Word: hissing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
President Conant expressed regret that the spirit of the American "reformer" has been broken in recent years under the burden of reactionary and fanatic Communist pressure. He referred to "the successful attempts by certain groups and individuals to undermine the status of all reformers... The conviction of Alger Hiss and the confession of Klaus Fuchs have been heavy blows to those who 'would win more victories for humanity.' For the time being, the reformer must struggle against a dark blanket of public suspicion woven by the same types of persons who have always fought him but now are aided...
...Like the Hiss case itself, Witness, by Whittaker Chambers (TIME, May 26), had a troubling effect on Americans. Few books in a dozen years have provoked such a burst of prompt, wide and heart-searching reviews. Verdicts have come not only from the professional book reviewers but from philosophers, historians and freelance intellectuals. They compared Whittaker Chambers (favorably or unfavorably) to St. Augustine, Rousseau, Casanova, Lincoln Steffens, Ulysses S. Grant, Lanny Budd. Adjectives chased one another across the pages: "terrible," "penetrating," "poignant," "unbelievable," "great," "boring," "thrilling," "overwritten," "embarrassing," "fascinating." Whatever their outlook, almost all reviewers agreed that the book...
...Charles Alan Wright, University of Minnesota law professor, Saturday Review: "I think Hiss is innocent . . . Mr. Chambers is the author of one of the longest works of fiction of the year . . ." Cf Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Saturday Review: "Whittaker Chambers has written one of the really significant American autobiographies. [The book] is written with intensity-with an unAmerican, I was about to say, or at least un-Anglo-Saxon intensity . . . Chambers is a figure out of Dostoevsky, not out of William Dean Howells . . . When Mr. Chambers demands belief in God as the first credential, he is surely skating near the edge...
...John Cogley, the Commonweal: "Moral relativism, pragmatism, raw secularism -all the timid forebears of the giant Marxism-stood before the bar with Hiss. It was not only a generation that was on trial, as Mr. Alistair Cooke put it; it was also the vision of good without...
...Rebecca West, the Atlantic: "[The Hiss trial] was yet another dervish trial . . . In they rush, and the examination of witnesses can hardly be carried on because of the commotion caused by the invaders, twirling and turning all over the courtroom, and the lawyers' speeches are not to be heard because of their holy bowlings . . . The mystic may be discomposed by the howling and gyrating of the dervishes [but] he leans on his understanding with God . . . To reach the state of intense perception which makes a mystic, a man must be unselfish but egotistical. He must be supremely interested...