Baltimoreans have long debated the guilt and innocence of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. As recently as last fall, as I sat at an informal Sunday evening supper party in Guilford, the guests divided into two vocal camps, those who were pro-Hiss and those who backed Chambers. No one's opinion budged a fraction by the end of that evening.
To this day, the question simmers whether Alger Hiss, the Baltimore-born favorite son, graduate of City College and Johns Hopkins, willingly handed over classified documents to the Soviets in the 1930s. To his death, Alger Hiss professed his innocence. The Chambers-Hiss spy case broke wide open in the late 1940s and has been contested here ever since.
Much of the mystery, as well as the circumstances, of this saga is explained in the 600-plus pages of "Whittaker Chambers, A Biography," the new book by author Sam Tanenhaus, a meticulous researcher who lays out the conflict between these two men in clear sentences based upon diligent research.
This compelling, page-turner of a read started my imagination overflowing about Baltimore in the 1930s. I envisioned our streets, houses and neighborhoods in terms of an espionage thriller. Soon spots as commonplace as Mount Veron Place became meeting locales for the characters in a drama that exploded in highly publicized government hearings and a pair of sensational trials. I questioned how many times this spy courier had walked into Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station, bought a day-coach ticket to Manhattan and boarded a maroon coach.
I first encountered the name Whittaker Chambers 30 years ago when I heard he had lived in Charles Village, the neighborhood where I lived then and now. In 1979, I bought a house two doors away from the residence Chambers had purchased 41 years before. Although he, his wife Esther Shemitz Chambers and children Ellen and John lived there only briefly, 2610 St. Paul St. remains Whittaker Chambers' house in neighborhood lore.
On a fine April afternoon last week, when I had just finished the book, my imagination got to me again. I stopped by yet another Chambers house at 2124 Mount Royal Terrace. This house gets my vote as a great example of spooky Victorian Gothic, #i something out of a Charles Addams New Yorker cartoon. The house has a dark brick facade and touches of castlelike architecture at its cornice. It just looks like a spy house.
