Whittaker Chambers

Jay Vivian (David Whittaker) Chambers (April 1, 1901 â€" July 9, 1961) was an American writer, editor, Communist party-member-turned-defector, best known for his testimony about the espionage and subversion of Alger Hiss.

Biography

Youth and Education

Whittaker Chambers' father, Jay Chambers, was an illustrator and part of the New York-based "Decorative Designers" group, largely students of Howard Pyle (see the IOBA Standard, the Revere Collection, the Minsky Gallery, Oberlin College, and the Lewis Stark Bookplate Collection): his grandfather, James Chambers, was an editor for the now-defunct Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper. Chambers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and spent much of his youth in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York (see photos of Lynbrook house and map). After graduating from high school in 1919, he worked for two years in a bank before enrolling in Columbia University in 1921. University officials later found that much of his application for admission included references that did not exist. Classmates included Louis Zukofsky, Lionel Trilling (who later made him a main character in Middle of the Journey) and Meyer Schapiro. Mark Van Doren was a mentor who helped introduce him to Communism. He was expelled in 1922 for a blasphemous play, which was later published -- see Can You Hear Their Voices? (in bibliography, below).

Communism and Defection

In 1925, Chambers joined the American Communist Party and wrote and edited for communist periodicals, including The Daily Worker and The New Masses. In 1931 he married Esther Shemitz, a young artist and fellow Communist whom he had encountered at a party-organized textile strike in 1926; the couple had a son and a daughter. Chambers joined the Communist underground in the spring of 1932. It is claimed that in 1933 he was sent to Moscow for intelligence training, but Chambers always denied this, the incident having been based on a prank postcard he sent to friend Meyer Schapiro. His main controller in the underground was Josef Peters (whom Earl Browder later replaced with Rudy Baker). People involved or associated with Chambers included: William Spiegel, Arvid Jacobson, Joshua Tamer, David Zimmerman, John Scott, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Viktor Vasilevish Sveshchnikov, David Weintraub, and Grace Lumpkin (friend of Chambers' wife).

The Ware Group

Peters introduced Chambers to Harold Ware, head of the Ware group, a Communist underground cell in Washington that included Henry Collins, Lee Pressman, and (allegedly) Alger Hiss, all members of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal" administration; Hiss took a job on the legal staff of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Chambers worked in Washington as an organizer among Communists in the city and as a courier between New York and Washington for stolen documents which were delivered to Boris Bykov, the GRU Illegal Rezident (the chief of the NKVD or GRU station in the country of destination).

He carried on in this capacity from 1934 until 1938, when, alienated by the Great Purge of Josef Stalin, he left the Communist party. In Witness (see bibliography, below), Chambers described his effort to convince Hiss to leave the party, too.

Chambers saved a collection of documents he received from Hiss to protect himself and his family against retribution from the secret apparatus, as had occurred in the Juliet Poyntz case. Ten years later, they became known as the "Pumpkin Papers" (see below).

Members of the Karl group

"Karl" and "Carl" were cryptonyms used by Chambers in the mid-1930s as courier between the CPUSA secret apparatus and Soviet intelligence. It appears that after the mysterious death of the NKVD Illegal Rezident Valentin Markin in August 1934, within days the Karl group was transferred to the GRU Illegal Rezident Boris Bykov. Members included:
*Noel Field, United States Department of State
*Harold Glasser, Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury
* Alger Hiss, United States Department of State
*Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Price Administration; National Labor Relations Board; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education; Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Senate Civil Liberties Subcommittee, Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee
* Victor Perlo, chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board; head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce; Division of Monetary Research Department of Treasury; Brookings Institution
*Ward Pigman, National Bureau of Standards; Labor and Public Welfare Committee
*Vincent Reno, mathematician at United States Army Aberdeen Proving Ground
*George Silverman, Director of the Bureau of Research and Information Services, US Railroad Retirement Board; Economic Adviser and Chief of Analysis and Plans, Assistant Chief of Air Staff, Material and Services, War Department
*Julian Wadleigh, United States Department of State
* Harry Dexter White, Director of the Division of Monetary Research Secretary of the Treasury
*Viktor Vasilevish Sveshchnikov -- John Herrmann (who introduced Chambers to Hiss).

Defection

After leaving the Communist party in late 1939, following the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact, Chambers approached Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle with information about Communist activity within the United States. In the wake of World War II, Chambers' story was mostly ignored despite being aired at all levels of Franklin Roosevelt's administration, including FDR himself, given that Hiss was being promoted within the party and to an advisory level for the President.

In 1940, Chambers joined the staff of TIME Magazine. Starting at the back of the magazine, reviewing books and film with James Agee, he would eventually rise to the position of a senior editor. While at TIME, Chambers became known as a staunch anti-Communist, sometimes enraging his writers with the changes he made to their stories. Some colleagues, led by Richard Lauterbach and Theodore White, tried to have publisher Henry Luce remove him.

It was during this period after his defection that Chambers and his family became members of Pipe Creek Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, about twelve miles from his Maryland farm.

The Hiss Case: "Trial of the Century"

Post-WWII investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee into communist activities led to Elizabeth Bentley and eventually to Chambers.Chambers testified about members of an underground communist network working within the United States government in the 1930s and 1940s (see testimony transcript). His story caught the attention of a HUAC committee member, a freshman Representative from California named Richard Nixon.

During testimony on August 3, 1948, Chambers mentioned Hiss, by then a State Department official who had participated in the creation of the United Nations. Hiss confronted Chambers on August 17, 1948 (see transcript testimony). The official White House response was to dismiss the case as a "red herring." Internally, White House staffers set about discrediting Chambers.

Hiss was well educated, had a long list of achievements to his name, and vehemently denied the charges. Hiss had credibility; Chambers seemed a fanatic whose story was fantastic, with little hard evidence. Hiss and supporters maligned Chambers in the press, including rumors and accusations of homosexual experiences, a source of discussion to the present [1]. Other detractors ranged from Charles Douglas Jackson to Lillian Hellman.

Initially, Hiss denied knowing Chambers, but later he recognized him as "George Crosley." When Chambers finally took Hiss' bait and outside of court called him a communist (on the radio program "Meet the Press"), Hiss filed a $75,000 libel suit. Not long afterwards and with professed reluctance, Chambers announced the existence of stolen documents which would prove Hiss' communist activities. Announcing their existence one Friday, Chambers hid them in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm over the weekend after, then led HUAC investigators to the pumpkin the following Monday, where he produced four rolls of microfilm, hence their name, the "Pumpkin Papers") from his farm in Westminster, Maryland. Nixon's posing with a magnifying glass and microfilmed papers appeared in a number of highly publicized photographs (see [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]).

A first Hiss trial began in 1949 and ended in a hung jury; a second trial ended with Hiss' conviction of perjury (the statute of limitations had run out on treason) on January 21, 1950 for lying about being a spy while under oath. The Hiss defense team hired a noted psychiatrist who had correctly profiled Adolph Hitler for the OSS. His profile of Chambers was that he was a highly intelligent sociopath who would be difficult to cross examine as he was a skilled liar with an obsession for destruction.

Life after the Hiss Case

Writings

While the Hiss trial propelled Nixon's political career, Chambers derived little benefit. A social pariah, Chambers retreated to work on his Maryland farm. He wrote an autobiography, Witness (1952), which became a bestseller for almost a year -- helping to offset legal expenses accumulated since 1948 (most of Hiss' expenses were borne by friends). Before his death, Chambers served briefly as senior editor of William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review. He also wrote for Fortune and Life magazines. He was for a time a member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (see letter by Sol Stein to The New York Times) but only while invalided by heart attacks (see Cold Friday).

Suffering from angina from the age of 38, Chambers died of his seventh major heart attack on July 9, 1961, at the age of 60 (see TIME obituary). A second book, Cold Friday, was published posthumously in 1964 with the help of Duncan Norton Taylor. The book predicted that the fall of Communism would start in the satellite states surrounding the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

Presidential Medal of Freedom

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism" (full citation, [7], [8]).

In 1988, Chambers' farm, the Pipe Creek Farm, was added to the National Register [9] after some public debate[10] .

Legacy

Chambers's book Witness is on the reading lists of the Heritage Foundation, The Weekly Standard, and the Russel Kirk Center. He is regularly cited by conservative writers, including Heritage's president Edwin Feulner ("The Revolution of Truth: 2005 Commencement Address to the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts" of May 26, 2005) the Hudson Institute's William Schambra (Michael Joyce's Mission of March 9, 2006 ]) and David Horowitz ("Radical Son Radical Son" of May 22, 1998) and continued arguments over the Hiss Case with Victor Navasky's The Nation ("David Horowitz's Long March" of July 3, 2000). [11] In 2001, members of the Bush Administration held a private ceremony to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Chambers' birth ([12], [13], [14]): Buckley spoke in remembrance of Chambers (http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/2001200511220837.asp], [15]).

(There is even a Pumpkin Papers Blog.)

While international figures like Andre Malraux and Arthur Koestler no longer concern themselves with the matter, American debate about the Hiss-Chambers case remains vigorous to the present day. Publication of books on the subject continues at a steady pace in the new millennium, and Chambers remains an important figure in partisan as well as general writings [16]. With the selection of Allen Weinstein as head of the U.S. National Archives, basic facts of the case have re-entered the media once again, due to Weinstein's refusal to publicize sources for Perjury ([17], [18] [19].

Bibliography

Books and plays by Chambers

After its publication, Witness remained on bestseller lists (see TIME listing for 1952) for well over a year â€" paying Chambers' court debts. Cold Friday was published posthumously by his widow.
* Svedek (Prague: Conservative Institute, 2005) Czech translation â€" also for Slovak
* Witness (New York: Random House, 1952) (review in TIME in 1952)
* Cold Friday (New York: Random House, 1964) with an introduction by Duncan Norton Taylor and Esther Chambers (reviews in TIME and New York Review of Books, National Review)
* Can You Hear Their Voices? (Poughkeepsie: Experimental Theatre of Vassar College (1931), edited by Hallie Ferguson Flanagan Davis

Writings online by Chambers

Witness

* On the Hiss Case from C-SPAN
* "Forward in the Form of a Letter to My Children" at Columbia University
* "Forward in the Form of a Letter to My Children" at the Law School of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
* "Our farm is our home. It is our altar." from Cold Friday

Other

* "Big Sister is Watching You" Reprint of December 28, 1957 review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in National Review ([20])
* The Nation John Leonard review cites "Forward" in opening paragraph

Books translated by Chambers

Having learned German as a child, Chambers relied on translation work to see him through lean times, including the period following his defection. His most enduring translation is of Felix Salten's Bambi, undertaken in 1927 while he was also editing the Daily Worker. He also translated Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel.
* Mann, Heinrich. Mother Mary (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1928).
* Werfel, Franz. Class Reunion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929).
* Salten, Felix. Bambi, A Life in the Woods (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929), foreword by John Galsworthy.
* Salten, Felix. Fifteen Rabbits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930).
* Bonsels, Waldemar. The Adventures of Mario (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930).
* Edschmid, Kasimir. The Passionate Rebel, the Life of Lord Byron (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930).
* Tralow, Johannes. Cards and Kings (New York: R. Long and R. R. Smith, 1931).
* Noder, Anton. Venetian Lover, the Romance of Giorgione (New York: R. Long and R. R. Smith, 1931).
* Salten, Felix. Samson and Delilah (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931).
* Weirauch, Anna Elisabet. Scorpion (New York: Greenberg, 1933).
* Salten, Felix. The City Jungle (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1932).
* Regler, Gustav. Great Crusade (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1940), with a preface by Ernest Hemingway, translated with Barrows Mussey.
* Weirauch, Anna Elisabet. The Scorpion (New York: Willey Book Co., 1948), revised edition.

Collections of Chambers' writing

William F. Buckley, Jr. and others have published collections of writings by Whittaker Chambers: none of these collections were published with the consent of the Chambers family.
* Buckley, William F., Jr. Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961 (New York: Putnam, 1969/1970) (review in TIME)
* de Toledano, Ralph. Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Letters, 1949-1960 (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishers, 1997).
* Teachout, Terry. Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959 (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1989).

Video on Chambers (TV, Film)

C-SPAN American Writers on Whittaker Chambers

Episode first aired May 22, 2002:
* full episode (05:22:00)
* Bruce Craig (00:01:55)
* Tony Hiss (00:34:00)
* Sam Tanenhaus at Manhattan Institute (00:57:00)
* Sam Tanenhaus on Booknotes, Part I
* Sam Tanenhaus on Booknotes, Part II

Audio on Chambers (Radio and Files)

* MP3 Whittaker Chambers "close friends" (good quality)
* RAM radio excerpts from hearings with Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss
* MP3 "Leadership in Liberal Arts" by Josiah Bunting, includes Whittaker Chambers (2003)
* Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers Learn Out Loud (ISI)
* WPR "Communism & The Cold War"

Caricatures of Chambers

* Whittaker Chambers on C-SPAN's American Writers series
* Whittaker Chambers by David Levine for NYRB 1997
* Whittaker Chambers by David Levine for NYRB 1964

Photos of Chambers' homes

* Lynbrook House
* "Front Place" of the Pipe Creek Farm (C-SPAN)
* "Front Place" of the Pipe Creek Farm (National Historic Register)
* Barn on Pipe Creek Farm

Books on the Hiss-Chambers Case

* 1950: Ralph de Toledano, Seeds of Treason
* 1950: Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial
* 1950: Jean Francois Chastellain, Espionnage soviÃ©tique aux Etats-Unis, l'affaire Alger Hiss & Cie
* 1952: Whittaker Chambers, Witness
* 1953: William Allen Jowitt, The Strange case of Alger Hiss
* 1955: Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time
* 1957: Alger Hiss, In the Court of Public Opinion
* 1958: Fred J. Cook, The Unfinished story of Alger Hiss
* 1962: Bert Andrews, Peter Andrews, Tragedy of History
* 1967: Richard Brandon Morris, Fair trial
* 1967: Meyer A. Zeligs, Friendship and Fratricide
* 1968: Ronald Seth, Sleeping Truth
* 1976: John Chabot Smith, Alger Hiss
* 1977: Tony Hiss, Laughing Last
* 1978: Allen Weinstein, Perjury (review in TIME)
* 1979: Morton Levitt, Michael Levitt, Tissue of Lies
* 1982: Athan G. Theoharis (editor), Beyond the Hiss Case
* 1983: William A. Reuben, Footnote on an Historic Case
* 1987: William Howeard Moore, Two Foolish Men
* 1987: Thomas F. Murphy, Thomas Murphy's cross-examination of Dr. Carl A. Binger in U.S. vs. Alger Hiss
* 1988: Alger Hiss, Recollections of a Life
* 1993: Beatrice Gwynn, Whittaker Chambers
* 1993: Esme J. Worth: Whittaker Chambers
* 1993: Doreen Rappaport, Alger Hiss Trial
* 1996: Bob Oeste, Last Pumpkin Paper (novel)
* 1997: Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers (review in New York Times)
* 2000: Tony Hiss, View from Alger's Window
* 2001: Brian Lamb: Booknotes: Stories from American History
* 2001: Karen Alonso, Alger Hiss Communist Spy Trial
* 2002: Kathryn S. Olmsted, [https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol47no2_2003/article08.html Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley]
* 2003: Patrick Swan (editor), Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul
* 2004 (reprint): Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time
* 2004: G. Edward White, Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars [https://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/vol48no4/Alger_Hiss.html]
* 2005: T. Michael Ruddy, Alger Hiss Espionage Case

Sources

* The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s by Alan Wald (see Alan Wald website)
* C-SPAN Writings of Whittaker Chambers (2002)
* TIME magazine articles with "Whittaker Chambers"
* Review of Cold Friday in TIME magazine
* "Whittaker Chambers, a biography" by Ann Douglas (review with historical overview)
* New York Times list of espionage stories and Whittaker Chambers
* "The Truest Believer" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
* New York Times obit for Alger Hiss of 1992 - includes review of Hiss-Chambers Case
* New York Times "Whittaker Chambers" mentioned, 1928-1980 (over 800 hits)
* New York Times "Whittaker Chambers" mentioned, 1981-present (over 200 hits)
* Encyclopedia Britannica
* Columbia Encyclopedia
* New York Times articles on Whittaker Chambers
* The Hiss-Chambers Case reviewed at the Law School of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
* handy bibliography of books on Hiss-Chambers Case at the Law School of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
* Truman Presidential Library
* Whittaker Chambers: A Centenary Reflection
* Heritage Foundation
* National Review Witness and Friends by William F. Buckley, Jr.
* Salon.com
* NNDB
* Lynbrook History: Whittaker Chambers
* The New Criterion: Whittaker Chambers: The Judgment of History
* Adolf Berle notes "Underground Espionage Agent" (1939), reprinted in the Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments, 6 May 1953, part 6, 329â€"330; FBI Summary Report, 11 May 1949, pgs. 225-234.
* The Alger Hiss Case: The Real Trial of the Century
* Quotes on ThinkExist
* Quotes on BrainyQuote
* Hiss Case on MS Encarta
* Biography MS
* "The Case of Cases" in The New York Review of Books
* Disloyalty As a Principle: Why Communists Spied by American Foreign Service Association (AFSA)
* Learning Pack The Hiss-Chambers Case by The Nation
* Jon Wiener " The Archives and Allen Weinstein," The Nation 2004
* Ellen Schrecker "The Spies Who Loved Us, The Nation 1999
* Elinor Langer "The Great Pumpkin (review of Sam Tanenhaus biography)," The Nation 1997
*Victor Navasky "Allen Weinstein's Docudrama, The Nation 1997
* John Leonard "Allen Ginsberg obit," The Nation 1997 (Leonard's recollection of Chambers on Ginsberg)
* Ann Coulter "Lie Down with Strippers, Wake Up With Pleas" (2006)

Sources on Venona

* Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "In the Enemy's House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence," presented at the 2005 Symposium on Cryptologic History (October 27, 2005)
* National Security Agency (NSA) Introductory History of VENONA and Guide to the Translations
* National Security Agency (NSA) The Venona Story
* [https://www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/preface.htm Central Intelligence Agency] (CIA) Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957
* [https://www.cia.gov/csi/books/venona/chron.htm Central Intelligence Agency] (CIA) Venona Chronology
* Venona (Yale University Press 2000)
* ''Venona Secrets (Regnery Press 2000)
* Stanford University Venona
* University of Michigan T. M. Sanders' personal pages on Venona Chronology

Whittaker Chambers: Encyclopedia BETA

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