Word: alger
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...Your article on Herbert R. Mayes' Alger: A Biography Without a Hero [June 10] neglected to mention that Horatio Alger scholars for decades have known of the contradictions in his book. It was not until 1972, however, that Mayes publicly revealed that his volume was intended to be a debunking biography. William Henderson, then an associate editor of Doubleday, began corresponding with Mayes, and gradually the author told him the history behind the writing of his book. Earlier this year their complete correspondence was printed in the Horatio Alger Society's newsletter, Newsboy, with Mayes subsequently receiving honorary...
Vice President Horatio Alger Society...
WHENEVER I AM TOLD that if only we had the White House tapes or a Liddy confession or a rigorous impeachment trial, we could determine the truth about Watergate and sift the guilty from the innocent, I think of reports of the Alger Hiss case, 25 years ago. I remember his accusers and defenders, his typewriter, his Ford and his Petersboro trip, the apartment he subletted and the carpet he received. I think of the facts and the denials, the interpretations and the reexaminations, the two trials and the endless press speculation. It has been almost a quarter century since...
...then scampering off to make a different point. He notes that no one accused of espionage by Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz or Whitaker Chambers "was ever convicted of spying," without bothering to add that the statue of limitation for espionage protected most of the accused. He never mentions that Alger Hiss, for example, was convicted of perjury for lying about his involvement with Chambers and that this verdict was delivered at the end of a trial which, the judge declared, centered on whether Chambers was telling the truth. Belfrage is too busy rushing on to spout another unsupported statement: "With...
PERHAPS WE STILL can't answer the important questions, perhaps we will never be able to answer them. They are nonetheless worth asking. It doesn't matter to history whether Alger Hiss actually passed those documents. What matters is that people believed that he could have; that, in fact, they were right--he' could have; and the unanswered question is why. And why, at his trial 15 years later, trying to explain or at least to understand what had happened to the world, Hiss could say only, "It was quite a different atmosphere in Washington then than today...