I don’t want to sound like one of those elitist jazz buffs who reject a musician as soon as the average Joe becomes attracted to him. We can’t fight the culture wars effectively unless the masses are in the ranks.
Yet I must admit that there are times when I wish that conservatism had not become a set of ideas associated more with the right-wing commentators on the nightly talk shows than with people like Whittaker Chambers. Those who base their conservatism on what they hear on the talk shows would profit from a dose of Chambers. The word “gravitas” gets overworked these days, but that is precisely what he offers anyone willing to think beyond the catchphrases and “gotcha” wordplay of the talking heads.
An article by Ralph de Toledano in the February 14th issue of The American Conservative magazine underscores the point. It focused on de Toledano’s recollections of the time he spent working with Chambers on Witness, Chambers’s book on his years as a Communist and his confrontation with Alger Hiss.
De Toledano takes us back to the 1950s, when Hiss and Chambers became household names, after Chambers appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused Hiss of being a highly-placed member of a Communist cell with many operatives in the federal government. Chambers admitted to his own membership in the cell. Hiss denied the charge, maintaining that he had never met Chambers.
The country chose sides. The establishment sided with Hiss, the slim, meticulously dressed president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who had been at various stages of his career a rising star in the State department, an adviser to FDR at the Yalta Conference and secretary-general of the San Francisco Conference that launched the United Nations.
It was at these HUAC hearings that Richard Nixon first attracted national attention. He pushed the committee to probe Hiss’s denials. Under questioning, Hiss’s story fell apart. Chambers produced as evidence piles of classified State Department documents typed on Hiss’s typewriter and four memos in Hiss’s handwriting, as well as information about Hiss’s life that only a close confidant would be aware of. Hiss was indicted for perjury.
Hiss went to his death insisting upon his innocence. But information uncovered in the years since his death has convinced all but his most ardent supporters of his guilt. The protestation you will hear most often these days from those who backed him is that he was indeed a Communist, but that there were good reasons for well-intentioned Americans to have been attracted to Communism in the Depression years and during the time of our alliance with the Soviet Union in the war against Nazi Germany.
But if you ask me, as momentous as it was, it is not for the Hiss trial that Chambers most deserves to be remembered. It is for his writings. De Toledano’s article prompted me to go back to my old underlined copy of Witness. It has been about 30 years since I read the book. I say now what I said then: Anyone determined to understand the great ideological struggles of our time should spend serious time with Witness. You will not come from it the same. The Cold War was not about the fate of free markets in the Eastern bloc countries.
What was it about? In Chambers’s words, it was a struggle against “man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force drives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of man without God.”
The vision of man without God: This is why the Communists have always had allies beyond the Communist Party. One need not be a card-carrying member of the Party to share in that vision. Chambers: “For the vision is shared by millions who are not Communists (they are part of Communism’s secret strength).” What the Communists succeeded in creating was a “great modern political movement” that “posed in practical form the most revolutionary question in history: God or Man? It has taken the logical next step which three hundred years of rationalism hesitated to take, and said what millions of modern minds think, but do not dare or care to say: If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?”
That question continues to be asked in our day in Hollywood, in the media centers and on our college campuses even though there is no longer a Soviet Union. Communism can come to a country in other ways than on the backs of the Red Army. Chambers: “Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God.”
And a country can fall to what was the worst element of Communism, without the aid of a Soviet Union. Chambers understood that the “crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world actually shares Communism’s materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics, that it fails to grasp that, for it, the only possible answer to the Communist challenge: Faith in God or Faith in Man? is the challenge: Faith in God.”
Chambers does not offer cheery thoughts. He admitted openly to his fear that, in turning from Communism, he had joined the losing side in history. In the opening chapter to Witness, he writes to his children: “I am leading you, not through cool pine woods, but up and up a narrow defile between bare and steep rocks from which in shadow things uncoil and slither away. It will be dark. But, in the end, if I have led you aright, you will make out three crosses, from two of which hang thieves. I will have brought you to Golgotha the place of skulls. This is the meaning of the journey. Before you understand, I may not be there, my hands may have slipped from yours. It will not matter. For when you understand what you see, you will no longer be children.”
There is more, a lot more, of the same in Witness. Turn of the TV and the barking commentators for an evening or two. Tolle, lege!
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)