To some, Alger Hiss was a person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. To others, he was a Communist sympathizer and spy. But whether he was unjustly accused of a crime he did not commit or whether he was a spy who escaped justice may never be truly known. What is certain is that his presence on the national scene at a critical point in American history serves to highlight the antisubversive feelings in America during the 1940s and the period leading up to the McCarthy "Red Scare" of the 1950s.

Quick Rise to the Top.

Alger Hiss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 11 November 1904. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1929, he was a law clerk for Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes between 1929 and 1930. He entered the service of the federal government in 1933 and in 1936 went to work in...