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Algier hiss3/31/2023 ![]() ![]() In his 1952 autobiography, Witness, Chambers wrote, "I prayed that, if it were God's will, I might be spared that ordeal." At the same time, he sensed that testifying about his past role as a Communist agent was the event for which "my whole life had been lived." Chambers believed that "the danger to the nation from Communism had now grown acute," threatening his country's very existence. Whittaker Chambers did not want to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in August 1948, but saw it as his patriotic duty. The House Un-American Activities Committee Hearings of 1948 In the summer of 1948, Chambers's story rang true to one very important young man: Congressman Richard Nixon, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, then an often-ridiculed political backwater. Oliver Wendell Homes with Alger Hiss in 1930 (John Knox photo) One man was lying, one was telling the truth. Hiss told a very different story, claiming unflinching loyalty and denying even membership in the Communist Party. Hiss, according to Chambers, was a dedicated Communist engaged in espionage, even while working at the highest levels of the United States government. Time and time again the two men would tell flatly contradictory stories about Hiss's allegiances during the period from 1933 to 1938 to congressional committees. Whittaker Chambers was a short, stocky, and rumpled Columbia drop-out and confessed former Communist from a poor and troubled Philadelphia family. Alger Hiss was a tall, handsome Harvard-trained lawyer with an impeccable pedigree. ![]() ![]() They featured two men who could hardly be more different, sharing only impressive intelligence. The case catapulted an obscure California congressman named Richard Nixon to national fame, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious Communist-hunting, and marked the beginning of a conservative intellectual and political movement that would one day put Ronald Reagan in the White House.Įven without its important influence on American political debate, the trials of Alger Hiss for perjury have the makings of a great drama. No criminal case had a more far-reaching effects on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case which held Americans spellbound in the middle of the twentieth-century. Agent: (Apr.Alger Hiss (circled) listens as Whittaker Chambers testifies before a HUAC meeting on August 25, 1948. Those who agree with Shelton and commentators such as Glenn Beck that America began its decline into collectivism with Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, advancing into frank socialism with FDR’s New Deal will accept this call to arms against liberals who aim, as Shelton believes, to turn America into a latter-day Soviet Union. Despite entire chapters devoted to evidence that he spied, most readers who accept Shelton’s conservative editorializing will not need convincing. Shelton delivers a clear, detailed account of Hiss’s privileged background, his 1933–1946 government career and that of dozens of fellow traveling and Communist associates the stormy accusations of espionage the 1948–1950 trials his imprisonment, and life-long campaign to rehabilitate his reputation. intelligence analyst Shelton writes that his story deserves retelling because he was a key 20th-century figure whose beliefs continue to influence America’s intellectual elite as they struggle, in her opinion, against individual liberty, small government, and free enterprise. Nowadays, few doubt Alger Hiss (1904–1996) was a Soviet spy, but retired U.S. ![]()
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