Ordered before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on August 3, 1948, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers admitted that from 1931 to 1938 he had allied himself with the Communist party. But Chambers’s most shocking revelation was that Alger Hiss—president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a senior State Department official under presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and a former clerk to the legendary Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—had been a friend of his and accomplice in an underground Communist spy ring in Washington, D.C. Outraged, Hiss emphatically denied the charges under oath and claimed he had never even met Chambers. (When it later became clear that he had, Hiss explained that Chambers introduced himself fifteen years earlier using the alias George Crosley and that they had not seen one another since.) Handsome, charming, and articulate, Hiss cut an impressive figure and initially was given the benefit of the doubt. HUAC even considered dismissing the accusations. But a thirty-five-year-old congressman named Richard Nixon insisted on further investigations, leading to a dramatic confrontation between Hiss and Chambers. The climax came in early December 1948 when Chambers presented classified State Department documents on microfilm, purportedly given to him by Hiss, which Chambers had been hiding in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm. The evidence convinced a jury to convict Hiss for perjury, and he began a three-year, eight-month prison term on March 22, 1951. Permitted to write home only three times a week, Hiss addressed his letters to the family as a whole, but occasionally wrote directly to his son Tony, who was nine when Hiss left for prison. The following was sent on March 10, 1953. (Hiss was allowed only one piece of paper to write a letter, so he indicated shifts in thought and new paragraphs with “x”s to save space. Hiss also affectionately used “thee” and “thy” when writing to his family.)
Dearest Tony, About time for a letter all of your own. I wish that we were permitted to write often enough so that I could send full-length letters to thee regularly—little bits in my regular letters home are not adequate to talk about all the things thee + I need to share with each other, x-x-x This letter is going to be mostly about a very big subject that we will often discuss, thee + I. The subject is: What makes people really happy inside themselves?—the kind of happiness that keeps on shining day after day, not just now + then; and the kind of happiness that lasts in spite of discouraging disappointments + sad events. I don’t mean that sorrow isn’t real; I do mean that it doesn’t continuously darken the skies of a truly happy person. x The answer isn’t simple + various ways exist for stating it. I’m forever changing, at least slightly, my way of saying it. Thee will in time decide on thy preferred formulation of it. The important part, which is itself quite simple + has been understood for a long, long time by wise people, is that happiness is a natural result of a full + healthy growing. In that respect men + women + children are like flowers; when they are healthy they grow continually—+ they blossom. The blossom is our happiness. Or it can be compared to a bird’s song—the natural result of living fully. So, if there is continuing sorrow or anxiousness or crossness or even boredom, this is a sign that something is wrong. The Romans knew this long ago. The wise Emperor Marcus Aurelius said: “A man’s happiness,—to do the things proper to man.” The ancient Chinese knew it. One of the followers of Lao Tze said to keep the mind easy (not worried) + the body healthy “since both mind + body have no inherent defect or trouble.” x-x But the really important words in all these statements are “proper,” “full,” “healthy.” This is where so many people, even kind + intelligent ones, get confused + this is where the question gets more complicated, where the more the world learns the surer the answer. This is the part of happiness that for a long, long time only the most wonderful + remarkable men understood, men like Buddha + then, later, Jesus. They learned that no one person can live fully or healthily or properly (or happily) by himself or for himself Now more + more people have come to understand this. We are lucky that we live at a time when this is no longer hard to grasp. x Perhaps you remember a kind + quiet older woman, Dr. Richards, who visited us at Peacham with Aunt Anna for just an hour or so in the summer of 1950. Dr. Richards is a psychiatrist + she says her pleasure in life comes from “pumping air into other people’s tires.” No one can live well with out both giving to + getting from other people that kind of help. x-x These are not normal times in our country. Many people are confused or frightened so that they are not naturally—+ happily—helping each other. And—a strange thing—it is so natural + necessary for all to love + help that one who stops gets twisted. The energy for helping is still there, but when it doesn’t get a chance to be used naturally, it sours + turns to hate or miserableness. When President Roosevelt was alive he encouraged most people to bring out their natural kindness; he “pumped” lots of “air”—good fresh air—into people’s spirits. And Adlai Stevenson had some of this quality as thee + many others realized. Thee knew then how happy-making it is to wish others well. Just because there came, after Roosevelt’s death, so much confusion + twisting of love into hate, there is much to be done by all of us who know what people need to be happy. As long as some are hungry + cold + sick + rejected no one can feel as good about life as he should, because we are all like members of one big family. But those of us who are fortunate in having enough to eat + to wear (+ MUCH MORE than merely enough), who are well + strong + loved, we can find great happiness in pumping friendliness + cheerfuness into the lives of others—including each other, of course! x-x-x That is why I thought thee would now enjoy the book about Boston during the years when Justice Holmes was just the age thee is now. His friends, young + old, were the people who did most to end slavery in our country And they didn’t lose heart though there was even more confusion + fear + hate than there is today. Much happy love to dear Tony,
Daddy.
P.S. Today the “Astronomers Club” had wonderful views of Venus by day I hope that N.Y.’s smog let thee + Mommy see it, too. It is especially bright as I am writing for the sun has now set + the sky is not so dazzling.
Alger Hiss, who maintained his innocence until his death in November 1996, rarely mentioned Whittaker Chambers in his prison letters. He did, however, refer to the 1952 publication of Chambers’s bestselling autobiography Witness as “the product of a seriously disturbed psyche.” The foreword to Witness was a letter from Chambers to his children John and Ellen about the Hiss-Chambers case. “Tlie Communist vision is the vision of Man without God,” he wrote to the two teenagers. “At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time—Communism and Freedom—came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men.” Almost a decade later, and a year before his death, Chambers expounded on his momentous clash with Hiss and how misunderstood it was by past and present generations in a typed letter to the journalist James Rorty, who had written a play about the two men. (Tukhachevsky, Bukharin, Muralov, Smirnov, Rakovsky, and Ovseenko, alluded to in the letter, were all Russians falsely accused of treason and executed during Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s. The last page of the letter has been lost.)
July 1960
To James Rorty—
What a generous letter! Especially after my bare-handed treatment of the tissues and ligaments. I purposely left out of my letter (during surgery) an appreciation of your kind treatment of me in your play It is so unusual that I was a little incredulous at first, but grateful.
There is a built-in handicap in dramatizing the Hiss Case. It was (perhaps I should say: it is, for it will never end) an epitomizing drama—on at least two levels. On one level, it was a drama of historical epochs—the signal that an epoch was ended. This is one of the things that so misled many liberals, who imagined that Alger was the rallying figure of an age coming to flower, whose tender shoots must at all costs (and some of them were pretty extravagant) be protected from the little foxes.
In fact, The Hiss Gase was a disclosure that the historic bases of several kinds which more or less give shape and direction to eras were changing at extreme speed; had, to a large degree, changed for an unguessable time. Since the mass of men seldom understand the history they live through and act in, nothing falls more quickly into oblivion than any given historical period. Even the facts of the fathers are unknown to the sons, who find the past generation almost entirely baffling. “Papa, who was Mussolini?” my daughter asked me mid way of her career at Smith, Then I knew. I said that she probably did not know, either, who Georges Sorel was, though Reflections On Violence was on our bookshelves—a book that Mussolini read and reflected on, so that, by reading it, one might grope better toward what Mussolini was than by reading stacks of the grotesque accounts in the press, or even Balibanova. The campus generation that I am so curiously embedded also does not know who Mussolini was—except as a name.
Last semester, I would often hear, coming from somewhere on the campus, a strong unself-conscious whistling: Mack The Knife. Those whistlers would have been astonished (and, I think, in some curious way, angered) if any one had told them that Mack The Knife was written by a Communist, who was a friend of several friends of the old man in their midst. Of course, the old man would never tell them, though he never ceased to be bemused by those innocent whistlers. Nothing marks so clearly the absolute cleavage between concurrent generations, or the complete ending of the historical epoch, than the revival of this theme song of the 1930’s without the slightest knowledge of what it is.
How long has Brecht been dead—three years? Yet almost certainly none of those whistling Mack The Knife even knows his name. Yet he wrote in their own life time and toward the end of his great assertion of basic faith: “In the bloodiest times, there are kind people.—In den blutigsten Zeiten, gibst gütige Menschen.” He also wrote:
The sons of the tiger
Are the horse’s brothers;
The child of the snake
Brings milk to the mothers.
What are the completely new dialectic minds of the campusmates to make of this riddle?
Now, Alger and I are dialectic. What ever differences of mind and character set us apart, we are held in this one consistent bond—the habit of our minds is essentially dialectic. So, once events had disclosed that Alger was still a Stalinist, I always felt that I knew what, in the main, he would do. For example, the notion was popular for a time in certain quarters that Alger would kill himself. I never believed this for a moment. Not that it could happen—There are limits to human endurance, but as we know it in hind sight, his are high enough to make him an extraordinary figure. My view was based on something else—a dialectical reading of the circumstances as a whole, how Alger read them and his role in them. Suicide was simply not what it was all about. I might commit suicide (for reasons implicit in the same reading). It was unlikely to the point of unthinkableness, that he would. To do so, would be to negate his reading of history, of reality, his own meaning in the total process. And to such men as we were (as the breed was that grew us), our meaning was the most precious thing to us in life. It was precisely the recovery of meaning in a world which had lost meaning that made us Communists. But our meaning lay in our active purposeful life which we could sacrifice only if a threat to our essential meaning left no other means but self-slaughter to rescue and reassert that meaning—our reality, our truth.
It was I, not he, who was especially vulnerable on this side: since there were recurrent spins when it seemed that there was no means left but self-destruction to assert my truth and, therewith, everybody elses. Alger had, not only a grasp of what the whole struggle was about on the historic plane, and what he must do. I had, I should think, an almost identical view. The difference lay in interpretation. It was as if the history of our time had been reduced to an equation filled with x’s, y’s and z’s. Alger read the value of X as human hope and Y as man’s salvation etc. But I read the same X as human night and the same Y as man’s damnation etc. But we both knew the same algebra and read the same equation in its terms. A paradox was that, while we were both algebrists, the mass of the onlookers had never got (in this direction) beyond simple arithmetic. Hence, the quite extraordinary public befuddlement about his motives and mine, the preposterous motivation assigned to us even to this day (and which, incidently, it was, and is, to his tactical interest to befuddle further). This is what Ralph de Toledano means when he says in his recent Lament To a Generation, that neither the American nor the public ever knew what the Hiss Case was about. Nor would it have done more than compound the confusion if any had known that, in certain frightful turns that were beyond my strength, I would try to recoup some force by saying to myself: “This effort for Tukhachevsky and his little girl (she hanged herself, age 6, a few days after he was shot). Or, again, this effort for Muralov, for Smirnov, for Rakovsky, for Antonov Ovseenko.” The problem was not vengeance (though who would reject an adrenolin of vengeance in those terms if it would strengthen us at such times?) The problem was to defeat what had defeated those men before it should defeat all men.
Do you remember Bukharin’s last words to the Purge court: “For when you ask yourself: ‘If I must die, what are you dying for?’—an absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. And when you ask yourself: ‘Very well, suppose you do not die; suppose by some miracle you remain alive, again what for? Isolated from everybody, an enemy of the people, in an inhuman position, completely isolated from everything that constitutes the essence of live.’ And at once the same reply arises. And, at such moments, Citizen Judges, every thing personal, all the incrustation, all rancour, pride, and number of other things, fall away, disappear’”.
Through The Hiss Case, I said to Bukharin’s memory that I had heard his words that all the world has forgotten; that there is not an absolutely black vacuity; that there is still the possibility of struggle while men live who dare to struggle. I knew this then and Alger knew it too. We both knew what, under all appearances (many of them perfectly valid in themselves) the struggle was all about at root. In a way, it simply continued in open form the substance of our last conversation. Little can be so improbable in history (so full of improbabilities) than that, in the land the most remote from the epicenter of the age’s central conflict, and most ignorant of it, two such men as Hiss and I should continue the struggle in public. Not because either of us wished to. Each of us, I imagine, down to his last drop of all plasm, wished not to. But forces, moving in an infinitely complex web of history, brought it to pass. “He and I are caught in a tragedy of history,” I said while he listened in public hearing. Though there is a sense in which this is the kind of thing, one does not say: one hears one’s self saying it—if the distinction is allowed—since the words well up, unpremeditated, from—where?
When winds were in the oaken straws,
And all the cauldrons tolled.
And never more than in an instant, we were both anachronisms—I of the revolutionary epoch that was ended; he of the long Thermidor whose true nature I find it difficult to believe he has yet assessed, but to which he has brought an individual fortitude—the ? of what gave force to the original revolutionary formations.
As you can see, at this point I am no longer writing a letter; I am bleeding at the pores. I will let it go because I have a sense that you will return (in writing) to these matters. By that date, I may not be around. My comments on these things may be of some small interest or help. I said, way back toward the beginning, that the Hiss Case was an epitomizing drama. It epitomized a basic conflict. And Alger and I are archetypes. This is, of course what made The Hiss Case. Though almost no one grasped what was afoot, this is what gave the peculiar intensity to the struggle. If he and I had not been gladiators of the revolution (though of different vintages and schools), if we had not fought, knowing what was at stake, to the end, The Hiss Case would have been just another Boris Moross case. It is all this, and much more of the same, that makes it all but impossible, or so it seems to me, to make a play of the Hiss Case….