![]() An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties. In January 1950, after a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation and two. Soviet archives unearthed many years later backed up these. Hiss was probably the most distinguished fall guy of Cold War I. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post-World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. Alger Hiss, a State Department official, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union in 1948. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the Left and the Right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post-Cold War era. In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. In addition to the original archival materials that are housed at NYU, both the Alger Hiss Defense Collection for the Harvard Law School Library and the Hiss Papers are available through Microfilm.įuture projects will microfilm the Alger Hiss correspondence in the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Alger Hiss files in the United Nations Archives.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 the summer of 1948-that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. He is placed on Chambers list in 1938 and his case is revisited in 1948 when he is charged with being a Soviet Spy. He was a law clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. A select group of materials from the Debevoise & Plimpton Records are being digitized and will be available online in 2018. Very successful, popular, young scholar who was a former State Department Official and an aide to FDR. ![]() The Debevoise & Plimpton Records on Alger Hiss (dated 1938-1980) contain files from the legal firm's representation of Alger Hiss in his 1949 perjury trials and his 1979 coram nobis petition to overturn his conviction. The Tamiment Library’s Alger Hiss (1904-1996) collections include Hiss family papers, his legal defense files, as well as collections from long-time Hiss associates. He was sentenced to five years in prison and served 44 months in Lewisberg Penitentiary. On January 21, 1950, he was convicted in a second trial. Hiss's first trial ended in a hung jury on July 7, 1949. Hiss voluntarily testified before HUAC, and, after a Grand Jury proceeding, was indicted on charges of perjury. Hiss's public career ended abruptly in 1948 when Time managing editor Whittaker Chambers, a former underground Communist Party operative testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), charged him with being both a Communist and a spy. In 1947 he left government service to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served as Secretary General of the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in April 1945. delegation to the Yalta conference in 1945. During the New Deal period he worked as an attorney at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, in the Solicitor General's Office at the Justice Department, as Assistant Secretary of State and in other positions in the State Department, and as a member of the U.S. ![]() Alger Hiss (1904-1996) Alger Hiss was a State Department official, who in 1948 was accused of transmitting government secrets to the Soviet Union. ![]()
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