July 16, 2007
Hiss and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:00 PM EST A line on the homepage of this website links to a Slate piece by Ron Rosenbaum on Alger Hiss. Rosenbaum writes about the fact that an American historian, Kai Bird, and a Russian historian, Svetlana Chervonnaya, have collaborated on a piece in the current The American Scholar titled “The Mystery of Ales.” As Rosenbaum tells the story, the two attempt (and signally fail) to clear Hiss’s name, or at least muddy the waters, by the nasty expedient of smearing another 1940s liberal who worked in the State Department, a man named Wilder Foote. Ales was the code name of a Russian spy; some modern scholarship on the Hiss case has tended to assume that Hiss was Ales, and the article Rosenbaum is writing about disputes that identification, suggesting that Foote better fits the bill, which Rosenbaum thinks unpersuasive to the point of being contemptible. I think Rosenbaum makes a good case, but I am depressed that he has been provoked to make it. At this point in my life, I do not much care about the Hiss case, and for that matter I never did; I am of the wrong generation and came from the wrong sort of political background (my father was a Truman Democrat) to have cared passionately about Hiss. I have, however, known and been close to people who knew Hiss in the 1930s and after, and who cared very much about the case. They were on both sides of the question, although by the 1970s most of the people I knew who had known Hiss, and who had at one time been convinced of his innocence, had moved to the position of assuming that he had been rightfully convicted of perjury and had almost certainly committed espionage. What Hiss meant to part of that group, the ones who were liberal patricians, was that contrary to their own first instincts, one of their own sort could indeed be a traitor. They did not thereby assume that all Communists were potential traitors, although they did think that in the wake of Hiss you had to think about the possibility, and they certainly didn’t think that non-Communist liberals were any likelier to be traitors than were, for example, Irish-American senators from Wisconsin. But Hiss had first seemed like a pure victim of gutter politics and Red-baiting in what they explained was the original sense of the phrase (falsely accusing a liberal of being a Communist), and they had reluctantly come to the sad conclusion that he was something very different. These people had remained liberals, but they were more aggressively anti-Communist liberals than they had been before. The Hiss case was a milestone for them, the way the Moscow purge trials had been one more than a decade before. I also knew at least one unashamed former Communist union organizer who had known Hiss, although not before his release from prison, and who resolutely insisted on Hiss’s innocence. This was something of a paradox. Why should people who had been loyal Communists insist that someone they had liked and admired could never have been one? Why should people who had not been Communists, but thought Communists the most honorable of people, also insist that Hiss had to be innocent? After a while, I decided that they thought Hiss had to be innocent for the same reason that they were sure the Rosenbergs were innocent, and that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been a sad necessity for the beleaguered Soviet Union, and on, and on, and on: because that was the party line, and it was the nature of a certain sort of loyalist to cling to the line. This was a bad habit of mind, one that occurred all over the political spectrum; on the right; these were the sort of people who (for example) didn’t care that McCarthy had lied about the number of combat missions he’d flown, almost tripling the number, or that one of his first political acts had been to curry favor with German-American voters by intervening on behalf of SS war criminals who had murdered American POWs in the Ardennes. The people who hewed to lines came in all political hues, but every one of them had the same kind of intellectual smell. What did change, after a while, or at least seemed to, was that people stopped arguing about Hiss, or even talking about him. The people I liked and admired mostly decided that Hiss could be guilty but that McCarthy was not on that account less of a villain, or liberalism any less compelling a politics. Finally, Hiss disappeared, and eventually the Soviet Union did too. But now Ron Rosenbaum comes along and shows that Hiss’s ghost is back and is haunting at least some magazines and websites. I am trying to cheer up about this. I believe Kai Bird is almost exactly my age, which makes him just old enough to have come by Hissocentrism honestly, or at least not insanely. I once asked a sophisticated sociologist of science why, given his views on the derisory effects of new evidence and good arguments on individuals’ adherence to paradigms, he thought bad scientific ideas ever disappeared. He thought about this for a second, and then opined that he thought bad ideas disappeared when the people holding them died. Here’s hoping.
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