The fall brings out some of the best memories of my life living on the Eastern Shore. A different scent in the air; a wind blowing from the east, or in this case, a pumpkin, young and bright, resting on colored leaves waiting to be carved. For me, this was not recalling blissful moments related to Halloween, or a fall lacrosse game next to a harvested cornfield on a Chesapeake autumn day. For me, it recalls Alger Hiss.
Long before spies started to use flash drives to steal confidential state secrets, the world of espionage had more crude forms to pass along these documents. In the famous Alger Hiss – Whittaker Chambers spy caper in the late 1940s, Chambers was reduced to stuffing rolls of film inside hollowed-out pumpkins for collaborators like Hiss to collect in the fields of his Maryland farm. In fact the unlikely role for these Cucurbitaceae was to propel the media to refer to this evidence (a primary source used to convict Hiss of perjury) as the”Pumpkin Papers.”
This nifty little piece of history trivia of mine pops up about this time each year. It was not acquired through a lecture at Washington College when I was a student, nor driven by any particular passion for crimes of betrayal and treason. Rather, it was the result of a slightly surreal moment of being told, nonplused, by my landlord, as I was signing the lease for a small cottage in Quaker Neck, that the house had been previously used by Alger Hiss and his family in the late 1930s when their children attended a camp there.
Periwinkle Cottage around 1978
That landlord happened to be Peter Kellogg-Smith, the first headmaster of Key School in Annapolis. A remarkably warm guy and charming polymath, Peter told me the history of Rigs o’ Marlow farm, located off of Johnsontown Road, and the almost incredulous fact that the cottage was part of a progressive school and camp started by his parents in the 1920s.
With an enrollment of twelve students and a few tutors, Peter’s parents, Jewell and Margaret (he graduating from Princeton, she from Bryn Mawr) abandoned New York City in the early 1920s to create a program of environmental education for their young children that would include the classics, music, log canoes, horses, theater and dancing. Peter, along with sister Joan, attended both the camp and the school, as did the Hiss’ son during the late 1930s when Alger was serving in the Roosevelt administration.
Jewell and Margaret had been friends with Alger and Priscilla Hiss (the wives had met in college), and for many summers, the Hiss family would retreat from Washington’s hostile summer weather to Periwinkle Cottage, as it was named, while their boys attended camp. The two-bedroom house later would be cited by Hiss during his trial when he testified he was at Rigs o’ Marlow rather than secretly meeting with Chambers in New Hampshire during the summer of 1938 as the prosecution claimed.
As would be typical of any college kid, my immediate thought on hearing this news was the inestimable cache this historical fact would bring to me and my housemates with our new crib. It was something to say in Chestertown that you lived in a house where Washington slept but to rightfully claim that one of the country’s most famous spies had been the legacy tenant before at Periwinkle, i.e. “Hiss slept here” had a far better ring to it to my ears.
But along with the rise in social capital, so did my curiosity about the Hiss case. How could such a fellow like Baltimore-native and former Kent County summer counselor, Alger Hiss, get caught up in a thing like espionage? What was the FBI and Dick Nixon’s role in the Hiss perjury conviction? And, finally, what was the impact of that guilty verdict on those in the Hiss family and their friends, many of whom lived in Kent County.
It didn’t take long to see how horrific this American tragedy was. Hiss, who before his trial was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and frequently mentioned as a future Secretary of State, returned to New York City, after almost four years in prison, to become a salesman of paper products for the rest of his working life. In the meantime, he lost his wife to separation, the alienation of friends at the height of cold war hysteria, and began a permanent campaign to clear his name.
Tony Hiss, Hiss’s son, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, said his family’s experience as ”like living inside a fairy tale, with a curse that couldn’t be lifted.’ Just last week, the Guardian published a review of the most recent Hiss book, “America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged” by Joan Brady. Brady, who had met Hiss in New York City in her 20s with her older husband, writes that after 50 years of having no doubt of Hiss’ guilt, she now believes that Richard Nixon had framed Alger.
Fifty years is a long time to change one’s mind, but the weight of historical record is once again pointing to Hiss’ innocence. Nonetheless, there remains no “smoking gun” after almost six decades to conclusively exonerate him. While the Russians continue to declassify Soviet documents that may eventually prove his innocence, the guilty verdict remains on the books.
It was hard to experience any form of glee after I recovered from the endless rabbit hole of Hiss case. Plans for an “Alger Hiss Party” at Periwinkle were quickly abandoned, and whatever cache this brought to the house was quickly replaced by a lingering sense of sadness for a person I had never met but had shared the same sight of Spaniard Point from the cottage porch, the wall-to-wall geese piling up on Rigs o’ Marlow farmland, and pumpkins sitting in front to the door waiting to be carved.
Joe Diamond says
This explains the 1985 visit of former vice president Nixon to Chestertown. He rented most of the Imperial Hotel. He must have been after hidden evidence from your old digs on Quaker Neck.
Also, your piece reminded me of my high school days……translating a page of Caesar’s Gallic Wars each night for Latin inquisition each school day of my sophomore year. ” Fiercest of these were the Cucurbitacace. They lived farthest from cities and were in constant warfare with all nearby tribes.” Must have been someone else. Caesar would never attack pumpkins.
Well done
Bart Byron says
Enjoyed your piece on Spaniard Point & Alger Hiss, your work makes the season a lot nicer.
Roger Brown says
Prior to Alger Hiss renting the Periwinkle Cottage, he had rented an apartment in Wickes Apartments, 117 N. Water Street. Mrs. Alexine Wickes, widow of Judge Lewin Wethered Wickes, was subpoenaed by the Senate Committee to testify in Washington, however she contacted a case of shingles and had to be deposed by staff attorneys in Chestertown. Mrs. Wickes is my wife Phyllis’ great grandmother.
Liz Smith says
Jewell (JK) and Margaret (Peggy) Kellogg Smith were my grandparents and I never knew you were Uncle Peter’s tenant – how neat ! I remember Alger Hiss well in my growing up. We were always at Rigs and that place alone, would be the subject of many a novel ! Alger would call my grandmother often – they remained close friends until her passing in 1973. Invariably, one-of-us kids would answer the phone with the usual : “Good Morning (or good evening), Kellogg-Smith residence “; to be greeted with Alger’s usual query; “and which grandchild is this?”
I remember sitting on Alger’s lap when he came for visits and I thought him particularly cool because he always shared his coffee with me. He was tall (at least to a child), considered in speech and intensely loyal to Peggy. It wasn’t until we got older that we realized that Alger Hiss was famous or infamous in any way. He didn’t seem overly colorful as so many of the Rigs residents and visitors were. The place was always crawling with artists, educators, writers and non garden variety eccentrics. It was a magical place to say the very least.
Periwinkle was where Aunt Edith Shearer (Peggy’s sister) lived. Like several of the Kellogg – Smith / Shearer women, she was years ahead of her time. She was well educated, never married and spent her life in the pursuit of human rights and social change. On winter Sunday afternoons, we would gather in the kitchen at Periwinkle to make waffles and homemade syrup with Aunt Edith.
My mother often spoke of the FBI men combing the place and interviewing everyone in sight. She said they stuck out like sore thumbs. Yes, Richard Nixon did stay in Chestertown while part of the investigation was in progress. His proximity certainly did not endear him to my grandmother one bit! Both of my Grandparents were subpoenaed to testify in Alger’s trial. His son went to school at Rigs
I can’t say I have ever developed an opinion as to his innocence or guilt. It all happened before I was born. I only came to know Alger Hiss as a nice man who liked his coffee the same as I.
Stephan Sonn says
Well, this is refreshing and quite scholarly. Sorry I missed it first time around.