Alger Hiss
Alger Hiss (November 11, 1904 – November 15, 1996) was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Before the trial Hiss was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a US State Department official and as a UN official. In later life, he worked as a lecturer and author.
Alger Hiss
November 15, 1996 (aged 92)
Being accused of espionage
2 counts of perjury
2 concurrent terms of 5 years in prison
Released after 3 years and 8 months
- Anna Hiss (sister)
- Donald Hiss (brother)
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former US Communist Party member, testified under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Hiss had secretly been a communist while in federal service. Hiss categorically denied the charge and subsequently sued Chambers for libel. During the pretrial discovery process of the libel case, Chambers produced new evidence allegedly indicating that he and Hiss had been involved in espionage. A federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time, and in January 1950 he was found guilty and received two concurrent five-year sentences, of which he eventually served three and a half years.
Arguments about the case and the validity of the verdict took center stage in broader debates about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States.[1]
Since Hiss's conviction, statements by involved parties and newly exposed evidence have added to the dispute. In the 1990s, two former senior Soviet military officers responsible for the Soviet Union's military intelligence archives stated, following a search of those archives, that the "Russian intelligence service has no documents proving that Alger Hiss cooperated with our service somewhere or anywhere," and that Hiss "never had any relationship with Soviet intelligence."[2][3] The 1995 Venona Papers provided evidence for the theory that Hiss was a Soviet spy.[4] Author Anthony Summers argued in 2000 that since many relevant files continue to be unavailable, the Hiss controversy will continue to be debated, with political divisions marking belief in Hiss's innocence or guilt.[5][6] Hiss himself maintained his innocence until his death in 1996.
Early life and education[edit]
Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 11, 1904, Alger Hiss was one of five children of Mary "Minnie" Lavinia (née Hughes) and Charles Alger Hiss. Both parents came from substantial Baltimore families who could trace their roots to the middle of the 18th century. Hiss's paternal great-great-grandfather had emigrated from Germany in 1729, and changed his surname from "Hesse" to "Hiss".[7]
Minnie Hughes attended teacher's college and was active in Baltimore society. Shortly after his marriage at age 24, Charles Hiss entered the business world and joined the dry goods importing firm Daniel Miller and Co., where he became an executive and shareholder.
When Charles' brother John died suddenly at the age of 33, Charles assumed financial and emotional responsibility for his brother's widow and six children in addition to his own expanding family.[7] Charles also helped his wife's favorite brother, Albert Hughes, find work at Daniel Miller. Hughes at first distinguished himself and was promoted to treasurer of the firm, but then he became involved in a complicated business deal and was unable to meet the financial obligation that was part of a joint agreement.[7]
In 1907, the year of great financial panic, Charles Hiss felt compelled to sell all his stocks to make good his brother-in-law's debts and to resign from the firm. After unsuccessful attempts by relatives to find him a job, Charles fell into a serious depression and committed suicide, cutting his throat with a razor. Minnie, who had made the most of her former prosperity and social position, was then forced to rely on her inheritance and financial assistance from family members.
Hiss was two years and his brother was two months old when his father died. As was customary in those days, they were not told of the circumstances of Charles Hiss's death. When Alger learned of it inadvertently years later from neighbors, he angrily confronted his older brother Bosley, who then told him the truth. Shocked, Hiss resolved to devote the rest of his life to restoring the family's "good name".[7]
Although shadowed by melancholy, Hiss's early childhood, spent in rough-and-tumble games with his siblings and cousins who lived close by, was not unhappy. Their Baltimore neighborhood was described by columnist Murray Kempton as one of "shabby gentility."[8] Hiss portrayed the economic circumstances of his childhood as "modest", but "not particularly shabby".[9] Two further tragedies occurred when Hiss was in his twenties: his elder brother Bosley died of Bright's disease and his sister Mary Ann committed suicide.[9]
Hiss learned to compartmentalize and to seek out paternal surrogates. At school, he was popular and high performing. He attended high school at Baltimore City College and college at Johns Hopkins University, where he was voted "most popular student" by his classmates, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. In 1929, he received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he was a protégé of Felix Frankfurter, the future US Supreme Court justice. During his time at Harvard, the famous murder trial of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti took place, ending in their conviction and execution. Like Frankfurter, who wrote a book about the case, and like many prominent liberals of the day, Hiss maintained that Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted unjustly.
Hiss served for a year as clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., before joining Choate, Hall & Stewart, a Boston law firm, and later the New York City law firm then known as Cotton, Franklin, Wright & Gordon.
Incarceration[edit]
On 22 March 1951, Alger Hiss was sent to a maximum security federal facility.[65] Although he had been sentenced to five years' imprisonment, Hiss served only three years and eight months in Lewisburg Federal Prison. He was released from prison on November 27, 1954.
While in prison, Hiss acted as a volunteer attorney, adviser, and tutor for many of his fellow inmates.
Post-incarceration[edit]
After his release in 1954 at age 50, Hiss, who had been disbarred, worked as a salesman for a stationery company in New York City. From 1958 to 1960 he worked as an administrative assistant to R. Andrew Smith, a comb manufacturer, earning $20,000/year.[66] In 1957, he published In the Court of Public Opinion,[67] a book challenging in detail the prosecution's case against him, and maintaining the typewritten documents traced to his typewriter had been forged. Hiss separated from his first wife, Priscilla, in 1959, though they remained married until her death in 1984. In 1985 he married Isabel Johnson, who had been living with him since soon after they met in 1960.[68]
On November 11, 1962, following Richard Nixon's failed 1962 bid for governor of California, Hiss appeared in a segment titled "The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon" on the Howard K. Smith: News and Comment show on ABC television. (The Chicago Tribune reported targets of Hiss's "invective" and whom he "denounced as conspirators in a monstrous plot to convict him on concocted evidence" included: the presiding judge at his second trial, the three appellate court judges who rejected his appeal, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, assistant attorney general Alexander M. Campbell, federal prosecutor Thomas F. Murphy, members of the New York grand jury who indicted him, jury members in his two trials who convicted him, and HUAC members and particularly Richard Nixon and Karl Mundt".[69]) His appearance led sponsors to withdraw from Smith's program when viewers bombarded ABC with complaints about letting a convicted perjurer appear on the air. Smith's show was cancelled in June 1963.[70]
The five rolls of 35 mm film known as the "pumpkin papers" had been characterized as highly classified and too sensitive to reveal and were thought until late 1974 to be locked in HUAC files. In 1975, independent researcher Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, sued the US Justice Department when it denied his request for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act. On July 31, 1975, as a result of this lawsuit and follow-on suits filed by Peter Irons and by Alger Hiss and William A. Reuben, the Justice Department released copies of the "pumpkin papers" that had been used to implicate Hiss. One roll of film turned out to be totally blank due to overexposure,[71]
two others are faintly legible copies of non-classified Navy Department documents relating to such subjects as life rafts and fire extinguishers, and the remaining two are photographs of the State Department documents that had been introduced at the two Hiss trials.[72]
A few days after the release of the Pumpkin Papers, on August 5, 1975, Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts bar.[73]The state's Supreme Judicial Court overruled its Committee of Bar Overseers[74]
and stated in a unanimous decision that, despite his conviction, Hiss had demonstrated the "moral and intellectual fitness" required to be an attorney. Hiss was the first lawyer ever readmitted to the Massachusetts bar after a major criminal conviction.[39]
In 1988, Hiss wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Life, in which he maintained his innocence. He fought his perjury conviction until his death from emphysema on November 15, 1996, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, four days after his 92nd birthday.[75][76] His friends and family continue to insist on his innocence.
Personal life[edit]
In 1929, Hiss married Priscilla Fansler Hobson, a Bryn Mawr graduate and grade school teacher. Priscilla, previously married to Thayer Hobson, had a three-year-old son, Timothy Hobson (September 19, 1926 – January 8, 2018).[77] Hiss and Priscilla had a son, Tony Hiss. The couple separated in 1959 after 30 years of marriage, five years after his incarceration.
In the 1960s, Hiss was introduced to Isabel (Dowden) Johnson, a model, freelance writer, and editor. Though Hiss asked Priscilla for a divorce so they could marry, she did not grant him one.[78] Johnson had a previous relationship with Communist writer Howard Fast,[79][78] recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, and had briefly married Communist screenwriter Lester Cole, of the Hollywood Ten.
After Priscilla’s death in 1984, Hiss and Johnson married in 1986.[80][81][82] Hiss was an Episcopalian.[83]
Hiss was conferred an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1947.[84]
Later evidence, for and against[edit]
Testimony by Bullitt and Weyl[edit]
In 1952, former US Ambassador to France William C. Bullitt testified before the McCarran Committee (the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee) that in 1939, Premier Édouard Daladier had advised him of French intelligence reports that two State Department officials named Hiss were Soviet agents.[85] When asked about it the next day, Daladier, then 68 years old, told reporters that he did not recall this conversation from 13 years previously.[86] Also called to testify before the McCarran committee was economist Nathaniel Weyl, a former Communist Party member "at large" who had worked for the Department of Agriculture during the early days of the New Deal and had become disillusioned with what he considered the underhanded methods of the Communist Party. In 1950 Weyl had been interviewed by the FBI and had told them that in 1933 he had belonged to a secret Communist Party unit along with Harold Ware and Lee Pressman and confirmed that Alger Hiss had been present at some meetings held at Ware's sister's violin studio.[87] In 1950, Weyl published an anti-communist book, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History, that made no mention of the so-called "Ware Group" and expressed doubt that Hiss was guilty of espionage.[56][88][89]
Forgery by typewriter hypothesis[edit]
At both trials, FBI typewriter experts testified that the Baltimore documents in Chambers's possession matched samples of typing done in the 1930s by Priscilla Hiss on the Hisses' home typewriter, a Woodstock brand. At both trials, the testimony was directed to comparing two sets of typed documents and not to the typewriter eventually submitted into evidence. As early as December 1948 the chief investigator for the Hiss defense, Horace W. Schmahl, set off a race to find Hiss's typewriter.[90] The FBI, with superior resources, was also searching for the typewriter, which the Hiss family had discarded some years earlier. Schmahl tracked it down first, and the Hiss defense introduced it with the intention of showing that its typeface would not be a match for that on the FBI's documents. It instead proved an excellent match and confirmed the FBI's evidence. Schmahl subsequently changed sides and went to work for the prosecution.
After Hiss had gone to prison, his lawyer, Chester T. Lane, acting on a tip he had received from someone who had worked with Schmahl that Hiss might have been framed, filed a motion in January 1952 for a new trial.[91] Lane sought to show that forgery by typewriter was feasible, and that such forgery had occurred in the Hiss case and was responsible for the incriminating documents. Unaware that the feasibility of such forgeries had already been established throughout the war by the military intelligence services that engaged in such practices, the Hiss defense team sought to establish feasibility directly by hiring a civilian typewriter expert, Martin Tytell, to create a typewriter that would be indistinguishable from the one the Hisses owned. Tytell spent two years creating a facsimile Woodstock typewriter whose print characteristics would match the peculiarities of the Hiss typewriter.[92]
To demonstrate that forgery by typewriter was not merely a theoretical possibility but had actually occurred in the Hiss case, the defense sought to show that Exhibit #UUU was not Hiss's old machine but a newer one altered to type like it. According to former Woodstock executives, the production date of a machine could be inferred from the machine's serial number. The serial number on the Exhibit #UUU typewriter indicated that it would have been manufactured after the man who sold the Hiss machine had retired from the company, and the salesman insisted that he did not sell any typewriters after his retirement. Decades later, when FBI files were disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, it turned out that the FBI had also doubted that the trial exhibit was Hiss's machine and for exactly the same reasons; although the FBI expressed these concerns internally as the first trial was about to begin, the public did not learn about the FBI's doubts until the mid-1970s.[93]
To explain why typing from Exhibit #UUU seemed indistinguishable from the typing on Hiss's old machine, Lane assembled experts prepared to testify that Exhibit #UUU had been tampered with in a way inconsistent with professional repair work to make it type like Hiss's old typewriter. In addition, experts were prepared to testify that Priscilla Hiss was not the typist of the Baltimore documents.[94]
In summarizing the conclusions of the forensic experts he had assembled in his motion for a new trial, Lane told the court, "I no longer just question the authenticity of Woodstock N230099. I now say to the Court that Woodstock N230099—the typewriter in evidence at the trials—is a fake machine. I present in affidavit form, and will be able to produce at the hearing, expert testimony that this machine is a deliberately fabricated job, a new type face on an old body. This being so, it can only have been planted on the defense by or on behalf of Whittaker Chambers as part of his plot for the false incrimination of Alger Hiss."[95]
In July 1952 Judge Goddard denied Hiss's motion for a new trial, expressing great skepticism that Chambers had the resources, knew how to commit forgery by typewriter, and would have known where to plant such a fake machine so it would be found. In his decision, Goddard did not address the possibility, raised by Hiss's defenders, that someone other than Chambers, namely Horace Schmahl and/or his associates on the prosecution side, might have been involved in faking the typewriter.[96]
In 1976, Hiss called ex-FBI official William C. Sullivan, who recounted in his 1979 memoir: