Isegoria

The Alger Hiss case casts light on why conservatives and liberals are suspicious of each other, Cass Sunstein says:

In his 1948 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Whittaker Chambers, a writer and editor for Time magazine and a former Communist, identified Hiss as a Communist. Hiss adamantly denied the charge. He said he didn’t know anyone named Whittaker Chambers. Encountering his accuser in person, Hiss spoke directly to him: “May I say for the record at this point that I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee without their being privileged for suit for libel?”

Chambers took Hiss’s bait. In an interview on national television, Chambers repeated his charges. In response to the libel suit, he produced stolen State Department documents and notes that seemed to establish not merely that Hiss was a Communist, but that he had spied for the Soviet Union. Hiss was convicted of perjury.

So, Hiss was a Communist who spied for the Soviets, and he was convicted of… perjury?

The conviction was stunning, for Hiss had been a member of the nation’s liberal elite. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a law clerk for the revered Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, he held positions of authority in the Agriculture, Justice and State departments. He was tall, handsome, elegant, gracious, even dashing.

At his 1949 perjury trial, an extraordinary number of liberal icons served as character witnesses for Hiss, including two Supreme Court justices (Stanley Reed and Felix Frankfurter); John W. Davis, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1924; and Adlai Stevenson, who was to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1952 and 1956.

By contrast, Chambers was short, plump and badly dressed. He was a college dropout. After abandoning Communism, he became a conservative and a Christian, and he saw the 20th century as a great battle between Communism on one hand and religious devotion on the other.

When Chambers initially made his charges, many people, especially on the left, thought he must have been motivated by some personal grievance against Hiss. Chambers responded: “Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are all fighting and I am fighting. I have testified against him with remorse and pity, but in a moment of history in which the nation now stands, so help me God, I could not do otherwise.”

As Chambers detailed his relationship with Hiss and their joint work with the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, the sheer accumulation of personal details threw Hiss’s denials into serious doubt. Chambers knew a lot about Hiss’s son and wife, his hobbies, his various apartments, his automobiles and more. In explaining his relationship with Chambers (whom he ultimately acknowledged knowing), Hiss spoke with apparent conviction, but he also seemed to offer an odd brew of evasions and concoctions.

The Hiss case split the country. Many liberals thought that Chambers was a liar and perhaps a madman. Chambers explained their reaction in a way that fit with, and helped spur, a widespread view on the right: “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, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”

Sunstein may need to flesh this out a bit:

Liberals are no longer much interested in Hiss’s conviction, yet they are puzzled, and rightly object, when they are accused of holding positions that they abhor.

Sunstein didn’t just write Nudge. He also wrote The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever.

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