At noon on Monday, August 2, 1948, a 47-year-old senior editor for Time magazine named Whittaker Chambers boarded a train in New York that was headed for Washington. Chambers was terrified. Two days earlier, he had been issued a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee: He was being called to testify about communist infiltration into the United States government. What happened next would alter United States history and become a touchstone for people who defend freedom.
Next year, I am hoping to host an Anti-Communist Film Festival in D.C., and one of the things we will discuss is the legacy of Whittaker Chambers. I also hope to inspire a talented filmmaker to make a film about Chambers. The Anti-Communist Film Festival is not only about revising classic films like I Was a Communist for the FBI. It’s about making new ones. The festival should be an annual event that helps inoculate people against the false god of Marxism.
It’s astonishing that Whittaker Chambers has never been depicted on screen. Or maybe not that surprising. The story of Whittaker Chambers and communism is not one that the left wants to be reminded about. A film about him would be a massive blow for freedom. The story of Chambers is the big bang that produced our modern culture war.
Whittaker Chambers had been a communist and a spy, but had left the party in 1938. His faith in communism had been total when he joined. He had dropped out of Columbia University to join the party in 1925, and his defection had been a personally wrenching decision. It had also been dangerous. Chambers was sure he had barely escaped communism with his life, and the idea of reliving all of that in Washington caused him to panic. Chambers was met at Union Station in Washington by Frank McNaughton, a congressional correspondent for the New York Times. McNaughton had offered to let Chambers stay in his house in Maryland, just over the district line. When they had spoken on the phone, Chambers had mentioned Walter Krivinsky, a communist who had defected and been found dead in a Washington hotel room.
Once in Washington, Chambers became too agitated to rest. He paced the floor in McNaughton’s house and kept taking glances out the front window. He tried to type out his statement to HUAC, but was too nervous to type, and McNaughton had to do it for him. The two men finally went to bed at 2 am, but after five minutes, Chambers appeared in McNaughton’s doorway and asked him to lock all the windows and doors. McNaughton finally told Chambers that he, McNaughton, had a pistol and that he would stay up and keep watch in the living room while Chambers slept.
Chambers did testify, revealing that there was indeed communist infiltration in the United States government. He specifically named a high-ranking government official named Alger Hiss as a communist and a spy. In 1952, Chambers published Witness, a classic not only of anti-communism but of spirituality. Ronald Reagan was converted to conservatism after reading Witness. Although purposely ignored on college campuses by liberal professors, Witness, a book that is equal parts espionage thriller, American history, Shakespearean tragedy, and religious text on the soul of man, still has a transformative effect on many who read it for the first time. It has been declared a classic of Western literature, worthy to be mentioned in the same sentence as St. Augustine, Goethe’s Faust, and Dante.
With time, the warnings of Witness have only gained power. When contemplating why his witness against communism caused such wide and deep ramifications through American society and culture, Chambers wrote this: “The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades. ...[T]hough I knew it existed, I still had no adequate idea of its extent, the depth of its penetration or the fierce vindictiveness of its revolutionary temper, which is a reflex of its struggle to keep and advance its political power.”
On August 3 at 9:15, Chambers and McNaughton took a cab to Capitol Hill. When they got to the Cannon office building, the press was there waiting. Chambers was brought into the office of Congressman Robert Stripling, HUAC’s chief investigator. Other congressmen were present, including Richard Nixon, a young congressman from California. Chambers was brought into a hearing room and sworn in. He testified that in the 1930s he had been a part of a communist cell in Washington. Then he named some of the other members of the group: Nathan Witt, an attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, John Abt, a lawyer in the AAA, Lee Pressman, a labor lawyer, Victor Perlo, an economist for the government during the 1930s, Alger Hiss and his brother Donald, economist Charles Kramer, and government official Henry Collins.
One of the most explosive names on that list was Alger Hiss. Hiss was a prominent government official at the State Department, a man with a seemingly flawless past. Born and raised in Baltimore, Hiss had been a clerk under Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In May 1933, he was brought to Washington to be part of the first Hundred Days of the New Deal. He served in the Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA) and then joined the State Department in 1936, where he remained for ten years. Hiss had been at Yalta with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and had been an important figure in the founding of the United Nations.
The committee decided to move the proceedings to a bigger hearing room to accommodate the growing crowds of press and onlookers. Chambers, Stripling, McNaughton, and the crowd started to cross New Jersey Avenue, headed towards the New Office (now Longhorn Building) and its larger hearing room.
As they crossed, Chambers noticed a face in the crowd - a communist he had known in the 1930s. He hustled into the building and asked McNaughton to sit between him and the man Chambers had seen in the crowd.
Chambers began his testimony by saying that his allegations were not new. In 1939, “almost exactly” nine years ago, Chambers had gone to a member of FDR’s administration to reveal the communist threat. Nothing had been done. Chambers then gave a brief summary of his own experience with communism. As a young man, he had become “convinced that the society in which we live, western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism.” He had found the answer in communism:
It is ten years since I broke away from the Communist Party. During the decade I have sought to live an industrious and God-fearing life. At the same time I have fought communism by act and written word. I am proud to appear before this committee.
At that point Chambers’s voice broke. He regained his composure and continued.
The publicity inseparable from such testimony has darkened, and will no doubt continue to darken, my effort to integrate myself into the community of free men. But that is a small price to pay if my testimony helps to make Americans recognize at last that they are at grips with a secret, sinister, and enormously powerful force whose tireless purpose is their enslavement.
At the same time ,I should like, thus publicly, to call upon all ex-Communists who have not yet declared themselves, and all men within the Communist Party whose better instincts have not yet been corrupted and crushed by it, to aid in this struggle while there is still time to do so.
Note: You can contribute support for the festival by donating at the GoFundMe page for the project.
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