Two men were being swept along last week by an onrush of events which were now well beyond their control—or the control of any other individual. They were two men of more than ordinary intelligence—well educated, quiet men caught in what one of them described as a "tragedy of history." Their paths first crossed 13 years ago; but their separate stories began much earlier: one in a commercial artist's household in Philadelphia, the other in a dry-goods merchant's respectable home in Baltimore.
The Profanist. Whittaker Chambers was born in 1901 in Philadelphia, the elder of two sons of Jay Chambers, who made a precarious living as a commercial artist. The family stock was a mixture of Dutch, German, French and English. When young Whittaker was three, his family moved to Lynbrook, L.I., where Mrs. Chambers raised chickens and vegetables to piece out the family income. As a child, Chambers slaughtered fowl and peddled vegetables. He was a boy of insatiable curiosity who read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment at eleven, and wandered on solitary walks through the woods, which he loved.
He went to South Side High School in Rockville Centre, and then, rather than go to college, which his mother wanted him to do, went south to look for a job. He got one in Washington working on the street railway tracks. From there he went to New Orleans, found no job at all.
Broke and hungry, he returned home, listened to his mother's advice and set out for Williams College. Already a cynical, worldly young man, he took one look at what he recalled later as "those young collegiate faces," stayed one night and decided to try Columbia University in New York. He was there two years. He wrote poetry, edited the literary Morningside, and shocked the campus by bringing out a blasphemous, so-called "Profanist" issue in which he wrote a story dealing "objectionably" with the Resurrection. A student committee invited the editor to resign. He left college and went off to Europe.
"Grease the Guillotine." He found Germany bankrupt, its economy collapsing. One night in Berlin he heard a Communist mob marching under his window singing: "Grease the guillotine with the fat of tyrants . . . Blood must flow." It seemed, to him that Western civilization was dying.
The U.S. to which he returned was celebrating the Jazz Age; and drinking bootleg gin. Chambers' brother Richard, to whom he was deeply attached, committed suicide. He visited Richard's grave one winter day and found it covered with ice. He wrote: "The cold earth holds him round, a sheet of ice is over his face. My brother has no more the cold rain to face."
Intellectually and morally frustrated, looking for a creed, he read the entire Socialist writings of Sidney & Beatrice Webb, discarded them as unpractical. One of his young Columbia friends put a copy of the Communist Manifesto in his hands. To Chambers, it was an awakening.