Word: algerism
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...fact a backward-looking revolution, which envisions a return to a mythical historical past in which Horatio Alger individualism was unhampered by monopoly power. Such a vision, reminiscent of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, presupposes a peculiarly slanted view of American history--one which Julian loses no time in expounding. He tells the senators that "Roger Williams, Ben Franklin, Sam Adams, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln and the Roosevelts" shared a single "collective vision" of America as "a nation of independent and self-reliant individuals who are free because equal in wealth and power equal in opportunity...
...Alger Hiss, New Deal whiz kid, Harvard Law graduate, head of the Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, was accused by an ex-Communist named Whittaker Chambers first of being a Communist, then later of passing State Department documents during the 1930s to the Communist underground. Chambers, a senior editor at Time, made his initial accusations in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where Hiss vigorously denied the charges. Despite Chambers' somewhat sordid past, the weight of evidence seemed on his side in the two perjury trials that followed; Chambers produced State Department documents allegedly typed...
...files on the case, now says his research there, and in Hiss defense files, has led him to believe that Chambers was telling the truth on the major points and that there was no frame-up of Hiss. In a book review of John Chabot Smith's Alger Hiss: The True Story (April 1, 1976 The New York Review of Books) Weinstein first advanced his findings--a switch from his earlier position expressed in the early 1970s that Hiss might be innocent. Smith's book argued the opposite, and so the debate by letter and article was on, spilling over...
...book Perjury: The Hiss Chambers Conflict, to be published by Knopf next year to answer his critics. While Weinstein claims to have a measure of objectivity--"I don't deny Whittaker Chambers told whoppers and lies, I'm simply saying on most major points at issue Alger Hiss told the greater and more significant ones"--he also says no one book can yet completely and adequately tell the full story of the Hiss case...
Weinstein: There's a great deal of useful documentary culling. There's an enormous record being built up partly through Freedom of Information Act suits such as my own and the Meeropols (the Rosenberg's sons) and Alger Hiss and others against the FBI and CIA, disgorging materials which five years ago scholars like myself could not obtain...