7/30/2023 0 Comments Who was alger hissThe Hiss-Chambers affair would prove to be one of the most important criminal cases of the century and the watershed event that that led directly to the McCarthy period.Ī first trial ended in a hung jury, but Hiss, who firmly maintained his innocence, was convicted in a second trial. Hiss denied the charge and filed a libel suit against Chambers, but when Chambers produced a number of copies of State Department documents and said they had been given to him in 1938 by Hiss for transmission to the Soviet Union, perjury charges were brought against Hiss for denying before a grand jury that he had committed espionage. He was serving in that capacity in 1948 when Whittaker Chambers, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), first publicly accused Hiss of being a secret communist. Hiss left the government in late 1946 to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a New York-based foundation which under his leadership became a leading supporter of the U.N. (The charter, unlike the plane’s passenger, had its own parachute.) after the San Francisco Conference on a special plane for President Truman’s signature. Charter.Īlger Hiss flies the United Nations charter to Washington, D.C. Later that year, he was Secretary General of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which created much of the final blueprint for the U.N. As deputy director of the Department’s Office of Special Political Affairs, he assisted in drafting the structure of a proposed United Nations. In 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close, he helped prepare for peace. In 1939, Hiss became assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department’s Political Adviser for Far Eastern Affairs. Sayre, to gain firsthand experience that would help the government defend the constitutionality of the Trade Agreements Act. The following year, he entered the Trade Agreements division of the State Department, as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. When the Nye Committee work was completed, he joined the Justice Department as special assistant to the Solictor General to help defend the AAA before the Supreme Court. During this time, New Deal legislation was constantly under attack by conservatives, and, as a lawyer, Hiss became a point man whose specialty was defending the constitutionality of the new reforms. Senate, which was investigating profiteering by the munitions industry. In 1934, Hiss’s services were loaned out to the Nye Committee of the U.S. The telegram urged him to join the New Deal as an attorney with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a program set up by FDR to help farmers who had been hurt by the Depression. He stayed with that firm – Cotton, Franklin, Wright & Gordon – until 1933, when he received a telegram from Frankfurter, saying the country needed him. The next year, he and his wife, Priscilla, whom he had married in 1929, and his stepson, Timothy Hobson, born in 1926, moved to New York, where Priscilla worked on a book while Hiss joined another law firm. Hiss would later say Holmes was the most profound influence in his life.Īfter his one-year appointment, Hiss joined the law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from law school in 1929, and immediately thereafter, on Frankfurter’s recommendation, received the honor of becoming Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s private secretary. Hiss attended Johns Hopkins University and then Harvard Law School, where he came under the influence of future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. In 1907, his father, an executive with a dry goods firm, experienced severe financial difficulties and committed suicide, leaving the children to be raised by their mother and aunt. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Alger Hiss at the Justice’s summer home in Beverly Farms, June 1930.Īlger Hiss was born on Novemin Baltimore, Maryland, the fourth of five children.
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