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The Bright Star. Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore in 1904, the fourth of five children of Charles Alger Hiss, whose father had been a great admirer of Horatio Alger. Alger's father, a wholesale dry-goods merchant, committed suicide when Alger was three years old. Later, one of his sisters also took her own life.
The Hisses lived in a respectable Baltimore neighborhood. Young Alger peddled spring water to the neighbors and raised and sold squabs. He went to camp in Maine, attended P.S. 14, a city high school, and finally entered Johns Hopkins University.
There, a quiet, good-looking young man with an easy charm, he shone with a luster that is still remembered. He ran on the track team, headed the dramatic society, edited the campus daily, became colonel in the R.O.T.C., belonged to the best fraternity, won a Phi Beta Kappa key and was voted "most popular, best handshaker, best all around."
Said the yearbook: "Alger must be the most cultured and learned bozo in this neck of the woods. Many and various are the discussions that we have had with him. Many and various the topics—they range from Soviet to style, from liberty to liquor, from guelphs to Goodnow [Frank J. Goodnow, then president of Johns Hopkins]. And like Socrates we admit our ignorance in the force of his irresistible logic and rhetoric."
After he graduated, Hiss went to Harvard Law School. There he was on the staff of the Harvard Law Review. Hiss's star continued to rise. He studied under Felix Frankfurter, graduated cum laude, and went to Washington to serve for a year as secretary to the late great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Path of Honor. After three years of private practice in New York and Boston, Hiss went back to Washington as an assistant general counsel in the AAA in Henry Wallace's Department of Agriculture. There he attracted the attention of Senator Gerald P. Nye, who was just starting his munitions investigations. Hiss served as a legal assistant through that sensational probe, then moved over to the Solicitor General's office.
By this time he was married and living quietly in Georgetown. His wife was Priscilla Fansler, a Quaker, the daughter of an insurance man. She was known as "Prossy." She had lived on Philadelphia's "Main Line" and had graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1924. She had worked as a copy chief on TIME (1927-28) and had been married once before, to Manhattan Publisher Thayer Hobson (William Morrow & Co.). They had one son, Timothy. She and Alger were to have another boy,
Anthony. They were an attractive, retiring couple, although some people thought Hiss's manner arrogant. The Hisses were usually the first to leave a party, preferring the company of a small circle of friends, or merely each other's company at home, reading or listening to music, or taking bird walks along the Potomac. Alger was an amateur ornithologist.