The summer of 1948: Whittaker Chambers, witness for the 'losing side'

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In August 1948, 75 years ago this summer, America was transfixed by the testimony of an obscure Time magazine editor before the House Un-American Activities Committee. For the first time, television broadcast a congressional hearing, and what a hearing. At issue was Soviet espionage in the United States. Soon, Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss and Richard Nixon were household names.

Chambers had joined the Communist Party of America in 1924. Then in his early 20s, he had convinced himself that communism was the only solution to the dual problems of war and "economic privation."

For a number of years Chambers wrote for the "Daily Worker." Eventually he agreed to go underground to function as a courier for embedded spies, including Alger Hiss, a high-ranking Roosevelt administration official who would ultimately be imprisoned for perjury in connection with Chambers' allegations.

Chambers had abandoned the Communist Party in 1937. His de-conversion, while gradual, was capped off by something very large (the murderous Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union) and something very small (an epiphany inspired, he wrote, by contemplating the perfection of his infant daughter's ears).

Until then, Chambers had regarded himself as a "typical modern man" living life "without God" save for "tremors of intuition." As of 1948, he had spent nearly a decade living the "other typical American life," namely a life of "career and success" as a writer for Time.

In his autobiography, "Witness," Chambers wrote that the 20th century was the "first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God."

What's more, this rejection had taken such a "specifically political form," Chambers wrote that there now loomed an "irrepressible conflict" between those who "reject and those who worship God."

In what remains one of the great autobiographies in all of American literature, Chambers declared that he had joined the "losing side" of a profound philosophical/political divide between "capitalism and communism." Chambers regarded both as misguided "materialistic philosophies," but with this crucial difference: Capitalism had abandoned religion, while communism had become a religion.

Chambers would die in 1961 without ever budging from his belief that he had left communism for the "losing side." He had decided that America was already in the process of "dying" in the 1920s. By midcentury, in "Witness," he concluded that his country was terminally afflicted with "self-satisfaction and indifference."

The book, and Chambers, would be vilified by virtually everyone on the left, while many on the right objected to his interminable pessimism. What was this business, they grumbled, about the "losing side?" For some it still rankled when President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.

One wonders what Chambers might say today. "Witness" stands as his main attempt to awaken and revive the "losing side," and to bridge the "jagged fissure" alienating the "plain people" from the "best people" — meaning experts and those in power. Sound familiar?

Calling himself a "man of the right," rather than a conservative or a Republican, Chambers had little time for politics, save for a soft spot for Richard Nixon, who was the first national leader to believe that Chambers was telling the truth.

Ironically, as president Nixon would later be responsible for the opening to Communist China. That opening was supposed to prepare the way for the gradual westernization of China. Instead it has paved the way for China to become a great power and a serious rival of the United States.

As in Chambers' lifetime, America's enemies are both without and within. Thanks to Chambers, among others, we now know that homegrown and Soviet spies were a genuine threat in the 1930s and '40s. Will we one day learn the same thing about Chinese espionage of the early 21st century?

Near the end of "Witness," Chambers declares that he had hit "something else" when he unleashed his "little sling and aimed at communism." That "something else" amounted to the "forces of that great socialist revolution," which, in the "name of liberalism" had been "inching its ice cap over the nation." Today, in the name of progressivism that force has not exactly receded.

"Man without mysticism is a monster," Chambers wrote. Who but monsters could build or excuse such monstrosities as the Soviet state of yesteryear — or its Chinese counterpart today?

Is it unreasonable to worry that Chambers' "losing side" might one day be transformed by its "best people" into a different sort of winning side — religiously irreligious but ideologically pure, distributing bread and circuses enough to distract us from monstrosities all its own?