THE TRIAL OF OUR TIMES
Wechsler, James A.
The Trial of Our Times (Cont'd) By James A. Wechsler THE CASE which I called "The Trial of Our Times" in The Progressive 13 months ago is moving through the final stages of appeal and review....
...ponderable in Hiss' alleged defection...
...His ordeal is not over...
...the silent evidence rested impassively on the table in the courtroom, neither glancing at the ceiling nor shifting nervously in its seat...
...Liberal partisanship, I think, was a throwback to the era of the Popular Front...
...Meanwhile, amid the raucous thunder on the Right, it needs to be said that the conviction of Alger Hiss does not prove that the Wagner Act was a subversive statute, that minimum wage-laws were un-American, that resistance to Hitler-ism was a Communist plot and thl New Deal a Kremlin blueprint...
...Front organizations and Marxist study groups sprouted everywhere...
...Ironically, contemporary fellow-travelers, re-enacting the error of collaboration with the Communists, have been peculiarly incapable of accepting Chambers' story...
...there...
...Some of the material in this article is adapted from Wechsler's editorial on the subject in The Post and from his earlier article in The Progressive...
...All the dark imaginings of a Hearst cartoon sprang to life...
...If anything, we are challenged mori dramatically than ever before to' make our society worthy of tkt loyalty and idealism of its promii* ing young men and to give freedom the noble quality of a fighting faife...
...Many moderate liberals and conservatives ardently identified themselves with the defense...
...All this may have reflected a profound uneasiness among conservatives...
...Hiss' performance, as described by Chambers, became a ruthless caricature of wide-eyed romanticism during the Popular Front years...
...Committees to aid Spanish Democracy and Friends of the Soviet Union enlisted the militant support of many an American who was neither queer nor subversive...
...What could be more logical (they cried) than that Hiss should have served the Russians in international intrigue...
...they could not help feeling that they, too, were under attack...
...who believe we have already constructed the best of all possible worlds, there was a terrifying im...
...Nor does it throw any light on the attachment for Hiss' cause found among enlightened Republicans...
...The notion that a man of his breeding and background aided a Soviet spy ring was unthinkable...
...aid of some of the nervous New Dealers who betrayed a thoroughly defensive mood and permitted their emotions to lead them to ridicule the proceedings as though the phenomenon of divided national loyalties and espionage suggested by Chambers' testimony is inconsequential and irrelevant in a democratic society...
...Why were so many men and women impelled to take sides...
...If Hiss, so clearly destined for success in the conventional world, was stirred even momentarily Communist mirage, his shift ofviffl legiance was an implied criticism o] our own society...
...his ties with the New Deal were intrinsic proof of the charges...
...Twelve men and women found "beyond a reasonable doubt" that it was Hiss who lied...
...In the final moments, as throughout the long conflict, the crucial issue was: Which of the two men lied...
...This was what they had been waiting for...
...Each man simply evolved his own theory according to his own preconceptions...
...Speculation about the case will fill the literature of our lifetime...
...It was the mid '30s when for the first time in American history the Communist Party influenced the nation's intellectual climate...
...they do not want to be told even at this late date that the Communist movement is, among other things, a unit of Soviet espionage...
...to men...
...The analysts of the Far Right assumed Hiss' guilt from the moment he was charged...
...But it was neither incredible nor inevitable, and the world's fate did not hinge on the outcome...
...II The emotional investment of some thoughtful conservatives in Hiss' defense is no less noteworthy...
...Not only extremists, however, were absorbed in the trial...
...they magnified democratic decadence and glorified the Russian foreign office...
...They saw his guilt as vindication of their warnings...
...reason, justice, and compassion plead that minds remain flexible until his last appeal i« heard...
...Their key article of faith is that the Communists are an over-zealous but well-intentioned species of native radical...
...The answer may be that this was a trial which cut through the history of our time, and almost everyone responsive to the century's turmoil felt a personal involvement in the clash...
...As for the Communists, their "double-think" device settled all arguments...
...His college classmates voted him "most likely to succeed...
...Guilty as charged, Hiss is a tragic, lonely figure, caught in the debris of the grand illusion that Communist Russia would save the world...
...If Chambers' charges against Hiss were sustained, the story was a grotesque, intolerable footnote to that age of innocence...
...Thoughtful men will avoid the celebrations and shrill outcries...
...The court-room duel between Hiss and Chambers rolled back time to the day when the Popular Front was a decisive influence in the thinking and experiences of countless thousands of Americans, especially among liberal intellectuals...
...Only "psych* paths" could be radicals in the con* servative scheme of things...
...Until the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact thousands of Americans clung to the belief that the Russian regime, however oppressive at home, was the world's last great anti-Fascist hope...
...Perhaps partly because there were inconsistencies of detail on both sides and because no human being offered corroborative (or defense) testimony as devastating as the inanimate objects which relentlessly damned the defendant...
...Faith in Soviet Russia was the grand illusion of American Liberalism in the span between two World Wars...
...If he had lost faith in our way of life, nothing was secure...
...Finally, there were sophisticated anti-Stalinists who never conceded any area of doubt in the Hiss-Chambers duel...
...Hiss personified the promising American, starred for success...
...his grace and intelligence impressed nearly everyone who met him...
...Hence, as I pointed out in these pages a year ago, men who were aligned on rival sides of the political battles of those years felt, in 1949-1950, an extraordinary personal involvement in the Hiss-Chambers clash...
...This was It: the details were unimportant...
...they had to believe he was innocent of the clandestine role ascribed to him or confess they might, vicariously, have been guilty of the same terrible folly—"There but for the grace of God...
...In the last chapter nothing the defense could offer effectively refuted the mute testimony of the typewriter and the documents...
...The nature of the onslaught against Hiss partially explained the support of some of his former New Deal colleagues...
...To fanatic reactionaries and devout Communists the issues were always simplest...
...Is the ordeal over...
...Alger Hiss stands convicted by a jury of his countrymen...
...He rose swiftly...
...It is as if they were saying that the charges against Hiss could not be true because if it were true, it would cast fatal discredit on the whole Roosevelt era...
...Why does the debate continue...
...Yet this gap alone would not explain the fascination the trial has held for our generation...
...To many who had accepted the premises of that "United Front" epoch, the conclusion that Hiss was guilty was unbearable...
...Some friends and partisans of the defendant will remain unshaken by the verdict...
...Acceptance of the main thesis in Chambers' charges—that Alger Hiss, who personified so many of the liberal virtues and the goals of that day, was a conscious spy for Soviet agents—would seem to suggest that all or many of the progressive movements of the 1930's were a savage hoax, a camouflage for the espionage activities of foreign spies...
...That alone does not explain the depth of pro-Hiss feeling among many liberals...
...There still seem to be American adults who reject the evidence that the Communist movement is a wing of the Soviet intelligence service...
...Obviously men who had pictured Franklin D. Roosevelt as a tool or agent of Communists were enthusiastically prepared to condemn Hiss without trial...
...The vigor with which some New Dealers insisted that Hiss' guilt was inconceivable seemed to express more than detached personal estimate...
...that it is no less an agent of Soviet nationalism than the Bund was a vehicle of the Nazi conspiracy...
...It confirmed—to them-—all their nightmare prejudices about the New Deal...
...that the humanitarian and idealistic images it invokes (and which many a Communist no doubt continues to embrace) are merely weapons in the shifting strategy of the Soviet Foreign Office, to be utilized in a time of the Popular Front and repudiated during a partnership with Hitler...
...Why did it matter so much...
...He is the author of two books, "Labor Baron" and "War Propaganda in the United States...
...Now the extreme Right rejoices and the "double - think" Communists cry frame-up, even as they search for espionage recruits among young men groping for absolutist assurances...
...Dismayed by wistful suggestions that it was incredible a man of Hiss* stature could be entrapped by the Communists, they often spoke as though it were inevitable that he had been...
...it was almost as if the honor of the Ivy League were at stake, and men rallied to the defense of one of their own against a moody mystic who had admittedly toiled in the Communist underground...
...it revealed that the grand illusion contained the seeds of treason...
...I noted in these columns last year that in the world of 1949 (in which the intellectual despair created by the fall of Madrid and the deal at Munich is forgotten or only dimly remembered) many liberals who once associated themselves with the Communists or its front mechanisms cannot endure what they consider to be the implications of Hiss' guilt...
...In this they had the unwitting JAMES A. WECHSLER, editor of the New York Post, was formerly its and The Progressive's Washington correspondent, in which role he covered the hearings of the original Congressional inquiry in the Hiss-Chamber s affair...
...The doctrinaire Rightists were determined to believe Hiss guilty— long before the evidence was in— because they were bent on harnessing the case for their own political ends...
...The sense persists, even among many who do not question the jury's finding, that some aspect of the story remains untold, that some human links are missing even if the legal pieces have been put together...
...No psychiatric disclosure could prove the Woodstock was the creature of a tortured imagination or that Hiss' handwriting revealed the "psychopathic personality" of his accuser...
...His articles have appeared in many magazines, including Harper's, Commentary, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Guild Reporter...
...Embittered by Chamberlain and Dala-dier, they accepted the Kremlin's self-portrait of international virtue...
...each became a vicarious participant in the trial...
...The long drama that began in a Congressional hearing-room when Hiss first convincingly protested his innocence has reached its climax...
...fore—the sequitur is vague—he must be innocent...
...They could publicly picture Hiss as another victim of capitalist injustice, target of a shameless frame-up for his "New Deal" labors...
...Hiss' trial had become—-retroactively—a Judgment Day for that period which was the heyday of the New Deal...
...Until the appeal proceeding runs its course the case is not closed...
...Certainly Whittaker Chambers is justified in viewing the decision as personal vindication...
Vol. 14 • March 1950 • No. 3
