Alger Hiss Trial

Question 1

Whittaker Chambers

Answer 1

• Senior editor at Time Magazine
• Former member of the Communist party USA
• Called before HUAC in 1948
• Asked to expose in government
• Tells what he knows about the “infiltration of the US government by communists”
• Says he and hiss were close friends in the 30s
• Chambers and his wife regularly visited Hiss ad his wife Priscilla in the home
• Says he tried to get Hiss to leave but he didn’t want to
• troubled childhood
• drops out of Columbia U after controversy
• attracted to communism
• saw his parents problems stemming from anxieties capitalism causes in the middle class
• becomes a reporter from the DAILY WORKER
• meets wife ester in 1926
• recruited as soviet spy, carried documents from spies in US government to soviet agencies
• but increasingly disillusioned. Renounces communism in 1938
• in return for immunity fro prosecution he tells official the 18 names of current or former communists in the government. List ignored until after war.
• Main witness for prosecution
o Testifies that Hiss took state department documents home, retyped them, passed them to chambers
o Defense tries to discredit chambers by talking about his unfavorable past

Question 2

Alger Hiss

Answer 2

• Prominent former state departments official from Baltimore, aide to FDR
• Johns Hopkins, Harvard law school
• Law clerk to Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “I do not know Mr. Chambers and, so far as I am aware, have never laid eyes on him”
• grew up in b more
• given prominent roles during WW2
• Hiss put on trial for perjury
• Statute of limitations for espionage was 5 yrs
• December 1948, a grand jury indicts him on two counts of perjury
• Trial opens May 31, 1949

Question 3

Richard Nixon

Answer 3

Congressman
• member of HUAC
• was not impressed with Hiss’s testimony
• calls him condescending and insulting

Question 4

Spanish civil war

Answer 4

• Fascists (led by Francisco Franco) vs. democratically elected socialists
• Lincoln brigade in Spanish Civil War (1936)
(1936 – 1939)

Question 5

The Red Scare

Answer 5

(1919)
• Third international (1919)
• 3,600 strikes in the US that year

Question 6

Palmer raids

Answer 6

• Nov 1919- Jan 1920

o 10,000 arrested

Question 7

Whitney v. California (1927)

Answer 7

(1927)
• 9-0 decision (w/ famous concurrence by Brandeis and Holmes)
• technical ruling that no federal issues raised
• danger must be so immnent no chance to discuss ideas

Question 8

Josef Stalin

Answer 8

~ becomes uncontrollable killer
• Stalin’s purge trials
• 10s of thousands former Bolsheviks, intellectuals and others executed, and almost 14 million more die in gulags.

Question 9

Nazi- soviet Non- aggression pact (august 1939)

Answer 9

Stalin and Hitler work together

Question 10

Yalta conference

Answer 10

• leaders negotiating what a post war Europe will look like
• stalin wants to dismember Germany, reparations
• FDR wants UN
• stalin takes hard line in Poland

Question 11

Judge Samuel Kaufman

Answer 11

• Issued a number of rulings favorable to the defense
• Including barring testimony of a female Soviet double agent who says she met Hiss at a cell meeting in a private home in 1935
o Kaufman rules testimony irrelevant

Question 12

Hede Messing

Answer 12

• prosecution has one major new witness
• former soviet agent
• says she met Hiss at communist meeting in 35
• says she argues with Hiss

Question 13

Dalton Trumbo

Answer 13

• After being blacklisted, writes dozens of scripts under pseudonyms

Question 14

Elia Kazan

Answer 14

director
testifies before HUAC in 1952
• Names 8 former friends from the Group theater in NY as communists
• On the waterfront
• Former friend Arthur Miller breaks with Kazan and writes the Crucible play (1953).

Question 15

Smith act (1940)

Answer 15

(1940)
• Used against both fascists and communists
• You could criminally convict anyone who attempts in any way to

Question 16

Dennis v. United States

Answer 16

(1951)
• In 1948, justice department charges and convicted 11 communist party members
• Supreme court upholds the convictions saying the government has the right to protect itself against revolution and did not need to wait until preparations reached the point of rebellion.
• One ironic result: decision will actually provide some protection for HUAC witnesses, because testimony could be :link in chain: to prosecution under the smith act
• Appeals court will allow congressional witnesses to “plead the 5th”

Question 17

Eisenhower’s executive order 10450

Answer 17

• Fire all government employees who are gay or show any type of suspicious and deviant behavior.

Question 18

5th amendment communists

Answer 18

• sen. Joe McCarthy:

o a witness who pleads the 5th is a communist.

Question 19

Senator Joseph McCarthy

Answer 19

• Senate committee on government operations

* Truman’s administration’s failure to check the rise of global communism..

Question 20

Army McCarthy hearings

Answer 20

(1954)
• McCarthy and his assistant Roy Cohn claim to have 130 names of communists in the US army.
• Hearings on TV for 1888 hours over 36 days in April and June 1954

Question 21

The cold war

Answer 21

• Includes growing demand for finding and punishing communists at home and abroad

Question 22

Mao Zedong

Answer 22

(communists)
• War communists win
• China going communists