Alger Hiss was born to Charles Alger Hiss and Mary Lavinia Hughes on November 11, 1904 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the fourth child out of five children. On April 7, 1907, Charles Alger Hiss, an executive with a dry goods firm, committed suicide. Charles’ suicide left Mary and her sister to raise Alger Hiss and his siblings, with the help of other family members as well. In 1922, Hiss attended Johns Hopkins University, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in June1926. He then attended Harvard Law School in September of 1926, graduating in 1929. In September 1929, Alger Hiss began working as a law clerk for United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. On December 11, 1929, Alger Hiss married Priscilla Harriet Fansler Hobson who had a three-year old son, Timothy Hobson from her previous marriage. In October 1930, after completing a one-year appointment as Holmes’ secretary, Hiss joined the law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston, Massachusetts.
In 1933, Hiss joined the legal staff of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration as a lawyer. According to Whittaker Chambers and others in the know, Mr. Hiss became a member of Harold Ware’s Communist underground cell in 1934. Around August/September of 1934, Mr. Hiss was introduced to Mr. Chambers (Carl was the name Whittaker used). Alger Hiss was appointed many positions within Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Administration, and in 1936 Mr. Hiss left his job at the Justice Department becoming the Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre. Also in 1936, Mr. Hiss and Mr. Chambers friendship came to an end, and in December of 1938, Mr. Chambers supposedly failed to convince Mr. Hiss to leave the Communist Party. In May of 1942, Mr. Chambers was interviewed by the FBI and he identified Alger Hiss as a Communist, but the FBI did nothing about it then. In May of 1944, Alger Hiss became apart of the State Department’s Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, which was a policy making office concentrating on postwar planning for international organizations. In 1945, the FBI interviewed Mr. Chambers again, and taps Mr. Hiss’ phones based on new information they received. On March 25, 1946, Mr. Hiss denied any connection with the Communist Party to a top aide of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. On March 30, 1945 a USSR cable (VENONA Cable) was sent that identifies Alger Hiss as “ALES,” a Soviet agent. On February 1, 1947, Mr. Hiss left the State Department for a job as president of the Carnegie Endowment. On June 2, 1947, Mr. Hiss was interrogated by two FBI agents and he signed a statement that said he did not know a man by the name of Whittaker Chambers.
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in Washington D.C. in response to a subpoena. Mr. Chambers testified that he was a former member of the Communist Party in the United States, where he received and photographed secret government documents and passed the film to the USSR. Mr. Chambers was an active member of a Communist group within Washington D.C. from 1934 to 1938. By this time Mr. Chambers had not engaged in communism for at least ten years, and now had a job as an editor for “Time Magazine.” Mr. Chambers described the purpose of this Communist group was to infiltrate the members of the group into responsible government positions, with an ultimate goal of espionage. In addition, Mr. Chambers testified that Alger Hiss was also a Communist while in federal service, accusing him of being a spy for the USSR. On August 5, 1948, Alger Hiss appeared before the HUAC and denied the charges made against him by Whittaker. In addition, Richard Nixon who was a Congressman during this hearing was appointed head of the subcommittee after the hearing. On August 7, 1948 Nixon’s subcommittee further questioned Mr. Chambers, and he went in depth with detailing of his relationship with Mr. Hiss between 1934 and 1938. On August 16, 1948 Alger Hiss came before the HUAC and testified that he remembered a man who went by the name Carl (Chambers admitted to this being an undercover name of his) who stayed at his house, and how he wanted to meet with Mr. Chambers in person to be able to properly identify him as George Crosley, a guy he associated with. On August 17, 1948 they met at the Commodore Hotel in New York, and Mr. Hiss identified Mr. Chambers as George Crosley. On August 25, 1948, a live television broadcast of Mr. Hiss and Mr. Chambers HUAC hearing took place where Mr. Hiss questioned Mr. Chambers about leasing his apartment to him and giving Mr. Chambers a car.
On September 28, 1948, Mr. Hiss filed a lawsuit for defamation of character against Mr. Chambers. On November 5, 1948, Mr. Chambers revealed that Mr. Hiss passed along to him secret documents of the State Department. This was the first time that Mr. Chambers had brought this to the court’s attention. Mr. Chambers later brought in proof on November 14, and 17 of 1948, he had forty-three typed and four handwritten memoranda documents as well as undeveloped micro-film to prove that he and Mr. Hiss were involved with espionage between January and April of 1938. On December 2, 1948, Mr. Chambers removed cans of undeveloped micro-film which came from out of hollow pumpkins given to him by Mr. Hiss. On December 15, 1948, Mr. Hiss denied ever giving Mr. Chambers any documents and denied having seeing him after January 1, 1937. Alger Hiss argued the documents were fakes or came from someone other than him. By April 1949, the “Woodstock” typewriter presumed to be the one the “pumpkin papers” were typed on was found, and Alger Hiss was indicted for perjury. He was indicted only on perjury, because the three-year statute of limitations for espionage had run out for the crime committed in 1937.
On May 31, 1949, Alger Hiss’ first trial started and it lasted for six weeks. During this trial Mr. Chambers accused Mr. Hiss of bringing the original documents home and returning them back to work, but not before Mrs. Hiss of retyped them on their “Woodstock” and gave the copies to Mr. Chambers, who had them photographed for the USSR. The typewriter was essential to the case, and it seems so was the statement from the maid who once worked for the Hiss’. The Hiss’ had given the maid the “Woodstock,” but the maid nor her son could testify to the exact date they received it. Since a time frame for the gift was needed to prove whether or not the Hiss’ had possession of the “Woodstock,” the fact that the maid could not recall when she received the gift it made it harder to place the “Woodstock” in the Hiss’ possession during January-April of 1937. The first trial of Alger Hiss ended with a hung jury, eight out of twelve jurors voted to convict Mr. Hiss.
Alger Hiss was put on trial a second time, which started on November 17, 1949 and lasted nine weeks. On January 21, 1950 the jury found Alger Hiss guilty on two counts of perjury, and he was sentenced to five years in prison on January 25, 1950. Alger Hiss appealed the trial court’s decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for New York.   Beer, Richards, Lane & Haller, New York City (Robert M. Benjamin Harold Rosenwald, Chester T. Lane, and Kenneth Simon, New York City, of counsel), for appellant Alger Hiss, and Irving H. Saypol, U.S. Atty., for the Southern District of New York, New York City (Clark S. Ryan, Sp. Asst. to U.S. Atty., New York City, Thomas J. Donegan, Sp. Asst. to Atty. Gen., of counsel), for the United States. On December 7, 1950, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for New York affirmed the decision of the lower district court, they held that there was sufficient evidence to establish the prosecuting witnesses testimony and to sustain the appellant conviction. Alger Hiss then requested a writ of certiorari, it was rejected four to two on March 12, 1951. On March 22, 1951, Mr. Hiss began his five year sentence, and was later released in 1954 after serving three years and eight months in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
On July 9, 1961, Whittaker Chambers died of a heart attack. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States, and became involved in the Watergate scandal. In 1978, Alger Hiss petitioned for a writ of coram nobis, asking the court to overturn his 1950 conviction. In 1982, his petition was rejected by District Judge Richard Owen. In 1994, Richard Nixon died. In 1996, the “VENONA” cables/documents revealed “ALES” to be Alger Hiss who was an underground communist since 1935, and someone who had gone from Yalta to Moscow, which Mr. Hiss did in 1945. On November 15, 1996 Alger Hiss died in New York at age ninety-two.
If this case was before a court today, I believe a lot of things would have been handled differently. Especially a televised broadcast of the hearing, as well as the FBI stepping in much sooner than they did. I believe that Hiss was guilty of perjury, and he may have also been guilty of espionage. Modern technology may have changed the outcome of the case, because no one uses typewriters anymore, so the “Woodstock” would have not been essential today as it was then, so it might have made it harder to tie him to the typed documents. I believe a modern jury would have reacted the same way, there is no doubt in my mind that they wouldn’t convict him on perjury. Alger Hiss’ story wasn’t tight enough, he wasn’t believable when he claimed to not know Whittaker as Whittaker or that their relationship ended. Alger’s story just didn’t seem to fully add up to me.
Works Cited
Linder, Douglas O. “Alger Hiss Trials (1949-1950)” Famous Trials.      Â
   2012.  University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Law.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm
Noe, Denise “The Alger Hiss Case” Crime Library: Criminal Minds &
   Methods.  2012. Turner Entertainment Networks, Inc. A Time Warner
Company. Â Â http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/terrorists_spies/spies/hiss/1.html
“Who was Alger Hiss?” The Alger Hiss Story.  Â
