Warblers and Alger Hiss

7/29/2019 Warblers and Alger Hiss

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WARBLERS WORM THEIR WAY INTO HISTORYBy Dennis Huckabay

Yesterday I thought I heard a brief purity the bluebirds call.

(Letter from Alger Hiss to his family from Lewisburg Federal Prison, March 19, 1953)

BUENA VISTA AUDUBON SOCIETY

Lagoon Flyer Special Supplement February, 2009

History was made here in November whentwo Buena Vista Audubon stalwarts spottedtwo eastern warblers almost never seen inSan Diego County. Both were seen at ornear San Elijo Lagoon. Steve Brad, knownto many of us as a leader of our field trips,saw a worm-eating warbler, and Terry Hune-

feld, who developed and oversees a hugelypopular pelagic birding program for BVAS,saw a prothonotary warbler. Neither warblerwas ever recorded here prior to the 1960s,and there have been only a few sightings ofthe birds since then. Both are birds of theeastern forests. Worm-eating warblers, spar-row-like, ground-nesting birds, can be foundduring the summer breeding season onwooded Appalachian hillsides from southernNew England to the Gulf States, foraging inshrubs and subcanopy layers for insects, spi-

ders, caterpillars, and slugs (not worms).They winter in forests ofsouthern Mexico andalong the Caribbeanslope of Central Americasouth to Panama.

Prothonotary warblers gottheir name in the EighteenthCentury from Louisiana Cre-oles who thought the birdsplumage resembled thegolden robes of the protono-

tarius, a scribe or notary public in Catholic eccle-siastical courts. A more apt name might be thegolden swamp warbler, both for the males bril-liant golden head and chest and the birds partial-ity to flooded forests and bottomlands in theSoutheast. Prothonotary warblers winter mainlyin mangrove swamps and coastal tropical forestsof Cost Rica, Panama and Colombia.

Prothonotary warblers figured in the history of theCold War. Birder Alger Hiss was accused in 1948of being a Communist spy in the 1930s. A gradu-ate of Johns Hopkins and Harvard Law, Hiss wentto Washington in the early years of RooseveltsNew Deal to serve in the Agricultural AdjustmentAdministration, an agency established to helpfarmers weather the Depression. From there hewent on to the State Department and accompanied

FDR to Yalta in 1945 to prepare with Churchilland Stalin the geopolitical configuration of thepost-World War II world. Hiss then served as theUnited Nations first Secretary General when theworldwide organization was set up in San Fran-cisco in 1945, and went on to become President ofthe Carnegie Endowment for International Peacein 1947.

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Prothonotary Warbler at San Elijo Lagoon E. Kallen

Worm-eating warbler

E. Kallen


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In 1948, before the House Un-American ActivitiesCommittee (HUAC), Whittaker Chambers accusedHiss of being a Communist in the 1930s, and sworethat Hiss, while a State Department official, had

given Chambers secret Government papers. Cham-bers, an apostate Communist, had been a memberof the Party from 1925 to 1938. He alleged that hehad known Hiss and his wife intimately in the1930s and had been a guest in their home. Amongother things, he revealed that Hiss and his wifewere enthusiastic birders. Here is Chambers testi-mony to the Committee on August 7, 1948:

HUAC Research DirectorBen Mandel: Did Mr.Hiss have any hobbies?

Chambers: Yes he did.They both (Hiss and his

wife) had the same hobby

amateur ornithologists,

bird observers. They

used to get up early in the

morning to observe

birds. I recall once they

saw, to their great excite-

ment, a prothonotary

warbler.

Congressman JohnMcDowell, Republicanfrom New Jersey and alsoa birder: A very rarespecimen?

Chambers: I never sawone. I am also fond of birds.

On August 16 Hiss was called by the Committee torespond to Chambers accusations of familiarity.

Unaware of Chambers earlier testimony, Hiss re-sponded to the Committees loaded questions:

Congressman Richard Nixon, Republican fromCalifornia: Is your wife interested in ornithology?

Hiss: My wife is interested in ornithology, as I am,through my interest. Maybe I am using too big a

word to say an ornithologist because I am pretty

amateur, but I have been interested in it since I was

in Boston. I think anyone who knows me would

know that.

Congressman McDowell: Did you ever see aprothonotary warbler?

Hiss: I have, right here on the Potomac. Do youknow that place?

Nixon: Have you ever seen one?

Hiss: (Ignoring Nixon).Did you see it in the same

place?

McDowell: I saw one inArlington.

Hiss: They come back andnest in those swamps. Beau-

tiful yellow head, a gor-

geous bird.

As Chambers later said:(T)he prothonotary war-bler, (is) a bird little bigger

than a half-dollar whosename many people hesitateto pronounce, and which Ihave never seen. It was thatbeautiful bird, glimpsed in amoment of wonder, onesummer morning somefourteen years before, that

first clinched the Committees conviction that Imust have known Alger Hiss.

Hiss denied that he had ever been a Communist.

Based on testimony about Hisss birding and otherinformation that Chambers proffered about Hissand his family that only an intimate associatewould be expected to know, Hiss was indicted forperjury. His first trial ended in a hung jury in1949. Tried again, Hiss was convicted in 1950 andsentenced to five years in the Federal Penitentiaryat Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.


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Hiss testifies before the House committee


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Hiss spent 44 months in prison, walking outjust after Thanksgiving, 1954. Decades later,when writing his autobiography, he could bringto mind only a solitary moment of joy from his

years in Lewisburg a morning when, on theway to his storeroom job in the spring of 1952,he saw and heard a rose-breasted grosbeaksinging from the top of the only tree in theprison yard:

What would have been an exciting event forme at any time brought a surge of intense en-joyment. The birds song was lengthy and re-peated more than once. A small group gath-ered, watching and listening silently. When thegrosbeak finished, no one spoke as we went to

our workplaces. I was refreshed; my senseswere sharpened as if by a great aesthetic ex-perience. I cannot think of another time whenmy spirits were so lifted that I was oblivious tomy grim, oppressive surroundings.

Hisss son Tony has written a memoir of his father,using his fathers letters from prison three-a-week, two pages long, all that were allowed totell the story of Alger Hisss life and of his ownexperience as a young boy swept up in the turmoilof the trial that marked the opening of the Cold

War. Here is one of Hisss letters to his family(April 7, 1953), recounting the time in the 1930swhen he first borrowed a friends binoculars tolook up at a bird in a forest clearing:

The first sight through glasses of a resplendentwild bird is breathtaking. The colors are so bril-liant and alive, the bird itself is so contained andcompetent. You see the bird whole, as a fellowpersonality the way his or her friends and rela-tions do (at least that is the way itseems!).

Tony Hiss (nine to twelve years old when his fatherwas imprisoned) admits that many of his fathersattempts to yoke his son to the fixed lights of hislife or the shining discoveries he made at Lewis-burg passed him by. The giant thunderstorms, themoon, the evening star, or the full bowl of thesky, which Hiss could observe from his prisonwindow, left his son with no special feelings of

kinship. I actively rebelled against bird-watching, writes Tony. It was only later thatHisss son, clinging to sunsets, began to reorgan-ize his thinking around the bright spots that maderepeated appearances in his fathers letters fromprison.

Tony eventually learned from his fathers lettersthat places needed to be listened to every bit ascarefully as people did. On August 3, 1952, Hisswrote his family from prison that rewarding ob-servation is not the result of a rare somethingworth looking at, but comes to one who iscapable of seeing the constant and ubiquitousmarvels of life. Despite Hisss assertion that thepleasures of everyday Nature are better than therare something worth looking at, he apparentlywas a lister. On October 24, 1954, he addedthree species to his Lewisburg list (a hermit

thrush, a jays cry and a visible and audiblechickadee.

Hiss came out of prison, his career in ruins. InNew York, he lived on his wifes work at a book-store and the $10,000 advance for his book on thecase (In the Court of Public Opinion, which ap-peared in 1957 to mixed reviews and poor sales).


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Whittaker Chambers, confessed spy and Hisss accuser.


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He took a course in touch typing and speed writingin midtown Manhattan and failed. He found a jobwith Feathercombs, Inc., a company that madewomens hair barrettes of looped piano wire;

Feathercombs was soon driven out of business by amajor manufacturer of plastic hair combs. Afterfive months of unemployment, when he wished hecould find a job teaching or working withan emergent African nation as an adviser,he found a job in 1960 selling stationeryand printing in Manhattan, a job he kept(longer than any other in his life) until heretired in the late 1970s. It was easy, Hisssaid in his autobiography: Business ex-ecutives who received me genially werelooking forward to saying at dinner par-

ties, guess who wants to sell me rubberbands and paper clips.

I met Alger Hiss in the spring of 1968,just returned from three-and-a-half yearsteaching in East Africa. Jane, my collegesweetheart, and I had just married. (Janewas to die in 1970 of an African cancer,Burketts lymphoma, that she had con-tracted when she came out to teach and bewith me in Kenya). I was scared that Iwould be drafted and sent to Vietnam, but

was told by a college friend working inNew York City for Mayor John Lindsaythat if I moved to New York and taught inthe public schools there I would be as-sured of a draft deferment. In January1968 I began teaching at IntermediateSchool 201 in East Harlem, a school thatwas then deep into a dispute between lo-cal parents and the city-wide board ofeducation. Jane and I signed up for anevening class at the New School for Social Re-search on the New Deal, taught by Alger Hiss.

Lyndon Johnsons Great Society initiatives at thetime were reminiscent of the New Deal, when thecivil rights movement was still multi-racial (I hadgone to Mississippi for Freedom Summer 1964)and opposition to the war in Vietnam provoked, inHisss words, spirited public participation some-how akin to the popular spirit of the mid-1930s.Hiss was proud of how he and his New Deal col-

leagues had stopped the worst ravages of the De-pression and set up agencies and policies that, untilthe deregulation mania of the last few decades putus in our present predicament, set the stage for

years of postwar prosperity. At the end of the lec-tures, discussion continued with Hiss, once ortwice joined by his son Tony, in a nearby Green-

wich Village bar.One afternoon that spring I came up out of the sub-

way on my way home from a rough day at IS201and ran into Mr. Hiss at the top of the steps. Westopped and talked and talked and talked andtalked about my experiences of teaching in newlyindependent Kenya, about teaching in an innercityschool and about wresting control of local schoolsfrom the ossified bureaucrats at the city-wideBoard of Education. We also talked about birds.


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Hisss son Tony wrote that late in his life his fatherbecame exceptionally good at talking with and lis-tening to much younger people. For thirty yearsand more, Tony wrote in the late 1990s, Ive

been hearing stories, first from people a little olderthan me, then from those my age, and finally froman even larger number ten and twenty yearsyounger, about how they will never forget thatwhen they were teenagers, or in college, or work-ing at their first job, how a chance meeting withAlger taught them to see themselves with a newpurpose.

That certainly was the case with me. All along Iknew that I wanted a career in teaching or publicservice, and my contacts with Mr. Hiss fortified my

choice. Jane and I were invited out to the Hissssummer place on Long Island. With Mr. Hiss Isaw my first old squaw drake (now called morepolitically correctly long-tailed duck) on a bitterlycold January morning on Jamaica Bay. Togetherwe saw a brilliant male Scarlet Tanager (anotherfirst) in Central Park on a late spring day a fewdays before Jane died.

I dont know if Alger Hiss was a Communist; hedenied ever having been one until the day he diedin 1996. Records made available after the collapse

of the Soviet Union are inconclusive. Hiss was notable to marshal a convincing defense against thefamiliarity and accusations presented by WhittakerChambers. But despite the damaging testimony,Hiss does not seem to me to be the sort of man who

could have so serenely asked his family and friendsto trust him if he were guilty. They stood by himfor the rest of his life while he worked hard fordecades to maintain his integrity and innocence.

Guilty or not, through his public service Alger Hissmade the world a better place before he wasbrought down. The symbolism of the man and histrials is still compelling, still unresolved in thecourt of public opinion. But one small fact doesstand out above the drama, imagery, opinion andjudgment of the man: Alger Hiss loved birds, andthe same prothonotary warbler that helped bringhim down also provides him vindication.

References

Audubon Watch List. n.d. Worm-eating Warbler.www.audubon2.org/webapp/watchlist/viewSpecies.jsp?id=221

Chambers, Whittaker. 1952. Witness. New York: Random HouseHiss, Alger. 1988. Recollections of a Life. New York: Seaver Books/Henry HoltHiss, Tony. 1999. The View from Algers Window: A Sons Memoir. New York:

Alfred A. KnopfPetit, Lisa. 1997. Prothonotary Warbler. Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center.

www.nationalzoo.sci.eduWeinstein, Allen. 1978. Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Case. New York: Alfred A.

Knopf


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http://www.audubon2.org/webapp/watchlist/viewSpecies.jsp?id=221http://www.nationalzoo.sci.edu/http://www.nationalzoo.sci.edu/http://www.audubon2.org/webapp/watchlist/viewSpecies.jsp?id=221

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Warblers and Alger Hiss