When was alger hiss accused of spying

He soon lost his job at the New York Public Library when he was accused of stealing books. Chambers joined the Communist Party in , later claiming he thought that Communism would save a dying world. He worked briefly for the communist newspaper Daily Worker and then the New Masses, a communist literary monthly. In Chambers entered the communist underground and began gathering information for his Soviet bosses.

In the late s, he abandoned Communism and became a fervent Christian and anti-Communist. Chambers recounted his Communist activities to the FBI in several interviews during the early s, but little happened. The Soviet Union, after all, was then an ally in the war against Nazi Germany. By the summer of the global picture had changed. As the Cold War chilled, Communist infiltration of the government—real or imagined—became a serious issue for both Republicans and Democrats.

The Justice Department had been investigating Communist infiltration since , but its grand jury had not returned any indictments. Committee members, particularly an ambitious freshman congressman from California named Richard Nixon, knew what was at stake.

HUAC was a controversial body under fire for its heavy-handed tactics. On August 5 he appeared before the committee and read from a prepared statement. Hiss also denied knowing Whittaker Chambers. Chambers, he is not particularly unusual looking. He looks like a lot of people.

I might even mistake him for the chairman of this committee. It appeared that Hiss had cleared his name. He argued that even if the committee could not prove Hiss was a Communist, it should investigate whether he ever knew Chambers. Nixon persuaded the other members to appoint him head of a subcommittee to investigate further. He described the homes the Hisses occupied and the old Ford roadster and Plymouth they had owned.

Hiss, Chambers said, insisted on donating the Ford for the use of the Communist Party despite the security risk. He said the Hisses did not drink, but they did; he described Hiss as shorter than he actually was; he wrongly maintained that Hiss was deaf in one ear. However, he also provided information that indicated he knew them rather well. On August 16 the committee summoned Hiss to appear in a secret session.

He then described a man he had known in the s and to whom he had briefly sublet his apartment. When asked about the Ford, Hiss claimed he had given it to Crosley. Hiss also said Crosley had once given him an oriental rug in lieu of payment of rent. Nixon now wanted Chambers and Hiss to meet face to face. A meeting had been set up for August 25, but instead Nixon arranged to surprise Hiss with Chambers eight days ahead of schedule.

Hiss issued a challenge to his accuser. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee without their being privileged for suit for libel. Over the ensuing months of the Hiss-Chambers controversy, the press--enjoying the alliteration--would generally refer to the entire set of documents and photographs taken from Baltimore as " the pumpkin papers.

The Pumpkin Papers changed everything. The question of whether Hiss knew Chambers better than he admitted, or even whether he was a Communist, now seemed relatively inconsequential. Fortunately for Hiss, the statute of limitations for espionage was five years, and the incriminating evidence all concerned documents passed over a decade earlier. The statute of limitations was not an issue, however, on the question of whether Alger Hiss committed perjury. The First Perjury Trial.

Forty-four-year-old Alger Hiss, wearing a gray herringbone suit, blue tie, and a brimmed brown hat, entered the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan on May 31, for the first day of his trial for perjury.

Hiss faced two counts, both stemming from testimony before a federal grand jury the previous December. Hiss was charged with lying when he testified that he never gave any documents to Whittaker Chambers and when he claimed never to have seen Chambers after January 1, Hiss, with his brother Donald, arrives at courthouse to testify before grand jury.

In his opening statement, Assistant U. Attorney Thomas Murphy told the twelve-person, middle-class jury, selected after questioning by Judge Samuel H.

Kaufman , "If you don't believe Chambers, then we have no case. Defense attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker , in his opening statement, said his client welcomed the "quiet and fair court of justice" after "the days of the Klieg lights, the television, and all the paraphernalia, the propaganda which surrounded the beginning of this story.

Whittaker Chambers was, of course, the prosecution's central witness. Chambers testified that Hiss began passing him State Department documents in early He described Soviet agent Colonel Boris Bykov's recommended espionage procedures, followed by Hiss, that included bringing files home nightly and retyping them.

Chambers identified the famous documents, both the typewritten and those in Hiss's own hand, and said that they had been given to him by Hiss in his Washington home. On cross-examination, Stryker tried to highlight defects in Chambers's character. He asked about a play, written by Chambers as a student at Columbia in , that Stryker called "an offensive treatment of Christ. He demanded to know whether Chambers was "for some fourteen years an enemy and traitor of the United States of America?

Styker suggested that the timing of Chambers's charge was an attempt to help the Republican Party's campaign against Truman. Chambers's wife, Esther, followed Whittaker to the stand. She told jurors of the close relationship that she and her husband enjoyed for several years with Alger and Priscilla Hiss--a relationship that she said extended well beyond the January 1, date that Hiss had told the grand jury was his last meeting with Chambers.

She described the Hiss's visit to their Baltimore apartment in December to celebrate the Hiss's wedding anniversary. The Hiss's, Esther Chambers testified, "brought a bottle of champagne. Following the testimony from the Chambers came a series of witnesses who tied Alger Hiss to the typewritten State Department documents introduced by the government.

Nathan Levine described the visit of Chambers to his mother's home to retrieve the envelope bearing documents from a dumbwaiter shaft. Eunice Lincoln, a secretary in Hiss's office, testified that Hiss often took departmental documents home to work on.

Feehan told jurors that letters known to have been typed by Hiss in and "Hiss standards" were typed on the same Woodstock typewriter as the sixty-five papers found in the Baltimore dumbwaiter shaft. He based his conclusion on similarities between certain letters, such as the lowercase "g," on both sets of papers. The defense, through its witnesses, tried to persuade jurors of three things: first, that Hiss's reputation was so good as to make his alleged espionage activity almost unthinkable; second, that Chambers was mentally unstable and should not be believed and, third, that Hiss's Woodstock typewriter had been given to a household employee sometime before , making it impossible for either Alger or Priscilla Hiss to have typed the Baltimore documents.

Three members of the Catlatt family testified that the Woodstock typewriter on which the Baltimore papers were allegedly typed was in fact in their possession, not the Hiss's, in early Claudia Catlatt thought she received the machine in mid Mike Catlatt recalled that the typewriter "was broke Perry Catlatt placed the time of the gift of the typewriter as December and recalled taking it soon thereafter to a "repair shop at K Street just off Connecticut Avenue.

Rarely has a defense team ever assembled so impressive a batch of character witnesses as appeared on behalf of Alger Hiss. The list included two U. Davis and future Adlai Stevenson Democratic presidential nominees. Justice Felix Frankfurter described Hiss's reputation as "excellent. On June 23, Alger Hiss took the stand. He admitted writing the four handwritten notes produced by Chambers, but denied any connection with the microfilm found in Chambers's pumpkin or any role in the typing of the sixty-five State Department documents.

He also insisted--as he had told the grand jury in December--that he had not met Chambers on any occasion after January 1, As for the Woodstock typewriter, Hiss's "best recollection" was that he gave it to the Catlatts "in the fall of The testimony of Priscilla Hiss did more harm than good to the defense case. She admitted typing the four "Hiss standards" used for comparison purposes by the FBI with the Baltimore documents.

After Priscilla denied that she was a member of the Socialist Party in , Murphy pulled out a voter-roll page that showed her Socialist registration. She struggled to explain her statement to the Grand Jury that the typewriter "may" have been given to the Catlatt's as late as Stryker spared nothing in his attack on Whittaker Chambers in his summation to the jury. He called Chambers "an enemy of the Republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect for matrimony or motherhood.

Murphy told the jurors that their duty was clear. The evidence left "only one inference" that could be drawn: "that the defendant, that smart, intelligent, American-born man gave [the secret State Department document] to Chambers.

On July 6, , the case went to the jury. Late the next afternoon, the jury sent a note saying it "is unable to agree at a verdict. Judge Kaufman reluctantly declared a mistrial.

Quizzed about the deliberations, jurors revealed that the final vote stood eight for conviction, four for acquittal. The four jurors in the minority believed that someone other that Alger or Priscilla Hiss typed the documents on Woodstock N The Second Perjury Trial. The months between the end of the first Hiss trial and the start of the second had been eventful. The Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb.

The NATO treaty had been approved. And, perhaps most ominously for Alger Hiss, polls showed public attitudes shifting towards harsher treatment of U. The second trial began with a somewhat changed cast. Murphy was back as prosecutor, but Claude Cross now led the Hiss defense.

Kaufman, criticized for his pro-defense rulings in the first trial, had been replaced on the bench Henry W. The prosecution produced one major new witness who Kaufman had barred from testifying in the first trial.

Hede Massing, a former Soviet agent, testified that he met Alger Hiss at a Communist cell meeting in a private home in In , however, Whitaker Chambers, a former member of the U. Berle, under whom Hiss worked, scoffed at the charge. Soon, however, similar information came from French intelligence sources. Within a year of Hiss's departure from the State Department, Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine, told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss had been a fellow communist in the s and had given him State Department documents that he passed to a Soviet official.

Chambers's revelation followed the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley , an admitted Soviet agent, who told the committee that she had passed documents from a nameless, high-ranking government official to the Soviets. Denying the charges, Hiss sued Chambers for libel. To counter Hiss's charges, Chambers produced handwritten memos and typewritten summaries of State Department documents. A Woodstock typewriter was introduced into evidence. Experts testified that Hiss had typed both the summaries and personal correspondence on the typewriter.