December 2, 1948: The "Pumpkin Papers" Condemn Alger Hiss

December 2, 1948: The Hiss-Chambers case breaks wide open, with the release of "The Pumpkin Papers."

Born on April 1, 1901 in Philadelphia as Jay Vivian Chambers, Whittaker Chambers was a little known figure prior to 1948. He was a self-professed former member of the Communist Party. He also admitted to having served as a spy for the Soviet Union. He left the Communist Party in 1938, and offered his services to the FBI as an informant on Communist activities in the United States.

By 1948, he was serving as an editor for Time magazine, then a very conservative publication. At that time, Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee (hereafter abbreviated as "HUAC") was involved in a series of hearings investigating Communist machinations in the United States. Chambers was called as a witness, and he appeared before the Committee on August 3, 1948.

He dropped a bombshell during his testimony: Chambers accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of having been a Communist and a spy during the 1930s. Born on November 11, 1904 in Baltimore, Hiss was one of the most respected men in Washington. He had been heavily involved in America's wartime diplomacy, and attended the Yalta and Potsdam conferences as an American representative. In 1948, he was serving as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Called to testify, Hiss angrily denied the charges, and declared that he did not even know Whittaker Chambers. He later admitted that he knew Chambers, but at the time he had been using a different name: George Crosley. In the weeks that followed Chambers' appearance before HUAC, the two men exchanged charges and countercharges, and their respective stories became more and more muddled. Finally, after Chambers publicly declared that Hiss had been a Communist, "and may be one now," Hiss filed a slander suit.

During the course of that trial, Chambers produced microfilmed copies of classified State Department documents from the 1930s, which he had hidden in hollowed-out pumpkins on his farm in Westminster, Maryland. The "Pumpkin Papers" were used as evidence to support his claim that Hiss had passed the papers to him for delivery to the Soviets.

In the photo at the top of this post, the microfilm is examined by a member of HUAC, a 35-year-old 1st-term Representative from Southern California named Richard Nixon. In addition to Hiss and Chambers, the hearings made Nixon into a national figure. How he could read anything on that microfilm, even with a magnifying glass, never mind whether anything on it is believable, is debatable. Hiss insisted that "forgery by typewriter" was responsible for the text on the microfilm.

But, based on this evidence, Hiss was indicted for perjury, for lying to HUAC and to a federal grand jury about his membership in the Communist Party. The statute of limitations had run out for other charges related to his supposed activities in the 1930s.

After the first trial ended with a hung jury, Hiss was convicted on January 21, 1950, and served 3 years and 8 months in jail. Hiss always maintained his complete innocence. For his part, Chambers remained equally adamant in his accusations about Hiss.

Frankly, it didn't make sense that the general public took Chambers' side. Even his supporters admitted that Chambers was not the most sympathetic of witnesses. Of the two, only he admitted to having ever been a Communist. He wasn't exactly made for television, something that Nixon would later find out would matter. He was also an alcoholic, as were his father and his brother.

And in 1978, a book about the Hiss-Chambers case was published that revealed surviving letters in which Chambers confessed to homosexual activity, stating that he had stopped in 1938, along with leaving the Communist Party, upon his conversion to Christianity. Had that information been revealed in 1948, it would have destroyed Chambers, and, if Hiss were indeed guilty, would likely have gotten away with it.

Instead, the Pumpkin Papers resulted in Hiss' downfall. And because they were revealed a month after Election Day, they did not cost President Harry S Truman a full term, despite his having stood up for Hiss, whom he believed to be innocent. Had they been revealed a month before the election, the Republican nominee for President, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, probably would have won the 3 more States he would have needed to be elected.

Chambers returned to his farm, and wrote his best-selling memoir Witness there. When William F. Buckley Jr. founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955, among the first people he hired to write for it was Chambers.

Chambers died of long-term heart trouble at his farm, on July 9, 1961, at age 60. He was survived by his wife, artist Esther Shemitz, and their 2 children, daughter Ellen and son John. Esther lived until 1986, Ellen until 2017. As of December 2, 2022, John is still alive, and has a son, David, a college professor who is now the family's main spokesman. The Chambers farm has been designated a National Historical Landmark, although it remains in the family's ownership, and is not open to the public.

Hiss was disbarred upon his conviction. After being released in 1954, he worked as a stationery salesman, and published his own account in 1957, In the Court of Public Opinion. In 1959, he separated from his 1st wife, the former Priscilla Fansler, mother of his son Tony Hiss and a son from a previous marriage, Timothy Hobson. They never divorced, but in 1960, Hiss met a woman named Isabel Johnson, and they began living together. Priscilla died in 1984, and Hiss and Johnson subsequently married.

Unlike Chambers, both Hiss and Nixon, who rose to become the 37th President of the United States, and then a bigger criminal than Hiss was ever alleged to be, outlived most of their enemies. Nixon died in 1994, and Hiss outlived even him, as one of the last surviving figures of the early days of the Cold War, until November 15, 1996, age 92, maintaining his innocence to the end.

Hiss even lived long enough to see many Soviet Union documents declassified by its successor nation, the Russian Federation. Some of these documents "proved" that he was a Soviet agent, with the code name "ALES." Others suggested that it was incredibly unlikely that he was ALES. Former Soviet officials have come forward, saying that Hiss "never had any relationship with Soviet intelligence."

After losing the 1960 Presidential election, Nixon set about writing a book about his political experience thus far. He titled it Six Crises, and listed the Hiss case as one of them, along with what became known as the Checkers Speech, President Eisenhower's 1955 heart attack, his troubled 1958 tour of South America, his 1959 "Kitchen Debate" with Nikita Khrushchev, and his defeat to Kennedy.

*

December 2, 1948 was a Thursday. Author T. Coraghessan Boyle was born.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. And no games were scheduled in the NHL. There were 3 games played in the Basketball Association of America, the league that would become the NBA the next season:

* The Washington Capitols beat the Providence Steam Rollers, 66-61 at the Rhode Island Arena in Providence.

* The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia Warriors, 88-87 at the Philadelphia Arena.

* And the Baltimore Bullets beat the Indianapolis Jets, 90-78 at the Baltimore Coliseum.

October 27, 1947: Hollywood Fights Back

Bacall and Bogart, at the head of the marching actors in D.C.

That could be Bette Davis behind Bacall.

October 27, 1947: Members of The Committee for the First Amendment fly to Washington, D.C., as part of the "Hollywood Fights Back" movement against the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings investigating Communist influence in the American film industry. They were attempting to defend screenwriters accused of Communist activity, a group known as The Hollywood Ten.

Members of The Committee included directors John Huston, William Wyler and Billy Wilder; songwriter Ira Gershwin (his brother George had died in 1937); singers Frank Sinatra and Lena Horne; and actors Myrna Loy (who founded the group with Huston and Wyler), Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz, Judy Garland & her director husband Vincente Minnelli, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Bette Davis, Melvyn Douglas, Katharine Hepburn, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Burgess Meredith, Jane Wyatt, Dorothy Dandridge and Marsha Hunt.

Many of them, including Wilder, Gershwin, Marx, Robinson and Kaye, were Jewish. So were half of the Ten: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz and Samuel Ornitz. Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo were not Jewish, although Lardner's 1st wife, Sylvia Schulman, was. Regardless of religion, the artists saw this persecution as the sort of thing the Nazis would have done, and this fed their outrage.

Some of them were registered Republicans, but they couldn't accept this garbage. In particular, Lucy (a Republican) and Bogie (a Democrat) testified in such a way that it could only be described as an artful way of telling the HUAC members to go to Hell. (As Bogie's character Sam Spade said in The Maltese Falcon in 1941, "I won't play the sap for you!") That night, the actors bought a 30-minute special on ABC Radio, and did another a week later.

It ended up ineffective. Many of them found it impossible to get work in America, and moved to Europe. In 1960, Kirk Douglas asked Trumbo to write the script for the historical epic he wanted to star in, Spartacus, and that film's success helped break the blacklist.

Ring Lardner Jr., son of the famous sportswriter, was the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten, living until 2000.

Marsha Hunt was able to make 2 movies in 1948, and 3 in '49, but none in '50 or '51, 2 in '52, none in '53, and just 1 each in '54, '55 and '56, before going into semi-retirement. In 1971, a year after Trumbo's death, she appeared in a film version of his novel Johnny Got His Gun. In 1987, she appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as an Admiral's wife. Her last role was in 2008, in The Empire State Building Murders.

She died on September 7, 2022, as the last surviving blacklisted actor. At the age of 105, she remained unrepentant, because she wasn't a Communist, and still believed that what had already been done, before she stepped in was unfair.

Marsha Hunt in 1947 (left) and 2020

One actor who did name names was Ronald Reagan, who wanted to protect his status as President of the only thing he ever should have been President of: The Screen Actors Guild. Yes, Reagan, the man who wrecked the labor movement in America 35 years later, ran a labor union.

I guess a later director and screenwriter, Christopher Nolan, was right: "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

*

October 27, 1947 was a Monday. Baseball season was over. There was no Monday Night Football until 1970. The season of the Basketball Association of America, the league that would become the NBA, didn't start for another 16 days. The NHL season had started, but there were no games scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.

January 2, 1950: The Fall of J. Parnell Thomas

January 2, 1950: Representative J. Parnell Thomas resigns his seat in Congress. He had little choice.

He was a phony from early on. Born on January 16, 1895 as John Parnell Feeney Jr. in Jersey City, New Jersey, and raised Catholic, he believed his political ambitions wouldn't be realized if people knew that. So, after serving in World War I, he changed his named to John Parnell Thomas, and became an Episcopalian -- Protestant, but often considered "Catholic Lite."

He was elected a Councilman in the Bergen County town of Allendale in 1924, Mayor in 1925, and to the New Jersey General Assembly in 1934. In 1936, he bucked a Democratic tide to be elected as a Republican to the open seat in New Jersey's 7th Congressional District, and was never seriously challenged for re-election.

Thomas was a staunch anti-Communist, opposing Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman at every turn. In 1947, with the Republicans having gained control of Congress, he was named Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), one of the most un-American things America has ever produced.

His investigations into the American film industry led to the imprisonment of the screenwriters known as "The Hollywood Ten." But some actors stood up to him, including a pair of married couples: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, labor-supporting Democrats, and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, staunch Republicans, basically told Thomas to stick it.

In 1949, Thomas called Secretary of Defense James Forrestal "the most dangerous man in America," and said that if Forrestal were not removed from office, he would cause another world war. Truman already had problems with Forrestal, and fired him on March 31. On May 22, Forrestal died, probably a suicide.

Washington Post columnists Drew Pearson (no relation to the later football star of the same name) and Jack Anderson uncovered Thomas' corruption: They received documents showing that, on New Year's Day of 1940, he placed Myra Midkiff, niece of his secretary, Helen Campbell, and Arnette Minor, Campbell's maid, on his payroll, as clerks. They earned about $1,200 a year, and kicked their entire salaries back to the Congressman. Through this practice, he would also evade a tax bracket increase. Once this was exposed, Thomas and Campbell were summoned to answer to charges of salary fraud before a grand jury.

Irony #1: Thomas pled the 5th Amendment, to protect himself from self-incrimination in legal proceedings, just like the Hollywood Ten did. On January 2, 1950, just 38 days before the "I hold in my hand" speech that allowed Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin to succeed him as the leading anti-Communist in Congress, Thomas resigned.

Irony #2: After being convicted of fraud, and being sentenced to 18 months, he was sent to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, then "home" to 2 of the Hollywood Ten: Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr.

Although politically opposed to him, Truman pardoned Thomas, as a measure of goodwill, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1952, with just 27 days left in his term. Thomas tried to regain his seat in 1954, but couldn't even win the Republican nomination. He retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, and died there on November 19, 1970.

McCarthy and Richard Nixon rode television to become famous, and infamous. Parnell resigned at the dawn of the TV era, and, despite appearing in many a newsreel in the late 1940s, has largely been forgotten.

*

January 2, 1950 was a Monday. These college football bowl games, normally played on January 1, were bumped to January 2, because New Year's Day fell on a Sunday:

* Sugar Bowl, Tulane Stadium, New Orleans: Number 2 Oklahoma beat Number 9 Louisiana State (LSU), 35-0.

* Rose Bowl, Pasadena, California: Number 3 California lost to Number 6 Ohio State, 17-14.

* Cotton Bowl, Dallas: Number 5 Rice beat Number 16 North Carolina, 27-13.

* Orange Bowl, Burdine Stadium (renamed the Orange Bowl in 1959), Miami: Number 11 Kentucky lost to Number 15 Santa Clara, 21-13.

* Pineapple Bowl, Honolulu Stadium: Number 12 Stanford 74, University of Hawaii 20. Yes, 74-20. (If you're a fan of the 1990s ABC sitcom Coach, you should know that there was a real game named the Pineapple Bowl, from 1940 to 1957.)

* Gator Bowl, Jacksonville: Number 14 Maryland beat Missouri, 20-7.

* Tangerine Bowl, Orlando: St. Vincent's of Pennsylvania beat Emory & Henry, 7-6. This game has been known as the Citrus Bowl since 1983, and the Tangerine Bowl Stadium would later be named the Citrus Bowl, and now Camping World Stadium.

* Sun Bowl, Kidd Field, El Paso: Texas Western beat Georgetown, 33-20. Texas Western were playing on their home field. In 1950, Kidd Field was replaced with a stadium named the Sun Bowl, where the game is still played today. In 1967, a year after winning college basketball's National Championship, Texas Western changed its name to the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).

Number 1 Notre Dame did not accept any invitations to bowl games in this period, and were named National Champions for the 1949 season. Number 4 Army and Number 8 Minnesota also did not accept bowl bids.

Baseball was out of season. No games were scheduled for the NHL. One game was played in the NBA: The Anderson Packers beat the Baltimore Bullets, 92-75 at the gymnasium at Anderson High School in Anderson, Indiana. Brooklyn Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine was a recent graduate of the at school.

Neither of these teams exists any longer. Founded in the National Basketball League in 1946, the Packers won that league's title in 1949, then moved to the NBA, but played only one season, then one more in another league, and folded in 1951. The Bullets won the NBA title in 1948, but folded early in the 1953-54 season, their name being taken by a new team in 1963.