Hiss, Alger

Hiss, Alger (1904–1996), central figure in a celebrated case of the late 1940s and early 1950s that embodied many of the central anxieties of the McCarthy Era.Hiss, a Harvard‐trained lawyer who served in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration during the 1930s and later as a State Department official, member of the U.S. delegation to the Yalta Conference, secretary‐general of the inaugural meeting of the United Nations, and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, exemplified the liberal “establishment” targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his allies.

In 1948, in testimony before the House Committee on Un‐American Activities (HUAC), the Time magazine editor and former communist Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) accused Hiss of having been a member of the Communist party. In a dramatic HUAC appearance, Hiss confronted Chambers and denied the charges. When Hiss sued Chambers for libel, Chambers further accused him of having passed secret documents to the Soviet Union during the 1930s. As a Soviet courier, Chambers claimed, he had transmitted to the Russian State Department documents given him by Hiss and his wife. In evidence, he offered microfilms that he had concealed in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. Because of the three‐year statute of limitation on espionage, Hiss was indicted by a grand jury in December 1948 not for spying but for perjury in his HUAC testimony. His first trial, in July 1949, resulted in a hung jury. A second trial, conducted in January 1950 with looser rules of evidence, resulted in conviction. His appeal failed, and he was imprisoned from 1950 to 1954.

Although Hiss continued to protest his innocence, evidence from the Soviet archives after the end of the Cold War convinced many historians that he had indeed committed espionage. The case was even murkier at the time, particularly as it became embroiled in Cold War domestic politics. Much of the ambiguity arose from the contrasting careers of the two principals: Hiss's background was patrician; Chambers's mediocre at best. Hiss graduated from Johns Hopkins and Harvard and enjoyed a brilliant public career; Chambers, a Columbia University dropout, had lived the marginal existence of a freelance writer, joining the Communist party in 1925. Because of such contrasts, most HUAC members initially doubted Chambers's charges. Freshman congressman and HUAC member Richard M. Nixon pursued them, however, leading to the dramatic retrieval of a Hiss family typewriter, given away years before, that experts linked to documents in Chambers's microfilms. Nixon's dogged pursuit of Hiss raised his own national profile, helping him secure the 1952 Republican vice presidential nomination.

Even after his conviction, Hiss retained the loyalty of high‐profile defenders, including Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Against a backdrop of anticommunist hysteria, however, the case also helped fuel government loyalty investigations and efforts by HUAC, Senator McCarthy, and others to root out communist influences in America. The case also seriously tarnished American liberalism, which fell under a general cloud of suspicion; for years after, liberals faced charges of being “soft on communism.” In this sense, the Hiss case influenced policy debates of the 1960s, including President Lyndon B. Johnson's rationale for escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
See also Anticommunism; Communism; Communist Party—USA.

Bibliography

Allen Weinstein , Perjury: The Hiss‐Chambers Case, 1978.
Richard Fried , Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, 1990.
Alexander Vassilier , The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America: The Stalin Era, 1999.

Mark L. Kleinman