He stayed with that firm – Cotton, Franklin, Wright & Gordon – until 1933, when he received a telegram from Frankfurter, saying the country needed him. The next year, he and his wife, Priscilla, whom he had married in 1929, and his stepson, Timothy Hobson, born in 1926, moved to New York, where Priscilla worked on a book while Hiss joined another law firm. Hiss would later say Holmes was the most profound influence in his life.Īfter his one-year appointment, Hiss joined the law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from law school in 1929, and immediately thereafter, on Frankfurter’s recommendation, received the honor of becoming Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s private secretary. Hiss attended Johns Hopkins University and then Harvard Law School, where he came under the influence of future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. In 1907, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm, experienced severe financial difficulties and committed suicide, leaving the children to be raised by their mother and aunt. For his part, Chambers remained equally adamant in his accusations about Hiss.Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Alger Hiss at the Justice’s summer home in Beverly Farms, June 1930.Īlger Hiss was born on Novemin Baltimore, Maryland, the fourth of five children. ![]() Hiss always maintained his complete innocence. After the first trial ended with a hung jury, Hiss was convicted in January 1950 and served 44 months in jail. The statute of limitations had run out for other charges related to his supposed activities in the 1930s. The “Pumpkin Papers” were used as evidence to support his claim that Hiss had passed the papers to him for delivery to the Soviets.īased on this evidence, Hiss was indicted for perjury for lying to HUAC and a federal grand jury about his membership in the Communist Party. During the course of that trial, Chambers produced microfilmed copies of classified State Department documents from the 1930s, which he had hidden in hollowed-out pumpkins on his farm. Finally, after Chambers publicly declared that Hiss had been a communist “and may be one now,” Hiss filed a slander suit. In the weeks that followed Chambers’ appearance before HUAC, the two men exchanged charges and countercharges and their respective stories became more and more muddled. He later admitted that he knew Chambers, but at the time he had been using a different name–George Crosley. Hiss angrily denied the charges and declared that he did not even know Whittaker Chambers. In 1948, he was serving as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He had been heavily involved in America’s wartime diplomacy and attended the Yalta and Potsdam conferences as an American representative. Hiss was one of the most respected men in Washington. Chambers accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of having been a communist and a spy during the 1930s. He dropped a bombshell during his testimony. Chambers was called as a witness, and he appeared before the committee on August 3, 1948. At that time, HUAC was involved in a series of hearings investigating communist machinations in the United States. By 1948, he was serving as an editor for Time magazine. He left the Communist Party in 1938 and offered his services to the FBI as an informant on communist activities in the United States. Chambers also admitted to having served as a spy for the Soviet Union. He was a self-professed former member of the Communist Party. ![]() READ MORE: Red Scare: Cold War, McCarthyism & FactsĬhambers was a little known figure prior to his 1948 appearance before HUAC. The accusation set into motion a series of events that eventually resulted in the trial and conviction of Hiss for perjury. In hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC), Whittaker Chambers accuses former State Department official Alger Hiss of being a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union.
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