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"The Evil Thing." He was to explain later to the House Un-American Activities Committee how Marxism could appeal not only to the bitter young intellectual but to more or less sheltered middle-class persons as well. They were attracted, he said, "by the very vigor of the project." They felt "a great intellectual concern—an almost Christian concern—for the underprivileged, for economic crises, for the problem of war. They say: 'What shall I do?' At that crossroad the evil thing, Communism, lies in wait with a simple answer."
Chambers read Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence and was converted to an acceptance of the evil thing as a worthy means to a clear and simple end. In 1924, he joined the Communist Party in New York. For the next 14 years, as he admitted later, he lived a lie—a disloyal citizen plotting against his country.*
He was a find for the party—a taciturn, even secretive man, an awkward, fiery writer, a self-taught linguist who read and spoke German, French, Spanish and Italian. He wrote for the Daily Worker, became its foreign news editor, finally (while Cartoonist Robert Minor was listed at the top of the masthead) became its editor in fact. On the side he did translations. Two of his translations (from the German) were Franz Werfel's Class Reunion and Felix Salten's Bambi. In 1929, disturbed by reports of Stalin's heavy-handed tactics and stories of the first party purges, he quit the Worker and in defiance of party discipline lit out for the Midwest.
He did not abandon Communism, however, and returned to New York. He had met and married a young labor organizer and painter named Esther Shemitz. They set up housekeeping in a poverty-stricken tenement on the East Side.
His great effort now was on proletarian fiction, published in the Communists' intellectual organ, the New Masses. His stories, full of romanticism and melodrama, were a summons to violence. Moscow was enraptured, cited him as "the first writer to introduce the Bolshevik into American writing."
The Man In the Linen Suit. In 1932 the party ordered him to go underground —in other words, wipe out his identity and become a secret agent, a spy. His wife cried; he himself was reluctant. But like any good Communist, he obeyed. The New Masses' Whittaker Chambers vanished. A man known simply as "Carl" appeared in the Red "cells" and in the innermost circles of the Communist underground. He buried his identity so successfully that some of his accomplices thought he was a Russian; one of them was positive that he was a Russian ex-colonel. The little boy who had peddled vegetables in Lynbrook became a skillful and consecrated agent of a Communist "apparatus."
One of the apparatus' assignments was to infiltrate the U.S. Government with Communist Party members. One day in Washington, in the summer of 1935, a dumpy little man, feeling self-conscious in the first white linen suit he had ever worn, confronted a tall, well-dressed young Government attorney. The little man was Whittaker Chambers; the other was Alger Hiss.