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Web Exclusives:
Under the Ivy May 10, 2006: An
outbreak of ‘Hiss-teria’ Fifty years ago, spring fever of a sort hit Princeton’s campus: a furious debate over the propriety of Whig-Clio’s invitation to Alger Hiss to speak on campus. Hiss, a state department official who had accompanied President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the historic World War II conference in Yalta in 1945, later had been accused of being a Soviet spy and convicted of perjury in a 1949 trial. He would proclaim his innocence until his death in 1996 but in 1956, with anti-Communist feelings and Cold War fears running high, his very name aroused strong emotions. When Hiss accepted Whig-Clio’s offer to come to campus, an uproar a local paper termed it “Hiss-teria” broke out. Alumni threatened to cut off their donations and throw their Whig-Clio medals “into the river” (Nelson B. Gaskill 1896). “I am disgusted,” wrote George C. Warner Jr. ’22, and University Press director Herbert Bailey ’42 penned an elegant letter to Whig-Clio president Bruce Bringgold ’57 reminding him of his responsibility “to live up to the University’s trust.” “How can you get any truth from a convicted liar?” asked Harold Erdman ’46. Dwight Marvin 1901 echoed him: “Doesn’t this go over the boundary of decency?” This “would not have occurred in the days when Moses Taylor Pyne and people of his caliber were on the Board of Trustees,” opined Bernard Peyton ’17, while C. E. Whitehouse ’15 summed things up starkly: “Frankly, it stinks.” Fittingly, there were plenty of voices for the opposition as well. “It is with great pride that I read of what might be called ‘The Hiss Invitation,’ ” declared Peter Fleming ’51, while his compatriot, Ira Pressman ’54, “put pen to paper to express my 100 percent approval of the action of the members of WhigClio … the object of education should not be to ‘learn’ a one-dimensional set of values, but it should be to gain understanding and comprehension.” Even those opposed to Hiss’ appearance acknowledged his right to speak: “Freedom of speech is, of course, one of the fundamental principles under which we live,” wrote T.B. Fisher ’46, though he wondered why Princeton need be Hiss’ “sounding board.” The Princeton administration under President Harold Dodds did not insist that Whig-Clio retract its invitation, but it did express its disapproval of the selection. Dodds told PAW: “We have sought to resolve this problem not in terms of ‘academic’ freedom but in the deeper and more subtle terms of human freedom …. One important element in education for human freedom is the freedom to make mistakes, and to learn to accept responsibility for them. … To the [Whig-Clio] officers I have made known my own contempt for Hiss’ record. Although undergraduates are curious about this man, their attitude is distinctly not one of admiration. … [But] to listen to a man, they feel, implies no endorsement by the listeners of the man, or his ideas, or his record.” This middle-of-the-road approach generally received approval from all sides, with alumni acknowledging that it would be bad form to ban the speaker and the Prince running an editorial that concluded: “If Hiss appears here, many will feel that Princeton is defending a perjurer at least, a traitor at worst. If the bid is retracted, even more will feel that Princeton is a university without the courage of her convictions. We must choose the lesser of two evils.” In the end, the debate over Hiss’ appearance proved far more educational than his actual speech. His 22-minute, April 26th lecture to 200 students was described in a single paragraph item in PAW’s news section as “vague and platitudinous.” Disappointed reporters vied for clever ways to say “boring,” with the Newark Evening News offering, “If Hiss were a professor, his class might be voted ‘most likely to be cut.’ ” In more extensive coverage in his On the
Campus column, Dick Atcheson ’56 echoed the professionals, describing
the Hiss speech as “so commonplace a survey of the results of the
Geneva Conference that it is about as memorable as an 8:40 freshman
politics lecture.” Placing the brouhaha in perspective, Atcheson
wrote that as he left the scene that night, “The bell in Old North
was quietly tolling the midnight hour, and lights were blinking
out in the big black dorms all along my route to Nassau Street.
The campus was very still, and there was a very solid air of permanence
about the place. I reflected then that it will take much more than
a pack of newsmen, or a score of faithless alumni, or a pitifully
foggy pariah like Alger Hiss, to bring Princeton to its ‘darkest
hour.’ ” Jane Martin ’89 is PAW's former editor-in-chief. You can reach her at paw@princeton.edu
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