Alger Hiss. Barack Obama. Bill Maher.
By way of explanation for those who came in late, for Americans
newly emerged from the triumph over evil that was World War II, the
name Alger Hiss became the very first symbol of the next chapter in
American history: the Cold War. Hiss, the son of America’s middle
class, grew up in Baltimore, advancing American-style with an
education at Johns Hopkins University and then, like Obama, it was
on to Harvard Law School. There he became an Establishment whiz
kid, a golden boy in the making. By the time he was a mere 44
Hiss’s career in government was blue ribbon. A clerkship to Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, senior staff positions in New
Deal Washington including the U.S. Senate, the Solicitor General’s
office and, finally, the State Department as an aide to Woodrow
Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of State son-in-law. It was in his
State Department job that Hiss accompanied President Franklin
Roosevelt to the Yalta summit with Stalin. Ditto with giving him
the opportunity to play a central role in the organizing conference
of the United Nations in San Francisco.
While all of this made Hiss a familiar favorite player with the
press and Establishment insiders, what brought him fame — and
ultimately brought him down — was the charge in 1948 that
throughout a considerable portion of his career he was in fact a
Soviet spy.
The purpose here is not to recount the particulars of the Hiss
case. After a series of stunning events, finally including the
revelation of stolen State Department documents that conclusively
proved Hiss’s guilt, Hiss went to prison. It was what surfaced in
the course of the Hiss episode that in retrospect has had such an
increasingly decisive impact on American politics since the Hiss
case, particularly on the image of Democrats nationally. That “it”
is, of course, the charge of “elitism,” a charge freshly made
against Senator Obama in the wake of his famous “bitter” remark
about the residents of small towns in Pennsylvania. A charge that
gets subsumed in the controversy over anti-Catholic bigotry as
vividly brought to life by HBO’s Bill Maher’s recent tirade against
an entire religion.
But when did this “elitism” business in the party of Andrew
Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Al Smith, FDR and Harry Truman
first surface?
Listen to the descriptions of the Hiss case as presented by two
of Hiss’s most famous antagonists, then California Congressman
Richard Nixon, and Whittaker Chambers, the man who, at great
personal sacrifice, came forward to finger Hiss. First is Nixon,
writing in his 1962 book Six Crises. He writes here of
Hiss in his first public appearance before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities, of which freshman Congressman Nixon was a
member:
His manner was coldly courteous, and, at times, almost
condescending….Hiss’s friends from the State Department, other
government agencies, and the Washington social community sitting in
the front rows of the spectator section broke into a titter of
delighted laughter. Hiss acknowledged his reaction to his sally [to
the Committee Chairman Karl Mundt, a South Dakota Republican] by
turning his back to the Committee, tilting his head in a courtly
bow, and smiling graciously at his supporters.
Now here is Chambers on the larger episode, as he wrote in his own
classic book
Witness:
I had attacked an intellectual and a ‘liberal.’ A whole
generation felt itself to be on trial-with pretty good reason
too…From their roosts in the great cities, and certain collegiate
eyries, the leftwing intellectuals of almost every feather (and
that was most of the vocal intellectuals in the country) swooped
and hovered in flocks like fluttered sea fowl — puffins, skimmers,
skuas and boobies — and gave vent to hoarse cries and defilements.
I had also accused a “certified gentlemen” and the “conspiracy
of gentlemen” closed its retaliatory ranks against me. Hence that
musk of snobbism that lay rank and discrepant over the pro-Hiss
faction.
And finally, this. Also from Chambers.
For the contrast between them [Hiss’s pursuers] and the
glittering Hiss forces is about the same as between the glittering
French chivalry and the somewhat tattered English bowmen who won at
Agincourt. The inclusive fact about them is that in contrast to the
pro-Hiss rally, most of them, regardless of what they had made of
themselves, came from the wrong side of the railroad tracks….No
feature of the Hiss Case is more obvious, or more troubling as
history, than the jagged fissure, which it did not so much open as
reveal, between the plain men and women of the nation, and those
who affected to act, think and speak for them. It was, not
invariably, but in general, the “best people” who were for Alger
Hiss and who were prepared to go to almost any length to protect
and defend them. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the
clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who
snapped their minds shut…
What is so striking in all of the above is the realization that the
“jagged fissure” of elitist superiority first glimpsed by Chambers
and Nixon in 1948 has now become a canyon-sized superhighway
running straight from the Hiss episode to the modern American left,
of which Obama is but the latest advocate. If one were to remove
the references to names, places and time itself, displayed above is
the essential sentiment behind the Obama “bitter” remark.
IS THIS, IN FACT, not the same collection of sniggering sentiments
on parade in the precincts of MoveOn.org, the New York
Times, HBO’s Maher and the gathering of rich San Franciscans
who were presumably nodding their heads in agreement as they heard
Obama condescend to small town Pennsylvanians who meet precisely
Chambers’ description of the “plain men and women of the
nation”?
Of all the critical issues hanging fire in this election season
— Iraq, terror, the economy, judges, health care and more — it is
now apparent that the undercurrent to all of these issues will be
the odors of snobbish elitism that emanate ever more aromatically
from the left. As Obama comes into focus there is less and less
question which side of the jagged fissure he would have sought out
had he been around in 1948.
It takes no imagination to see Obama laughing and applauding
Hiss were he sitting in the spectator section behind the witness,
who, like Obama, was a Harvard law graduate. It is easy to see
Obama not getting the problem of an association with Hiss just as
he right now has no understanding of the problem others see with
his association with Weatherman William Ayers. Indeed, based on
what has been revealed thus far about Obama allowing Ayers to host
a fundraiser for his state senate campaign, then later going on to
serve on the board of the Woods Foundation with Ayers one sees a
21st-century version of Chambers description of the liberals who
rallied to Hiss and saw no big deal. Both Obama and Ayers, as with
Bill Maher, perfectly fit the image of the 1948 liberal
intellectual “of almost every feather” who “swooped and hovered in
flocks like fluttered sea fowl — puffins, skimmers, skuas and
boobies” as they gave vent to “hoarse cries and defilements.”
“Defilements” in the current day meaning Obama’s musings about
all of those bitter Pennsylvanians clinging to God and guns. Ayers’
longings to bomb the living hell out of America. And Maher’s
loathing for the Catholic Church.
In the wake of the Hiss controversy, a liberal book reviewer
assigned the task by the Nation of reviewing a book by
Hiss said this: “If one has any interest in our national taste it
is impossible to refrain from asking how American jurors could be
persuaded to give credence to such a man as Chambers in preference
to such a man as Hiss.” Catch the key phrase here: “…interest in
our national taste.” There is no mention here about the central
issue in the Hiss case — the facts. No, the liberal reviewer was
really upset about…taste.
How different is this really from, say, House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi’s fulminations about the activities of then-Florida
Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s lustings for young boys — all
the while knowing she had happily marched in San Francisco’s Gay
Pride parade behind a Grand Marshal who was famous in her city for
his advocacy on behalf of the North American Man-Boy Love
Association (NAMBLA)? One suspects that if the police in some city
swooped in on a group of NAMBLA adherents caught living out their
desires Bill Maher would be indignant over the violation of their
privacy. What outrages elitists like Maher, as with Pelosi, is not
the facts — it’s the matter of taste. Culture. The right people,
don’t you know, are the right people. And the common folks and
Catholics, well, aren’t.
THIS ELITISM EXPLAINS in an instant the visceral hatred for George
W. Bush. Bush, after all, was supposed to be one of them. The rich
Establishment parents. Yale. Harvard. What makes him so despised by
elitists like Obama, Ayers, Maher and the rest is precisely that he
doesn’t simply disagree with liberal elitists, he, having
encountered the breed close up in his youth, despises them for the
very thing they prize — their self-imagined sense of superiority.
Were Bush a young man in 1948 sitting in that congressional hearing
room, he would have been rooting for Whittaker Chambers, not Alger
Hiss. He would know that simply because Chambers was, in Nixon’s
words, “…short and pudgy…(his) clothes un-pressed…his shirt
collar curled up over his jacket…” and Hiss was everything
opposite — smooth, handsome, well-dressed, a man with a golden
resume — that a human being’s character is never defined by
outward appearance. Not for Bush the front rows behind Hiss with
the tittering State Department types and “Washington social
community.”
Bush, in other words, has deliberately sought out what Chambers
called the men and women who grew up on the wrong side of the
railroad tracks. Obama, Ayers, Bill Maher of Hollywood and a whole
lot more in this election season are the modern “glittering” bands
of elitist opposition. They will shortly, if they have not already,
be figuratively dumping their vitriol not on George W. Bush but on
John McCain, who, as the ultimate military man, will attract their
venom with the certainty that magnets fly to metal.
It is worth remembering that in the end Alger Hiss and his
“glittering” legion of tittering, elitist, snobbish supporters
finally lost, although at great cost to those who challenged them.
Nixon was, it now seems clear, scarred for the rest of his life.
Chambers was suicidal. The important point, however, is that it was
“the plain men and women” who carried the day.
In time, they will do so again when they get Obama’s underlying
philosophy in focus.
They will get the core of Barack Obama just as they get the core
of Bill Maher.
Just as they got Alger Hiss.
And by the way, why do you think it is that they listen to
Rush?
Jeffrey Lord is the creator, co-founder, and CEO of
QubeTV, a
conservative online video site. A Reagan White House political
director and author, he writes from Pennsylvania, where he
lives.
