Alger Hiss Case (1948-1950): Espionage Charges and Perjury

The Alger Hiss case was one of the most famous espionage controversies of the early Cold War. In August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet underground courier, told a congressional committee that Alger Hiss, a respected former State Department official, had been a secret communist. The dispute ended with Hiss’s conviction for perjury in January 1950, and it helped launch the career of Richard Nixon and the anti-communist politics later called McCarthyism.

Background

Alger Hiss was a Harvard-trained lawyer who had joined Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in the 1930s and moved to the State Department in 1936. He accompanied Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and was secretary-general of the San Francisco conference that drafted the United Nations Charter. In 1947 he became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Whittaker Chambers was a writer and editor at Time magazine. In the 1930s he had been a member of the Communist Party and a courier for a Soviet intelligence network in Washington, before breaking with communism in 1938. By 1948 fears of Soviet espionage were growing, fed by defectors’ testimony, the Hollywood Ten hearings and the developing Cold War.

What happened

On 3 August 1948 Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Hiss had belonged to a secret communist group in the 1930s. Hiss appeared two days later and denied ever knowing anyone named Whittaker Chambers. Most committee members were inclined to drop the matter, but Richard Nixon, a freshman Republican congressman, pressed for further questioning.

On 17 August the two men were brought face to face in a New York hotel room. Hiss then said he had known Chambers in the mid-1930s under the name “George Crosley” but denied any political connection. After Chambers repeated his charge on a radio programme without the protection of congressional privilege, Hiss sued him for libel.

During the libel case Chambers went further. On 17 November 1948 he produced copies of State Department documents, several typed and others in Hiss’s handwriting, which he said Hiss had given him in 1938 to pass to the Soviets. On 2 December he led HUAC investigators to his farm in Westminster, Maryland, and handed over rolls of microfilm he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin. The press called them the “Pumpkin Papers”.

The trials

Because the five-year statute of limitations on espionage had passed, a federal grand jury in New York indicted Hiss on 15 December 1948 on two counts of perjury: for denying that he had passed documents to Chambers and for saying he had not seen him after 1 January 1937.

The first trial, from May to July 1949, ended in a hung jury, reportedly split eight to four in favour of conviction. A key piece of evidence was a Woodstock typewriter once owned by the Hiss family; experts testified that the copied documents had been typed on it. At the second trial, which opened in November 1949, Hiss was found guilty on 21 January 1950. On 25 January he was sentenced to five years in prison. He served 44 months in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and was released in November 1954.

Key people

• Alger Hiss (1904–1996), former State Department official who denied the charges for the rest of his life.
• Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), former communist courier and Time editor, who described the case in his memoir Witness (1952).
• Richard Nixon (1913–1994), HUAC member whose role made him a national figure; he later became vice president and president.
• Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, who caused a storm by saying after the verdict that he would not turn his back on Hiss.

Consequences

The conviction seemed to many Americans to confirm that communists had penetrated the government at a high level. Less than three weeks later, on 9 February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy made his first claims about communists in the State Department, opening the era of McCarthyism. Together with the arrest of Klaus Fuchs and later the Rosenberg trial, the case hardened public fears of Soviet espionage.

Legacy and debate

Hiss spent decades trying to clear his name, and in 1975 he was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar. The case divided American opinion along political lines for half a century. In the 1990s the release of the Venona decrypts of Soviet intelligence cables, and material from Soviet-bloc archives, led many historians to conclude that Hiss probably did work for Soviet military intelligence. Others still argue that the evidence is circumstantial or open to other readings, and the question has not been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

Timeline

• 1948, 3 August: Whittaker Chambers names Alger Hiss before HUAC.
• 1948, 5 August: Hiss testifies and denies knowing Chambers.
• 1948, 17 August: The two men confront each other in New York.
• 1948, 17 November: Chambers produces State Department documents in the libel suit.
• 1948, 2 December: The “Pumpkin Papers” microfilm is handed to HUAC investigators.
• 1948, 15 December: Hiss is indicted for perjury.
• 1949, July: The first trial ends with a hung jury.
• 1950, 21 January: Hiss is convicted at his second trial; he is sentenced four days later.

Why it matters

The Hiss case turned fears of communist infiltration into a national drama and made Richard Nixon a leading politician. It remains a touchstone in debates about Soviet espionage, civil liberties and the anti-communist politics of the early Cold War.