Black and white film clips of the 1940s are so dark even in full daylight that they threaten claustrophobia and nightmare. Film noir is exactly the right term. There are many old newsreels of the Congressional Caucus Room in the old House Office building in Washington, D.C., where Alger presented himself. The room no longer exists, but it must have been huge, ceiling too high to be seen in the clips, barely a sense of walls.
Cinema newsreels of sessions were very popular, and in the film clips the space is packed, crammed. I’d have expected an attentive audience, but hardly anybody seems to be paying attention. People write, read, some chat, smoke, lots of milling about. The witness is the only place for the eye to rest. The press swarm around him – usually him, though occasionally her – like ants at a drop of honey. Flashbulbs explode. Huge double-reel cameras on tall legs and banks of floodlights all aim at him.
The Hollywood people probably took such razzmatazz in their stride, and Alger was an old hand at Congressional hearings. But he’d never seen anything like this. HUAC Chief Investigator Robert E. Stripling said that this August morning “drew perhaps the biggest turnout of reporters and spectators in the history of our inquiries.”
Here’s another odd thing. It slips by unnoticed on a first reading, even a second or a third. All this is going on less than twenty-four hours after HUAC read Alger’s telegram into evidence. Good PR to choose the celebrity, but a response as big as this? Clearly HUAC knew it was going to happen; otherwise, they’d have chosen a smaller room. Getting the press was easy – telephones and wire services – but enough spectators to pack the place? The Hollywood hearings were in the news for weeks beforehand. How did so many people find out about this one so quickly? How did they know there was going to be enough press there to make a real occasion of it? How did so many people arrange to be away from work on a Thursday morning? And at such short notice?
There’s a raised dais at one end of the room, a fluted, columned wall behind it – funeral drapery at the windows – and a long table atop it, angled forward across both ends. Ten men sit at this table, five Congressmen from the House of Representatives and five members of HUAC’s staff. The heat wave that greeted Alger in New York covers the whole of the East Coast; the Caucus Room isn’t air conditioned, and these guys are all wearing suits and ties; no jackets off either, no ties loosened, not a rolled-up sleeve in sight.
The audience would know their faces from the Hollywood hearings. Today’s chairman, Karl Earl Mundt is balding, long upper lip, elfin mouth beneath it: a sheep face. He’s the one who fears for world peace “under the leadership of men like Alger Hiss”; he’s a schoolteacher – psychology and economics – and a white supremacist but not a man without humour. Or a sense of theatre. A sweltering audience can hardly be said to need warming up, but that’s just what Mundt is about to do.
He calls first on John Rankin from Mississippi, lover of the KKK – stern, gaunt face, wavy grey hair – and Rankin starts in on Roosevelt’s first vice president, Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party’s candidate for president in the next election. The public needs to know how come Communists “who were plotting the overthrow of the Government, were placed in key positions in his Department at a time when our young men were fighting and dying on every battle front in the world for the protection of this country.”
But why talk about Wallace today? He’s no part of this. Unless you consider that he was Alger’s boss a while back, and lots of the people who see newsreels will know it.
Next come Russian spies in the government in 1943 arranging for the makings of a nuclear bomb to be flown to Russia from “a small obscure airfield in the United States”. John McDowell of Pennsylvania – tall, long face, an ex-journalist and editor – explains: “We know that a factory was flown entirely to Russia.” A whole atomic bomb factory? In 1943? When nobody knew a bomb would explode?
It just so happens that Alger was chief counsel to the Nye Committee, the Senate committee investigating the munitions industry.
McDowell goes on to “the widespread ramifications of this intense espionage ring” that the Committee has discovered was “deep in the State Department.”
Which is where Alger had been working for well over a decade before he went to the Carnegie Endowment.
Now that they’ve tied him into three separate areas of sabotage – all in the first ten minutes of the hearing – an Illinois Congressman called Fred E. Busby takes the stand: a Clark Gable moustache and finger-waves in his hair, an army man and insurance broker – he does look like an insurance broker – who served four terms as a Republican Congressman but kept losing in between them. He’s up for re-election in 1948. This turns out to be important. The Committee is almost all Republicans, and every single member is up for election. All of them are on the campaign trail. And today they have newsreel cameras trained on them, a packed audience and a New Deal Democrat in the pillory.
Busby starts naming names of suspected Communists in government. The list is as meaningless in the 21st century as the Bible’s begats: “Tom Tippett, E. J. Lever, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Carl Aldo Marzani…”
Rep. Busby is very boring. After the begats, he reads out page after page of Civil Service Commission regulations for hiring government employees and finds them painfully inadequate. There are no guidelines for investigating what a person reads, believes, does with his spare time, “whether the applicant associates with Negroes or has had Negroes to his home”. Busby says failure to probe into areas like this saddled the government with a man everybody knew was “an organizer for the Communist Party on New York City’s East Side” and another “whose wife has been a known Communist out in the open for many years”. He also says – more or less out of the blue – that the brigades who “went to fight in Spain were definitely 100% Communist outfits.”
Democrats have been in power for twenty years. It looked as though they were going to stay there forever when the much-beloved Franklin Roosevelt died in office shortly after starting his fourth term. His much-less-loved vice president Harry Truman succeeded him, and this gives the Republicans a real shot at the White House. Communist subversion among Democrats is their most powerful weapon; they began developing it almost as soon as Roosevelt introduced the New Deal and the idea that society should help people who couldn’t help themselves. The Republican Busby says there’s been a cover-up. “Truman does not want the truth to come out because it would be embarrassing to the present administration.” People like Alger Hiss – he does state the name – were part of the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration at a time when that department “could rightfully be termed the spawning ground of all Communists in government”.
A lot of energy and ingenuity has gone into setting this scene for the morning’s star turn: gathering the press, rustling up a crowd for the occasion, spelling out the three separate areas of spying Alger could be tied to. And Busby’s role? Chairman Mundt thanks him kindly for showing “how these Communists and espionage agents have been able to weasel their way into Government, escape detection, and secure promotion after they have been there.”
Then he says, “Call the next witness, Mr. Stripling.”
Stripling shouts, “Mr. Alger Hiss.”