The Cautionary Tale of Whittaker Chambers: Why Being Profoundly Anti- Isn't Enough
Remnant Review
If you are under the age of 50, you probably do not remember the name Whittaker Chambers. If it does ring a bell, all you can hear is the bell. You cannot describe what he did. Yet he was a crucial figure in American political life in the middle of the twentieth century.
If I were asked to date the origin of the political conservative movement, it would be August 3, 1948. On that day, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) regarding the Communist Party affiliation in the 1930's of one of the major figures in the political establishment in 1948: Alger Hiss.
[Side note: there has never been an organization called the House Un-American Activities Committee. This designation was adopted by the liberal media as a way to get even with the committee. The media re-named the committee. The new name was a play on words. It made it sound as though the committee was promoting un-American activities. The media also created the acronym, HUAC. This was self-conscious. The strategy worked. Today, we see only the designation HUAC. Today’s writers and historians have no awareness of how and why this subterfuge was orchestrated. The origins of this switch are lost in the mists of time. The switch did not deter the committee. Most Americans did not not perceive the switched meaning of the new name. But the switch stands as a testimony to the ability of the media to alter history in subtle ways. Their success can be seen in the Wikipedia entry, House Un-American Activities Committee. The headline is different from the name in the first paragraph.
Concealed by the words "popularly dubbed," there is a master's thesis in history, political science, or journalism.]
AN IMMEDIATE SENSATION
Chambers’ testimony created an immediate sensation. He testified on a Tuesday. By Friday, the lines were drawn. The American Left and the American establishment lined up behind Hiss by the end of the week. Anti-Communist Americans were lined up on the other side of the debate. In less than a year, they became the foundation of a disorganized movement within American politics. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began to speak for these people.
Hiss had been one of the advisors of Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta conference in February 1945. Later that year, he became the senior American representative at the founding meeting of the United Nations. In 1948, he was the head of one of the most influential establishment nonprofit foundations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Who was Chambers? He was a senior editor at Time magazine. He was also one of the magazine's most gifted writers. He had been an active Communist from 1925 to 1938.
This may sound as though it is ancient history. In the modern world, anything that took place more than three decades ago that was not associated with a major war, the assassination of a national political leader, a national catastrophe, or a television sitcom that lasted a decade and is still being re-run, is ancient history. Ancient history is history that only historians remember.
About 30 years ago -- maybe longer -- I read an article written by William F. Buckley. He was the founder of National Review in 1955. He had been a close friend of Chambers from 1954 until Chambers died in 1961. He said that he had spoken several years earlier at a major university. There was a large audience. He asked anyone who remembered the name Alger Hiss to raise his hand. No one did.
In August 1948, it was not clear who was telling the truth: Hiss or Chambers. In testimony before the committee on August 5, Hiss denied all knowledge of Chambers. That same day, President Truman, campaigning for re-election, dismissed Chambers’ testimony as a “red herring.” Given the fact that red was associated with Communism, his choice of words might have backfired. They didn't. He made his point clear. He supported Hiss.
One member of the committee did not believe Hiss. He was a first-term congressman from California: Richard Nixon. He wanted a further investigation. Hearing by hearing that month, it became clear to Nixon that Hiss had committed perjury. The story is summarized on the website of the Nixon Foundation.
By the end of the month, the division was complete: the Left/establishment vs. the newly emerging Right. That division continues to this day. Among aging representatives of the two camps who grew up in the 1960's in the shadow of this showdown, the debate continues. But, for those historians who still mention it, the Right seems to have won. Hiss is now regarded as a spy who lied under oath, and deservedly went to jail. For skeptics, there is Allen Weinstein’s book on Hiss, Perjury (1978), and Sam Tanenhaus’ book, Whittaker Chambers (1997).
Later in 1948, Hiss sued Chambers for libel, demanding $75,000, which is $800,000 in today’s money. This was a major strategic blunder. Chambers then produced documents that he had previously concealed. This evidence proved that Hiss and Chambers had worked together as spies for the Soviet Union a decade earlier. Hiss not only lost the slander case, he was convicted of perjury by the government in 1950. Had the statute of limitations not run out, he might have been executed for treason.
Hiss was convicted on January 21, 1950. On February 9, the then little-known junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, delivered a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he said that he had the names of dozens of Communists inside the State Department. A report of the speech was picked up by newspapers around the nation. The fan mail immediately poured in, and he shifted to anti-Communism as the primary issue of his Senate career for the next four years. The anti-Communist movement took off like a rocket. (He was censored by the Senate on December 2, 1954.)
In the spring, a book by Ralph de Toledano and Victor Lasky appeared: Seeds of Treason. It was the story of the hearings. The hearings were a very hot topic. Nixon ran for U.S. Senate that year, and he was elected. In the summer of 1952, Dwight Eisenhower chose him as his Vice Presidential candidate. He later said that one of the reasons was that he had read the book, and he liked “the cut of the man,” as he put it. Had Nixon not sided with Chambers in August 1948, few people would remember him today.
Hiss died in 1996 at the age of 92.
Chambers left four legacies. Each is worth mentioning.
LEGACY #1: THE BAMBI COMPLEX
Almost no one in 1948 was aware of the fact that Chambers had been the translator of the 1923 book by an Austrian hunter, Felix Salten, Bambi. It was published in 1928 in the United States.
On August 8, 1942, Walt Disney released the movie. It became an instant classic. The scene that every child remembers is when Bambi learns that his mother has been killed by a hunter. Throughout the movie, mankind is portrayed as the supreme enemy of the forest creatures. Today, hunters are derisive about the Bambi complex of anti-hunting urban residents.
It would be unfair to blame Chambers for the Bambi complex, but there is no question that he was part of the chain of events that led to it.
LEGACY #2: ANTI-COMMUNISM
Prior to his testimony in 1948, there was no conservative political movement.
Two books had begun to spread the message of the free market. The first was published in 1944, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It was published by the University of Chicago Press. It was an academic book by an Austrian economist living in England. No one employed by the University of Chicago Press had imagined that it would become a bestseller. After the condensation of the book in the Readers Digest in April 1945, it did become a bestseller. That article is still in print here. In 1946, a book by New York Times columnist Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, was published. It is still in print.
These two books can be regarded as the foundations of the libertarian movement. Leonard E. Read started the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946. Both of these books became part of FEE’s recommended reading list. FEE was not political. It was anti-Communist only in the broadest sense of being in opposition to government intervention. It did not focus on Communism as a world movement.
So, it was left to Whittaker Chambers to launch the conservative political movement. He had no intention of doing so. What resulted within a month of his testimony on August 3 was another example of the law of unintended consequences. He did not expect this kind of public attention. He was grateful for it. He was a deeply committed anti-Communist. From that point on, he saw himself and his testimony as potentially pivotal, not just in American politics, but in a clash of civilizations: Western democracy versus Soviet totalitarianism.
He had been inside the Communist movement from 1925 until he left, disillusioned, in 1938. He had been sufficiently committed to the Soviet Communist cause in the 1930's to have committed espionage. His hatred of Communism continued after 1945. But he was not known as an anti-Communist during his decade at Time, 1939–1948. He was one of their finest writers. He was an efficient editor. His peers at Time must have known that he had been a Communist. He had written for The Daily Worker and The New Masses. But they did not care.
He had been a true believer. He was devoted to the party completely. He was an intellectual. He had read the works of Karl Marx. But he left all that behind for a decade, 1938-48. Then, without warning, he presented his testimony.
LEGACY #3: WITNESS
In 1952, his autobiography appeared, Witness. It became a bestseller. It was a detailed, thoughtful book on why he had become committed to Communism, and why he had defected in 1938. It was an eloquent book. He was a superb writer. In the late 1940's through the 1950's, there were numerous books published by former Communists who wanted to tell their stories. But none of the stories was told with the same eloquence and same degree of insight as Chambers’ was.
He saw the Hiss case as a conflict between two faiths. As he wrote in the Foreword:
At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time — Communism and Freedom — came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men.
What was the nature of this conflict? Recently retired high school history teacher Charles Burris posted an article on Leftism’s nihilism. In his article, he reprinted an extract from the Foreword. It is worth reprinting here.
The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.” It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: “Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.” Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die —to bear witness—for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.
It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
The vision is a challenge and implies a threat. It challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation—by making thought and act one. It challenges him to prove it by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaningless-ness of man’s history—by giving it purpose and a plan. It challenges him to prove it by reducing the meaningless chaos of nature, by imposing on it his rational will to order, abundance, security, peace. It is the vision of materialism. But it threatens, if man’s mind is unequal to the problems of man’s progress, that he will sink back into savagery (the A and the H bombs have raised the issue in explosive forms), until nature replaces him with a more intelligent form of life.
These four paragraphs are profound. They apply to far more than the Communist movement. The Communist movement was the 20th century’s most consistent social, political, and military force that implemented a particular worldview: the worldview of humanism.
Chambers understood this. He was not just an anti-Communist. He was an anti-humanist, meaning humanism in the form of central planning by men who had abandoned faith in the God of the Bible.
LEGACY #4: PESSIMISM
He began his book with a foreword. There was nothing radical about this. Lots of authors use forewords to get the readers going. But there has never been a foreword like this one. Anyway, I have never seen one. The forward was not addressed to the typical reader. It was to a specific set of readers. It began with these words: “Beloved Children.”
I am writing a book. In it I am speaking to you. But I am also speaking to the world. To both I owe an accounting. It is a terrible book. It is terrible in what it tells about men. If anything, it is more terrible in what it tells about the world in which you live.
He said that the book was about the Hiss case. But it was far more than this. It was the background leading up to the Hiss case.
For it was more than human tragedy. Much more than Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers was on trial in the trials of Alger Hiss. Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies. At issue in the Hiss Case was the question whether this sick society, which we call Western civilization, could in its extremity still cast up a man whose faith in it was so great that he would voluntarily abandon those things which men hold good, including life, to defend it. At issue was the question whether this man's faith could prevail against a man whose equal faith it was that this society is sick beyond saving, and that mercy itself pleads for its swift extinction and replacement by another. At issue was the question whether, in the desperately divided society, there still remained the will to recognize the issues in time to offset the immense rally of public power to distort and pervert the facts.
This was a challenge in the name of Western civilization. It was a challenge to his readers to recognize the irreconcilable conflict between Communism and Western civilization. At stake was the whole world.
Karl Marx would have agreed with this. He also saw the conflict between Communism and bourgeois capitalism as a battle for the world. But he did not believe that this battle is religious or even intellectual. He believed that the central factor of society is what he called the mode of production.
If you ever read Witness, you will see that Chambers never took Marx seriously. He saw the battle as essentially a battle of faiths. He switched sides in 1938. He did not fill the book with tedious discussions of the mode of production, the vanguard of the proletariat, or any of the other catchphrases of Marxism-Leninism.
First, let me try to say what Communism is not. It is not simply a vicious plot hatched by wicked men in a sub-cellar. It is not just the writings of Marx and Lenin, dialectical materialism, the Politburo, the labor theory of value, the theory of the general strike, the Red Army, the secret police, labor camps, underground conspiracy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the technique of the coup d’etat. It is not even those chanting, bannered millions that stream periodically, like disorganized armies, through the heart of the world’s capitals: These are expressions of Communism, but they are not what Communism is about.
Here was the heart of the matter, he said. “The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.” Marx had said the same thing in the famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach in 1845. (No one remembers the other ten.) “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Chambers said this: “Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age.”
He believed that Western intellectuals did not understand the comprehensive nature of the war between the two religious faiths. He believed that they failed to understand how high the stakes were. The enemies of Western civilization were consistent. The defenders of Western civilization were not.
This outlook led him to an overwhelming pessimism. In his first day’s testimony to the House Committee on August 3, 1948, he said this: “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under Communism.” He said it again four years later in Witness. Chambers was profoundly wrong in the following assessment.
. . . Communism is the central experience of the first half of the 20th century, and may be its final experience--will be, unless the free world, in the agony of its struggle with Communism, overcomes its crisis by discovering, in suffering and pain, a power of faith which will provide man's mind, at the same intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die.
By the time that Mikhail Gorbachev formally declared the Soviet Union dead, on December 25, 1991, the old revolutionary faith of the Communists was long gone. It had been gone for at least two decades.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the faith of the leading intellectuals was as compromising as ever. They had never seen the conflict between Communism and democracy as a life-and-death struggle. The leading businessmen in America had also never believed this. They did trade deals with the Soviet Union from 1921 until 1991. The definitive study of this is the three-volume set written by Antony Sutton and published by the Hoover institution: Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development (1971–73). That set went down the memory hole when Hoover fired Sutton in response to the publication of his popular book, National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union (Arlington House, 1973). In his 1972 testimony to the platform committee of the Republican Party, he summarized his three-volume study.
In a few words: there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all — perhaps 90–95 percent — came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In effect the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union. Its industrial and its military capabilities. This massive construction job has taken 50 years. Since the Revolution in 1917. It has been carried out through trade and the sale of plants, equipment and technical assistance.
There was even an organization set up to facilitate these deals, one which was systematically hidden from the general public: USTEC. This was the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council. Some young historian should write a doctoral dissertation on it. But he will have great difficulty in locating primary sources or even the organization’s officially published journal. A good place to begin his investigation is with the 1988 report published by the Heritage Foundation.
The Soviet Union died. It died, to quote T.S. Eliot’s famous final line in The Hollow Men (1925): “Not with a bang but with a whimper.” Chambers did not see this coming. He was blind to it. Being blind to it, he wrote these words on the first page of Chapter 1.
I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed, or that has happened to me since, has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast. But nothing has changed my determination to act as if I were wrong – if only because, in the last instance, men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.
He had some vague hope that he could make a slight difference. He wrote this to William Buckley in 1954. Buckley reprinted it as the first letter in Buckley’s book, Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley Jr. 1954–1961 (1970).
I no longer believe that political solutions are possible for us. I am baffled by the way people still speak of the West as if it were at least a cultural unity against Communism though it is divided not only by a political, but by an invisible cleavage. On one side are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, articulate elite which, to one degree or other, has rejected the religious roots of the civilization—the roots with-out which it is no longer Western civilization, but a new order of beliefs, attitudes and mandates. . . .That is the real confrontation of forces. The enemy—he is ourselves. It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury it secretly in some flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of love and truth.
For all its weaknesses, the West won. The Soviet Union died exactly three decades after Chambers did. For all their verbal self-confidence in 1948, the Communists lost in China in 1979 and in the Soviet Union in 1991. Communists still rule in China, but only politically. Western capitalism, in the form of Keynesian mercantilism, has dominated the Chinese economy for four decades. The social order of China is authoritarian, but it is no longer Marxist. China's leaders do not expect a proletarian revolution in the West or anywhere else. Rather, they expect 5G communications and the Belt and Road Initiative to give them a competitive edge in world markets. Marx dismissed this process as capitalism's cash nexus. But the cash nexus has overcome proletarian revolution as the engine of progress. China's oligarchs intend to cash in on this process.
CONCLUSION
Chambers was an unreliable witness to the age in which he lived. He understood that there was an irrepressible showdown between Western civilization and world Communism. But he did not understand the fatal inherent weaknesses of Communism. He surely did not understand its economic weaknesses, which Ludwig von Mises had identified in 1920 in his essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” He did not understand its spiritual weakness. He did not understand that atheism cannot sustain a culture.
His career is a warning: do not build your life and your calling in terms of what you are against. It is not sufficient to be against something, no matter how much it deserves opposition. You must be pro-something. You can’t beat something with nothing. Furthermore, the something that you favor must be sustainable in terms of its presuppositions and the implementation of these presuppositions by individuals who are committed to its triumph in history.
The Foreword to Witness is one of the most profoundly inaccurate assessments of the crisis of the century. He saw the immediate future as being dark for the West and therefore bright for Communist civilization. He was wrong on both counts.
Western civilization is now spreading across the globe into Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. That extension accelerated in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This had begun in India two centuries earlier. As it undermines the foundations of traditional civilizations, it is modified by the existing traditions and institutions. But it is clear that the West is winning the contest. The world wants a piece of the West's action. This action is provided by the private property system, technological advance, and the optimism of entrepreneurs.
Yet this raises a crucial question. Was Marx correct? Is the mode of production the foundation of Western civilization? Is it the substructure? Are philosophy, religion, and culture mere superstructures -- extensions of the substructure? This is the central social question of our era. Put succinctly, will compound economic grown or the Ten Commandments shape the next century and millennium?
My money is on the latter -- in this world and the next.