Selling the Constitution: Alexander Hamilton Markets the New Government

Having achieved independence with the end of combat in 1781 and with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States established itself as sovereign, and organized itself under a document known as the Articles of Confederation. This document had been ratified by all thirteen states between December 1777 and March 1781.

This form of government quickly showed itself to be impractical and ineffective. Among other shortcomings, the Articles of Confederation left the national government too weak to enforce the Treaty of Paris, too weak to prevent the British government from dumping onto American shores boatloads of criminals, and too weak to prevent individual states from forming their own separate foreign policies, outside of the united policies, with regard to other nations. It was too weak to solve the economic crisis caused by the large amount of debt from the war; the ripple effects of the debt through the economy triggered Shays’ Rebellion, a movement which represented farmers who were losing land and property to debt collectors.

In early 1787, Congress called for a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation. That convention began in May and ended in September of that year.

The new text produced by the convention did a bit more than “revise” the Articles of Confederation, as historian Ron Chernow writes:

For all its gore and mayhem, the American Revolution had unified the thirteen states, binding them into a hopeful, if still restive, nation. The aftermath of the Constitutional Convention, by contrast, turned ugly and divisive, polarizing the populace. Four days after Hamilton affixed his signature to the Constitution, The Daily Advertiser gave New Yorkers their first glimpse of it, and many blanched in amazement. This charter went far beyond Congress’s instructions to rework the Articles of Confederation: it brought forth a brand-new government. The old confederation had simply gone up in smoke. Marinus Willett, once a stalwart of the Sons of Liberty and now New York’s sheriff, echoed the consternation among Governor Clinton’s entourage when he lambasted the new Constitution as “a monster with open mouth and monstrous teeth ready to devour all before it.”

The Americans, having only recently gained their freedom by fighting against a powerful central government, were sensitive to any plan of government which seemed to establish another powerful central government. Why had they rebelled against the King and Parliament of Britain, if they were simply proceeding to re-enslave themselves to the same type of tyranny?

Was this new Constitution, produced by the convention in Philadelphia, establishing an undemocratic absolutism over the Americans? Or was it really, as the delegates to that convention claimed, given power for the purpose of protecting American freedom?

Those who supported the new text were called Federalists, and those who opposed the ratification of it were called the Anti-Federalists.

There was a large segment of the American public which opposed the new Constitution. In order to persuade them to accept, and then support, this Constitution, carefully-worded justifications and explanations would be needed to gain the public’s approval. An important piece of this marketing effort, perhaps the decisive piece, was a writing project known as the The Federalist Papers.

This project consisted of a series of essays published over a period of months in various newspapers. There were a total of 85 essays, written by three authors: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Hamilton wrote 51 of the essays, and organized the project. The first essay was released in October 1787, and the last one in August 1788. They were released together in book form in 1788.

Because Hamilton wrote a majority of the essays which together did a majority of the persuading, it is plausible to argue that he was the key factor in persuading the American public to cause their legislators to ratify the Constitution. If James Madison is often called the “Father of the Constitution” because he was influential in drafting the text, then perhaps Alexander Hamilton should be called the “Midwife of the Constitution” because he ushered it into the world.

The Federalist Papers seem to have effected a significant change in public opinion. Between December 1787 and May 1790, all thirteen states ratified the text.

In July 1788, New York became the eleventh state to ratify, and it was clear that it was only a matter of time until the Constitution would indeed be the operating system for a new government. The public, once largely skeptical, had in the meantime become enthusiastic about the Constitution, and about the man who sold it to the public, Alexander Hamilton.

Ron Chernow describes the celebration in New York City. People lauded Hamilton and cheered on the ratification of the Constitution:

The parade apotheosized the hero of the hour, the man who had snatched victory from the antifederalist majority. So exuberant was the lionization of Alexander Hamilton that admirers wanted to rechristen the city “Hamiltoniana.” It was one of the few times in his life that Hamilton basked in the warmth of public adulation. Sail makers waved a flag depicting a laurel-wreathed Hamilton bearing the Constitution while an allegorical figure representing Fame blew a trumpet in the air. This paled before the grandest tribute of all to Hamilton. Gliding down Broadway, pulled by ten horses, was a miniature frigate, twenty-seven feet long, baptized the “Federal Ship Hamilton.” The model ship rose above all other floats “with flowing sheets and full sails[,]... the canvas waves dashing against her sides” and concealing the carriage wheels moving the ship, noted one observer. The cart men fluttered banners that proclaimed, “Behold the federal ship of fame / The Hamilton we call her name; / To every craft she gives employ; / Sure cartmen have their share of joy.” When the Hamilton arrived near the Battery, it was received by congressmen standing outside Bayard’s Tavern. To represent the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, the ship changed pilots amid a deafening cannonade. The parade marked the zenith of the federalist alliance with city artisans. Hamilton had never courted the masses, and never again was he to enjoy their favor to this extent. Riding high on the crest of the new Constitution, Hamilton and the federalists held undisputed sway in the city.

More than two centuries later, the questions posed by the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists remain. Is the Constitution a system which will maximize and protect individual freedom, political liberty, and economic liberty? Or is it an oppressive system which tyrannizes people by taxing them and regulating them? Of course, the Constitution as a system is only one part of the answer to those questions. The other part is the character of the people who serve in the various elected and appointed offices created by the Constitution, and the degree to which they act in accord with the text.

Segregation and “Jim Crow” Laws — The Results of Government

In the history of the United States, the bitter realities of segregation were both a harsh burden upon the victims and a result of government regulation left unchecked. Segregation was the result of legislation.

One example illustrates this principle. In the State of Kentucky, public schools were often, although not always, segregated in the late 1800s. Private schools had the opportunity to be integrated — including both secular institutions and parochial religious schools.

One private school in particular — Berea College — took advantage of that opportunity and functioned in a fully desegregated manner. In November 1903, a member of the Kentucky legislature, Carl Day, happened to be on the campus of Berea College. He witnessed firsthand how Black and White students socialized as equals.

Carl Day returned to the state legislature, conferred with his fellow members of the Democratic Party, and introduced a bill which would require all schools — public and private — to be segregated. The president of the Democratic Club, J.M. Early, gave speeches in favor of this proposed legislation.

Administrators, professors, and students from Berea College spoke in opposition to the bill, but to no avail.

In January 1904, Carl Day’s bill was passed by the legislature, and in March 1904, it was signed into law by Governor John Crepps Wickliffe Beckham. Governor Beckham was known as “J.C.W. Beckham” in many reports.

Left to their own devices, the people of Kentucky were content to have integrated institutions of higher learning. But the government imposed segregation. As historian Benjamin Shapiro writes:

Segregation was governmentally imposed, not socially imposed. The whole reason that government was necessary was so that those who would not abide by social racism were forced to do so. As black economist Walter Williams states, “whenever there is a law on the books, one’s immediate suspicion should be that the law is there because not everyone would behave according to the law’s specifications.”

Walter Williams goes on to identify parallels between “Jim Crow Laws” in the United States and “Apartheid” in South Africa. In both cases, society had no desire for complete and legally enforced segregation. In both cases, individuals in the private sector were willing to violate the government’s demands for segregation.

Racism requires the existence of government regulations in order to do its damage. Without such regulations, ordinary women and men are happy to do business with anyone of any race, if that person can strike a good deal. Walter Williams writes:

The bottom line is that racists cannot trust free markets to racially discriminate. Free markets, with their dispersion of power, have little respect for race. Racial solidarity could not prevent white South African businessmen from contravening laws that banned them from hiring blacks in jobs "reserved" for whites. In the U.S., Jim Crow laws were frequently ignored. In South Africa, the U.S. and elsewhere, the private desire for profits and other personal gain challenged racial loyalty. Racists need the force of government to have success.

After the “Reconstruction” Era began to wind down, around 1877, the Democratic Party in many of the states in the South were still bitterly angry that slavery had been abolished and that the Democratic Party had lost the war. Walter Williams explains that these states “enforced some form of segregation through what were known as Jim Crow laws.”

While American society was content to embrace integration and desegregation, historian Benjamin Shapiro explains that “segregation was imposed governmentally.”

The suffering imposed on African-American in South after the Civil War, up until the relief provided by the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, was imposed not by American society, but rather by governments which had gained too much power over the daily lives of ordinary people.

Posing as Journalists, Soviet Agents Deliver China to Destruction: The Amerasia Case

One skill needed for successful covert operations is the ability to establish a good ‘front’ — a seemingly innocuous activity or organization, behind which an intelligence agency can assemble its destructive efforts. Such was the case of the magazine Amerasia, which managed to hide the workings of both Soviet agents and Maoist insurgents.

Aside from its obvious pro-communist prejudices, the periodical seemed to be an innocent enough collection of articles about the politics and policies of east Asia. In reality, however, the offices of the journal served as a junction for a network of spies. Once detected, the web of individuals and other ‘front’ organizations connected to Amerasia showed itself to be both large and significant.

As reported in the Taiwan Today newspaper, the unraveling of the magazine’s facade began when one of its articles contained text which could have only come from a confidential source:

The strange case of Amerasia, like many a fictional spy thriller, opened quite accidentally. One day in February, 1945, Kenneth E. Wells of the Office of Strategic Services picked up a recent issue of the magazine, dated January 26, and found himself quoted — but not cited. Wells was head of the Southern Asian Section of the research branch of the OSS. To his amazement he read, in an article entitled “The Case of Thailand,” the very language he had used in a highly classified memorandum describing the lack of harmony between British and American policies in that part of the world. The article contained, verbatim, whole paragraphs out of a secret OSS report prepared by Wells himself some months earlier. Obviously, the magazine writer must have had the document itself be­fore him as he wrote.

It was clear that secret government documents had been stolen and were in the hands of people who had no clearance to have them. Further, passages from those documents had been published. This was a crime, a breach of national security, and posed a danger to the lives of both Americans and Chinese.

The need for immediate action was obvious, as Taiwan Today explains:

Wells properly called the matter to the attention of Archibald Van Beuren, OSS security chief, who was sufficiently alarmed to fly to New York on February 28. There he instructed his director of investigation, Frank Brooks Bielaski, to find out how and why the document had gotten out of OSS files. Bielaski was given a list of the names of some 30 persons to whom copies had been sent. Most of them were in the OSS, but a few were in the Department of State, and at least one in both Army and Navy Intelligence. Copies had gone also to a half-dozen Foreign Service officers on duty in the Far East. With secretaries and assistants counted, perhaps 100 employees of the United States Government had access to the OSS report on Thailand. Biela­ski’s task was to locate the leak. Figuring that it would take 10 men to maintain a close watch on each person in Washington, Bielaski estimated that he would need at least 1,000 OSS agents for the job. Such a force was not available. It was decided, therefore, to make a preliminary investigation of the magazine itself. An agent was sent to the New York Public Library to analyze past issues of Amerasia, and its editorial offices at 225 Fifth Avenue were put under round-the-clock surveillance. Bielaski himself made some inquiries re­garding the staff of the magazine.

Already early in the case, a number of OSS agents were involved: Kenneth E. Wells, Archibald Van Beuren, and Frank Brooks Bielaski. Soon more OSS operatives would be part of the events, as well as FBI agents and eventually investigators acting on behalf of the U.S. Congress.

The cast of characters on the other side would grow as well. What began as a question about a small and even obscure little publication would turn into a catalogue of many of the most dangerous Soviet agents of the era.

The Soviet Socialists understood that the future success or failure of Mao’s insurgents would not only shape the history of China, but also the history of the United States. In turn, America’s policies toward China would nudge Mao’s terrorists in one direction or the other: toward success or toward failure. The Amerasia case uncovered one of Stalin’s key weapons in this struggle: Soviet agents acting covertly — as “moles” — inside the U.S. government. Those who shaped America’s policies toward China were acting, not on reliable information provided by honest civil servants, but rather on fabrications and opinions provided by Soviet espionage agents planted within the U.S. State Department.

Even as the battles of WW2 still raged, the Soviets were planning the postwar destruction of the Chinese government and the creation of Mao’s Marxist dictatorship.

OSS agents investigating Amerasia found not only that the publication’s staff had obtained stolen documents, but that many of the magazine’s writers were actually Soviet agents, part of a larger network which led to still more Soviet agents in the government and in other organizations, as Time magazine reports:

Chunky, spectacled Frank Bielaski, an ex-Wall Street broker turned Government secret agent, had handled many cases for OSS during the war. One midnight, tracing down the document quoted in Amerasia, Bielaski and four aides let themselves into a dark, empty building at 225 Fifth Avenue. They took an elevator to the eleventh floor and there, by what Bielaski later called “deceit and subterfuge,” entered Amerasia’s office. Once inside, they began a careful inspection. They found one room fitted out with photocopy equipment, a desk in another room spread with copies of Government documents. Behind a door were a bellows-type suitcase and two briefcases packed with other papers — altogether close to 300 originals and copies of documents stolen from the Offices of Naval Intelligence and Censorship, G2, OSS, State Department and British Intelligence. A few of them were marked “Top Secret” and “Secret”; all of them were labeled for official scrutiny only.

Clearly, there were moles at work inside the State Department. In addition to Amerasia, secrets were being passed on to the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a policy think-tank, and to the IPR’s publications. The IPR’s main publication was a periodical titled Pacific Affairs.

The Soviet Socialist espionage network inside the United States did more than steal secret documents. It was also active in shaping America’s policies. Individuals working the State Department who were associated with the IPR wrote briefings for decision-makers in the U.S. government.

The Soviets, who sought the ultimate destruction of the United States, were shaping the decisions by which America was to defend itself against the Soviets. The USSR had managed to subvert the American system against itself.

The OSS gained physical evidence which revealed how widespread the Soviet infiltration was, as Time magazine reports:

The raiders picked up a dozen documents to show the kind of material they had found, and left. A few hours later Bielaski laid his report and the documents before officials in Washington.

Amerasia was co-edited and co-founded by Philip Jaffe. Jaffe was connected to a number of known Soviet spies, including Earl Browder, Owen Lattimore, and John Stewart Service. Each of these was connected to still others. In the end, a dizzyingly large network of Soviet operatives were related directly or indirectly to the Amerasia case.

Ultimately, some of these were tried in court and jailed. Others were rendered useless to the Soviets because their identities had been revealed. But some of them also managed to slip away and continue their espionage activity.

The case expanded from the OSS to the FBI, and then culminated in legal actions, as Time magazine explains:

The case was assigned to the FBI. For almost three months FBI agents kept Jaffe and his office under surveillance. Other agents tailed Jaffe on frequent trips to Washington where he met assorted small-bore Government officials. By late May, James Mclnerney, first assistant to Tom Clark, who was in charge of criminal prosecution for the Justice Department, was ready to collar the crowd, start prosecutions for espionage.

All of this would be mere historical trivia, except for the fact that Mao’s terrorists ultimately destroyed both China’s government and much of Chinese society. Mao’s victory is due, in part or in whole, to less-than-energetic American support for Chiang Kai-shek. Had Chiang been able to defend China against Mao, and had Mao’s communist dictatorship not been able to oppress China for several decades, then millions of Chinese would not have been murdered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Not only would millions of Chinese lives have been saved, but also lives in Korea and Vietnam, including American lives.

Why did America fail to stoutly oppose Mao’s genocidal takeover of China? In part because the network of individuals who were associated with Amerasia had persuaded U.S. policy makers that Mao was benign and that Chiang Kai-shek was useless. Acting on disinformation — a step worse than misinformation — U.S. policy makers were lulled into letting Mao have China. Philip Jaffe’s network of Soviet spies is directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings.

When a Magazine Is More Than Simply a Magazine: Amerasia As a Front for Maoist-Stalinist Espionage

In June, 1950, Time magazine reported that Congress was examining a collection of classified government documents. These documents had been found, not securely stored under lock and key in a federal office, but rather in the offices of a magazine title Amerasia. The questions presented themselves: What information did these secret papers contain? How did they come to be in the offices of a quirky little periodical?

More questions were prompted by the fact that the FBI had discovered the trove of confidential documents in 1945, and yet the Congressional investigations into the matter were underway in 1950. Why the five-year delay into an incident which revealed a stunning breach of national security? Wouldn’t such a discovery demand quicker action?

The Time article reports:

In a Justice Department office last week, staffmen of a Senate subcommittee combed through three large boxes containing hundreds of documents seized five years ago in the Amerasia case. Around the boxes swirled a storm of argument. Republican Senators, none of whom had actually seen the contents, cried that the Administration had put the fix on the Amerasia case, and that a real probe of the case would prove it. From Iowa, where he was campaigning in a primary election, Bourke Hickenlooper charged that at least some of the documents were important U.S. wartime secrets. Didn’t one of them show the disposition in 1944 of U.S. submarines in the Pacific? Wasn’t one of them a highly confidential (“for eyes only”) message from Roosevelt to Chiang Kaishek? Said Hickenlooper: “I think that all Americans will be appalled when the whole truth becomes known.”

It seemed that the administration — in this case, the Truman administration — was dragging its feet. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had confirmed Amerasia’s illegal possession of the papers in March 1945. Why would the government slow-walk a matter of national security?

Was Truman himself involved in deciding the pace at which the Amerasia case would be handled? Or were underlings making these choices without the president’s knowledge?

The Time article records the administration’s reaction to the congressional concerns:

Such talk, Administration sources replied, was hogwash; the documents were nothing much. Said Assistant Attorney General James M. Mclnerney: Hickenlooper is “100% wrong.”

While obfuscation about the processing of the case muddied the waters, the facts of the case were simple and clear. Someone had stolen classified documents from the OSS. Those documents were found in the offices of Amerasia. This was a crime. In the words of historian Stan Evans, it was “felonious.”

The case began in a straightforward way, as Time reports:

As thick as the argument was the smoke screen of confusion around the whole affair, which the Administration seemed determined to preserve at all costs. In 1945, Amerasia was a magazine (circ. about 2,000) devoted more or less openly to the Communist line and the Far East, and published sporadically in New York by one Philip Jaffe. The case began that February when the eyes of a Government official fell upon a surprising Amerasia article. It quoted at length and almost verbatim from a secret report which was supposed to be tucked safely away in the Office of Strategic Services’ file. The OSS immediately put a special investigator, Frank Brooks Bielaski, on Amerasia's pink and wispy trail.

As the initial investigation continued, it became clear that the case would involve much more than Philip Jaffe and his magazine.

Jaffe was part of a network of Soviet operatives and communist sympathizers. This network had connections to Moscow and to Mao’s rebels in China. Jaffe’s associates included a number of current and former highly-placed officials in various government offices. Was the administration anticipating embarrassment when it was revealed that the Soviet Socialists had developed a spy network inside significant branches of the U.S. government?

Jaffe’s associates constituted a list of known Soviet operatives, as historians Herbert Romerstsein and Stan Evans write:

The contents of a secret OSS memo had appeared, in some respects verbatim, in the pages of Amerasia — the obvious implication being that someone had been leaking official data to the journal. This led agents from OSS, and then the FBI, to conduct an in-depth probe of the magazine and its personnel, including dragnet coverage of the suspects and their contacts, plus entry into Amerasia’s New York offices to photograph papers being held there. In the course of this inquiry, the Bureau noted Jaffe’s multifarious dealings with Service, Roth, State Department official Emmanuel Larsen, and journalist Mark Gayn. Interspersed with these, Jaffe was also surveilled meeting with U.S. Communist Party chief Earl Browder, visiting Chinese Communist bigwig Tung Pi-wu, officials at the Soviet consulate in New York, and self-described Soviet espionage courier Joseph Bernstein.

John Stewart Service worked in the State Department’s foreign service organization. In addition to stealing classified documents and passing them to Jaffe and Gayn, Service had gerrymandered his internal reports about the China situation: these reports circulated within the State Department and influenced American policy-making. Under the influence of Service, American support for Chiang Kai-shek became less enthusiastic, and Mao’s communists benefitted.

Andrew Roth was a lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). He introduced Service to a group who were “avid supporters of the Communists at Yenan,” as Evans and Romerstein write.

Philip Jaffe was not only networked in this way with a constellation of Soviet operatives, but Amerasia was linked to other organizations which, like Amerasia, were fronts for Soviet intelligence agencies.

One such front organization was the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Allegedly a think-tank for discussing regional problems and writing policy recommendations, IPR staff and board members greatly overlapped with Amerasia’s staff and board members. Both the IPR and Amerasia were located in the same office building, as was another organization, the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. This “committee” was also a facade behind which the Soviet Socialists could run a pro-Mao operation.

The IPR published its own magazine, Pacific Affairs. The list of authors who wrote for this magazine, and for other IPR publications, was nearly identical to the list of authors who wrote for Amerasia.

The network went still further: “Lauchlin Currie,” writes Stan Evans, was “an executive assistant to President Roosevelt in the early 1940s whose portfolio included policy toward China. Currie left the government in 1945.” When investigations of Amerasia and the IPR continued, Currie “would flee the country,” because he had a central organizational role in the IPR. “In trying to retrace the steps by which the U.S. government had been penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents,” congressional investigators “got on the trail of Currie and his multitude of contacts.”

Currie was, for instance, closely linked with Owen Lattimore, and with diplomat John Stewart Service, arrested in the Amerasia case after sending back a stream of dispatches from China denouncing the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek. Currie was also extremely thick with John Carter Vincent, the State Department official who played a critical role in shaping U.S. Asia policy in the years before the Red conquest of China.

Owen Lattimore was yet one more link in the chain connecting Moscow, Mao, and the network which included Philip Jaffe and John Stewart Service. Lattimore had been an IPR employee and then a foreign policy advisor in the Roosevelt administration. Lauchlin Currie had recommended to Roosevelt that Lattimore be dispatched to China to advise Chiang Kai-shek.

It is worth noting that Lattimore and Currie were Soviet agents who had direct access to the President of the United States. They were not the only ones. Roosevelt relied on these men for advice, assuming that they were seeking what was best for the common Allied cause in WW2. Instead, these two, along with Alger Hiss and other known Soviet agents who met face-to-face with FDR, were advocating policies which would undermine the Allied cause and which would set up a postwar world framework favorable to the Soviets.

In the end, Amerasia was not simply a magazine discussing foreign policy and thereby exercising its first amendment rights. It was a front for Soviet and Maoist intelligence agencies. It was part of a network which influence American policy in China, which led ultimately to Mao’s seizure of power in 1949, and which is therefore at least partly responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings.

Proliferation: How One Person’s Actions Affects Millions

Technology — understood not merely as the latest iPhone or AI app, but rather in a more general way — has led to a situation in which one individual’s actions can affect, for good or for ill, the lives of millions. Such is the case of Alger Hiss.

Alger Hiss is one of the most destructive people of the twentieth century.

Born in the United States, in Maryland in 1904, Hiss came from a comfortable middle-class family. He was popular in high school, and succeeded academically, completing his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, and his graduate work at Harvard. Alger Hiss developed significant social connections, which turned into professional and political connections, during his time at Harvard.

In 1936, Hiss obtained a job within the State Department. Around the same time, he also became a spy for the Soviet Socialists. Although a paid employee of the USSR, Hiss did his espionage more as a passion than as a way to earn money: his desire was to destroy the United States as a constitutional democratic republic.

Alger Hiss was an agent for the organization which would become the KGB.

Eventually working his way up to the level of presidential advisor, Alger Hiss would have face-to-face meetings with President Roosevelt. As a Soviet agent, his task was twofold: first, to steal secrets from the United States government and send them to Moscow; second, to give misleading advice to President Roosevelt so that he would make decisions which favored the USSR and not the United States.

One of Joseph Stalin’s paid employees was giving advice to the president of the United States.

One of the Soviet agents to whom Alger Hiss reported eventually defected. Whittaker Chambers, a high-level insider in the Soviet Socialist espionage network, confessed to the U.S. authorities what he was doing. Chambers was not comfortable when he discovered the consequences of supplying the USSR with military intelligence.

As a result of Soviet spying in the United States, the Soviet Socialists obtained the technology to build their own atomic bombs. Emboldened by this technology, they increased their resolve to oppress the nations of eastern Europe. Millions of people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and other nations died or lived in servitude because of the Soviet hegemony.

Further, the Soviet Socialists launched and maintained their military proxies in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The Soviet espionage network inside the United States gave them the technology to start such efforts, and the intelligence to maintain them.

The roots of the Soviet spy network go back a decade earlier: In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Alger Hiss was assuring President Roosevelt that he could trust the promises of Joseph Stalin. Stalin pledged to allow free and fair elections in the nations of eastern Europe. Stalin broke these promises and ordered the Soviet Socialist army to invade these nations at the end of WW2. Alger Hiss was simultaneously sending U.S. military secrets to the Soviet intelligence headquarters in Moscow.

Historian Christina Shelton writes:

During the late 1940s, a high-level State Department official, Alger Hiss, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union by a senior editor of Time magazine, Whittaker Chambers, who previously had been a Soviet agent and Hiss’s “handler.” For two years, the political drama of congressional hearings and Hiss trials made headline news throughout the country. The case was particularly contentious, given Hiss’s prominence, the political climate of an incipient anti-Communist movement during the Truman administration, and, most importantly, because of the ideological rupture that unfolded. Battle lines were drawn between the right and the left that remain to this day. Hiss eventually was convicted of perjury related to espionage. The evidence that was crucial to the government’s case included stolen State Department classified documents, microfilms with classified material, and handwritten notes — all of which came to be known collectively as the “Pumpkin Papers” — that Hiss had turned over to Chambers for passage to Soviet military intelligence. Chambers had secreted them prior to his defection for his own future protection and then presented them shortly before the perjury trials began.

Some of the evidence which ultimately led to Hiss’s conviction was a set of documents which had been hidden inside a hollowed-out pumpkin: so they were called the “Pumpkin Papers.”

Hiss had given these documents to Whittaker Chambers when they were both working for the Soviet Socialists. When Chambers decided to stop supporting the USSR, he kept these documents and hid them. Later, when Chambers had to defend himself against Hiss’s attacks, Chambers produced the documents and showed them to U.S. intelligence officials.

When the evidence showed beyond doubt that Hiss had stolen U.S. information and attempted to send it to the USSR, it was clear that Hiss was guilty. Hiss had not only betrayed the United States, but he had willingly supported the Soviet Socialist efforts which caused millions of deaths in Korea, in Vietnam, and in eastern Europe.