Alger Hiss Testifies Before HUAC as Whittaker Chambers Accuses Him of Espionage

On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party USA member, testified under subpoena before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss—a former State Department official who had accompanied FDR to Yalta—had secretly been a communist while in federal service. Hiss categorically denied the charge and subsequently sued Chambers for libel. Richard Nixon, then an unknown first-term congressman from California, seized upon the case as his political vehicle. During the pretrial discovery process, Chambers produced new evidence allegedly indicating espionage, including the famous “Pumpkin Papers”—microfilm hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin at his Maryland farm.

On December 2, 1948, HUAC investigators retrieved five canisters of microfilm from Chambers’ pumpkin. Nixon, who had rushed back from a Caribbean cruise, was photographed holding up strips of developed film and peering at them through a magnifying glass. Initial testing by Eastman Kodak indicated the film was manufactured in 1945, which would have vindicated Hiss. An outraged Nixon even called Chambers a liar. However, Eastman Kodak subsequently reported the initial analysis was wrong—the film was made in 1938, consistent with Chambers’s story. On December 15, 1948, a federal grand jury indicted Hiss on two counts of perjury.

After a mistrial due to a hung jury, Hiss was tried a second time and in January 1950 found guilty, receiving two concurrent five-year sentences of which he served three and a half years. Nixon made a Pumpkin Papers speech to Congress in 1950, just weeks after Senator Joseph McCarthy cited the Hiss case to launch McCarthyism. Two years later, Nixon was elected to the U.S. Senate thanks in large part to recognition gained from the Hiss case, and in 1968 he was elected president. The Hiss case became a foundational myth for anti-communist crusaders, demonstrating how espionage allegations could be weaponized for political advancement regardless of the destruction of individual lives and careers.