The Home Page of this blog quotes the late great Whittaker Chambers as the source for its title: The Pull of the Land.
Although crediting Mr. Chambers for the title, I’ve said nothing about him beyond that. Going forward I hope to rectify this oversight, because, in probably the only sentence Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ever wrote with which I agree, “Whittaker Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies. When some future Plutarch writes his American Lives, he will find in Chambers penetrating and terrible insights into America in the early twentieth century.”
Chambers was, and continues to be today, sixty years after his death, a controversial figure. He was a Communist spy, when Americans were told emphatically that no such thing existed. He then converted, after focusing on his infant daughter’s ear and submitting to his epiphany which insisted that such a marvel could not have come into existence absent an all-powerful God.
He went underground to avoid assassination by his erstwhile comrades and emerged publicly as a journalist, writing in The American Mercury and, most notably in Time and Life, two of the famous publications of Henry R. Luce, the others being Fortune and Sports Illustrated. Luce deeply respected and admired Whittaker Chambers, but he could not have anticipated the next, explosive era in Chambers’ life.
In 1948 he was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). However, this was not the first time he had come forward to alert the United States federal government of Communist infiltration in its highest echelons. Almost a decade earlier, he had spoken with a top State Department official, Adolph A. Berle, identifying Communist cells and names of individuals with critical access. Berle took the information to President Franklin Roosevelt, who promptly dismissed it, even though the Communists named included his special assistant, Lauchlin Currie, who would also become the president’s Special Representative to China, Alger Hiss, who would eventually go on to preside over the United Nations Charter Conference, and Victor Perlo, who had clearance at the secret bombsight project at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
A cursory review of that decade reveals several of the earth shattering events of the 20th century, including the fall of China to Mao Tse Tung, the fall of the Iron Curtain across central Europe, and the creation of the United Nations on terms disadvantageous to the United States. One could bicker about “who lost” what, but one cannot ignore the role played by agents who had been identified by Chambers a few years before Pearl Harbor.
In his testimony in 1948, Chambers repeated his testimony and was promptly denounced by Alger Hiss who went to his grave denying his being a Communist agent. The contrast between the two men was dramatic. And instructive. Handsome, Ivy League, well-spoken, neat, fit vs. Crooked teeth, college dropout, mumbler, disheveled, poor health. President Harry Truman mocked Chambers calling him a “Red Herring” and refused to take action on the allegations.
Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury.
Allen Weinstein researched the case extensively, believing that Hiss was not a spy. But he, like many after reviewing the record, came to believe Chambers. The Venona Project whereby, after the fall of the Soviet Union, many, but not most, by far, files were deciphered and published, confirmed that Hiss was working for the Soviets, as testified by Chambers over four decades earlier. The list of Americans in the files was astounding. Hayden Peake, curator of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Historical Intelligence Collection has stated, “No modern government was more thoroughly penetrated.”
Every single name in Chambers’ testimony was in the Venona lists. And he is hated to this day by the usual suspects.
Whittaker Chambers wrote the deeply moving and genuinely classic American autobiography, Witness, from which I took the title to this blog.
He also wrote what many considered an explosive essay about the Yalta conference attended by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the WWII allies, in 1945. Explosive because Stalin was our “ally” and the essay did not reflect positively about the Soviet Union’s intentions. The staff at Time and Life rose in outrage and a “delegation” visited Chambers’ editor to urge the essay not be published. The editor, T. S. Matthews was so shaken, that he held the piece for a week, but eventually proceeded to publish it. Time was inundated with what today we would call “hate mail” along with cancellation requests. How could Time question the motives of our faithful Communist ally?
The essay was “Ghosts on the Roof”. The murdered Czar and his family, descend “with the softness of bats” upon the roof of their old palace and meet the muse of history already there. They proceed to discuss the conference now unfolding beneath them and the Czar announces his unabashed admiration of Stalin and his own conversion to Marxism, “What statesmanship! What vision! What power!” he exclaims. “And now … the greatest statesmen in the world have come to Stalin. Who but he would have had the sense of historical fitness to entertain them in my expropriated palace!”
Sitting next to a gravely ailing President Roosevelt was Alger Hiss. Roosevelt would die 3 months later.
Three years later, when Chambers’ prescience could not be ignored, Time republished the essay, saying it was worth a second reading.
We’ll write more about Chambers in future posts.
