At first glance, Alger Hiss would seem confined to the dustbin of Cold War History. Hiss, a State Department official accused by former Soviet spy-turned born-again anticommunist Whittaker Chambers in 1948, became a celebrity/matyr of the Old and New Left. With his guilt confirmed by the Venona telegrams, World War II era secret Soviet cables to their US agents released in 1996, the case seemingly was closed, opened only by The Nation crowd.
But a feature of the aging Hiss defenders is their tenacity. Into the 21st century, they have scrambled around the damning evidence to present desperate theories to vindicate Hiss or at create ambivalence about the verdict.
Enter Steven Salant, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, who has longed been obsessed by the case. Last year, Salant donated his papers on the case to the University of Michigan Library Archive. He also introduced this web exhibit with an online essay in which he argues that Hiss was framed by Army Intelligence and the OSS. This cabal used as their point man one Horace Schmahl, an OSS agent who masqueraded as an investigator for the Hiss defense team, all the while alerting his handlers about the maneuvers Hiss might take. Schmahl also provided the prosecution with what Salant argues was the most damning bit of evidence, the infamous Woodstock typewriter with which Hiss and his wife Priscilla typed summaries of top-secret State Department cables, by â??buildingâ? a fake typewriter that matched up with the documents in Chambers possession.
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