Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss was an American statesman and prominent figure in the early Cold War era, best known for being accused of espionage and his subsequent trials in the late 1940s. Born in 1904 in Baltimore, Hiss excelled academically, graduating from Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, and worked in significant roles within the U.S. government during the New Deal, notably at the Department of State where he contributed to the founding of the United Nations. His career took a dramatic turn in 1948 when he was accused by former Communist Whittaker Chambers of being a Soviet spy, leading to a highly publicized legal battle.
Despite Hiss's eloquent denials and initial public support, he was eventually convicted of perjury in 1950 after two trials, serving over three years in federal prison. Hiss consistently maintained his innocence, framing his plight as a victim of Cold War hysteria. The controversy surrounding his case became emblematic of the era's political tensions, significantly impacting American perceptions of communism and contributing to the rise of anticommunism in the United States.
After his release, Hiss continued to assert his innocence through writings and public statements, appealing to various courts without success. His legacy remains contentious, with ongoing debates about his guilt and the implications of his case for American political history, reflecting deeper societal divisions during a critical period. Hiss passed away in 1996, leaving behind a complex legacy intertwined with the narratives of the Cold War.
Subject Terms
Alger Hiss
Lawyer
- Born: November 11, 1904
- Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
- Died: November 15, 1996
- Place of death: New York, New York
American diplomat
Hiss was a U.S. diplomat accused of being a communist spy and became the defendant in two notorious trials that heightened the public’s fear of communist infiltration in the government.
Areas of achievement Diplomacy, law, government and politics
Early Life
Alger Hiss was born to Mary and Charles Alger Hiss. Raised in an upper-middle-class atmosphere in Baltimore, Hiss possessed an eagerness for knowledge and excelled at his studies. He enjoyed being read to by an aunt who lived in the Hiss household after Charles died when Alger was just two years old. As a youth, Hiss attended Baltimore public schools; after graduating from Baltimore City College high school in 1921, he attended Powder Point Academy in Massachusetts. Hiss glided through college and law school with honors and scholarships, graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1926 and Harvard Law School in 1929. He was a protégé of Felix Frankfurter (a future U.S. Supreme Court justice) and later clerked for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
After practicing law in Boston and New York City from 1930 to 1933, Hiss began his career in Washington, D.C. He held several New Deal posts in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, including work in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the major New Deal agency concerned with farming. In July, 1934, Hiss shifted from the AAA to a new post on the legal staff of the Nye Committee, which was investigating the arms manufacturers of World War I. Hiss then worked briefly for the Department of Justice before transferring to the Department of State on September 1, 1936; he served in various capacities, including assistant to the adviser on political relations, assistant to the director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs, and deputy director for the Office of Special Political Affairs.
Hiss’s hard work and dedication enabled him to rise quickly through the ranks of the State Department. He was appointed executive secretary to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944, at which the blueprint of the United Nations Charter was approved. The following year, Hiss accompanied President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference as a member of the U.S. delegation. He then participated in the founding of the United Nations as the temporary secretary-general of the United Nations’ organizing conference in San Francisco, California, in April, 1945. After returning from the meeting and delivering a copy of the U.N. Charter directly to President Harry S. Truman, who praised his work, Hiss settled into his new responsibilities as director of the Office of Special Political Affairs. Hiss continued to impress his superiors and, as a result, attended the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in London, England, as a principal adviser for the U.S. delegation in January, 1946. One year later, at the age of forty-two, Hiss left the State Department to become the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
After joining the Roosevelt administration, Hiss had experienced swift and remarkable career advancements. He seemed headed for a great future, yet his many accomplishments occurred at a time when the United States was engaged in an ideological struggle between the forces of capitalism and the forces of communism. The Cold War extended beyond foreign policy and reached into the spirits of the United States and the Soviet Union. As tensions heightened, communist infiltration in the government became a serious concern. Many soon began to doubt Hiss’s allegiance to the United States, suspecting him of communist sympathies. While Hiss’s public career had been that of a brilliant bureaucrat and model New Dealer, his notoriety derived from the accusations leveled against him in the late 1940’s. The events that transpired would change his life forever.
Life’s Work
In the summer of 1948, the country was electrified to learn that Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had been identified as a member of an underground Communist Party cell in Washington, D.C., during the 1930’s. The fascinating drama began on August 3, when a former Communist named Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor of Time magazine, appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and accused Hiss of having been a Communist spy while working for the State Department in 1937 and 1938. The charge was shocking. The tall, handsome, and elegantly dressed Hiss seemed to be the model U.S. citizen. Hiss demanded the right to refute the charges; forty-eight hours later, in a masterful performance in front of an audience of supporters, he seemingly put the accusations to rest by insisting that he had never met Chambers and did not even recognize a picture of him. Hiss received a standing ovation from Congress as he ended his testimony. There was one congressman, however, who remained unconvinced. Richard M. Nixon, a freshman from California, harbored doubts about Hiss’s veracity.
Under the eyes of the country, an exciting drama of confrontation developed between Hiss and Chambers. Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat his charge without the protection of legal immunity. Chambers did so on Meet the Press, and Hiss sued him for libel. Hiss’s defense lawyers became thoroughly committed to the task of destroying Chambers’s credibility. To defend himself, Chambers produced microfilm copies of sixty-five classified State Department documents that he claimed Hiss had passed to him in the mid-1930’s to give to the Soviets. These secret documents, hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin behind Chambers’s Maryland farm, have been known ever since as the Pumpkin Papers. Although the documents possessed little secret value, the American public’s preoccupation with the infiltration of Soviet influence into the U.S. government allowed the revelation to discredit Hiss. As a result, Hiss resigned as president of the Carnegie Endowment on December 13, 1948. Two days later he was indicted for perjury, since the statute of limitations on espionage had expired. Hiss was tried twice, his first trial having ended with a hung jury. After the second trial, which began on November 17, 1949, Hiss was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. He served forty-four months in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Hiss was released from prison on November 27, 1954. Unable to return to a normal life, he devoted the rest of his days to establishing his innocence. He identified himself as the victim of a larger evil Cold War hysteria and antagonism toward the New Deal and emphatically insisted that he was the subject of a frame-up. In his two books, In the Court of Public Opinion (1957) and Recollections of a Life (1988), Hiss continued to present himself as an American innocent. His reputation made a partial comeback in public esteem when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign the presidency. The judgment that Hiss was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, however, has been upheld in the face of repeated appeals to the highest courts. In 1978, using newly acquired government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Hiss petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a third time in an attempt to get a new trial. On October 11, 1983, the Court refused to hear his case. Nevertheless, Hiss remained determined to demonstrate his innocence.
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Hiss requested information from Soviet sources to clear his name. After extensive research, General Dimitri Volkogonov, head of the Russian military intelligence archives, announced in October, 1992, that “not a single document” substantiated the allegation that Hiss collaborated with Soviet Union intelligence. Pressured by the American Right, Volkogonov qualified his finding, stating that while he had found no evidence against Hiss in KGB files, he could not speak for other Soviet intelligence agencies, nor could he comment on the many documents that had been destroyed. In 1993, Hungarian historian Maria Schmidt divulged material from Communist Hungarian secret police files that seemed to suggest Hiss’s guilt. Another piece of evidence also became available in 1996 when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency released several thousand documents of decoded cables exchanged between Moscow and Communist agents in the United States from 1939 to 1957. These materials were part of a secret intelligence project called “Venona.” A cable, dated March 30, 1945, referred to an agent code-named “Ales.” An anonymous footnote, dated more than twenty years later, suggested that Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.” Hiss issued a statement denying this allegation. Never ceasing to maintain his innocence, Hiss died on November 15, 1996, at the age of ninety-two.
Significance
The Hiss-Chambers case emerged in 1948 at a pivotal moment in Cold War America. The controversial and well-publicized case dramatized the emerging political and cultural implications of the Cold War. Hiss’s conviction, more than any other domestic event, convinced millions of Americans that there was truth to the often-made Republican charges that Roosevelt and Truman had not been sufficiently alert to the dangers of communist infiltration, subversion, and espionage. Over the years, the Hiss-Chambers controversy was transformed from an argument over the facts of the case to a struggle between the United States’ patrician liberal establishment and its populist opponents. For many Americans, the contest was an elemental struggle between good and evil, between leftist New Dealers and right-wing anticommunists. It divided the nation and set off widespread fears that the State Department was infiltrated by Soviet agents. Hiss’s conviction also gave prominence to a fledgling congressman, Nixon, who used the notoriety to help win a Senate seat in 1950 and the vice presidency in 1952. Furthermore, the case boosted the anticommunist crusade in the United States and legitimated Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reckless attacks on the Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower administrations.
The Hiss case continues to ignite controversy within political and cultural circles. While some evidence suggests that Hiss was guilty, his unrelenting declarations of innocence have allowed historians, journalists, and political figures to continue to debate the case. Interestingly, an ironic twist occurred in the Hiss saga. The metal box used by Hiss to transport the U.N. Charter back to President Truman in 1945 now contains the infamous Pumpkin Papers, which are stored at the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland.
Further Reading
Hiss, Alger. In the Court of Public Opinion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957. In this subjective account, Hiss takes his case to the court of public opinion and details the evidence and arguments that he believes establish his innocence.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Recollection of a Life. New York: Seaver Books, 1988. The eighty-three-year-old Hiss offers an intriguing narrative that serves as both a memoir and a final declaration of his innocence.
Hiss, Tony. The View from Alger’s Window: A Son’s Memoir. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. Hiss’s son recalls his father’s trial and imprisonment and how these events affected the Hiss family.
Nixon, Richard M. Six Crises. New York: Doubleday, 1962. This memoir details the various crises confronted by Nixon and his response to them. Chapter 1 is Nixon’s personal account of the Hiss case.
Smith, John Chabot. Alger Hiss: The True Story. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. Smith portrays Hiss as the victim of a conspiracy in which Chambers played the central role. A spectrum of conspiracy theories finds expression within this single volume.
Swan, Patrick, ed. Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003. Collection of twenty-three essays written between 1950 and 2001 by William F. Buckley, Jr., Lionel Trilling, Rebecca West, Murray Kempton, and others who describe the Hiss-Chambers case and the surrounding political climate.
Tanenhaus, Sam. Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997. An exhaustive 638-page biography by a freelance journalist that provides a sympathetic portrait of Chambers while sustaining Hiss’s guilt. This well-written and compelling work makes an invaluable contribution to the history of American communism and anticommunism.
Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. This extensively researched work uses previously classified documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and is supplemented with numerous personal interviews. Weinstein began working on the book convinced of Hiss’s innocence but concludes that he is guilty.
White, Edward G. Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy. New York: Oxford University Pres, 2004. White depicts Hiss as an unrepentant liar, examining how and why he believes Hiss became a Communist and a Soviet spy.
Zeligs, Meyer A. Friendship and Fratricide. New York: Viking, 1967. Zeligs offers a 476-page psychoanalytic study of Hiss and Chambers. Based on numerous interviews, legal records, and personal writings, the book attempts to explain the subconscious motives that determined their actions.