April 3, 2023 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the book Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation is one of the biggest U.S. bestsellers of the 20th century, yet it is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell the story is Greg Forster on behalf of the Acton Institute. Forster is a Whittaker Chambers expert who has earned a Ph.D. with distinction in political philosophy from Yale University.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is lei Habbib, and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
The book Witness by author Whittaker Chambers, who was one
of the biggest US bestsellers of the twentieth century, yet
it is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell
(00:32):
the story of the book and its author is Greg Forster,
on behalf of the Acting Institute. Forrester is a Whittaker
Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction in
political philosophy from Yale University. Let's take a listen. Chambers
grew up in an unhappy home, a home full of
(00:54):
emotional needinessts, manipulation, petty jealousies. He had a younger brother
named Richard, who was really popular at school, and he
was able to take solace in his friends. But Chambers
himself was awkward and socially inept, and he was tormented
as much as school as he was at home. His
only escape was into the woods. He spent long days
(01:16):
walking alone in the woods near his home. In the
world of nature, he said, nature gives peace to anyone
who comes to see and to hear, and not to
change as a teenager, he ran away from home. He
got a job laying railways in the streets in Washington,
(01:37):
d c. On that job, he experienced the hopelessness and
the cruel mistreatment of the impoverished workers. On his very
first day on the job, as one of the street
cars slowed down in order to move through the worksite,
a laughing passenger leaned his head out of the window
and casually and deliberately spat tobacco juice all over him.
(02:01):
But among those workers, Chambers also experienced the unique compassion
and mutual assistance that the poor give to one another
in their affliction. After he was forced to return home,
Chambers went to Columbia University. Looking around at the chaos
and the injustice of the world. Watching the developments in
(02:22):
and after World War One, and also his own experience,
he became convinced that society was sick, so sick that
only surgery could save it, and he became convinced that
communism was history surgeon. He would later write, nobody becomes
a communist because communism is intrinsically attractive. People become communists
(02:43):
because they confront the crisis of history in the modern world,
and they are driven to desperation because they can't find
any other answers, and also because the blurring of the
lines between good and evil is part of that crisis
of history. Well, his advice or Columbia was Mark van Doren,
and Van Doren told him go see the wave of
the future. They're building it in the Soviet Union. In
(03:07):
order to get over to the Soviet Union, Chambers joined
a Quaker international relief team, and among the Quakers he
began to discover God, and he moved toward God. He
was powerfully moved by the peace of the Quaker meeting,
where they will sit in silence for long periods so
that the spirit of God can make his presence felt.
(03:28):
But then the Quakers discovered some atheistic writings that Chambers
had published in the student paper. They kicked him off
the relief team, and they cast him out of the
meeting house. Chambers said that if even one person had
taken him aside in that moment and asked him what
is in your heart? He would never have become a communist.
(03:51):
But instead he was left bitterly asking himself where in
Christendom is the Christian So he began calling himself a communist.
Eventually he dropped out of college in order to join
the Communist Party. During this time, his brother Richard had
also gone off to college, and Richard's life fell apart.
(04:13):
Richard was not as popular at college as he had
been at home, and without though friends and the popularity
to prop him up, the inner emptiness of his life
consumed him. He was reading pessimistic atheistic philosophy, and he
came home declaring that life is meaningless, suffering and folly.
He said to his family, I'm not brave enough to
(04:34):
kill myself yet, but i will be soon. He began
drinking heavily, staying out all night. The parents saw what
was happening, but they felt helpless to do anything about it.
So it fell to Chambers to try to convince his
brother not to kill himself. They had endless arguments. Richard said,
look around you. Look at people. They're all hypocrites. Look
(04:56):
at the world, it's hopeless. Look at religion, even the
people who pretend end to believe in it don't really.
Look at marriage, it's a fraud. Look at family. Look
at our family and children. It's a crime against nature
to bring children into this world. Chambers told him, it's
not the world that's evil. It's what people have made
of the world that's evil. The answer is to struggle
(05:18):
against evil, he said. Communism has found the way out.
Richard just spat at that the Communists are just another
fraud like all the others. And besides, what does it matter.
We're all going to die. Nothing waiting for us but
eternal oblivion. There's no hope to build anything meaningful with
death waiting for us all. After a prolonged period of
(05:42):
agony for the entire family, Richard finally killed himself. Chambers
began visiting Richard's grave every day before work, and then
again every day after work. Winter came and the graveyard
was covered with snow. On New Year's Eve, Chambers was
still there, ending at his brother's grave when midnight came
with the new year, and Chambers began to hear the
(06:04):
sound of celebration fireworks, bells, car horns, parties, the sound
of glass smashing against the cemetery wall, and standing there,
Chambers blamed those cet those partiers, and their whole world
for Richard's death, This materialistic, shallow world that wallows in
(06:27):
superficial pleasures and gave Richard nothing that was worth living for,
and he thought that the only thing he had worth
living for was the struggle to destroy that shallow and
materialistic society. So standing there in the graveyard, he consecrated
his life to the destruction of America. He would later write,
(06:47):
at that point, I had been a member of the
Communist Party for some time, but it was not until
that night that I truly became a Communist. I became
ear recons silable. He walked out of the grave heard,
and he never went back. And you've been listening to
Greg Forrester tell a heck of a story about Whittaker
(07:11):
Chambers and particularly what drove him right into the arms
of pure, unfettered communism and a deep anti Americanism. When
we return more of the story of Whittaker Chambers here
on our American Stories. Here at our American Stories, we
(07:32):
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(07:53):
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot com. And we returned to our American stories.
When we last left off, Widow Could Chambers had declared
(08:15):
himself to be an irreconcilable Communist and consecrated his life
to the destruction of America. Let's continue with our storyteller,
Greg Forster. He worked in the Open Communist Party for
several years in a variety of roles. Then he was
recruited into the Soviet Underground and spent six years there
as a spy. At first in New York, he was
(08:37):
part of a smuggling operation shuttling messages and materials between
the American underground and the European underground. Later he returned
to Washington, where he had laid rails, But now he
had come to organize one of several Soviet apparatuses that
penetrated the United States government. Chambers was a go between.
He would bring the commands of the Soviet government to
(08:59):
a number of highly placed American officials, and he would
receive from them copies of state secret documents to be
copied and passed on. In this period, in the nineteen thirties,
shockingly large numbers of middle class intellectuals, the kind of
people who populate the US government, were becoming communists. It
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can be very difficult for us today to recapture that
moment in the nineteen thirties when so many people in
that group became communists or were sympathetic enough to help them.
Chambers said at the time, capitalism is going to fall
not because we will break the locks, but because all
the men who have been trusted to hold the keys
are joining the conspiracy. In order to live undercover, Chambers
(09:45):
had to adopt the lifestyle of a respectable bourgeois and
blend in with the world around him. But there was
one thing he refused to compromise on. In order to
blend in, he had to hire a black woman as
a housekeeper, because that was the prevailing practice in the neighborhood.
But although it meant a risk of discovery, he refused
to pay her the lower negro wage that was the
(10:09):
acceptable practice, And even more risky than that, he invited
her to dine at the family dinner table with the family.
As a communist, Chambers refused to have segregated dining in
his home. He would later write, by acting as a
Communist must, I acted as a Christian should. However, he
(10:34):
soon discovered that most Communists were not as scrupulous as
he was. At first, he thought that by entering the
underground he would be escaping the petty factional squabbling, the recriminations,
and the constant cycles of purges and recriminations that were
ubiquitous in the open party. But he soon found out
that the underground had its own forms of destructive stupidity.
(10:57):
The rise of Communism to national power in Russia was
producing a new kind of communist careerist, corrupt, cynical. The
Party is nothing but a path to power for them.
Chambers was forced to help the party to hurt people
and even kill people in petty disputes that had nothing
(11:18):
to do with the communist cause or advancing the world revolution.
He went along with it, he said, because the only
hope for a better world was communism, So if he
disobeyed the Communist Party and was thrown out, he would
lose the whole purpose of his life. But doubts were
beginning to grow in his mind. Something else happened to
(11:40):
Chambers as well. Into that world of death came the
unexpected power of new life, and I'd like to share
this with you. For one of us to have a child,
my brother had said in his agony, would be a
crime against nature. I longed for children, but I agreed
with my brother there had been enough misery in our line.
(12:04):
What selfish right had I to perpetuate it? And right
had any man or woman to bring a child into
the twentieth century world. They could only suffer its inevitable
revolutions or die in its inevitable wars. One extreme group
among the Communists held that it was morally wrong for
a professional revolutionists to have children at all. They could
only hamper or distract his work. That was one of
(12:27):
the penalties of being a communist. I did not belong
to that group, but in general I shared their views.
As an underground Communist, I took it for granted that
children were out of the question. Not only left wing
an underground communist took such matters for granted. Abortion was
a commonplace of party life. There were Communist doctors who
(12:47):
rendered that service for a small fee, Communists who were
more choosy new liberal doctors who would provide it for
a larger fee. Abortion, which now fills me with physical
whole horror. I then regarded, like all Communists, as a
mere physical manipulation. One day in early nineteen thirty three,
(13:08):
my wife told me that she believed she had conceived.
No man can hear from his wife, especially for the
first time, that she is carrying his child, without a
physical jolt of joy and pride. I felt it, But
so sunk were we in that life that it was
only a passing joy and was succeeded by a merely
(13:29):
momentary sadness that we would not have the child. We
discussed the matter, and my wife said she must go
at once for a physical check and to arrange for
the abortion. When my wife came back, she was quiet
and noncommittal. The doctor had said there was a child.
My wife went about preparing supper. What else did she say?
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I asked. She said, I'm in good physical shape to
have the child. My wife went on working very slowly.
The truth dawned on me. Do you mean, I asked
that you want to have the child? My wife came
over to me, took my hands and burst into tears.
(14:13):
Dear heart, she said, with a pleading voice, we couldn't
do that awful thing to a little baby. Not to
a little baby, dear heart, A wild joy swept over me. Reason,
the agony of my family, the Communist Party, in its theories,
the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, crumbled at
the touch of the child. Both of us simply wanted
(14:37):
a child. If the points on the long course of
my break with Communism could be retraced, that is probably
one of them. Not at the level of conscious mind,
but at the level of unconscious life. The child, even
before her birth, had begun invisibly to lead us out
(15:00):
of that darkness that we could not even realize, toward
that light which we could not even see. As his
daughter grew, Chambers used to love sitting there, watching her
in her tie chair, smearing porridge on her face or
meditatively dropping it on the floor. One day, he noticed
(15:22):
her ear, how intricate and complex the human ear was,
and the thought came burning into his mind that could
not have happened by accident. Only an immense design could
have created that. The thought was unwanted, and he shoved
it aside, but it would return to haunt him. In
(15:44):
nineteen thirty seven, Stalin's purges reached their peak. Chambers watched
as people who he had known and cared about for years,
dedicated communists who had given their lives to the cause
and to the Party were brutally murdered for no good reason,
and his superiors laughed and joked about it. They enjoyed
(16:06):
the cruelty. His doubts growing, Chambers read a book by
a man who had escaped from a Soviet labor camp.
He began to be haunted by the screams of those
whom he had helped to hurt and to kill. Chambers said,
the vision of communism is the vision of the almighty
mind of man. So no one ever really stops being
(16:26):
a Communist until they discover that there is something in
man that is greater than the mind. Those screams of
the people in Agony were the cry of something inside
human beings that is greater than mind. Was the cry
of the human soul, and they were crying out to
the only thing that can hear, a human soul, another
(16:51):
human soul. Listening to the screams caused Chambers to realize
that those people he was hurting had souls, and that
he had a soul too, and been listening to Greg
Forster and Forrester is a Whittaker Chambers expert who has
earned a PhD with distinction and political philosophy from Yale University.
(17:12):
And that story about the pregnancy of Whittaker Chambers bride
and her willingness to sacrifice the child for the good
of the party and for the good of mankind, because
why on earth bring a child into this world that
would suffer? So this was the beginning of the end
(17:35):
of his flirtation and commitment to communism. He didn't know
it yet, Whittaker Chambers, but this was the beginning of
the end, this realization of the inhumanity of communism. When
we come back more of the story of Whittaker Chambers
and the book Witness. Here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and the story of
Whittaker Chambers and the story of his remarkable book Witness.
I urge you to pick it up, go to Amazon
dot com and read it. So much of what's happening
today in the world was happening then two and so
many of the same arguments and so many of the
(18:29):
same spiritual battles. In nineteen thirty seven, word of Stalin's
torture and murder was becoming public knowledge in America. Whittic
Could Chambers, the American turned Communist spy, struggled to reconcile
his commitment with these truths. Let's return to Greg Forster.
(18:49):
It began to dawn on him that the problem was
not that Stalin had perverted communism. The problem was Communism itself.
As he said, the problem is not the Dollin is evil,
but Communism is even more evil. And only at the
very end of that process did he finally allow himself
to return to that thought that he had suppressed years earlier.
(19:12):
When he noticed his daughter's ear, he finally allowed himself
to ask, what is it that we are missing? The
Communism always goes so wrong? Could it be God? He
had reached what he called the division point, the point
(19:32):
where you have to choose one path or the other.
He got down on his knees and prayed, and he
began praying every day, and he came to need prayer
like food and water. By turning to God, he was
discovering who he really was. That illusion of the almighty
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mind of man began to fade away. Chambers said, reason
is good, but there's a flaw in humanity. He a
flaw that causes great evil and suffering, and it goes
beyond the realm where reason can reach. As he put it,
the death camps exist first in our minds. When he
(20:14):
finally left the Communist Party in April nineteen thirty eight,
he left absolutely everything that he had except his wife
and children. He had no career, and the depression was on.
He had no standing in any community, no relationships. He
was a fugitive from both the American government and the
Soviet government. He knew that the party's first instinct would
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be to kill him, possibly getting to him through his family,
so he got himself a car and a weapon. He
took his last stash of stolen documents and he gave
it to a cousin to hide, to use as leverage
against the party in case they kidnapped his wife or child,
and then he fled into hiding for six months or so.
After that, he emerged from hiding and each went back
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and contacted his former contacts in the underground, and he
tried to persuade them to leave the party, to defect
from the Communist Party, and he threatened to denounce them
to the authorities if they wouldn't. In nineteen thirty nine
came the Hitler Stalin packed the alliance between the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany, and Chambers knew that the Soviet
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underground in Washington would be put at Hitler's disposal to
use against the US, and so it had become his
duty to become an informer. Becoming an informer was physically
and spiritually repulsive to Chambers because it involved using people's
trust in you to destroy them. It was a sort
of slow motion spiritual death for him, even though it
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was morally the right thing to do. And the worst
of it was he went to the government and he
told them everything he knew and they didn't do anything
about it. Through a friend, Chambers got the opportunity to
apply for a job at Time magazine. He worked his
way up from book reviews to senior editor. He became
a Quaker. He returned to the deep piece of the
Quaker meeting from his college days. The Chambers has moved
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to a family farm which they worked entirely themselves. On
top of chambers more than a full time job as
a senior editor of Time magazine, the farm was their
witness against the materialism of the modern world. The Farm said,
we choose this life of great hardship and great satisfaction
because the modern world has nothing better than this to
(22:25):
offer us. Over the course of nine years at time,
Chambers watched as the people who had worked for him
as Soviet spies moved their way up in the New
Deal administration. Harry Dexter White led the creation of the
World Bank and served as his first president, and a
Harvard trained lawyer named Alger Hiss, who had become the
(22:48):
closest friend of Chambers whole life during their service together
in the Soviet underground, became a major architect of US
foreign policy in the post World War Two period. Hiss,
who was a Soviet spy, sat directly behind President Roosevelt
across the table from Stalin at the Alta Conference. His
(23:10):
was essential in the creation of the United Nations. He
later became the president of the Carnegie Endowment for World
Peace and in the initiatives of the New Deal, which
involved not only safety net programs but also massive central
planning and quasi nationalization of many industries. Chambers thought that
he heard not communism but a milder and more liberal
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form of that destructive vision of the almighty mind. Of Man.
In nineteen forty eight, ten years after he left the
party and after nine years a time, Chambers was summoned
to testify before the House on American Activities Committee. He's
still had a large mortgage. He knew that by testifying
he could lose his job and the farm. He did,
(23:57):
in fact lose his job as a result of his testimony,
although he did manage to keep the farm going until
much later. He could have saved himself, saved his job,
saved his position at the top of American society the
Time magazine by just pretending not to remember very much.
But he decided to tell what he knew. The nation
did not understand either the extent or the totalitarian nature
(24:21):
of the communist threat. Now, most of chambers contacts from
his underground days by that time had either already admitted
that they were communists, or had left the country, or
had died or pled The fifth, but almost alone of
the whole group, Alger Hiss, Chamber's closest friend in the
(24:42):
whole world, stood up in public and denied everything. The
public hearing at which Chambers and his confronted one another
was the first televised congressional hearing In fact, you can
actually see television footage of the hearings on YouTube. I'm
going to play a quick clip here. This is a
point where Alger Hiss has been listing a long list
(25:04):
of highly respectable and powerful people that he's worked with,
and he's bragging about his credentials. So let's roll out
ask them if they ever found in me anything except
the highest adherence to duty and honor, then the committee
can judge, and the public can judge whether to believe
a self discredited accuser whose names and aliases are as
(25:25):
numerous and as casual as his accusations. The other side
of this question is the reliability of the allegations before
this committee, the undocumented statements of the man who now
calls himself Whittaker Chambers. Is he a man of consistent reliability,
truthfulness and honor. Clearly not. He admits it, and the
committee knows it. Chambers, who has already sworn that he
(25:48):
pleaded with Hiss to join him in leaving the party,
is recalled in the middle of the dramatic nine hour
session ask why he single out Hiss. He replies the
story and testifying against mister Hiss. I'm working at some
old grudge from alten revenge or hatred. I don't hate
(26:13):
mister Hist. We were close frimance, but we are in
the tragedy of history. Mister Hist represents the concealed enemy
against which we are all fighting fighting. I've testified against
(26:36):
him with remorse. And you're listening to Greg Forster tell
the story of what It Could Chambers and the story
of What It Could Chambers best selling book Witness, And
there's a terrific line in the beginning of this segment.
The problem wasn't that Stalin subverted communism. The problem was
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Communism itself. And he began to get on his knees
and pray. And ten years later he's a senior editor
at time, and he is a Quaker, and he's leading
the charge to expose the Communists in the highest ranks
of American life. The story of Whitaker Chambers continues here
(27:24):
on our American stories, and we return to our American
stories and to Greg Forster's story of whit It Could
Chambers and Whita Could Chambers book Witness, which again I
(27:48):
urge you to go on Amazon and buy it is
one of the best books you'll ever read, and it's
relevant today is when it was written in the mid
twentieth century. Let's pick up where we last left off.
You can really see the contrast, can't you. Hissed this
beautiful man, well spoken and accustomed to public speaking, and
(28:12):
close friends with half the people who run the institutions
of American society, and Chambers, this overweight, awkward, shy, soft spoken,
halting man. The case became a national sensation. The confrontation
was fascinating. After he testified, Chambers was shocked to discover
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that his fellow news reporters had no interest in gathering
the facts. They all went and interviewed Hiss, but none
of them interviewed him. Throughout the case, the national media
did its best to portray Chambers in the most negative
light possible. Chambers went on Meet the Press, where the
panel of reporters interviewing him was moderated by a reporter
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who had personally recommended Alger Hiss for his position as
president of the Carnegie Endowment. These opposedly neutral, objective reporters
treated Chambers so shamefully that after the show, his son
asked him, Papa, why do those men hate you? So
As the testimony unfolded, it became clear that Hiss was lying.
The evidence was all against him. Hiss started dodging questions.
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He had to keep changing his story. That didn't affect
the media coverage. However, on the contrary, the more clear
it became that Hiss was in trouble, the more to
media covered up for him and found ways to attack Chambers.
So it was not until many years later that the
nation at large fully realized how clearly and unambiguously the
evidence had been against Hiss. From the beginning. President Truman
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made the case into an election issue. He'd denounced Whittaker
Chambers at rallies in front of big, cheering crowds. The
security official that Chambers had gone to in nineteen thirty
nine to tell all he knew lied about what Chambers
had told him, and the lie would have stuck. But
the man's notes were introduced into evidence, and they contradicted
his story. In the trials that came out of the case,
(30:03):
two sitting Supreme Court justices took the stand as character
witnesses for Aldrehis who do you think? Took the stand
as a character witness for Whittaker Chambers. The housekeeper, the
black woman he had hired and refused to pay the
lower wage. He paid her a decent wage, and he
invited her to sit at the table and eat with
the family. As Chambers put it, in our dining room,
(30:27):
we gave her back her human dignity, and on the
witness stand, she gave me back my human dignity. Hiss's
main strategy was to smear Chambers. In the courtroom, the
chair of the Harvard Psychiatry Department took the stand and
testified under oath that he had diagnosed Whittaker Chambers as
a delusional and dangerous mentally ill man solely on the
(30:49):
basis of reading his articles in Time magazine. At the trial,
Chambers was questioned on the stand at great length by
his attorneys about the suicide of his brother, and at
the time he didn't understand why. It was because the
Hiss forces were hoping that the jury had heard the
rumors that they had been spreading that Chambers had abused
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his brother and that that's why his brother committed suicide.
These claims were widely believed. No claim was too outrageous
to be believed if it made the Harvard man, the
respectable lawyer, the new dealer, the architect, of the United
Nations and friend to half the people who run the
institutions of the country as the hero and the fat,
weirdo Quaker as the villain. But then Hisses lawyers made
(31:34):
their fatal mistake. They demanded that Chambers turn over any
documents from Hiss that he might have in his possession.
They assumed, of course, that he would have nothing, and
that this would be embarrassing for him. But Chambers remembered
he had taken that last parcel of stolen documents and
handed it to his cousin to hide to use his
leverage against the Party in case his wife or child
(31:55):
were kidnapped. He didn't remember what was in it. He
went back to his cousin to get it. It had
sat in a dumb waiter shaft for ten years. It
had sixty five pages of handwritten documents and canisters of
microfilm that, when they were developed, produced a stack of
documents four feet high. Proved beyond a doubt that Hiss
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was lying. There were documents in Hiss's handwriting and typed
on his Hisses typewriters. There were copies of secret documents
that only Hiss could have acquired, and that he had
no legitimate reason to be making copies of On the stand.
Hiss actually said under oath, I am amazed, and to
(32:36):
my dying day, I will wonder how Whittaker Chambers got
into my house to use my typewriter. Hiss went to
jail for perjury. More importantly, the nation was awakened to
the real nature of communism. There would be no more
cheap and easy talk about a peaceful and democratic Soviet
Union or agrarian liberals in China. Chambers description of communism,
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his powerful testament only to what it was, and his
willingness to endure all suffering and sacrifice in order to
oppose it, had exposed the true nature of the threat.
In his retirement, Chambers was sought out by William F. Buckley,
who at that time was building what would become the
Conservative movement, and the two of them became very close friends.
For a short time, Chambers wrote for National Review, including
(33:21):
a deconstruction of Anne Rand's Atlas Shrug, which remains to
this day one of the key documents of American intellectual life.
Chambers interaction with Buckley and with the other Conservatives forced
him to recognize something he had never been willing to
admit before that human freedom is inextricably linked to economic
and technological development. This was a huge change for Chambers.
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He had spent his entire adult life denouncing the mechanization
of the modern world, building that family farm, trying to
get back to the land, to get back to the
woods from his unhappy childhood, where nature offers peace to
those who come to see and to hear and not
to change. But near the end of his life he
(34:07):
wrote to Buckley, I have decided that the machine is
not the enemy. Chambers was critical in breaking through the
wall of lies and forcing a public confrontation with the
true nature of communism. And that's another meaning of the
title witness. But above all, Chambers bore witness that America
(34:29):
had lost its way spiritually. He said, the modern world
is in crisis because technological progress and economic development have
brought an end to older ways of life that were
bound by traditions. In those older ways of life, traditions
had dictated to people what the meaning and the purpose
(34:51):
of their life was. But today, in the advanced modern world,
we have to figure out the meaning of our lives
for ourselves. We find ourselves facing a basic question God
or man. Do we believe that the human mind is
the highest thing that there is, that the solution to
our problems is the almighty mind of man remaking the
(35:14):
world to eliminate war, poverty, and injustice. Or do we
believe that there is a power higher than the human mind,
that the destiny of man is not in the hands
of man, Chamber said, without God, man cannot organize the
world for man. Without God, sooner or later, we are
(35:37):
going to start lying, cheating, and stealing, and eventually torturing
and murdering on a massive scale in order to remake
the world. Believing that because our destiny is in our
own hands, that means we have the power to set
the world free, set the world free from war and
(35:59):
poverty and injustice, if only we are willing to pay
the price, if only we are willing to make the
necessary sacrifices. Chamber said, the communist East has chosen man,
and it practices totalitarianism and mass murder because it has
(36:20):
the courage of that conviction. The capitalist West, meanwhile, has
also chosen man, but it does not practice mass murder
because it is haunted by the specter of its Christian past.
That's the highest meaning I think of the title witness.
(36:40):
Chambers had grown to love his country very dearly, and
because he loved it so much, he bore witness against
a prophetic witness against our American version of this monstrous
vision of the almighty mind of man that can remake
the world. And a terrific job on the editing and
abduction and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and his
(37:03):
special thanks to Greg Forrester who made this speech, gave
this talk on behalf of the Acting Institute. And what
a story it is the story of what it could Chambers,
he had spent his entire life denouncing the machine. Near
the end he realized that the machine was not the enemy.
(37:25):
And the basic question that haunted him. Does God reign
supreme or man? Is it the almighty mind of man
that is the higher power? Or is there a power
higher than the mighty mind? Without God? He said, Man
can't organize the world or man. The communists has chosen man,
(37:47):
Horster said, But the capitalist West chose man too. But
America luckily was still haunted by its own Christian past,
by its own Christian conscience. The story of Whittaker Chambers,
the story of communism in the twentieth century, and forces
like it attacking the West. To day, here on our
(38:11):
American stories.
This is lei Habbib, and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
The book Witness by author Whittaker Chambers, who was one
of the biggest US bestsellers of the twentieth century, yet
it is almost unknown among Americans today. Here to tell
(00:32):
the story of the book and its author is Greg Forster,
on behalf of the Acting Institute. Forrester is a Whittaker
Chambers expert who has earned a PhD with distinction in
political philosophy from Yale University. Let's take a listen. Chambers
grew up in an unhappy home, a home full of
(00:54):
emotional needinessts, manipulation, petty jealousies. He had a younger brother
named Richard, who was really popular at school, and he
was able to take solace in his friends. But Chambers
himself was awkward and socially inept, and he was tormented
as much as school as he was at home. His
only escape was into the woods. He spent long days
(01:16):
walking alone in the woods near his home. In the
world of nature, he said, nature gives peace to anyone
who comes to see and to hear, and not to
change as a teenager, he ran away from home. He
got a job laying railways in the streets in Washington,
(01:37):
d c. On that job, he experienced the hopelessness and
the cruel mistreatment of the impoverished workers. On his very
first day on the job, as one of the street
cars slowed down in order to move through the worksite,
a laughing passenger leaned his head out of the window
and casually and deliberately spat tobacco juice all over him.
(02:01):
But among those workers, Chambers also experienced the unique compassion
and mutual assistance that the poor give to one another
in their affliction. After he was forced to return home,
Chambers went to Columbia University. Looking around at the chaos
and the injustice of the world. Watching the developments in
(02:22):
and after World War One, and also his own experience,
he became convinced that society was sick, so sick that
only surgery could save it, and he became convinced that
communism was history surgeon. He would later write, nobody becomes
a communist because communism is intrinsically attractive. People become communists
(02:43):
because they confront the crisis of history in the modern world,
and they are driven to desperation because they can't find
any other answers, and also because the blurring of the
lines between good and evil is part of that crisis
of history. Well, his advice or Columbia was Mark van Doren,
and Van Doren told him go see the wave of
the future. They're building it in the Soviet Union. In
(03:07):
order to get over to the Soviet Union, Chambers joined
a Quaker international relief team, and among the Quakers he
began to discover God, and he moved toward God. He
was powerfully moved by the peace of the Quaker meeting,
where they will sit in silence for long periods so
that the spirit of God can make his presence felt.
(03:28):
But then the Quakers discovered some atheistic writings that Chambers
had published in the student paper. They kicked him off
the relief team, and they cast him out of the
meeting house. Chambers said that if even one person had
taken him aside in that moment and asked him what
is in your heart? He would never have become a communist.
(03:51):
But instead he was left bitterly asking himself where in
Christendom is the Christian So he began calling himself a communist.
Eventually he dropped out of college in order to join
the Communist Party. During this time, his brother Richard had
also gone off to college, and Richard's life fell apart.
(04:13):
Richard was not as popular at college as he had
been at home, and without though friends and the popularity
to prop him up, the inner emptiness of his life
consumed him. He was reading pessimistic atheistic philosophy, and he
came home declaring that life is meaningless, suffering and folly.
He said to his family, I'm not brave enough to
(04:34):
kill myself yet, but i will be soon. He began
drinking heavily, staying out all night. The parents saw what
was happening, but they felt helpless to do anything about it.
So it fell to Chambers to try to convince his
brother not to kill himself. They had endless arguments. Richard said,
look around you. Look at people. They're all hypocrites. Look
(04:56):
at the world, it's hopeless. Look at religion, even the
people who pretend end to believe in it don't really.
Look at marriage, it's a fraud. Look at family. Look
at our family and children. It's a crime against nature
to bring children into this world. Chambers told him, it's
not the world that's evil. It's what people have made
of the world that's evil. The answer is to struggle
(05:18):
against evil, he said. Communism has found the way out.
Richard just spat at that the Communists are just another
fraud like all the others. And besides, what does it matter.
We're all going to die. Nothing waiting for us but
eternal oblivion. There's no hope to build anything meaningful with
death waiting for us all. After a prolonged period of
(05:42):
agony for the entire family, Richard finally killed himself. Chambers
began visiting Richard's grave every day before work, and then
again every day after work. Winter came and the graveyard
was covered with snow. On New Year's Eve, Chambers was
still there, ending at his brother's grave when midnight came
with the new year, and Chambers began to hear the
(06:04):
sound of celebration fireworks, bells, car horns, parties, the sound
of glass smashing against the cemetery wall, and standing there,
Chambers blamed those cet those partiers, and their whole world
for Richard's death, This materialistic, shallow world that wallows in
(06:27):
superficial pleasures and gave Richard nothing that was worth living for,
and he thought that the only thing he had worth
living for was the struggle to destroy that shallow and
materialistic society. So standing there in the graveyard, he consecrated
his life to the destruction of America. He would later write,
(06:47):
at that point, I had been a member of the
Communist Party for some time, but it was not until
that night that I truly became a Communist. I became
ear recons silable. He walked out of the grave heard,
and he never went back. And you've been listening to
Greg Forrester tell a heck of a story about Whittaker
(07:11):
Chambers and particularly what drove him right into the arms
of pure, unfettered communism and a deep anti Americanism. When
we return more of the story of Whittaker Chambers here
on our American Stories. Here at our American Stories, we
(07:32):
bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith, and love.
Stories from a great and beautiful country that need to
be told. But we can't do it without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love our stories in America like
we do, please go to our American Stories dot com
and click the Donate button, give a little, give a lot,
(07:53):
help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our
American Stories dot com. And we returned to our American stories.
When we last left off, Widow Could Chambers had declared
(08:15):
himself to be an irreconcilable Communist and consecrated his life
to the destruction of America. Let's continue with our storyteller,
Greg Forster. He worked in the Open Communist Party for
several years in a variety of roles. Then he was
recruited into the Soviet Underground and spent six years there
as a spy. At first in New York, he was
(08:37):
part of a smuggling operation shuttling messages and materials between
the American underground and the European underground. Later he returned
to Washington, where he had laid rails, But now he
had come to organize one of several Soviet apparatuses that
penetrated the United States government. Chambers was a go between.
He would bring the commands of the Soviet government to
(08:59):
a number of highly placed American officials, and he would
receive from them copies of state secret documents to be
copied and passed on. In this period, in the nineteen thirties,
shockingly large numbers of middle class intellectuals, the kind of
people who populate the US government, were becoming communists. It
(09:19):
can be very difficult for us today to recapture that
moment in the nineteen thirties when so many people in
that group became communists or were sympathetic enough to help them.
Chambers said at the time, capitalism is going to fall
not because we will break the locks, but because all
the men who have been trusted to hold the keys
are joining the conspiracy. In order to live undercover, Chambers
(09:45):
had to adopt the lifestyle of a respectable bourgeois and
blend in with the world around him. But there was
one thing he refused to compromise on. In order to
blend in, he had to hire a black woman as
a housekeeper, because that was the prevailing practice in the neighborhood.
But although it meant a risk of discovery, he refused
to pay her the lower negro wage that was the
(10:09):
acceptable practice, And even more risky than that, he invited
her to dine at the family dinner table with the family.
As a communist, Chambers refused to have segregated dining in
his home. He would later write, by acting as a
Communist must, I acted as a Christian should. However, he
(10:34):
soon discovered that most Communists were not as scrupulous as
he was. At first, he thought that by entering the
underground he would be escaping the petty factional squabbling, the recriminations,
and the constant cycles of purges and recriminations that were
ubiquitous in the open party. But he soon found out
that the underground had its own forms of destructive stupidity.
(10:57):
The rise of Communism to national power in Russia was
producing a new kind of communist careerist, corrupt, cynical. The
Party is nothing but a path to power for them.
Chambers was forced to help the party to hurt people
and even kill people in petty disputes that had nothing
(11:18):
to do with the communist cause or advancing the world revolution.
He went along with it, he said, because the only
hope for a better world was communism, So if he
disobeyed the Communist Party and was thrown out, he would
lose the whole purpose of his life. But doubts were
beginning to grow in his mind. Something else happened to
(11:40):
Chambers as well. Into that world of death came the
unexpected power of new life, and I'd like to share
this with you. For one of us to have a child,
my brother had said in his agony, would be a
crime against nature. I longed for children, but I agreed
with my brother there had been enough misery in our line.
(12:04):
What selfish right had I to perpetuate it? And right
had any man or woman to bring a child into
the twentieth century world. They could only suffer its inevitable
revolutions or die in its inevitable wars. One extreme group
among the Communists held that it was morally wrong for
a professional revolutionists to have children at all. They could
only hamper or distract his work. That was one of
(12:27):
the penalties of being a communist. I did not belong
to that group, but in general I shared their views.
As an underground Communist, I took it for granted that
children were out of the question. Not only left wing
an underground communist took such matters for granted. Abortion was
a commonplace of party life. There were Communist doctors who
(12:47):
rendered that service for a small fee, Communists who were
more choosy new liberal doctors who would provide it for
a larger fee. Abortion, which now fills me with physical
whole horror. I then regarded, like all Communists, as a
mere physical manipulation. One day in early nineteen thirty three,
(13:08):
my wife told me that she believed she had conceived.
No man can hear from his wife, especially for the
first time, that she is carrying his child, without a
physical jolt of joy and pride. I felt it, But
so sunk were we in that life that it was
only a passing joy and was succeeded by a merely
(13:29):
momentary sadness that we would not have the child. We
discussed the matter, and my wife said she must go
at once for a physical check and to arrange for
the abortion. When my wife came back, she was quiet
and noncommittal. The doctor had said there was a child.
My wife went about preparing supper. What else did she say?
(13:51):
I asked. She said, I'm in good physical shape to
have the child. My wife went on working very slowly.
The truth dawned on me. Do you mean, I asked
that you want to have the child? My wife came
over to me, took my hands and burst into tears.
(14:13):
Dear heart, she said, with a pleading voice, we couldn't
do that awful thing to a little baby. Not to
a little baby, dear heart, A wild joy swept over me. Reason,
the agony of my family, the Communist Party, in its theories,
the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, crumbled at
the touch of the child. Both of us simply wanted
(14:37):
a child. If the points on the long course of
my break with Communism could be retraced, that is probably
one of them. Not at the level of conscious mind,
but at the level of unconscious life. The child, even
before her birth, had begun invisibly to lead us out
(15:00):
of that darkness that we could not even realize, toward
that light which we could not even see. As his
daughter grew, Chambers used to love sitting there, watching her
in her tie chair, smearing porridge on her face or
meditatively dropping it on the floor. One day, he noticed
(15:22):
her ear, how intricate and complex the human ear was,
and the thought came burning into his mind that could
not have happened by accident. Only an immense design could
have created that. The thought was unwanted, and he shoved
it aside, but it would return to haunt him. In
(15:44):
nineteen thirty seven, Stalin's purges reached their peak. Chambers watched
as people who he had known and cared about for years,
dedicated communists who had given their lives to the cause
and to the Party were brutally murdered for no good reason,
and his superiors laughed and joked about it. They enjoyed
(16:06):
the cruelty. His doubts growing, Chambers read a book by
a man who had escaped from a Soviet labor camp.
He began to be haunted by the screams of those
whom he had helped to hurt and to kill. Chambers said,
the vision of communism is the vision of the almighty
mind of man. So no one ever really stops being
(16:26):
a Communist until they discover that there is something in
man that is greater than the mind. Those screams of
the people in Agony were the cry of something inside
human beings that is greater than mind. Was the cry
of the human soul, and they were crying out to
the only thing that can hear, a human soul, another
(16:51):
human soul. Listening to the screams caused Chambers to realize
that those people he was hurting had souls, and that
he had a soul too, and been listening to Greg
Forster and Forrester is a Whittaker Chambers expert who has
earned a PhD with distinction and political philosophy from Yale University.
(17:12):
And that story about the pregnancy of Whittaker Chambers bride
and her willingness to sacrifice the child for the good
of the party and for the good of mankind, because
why on earth bring a child into this world that
would suffer? So this was the beginning of the end
(17:35):
of his flirtation and commitment to communism. He didn't know
it yet, Whittaker Chambers, but this was the beginning of
the end, this realization of the inhumanity of communism. When
we come back more of the story of Whittaker Chambers
and the book Witness. Here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and the story of
Whittaker Chambers and the story of his remarkable book Witness.
I urge you to pick it up, go to Amazon
dot com and read it. So much of what's happening
today in the world was happening then two and so
many of the same arguments and so many of the
(18:29):
same spiritual battles. In nineteen thirty seven, word of Stalin's
torture and murder was becoming public knowledge in America. Whittic
Could Chambers, the American turned Communist spy, struggled to reconcile
his commitment with these truths. Let's return to Greg Forster.
(18:49):
It began to dawn on him that the problem was
not that Stalin had perverted communism. The problem was Communism itself.
As he said, the problem is not the Dollin is evil,
but Communism is even more evil. And only at the
very end of that process did he finally allow himself
to return to that thought that he had suppressed years earlier.
(19:12):
When he noticed his daughter's ear, he finally allowed himself
to ask, what is it that we are missing? The
Communism always goes so wrong? Could it be God? He
had reached what he called the division point, the point
(19:32):
where you have to choose one path or the other.
He got down on his knees and prayed, and he
began praying every day, and he came to need prayer
like food and water. By turning to God, he was
discovering who he really was. That illusion of the almighty
(19:53):
mind of man began to fade away. Chambers said, reason
is good, but there's a flaw in humanity. He a
flaw that causes great evil and suffering, and it goes
beyond the realm where reason can reach. As he put it,
the death camps exist first in our minds. When he
(20:14):
finally left the Communist Party in April nineteen thirty eight,
he left absolutely everything that he had except his wife
and children. He had no career, and the depression was on.
He had no standing in any community, no relationships. He
was a fugitive from both the American government and the
Soviet government. He knew that the party's first instinct would
(20:35):
be to kill him, possibly getting to him through his family,
so he got himself a car and a weapon. He
took his last stash of stolen documents and he gave
it to a cousin to hide, to use as leverage
against the party in case they kidnapped his wife or child,
and then he fled into hiding for six months or so.
After that, he emerged from hiding and each went back
(20:56):
and contacted his former contacts in the underground, and he
tried to persuade them to leave the party, to defect
from the Communist Party, and he threatened to denounce them
to the authorities if they wouldn't. In nineteen thirty nine
came the Hitler Stalin packed the alliance between the Soviet
Union and Nazi Germany, and Chambers knew that the Soviet
(21:17):
underground in Washington would be put at Hitler's disposal to
use against the US, and so it had become his
duty to become an informer. Becoming an informer was physically
and spiritually repulsive to Chambers because it involved using people's
trust in you to destroy them. It was a sort
of slow motion spiritual death for him, even though it
(21:40):
was morally the right thing to do. And the worst
of it was he went to the government and he
told them everything he knew and they didn't do anything
about it. Through a friend, Chambers got the opportunity to
apply for a job at Time magazine. He worked his
way up from book reviews to senior editor. He became
a Quaker. He returned to the deep piece of the
Quaker meeting from his college days. The Chambers has moved
(22:04):
to a family farm which they worked entirely themselves. On
top of chambers more than a full time job as
a senior editor of Time magazine, the farm was their
witness against the materialism of the modern world. The Farm said,
we choose this life of great hardship and great satisfaction
because the modern world has nothing better than this to
(22:25):
offer us. Over the course of nine years at time,
Chambers watched as the people who had worked for him
as Soviet spies moved their way up in the New
Deal administration. Harry Dexter White led the creation of the
World Bank and served as his first president, and a
Harvard trained lawyer named Alger Hiss, who had become the
(22:48):
closest friend of Chambers whole life during their service together
in the Soviet underground, became a major architect of US
foreign policy in the post World War Two period. Hiss,
who was a Soviet spy, sat directly behind President Roosevelt
across the table from Stalin at the Alta Conference. His
(23:10):
was essential in the creation of the United Nations. He
later became the president of the Carnegie Endowment for World
Peace and in the initiatives of the New Deal, which
involved not only safety net programs but also massive central
planning and quasi nationalization of many industries. Chambers thought that
he heard not communism but a milder and more liberal
(23:34):
form of that destructive vision of the almighty mind. Of Man.
In nineteen forty eight, ten years after he left the
party and after nine years a time, Chambers was summoned
to testify before the House on American Activities Committee. He's
still had a large mortgage. He knew that by testifying
he could lose his job and the farm. He did,
(23:57):
in fact lose his job as a result of his testimony,
although he did manage to keep the farm going until
much later. He could have saved himself, saved his job,
saved his position at the top of American society the
Time magazine by just pretending not to remember very much.
But he decided to tell what he knew. The nation
did not understand either the extent or the totalitarian nature
(24:21):
of the communist threat. Now, most of chambers contacts from
his underground days by that time had either already admitted
that they were communists, or had left the country, or
had died or pled The fifth, but almost alone of
the whole group, Alger Hiss, Chamber's closest friend in the
(24:42):
whole world, stood up in public and denied everything. The
public hearing at which Chambers and his confronted one another
was the first televised congressional hearing In fact, you can
actually see television footage of the hearings on YouTube. I'm
going to play a quick clip here. This is a
point where Alger Hiss has been listing a long list
(25:04):
of highly respectable and powerful people that he's worked with,
and he's bragging about his credentials. So let's roll out
ask them if they ever found in me anything except
the highest adherence to duty and honor, then the committee
can judge, and the public can judge whether to believe
a self discredited accuser whose names and aliases are as
(25:25):
numerous and as casual as his accusations. The other side
of this question is the reliability of the allegations before
this committee, the undocumented statements of the man who now
calls himself Whittaker Chambers. Is he a man of consistent reliability,
truthfulness and honor. Clearly not. He admits it, and the
committee knows it. Chambers, who has already sworn that he
(25:48):
pleaded with Hiss to join him in leaving the party,
is recalled in the middle of the dramatic nine hour
session ask why he single out Hiss. He replies the
story and testifying against mister Hiss. I'm working at some
old grudge from alten revenge or hatred. I don't hate
(26:13):
mister Hist. We were close frimance, but we are in
the tragedy of history. Mister Hist represents the concealed enemy
against which we are all fighting fighting. I've testified against
(26:36):
him with remorse. And you're listening to Greg Forster tell
the story of what It Could Chambers and the story
of What It Could Chambers best selling book Witness, And
there's a terrific line in the beginning of this segment.
The problem wasn't that Stalin subverted communism. The problem was
(27:01):
Communism itself. And he began to get on his knees
and pray. And ten years later he's a senior editor
at time, and he is a Quaker, and he's leading
the charge to expose the Communists in the highest ranks
of American life. The story of Whitaker Chambers continues here
(27:24):
on our American stories, and we return to our American
stories and to Greg Forster's story of whit It Could
Chambers and Whita Could Chambers book Witness, which again I
(27:48):
urge you to go on Amazon and buy it is
one of the best books you'll ever read, and it's
relevant today is when it was written in the mid
twentieth century. Let's pick up where we last left off.
You can really see the contrast, can't you. Hissed this
beautiful man, well spoken and accustomed to public speaking, and
(28:12):
close friends with half the people who run the institutions
of American society, and Chambers, this overweight, awkward, shy, soft spoken,
halting man. The case became a national sensation. The confrontation
was fascinating. After he testified, Chambers was shocked to discover
(28:33):
that his fellow news reporters had no interest in gathering
the facts. They all went and interviewed Hiss, but none
of them interviewed him. Throughout the case, the national media
did its best to portray Chambers in the most negative
light possible. Chambers went on Meet the Press, where the
panel of reporters interviewing him was moderated by a reporter
(28:54):
who had personally recommended Alger Hiss for his position as
president of the Carnegie Endowment. These opposedly neutral, objective reporters
treated Chambers so shamefully that after the show, his son
asked him, Papa, why do those men hate you? So
As the testimony unfolded, it became clear that Hiss was lying.
The evidence was all against him. Hiss started dodging questions.
(29:18):
He had to keep changing his story. That didn't affect
the media coverage. However, on the contrary, the more clear
it became that Hiss was in trouble, the more to
media covered up for him and found ways to attack Chambers.
So it was not until many years later that the
nation at large fully realized how clearly and unambiguously the
evidence had been against Hiss. From the beginning. President Truman
(29:40):
made the case into an election issue. He'd denounced Whittaker
Chambers at rallies in front of big, cheering crowds. The
security official that Chambers had gone to in nineteen thirty
nine to tell all he knew lied about what Chambers
had told him, and the lie would have stuck. But
the man's notes were introduced into evidence, and they contradicted
his story. In the trials that came out of the case,
(30:03):
two sitting Supreme Court justices took the stand as character
witnesses for Aldrehis who do you think? Took the stand
as a character witness for Whittaker Chambers. The housekeeper, the
black woman he had hired and refused to pay the
lower wage. He paid her a decent wage, and he
invited her to sit at the table and eat with
the family. As Chambers put it, in our dining room,
(30:27):
we gave her back her human dignity, and on the
witness stand, she gave me back my human dignity. Hiss's
main strategy was to smear Chambers. In the courtroom, the
chair of the Harvard Psychiatry Department took the stand and
testified under oath that he had diagnosed Whittaker Chambers as
a delusional and dangerous mentally ill man solely on the
(30:49):
basis of reading his articles in Time magazine. At the trial,
Chambers was questioned on the stand at great length by
his attorneys about the suicide of his brother, and at
the time he didn't understand why. It was because the
Hiss forces were hoping that the jury had heard the
rumors that they had been spreading that Chambers had abused
(31:10):
his brother and that that's why his brother committed suicide.
These claims were widely believed. No claim was too outrageous
to be believed if it made the Harvard man, the
respectable lawyer, the new dealer, the architect, of the United
Nations and friend to half the people who run the
institutions of the country as the hero and the fat,
weirdo Quaker as the villain. But then Hisses lawyers made
(31:34):
their fatal mistake. They demanded that Chambers turn over any
documents from Hiss that he might have in his possession.
They assumed, of course, that he would have nothing, and
that this would be embarrassing for him. But Chambers remembered
he had taken that last parcel of stolen documents and
handed it to his cousin to hide to use his
leverage against the Party in case his wife or child
(31:55):
were kidnapped. He didn't remember what was in it. He
went back to his cousin to get it. It had
sat in a dumb waiter shaft for ten years. It
had sixty five pages of handwritten documents and canisters of
microfilm that, when they were developed, produced a stack of
documents four feet high. Proved beyond a doubt that Hiss
(32:16):
was lying. There were documents in Hiss's handwriting and typed
on his Hisses typewriters. There were copies of secret documents
that only Hiss could have acquired, and that he had
no legitimate reason to be making copies of On the stand.
Hiss actually said under oath, I am amazed, and to
(32:36):
my dying day, I will wonder how Whittaker Chambers got
into my house to use my typewriter. Hiss went to
jail for perjury. More importantly, the nation was awakened to
the real nature of communism. There would be no more
cheap and easy talk about a peaceful and democratic Soviet
Union or agrarian liberals in China. Chambers description of communism,
(32:59):
his powerful testament only to what it was, and his
willingness to endure all suffering and sacrifice in order to
oppose it, had exposed the true nature of the threat.
In his retirement, Chambers was sought out by William F. Buckley,
who at that time was building what would become the
Conservative movement, and the two of them became very close friends.
For a short time, Chambers wrote for National Review, including
(33:21):
a deconstruction of Anne Rand's Atlas Shrug, which remains to
this day one of the key documents of American intellectual life.
Chambers interaction with Buckley and with the other Conservatives forced
him to recognize something he had never been willing to
admit before that human freedom is inextricably linked to economic
and technological development. This was a huge change for Chambers.
(33:45):
He had spent his entire adult life denouncing the mechanization
of the modern world, building that family farm, trying to
get back to the land, to get back to the
woods from his unhappy childhood, where nature offers peace to
those who come to see and to hear and not
to change. But near the end of his life he
(34:07):
wrote to Buckley, I have decided that the machine is
not the enemy. Chambers was critical in breaking through the
wall of lies and forcing a public confrontation with the
true nature of communism. And that's another meaning of the
title witness. But above all, Chambers bore witness that America
(34:29):
had lost its way spiritually. He said, the modern world
is in crisis because technological progress and economic development have
brought an end to older ways of life that were
bound by traditions. In those older ways of life, traditions
had dictated to people what the meaning and the purpose
(34:51):
of their life was. But today, in the advanced modern world,
we have to figure out the meaning of our lives
for ourselves. We find ourselves facing a basic question God
or man. Do we believe that the human mind is
the highest thing that there is, that the solution to
our problems is the almighty mind of man remaking the
(35:14):
world to eliminate war, poverty, and injustice. Or do we
believe that there is a power higher than the human mind,
that the destiny of man is not in the hands
of man, Chamber said, without God, man cannot organize the
world for man. Without God, sooner or later, we are
(35:37):
going to start lying, cheating, and stealing, and eventually torturing
and murdering on a massive scale in order to remake
the world. Believing that because our destiny is in our
own hands, that means we have the power to set
the world free, set the world free from war and
(35:59):
poverty and injustice, if only we are willing to pay
the price, if only we are willing to make the
necessary sacrifices. Chamber said, the communist East has chosen man,
and it practices totalitarianism and mass murder because it has
(36:20):
the courage of that conviction. The capitalist West, meanwhile, has
also chosen man, but it does not practice mass murder
because it is haunted by the specter of its Christian past.
That's the highest meaning I think of the title witness.
(36:40):
Chambers had grown to love his country very dearly, and
because he loved it so much, he bore witness against
a prophetic witness against our American version of this monstrous
vision of the almighty mind of man that can remake
the world. And a terrific job on the editing and
abduction and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and his
(37:03):
special thanks to Greg Forrester who made this speech, gave
this talk on behalf of the Acting Institute. And what
a story it is the story of what it could Chambers,
he had spent his entire life denouncing the machine. Near
the end he realized that the machine was not the enemy.
(37:25):
And the basic question that haunted him. Does God reign
supreme or man? Is it the almighty mind of man
that is the higher power? Or is there a power
higher than the mighty mind? Without God? He said, Man
can't organize the world or man. The communists has chosen man,
(37:47):
Horster said, But the capitalist West chose man too. But
America luckily was still haunted by its own Christian past,
by its own Christian conscience. The story of Whittaker Chambers,
the story of communism in the twentieth century, and forces
like it attacking the West. To day, here on our
(38:11):
American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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