You might not remember the Hiss case, but it remembers you. Like it or not, the lingering DNA from the Hiss case still divides the American political landscape between liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries, and cold warriors and one-worlders-if not Whigs and Know-Nothings.
Donald trump hiss trial#
Nor was Hiss the only defendant in the dock also on trial with him-albeit as unindicted co-conspirators-were FDR’s New Deal, the Yalta Conference, Harry Truman’s re-election campaign, the United Nations, and what shock jock Alex Jones now calls globalism. The Hiss trials were sensational as they advanced the idea of an enemy within-an idea which remains dear to political hearts in the Department of Homeland Security.
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It was only after the Hiss trials (there were actually two he was only convicted the second time around) that Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy stood up in Wheeling, West Virginia, and proclaimed that he had a list of “205” members of the State Department who, he said, were “card-carrying” (a big phrase in the 1950s) Communists and on-the-job to subvert truth, justice, and the American way.
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state papers, via Chambers, to Soviet Russia. While the formal charges against Hiss were two counts of perjury, for having lied under oath while testifying to the House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAC), in reality Hiss was sent up the river for having been a member of the Communist Party and for having passed U.S. Bush, and Donald Trump, all of whom, I would argue, are spiritual heirs of Whittaker Chambers (Hiss’s accuser who later published Witness, his breathless confessional).
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Why should anyone, in 2017, care about a federal case for perjury that was decided in 1950, with a victory for the prosecution, which sent New Dealer and former State Department official Alger Hiss to prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for forty-four months?įor one thing, there is a political-genealogical link between the Hiss case (the first show trial of the McCarthy era) and the subsequent political careers of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu, Voltaire, Robespierre, and often used to explain the Hiss case If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.