Chambers accuses Hiss before HUAC

Whittaker Chambers’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on August 4, 1948, brought an accusation of Communist espionage into the center of national politics: Chambers named Alger Hiss, a prominent former government official, as a member of an underground network. The charge rocked Washington, and Harry S. Truman’s dismissal of the hearings as a “red herring” quickly turned the testimony into a controversy over both alleged subversion and the political uses of the investigation.

The accusation

The testimony came during a two-week special session of Congress that had accomplished little, in Truman’s view, beyond exposing the distance between Republican promises and performance. On Capitol Hill, Chambers, an editor at Time, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He described his own past involvement in an underground organization in Washington and identified Hiss as part of it: “For a number of years, I, myself, served in the underground in Washington, D.C.,” Chambers said. “I knew it at its top level…. A member of this group…was Alger Hiss.”

Hiss was a conspicuous figure to accuse. He was president of the Carnegie Foundation, had served in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, and had spent fourteen years in the State Department. The allegation therefore reached beyond one man’s reputation: it implicated a figure associated with the New Deal and raised the possibility of Communist activity within the federal government. The passage records Chambers’s charge and its reception, not a resolution of its truth.

Washington reacts

The news was described as rocking the city. Official Washington was reported to be “stunned with anger and disbelief,” while the political danger was apparent to congressional leaders. Speaking to a reporter, Sam Rayburn warned, “There is political dynamite in this Communist investigation. Don’t doubt that.” His remark captured the testimony’s double force: it was a grave allegation about a government official, and an explosive issue in the contest between the parties.

The timing heightened that political pressure. Truman had spent the special session attacking the Republican Congress as an obstacle to social progress. The Hiss allegation introduced a new and potentially dominating controversy just as the session was ending, giving the investigation significance well beyond the committee room.

Truman’s response

At a press conference the day after the testimony, Truman was asked whether the “spy scare” on Capitol Hill was merely a “red herring” intended to divert attention from inflation. He agreed, characterizing the hearings as “a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they ought to do….” He added that “They are slandering a lot of people that don’t deserve it.”

Reporters then asked whether they could quote him. Truman said they could. The exchange made his criticism public and attributable, intensifying the political risk of his intervention: rather than treating the allegations cautiously or leaving his view unrecorded, he authorized the press to print his dismissal of the inquiry. A week later, after the special session had ended, another exchange produced a line more useful to him. Asked whether the session had been a “do-nothing” Congress, he answered, “Entirely,” supplying the name he thought apt for the 80th Congress even as the Chambers-Hiss controversy continued to unsettle Washington.