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Alger Hiss and the Battle for History

(Icons of America)

Susan Jacoby

3.14 · Rating details · 77 ratings · 16 reviews

A tough, evenhanded investigation of changing public perceptions of the Alger Hiss case and why it has served as a litmus test of American political loyalties for sixty years

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers’s shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in ...more

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Hardcover, 256 pages

Published March 1st 2009 by Yale University Press (first published January 1st 2009)

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Apr 24, 2009 Eric_W rated it really liked it

Does anyone under the age of seventy really care any more about Alger Hiss? Even Susan Jacoby's mother asked, "Who the hell cares about that anymore?" Jacoby's goal was to show how the arguments and debates over Hiss's guilt continue to play out in our politics in different forms. What we see today is simply a continuation of the besmirchment of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt by the Right and an attempt to defend them by the Left. That was precisely the symbolism behind the Alger Hiss case. Does anyone under the age of seventy really care any more about Alger Hiss? Even Susan Jacoby's mother asked, "Who the hell cares about that anymore?" Jacoby's goal was to show how the arguments and debates over Hiss's guilt continue to play out in our politics in different forms. What we see today is simply a continuation of the besmirchment of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt by the Right and an attempt to defend them by the Left. That was precisely the symbolism behind the Alger Hiss case. The Left was attempting to defend the New Deal and obfuscate its flirtation with Communism in the thirties, while the Right was attacking the New Deal and hiding its own flirtation with Naziism and isolationism of the twenties and thirties by labeling FDR's attempt to save capitalism as communistic.

She decided to write the book after watching a pathetic spectacle. At a conference on Hiss in 2007, she watched his stepson, who was in his nineties, valiantly trying to deny that his step-father had ever met Chambers because he, a little boy at the time, never saw him in the house. The idea that an eight-year-old could remember who was in the house at a particular time was emblematic of the irrationality of the Left; but the Right had its own irrationality.

Jacoby, herself is absolutely convinced Hiss lied -- she cites Weinstein's Perjury as providing conclusive proof, but she's only 98% convinced Hiss was a spy. If he was for certain, his spy skills were childish. And there were really competent spies like George Koval who had been trained by the GRU and even worked on the Manhattan Project. But Hiss and his eastern establishment elitism had become symbolic of the New Deal which was under attack by the Right. Richard Nixon had hated Hiss and his background from the first day they met. Hiss had remarked how he had gone to Harvard and Nixon had gone to what was it? Whittier College? So even though Chambers was clearly a disreputable liar and Hiss a charming aristocrat, -- or perhaps because of that -- Nixon and HUAC had it in for him.

But her book is not really about the case but about the media and how it wrote about the case over the years.

In another of those wonderful ironies, after Hiss got out of prison, he got a job selling stationery. Salesmanship is sort of the iconic American profession where those who are the most successful are those who are best at telling people what they want to hear.

I listened also to an interview Jacoby had with Brian Lamb. He asked her about her time in Moscow where she had been a correspondent for the Washington Post while protests were going on in the United States about the Vietnam War.

But where I really became opposed to the Vietnam War was in Moscow. l lived in Moscow from 1969 to the end of 1971. I wrote my first two books on Russia when I came home from the material I gathered there. And I was there on the day that the shootings at Kent State University, which you know the famous iconic picture of the young girl over the fallen student there shot by the National Guard. It was of course on the front page of Izvestia ire Pravda that day.

And l had many Russian dissident friends who had an almost highly idealized view of the United States because the Soviet Union was so bad; the United States must be good. And the time l had, the question they asked was how you know when the thing we looked to for your country is that you allowed dissent. You don't kill dissenters. You don't put them in concentration camps. How do you reconcile that, my Russian dissident friends said, with this picture from Kent State?

First of all, they said - because they're so used to, they were so used to doctored pictures - is this real? And I said, yes, It real you know I've seen it on the wire. But at this point I began to think what kind of a damage to our reputation, our best ideals, the best things that people around the world think America stands for, this is yet another thing. And I think that's when I decisively turned against the Vietnam War, when I found it impossible to explain to Russians who had idealized America, how can we be shooting people for demonstrating against the Vietnam War?

How sad.

As to the lessons from Alger Hiss and Vietnam:

But l think that what happened in the .60s, even more than the Vietnam War obviously. Obviously you know two things happened in oOs of surpassing importance, the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war protest, followed quite swiftly by the Women's Movement. All of these things had to do with saying, well just because you're the government or just because you're the authorities, you don't know best.

And I think that -1 think unfortunately the Vietnam War has not had nearly as much of an impact as l would have thought it would have had because of the kind of historical amnesia that has characterized our country over the last four decades. And that begins a little bit in the 60's where the culture of celebrity begins to come in and people are getting all of their news from visual images which in one way is what turned people against the war. But I think of the late 60s as a time when begin the process of losing our attention span.

So I think in one way, I don't think if the lessons of the Vietnam War were learned, 1 don't think that Bush would have had so much overwhelming support early on for the Iraq War. So I'm not sure what a long-term effect the Vietnam War had on this country.

...more

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Feb 08, 2010 Nanette Bulebosh rated it really liked it

The McCarthy era continues to fascinate this reviewer. Maybe it's all the accusations hurled at our president charging that he is a communist, socialist AND a fascist leading our country to disaster (how anyone can be all three at the same time escapes me). That this should be happening 65 years after the height of the anti-communist fever, when access to accurate information has never been more widely available, is a remarkable thing. I started this book in an effort to become better informed a The McCarthy era continues to fascinate this reviewer. Maybe it's all the accusations hurled at our president charging that he is a communist, socialist AND a fascist leading our country to disaster (how anyone can be all three at the same time escapes me). That this should be happening 65 years after the height of the anti-communist fever, when access to accurate information has never been more widely available, is a remarkable thing. I started this book in an effort to become better informed about the history of this paranoia, and what drove the original accusers.

I've also long admired Susan Jacoby (loved her "Age of Unreason" and "Freethinkers: The Age of Secular Humanism."), so I thought this book would also be good.

It is. Unlike some liberals, Jacoby believes that Alger Hiss almost certainly WAS a Communist spy, although she says no one has proven this beyond a shadow of a doubt one way or the other. But this is not the focus of her book. What interests her more than whether or not one individual was a traitor is the extent to which this man's story has been hijacked by both the right AND the left to serve various political aims (hence the title, " the Battle for History.") She takes both sides to task.

Conservatives want to use the Alger Hiss story to make the case that Joe McCarthy and the HUAC folks were exactly right, that there WAS a conspiracy to infuse our government, universities, labor unions and entertainment venues with Stalinism, and that if the Reds succeeded we'd all be .... I'm not sure ... wearing heavy fur coats, standing in line for meagerly stocked grocery items, and not going to church, I guess. Of course, they feared much worse than this. Government control of the economy is a frightening notion for those who have succeeded under capitalism. It didn't work so well for the average citizen, either, by all (or at least most) accounts.

Liberals who believe that Hiss was innocent have used his trial, conviction (for perjury, not for having been a Communist) and jail sentence to show that he was just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans whose lives were ruined by unfair, over-blown, inaccurate, and downright un-American accusations by ambitious politicians (Nixon, anyone?) whose real intent was not stopping Communism so much as undermining the New Deal and reigning in labor unions, integration, and anything that smacked of class consciousness.

It's a thin little book, and an easy read for any history lover, especially one interested in this important era. ...more

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Mar 24, 2020 Vel Veeter rated it liked it

I am not a historian and so when I comment on the historological methods here, I am doing this as an amateur, or more as someone trained in a different methodology. But this not a history so much as a summary of other histories. On the one hand, there are some primary texts analyzed, but they are more so things like biographies and autobiographies of the concerned parties rather than more traditional kinds of historical documents.

I don’t know much about Alger Hiss except as a historical allusion ...more

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Sep 11, 2017 Cindy rated it liked it

Shelves: history

Interesting to read this book based on Jacoby's extensive research. We are contemporaries so I had somewhat the same questions about this whole episode in our nation's history. Jacoby reaches the conclusion that most conservatives have long held and most liberals now admit: Hiss was not only a member of the Communist Party but also passed (probably mundane) information to the Soviets. He was guilty of more than the charges for which he served time although he protested his innocence to his last. ...more

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Aug 28, 2018 Mike rated it liked it

Shelves: audio-books, history

Interesting how it relates the Cold War to today and how it emphasizes George Orwell's warning that people can only see the present and future through the perspective of what has come before. However some parts about Hiss and Chambers motivations were just as highly speculative as those of the commentators on tbe left and right the author criticizes. ...more

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Apr 08, 2021 Adam rated it it was ok

Meh. The author's personal axe-grinding was tedious (and sometimes entertaining). Some of the context was interesting, but the whole book boiled down to the last two pages and it wasn't worth the time spent on the rest. ...more

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Oct 19, 2017 Tom N rated it liked it

3.5 maybe. Just ok kind of drab.

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Mar 20, 2017 Rick Folker rated it really liked it

good info

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Aug 01, 2013 Scottnshana rated it really liked it

When societies are in trouble and people are angry, that's when the ideologies appear. You cannot, therefore, talk about the Great Depression without mentioning the appearance of Communism in America. You also cannot talk about ideology without discussing the types of charlatans and disgruntled misfits who become its zealots. There are no likeable characters in the Alger Hiss case--the defendant perjured himself on the stand and acted as if it was beneath him to account for his actions. We all k When societies are in trouble and people are angry, that's when the ideologies appear. You cannot, therefore, talk about the Great Depression without mentioning the appearance of Communism in America. You also cannot talk about ideology without discussing the types of charlatans and disgruntled misfits who become its zealots. There are no likeable characters in the Alger Hiss case--the defendant perjured himself on the stand and acted as if it was beneath him to account for his actions. We all know those people who gravitate toward power (and Alger Hiss was right up next to the pinnacle in Washington and Yalta) and not all of them end up on the right side of morality up there in the rarified air. Having read Ms. Jacoby's account of the Hiss Case, however, I can say Hiss's principal accuser is the least likeable character of all in this drama (and there were plenty of them associated with the HUAC Hearings). Whittaker Chambers was one of those personalities that doesn't seem to know its own identity, but declares itself something and tries to convince everyone in earshot that not only does it know what it is but that everyone else should get on the bus with it. The Hearings harnessed this personality's instability and identity crises for their own aims. Chambers, in short, was a zealot for whatever would get him noticed, and in the first chapter, Ms. Jacoby describes what he went through in the turbulent 1930s: "[F]or many American intellectuals (Chambers among them), communism served the same emotional needs that other religions do. And by the late thirties, retaining belief in the moral superiority and objective effectiveness of communism required something else characteristic of all traditional faiths: imperviousness to evidence. Yet there was another way in which communism resembled religion: the movement had its passionate fundamentalists and its cooler, more skeptical participants. Men like Chambers were the fundamentalist evangelicals of American Communism..." The Depression brought out the zealots, doubtless, but it also brought the New Deal, and the author makes it clear that the enduring controversy surrounding the Hiss case is about that landmark event in American history. At the time of the HUAC hearings, she writes, "most scholars agreed with 'consensus historians' like [Arthur] Schlesinger and Richard Hofstadter, who viewed the New Deal more as a series of brilliant improvisations than as a planned, consistent program for social and governmental change... in the hands of the political right today, the view of the New Deal as a centralized, intentional plan to remake American society lends itself to the contention that many New Dealers were really socialists or communists who wanted to remake the U.S. economy in an 'un-American' mold." It is, as the book's title states, a battle over the history of the New Deal and how those who grew up in it influenced the postwar world; it is also, however, about the types of people who completely shift from one worldview to its opposite and the dangers these people pose when they get any influence. I would recommend it to anyone with in interest in the Cold War, but also to those who study the societal rough spots in Twentieth Century America, to include Viet Nam, 9/11, and Watergate. ...more

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Jun 17, 2009 Matt rated it liked it

Pretty good, though this is a really really quick read. It's got large type, and it doesn't get too bogged down in minutia. Which, I should admit, I kind of missed. I understand this isn't an academic history, or not precisely, but I looked for a little more depth and density, more specifics and details and tiny pulls and levers of experience and effect. This book seems more interested in broad details and trends, which are interesting, and I guess you can't get into things too deeply when you'r ...more

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Jun 08, 2009 James rated it really liked it

Susan Jacoby, a former Washington Post reporter and now a keen observer of the American intellect and intelligencia, has examined the strange case of Alger Hiss and the hold that his perjury conviction nearly 60 years ago has had on the minds of the political elite for generations.

This slim volume doesn't examine the case itself. (She takes at as a given that Hiss was both a Communist and guilty of perjury.) Rather, she looks at the debate that it has engendered, and the schools of thought that ...more

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Jul 26, 2013 The American Conservative added it

'In Jacoby’s evaluation, it is a “98%” certainty that Hiss is guilty as charged, but her reaction is, essentially, so what?
“As a liberal,” she writes, “I must ask how Hiss’s guilt or innocence changes anything of fundamental importance about American history, from the New Deal through the present era of transnational terrorism.” Well, it certainly changes our understanding of that history to note that a large and influential contingent of the American elite—diplomats, scientists, journalists, po ...more

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May 14, 2009 Paul Rhodes rated it it was ok

This book is merely evidence of truth of Chomsky's famous dictum that the spectrum of political ideas in the United States of America is astonishingly narrow. For Ms. Jacoby, it seems, the core of the American Leftist agendum is the jerry-rigged New Deal, even though the New Deal bribed the American Worker into acquiescence and thereby gave Capitalism enough breathing space to recoup and live to prey another day (like now). I might have more to say later. ...more

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Jun 26, 2012 David Wardell rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Tries to be balanced and doesn't really succeed. An overview of the Hiss affair--concludes he was probably guilty of something, but likely not what people assume. Not really fulfilling whatever side you take. ...more

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Aug 25, 2015 John rated it liked it

This book examines the Alger Hiss case in its historical context, but seems not to be concerned much with whether Hiss was guilty.

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About Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby

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Susan Jacoby is an independent scholar and best-selling author. The most recent of her seven previous books is The Age of American Unreason. She lives in New York City.