Chapter 34: The Impact of the Guilty Verdict on America

08/23/23 • 27 min

A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case

Alger Hiss is taken to prison Alger Hiss’s conviction — technically for perjury, but effectively for treason — was a major event. It was a disaster for The Establishment, especially liberal Democrats, and vindication for Republicans and populist Democrats. The 18 month labyrinth of HUAC hearings, depositions in Hiss’s libel suit, grand jury proceedings, and two criminal trials were the long, long overture to the so-called McCarthy Era. Senator McCarthy, in fact, gave his famous “I have a list . . .” speech just weeks after Hiss’s conviction. This Podcast gives an overview of the many and complex reactions to the guilty verdict. Everyone, it seems, accepted the factual correctness of the verdict. But many liberals could not help making up excuses for Hiss, or damning Chambers for being fat and melodramatic. And many conservatives and populists could not help painting all liberals and Harvard graduates with the black pitch of Hiss’s treason. Most interesting and encouraging to me, a significant number of liberals and Democrats were sufficiently mature and morally alive to engage in genuine introspection and self-criticism, to admit they had ‘blown it big time’ when it came to Soviet traitors in our midst, and to resolve to fashion a liberal anti-communism that was just as vigorous as what Republican conservatives had been offering for decades. FURTHER RESEARCH The McCarthy Era, although sparked by this Case, is an oceanic subject beyond the scope of these Podcasts. If you want to read about it, among the best conservative books are George H. Nash’s “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” (Basic Books 1976), esp. 84-130; and Richard Gid Powers’ “Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism” (Free Press 1995), esp. 191-272.See also Professor Harvey Klehr’s essay “Setting the Record Straight on Joe McCarthy,” https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/setting-record-joe-mccarthy-straight-harvey-klehr/. Among the far more numerous, totally anti-McCarthy books are David Caute’s “The Great Fear:The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower” (Touchstone 1979), esp. 56-62; Fred J. Cook’s “The Nightmare Decade:The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Random House 1971); Victor Navasky’s “Naming Names” (Viking 1980) (especially the early pages); I.F. Stone’s “The Truman Era: 1945-52” (Little Brown 1953) (Stone was himself a secret agent of the Soviet Union); and James A Weschler’s “The Age of Suspicion” (Random House 1953). I must note that it was a stroke of genius for the minimizers of Communist treason to name the era after anti-Communism’s most irresponsible big name. This is as if racists had succeeded in labeling the civil rights movement The Al Sharpton Movement. Concerning the impact of the Hiss verdict in particular, Dean Acheson, in his autobiography “Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department” (Norton 1987), titles his pertinent chapter (at 354) “The Attack of the Primitives Begins.” Alistair Cooke (at 340) also saw nothing good coming from Hiss’s conviction. A more mature view, at page 267 of Walter Goodman’s “The Committee:The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1968), is that the Hiss-Chambers Case “whip[ped] up a storm which did not last long but left ruins in its wake.” Other more realistic analyses of the Case’s impact on America are in Weinstein at 529-47 (chapter titled “Cold War Iconography I: Alger Hiss as Myth and Symbol”); the best single essay on this Case in my opinion, Leslie Fiedler’s “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” at 3-24 of his “An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics” (Beacon Press 1955) and Diana Trilling’s essay “A Memorandum on the Hiss Case,” first published in The Partisan Review of May-June 1950 and re-published at 27-48 of Patrick J. Swan’s anthology of essays on this Case, “Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul” (ISI Books 2003). The latter two essays I highly recommend. Questions: If you had been adult when Hiss was convicted, what would have been your reaction to his conviction? ‘Justice at long last,’ ‘a miscarriage of justice,’ ‘guilty but a fair trial was impossible,’ ‘technically guilty but with an excuse,’ or something else? Would your reaction have been purely emotional/political/tribal, or would you have cited one or more facts to support your reaction? Would you have been totally certain that your reaction was the right one, or would you have harbored some doubts?

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Chapter 33: The Summations, and the Verdict

Prosecutor Thomas F. Murphy

In this Podcast, we hear the closing speeches, and the verdict of the second jury. In a mirror image of the first trial, this time it was Hiss’s lawyer Claude Cross who was quiet, even plodding, and it was Prosecutor Murphy (like Hiss’s barrister Stryker at the first trial) who delivered the barn-burner. Then — after a year and a half of HUAC hearings, Hiss’s libel suit, the Grand Jury proceeding, and two trials — finally comes the jury’s verdict. Further Research:- Alistair Cooke (at 335) described Mrs. Hiss after the guilty verdict was uttered as “a flushed and now ageless little gnome.” Hiss wrote that the jury’s verdict stunned him. (“Recollections of a Life” at 157.). I read elsewhere that he and his defense team had planned a victory press conference to be followed by a victory lunch. I have read in an unpublished biography of Hiss that, as he and his wife walked and then drove away from the courthouse, a few people yelled “Traitor!” but no one blocked his path or attempted physical harm. At sentencing several days later, Claud Cross was the only speaker who showed emotion. The verdict must have been crushing for him. He must have known that, despite his excellent reputation as a trier of complex corporate cases in the Boston area, fifty and a hundred years hence the only thing anyone would remember about Claud Cross was that he lost the Hiss Case. Stryker got a hung jury, but Cross lost. It must have added to his gloom that he went to his grave (in 1974) believing Hiss innocent. Alistair Cooke (at 339-40) had strong feelings at the sentencing: “It is a moment when all the great swirling moral abstractions are blacked out in a crisis of the flesh. The principles we try to live by . . . . dissolve into a formal ceremony . . . The defendant stands alone, the lawyers look through a glaze at their papers, the judge says: ‘to run concurrently.’. . . . People who had craved the confirmation of Hiss’ guilt sighed and looked palely miserable. Mr. Murphy . . . had been suddenly overcome with a rheumy blur of speech that could have come from the onset of a cold but most likely did not." Cooke recalled being at the sentencing in 1939 of Jimmy Hines, a monumentally corrupt and gangster-affiliated politician who had been unsuccessfully defended by Lloyd Paul Stryker. “[I]n that moment neither the crime nor the personality condemned is clear. You do not respond as you might expect to the case resolved or the victim labeled, or the fox run to ground. The defendant becomes a symbol of the alternative fates possible to all our characters.. . . . The man about to be sentenced is suddenly at the center of the human situation; and because he is totally disarmed he takes on the helpless dignity of the lowest common denominator.” Cooke, sad to say, never expressed the slightest sympathy for Chambers. As I wrote earlier, maybe Chambers was too much the ‘Red Hot American,’ unlike anything the very British Cooke had ever experienced. Questions: Do you agree with the second jury’s verdict? If you had been the judge, would you have sentenced Hiss to more or less time in prison? If you were Hiss speaking to the judge just before sentencing, would you have been tempted to confess, said that you had been a naive and ignorant intellectual in the depths of The Great Depression, and hoped for a lighter sentence?

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Chapter 35: Forgery by Typewriter

Several people have told me that, of my 38 episodes, this is their favorite. See if you agree. It is all about the question Hiss could never answer: how, if Hiss is innocent, did the 64 Typed Spy Documents get typed on his home typewriter. You may recall that Hiss first told The Grand Jury that Chambers broke into his house in 1938 and typed them on it himself when no one was looking. That didn’t work. Second, Hiss told the jury at the second trial that Hiss gave the Typewriter to the Catlett Kids in late 1937; they put it in the back room where they had their non-stop dance party; then Chambers found it there and typed up The Typed Spy Documents himself on it as the conga line snaked past. That didn’t convince, either. Third — and this is the subject of this Podcast — in a Motion for a New Trial on Grounds of Newly Discovered Evidence, Hiss’ new lawyer speculated that Chambers in 1948 had made a fake typewriter, which typed just like The Hiss Home Typewriter, and had typed up The Spy Documents on it; then Chambers found where the real Hiss Typewriter was (in the nightwatchman’s home, you remember), stole it and planted his fake there, and waited for someone to find the fake and for everyone to assume it was the real Hiss Home Typewriter. Quite a frame-up, if true. But did that really happen? Is it even plausible? Podcast #35 explores this theory, which Hiss stuck to till his dying day (with numerous variations as each old one failed). FURTHER RESEARCH The best dissection of The Forgery by Typewriter Theory is Chapter 2 (titled “Chambers”) in “Ex-Communist Witnesses:Four Studies in Fact Finding” by Professor Herbert L. Packer of Stanford University Law School (Stanford University Press 1962) at 21-51. Others are Cornell/Georgetown/Minnesota Law School Professor Irving Younger’s article “Was Alger Hiss Guilty?” in Commentary Magazine’s August 1975 issue, available at https://www.commentary.org/articles/irving-younger/was-alger-hiss-guilty-2/; and the Appendix to professor Weinstein’s book, titled “‘Forgery by Typewriter’: The Pursuit of Conspiracy, 1948-97,” at pages 624-30, 632-34, 645-47. The version of Alistair Cooke’s book (“A Generation on Trial:U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss”) that was published in 1952 has a few new pages at the end, 347-54, describing Hiss’s Motion for a New Trial and the Court hearing about it. Judge Goddard presided, and Cooke notes (at 348) that the audience included “leisured and unidentified old ladies who appeared at all Hiss hearings with the ritual fatalism of the annual pilgrims to Valentino’s grave.” Cooke writes (at 348) that “several excellent lawyers were dumbfounded by the claims that the defense now put forward.” After describing Judge Goddard’s dismissal of those claims, Cooke ends his book with the following words. “Four years had passed since the names of Hiss and Chambers shook the nation. Now there was another Presidential campaign, and the Democrats were in full fling at their convention in Chicago. Judge Goddard’s word, perhaps the last, about Hiss was lucky to earn a few lines at the bottom of the inside pages of newspapers. In most it earned none. Hiss had passed into shame and into history.” Here is my list of the people who, Hiss defenders have speculated over the decades, masterminded or participated in the framing of Hiss (in most cases involving forgery by typewriter): Whittaker and Esther Chambers, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, Ambassador William C. Bullitt, Jr., Richard and Pat Nixon, the Democratic financier and Presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, President Truman’s Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, the Dulles Brothers, supporters of the Chinese anti-communist dictator Chaing Kai-Shek, a Nazi sympathizer who owned a typewriter store in New York City, the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, and a private detective named Horace Schmahl. If you are interested in the broader question of why people believe highly implausible stories, I recommend Michael Shermer’s book “Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time” (St. Martin’s Griffin 2002); and a delightful article by the Brandeis University Professor Jacob Cohen, “Will We Never Be Free of the Kennedy Assassination?,” published in the December 2013 issue of Commentary Magazine and available at https://www.commentary.org/articles/jacob-cohen/will-we-never-be-free-of-the-kennedy-assassination/. Questions: Here are two questions I have asked myself for years but never answered satisfactorily. Can you help me? (1) In his Motion for a New Trial, Hiss claimed that Chambers did the forgery all by himself, or with the help of Communist friends. This seems plainly ridiculous. Chambers had neither the ti...