Jun 21, 2023
Each side in this Case had a male homosexual secret.
Remember that we’re in 1949, when conservatives thought that male
homosexuality was a sin and a crime and enlightened liberals
thought that gay men were tragic mistakes of nature, mentally ill,
women trapped in men’s bodies, but fortunately there was talk
therapy, shock treatment and, if all else fails, lobotomies.
(Homosexual men were subjected to lobotomies until recently in
Communist Cuba.)
Chambers, during his years in the Communist underground, had
had gay sex with men he met in public places. And Hiss’s
stepson (Mrs. Hiss’s son by her first marriage) was gay and had
been discharged from the Navy in 1945 on psychological grounds,
which was a polite way of eliminating gay sailors. The
precise dimensions of each side’s gay secret, how it was concealed,
and how it was hinted at publicly and used covertly, is the subject
of this Podcast.
Further Research:
Robert Stripling, HUAC’s Chief Investigator and Nixon’s
partner in the first phase of the Case, said that it was whispered
around the hearing room from Day One that Chambers was “a queer” —
Stripling’s word, not mine. He also said that, whenever an
ex-Communist testified, within hours rumors began that he or she
was an alcoholic or drug addict, had been to see a psychiatrist, or
was a “sex pervert” — again, Stripling’s words, not mine.
The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote
discreetly that the “anti-Chambers whispering campaign was one of
the most repellent of modern history.” George H. Nash, “The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” at 100
(Basic Books 1976). Alistair Cooke used equal delicacy when,
in his inventory of ‘secret explanations’ of what happened between
Hiss and Chambers, he wrote “one or two other theories . . . went
the rounds of Washington and New York [that] . . . so mercilessly
intrude into other people’s lives that the incompleteness of this
report appears a small price to pay for giving everybody so
slandered the benefit of a large doubt. The reader who is
most prurient to know about such theories will be the one most apt
to hit on them.” Cooke at 334. Dr. Weinstein, in his
definitive book on this Case, deals with Chambers’ homosexual acts
at 112-13, 129-30, with Hiss’s stepson’s gayness at 424-25, and
with Hiss’s use of Chambers secret gay life to ‘explain’ his
mentally ill lies about Hiss at 405-08 and 639-41 (section 4,
titled “Chambers as Paranoid: The Revenge Motif” in an
appendix titled “Six Conspiracies in Search of an Author,
1948-1996”).
I have never seen any indication that the two sides in this
Case formally agreed not to smear each other with their gay
secrets. Nor have I ever had any reason to believe that Alger
Hiss was in the slightest degree gay.
Questions: If you were one of Hiss’s lawyers and the
prejudices of 1949 were still widespread today, would your ethics
deter you from smearing Chambers as gay (and therefore mentally ill
or evil)? Don’t you have an ethical obligation to defend your
client vigorously?? If you were Prosecutor Murphy, and if you
feared testimony by Hiss’s stepson, would you use your gay smear on
the same grounds? On the whole, which side do you condemn
more for its use of the other side’s ‘gay secret’?
Here is a poem, titled “Lothrop, Montana” that Whittaker
Chambers wrote. It was published (under Chambers’ real name) in The
Nation magazine — to this day, the media headquarters of the Hiss
side — on June 30, 1926, at page 726:
The cottonwoods, the boy-trees,
Imberle — the clean, green, central bodies
Standing apart, freely, freely, but trammeled;
With their branches inter-resting — for support,
Never for caressing, except the wind blow.
And yet, leaning so fearfully into one another,
The leaves so pensile, so tremulously hung, as they lean
toward one another;
Unable to strain farther into one another
And be apart;
Held back where in the earth their secret roots
Wrap one about another, interstruggle and knot; the vital
filaments
Writhing in struggle; heavy, fibrous, underearthen life,
From which the sap mounts filling those trembling leaves
Of the boy-trees, the cottonwoods.
Is it reading too much between the lines to see in there a
description of wrestling (Chambers’ college sport) by two young gay
men, ending as each one’s ‘sap mounts’ within their ‘secret roots’
and ‘trembling leaves’?