#Who was alger hiss update
#Who was alger hiss trial

Could these ex-Soviet agents be believed? Had Communist subversion reached into the Roosevelt White House? And so the scene was set for the divisive McCarthy era and the “Red Scare” of the mid-1950s. Understandably, the American public was shocked. Soon, another ex-Soviet spy, Whitaker Chambers (then an editor at Time Magazine ) would be debriefed by the FBI and add his own names to Bentley’s list, including Alger Hiss and his brother. Many, like Hiss, were Washington insiders, high ranking officials in the State Department, Treasury, and even the White House. Spy fever, it was called, especially after the “Red Spy Queen” Elizabeth Bentley went to the FBI in 1945 and named nearly 150 agents working for the Soviet Union, 37 of them in the federal government, including Alger Hiss.

While on the home front, and quite suddenly-or so it seemed at the time-congressional inquiries and headline grabbing confessions of ex-Soviet spies were turning up KGB agents everywhere. The Soviet Union, recently an ally in the Second World War, was increasingly viewed as a threat with Stalin’s imposition of the Iron Curtain and acquisition of an atomic bomb.

#Who was alger hiss update

Later parts of this same section present Hiss’s lifelong effort to clear his name, and give an update on what’s happened since his death in 1996 – since the process of vindication outlived Hiss and remains ongoing.How difficult it seems, gazing back just seventy years to the late 1940s and 50s, to truly appreciate what a confusing and fraught era it was for our grandparents. The details of the case, from Chambers’s first public accusation before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in August 1948 to Hiss’s conviction in January 1950, are discussed in the first part of this section of the website. Under his presidency, Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss’s accuser, was officially given heroic status: Chambers was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and his Maryland farm (where he had once concealed the “Pumpkin Papers” films) was made a National Historic Landmark. Because of the Hiss case, Ronald Reagan turned his back on New Deal liberalism, embraced conservative views, and, after entering politics, became president in 1980.

Nixon, then an unknown, first-term congressman from California, became nationally famous for his pursuit of Alger Hiss, and 20 years later, in 1968, was elected president.

#Who was alger hiss trial

Newspapers of the time routinely called it “the trial of the century.” Richard M. Alger Hiss – that made front-page headlines year after year in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Richard Nixon examines a Pumpkin Papers filmstrip for the press.Īs a historical subject, the Hiss case is a fast-receding, mid-20th-century federal criminal case – a perjury indictment known officially as The United States of America v.

For still others – some of them Hiss supporters some of them detractors – the Hiss case has not yet receded into history, and, decades after the end of the Cold War, remains a still-living, unresolved, and now 21st-century event that continues to arouse intense interest, stir passionate debate, and exert its influence on national policy. Other people these days are not quite sure if they have ever heard of Alger Hiss. Some people who are old enough still remember the case, with its swirling charges of treason, lies, and Soviet espionage, as a watershed event in post-World War II America that, because it directly and immediately gave rise to McCarthyism, dramatically changed the course of thousands of American lives and the ways in which additional millions of Americans thought about the world. The Hiss case has maintained a persistent, restless, troubling presence in modern American history, straddling past and present as a piece of stubbornly unfinished business. Alger Hiss examines photos of Whittaker Chambers at a televised HUAC hearing on August 25, 1948.