A great strength of the U.S. Constitution has been how it has usually guided us peacefully through transitions of power between factions.
Over the past few decades, transitions of power have become disturbingly more rancorous. Violence, usurpation, and subversion are old factional tools that good governance is supposed to guard against.
It is in this context that a communist who sought the Worker's Revolution and spied against America for the Soviet Union--but who ended his years as a farmer and staunch anti-communist writer in Maryland's Carroll County--has been honored.
Maryland State Senators Justin Ready and Michael Hough have nominated Whittaker Chambers for the proposed National Garden of American Heroes, as reported by The Baltimore Sun on September 4, 2020.
While he eventually became a farmer who lived near Westminster, Maryland, until his death in 1961, Chambers is a controversial and historic figure at the center of the early Cold War.
Chambers joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and was a writer and editor of communist publications, seeking a workers' revolution and spreading glowing commentary of socialism in the Soviet Union under the rule of Joseph Stalin.
In the 1930s Chambers became a spymaster for the Soviets, working with communist assets in the Washington, D.C., area. However, he left the Communist Party and espionage in 1938 after Stalin consolidated control in his Great Purge.
Forest and Crosses Memorial at Mass Grave in Kurapaty, near Minsk, Belarus. Place of Mass Executions During the Great Purge by Stalin's NKVD.
Chambers went to the U.S. government with what he knew, but the information was not acted upon until after World War II. Chambers joined Time under Henry Luce and started to ring the warning bells about Marxism and the coming Cold War.
In the late 1940s Chambers became a key figure testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities of the U.S. Congress, including allegations that the highly-placed career diplomat Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy.
Alger Hiss denied being a spy but was found guilty of perjury and spent five years in prison. The investigations, leaks, innuendo, perjury, trials, and media circus that became known as "McCarthyism" are echoed in the turbulence of recent events. In the Hiss-Chambers controversy, Chambers wrote that two great faiths were on trial: communism and freedom.
In 1952 Chambers published Witness, his autobiography describing his path from communism to freedom. It became a best-selling, dramatically influential book that Ronald Reagan credited for sparking his own transformation from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.
Sidney Hook reviewed Witness for The New York Times, writing:
"It throws more light on the conspiratorial and religious character of modern Communism, on the tangled complex of motives which led men and women of goodwill to immolate themselves on the altar of a fancied historical necessity, than all of the hundred great books of the past combined."
In 1984 President Reagan posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest honor.
Two faiths are again on trial today. While one wears camouflage and disguises itself against the casual eye, it still aims at growing central power and the runaway state: tyranny by another name. The other faith goes by the same name as it did back in Chambers' day: freedom.
We commend the Maryland senators' nomination of Whittaker Chambers, who was seduced and betrayed by tyranny and came to love freedom.
The proposed National Garden of American Heroes is an effort to repair the damage wrought by rioters during the recent tyrannical insurrections. Consider the damage that has been done to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the peaceful transition of power over the past century.
We see the results of seductive tyranny's betrayal in our streets. In the contest between tyranny and freedom, it's time for us to choose.
Choose freedom and join the call for a Convention of States!
References
"Whittaker Chambers," Encyclopedia Britannica
"Witness," by Whittaker Chambers
"America, West Ignored Warnings About Stalin," Francis Sempa, RealClear History
"The Trials of Alger Hiss: An Account," Prof. Douglas O. Linder, FamousTrials.com
