Alger Hiss Spy Case

The Alger Hiss Spy Case

During the late nineteen forties, a new anti-Communistic chase was in full holler, this being the one of the most active Cold War fronts at home. Many panic-stricken citizens feared that Communist spies were undermining the government and treacherously misdirecting foreign policy. The attorney general planned a list of ninety supposedly disloyal organizations, none of which was given the right to prove its loyalty to the United States. The Loyalty Review Board investigated more than three million employees that caused a nation wide security conscious. Later, individual states began ferreting out Communist spies in their area. Now, Americans cannot continue to enjoy traditional freedoms in the face of a ruthless international conspiracy known as the Soviet Communism. In 1949, eleven accused Communists were brought before a New York jury for abusing the Smith Act of 1940, which prohibited conspiring to teach the violent overthrow of the government. The eleven Communist leaders were convicted and sentenced to prison.

In 1950, Alger Hiss, formerly an employee of the Department of State, was convicted of perjury. Born in November 11, 1904, he grew up shabby-genteel in Baltimore, Maryland. Lean and boyishly handsome, Hiss was a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and of Harvard Law School and was a law clerk to the Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter and later a clerk for Associate justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. In 1933, he worked for law firms in Boston and on Wall Street, joined Roosevelt¡¦s administration, and worked in several areas, including the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Nye Committee, the Justice Department, and, starting in 1936, the State Department. In the summer of 1944 he was a staff member at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which created the blueprint for the organization that became the United Nations. By 1945, he was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference as well as to Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill. Later that year, Hiss served as acting the temporary secretary general at the San Francisco assembly that created the United Nations. In 1947, John Foster Dulles, Chairman of the board of Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, asked Hiss to become that organization¡¦s president.

Hiss was more than a bright young bureaucrat. While working by day on Wall Street, he was active by night in the International Juridical Association, an alleged communist-front lawyers¡¦ organization. As early as 1942, the Federal Bureau of Investigations received warnings that Hiss was probably a Soviet agent.