Alger Hiss

Baltimore-born Alger Hiss was a graduate of Harvard Law School. He was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a protégé of renowned legal scholar Felix Frankfurter. He was a counsel to the Nye Committee in Congress when it was investigating the munitions industry in 1934, and in 1936 he was made an aide to the Assistant Secretary of State, specializing in Far Eastern affairs, and later became director of that office in the State Department. In 1946 during testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating alleged Communist "infiltration" in government, Hiss was accused by former Communist Party member Whittaker Chambers of being a Communist and of passing atomic secrets to the Russians. Hiss denied ever being a Communist and said that he had never even met Chambers. Nevertheless, Hiss was indicted for perjury and went on trial in June of 1949. That trial ended in a hung jury. At a second trial in November of that year he was convicted and sentenced to federal prison, where he served 44 months. He was released in 1954.