Whittaker Chambers Told Americans the Cold War Was a Contest of Faiths

There is a hollowed-out pumpkin in American history, and it is the strangest piece of evidence ever to land in a courtroom. In December 1948, a rumpled magazine editor led investigators to his Maryland farm, walked into a field and pulled rolls of microfilm out of a pumpkin. Newspapers, naturally, called them the Pumpkin Papers. A nation that had been told for years that espionage was a smear invented by anti-communists suddenly had a vegetable to explain.

The editor was Whittaker Chambers, and the story he told about the pumpkin was only the beginning of the story he had to tell. He did not want to be remembered as a witness against one man. He wanted to be remembered as a witness to a faith, and to the other faith it was fighting. Let me walk through it.

Who Chambers was

Whittaker Chambers was born in 1901 in Philadelphia and raised on Long Island. He went to Columbia, left without a degree, and in the middle 1920s joined the Communist Party. He wrote for party publications, and in the 1930s he dropped into the underground, serving as a courier between Washington sources and Soviet intelligence.

In 1938 he broke with the party. He did so at personal risk, hiding for a time and keeping insurance copies of documents he had been given to pass along. He then built a second career as a writer and editor at Time magazine, where he rose to senior editor. His colleagues knew him as a gifted prose stylist with a haunted look.

Hold onto one point: Chambers was not a bystander who happened to overhear a conspiracy. He was a participant, and he said so. That is exactly why his testimony was both powerful and easy to attack. A man who had lied for years for the party was now asking America to believe him. The question was why.

The case against Alger Hiss

In August 1948, Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named a group of government officials who, he said, had been part of a Communist underground in the 1930s. One of them was Alger Hiss, a polished State Department veteran who by then was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss had been present at the Yalta conference in 1945 and had helped organize the founding conference of the United Nations.

Hiss denied everything under oath, including that he had known Chambers under that name. The two men confronted each other. Hiss was suave, credentialed and well-liked by the establishment. Chambers was disheveled and had every reason for a jury to distrust him. Much of the press sided with Hiss, and President Truman called the hearings a "red herring."

Then came the documents. Chambers produced typed copies of State Department papers, and then, in December 1948, the microfilm from the pumpkin. The statute of limitations had run out on any espionage charge, because the events were more than a decade old. But Hiss had denied under oath, to a grand jury, that he had passed documents to Chambers and that he had seen him in 1937 and later. That became a perjury case.

The first trial in 1949 ended with a hung jury. The second trial ended in January 1950 with a conviction on two counts of perjury, and Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison. He served three years and eight months and maintained his innocence for the rest of his life.

Let me be careful about what this does and does not establish, because honesty is the whole point of the exercise. Hiss was convicted of perjury, not of espionage, and the question of his guilt has been argued for seventy years. Material opened from Soviet and American archives in the 1990s, including the American decrypts known as the Venona cables, has persuaded many historians that Hiss did work for Soviet intelligence, though a few scholars still dispute that. A conservative can say so without claiming more than the record shows. And any conservative who calls it a clean win should remember that the same era produced real abuses, which The Hollywood Blacklist Was Wrong, and Conservatives Should Say So Plainly takes up honestly.

The book that was not about the case

Chambers had made his name as a witness. In 1952 he published Witness, an enormous autobiography of about eight hundred pages. Readers expected a thriller. They got something stranger and larger, a spiritual argument conducted through a life.

The book opens with a foreword in the form of a letter to his children, titled "Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children." This is the best-known part, and it is worth understanding why. Chambers wrote to explain to his children why he had done what he did, and what it had cost. In it he described leaving the Communist Party as leaving the winning side for the losing side.

Chambers called the book's subject the crisis of the Western world. And he did not mean the Soviet army.

The argument in four steps

Chambers's central claim fits into numbered premises. I will state it in my own words, not his, because he deserves a fair paraphrase more than a loose quotation.

1. Communism is a faith, not just an economic system. Its adherents hold a total view of man, history and meaning. It has a doctrine, a priesthood in the party, a vision of salvation in the classless society and an enemy that must be overcome.
2. Its core belief is that man is the highest being. If there is no God above man, then man's reason is final, and a party that claims to speak for reason can claim to speak for everything. That is the faith in man without God.
3. The West's real danger is that it shares the premise. Chambers argued that the secular, progressive West also tended to believe that man is the measure and that problems can be solved by clever organization. He thought the West differed from communism in degree of consistency, not in the root belief.
4. Therefore the contest is between two faiths: one that places man above God and one that does not. Chambers believed that where the West lost its belief in God, it lost the reason to resist. He said bluntly that the Western world was indifferent to God to the degree it was in crisis.

That is the argument. It is not an argument about tanks or tariffs. It is an argument about what people need to believe in order to refuse a tyranny.

Why a former communist was a good witness to the religious point

Chambers had a particular authority here. He had not been recruited by a pamphlet. He had been drawn by an idea: that the world was broken and that a movement existed to repair it. He described the appeal of that idea with sympathy. The communist believes he is fighting for the poor and for justice, and he is willing to give everything for it.

That is the very thing that made the faith dangerous. A man who thinks he is serving humanity will excuse any method. Chambers saw that in the underground: the lying, the secrecy, the willingness to sacrifice people for a cause. He argued that what drove it was not simple evil. It was belief with no higher judge than the believer.

The conservative reply is to observe that a free society needs something above the state to hold the state accountable. The Declaration of Independence says that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," which means the government did not grant them and cannot take them away. Take away the Creator and you have a government granting itself whatever rights it likes. That is the faith contest in miniature, and we trace it further in Why 'created equal' is a claim about God and not just about politics. Chambers would have recognized the point at once. He had watched the other side of it.

The part of the book conservatives argue about

Here I should be straight with you. Chambers was a pessimist, and his pessimism troubles many readers who admire him. He wrote that in leaving communism he felt he was leaving the winning side for the losing side. That is a startling thing for an American to say about the Cold War. He doubted that the West, with its comforts and its unbelief, had the spiritual strength to win.

He was wrong about the outcome, in one sense. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and the West won. But he was not wrong that the contest turned on belief. John Paul II, who had lived under communism in Poland, made a similar point about the role of faith in the collapse of the eastern bloc. John Paul II's 1991 Encyclical Weighed Capitalism After Communism Fell covers that, and Solzhenitsyn's Line Through Every Human Heart Is Where Conservatism Starts shows another witness who reached the same conclusion from a labor camp.

There is also a limit to Chambers's argument worth naming. A free society cannot be run on a single creed, and Americans have always disagreed about God. The Founders solved the problem by leaving religion free and by insisting that morality and religion were still the supports of republican government, a point Washington made in his Farewell Address, which Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable reads closely. Chambers's point survives that qualification. A republic does not need everyone to agree on God. It needs enough people who believe there is a standard above the government, and who act on it.

The strongest objection, answered

Put the critique at full strength.

Chambers was an unreliable witness with a history of deception. His religious reading of the Cold War is a way of dressing up a political fight in sacred clothes. And treating communism as a faith lets the right avoid arguing against it on the merits, such as its record of famine and terror. Besides, plenty of religious societies have been tyrannies, and plenty of secular ones have been free.

Answer it in numbers.

1. Unreliable witness, reliable documents. Chambers's credibility was tested by the evidence he produced, not by his character. The typed papers and microfilm were examined in court, and a jury weighed them. A witness who tells you where to find the proof does not need to be admired.
2. The merits are part of the argument. Chambers did not skip the record. His point was that the record of communist regimes made sense only if you understood the premise behind them. A system that has abolished any authority above itself will go on to abolish dissent.
3. Religious tyrannies exist. True, and Chambers knew it. His claim was not that belief in God guarantees liberty. It was that liberty needs a belief that rights come from something beyond the state. A theocracy fails that test as surely as a party does, which is why the American arrangement protects conscience as well as faith.

The objection is right that Chambers was no saint and that "faith" is a word that can be abused. It is wrong that his reading is merely rhetoric. It explains why the argument with communism could not be won with economics alone.

The late honor

Chambers left Time and later worked briefly for National Review in the 1950s, which was a natural home for a man who had stopped believing the left could be argued out of its premises. He farmed in Maryland, wrote and was widely attacked by critics until his death in 1961, widely attacked by critics.

His reputation changed in the years after. President Reagan, who read Witness and often cited Chambers, posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. It was an unusual honor for an unusual man: a writer, a convert and a witness whom many in the press had once called a liar.

The case in brief

1. Whittaker Chambers, a Communist Party member from the 1920s who left in 1938, testified in 1948 against Alger Hiss and produced the documents known as the Pumpkin Papers.
2. Hiss was convicted of perjury in January 1950 and sentenced to five years, and later archival material has persuaded many historians that Chambers told the truth.
3. In Witness (1952), opened by a foreword in the form of a letter to his children, Chambers argued that communism is a rival faith, the belief that man is the highest being, and that the West's crisis was its own indifference to God.
4. Chambers was pessimistic about the West's chances, and the Soviet collapse in 1991 proved him wrong on the outcome but not on the point that belief decides such contests.
5. A free republic need not agree on a creed, but it does need enough citizens who believe in a standard above the government.

What you can do: read the foreword to Witness, the letter to his children, and then write a letter of your own to a child or grandchild about one thing you believe and why.