 1930s.
Harry Truman was very unhappy. He pressured the HUAC to keep its hands off Hiss. But Republicans on the Committee insisted that Hiss testify.
Hiss denied everything; he denied even knowing Chambers. These were lies exposed by Chambers after he released documented evidence that he and Hiss were Communist spies, in files known as the "Pumpkin Papers" because they were hidden on Chambers's farm in Maryland.
Hiss was indicted, but the disbelief that someone such as Alger Hiss could be a traitor saw the trial end in a hung jury.
But the case was not over. Hiss sued Chambers for defamation, while being indicted for perjury. When Chambers was able to prove that the two actually did know each other, the jury convicted Hiss, and on Jan. 25, 1950, a judge sentenced him to serve two five-year concurrent sentences.
The trial of Alger Hiss inspired a new generation of conservatives, including William F. Buckley.
Historian George Nash writes of the enduring effect that the Hiss trial had on the post-conservative intellectual renascence: “As much as any other event, the Hiss case forged the anti-Communist element in resurgent conservatism.” Conservatives and anti-Communists saw Chambers as a courageous, principled man willing to destroy himself “in order to awaken the nation to the Communist peril symbolized by the unrepentant traitor Alger Hiss.” Nash’s assessment recalls that of Ralph de Toladeno, the journalist who covered the trial for Newsweek and befriended Chambers, who wrote that HUAC had “demonstrated, dramatically and effectively, that Communists in government systematically looted the nation of its secrets.”
Chambers soon released his autobiography of the trial and his time as Soviet spy, Witness (Random House, 1952), in 1952 and it quickly became a best-seller. Conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr. found Chambers’ pen brilliant and his analysis of the Communist threat to the West incisive, pessimistic, and thoroughly honest. When Buckley decided to launch National Review in 1955, Chambers was one of his primary targets for an editor and he pursued him for years until Chambers finally joined the magazine in 1957.
Despite overwhelming evidence found in the Venona files and Whittaker Chambers's unshakable testimony, many on the left still insist that Hiss was completely innocent and a patriot.
Chambers had his regrets. He and Hiss had forged a close friendship in their days as Soviet agents. He lamented that “no day passes without my dying a little at the thought of what befell them through me." He said he still saw Hiss and his wife Priscilla as friends that “history forced me to make suffer.”
Prior to the Hiss trial. American conservatism was without form. Chambers gave the right a new mission that they embraced for the next 75 years: defending freedom against all enemies.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member