Dec. 2, 1948: The 'Pumpkin Papers' incriminate Alger Hiss
On Dec. 2, 1948, Whittaker Chambers led a group of congressional investigators from the House Un-American Activities Committee to his farm about 60 miles outside Washington, D.C. There, in dramatic fashion, Chambers walked them to his garden, where from a hollowed-out pumpkin he retrieved five canisters of film that he claimed proved Alger Hiss, a highly regarded official during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, was a communist spy.
The scene was as effective as it was contrived. Chambers had been making his claims about Hiss publicly for months and had hidden the film inside the pumpkin that very morning. Shortly thereafter, a House Un-American Activities Committee press release described what became known as the “Pumpkin Papers” as “definite proof of one of the most extensive espionage rings in the history of the United States.”
As a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, Hiss’ resumé epitomized that of the polished intellectual: He had been a clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, he had secured ranking posts in the New Deal, and he later became president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
His accuser, Chambers, was a social inverse: a jowled Columbia University dropout and a journalist whose personal testimony would help spark the McCarthyite rebellion against liberal elites.
By his own account, Chambers became a communist in 1925 and worked for its newspaper, the Daily Worker. Chambers testified that he remained a dedicated communist until 1938, when a religious conversion caused him to renounce his long-held belief. But starting in 1934, Chambers said, he became part of an underground communist cell that included a few government officials, among them Alger Hiss.
As early as 1942, Chambers had made his accusation against Hiss in interviews with the FBI. But it wasn’t until August 1948, in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, that his claim began to gain detail and traction. Chambers told the committee he had met Hiss more than a decade earlier through his activities for the underground cell. Those activities included carrying copies of government documents from Hiss to a party contact in Baltimore.
Public reaction was electric. Hiss confronted Chambers before the committee. And when Chambers repeated his claim on NBC’s Meet the Press, Hiss sued Chambers for slander. That proved to be a mistake.
At a deposition in November 1948, Chambers produced a packet of 43 documents dated between January and March 1938, documents obtained from Hiss that he’d hidden inside an unused dumbwaiter at a relative’s house. Some, he said, were replications of sensitive state department communications typewritten at home by Alger’s wife, Priscilla Hiss. Some contained penciled notes written by Hiss himself.
In increasingly detailed accounts, and under oath, Chambers detailed evening meetings with Hiss at his residence. Approximately every two weeks, he said, he went to the Hiss home to collect government documents, returning them before dawn—after they were photographed. Over time, Chambers claimed, the contact became a friendship that included a three-week stay by his family at Hiss’ D.C. apartment, loans of money and a car, and social visits between wives.
Indictment and trials
Before a New York federal grand jury in December, Hiss denied handing over state department secrets to Chambers or even seeing Chambers after Jan. 1, 1937. Hiss was indicted on charges he lied to the grand jury about both.
His first trial ended in July 1949 with a hung jury; but in his second trial, Hiss was convicted on both counts of perjury in January 1950.
By then, government investigators had located the Leica camera used to photograph documents as well as the Woodstock typewriter—once owned by Hiss—with imperfections that matched those of the pictured documents.
And then there was the matter of those “Pumpkin Papers.” Of the five rolls of film retrieved, three had not been developed, and one of those three had been light compromised. But the two developed rolls were photographs of State Department documents..
Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison. His appeal to the Supreme Court was denied certiorari; two justices who knew him recused themselves.
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