The Southern Man, Communism, Books and a Shotgun

Russell Wardlow at Mean Mr. Mustard 2.0 is reading Whittaker Chambers's excellent book Witness.

Chambers joined the Communist Party and served as a spy in the United States. He became aware of how bad Communism was as a form of government that he left, turning around and indicting Alger Hiss (One of the Communists top operatives in the US) as a spy.

Here is Russell:

I'm currently reading "Witness" by Whittaker Chambers for the first time. I'm only about 120 pages into it so far (I only get bits of time here and there to read for pleasure), but I already regret having waited until now to pick it up. I can't read more than a page or two before coming across some bit of prose worthy of stopping to think about it, or just to appreciate it.

Here, for instance. Chambers is describing obtaining a gun on his first return to his home town of Baltimore after hiding out in Florida for several months in the wake of first breaking away from the Communist underground. Earlier pages had described how most of his close friends who had made similar breaks with the party had been hunted down and killed in what Chambers called "the year of the Long Knives."
As we entered Baltimore, I stopped at Montgomery Ward's and bought a shotgun. It looked big enough to fell an elephant and the clerk warned me the kick might knock me down. "Just what do you wan it for?" he asked me. What I wanted it for was so much at the front of my brain that I felt as if I had been caught with my thoughts down and fumbled: "Well, I think there are prowlers around the house and a gun might come in handy." His reaction was completely different from what I expected. He was a Southerner with the fine abandon some Southerners have about firearms and related matters. "Well, sir," he said with immense pleasure, "you've bought the right gun. Just hold it in front of you, squeeze the trigger, and, brother, it will be fay-ya-you-well." I have sometimes thought of him since. I have thought that while there are few such uncomplicated souls around perhaps the battle is not quite lost yet.

As I was looking at Amazon to get the link for the book, I started reading the reviews -- they are well worth checking out for a good understanding of what conditions were like at that time and how much things have/have not changed since then... Here is an excerpt of the first one:

It's unfortunate that the Left is so earnest and humorless, otherwise they might be able to enjoy the immense irony of the lofty position held by Whittaker Chambers in the Right's pantheon of 20th century heroes. I mean think about it for a second, Chambers, who spent half his life as a bisexual Communist spy, was also a leading light of TIME and the National Review, a friend of Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley, was awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, and made many conservatives' end-of-century lists, both for this memoir and for his personal influence. That's a fairly interesting resume by anyone's standards.

Chambers would be a heroic figure to the Right even if he had done nothing else but to accuse Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy. This action, so divisive that it still echoes through our politics today, helped to define the Cold War era, forcing people to choose sides--between anti-Communists, on the one side and communists, communist sympathizers and fellow travelers, and Anti-Anti-Communists on the other--and in turn hardening the lines between the sides as the nation headed into a period of prolonged cultural civil war, from which we have still not truly emerged.

But Chambers did not merely attack one man. With his memoir Witness he declared war on Communism and the Soviet Union and explained in no uncertain terms just what the struggle was about--what was at stake, the methods that the other side was using, and the seriousness of purpose which would be required to defeat them--and at the same time he told a life story which somehow managed to unite nearly all of the themes of modernity in one gloriously messy tale of personal degradation and desperation, followed by political and religious redemption and salvation. And to top it all off, not only does the story have all of the elements of a thriller and a courtroom drama, the author just happens to write brilliantly.

Good stuff...

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on March 6, 2005 9:10 PM.

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