Hiss, Alger (1904–1996)

U.S. lawyer and government official accused of espionage for the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and sentenced to five years imprisonment for perjury. Born on November 11, 1904, in Baltimore, Maryland, Alger Hiss attended Johns Hopkins University and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1929. Before joining the Boston law firm Choate, Hall & Stewart in 1931, Hiss served for a year as private secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1933, he entered government service, working as an attorney for the New Deal.

Hiss later joined the U.S. State Department, where he served as special assistant to Assistant Secretary Francis Sayre on trade agreements. In 1941, he became assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department's political adviser in charge of Far Eastern affairs. In 1945, Hiss attended the Yalta Conference and was then named secretary-general of the San Francisco conference that set up the United Nations.

In 1946, Hiss left the government to serve as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a foundation that became a leading supporter of the United Nations. He was serving as president of the Carnegie Endowment when, in August 1948, journalist Whittaker Chambers accused Hiss of being a communist. Hiss voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, denying the charge. Initially, Hiss denied having ever known [Page 324]Chambers, but he later identified Chambers as George Crosley, a man he had known 12 years earlier.

In October 1948, Chambers produced the so-called Baltimore Documents, which he hid in a dumbwaiter shaft in the bathroom of the home of his nephew's mother. The envelope contained four notes handwritten by Alger Hiss, 65 State Department documents, and five microfilms that Chambers said were given to him by Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union.

The State Department documents, dated between January 5 and April 1, 1938, covered a wide variety of subjects, such as the U.S. intentions with respect to the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, and Germany's takeover of Austria. Other documents included diagrams of fire extinguishers and life rafts.

Chambers turned over the documents to his lawyers but placed the microfilms into a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. On the evening of December 2, 1948, Chambers accompanied two investigators to the farm and gave them the hollowed-out pumpkin. The films included photographs of State and Navy Department documents. The press soon referred to the entire set of documents as the “pumpkin papers.”

Hiss now faced charges of being a Soviet spy. Fortunately for Hiss, the statute of limitations on espionage was five years, and the incriminating documents were dated more than a decade earlier. The first trial against Hiss ended in July 1949 in a hung jury. He was convicted of perjury in a second trial in January 1950, although he continued to firmly maintain his innocence. Hiss served 44 months in prison before his release in November 1954.

Disbarred from the practice of law, Hiss became a salesman for a Manhattan printing firm. He continued to protest his innocence for the rest of his life. Based on information in official documents released during the 1970s that said the FBI hid evidence that would have helped to clear him, Hiss filed a petition of coram nobis, asking that the verdict be overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. The petition was turned down in federal court, and subsequent appeals were unsuccessful. Hiss was readmitted to the bar in 1975.

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