Alger Hiss Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1904 and educated in the city's schools before attending Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School. At Harvard he studied under Felix Frankfurter, then a prominent professor who later joined the U.S. Supreme Court, and came into contact with a circle of reform-minded lawyers who would populate the New Deal. After graduating in 1929, Hiss secured a coveted clerkship with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an experience that gave him a close look at constitutional argument and legal craftsmanship at the highest level. The Holmes clerkship placed him among the elite young lawyers of his generation and opened paths into public service.

Rise in the New Deal
In the early 1930s Hiss joined the federal government during the burst of experimentation that characterized Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term. He served at the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, where lawyers were essential to designing the legal architecture of farm policy, and worked with the Senate's Munitions Investigating Committee, commonly known as the Nye Committee, which examined the influence of arms manufacturers. The assignments brought him into a growing network of officials and attorneys whose careers would shape domestic and foreign policy. His brother Donald Hiss also served in government during these years, part of the same milieu of ambitious New Dealers.

State Department and the United Nations
By 1936 Hiss had moved to the Department of State, where he advanced through posts dealing with international organization and postwar planning. During World War II he worked on the policy staff engaged in designing the institutions that would follow the League of Nations. He took part in the Dumbarton Oaks conversations in 1944 and traveled to Yalta in early 1945 as an adviser when President Roosevelt, accompanied by Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., met with Allied leaders. In the spring of 1945 Hiss served as secretary general of the San Francisco conference that founded the United Nations, a role that placed him at the center of practical negotiations that produced the UN Charter. Senior diplomats, including Dean Acheson and others in the State Department, regarded him as an able organizer and a deft draftsman of complex texts.

After the war Hiss left the State Department and, with the encouragement of colleagues who valued his administrative and diplomatic skills, became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1946. The position crowned a swift ascent through the ranks of public service and linked his name to the architecture of postwar international cooperation.

Accusations, Hearings, and Trial
Hiss's reputation was upended in 1948 when Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time and a former Communist, testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Hiss had been part of a clandestine network in Washington in the 1930s. Chambers, who said he had known Hiss under the alias George Crosley, alleged that government documents had been passed to him for delivery to Soviet contacts. Hiss adamantly denied the charges, requested a public hearing, and confronted Chambers in nationally followed proceedings. The confrontation, and the committee's digging, drew in a young Congressman, Richard Nixon, whose persistence on the case helped propel his rise to national prominence.

As the inquiry deepened, investigators produced typed copies of government papers and microfilm that Chambers said he had hidden at his Maryland farm; the roll of microfilm later dubbed the "Pumpkin Papers" became an emblem of the case. Because the statute of limitations for espionage had expired, federal prosecutors charged Hiss with perjury, alleging that he lied to a grand jury when he denied giving documents to Chambers and denied knowing him as Crosley. Two closely watched trials followed; the first ended with a hung jury, and the second concluded in 1950 with a conviction for perjury. Hiss was sentenced to prison and ultimately served about three years and eight months. He never wavered from his insistence on innocence. The case divided colleagues and friends; Dean Acheson, then Secretary of State, declared he would not turn his back on Hiss, a statement that carried political costs during the intensifying domestic struggle over communism.

Imprisonment, Advocacy, and Later Life
After his release, Hiss returned to a far more constrained life. He could not resume his old roles, and for a time he worked outside the law, taking modest jobs while supporting himself and his family. With his wife, Priscilla Hiss, he continued to assert that the accusations were false and that the evidence used to convict him had been misinterpreted or manufactured. He set out his case in a detailed memoir, In the Court of Public Opinion, which challenged the logic of the prosecution and the reliability of the documents presented during the trials. Their son, Tony Hiss, later wrote about the family's experience and the long public controversy.

In the 1970s, after years of petitions, Hiss was readmitted to the bar in Massachusetts, a procedural milestone he saw as a step toward vindication. Debate about the case persisted in academic and public forums. Some historians and journalists, drawing on newly available materials, argued that confidential reporting from the 1940s pointed to Hiss's involvement in clandestine activities; others questioned the interpretations and emphasized the ambiguities, the fragmentary nature of the evidence, and his consistent denials. The release of Cold War decrypts in the 1990s, including references to a figure code-named "ALES", intensified the debate without permanently ending it. Hiss himself rejected any suggestion that he had acted as an agent and maintained his innocence until his death in 1996.

Family and Personal Network
Alongside colleagues and political antagonists, Hiss's family shaped his public journey. Priscilla Hiss stood beside him through the hearings and prison term, defending his character and disputing the allegations. Their son, Tony, became a writer and public voice for the family's position. Donald Hiss, Alger's brother, navigated his own public scrutiny as investigations widened. On the other side of the confrontation, Whittaker Chambers's testimony and the public campaign he mounted in print became the counterpoint to Hiss's denials. Richard Nixon's role on the House Committee transformed his own career, creating a line from the Hiss case to later stages of American politics. Within the diplomatic world, figures such as Dean Acheson and Edward Stettinius Jr. were markers of the professional esteem Hiss had once enjoyed, as were earlier mentors like Felix Frankfurter and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose chambers had first opened the door to national service.

Legacy
Alger Hiss's life contains two entwined legacies. One is the record of a skilled New Deal lawyer who helped the United States think through its role in creating a postwar order and who played a visible part in the founding of the United Nations. The other is the controversy that reshaped his reputation and, by extension, American political culture in the early Cold War. His prosecution for perjury, the symbolic power of the "Pumpkin Papers", and the prominence gained by Richard Nixon during the investigation made the case a touchstone for arguments about loyalty, evidence, and the boundaries of dissent. Hiss's steadfast denials, the loyalty of allies like Acheson, and the continuing scholarly disputes ensured that the questions raised by his case would endure long after the courtroom battles ended. He died in 1996, still asserting the innocence he had maintained since the first accusations, leaving behind a historical debate that continues to illuminate the anxieties and ambitions of his era.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by Alger, under the main topics: Justice - Sarcastic.