Was Alger Hiss a Soviet Spy? The Case That Captivated America

On August 3, 1948, former FDR advisor Alger Hiss was accused of being a "communist" by Whitaker Chambers. From the article:

"Was Alger Hiss a Soviet Spy? The Case That Captivated America

Updated March 31, 2019

Alger Hiss was a former State Department officer who was accused of being a spy for the Soviet Union by a former friend in the late 1940s. Controversy over whether Hiss was guilty or innocent became a national sensation and one of the first public spectacles of the McCarthy Era.

Fast Facts: Alger Hiss
Known For: Accused of spying and convicted of perjury during the McCarthy Era, sparking massive public debate across the U.S.
Occupation: Lawyer, government official, and diplomat
Born: November 11, 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland
Education: Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Law School
Died: November 15, 1996 in New York, New York
Early Life and Career
Alger Hiss was born November 11, 1904, in Baltimore, to a middle class family. A brilliant student, he was awarded a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, he received another scholarship to attend Harvard Law School.

After graduation from law school, Hiss received a prestigious clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He then went on to join law firms in Boston, and later New York City.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president, Hiss, who had turned leftward in politics, accepted an offer to join the federal government. He worked for various New Deal agencies before joining the Justice Department and ultimately the State Department.

Within the State Department during World War II, Hiss was deeply involved in the planning for a postwar world. He served as the executive-secretary of the 1945 San Francisco conference where the charter for the United Nations was drafted. Hiss stayed with the State Department until early 1947, when he left to become the president of a prestigious foreign policy organization, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Explosive Accusations and Hearings
In the summer of 1948, during congressional battles between the Truman administration and conservatives in the early Cold War era, hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities drew Hiss into a colossal controversy. On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and a former communist, named in a testimony people he said had been part of a 1930s Soviet spy ring operating in Washington.

Chambers said he recalled Hiss as a government official who was an active and very enthusiastic communist. The charge was explosive. On August 4, 1949, Hiss was prominently mentioned on the front pages of newspapers, and the formerly respectable bureaucrat and diplomat was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a Soviet sympathizer.

Hiss denied he'd been a communist, but admitted he had met Chambers years earlier. According to Hiss, he had known Chambers casually, and that Chambers had gone by the name "George Crosley." Disputing that statement, Chambers claimed he had known Hiss so well that he had visited his home in the Georgetown section of Washington.

On August 25, 1948, Hiss and Chambers both testified in a HUAC session that became a sensation. The committee's chairman, New Jersey congressman J. Parnell Thomas, declared at the beginning of the hearing "certainly one of you will be tried for perjury."

In his testimony, Chambers claimed Hiss had been such a devoted communist that he had given him a car, a 1929 Ford Model A, to use in his work as an organizer for communists in America. Hiss claimed he had rented an apartment to Chambers and had thrown in the car. And Hiss maintained he had never been a communist and had not been part of a spy ring. The members of the committee, including Richard Nixon, were openly skeptical of Hiss.

Outraged by the accusations leveled at him, Hiss challenged Chambers to accuse him of being a communist outside of a Congressional hearing, so that he could sue him. Chambers obliged by repeating his charges in a radio interview. At the end of August 1948, Hiss sued for libel.

The Pumpkin Papers Controversy
The legal skirmishing between Chambers and Hiss faded from the headlines for a few months but erupted again in December 1948. Chambers led federal investigators to secret government documents he said Hiss had passed to him in the late 1930s.

In a peculiar and dramatic twist, Chambers claimed he had stored stolen government microfilms, which he said he received from Hiss, in a hollowed out pumpkin in a field on his farm in rural Maryland. The controversy over Hiss and his alleged work for the Soviets became a national craze, and disputes over the "Pumpkin Papers" would last for decades."