Whittaker Chambers and the Confessions of Ex-Communists

Abstract

Chapter 5 places Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 Witness within the American panic over communism during the second Red Scare. In the late 1940s, Chambers took the stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee to confess that he and Alger Hiss, among others, had conspired against the United States from a Soviet underground cell. Though Hiss’s prison sentence was a legal victory, the autobiography claimed authority back from the trials and the state’s capacity to make meaning of Chambers’s life. Chambers argued for a return to the authority of God and fathers outmoded in a secular modernity exemplified by communism and New Deal liberalism. Although the trial of Hiss had publicized these accusations, Chambers turned to autobiography to achieve where he thought he had failed: to convert Americans to a Christian anticommunism and to compel present and former communists to confess, though he would ultimately fail to convert Hiss himself.