bomb-throwing, strikes, arrests and deportations as the days of “the great Red scare.”
However, a fertile field for future Communist conquests was being developed among the very people who feared it least. The United States was going sophisticated in an atmosphere of half-baked intellectualism. Pedestals of the past crumbled to the cry of scandal and the rattling of closeted skeletons. An age of daring debunking had arrived. At the time few people realized that the economic and spiritual collapse toward which the nation was drifting would produce an intellectual revolt that would permit the agents of Communism to propel them into every echelon of American society—including some of the highest offices of the United States Government. This brings us to the story of Whittaker Chambers. Because Chambers was converted to Communism during this period and worked himself up to the highest levels of intrigue as a leader of Russian espionage, his disclosures give a sweeping panoramic picture of the growth of Communism in the United States from 1925– 1938.
The Growth of U.S. Communism as Seen by Whittaker Chambers
A brief review of Whittaker Chambers’ conversion to Communism will perhaps reveal an evolutionary pattern which was followed by a considerable number of young American intellectuals during the Nineteen- Twenties and early Thirties.
Whittaker Chambers was raised on Long Island not far from suburban New York. In the Chambers home was an impersonal and disinterested father (a newspaper illustrator), an over-loving and therefore overbearing mother (who had formerly been an actress), an insane grandmother and a younger brother toward whom Chambers felt no particular fraternal affection.
Both Chambers and his younger brother came to maturity during the hectic post-war period and, like many people of their time, both became moral and spiritual casualties. Chambers’ younger brother returned from college cynical and disillusioned. He became an alcoholic and finally committed suicide. The whole family seemed to have degenerated into a pattern of life which was precisely the mess of purposeless Pottage that Marx and Engels had declared it to be. Whittaker Chambers describes his own experiences as follows:
“When I entered (college shortly after World War I) I was a conservative in my view of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the time I left, entirely by my own choice, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion. 1 had published in a campus literary magazine an atheist playlet…. The same year, I went to Europe and saw Germany in the manic throes of defeat. I returned to Columbia, this time paying my own way. In 1925, I voluntarily withdrew for the express purpose of joining the Communist Party. For I had come to believe that the world we live in was dying, that only surgery could now save the wreckage of mankind, and that the Communist Party was history’s surgeon.”{71}
Chambers went to work for Communism in real earnest. He became co-editor of
It was his intention to make the Communist program the permanent pattern of his life. Before long, however, his Communist “wife” left him to go her own way and Chambers felt it would be more to his liking to make his next union (which took place in 1931) an official “bourgeois marriage” at some city hall. At this stage, Chambers would never have guessed that he also had other sensibilities which would one day take him out of Communism and make him senior editor of Time magazine at a salary of around $30,000 per year!
In 1928, Chambers saw the first series of purges in the American Communist Party. For several years, the party had been dominated by Charles E. Ruthenburg, “the American Lenin.” When Ruthenburg suddenly died there was a mad scramble for power. Jay Lovestone came out on top with William Z. Foster representing a small, noisy minority. But soon Lovestone made a serious political mistake. He sided with one of Stalin’s most powerful Russian opponents. Nikolai Bukharin, who stood for a less violent program than Stalin had in mind.
Lovestone and William Z. Foster were summoned to Moscow. When they returned, Lovestone was a broken man. He had been called a traitor by Stalin and thrown out of the party. Stalin had named Foster the heir to the throne. The next step was to force every member of the party in the United States to support Foster’s radical program or be expelled. Most Communists picked up the new set of signals from Moscow and immediately swore allegiance to Foster. But not so with Chambers. It looked to him as though Stalin were behaving exactly like a Fascist dictator by forcing the majority of the American Communists to follow leadership they had already voted against. Chambers stopped being active in the party.
For two years, by his own choice, Chambers remained outside the regular ranks. He was never expelled, nor did his loyalty to Communism change, but he deeply resented Stalin. The entire situation was changed, however, by the great depression. Chambers’ sympathies for the unemployed once more drew him back toward the party program. He also felt forced to admit that from all appearances the long-predicted collapse of American capitalism had arrived.
In the spirit of the times, Chambers wrote a story called, “Can You Hear the Voices?” It was a great success. It was made into a play, published as a pamphlet and hailed by Moscow as splendid revolutionary literature. The next thing Chambers knew he was being feted by the American Communist Party as though he had never left it. Chambers soon went back to work for the revolution.
It was in June, 1932, that Chambers was asked to pay the full price of being a Communist. The Party nominated him to serve as a spy against the United States in the employment of the Soviet Military Intelligence. For the sake of his wife Chambers tried to get out of this assignment, but a member of the Central Committee in New York told him, “You have no choice.”
Chambers soon found himself under the iron discipline of the Russian espionage apparatus. Because Communism had become his faith, Chambers blindly followed instructions. He became expert in the conspiratorial techniques of clandestine meetings, writing secret documents, shaking off followers, trusting no one, being available day and night at the beck and call of superiors.
Before long Chambers was assigned to be the key contact man for Russia’s most important spy cell in Washington, D.C. Chambers has described his espionage associations with the following persons who were later to become top officials in the United States Government:
1. Alger Hiss, whom Chambers says became a close personal friend. Hiss started out in the Department of Agriculture, and then served on the Special Senate Committee investigating the munitions industry. For awhile he served in the Department of Justice and then went to the State Department. There he made a meteoric rise, serving as Director of the highly important office of Political Affairs. He served as advisor to President Roosevelt at Yalta and as Secretary General of the International Assembly which created the United Nations.
2. Harry Dexter White, who later became Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury and author of the Morgenthau Plan.
3. John J. Abt, who served in the Department of Agriculture, the WPA, the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and was then made a Special Assistant to the Attorney General in charge of the trial section.
4. Henry H. Collins, who served in the NRA, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State. During World War II he became a major in the Army and in 1948 became Executive Director of the American Russian Institute (cited by the Attorney General as a Communist front organization).
5. Charles Kramer, who served in the National Labor Relations Board, the Office of Price Administration, and in 1943, joined the staff of the Senate Sub-committee on War Mobilization.
6. Nathan Witt, who served in the Department of Agriculture and then became the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board.
7. Harold Ware, who served in the Department of Agriculture.
8. Victor Perlo, who served in the Office of Price Administration, the War Production Board, and the Treasury.
