To the Editors:
Having read Hilton Kramer’s reference in the March issue of The New Criterion to my review of Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (“The Faiths of Whittaker Chambers,” The New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1952), I re-read what I wrote. There are many things that I have published in the past which, in the light of further reflection and subsequent experience, I would have liked to modify and correct. But I would not alter a line of what I wrote about Witness and Chambers, both in praise and in criticism. (Today I would only add a footnote expressing the hope that Witness would be on the required reading list of any course in the political history of the twentieth century.)
What I found startling about Mr. Kramer’s discussion was his failure adequately to present the views of Chambers that I criticized in my review, the grounds of my criticism, and the evidence bearing on what is and isn’t an intelligent guide to defending freedom against Communism. I do not in any way disagree with Mr. Kramer in his assessment of the heroic character of Whittaker Chambers—indeed, for reasons I make clear in my autobiography, Out of Step, I was in a better position than most to appreciate Chambers’s heroism. I agree with Lionel Trilling that Chambers was “a man of honor.” I regret that Diana Trilling—writing about Chambers in your May issue—does less than justice to herself in now contesting that judgment. That was not always her view.
When he wrote Witness, Chambers was convinced that the great political divide in the United States and elsewhere was between, on the one hand, socialist reform, the New Deal, and Communism in all its varieties, and, on the other, a faith in human freedom rooted in a firm belief in the existence of God. In this he was demonstrably mistaken. Indeed, until the Communist International adopted the Popular Front strategy in 1935, the New Dealers and Roosevelt were denounced as fascists by the Communists, or on the way to becoming such. I remember how intensely Rexford G. Tugwell and other New Deal “brain trusters” were annoyed by Communist criticism. They didn’t like Communists, but—and this is crucial—they didn’t regard them as enemies. In fact, in their innocence they looked on them as liberals in a hurry—impatient, youthful idealists. They appreciated the zeal of the Communists, their sometimes sacrificial zeal in behalf of good causes; but they dismissed their doctrinal zealotry as overblown rhetoric.
Most of the genuine New Dealers had not the foggiest notion of what actual conditions in the Soviet Union were like, or about the “theological differences” (their favorite phrase) among the Communist factions. All they knew is what they learned from a continuous barrage of Communist propaganda, reinforced by the reports of pious pilgrims who said that the Soviet Union had a planned economy, no unemployment, great engineering works. The New Dealers didn’t approve of Communist violence, but at the time it was Hitler who seemed to be threatening the peace of Europe. Although they were very hostile to Franco, who was being aided by Mussolini and Hitler, they did not oppose the Neutrality Resolution that was adopted with the approval, if not instigation, of the Roosevelt administration. The Resolution made it impossible for the legally recognized Spanish Republic to purchase arms in the United States; this compelled the Republican Spanish regime to turn to the Soviet Union for military aid, for which Stalin exacted the price of NKVD hegemony and the Spanish gold supply.
In 1938, when Chambers broke with Communism and emerged from its underground in search of a public character that would give him safety, he certainty did not believe what he wrote in 1952: that liberalism, socialism, and the New Deal were akin to Communism, all on the same side of the line dividing the Free World from totalitarianism. The notion was absolutely absurd then and has remained absurd. As I pointed out in my review, Chambers’s classification of liberals, socialists, and humanists with Communists was as irresponsibly false and dangerous as the earlier Communist classification of the same groups with fascists. (Stalin’s theory of social-fascism had been de rigueur for all Communists, including Chambers, until 1935.)
Nor did Chambers believe in this fantasy when, on September 2, 1939, without any guarantee of immunity from criminal prosecution for his own underground activities, he identified some twenty members of Communist Party cells who had acquired strategic posts in the American government. This was the first and most important of Chambers’s heroic actions. Its one fortunate consequence was that Adolf Berle, an assistant secretary of state at the time, kept notes of the meeting. Their content makes utterly ridiculous the charge that Hiss’s trial ten years later was a frame-up. No one in his wildest fantasy could have anticipated the myriad of fortuitous circumstances that led Hiss to file a libel suit against Chambers. Had he not done so, the damning evidence of his guilt would not have come to light.
It was not Chambers who first publicly identified Hiss as an underground member of the Communist Party but Elizabeth Bentley, who had also served in the Communist underground. Chambers was formally subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because it was aware of his previous testimony to Berle and others. As brave and honorable as Chambers was, I doubt that he (or any other person I know) would have accepted the subpoena if he had had any conception of what he and his family were fated to endure in consequence of his truthful testimony. At the time, the Cold War had already become acute. The situation in Berlin was already so inflamed by the Soviet blockade that the outbreak of hostilities with the Soviet Union seemed imminent. (I was in Berlin that summer—the summer of 1948—at the height of the blockade; like everyone else, I was convinced that if the Russians shot down any of the American relief planes war would break out.) Chambers came forward as a witness prepared to end the few tranquil years of his life because he felt his testimony was necessary to re-acquaint the American people with the true nature of the Communist movement, which they had lost sight of during the euphoria of World War II co-belligerency. Chambers knew that his testimony meant the loss of a coveted job and the end of his career. He was prepared to accept that, as well as the obloquy of the Communist movement and its allies. He was not prepared to be treated as an enemy of mankind by the entire liberal establishment.
Truman’s scoffing dismissal of the Hiss Case as a “red herring” could be viewed as a kind of political damage control. But other reactions were not so easy to explain. In the face of Hiss’s conviction, the overwhelming evidence of Communist penetration, the Communist aggressions in Europe and Asia, the revelations of the Gulag, and the intensification of the Stalinist terror, Chambers could make no sense of the hysterical lynch spirit against him in the citadels of liberalism, except as an indication of the basic ideological kinship among liberals, socialists, and Communists. It was only then that liberalism and Communism seemed to become, for Chambers, members of the same ideological blood group.
I am loath to believe that Hilton Kramer accepts Chambers’s view as valid. But there is no doubt that he strongly contradicts my assertion that Chambers’s view is false, dangerously false, despite my recognition of the largely unpaid tribute liberals and anyone who values the truth owes to Whittaker Chambers. But then, asks Kramer: how did it happen “that the Communists had such a free ride in the Roosevelt administration”? In my review of Witness, I answer that it was colossal stupidity and ignorance on the part of the New Dealers. To which I should have added a reference to their intellectual arrogance. Hilton Kramer dismisses my explanation as “not very persuasive.” Indeed, to him my answer is “tantamount to abandoning the whole question.”
My answer may not be persuasive but, nonetheless, it is true. There is considerable evidence for it which Mr. Kramer ignores. And it is undoubtedly truer as an explanation of the ease and magnitude of Communist penetration than Chambers’s desperate surmise that the New Dealers and the Communists were members of the same ideological family.
Then there is my second main criticism of the doctrinal message of Witness—Chambers’s belief that only a return to God and religious faith could save the Free World. According to Chambers, “faith is the central pattern of this age,” and it is religious faith that is the best—indeed, the only—defense against the triumph of Communism. I disputed this on various grounds, among them that in a world of divided religious faiths one could not fashion an effective unity. I declared, in a passage quoted by Mr. Kramer, that “it is not unlikely that the [secular] humanistic spirit may be the best defense on a world scale against the Communist crusade because it can unite all human beings who, despite their religious differences on first or last things, value truth, justice, kindness and freedom among all men.” Hilton Kramer comments ironically.
Now, over a third of a century later, I think it would be accurate to say that the “spirit” so fondly invoked by Sidney Hook in his review of Witness has not proven to be much of a defense at all . . . . History, as a matter of fact, has proved Chambers to have been right about many things, and Witness remains not only one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American . . . but the very thing that Sidney Hook said it wasn’t: “an intelligent guide” to the victory of freedom over Communist tyranny.
Chambers, like so many others, had inherited his non-religious outlook when he became a Communist. He did not earn it. He never faced what one may call “the transcendental temptation,” intelligent resistance to which results invariably in an unillusioned naturalism. Like many others, when he lost the Communist faith that had functioned like a religion in his political life, he was bereft of any foundations of belief for his new devotion to the ideals of freedom. He reached out for whatever was at hand, not realizing its logical and psychological inadequacies. From his Quaker quietism he went to a kind of Kierkegaardian existentialism, failing to understand that such a view was compatible with any kind of empirical political reality and that its God was beyond any judgment of human value. He forgot that the existentialist Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he admired, had headed the Revolutionary Policy Committee of the Socialist Party, which had opted for the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; he forgot that the existentialist Paul Tillich had sought to be selected as president of East Germany, or that Karl Barth, who excoriated Hitler, had refused to utter a word of criticism of Stalin.
Mr. Kramer is right on one point. I was unduly optimistic about the prospects of developing a universal humanist movement in defense of a free society. But what other alternative is there for any person who cannot accept the superstitions of a transcendental world, and who on incontrovertible logical grounds accepts the autonomy of moral values and principles with respect to all theological and metaphysical beliefs? We don’t have to agree on the existence of heaven or hell to know that a free world, despite its imperfections, is better than the despotism of its enemies.
The personal religious faith that Chambers himself espoused does him credit. He became a Quaker and, despite what his detractors said about him, he tried to live by the precepts of that religion. His remarks about Hiss in public and private showed no personal animus whatsoever. In an eloquent letter to Bertram Wolfe (June 7, 1957), Chambers wrote: “What moved me was that you noted my efforts to spare Alger.” He went on to say that for him “this lies at the very heart of the meaning of the whole business. The West that I must stand for was one of a humanity that above all understands, forgives, spares . . . .”
But at the time that Chambers joined the Quakers, the Friends Service Committee was devoting its efforts to preventing England from resisting Hitler; it subsequently came out against the military resistance to Nazi aggression, and since the end of World War II it has played a very mischievous role, together with the Communist peace movement, in attempting to disarm the United States and to further the foreign policy goals of the Kremlin. In no country of the world does it co-operate with the forces opposing Communist tyranny to the same extent as it cooperates with Communist guerrillas struggling to impose their own ruthless, dictatorial rule over others. What other religious movement today is engaged in a struggle to keep the West free? Catholic “liberation theology”? The Papal doctrine of the moral equivalence of Communism and capitalism? The statement of the American Catholic bishops on weapons and arms control and on the causes of poverty? I find it passing strange that any knowledgeable and critical-minded partisan of freedom in the modern world should, in light of the historical evidence, find plausible Chambers’s view that only religious or transcendental faith can overcome Communism.
Sidney Hook
Hoover Institution
Stanford, CA