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Former communist Whittaker Chambers, whose dramatic testimony against former State Department official Alger Hiss in August 1948 helped spark the movement that was to become modern American conservatism, demands another look. His revelations and Hiss's subsequent two trials for perjury made anti-communism a political issue from the late 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and helped lay the foundation for the excesses labeled McCarthyism in the 1950s. The scholarly assessment of the case itself was settled three decades later when Allen Weinstein published Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case to conclude that Chambers told the truth when he testified that Hiss was indeed a communist when he worked for the State Department in the 1930s and passed along purloined government documents to be transmitted to Moscow.1 Biographer Sam Tanenhaus reached the same conclusion in his excellent Whittaker Chambers in 1997.2 Yet the political controversy over Chambers's veracity raged on, even after Hiss's death in 1996 removed him from the struggle. For example, the second edition of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, published by Oxford University Press, fails even to nod toward these two scholarly works. And unreconstructed true-believer William A. Reuben wrote the article on the Hiss case peddling the line that Hiss was railroaded to prison through the efforts of Chambers and his staunchest supporter on the House Un-American Activities Committee, California Representative Richard Nixon, who twenty years later would be elected president.3
"Anti-communist" and "conservative" were the two words used to describe Whittaker Chambers in the lexicon of historical and political analysis, and they have sufficed to encapsulate him for generations of students and observers. His religious experiences that expressed themselves in his affiliation with the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, the very heart of his famous memoir, have been relegated to a secondary level if considered at all. In fact, it is not too much to say they have never been properly evaluated.
The Need for an Assessment
The needed reassessment involves the role played by religion in Chambers's life. Unable to surrender his faith in secular communism without a substitute, he joined the Pipe Creek Meeting of Friends in Union Bridge, Maryland, near his farm, in August 1943.4 In 1952 Chambers wrote a memoir, Witness, that was...