'With It Our Lives Were Changed Forever'

When we confidently say that “people don’t change,” we are wrong. Most people on most occasions don’t change in fundamental ways. Inertia and rationalization are powerful, seldom recognized forces in history and our personal histories. 

Some extraordinary men and women have made dramatic changes in their lives, often moral or spiritual, but so have utterly ordinary people. By conventional standards, Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) appeared to be a caricature of ordinariness – fat, frowning, indifferently dressed, the opposite of his legal and philosophical opponent, the smooth and shiny Alger Hiss. Numerous acquaintances described Chambers’ appearance and manner as “Dostoevskian.” Yet he went from being a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union to being an American patriot, a courageous witness against Hiss, a prophet and first-rate writer, while Hiss remained a lifelong liar. Chambers begins his memoir, Witness (1952), with a twenty-one-page “Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children”:

 

“Then, on August 3, 1948, you learned for the first time that your father had once been a Communist, that he had worked in something called ‘the underground,’ that it was shameful, and that for some reason he was in Washington telling the world about it. While he was in the underground, he testified, he had worked with a number of other Communists. One of them was a man with the odd name of Alger Hiss. Later, Alger Hiss denied the allegation. Thus the Great Case began, and with it our lives were changed forever.”

 

On that date, Chambers appeared under subpoena before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee and testified about his work in the nineteen-thirties in the Soviet spy network. He served as a courier between his Soviet handlers and a network of federal officials, including Hiss, who worked in the State Department. In December 1948, Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury. Statutes of limitations for espionage had expired. His first trial ended in a hung jury. In a second trial, Hiss was convicted in January 1950 and sentenced to five years in prison on each of both counts, to run concurrently. He served three years and eight months in Lewisburg Federal Prison.

 

Chambers, as he expected, was pilloried by the Left, and no doubt some still proclaim his treachery and Hiss’ innocence. Chambers, who became a Quaker, always insisted his witness was about more than an espionage case. He intended the title of his memoir to be understood in both the legal and religious senses. In the forward addressed to his son and daughter, Chambers writes:

 

“Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. But its view of God, its knowledge of God, its experience of God, is what alone gives character to a society or a nation, and meaning to its destiny. Its culture, the voice of this character, is merely that view, knowledge, experience, of God, fixed by its most intense spirits in terms intelligible to the mass of men. There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God, and died.”

 

While still a writer and editor for Time magazine, Chambers reviewed Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason in the December 8, 1947 issue (collected in Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers 1931-1959; ed. Terry Teachout, Regnery Gateway, 1989). Here is the conclusion of the review, “Circles of Perdition,” featured on the cover:

 

“For all her warmth of heart and incandescence of mind, she is seldom averse to a good brawl. She listens, calmly poised for pouncing, when she is called a Fascist, a Communist, an anti-Semite, though she is none of those things. The root of the misunderstanding is that in a world racked by partisan passion, which more & more insists on viewing men in black & white, as caricatures of good or evil, she finds them blends of both. Her view asserts the faith that what distinguishes men, not so much from the brutes as from their more habitual selves, is the fact that however tirelessly they pursue evil, their inveterate aspiration, invariable even in depravity, is never for anything else but for the good.

 

“This faith Rebecca West tries to express with a tonality equal to its meaning. Thus, in a prosy age, her style strives continually toward a condition of poetry, and comes to rest in a rhetoric that, at its best, is one of the most personal and eloquent idioms of our time.”

 

In turn, West published a not wholly approving review of Witness in the June 1952 issue of The Atlantic (collected in Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul; ed. Patrick Swan, ISI Books, 2003). She concludes her review:

 

“Perhaps the best way of understanding Whittaker Chambers would be to turn back to the records of the Dreyfus case, and try to imagine what it would have been like had the witness who exposed the Army conspiracy been not the straightforward soldier, Colonel Picquart, but Charles Péguy, the Christian poet and philosopher who was Dreyfus’s greatest literary defender, and whose relationship with the Roman Catholic Church showed the same inconsistency as Whittaker Chambers’s relationship to the Society of Friends. The spectators would often have been greatly perplexed.”

 

Witness is arguably the finest memoir written by an American. It’s only rival, Speak, Memory, was the work of another writer with painful, first-hand experience of Communism – Vladimir Nabokov. Along with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Witness makes 1952 an annus mirabilis in American literature.