Word: algerism
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...Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, China fell to the Communists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was trumpeting after subversives. The year was 1949 and the Red Scare was spreading when Alger Hiss went on trial. The confrontation between Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, his accuser, was to become a haunting symbol of the era's fears and suspicions. Conservatives tended to trust Chambers' claims that Hiss had passed secrets to the Soviets; many liberals believed that the poised State Department official with the splendid record of service had been wrongfully and villainously attacked...
...crisp day in January 1950, Alger and Priscilla Hiss sat in a Manhattan courtroom, he pressing his lips in a tight smile, she fingering her handbag. A federal jury was ready to pass judgment on whether he had lied in denying that he had given secret State Department documents to a Soviet agent in 1938. Intoned the forewoman: "We find the defendant guilty on the first count and guilty on the second." Showing almost no emotion, Hiss and his wife slowly walked out of the room, surrounded by a pack of lawyers and spectators...
...them little more than briefs for one side or the other, the question has not been answered conclusively. Now Allen Weinstein, a respected historian at Smith College, has turned up previously undisclosed evidence that inexorably led him to this unqualified verdict: "The jurors made no mistake in finding Alger Hiss guilty as charged...
...interview with Bell, Weinstein said simply: "In the end, Chambers' version turned out to be truthful, and Hiss's version did not. Alger Hiss is a victim of the facts...
...authorities. Two months later, Hiss's lawyer, Edward McLean, made a search of his own, found the machine and told the FBI that he had it." Thus, adds Weinstein, if the typewriter obtained by McLean was a fake, as Hiss later claimed, "the only two people, other than Alger Hiss, in a position to make a switch were Donald Hiss and the maid...