Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Whittaker Chambers (born Jay Vivian Chambers; April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961) was an American writer and intelligence agent.

[1] At Columbia, his undergraduate peers included Meyer Schapiro, Frank S. Hogan, Herbert Solow, Louis Zukofsky, Arthur F. Burns, Clifton Fadiman, Elliott V. Bell, John Gassner, Lionel Trilling (who later fictionalized him as a main character in his novel The Middle of the Journey),[6] Guy Endore, and City College student poet Henry Zolinsky.

Chambers claimed that Ware was head of a communist underground cell in Washington that reportedly included the following:[13] Apart from Marion Bachrach, these individuals were all members of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration.

[citation needed] In his autobiography, Chambers presented his devotion to communism as a reason for living, but after his defection, he saw his actions as being part of an "absolute evil".

Levine had introduced Chambers to Walter Krivitsky, who was already informing American and British authorities about Soviet agents who held posts in both governments.

[23] During the meeting at Berle's home, Woodley Mansion, in Washington, Chambers named several current and former government employees as spies or communist sympathizers.

The FBI interviewed Chambers in May 1942 and June 1945 but took no immediate action in line with the political orientation of the United States, which viewed the potential threat from the Soviet Union as minor compared to that of Nazi Germany.

When Fixx suffered a heart attack in October 1942, Wilder Hobson succeeded him as Chambers's assistant editor in Arts & Entertainment.

Other writers working for Chambers in that section included novelist Nigel Dennis, future New York Times Book Review editor Harvey Breit, and poets Howard Moss and Weldon Kees.

[28][29] A struggle had arisen between those, like Theodore H. White and Richard Lauterbach, who raised criticism of what they saw as the elitism, corruption and ineptitude of Chiang Kai-shek's regime in China and advocated greater co-operation with Mao's Red Army in the struggle against Japanese imperialism, and Chambers and others like Willi Schlamm who adhered to a perspective that was staunchly pro-Chiang, anticommunist, and both later joined the founding editorial board of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review.

[33] Chambers, close colleagues, and many staff members in the 1930s helped elevate Time and have been called "interstitial intellectuals" by the historian Robert Vanderlan.

Time's style was still very hokey—"backward ran sentences till reeled the mind"—but I could tell, even as a neophyte, who had written each of the pieces in the magazine, because each of these writers had such a distinctive voice.

[38] On August 3, 1948, Chambers was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he gave the names of individuals he said were part of the underground "Ware group" in the late 1930s, including Alger Hiss.

[2] Biographer Timothy Naftali describes the trial as "a battle between two queers", an allusion to the fact that both parties were supposedly homosexual.

[40] In the atmosphere of increasing anticommunism that would later be termed McCarthyism, many conservatives viewed the Hiss case as emblematic of what they saw as Democrats' laxity towards the danger of communist infiltration and influence in the State Department.

[citation needed] Many liberals, in turn, saw the Hiss case as part of the desperation of the Republican Party to regain the office of president since it had been out of power for 16 years.

The independent researcher Stephen W. Salant, an economist at the University of Michigan, sued the U.S. Justice Department in 1975 when his request for access to them under the Freedom of Information Act was denied.

However, in addition to innocuous farm reports, the documents on the other pumpkin patch microfilms also included "confidential memos sent from overseas embassies to diplomatic staff in Washington, D.C."[43] Worse, those memos had originally been transmitted in code, which, thanks to their presumable possession of both coded originals and the translations (claimed by Chambers, to be forwarded by Hiss), the Soviets now could easily understand.

Chambers, on the other hand, was attacked by Hiss's attorneys as "an enemy of the Republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect for matrimony or motherhood".

[40] Witness was a bestseller for more than a year[55] and helped to pay off Chambers's legal debts, but bills lingered ("as Odysseus was beset by a ghost").

It is the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing [William F.] Buckley's legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture.

[57] In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. started the magazine National Review, and Chambers worked there as senior editor, publishing articles there for a little over a year and a half (October 1957 – June 1959).

[2][58] The most widely cited article to date[59][60][61][62][63] is a scathing review, "Big Sister is Watching You", of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

[1][69] Shemitz, who had studied at the Art Students League and integrated herself into New York City's intellectual circles, met Chambers at the 1926 textile strike at Passaic, New Jersey.

While some Communist leadership expected professional revolutionists to go childless, the couple refused, a choice Chambers cited as part of his gradual disillusionment with communism.

Historian H. Larry Ingle argues that Witness is a "twentieth-century addition to the classic Quaker journals", and that "it is impossible to understand him without taking his religious convictions into consideration".

Speakers included William F. Buckley, Jr.[87] In January 2017, the National Review Institute (NRI) inaugurated a "Whittaker Chambers Award"[88] for its 2017 Ideas Summit.

'"[95] Regarding the award to Daniel Hannan, another grandchild said, "My grandfather would have been horrified" by a Brexiteer who sought to divide the West (the European Union), as if it were a favor to the "very Stalin-like" Vladimir Putin.

In September 2020, two senators from Carroll County to the Maryland General Assembly, Justin Ready and Michael Hough, announced their intention, reported in the Carroll County Times[98] to recommend a "Whittaker Chambers Memorial"[99] for a "National Garden of American Heroes, following an executive order by Donald J. Trump to create an Interagency Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes to establish that garden.

[103] Chambers's book Witness is on the reading lists of The Heritage Foundation, The Leadership Institute, and the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.