In the late 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated allegations that Alger Hiss, a celebrated New Dealer heading the Carnegie Endowment For Peace, spied on behalf of the Soviet Union. The accusations rested solely on the testimony of one man, Whittaker Chambers, a journalist who claimed Hiss had been his former conspirator in the communist underground.
Since September, I’ve been working my way through Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, a rich biography of the preeminent anti-communist, who believed US/Soviet conflict represented an eschatological conflict between freedom and the socialism increasingly adopted by New Deal liberals. The Hiss trial dramatized this dichotomy, pitting Hiss and his liberal defenders against the peculiar, uncharismatic Chambers.
Leading some of the hearings was South Dakota Representative Karl E. Mundt, from Humboldt. Scott Flynn, a South Dakotan historian, rehearses the trial in a book chapter for the Plains Political Tradition, emphasizing Mundt’s role as a principled crusader representing decent midwesterners skeptical of liberal internationalism and New Deal economics. He writes, “Mundt found it in the nation’s interest to uncover the truth in the Hiss Case. He succeeded and did so in a fair and judicious manner that chastened Hiss, and, by association, the elite class he represented.”1 In arguing this, I think Flynn misreads the legacy of both Mundt’s anti-communism, and the Hiss Trial.
What was Mundt’s role in the Hiss case?
Much of Flynn’s narrative rests on the contrast between elitist, smug liberals and the modest, tempered Mundt. For example, he makes much of a confrontation Hiss and the Congressman in a HUAC hearing August 5 1948. While being interrogated by Mundt on his acquaintance with Chambers, Hiss subtly mocked the South Dakotan’s physical appearance and intelligence, highlighting the condescending attitude of New Dealers towards “ignorant midwesterners” (at least towards Mundt and other HUAC members). As far as I can tell, this is a fair reading of the scene, as Tanenhaus also emphasizes Hiss’s elitism.
However, in fixating on Hiss’s personal prejudice, Flynn ignores how Mundt’s over-eagerness to expose liberal hypocrisy undermined his credibility. Tanenhaus shows Mundt embarrassed himself during the hearing, suggesting Hiss undermined the anti-communist Chinese KMT and supported additional votes for the USSR in the U.N. General Assembly. Both points had dubious justifications, and Mundt was plainly wrong on the second — “I had nothing to do with the decision,” Hiss told him.2 Hiss had apprently circulated a memo arguing against the extra votes. Thus it was not purely Hiss’s condescension that made the hearing a failure, but also Mundt’s zealousness.
Of course, Hiss would eventually contradict himself in an August 25 hearing after a line of questioning from Mundt about a car Hiss gifted Chambers. From these moments, Flynn finds Mundt to be a “level headed, fair-minded” leader — “not a partisan witch hunter.”3 This too, I think overstates the evidence — given Tananhaus’s account, it’s likely diminishing faith from HUAC allies, Chambers’s poor reputation, and Mundt’s personal embarrassment also informed his reluctance.4 Is it possible that after the August 7 hearing Mundt knew the committee was grasping at straws — “one eye on today’s evidence and the next on tommorow’s headlines”?
The legacy of Mundt’s anti-communism
Mundt was almost certainly right, both in his general suspicion that communist espionage had occurred in high levels the U.S. government and in Hiss’s particular case, which represented the high point of his career. Flynn pays little attention to later details following this apex, arguing that in the Hiss case, Mundt notched a symbolic victory for midwestern anti-communism:
“In helping to expose the treasonous acts of Alger Hiss, Mundt embarrassed northern liberals, vindicated critics of [FDR’s] screening procedures, and legitimized rural attitudes toward Communism ridiculed by the political elite.”5
In examining Mundt’s legacy, I think it is important to consider information beyond the high point of his career, which reveals that he did not act in a “fair and judicious manner.” Rather than carefully and modestly investigating espionage, Mundt embraced the spectacle of anti-communist hearings, lying to reporters about secret witnesses and calling emergency press conferences.6 This “partisan grandstanding” frustrated not just liberal elites, but also HUAC Democrat Edward Hébert.7 Mundt’s victory in the Hiss case was celebrated by newspapers back home, Penn shows, but I see no evidence that Mundt substantively undermined stereotypes of rural anti-communism.
In fact, the rest of Mundt’s career likely accomplished the opposite. While Chambers despised Joseph McCarthy’s project, Mundt embraced it, supporting the senator long after it was clear no spies were being produced. Rather than proving the righteousness of midwest conservatives, Mundt showed how heartland grievance can lead to troubling political excesses.
Those excesses included not just demagoguery, but also abuses of state power. In celebrating Mundt as a bastion of heartland sensibility, Flynn ignores Mundt’s role in the Lavender Scare, when he pushed for the firing of low-level gay employees in the federal bureaucracy.8 He also ignores Mundt’s legislative attempts to purge communism from the federal government. The senator’s signature policy, the Mundt-Nixon Act, would have forced the CPUSA to reveal all its members to the government. In negotations for the Internal Security Act, Mundt and his allies folded in language allowing the President to forcefully relocate domestic communists into what critics labeled “concentration camps.”9 As R. Alton Lee wrote in 1980, “Mundt and the anti-Communists of the McCarthy period believed that safeguarding America from subversion was more important than protecting the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights.”10
The Hiss case
While he provides many details that convey this nuance, his larger argument suggests Mundt should be celebrated for exposing the hypocrisy of New Deal liberals. To me, this completely misses the point. The lesson I drew from Tanenhaus’s biography is not that the Eastern Establishment was exposed as dishonest, but delusional.
Following the Hiss trial, the literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler sought to untangle a mystery of the Hiss case — with the most powerful institutions sympathetic to the sins of spies like Hiss, why wouldn’t they admit their wrongdoing? Fiedler locates the problem with the “dogma” of liberalism, the mythmaking and clarity that accompanies ideology. As he writes, there is no magic in the words ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist’ that can prevent deceit and the abuse of power.’”11
In his account, Flynn appeals to a mythos of sensible midwesterners maintaining the virtue of the Republic while eastern liberals squander it. He seeks to imbue the words “heartland,” “rural,” and “conservative” with their own magic. This celebration of Mundt’s populist anti-communism is odd in 2024, as the vindictive, Buchannanite right has reared its head as a potent political force. Mundt uncomfortably reflects an archetype modern South Dakotans are all-too familiar with —a politician seeking national prestige by hitching their careers to largely-symbolic, “America first” crusades. If the Hiss case put the “Eastern Establishment on trial,” many midwesterners would now like it to be hanged. In history, moral clarity can be a dangerous thing.