The West Side Faith
Mandel, David J.
David J. Mandel The West Side Faith • • I was in the right-field grandstand at the Polo Grounds when Bobby Thomson homered off Ralph Branca. I was in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium when Al...
...To begin with, since Solzhenitsyn, it has become much harder to view Communist Party membership (and, a fortiori,espionage) during the thirties and forties as reasonable or even justifiable political behavior...
...Even if Hiss himself were to confess his guilt, I wouldn't believe it...
...Notwithstanding the devotion of many of The Faithful, The Faith has surely suffered some defections...
...Weinstein's conclusion "...that Hiss has been lying about his relations with Chambers for nearly thirty years," is especially significant because Weinstein had sued successfully to obtain the FBI files and he also had access to the records of Hiss's defense counsel...
...To conclude that Alger Hiss was guilty of perjury demands no act of faith when you have: Hiss's Woodstock typewriter on which Chambers' documents had been typed...
...the documents in Hiss's handwriting...
...It has no Prince of Light, no Teacher of Righteousness...
...April 1, 1976 issue of the New York Review of Books will surely cut deeper and wider for it contains a devastating review, written by Professor Allen Weinstein of Smith College, of a new Faithful Hiss book by John Chabot Smith...
...Clearly, had there been no Nixon, no matter the difficulty, it would have been necessary to invent him...
...Professor Weinstein's book on the Hiss case, to be published late this year, will undoubtedly do The Faith no good...
...Hence, I doubt the correctness of the prediction by Philip Nobile in the April Harper's that, "The Alger Hiss affair is tending toward final judgment...
...it lacked the immediate comprehensibility of Thomson's homer or Gionfriddo's catch...
...And I was in the United States Courthouse when The Faith in the Innocence of Alger Hiss was born...
...In the face of this evidence (and a great deal more) to believe that Hiss was innocent does require faith, enormous faith...
...That's faith...
...It was the second Hiss trial, the one when he was convicted of perjury, that I attended...
...I was then in my first year at law school at New York University...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 23...
...Smith's book, Weinstein's criticism notwithstanding, will be persuasive to some...
...I call it the West Side Faith in honor of the section of the city where I now live, and where, it seems to me, The Faith is most devoutly practiced...
...the written notes of Chambers' interview with A.A...
...The fact that he did nothing to cause Hiss's conviction except to arrange a meeting of Hiss, at Hiss's request, with Hiss's accuser, Whittaker Chambers, is of no importance whatever...
...Berle nine years before...
...The West Side Faithful have never even been especially fond of Alger Hiss—that they would deify him was always unthinkable for a host of reasons including his strange, sibilant name...
...Of course I didn't do anything there, no more than I did at Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds, but I was there...
...I admit that at the time I was not aware of the full significance of the case...
...It was also absolutely imperative for the birth and growth of The Faith that its central, in fact, its only creed, The Innocence of Alger Hiss, be extremely unlikely...
...So, while I am sure that Joe McCarthy will never be enshrined on the West Side, the climate now is different and it is no help to The Faith...
...Younger's conclusion that Hiss was clearly guilty generated some angry responses for Commentary's celebrated letters section, but the hit was palpable...
...the rug delivered...
...Nixon, slayer of Jerry Voorhees, mauler of Helen Gahagan, the threeo'clock-shadow man, lupine and vicious...
...Evidently, in order to flourish, The Faith needed no Prince of Light...
...I was there at the beginning, you see, and I know...
...the documents with interlineations in Hiss's handwriting...
...The first trial had ended in a hung jury...
...It did have a Prince of Darkness, R.M...
...In this new climate, the emergence of infidel critics and historians, untainted by any Nixon connection, is especially distressing to The Faith...
...For example, there is this dialogue with a West Side professor reported recently by Sidney Hook: "What kind of evidence would convince you that Chambers was telling the truth...
...Professor Irving Younger of Cornell Law School contributed to the August 1975 issue of Cornmentivy a detailed analysis of the trial transcripts...
...Still, faiths can suffer a lot and yet survive...
...The West Side Faith shares few characteristics with ordinary, familiar faiths...
...But over the years I've observed The Faith closely, and now that it may have reached a crisis stage, I feel I have the obligation to speak out...
...I, a classmate named Gene Levitt, and a couple of other classmates whose names I can't remember took the subway down to Foley Square two or three times to watch the Hiss trial...
...The death-in-life of Richard Nixon, though it bears not a whit on Hiss's guilt or innocence, has changed the dramatic structure of The Faith...
...Sure, they can still kick Nixon around, but the old enthusiasm is pretty much gone...
...There are additional reasons for concluding that The Faith is having a hard time now and may face worse in the future...
...It was, of course, a complicated and extended event...
...the car transferred...
...I was in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium when Al Gionfriddo robbed DiMaggio of a home run...
...If by "final judgment" Nobile means that soon we'll all either be converted to The Faith or that The Faithful will utterly disappear, like the followers of Sabbatai Zevi or the Shakers, then he is almost certainly wrong...
...Similarly, the analogy between the HUAC hearings of twenty and thirty years ago and a Salem witch hunt is now harder to accept...
...Compare: Could Judaism survive Moses' confession that the bush had indeed been reduced to ashes...
...What Christian would remain so were there to come to light Jesus' written confession that it wasn't leprosy but impetigo, and that His turning water into wine was accomplished by momentarily distracting the Disciples and quickly switching flasks...
...Fortunately for The Faith and The Faithful, Nixon was there...
...In the first quarter-century following Hiss's conviction the West Side Faithful rarely wavered...
...Faith is not needed in order to believe what is reasonable or plausible...
...Moreover, The Faith may have gained adherents—and new strength—from Hiss's readmission to the Massachusetts Bar late last year, and J .C...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
