Word: algerism
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Died. Alfred Carl Fuller, 88, the Horatio Alger of door-to-door selling who parlayed a $375 operation into the multi-million-dollar Fuller Brush Co.; of a form of blood cancer; in Hartford, Conn. Fuller got his foot in the door by making brushes at night and soft-selling them by day to housewives in Boston. He eventually recruited an army of Fuller Brush Men and "Fullerettes" that today numbers 25,000 and sells 325 varieties of household brushes, cosmetics and chemicals all over the U.S., Canada and Mexico. According to Fuller's homespun philosophy, " 'American...
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 back 25 years to the case of Alger Hiss. I remember his accusers and defenders, his typewriter, his Ford and his Petersboro trip, the apartment he subletted and the carpet he received. I recall the facts and the denials, the interpretations and the re-examinations, 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 statute 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. No, Belfrage is too busy rushing on to spout another unsupported statement...
...vituperative writing style, but more importantly, in the questions it chooses to ask and not ask. By writing a narrative of the American purge trials, Belfrage has opted to remain within the intellectual context of the fifties. Was Owen Lattimore the number one Soviet espionage agent in America? Did Alger Hiss maneuver the Yalta sell-out? Did the denial of a passport to W.E.B. DuBois uphold the principles or security of this nation? No. Granted. But...so what...
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 fifteen 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...