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If you don't know Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, you have a hole in your education, as teacher William "Wild Bill" Harper sometimes said to me and my classmates in eighth grade earth science at Chester Junior High whenever we answered his questions with a blank stare.
I have recently filled my own Chambers-Hiss hole by reading "Whittaker Chambers, a Biography" (1997 by Sam Tanenhaus). (To those like my wife who hate "dry" history, read on to see how "Bambi," a prothonotary warbler and microfilm hidden in a pumpkin figured in this tale.)
Mr. Harper was quirky, smart, a good teacher. I especially liked how he pretended not to notice the acrid smell of sulphur after my buddies and I had been making little rockets out of book matches and shooting them around the classroom when he was out. He didn't teach history, but I'm sure he could have, including the history of Chambers, Hiss, McCarthyism and the Red Scare which swept our country in the early 1950s because he lived through that era.
Whittaker Chambers was an American intellectual and a talented writer, a young man who carried the burdens of his dysfunctional family and was searching for meaning in his life. He was repulsed by the senseless carnage of World War I and the plight of poor American workers. Despite success and recognition at Columbia University, he found his classes pointless and quit attending halfway through his third year.
Browsing a secondhand bookstore in Manhattan in 1918, he came across a 50-cent copy of a speech by Vladimir Lenin titled "The Soviets at Work." Along with sympathy for the poor and oppressed of the world, Lenin outlined how the ruthless use of violence and power were necessary to achieve democracy "by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one." Chambers joined the American Communist Party in 1925, thinking it a blueprint for a new and better world.
Chambers rose in the Party and began writing for its publications. In 1928, a friend working for Simon and Schuster who knew Chambers was an excellent writer and proficient in German paid him several hundred dollars to translate the children's novel "Bambi" by Austrian writer Felix Salton. Just as his literary star was rising, in 1932 Chambers was ordered underground and became a courier for a communist spy ring operating out of Washington, D.C., forwarding secret government documents to Russia.
One of those passing secrets to Chambers was Alger Hiss. Chambers and Hiss were close and so were their wives and children for a short time. Hiss had friends in high places such as John Foster Dulles, and was a wunderkind in the state department under the Roosevelt administration.
When Joseph Stalin began a ruthless purge and executions of political and military officials in 1937, American Communist Party members whom Chambers knew were assassinated. He quit the Party in 1938. Carrying a gun and fearing his own liquidation, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Alger Hiss and other friends to quit, too. He said Hiss wept when they parted.
Along came World War II. Soviet Russia became an ally against Germany. FDR and the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover were not interested in Chambers' warnings of communists in government. Meanwhile, Chambers' writing abilities and canny insights into international affairs (including prescient warnings about Russia) led him to become a senior writer and editor at Time Magazine and a trusted friend of its owner, Henry Booth Luce. Luce and others knew Chambers had been a communist, but he hid his role as a spy.
Then came the Cold War, and in the late '40s Chambers was called to testify before the little-known House Un-American Committee about communist traitors within. Hiss, whose sterling resume included being one of four state department staffers who guided FDR at Yalta, was among those named.
John Foster Dulles counseled Hiss to admit Party membership as a youthful mistake, but Hiss called Chambers a liar and claimed never to have known him or been a communist. Chambers' accusation before the committee protected him from civil liability, so Hiss challenged him to call him a communist in public. Chambers obliged on the radio program "Meet the Press."
Hiss sued for slander and libel. In his defense, Chambers had to confess his own role as a spy and accept martyrdom to the truth. He produced written government documents he had given to a friend to hide years before. Among them were papers in Hiss' handwriting, and microfilm of other secret files originating from Hiss.
Fearing that unfriendly agents might find this evidence in his house, Chambers, who had meanwhile become a farmer, hollowed out a pumpkin and put it back in the patch with the microfilm inside. When newspapers printed "Spy film hidden in pumpkin" the case caught the attention even of people who found the whole thing confusing.
Chambers' memory of Hiss telling him he had seen an uncommon songbird, a prothonotary warbler, an event Hiss inadvertently corroborated, were among details of their close relationship that convinced prosecutors to charge Hiss, not Chambers, with perjury.
Hiss' first trial ended in a hung jury. The second brought conviction and two five-year prison sentences. Hiss served almost four years. He maintained his innocence to the end of life. Chambers, vindicated but still branded a spy, wished to return to Time Magazine, but had become unemployable. To raise money he wrote his story in an acclaimed memoir titled "Witness."
The Chambers-Hiss case made a national figure out of Richard Nixon, a freshman senator from California who took a gamble in believing Chambers and pushing the House Un-American Activities Committee into hearings. That committee later under Senator Joseph McCarthy became a disgrace and tragedy. The old Red-baiter Nixon became President and opened the door to Mao's China.
Just as American intellectuals in the 1930s naively believed in Soviet communism, today many apparently smart people think America would prosper as a Zohran Mamdani-style socialist nation. Those who know history and understand economics say otherwise.
As for me, I escape justice despite just confessing to shooting off match rockets in earth science class because both Mr. Harper and the statute of limitations have expired.
In childhood I made my dad read the Disney comic book version of "Bambi" to me every night, tears in my eyes each time Bambi's mother doesn't come back from The Meadow. As a man, I grow pumpkins in The Meadow and shoot Bambi because he eats them.
You see how it all ties together.