Seven decades after Whittaker Chambers exposed the misdeeds of Alger Hiss and others to the public, his name is once again at the center of controversy.
Last month, Chambers’ surviving son and seven grandchildren published a letter rebuking the National Review Institute, the nonprofit think tank of which National Review magazine is a subsidiary, for bestowing its annual Whittaker Chambers Award on individuals they object to. Partially yielding to their demands, the institute has discontinued the award out of respect for the family. That is understandable. Less so are the arguments advanced by the Chambers family in support of the speculative assertions regarding their deceased forebear.
According to their letter calling for the removal of the Chambers name from the award prospectively and retroactively, Chambers’ offspring postulate that Chambers himself would have opposed the respective causes of recipients Daniel Hannan and Mark Janus.
Hannan, a member of the European Parliament and a vocal Brexiteer, who writes a weekly column for the Washington Examiner, is opposed by the Chamberses because they feel confident that Whittaker Chambers would have opposed Brexit. They believe he would have viewed a united Europe as a defense against Vladimir Putin’s nefarious designs.
Such logic depends on extrapolating Chambers’ well-documented fear of Soviet communism to post-Cold War Russia, a far weaker threat no longer committed to world revolution.
Perhaps the Chambers family is correct. Or perhaps it’s a mistake to divine the views on modern Russia and post-Cold War Europe of someone whose famous pessimism led him to believe that, in forsaking communism for anti-communism, he was “leaving the winning side for the losing side.”
This is not to say to Chambers’ prognostication was not well-grounded in personal experience and the global state of play at the time. But were he alive, Chambers might be willing to evaluate and update his view of the relationship between a weakened Russia and a European Union hopelessly dependent on Russia for energy. (Some bulwark against Russian aggression.)
Unlike the arguments presented against Hannan, the arguments leveled against Janus appear to be impeached by the testimony of the witness himself. Janus was the plaintiff in last year’s Supreme Court decision Janus v. AFSCME, which held that compulsory agency fees charged to nonmembers by public sector unions were a violation of free speech under the First Amendment. He was identified by the Chambers family as holding views antithetical to those of Whittaker Chambers.
However, according to Richard M. Reinsch II, author of Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary (2010), Whittaker Chambers was supportive of the Taft-Hartley Act, the landmark 1947 law passed over President Harry Truman’s veto that permitted states to enact right-to-work laws. The Janus decision merely extended right-to-work principles to public sector unions.
In their letter, the Chambers family notes that Whittaker Chambers was supportive of labor unions while remaining cognizant of the dangers presented by communist infiltration of the labor movement. What is not made explicit in the letter is that Whittaker Chambers’ support for labor unions was grounded in his support for workers. Surely, one could imagine Chambers sympathizing with those like Mark Janus who believe their well-being is hindered rather than enhanced by a labor union in which they actively chose to forego membership.
Moreover, for almost all of Chambers’ life, public sector unions did not have collective bargaining rights. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the dominant political figure of the era, opposed creating such rights for government-sector unions.
The amount of power that unions exercised over workers like Janus before the Janus decision would come as a surprise to Chambers, whose strong support for civil liberties, articulated in his published work for National Review, could lead one to speculate that Chambers would have sympathized with Janus’ First Amendment argument.
The differences Whittaker Chambers had with the editors of National Review are well documented and supply the explanation as to why his tenure with the magazine was so brief. Those differences were principled and in no way prevented a mutual respect as detailed in the book Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).
Unfortunately, the current differences between the Chambers family and National Review Institute are as hollow as a pumpkin one might find on the Chambers farm in Westminster, Maryland. Anyone who has read Whittaker Chambers’ poignant autobiography Witness (1952) will testify that there should be more, not fewer awards bearing his name. Nowadays, one is more likely to see a prothonotary warbler. And that is a tragedy of history.
Paul F. Petrick is an attorney in Willoughby, Ohio.
