The fall brings out some of the best memories of my life living on the Eastern Shore. A different scent in the air; a wind blowing from the east, or in this case, a pumpkin, young and bright, resting on colored leaves waiting to be carved. For me, this was not recalling blissful moments related to Halloween, or a fall lacrosse game next to a harvested cornfield on a Chesapeake autumn day. For me, it recalls Alger Hiss.
Long before spies started to use flash drives to steal confidential state secrets, the world of espionage had more crude forms to pass along these documents. In the famous Alger Hiss – Whittaker Chambers spy caper in the late 1940s, Chambers was reduced to stuffing rolls of film inside hollowed-out pumpkins for collaborators like Hiss to collect in the fields of his Maryland farm. In fact the unlikely role for these Cucurbitaceae was to propel the media to refer to this evidence (a primary source used to convict Hiss of perjury) as the”Pumpkin Papers.”
This nifty little piece of history trivia of mine pops up about this time each year. It was not acquired through a lecture at Washington College when I was a student, nor driven by any particular passion for crimes of betrayal and treason. Rather, it was the result of a slightly surreal moment of being told, nonplused, by my landlord, as I was signing the lease for a small cottage in Quaker Neck, that the house had been previously used by Alger Hiss and his family in the late 1930s when their children attended a camp there.
That landlord happened to be Peter Kellogg-Smith, the first headmaster of Key School in Annapolis. A remarkably warm guy and charming polymath, Peter told me the history of Rigs o’ Marlow farm, located off of Johnsontown Road, and the almost incredulous fact that the cottage was part of a progressive school and camp started by his parents in the 1920s.
With an enrollment of twelve students and a few tutors, Peter’s parents, Jewell and Margaret (he graduating from Princeton, she from Bryn Mawr) abandoned New York City in the early 1920s to create a program of environmental education for their young children that would include the classics, music, log canoes, horses, theater and dancing. Peter, along with sister Joan, attended both the camp and the school, as did the Hiss children during the late 1930s when Alger was serving in the Roosevelt administration.
Jewell and Margaret had been friends with Alger and Priscilla Hiss (the wives had met in college), and for many summers, the Hiss family would retreat from Washington’s hostile summer weather to Periwinkle Cottage, as it was named, while their boys attended camp. The two-bedroom house later would be cited by Hiss during his trial when he testified he was at Rigs o’ Marlow rather than secretly meeting with Chambers in New Hampshire during the summer of 1938 as the prosecution claimed.
As would be typical of any college kid, my immediate thought on hearing this news was the inestimable cache this historical fact would bring to me and my housemates with our new crib. It was something to say in Chestertown that you lived in a house where Washington slept but to rightfully claim that one of the country’s most famous spies had been the legacy tenant before at Periwinkle, i.e. “Hiss slept here” had a far better ring to it to my ears.
But along with the rise in social capital, so did my curiosity about the Hiss case. How could such a fellow like Baltimore-native and former Kent County summer counselor, Alger Hiss, get caught up in a thing like espionage? What was the FBI and Dick Nixon’s role in the Hiss perjury conviction? And, finally, what was the impact of that guilty verdict on those in the Hiss family and their friends, many of whom lived in Kent County.
It didn’t take long to see how horrific the American tragedy was. Hiss, who before his trial was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and frequently mentioned as a future Secretary of State, returned to New York City, after almost four years in prison, to become a salesman of paper products for the rest of his working life. In the meantime, he lost his wife to separation, the alienation of friends at the height of cold war hysteria, and began permanent campaign to clear his name.
Tony Hiss, Hiss’s son, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, said his family’s experience as ”like living inside a fairy tale, with a curse that couldn’t be lifted.’ Just last week, the Guardian published a review of the most recent Hiss book, “America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged” by Joan Brady. Brady, who had met Hiss in New York City in her 20s with her older husband, writes that after 50 years of having no doubt of Hiss’ guilt, she now believes that Richard Nixon had framed Alger.
Fifty years is a long time to change one’s mind, but the weight of historical record is once again pointing to Hiss’ innocence. Nonetheless, there remains no “smoking gun” after almost six decades to conclusively exonerated him. While the Russians continue to declassify Soviet documents that may eventually prove his innocence, the guilty verdict remains on the books.
It was hard to experience any form of glee after I recovered from the endless rabbit hole of Hiss case. Plans for an “Alger Hiss Party” at Periwinkle were quickly abandoned, and whatever cache this brought to the house was quickly replaced by a lingering sense of sadness for a person I had never met but had shared the same sight of Spaniard Point from the cottage porch, the wall-to-wall geese piling up on Rigs o’ Marlow farmland, and pumpkins sitting in front to the door waiting to be carved.
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Barbara Reisert says
Dave, This was a very interesting piece. I was expecting to see a date when it would be appearing at the News Center. Why not go for it? Barbara