Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's another one where I don't know how it got on my list. You've had a lot of those lately. I know, I don't. I guess I'm clearing out what was that? Why did I get I mean, this is a weird one for me because I feel like Algerhiss got talked about in my home growing up a lot. Yeah. And I don't know if I just had one parent or the other who was fascinated by the whole thing, yeah, or if it was some sort of like Boogeyman of treason or like what it was, uh huh. But then it came up recently. Maybe this is how it got on my list, because I do remember it came up recently in like a social group setting and I made a joke about calling someone an alger Hiss and everybody looked at me like, oh, Holly's talking about history things again, and I'm like, I mean, not history history, And I realize people even our age don't know this story. Well. I had instant name recognition. Yeah, and then my mind kind of fished around, going was this person though, right, he's one of those people that I would be like, we should never do an episode on that. Everybody knows that, but clearly they don't, so now it's on the list. I guess that's probably how it got on the list. Alter Hiss is a really important moment historically. His case, his accusations of spying for an enemy of the US while working at very high levels of the US government, is one of the things that people say really catalyze the McCarthy era and the really really aggressive seeking and prosecuting of people during that Second Red Scare. It's a very fascinating story of someone who by all accounts was incredibly high achieving and successful and then suddenly being accused of something pretty terrible. And also, this is an interesting one because you have the story of who he was, the story of this big event and how it played out, and then a whole thing that goes on after the fact as people try to untangle the truth, which, by the way, spoiler alert, if you want a definitive answer, you're not going to get it here, because I don't think we can ever have one yeah, about his level of gil. Some people feel like there's a definitive answer. I still feel like there's enough questions that I don't feel like we could give one. But we're talking about Alger Hiss today. Alger Hiss was born November eleventh, nineteen oh four, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Charles Alger and Mary Lavinia Hugh's Hiss. He had four siblings, but their family grew rapidly when Alger's uncle died and his father, Charles took on the care of his sister in law and seven children. Business and financial stress cause Charles to fall into a depression, and he died by suicide when Alger was still a toddler. The his family experienced several other painful losses. When Alger was in his early adulthood, he lost a brother to kidney disease and a sister to suicide. As for Alger, he was a really popular student and academically he was an achiever. He attended high school in Baltimore and then received his undergraduate degree from JOHNS Hopkins in nineteen twenty six. Following that, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, and he graduated from that program in nineteen twenty nine, and his was really a star law student, and he became a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes right after graduation, and he worked for him for a year before joining a pretty prestigious law firm. In nineteen thirty three, his started working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration as an attorney. From there, Hiss served in a number of roles. He worked on the legal team that defended the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which was in charge of distributing subsidies to farmers as part of a larger initiative to minimize surplus and increase market rates of agricultural products. This was to help support the farmers financially. He also served on the NI Committee, which investigated war profiteering. In nineteen thirty six, Hiss joined the State Department, working in the office of Francis B. Sayer, who was the Assistant Secretary of State briefly before joining the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. Then in nineteen forty four he moved into the Office of Special Political Affairs as its director. Yes, so clearly this was a man on a pretty impressive career trajectory. In nineteen forty five, having become a trusted member of the Roosevelt administration, Hiss went to the Yalta Conference as one of Roosevelt's advisors. On that trip, he reported to Under Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. The Alta Conference was a meeting where President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met to discuss a possible situation where the Soviets would fight against Japan in the ongoing war. The Allies were doing pretty well in Europe at that point, and they felt like they could be victorious, but there were real concerns about the possibility of a Pacific theater conflict just dragging on forever and depleting everyone's resources. Ultimately, Stalin did agree to join forces, but that came with a price. The Soviets would gain significant power in Manchuria in exchange for their cooperation in fighting the Japanese. This was a very significant and high profile event, and Hiss was right in the middle of it. In nineteen forty six, Hiss left his government work and became the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sometimes this is characterized as him being forced out of the State Department. Regardless of exactly how this transition played out, there were things happening during these years that would change Hiss's life forever. So before we move on, we need to talk about another major player in this story, and that is Whittaker Chambers. He was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April first, nineteen oh one, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he grew up on Long Island and attended Columbia University, where he was the editor of The Morning Side, which was the school's literary paper. And it was during this time that he changed his first name to Whittaker, which had been his mother's maiden name. In the nineteen twenties, Whittaker joined the Communist Party and wrote for a number of Communist and Marxist papers. By the mid nineteen thirties, he had been recruited by Soviet agents to work as part of their network in New York, but he became disillusioned with Communism in the late nineteen thirties as he saw the Soviet Union prosecuting Bolshevik's and sentencing them to prison or to death. He eventually went to the Roosevelt administration to warn that communists backed by the USSR were secretly working in the US government. Yeah, we'll get into more detail on that in just a moment. But in nineteen thirty nine, Chambers's journalism career really took off when he was hired by Time magazine. He initially worked there as a writer, and then he worked his way up to special editor. His most famous piece of writing while working there was a political fairy tale titled The Ghosts on the Roof, And if you've never read that particular piece of writing, it opens to my mind rather spectacularly with quote with the softness of bats. Seven ghosts settled down on the flat roof of the Levadia Palace at Yalta. They found someone else already there, a statuesque female figure crouching with her eye glued to one of the holes in the roof. It had been through the Russian Revolution, three years of Civil War, twenty one years of socialist reconstruction, the German invasion, and the Russian reoccupation. Madam said the foremost ghost, an imperious woman with a bullet hole in her head. What are you doing on our roof? The mysterious female figure turns out to be Cleo the muse of history, and when she sees Nicholas the Second, the last Emperor of Russia, she's at first happy to see him, but as Nicholas explains the current state of global politics to her, she becomes chagrined, telling him at one point quote, I think I liked you better Nicholas, when you were only a weakling Czar. You are becoming a realist. This entire article is a scathing review of the Yalta Conference. That article was of course written shortly after the Alta Conference took place, but back in nineteen thirty nine, the same year he started working for Time, Chambers had a meeting with the Assistant Secretary of State atolf A Burrel, and this is where he gave his warning to the government about so spies. He told Burle that he knew of eighteen people in the government who were communists and who were working against US interests, and one of those people was Alger Hiss. Burle took the Chambers list to President Roosevelt, but there was no action taken. It seems that the president didn't put a lot of stock in Chambers's claim, and moreover, the government's focus was on Germany and Hitler at that time, but Burle was concerned enough to follow up on the information the following year, this time taking Chambers's list to the FBI, and the FBI did talk to Chambers, but it took two years before he did. He met with Bureau officials twice, first in nineteen forty two and then again in nineteen forty five. The House on American Activities Committee, which had been formed in nineteen thirty eight to investigate possible communist activities in the US, subpoenaed Chambers in the summer of nineteen forty eight to question him about what he knew of Communist activity in the States. He told the committee that he had been part of the Communist Party from nineteen twenty four until nineteen thirty seven or nineteen thirty eight. He stated that he knew seven officials in the US government who had been part of a spy ring in the nineteen thirties, and that ring was funneling information to the Soviets, and he specifically named Alger Hisss as one of these officials. Coming up, we will talk about Hiss's reaction to those allegations, but first we'll pause for a sponsor break. Once that accusation that he was a spy for the Soviets was made. Algerhiss vehemently denied it, but even after his appearance before the committee, Whittaker Chambers continued to accuse Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union, and he did so publicly. He went on news shows and repeated the story over and over, and this led Hiss to sue Chambers for slander. But Chambers was also adamant that he was telling the truth and his accusations were accurate. At the end of nineteen forty eight, on December sixth, the sworn testimony of Chambers was released publicly by the House Committee. At that point, everyone learned that Chambers testified that he too had been a member of the espionage ring, which was how he knew that Hiss was. Chambers gave detailed information about State Department papers being handed off to him by Hiss with the intent that they would in turn be given to the Soviets. To prove that he was telling the truth, Chambers produced documents that he said had been handed over to him by Alger Hiss to give to the Soviets during their time as spy ring collaborators. Those documents included dozens of typed pages which Chambers said Alger's wife Prisons Scilla, had typed, along with several pages of handwritten communicates that Chambers said were written by his himself. These documents came to be known as the Baltimore Papers, and Chambers had kept these papers as evidence in case he ever faced threats from the Communist Party. Once he left, those papers were given to Hiss's legal team as evidence that Chambers had not committed libel, with the exception of one part of the document's package, and that was five rolls of thirty five millimeter film. Chambers believed that Hiss's legal team intended to steal the film, so he hid it in a hollowed out pumpkin on his family farm, and he told the House on American Activities Committee where it was. Soon there were agents at the farm with a subpoena. They found and confiscated the film. This was supposed to be turned over to the FBI, but it was developed by the committee instead. The film showed fo of government documents that sounds like it could be sort of thrilling, but the documents in question were actually pretty benign. Some of them were Navy documents, which were incredibly boring. They literally talked about things like paint colors on fire extinguishers. The other papers were State Department papers that weren't especially important in terms of holding secrets, but they still were not things that people should have been sharing. His would later offer his own commentary on these documents in The Real World magazine in nineteen seventy six, stating that according to Chambers and Richard Nixon, the documents had been quote turned over to Chambers in the thirties for the reading pleasure of the Russians. When Chambers, then an experienced publicist himself as a time editor, produced these stills shortly after Halloween nineteen forty eight from a scooped out pumpkin on his farm in Maryland, Nixon, then a freshman congressman from California, went into action, holding them up for the newsreel cameras. He said the papers of which they were copies were all from the State Department and were proof of quote, the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been launched against the government in the history of America. The message intended and conveyed was that microfilms and spies go together, Chambers had come up with five rolls of film, two of them already developed, proved to contain fifty five frames of dull State Department documents about routine trade negotiations with Germany, all of which had nothing to do with my department, let alone me, plus three documents, three very ordinary cables that had passed over my desk on their way to other people's desks or to the incinerator. If you noted that mention of Nixon, he was right in the middle of the his case. As a member of the House an American Activities Committee. He had been part of the committee since nineteen forty seven. When the Chambers accusations were made. He had backed Whittaker chambers version of the story. Nixon also surely saw an opportunity to make a name for himself as somebody who was tough on communists. He had introduced a bill in his short time as Senator to make it mandatory for anyone who aligned with the Communist Party to register with the US government. That did not get past the Senate, but when Chambers offered up the names of government officials who he claimed were communists, Nixon jumped on it. The alger Hiss scandal and the Pumpkin Papers, as the films came to be known, catapulted Nixon into the public eye, and they paved the way for his high profile political career. Yeah, we're not going to rehash his whole political career because it's outside the scope of this, but this is really where everybody suddenly knew who he was, and a grand jury investigation began, and both Chambers and his testified. His had denied that he had given any papers to Chambers, and he also stated before the grand jury that he had not spoken to Chambers since January first, nineteen thirty seven. Hiss continued to assert his innocence, but he was indicted on December fifteenth, nine days after the Chambers testimony had been released by the House and thirteen days after the seizure of the Pumpkin Papers. The indictment was for two charges of perjury, based on the documents produced by Chambers that he claimed showed that Hiss had absolutely passed him papers. Hiss could not be tried for espionage because there was a five year statute of limitations on espionage charges and all of this had happened in the thirties, but he could be charged for perjury, to which Hiss also pleaded not guilty, and a lot of people came to alger Hiss's defense, noting that those papers that were being waived around were things that a lot of people had access to. Some of those people weren't even government employees, so the papers that Chambers produced could have come from almost anywhere. Hiss's trial began on May thirty first, nineteen forty nine, and continued until July eighth. The result was a hung jury. A second trial started on November nineteenth, nineteen forty nine, that concluded in January of nineteen fifty with a guilty verdict. His was convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. One of the key pieces of evidence had been expert testimony regarding the woodstock typewriter that was used to type up the documents Chambers had produced. It was determined that the typewriter in question was one that belonged to Priscilla Hiss. This was an issue that Hiss's legal team doggedly pursued after the trial, trying to get a retrial in the case based on evidence they were compiling that there had been a forgery of the unique characteristics of the Hiss family typewriter. A judge denied that most though, and Hiss went to prison. Yeah, that whole typewriter story is its own kind of fun side thing. I'll talk a little bit about it in Behind the Scenes on Friday, and coming up, we're going to talk about the rest of Algerhiss's life and the life his case continues to have decades after his death. But first we will hear from his sponsors that keep the show going. Algerhiss was released from prison in nineteen fifty four after serving forty four months of his sentence, and he never ever wavered in proclaiming his innocence. Over the next several decades after his release, supporters of Hiss continued to defend him and assert that he had been wrongly convicted. And this case remained really important to people because the details of it impact what we know about the Cold War and global politics, as well as the state of US intelligence, both at the time that Hiss was accused of spying and in the years since, because in some cases, current methods have built on those that were used then. Plus, if information came to light that cleared Hiss, it would be proof that he had been wrongfully convicted, and that would likely catalyze a fresh analysis of the handling of his case. In nineteen seventy eight, Alan Weinstein published a book about the Hiss case called Perjury, in which he builds a pretty well supported and logical chain of events and information that seems pretty conclusively damning of Alge Hiss. It was convincing enough that support for Hiss really wanes to a degree after its publication. In nineteen seventy nine, Hiss tried unsuccessfully to have his conviction overturned, claiming misconduct of the prosecutors in his case. He had been taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to request any and all documents he could get related to his case. All was trying to get more information and hoping to find some detail that remained that would clear his name. In nineteen ninety two, after the archives of the former Soviet Union were opened, Hiss hoped that new light could be shed on his situation, so he asked the Russian government to look into available records for any information about him or his alleged involvement with Soviet intelligence. That request was honored, and after several months, Russian chairman of the Military Intelligence Archives, General Dmitri A. Vol Kaganov, announced that they found nothing about Hiss in the Soviet record. While this seemed to some like a step toward exoneration, a lot of people made the point that it was unlikely that every facet of a massive secret spy ring would be mentioned in any kind of record. It also appeared that not all intelligence files were actually searched, so there was just no real resolution from the effort. And in what's a little bit of a letdown in how this story plays out, His died on November fifteenth of nineteen ninety six. He was ninety two at the time, and he had been trying to clear his name for more than forty years. His wife, Priscilla, had died in nineteen eighty five, and he remarried in nineteen eighty six to Isabel Johnson, who survived him. He had been readmitted to the Massachusetts bar in the mid nineteen seventies, so he did leave a legacy of being the first lawyer to ever do so after disbarment in the state of Massachusetts. That same year that his died, new evidence came to light when missives that US intelligence had intercepted during World War II from the Soviets were released. The documents involved were part of what was called the Venona Project, which began in February of nineteen forty three and was focused on cracking the encryption of intercepted Soviet messages and using the information within them to the advantage of the United States. This program continued until nineteen eighty, and starting in nineteen ninety five, batches of these top secret documents were declassified and released to the public once decrypted. One of these documents, known as Cable number eighteen twenty two, included mentions of an agent referred to as Ales Alees, who many have come to believe is in fact Algerhiss. This was a communication intercepted as it was sent from Anatoly Gorski, a member of the US Soviet State Security Agency home to the USSR from Washington, and that pertinent document, dated March thirtieth, nineteen forty five, includes the following bullet points sent from Washington to Moscow. One. Ales has been working with the neighbors Sosaid or so Seti continuously since nineteen thirty five two. For some years past, he has been the leader of a small group of the neighbour's probationers, for the most part consisting of his relations. Three. The group and Ale's himself work on obtaining military information. Only materials on the bank allegedly interest the neighbors very little, and he does not produce them regularly. Four. All the last few years, Ales has been working with Paul pol who also meets other members of the group occasionally. Five. Recently, Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. Six after the Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to Moscow, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position allegedly got in touch with Ales and at the behest of the military neighbors passed on to him their gratitude and so on. You can view this document and the other released Venona documents online at the nsay's website. There are notes at the bottom which explain what the code names are believed to be. So SETI, the neighbors are quote members of another Soviet intelligence organization here probably the GRU, the bank is the State Department, and Ales is listed as probably alger Hisss. So how did anyone come to that conclusion? Well, the key points are those mentions of the Yalta Conference and the Soviet decorations. In two thousand and nine, a historian named Edward Mark published an article in Journal of Cold War Studies titled in re Algerhiss, a final verdict from the Archives of the KGB, and in it he actually references another article that he wrote six years earlier, in which he laid out the case that he believed pointed squarely to Algerhiss being Ales. He wrote, quote, I matched the clues given in Cable number eighteen twenty two against the biographies of all the members of the small party that Secretary of State Edward R. Statinius led to Moscow after the Yalta Conference of February nineteen forty five. As Gorski's message left little room for doubt that Ales had been one of Statinius's party, I concluded that gorsky He's profile of Ales closely matched Alger Hisss and that there was no other plausible candidate in the small universe of suspects. Mark was not the only person to come to that conclusion, although he does also note that it is possible that Hiss was a spy and yet not the Ales mentioned in Cable number eighteen twenty two. The identity of Ales had been swirling in fresh controversy for several years by the time Edward Mark wrote his two thousand and nine article, including several events he alluded to. One issue that has often been argued over is just how much faith should be put in the Venona document that mentioned Ales and its footnote that equates Ales with alger Hiss. For one, there's really no confirmation that the Venona decryption was accurate. The work done to tease out the messages that were intercepted by the FBI and the NSA that was incredibly difficult and arduous. There was a thing like a Rosetta stone to guide them. That means that at times decryption experts had to make some leaps of faith in their work, and that means there could be errors. Critics of the Venona documents note that the translations of them didn't really incorporate cultural context or nuance, so it's possible that really important information was missed or misconstrued. And the other big thing that detractors have focused on is that while it's possible to triangulate the likelihood that Ales was Hiss, the NSA and FBI never showed their work in terms of how they determined that to be the case. It appears in the document eighteen twenty two footnote. And while a lot of people took that is fact, other people questioned it. In two thousand and two, one of Alger Hisss's lawyers wrote an article that was published in Intelligence and National Security which called just about everything about the Venona cable regarding Hiss into question. Yes, cable's plural, because it turned out there were other mentions of Hiss, mentions that the lawyer John Lowenthal thought actually helped the Hiss case. That document was number fifteen seventy nine of the Venona files, and it mentioned Algerhiss, not by any code but by name. That message was intercepted on September twenty eighth, nineteen forty three, and after information about money needs the missive reads quote the neighbor so said, has reported that one group unrecovered from the State Department by the name of Hiss. So that unrecovered segment of cable leaves a lot of context missing. But what we do know, and it's noted at the bottom of the decryptied document, is that Algerhiss was working at the State Department at the time as assistant advisor for the Far East. Lowenthal stated in his article that if Hiss was a spy, there's almost no way that he would be mentioned by his real name in secret communications. He also notes that the way this reads, it seems as though he's being introduced as someone the folks back in Moscow had not heard of before. Lowenthal argued that Algerhiss didn't actually match up with the identity of Ales based on the information that was relayed about Ales in document in eighteen twenty two. One of the things he pointed out was that his had been accused of sharing State Department documents, but that document eighteen twenty two specifically says that Ales is concerned only with military documents. Lowenthal also noted the problems with presuming the Venona documents were accurate, and even kind of hinted at the idea that the NSA and the FBI might have fudged some information to make Hiss look guilty, although he really offered no evidence for that. Yeah, he definitely was like, this was a case where they wanted to prosecute someone, and that seemed like a good someone. But he's really just going on conjecture. The two thousand and three article that Edward Mark wrote and referenced in his two thousand and nine write up was something of a response to the Lowenthal claims. Mark was very diligent and careful in his tracking of the movements of the State Department members who matched up with all of the evidence in document eighteen twenty two, and he also noted that there was precedent for Soviets using spies, real names and communications generally by accident, So there was no reason to assume that that second document that Lowenthal invoked was truly disqualifying of Hiss being Ales. Well into the two thousands, there were new developments in the story. In two thousand and five, the original untranslated version of Cable eighteen twenty two was released. It showed that nothing had been added or omitted to the information. Moreover, the decryption on which the entire Ale's case had been base did appear to have been correct, per an account written in two thousand seven by John Erman for Studies in Intelligence. Quote in April two thousand seven, a prominent American historian Ky Bird and his Russian collaborator, historians Vetlana Charvanaya, stepped forward at a conference to claim that the central piece of evidence against Hiss, an intercepted cable in the Venona Series number eighteen twenty two, naming a Soviet asset. Ayles did not refer to Hiss, as the FBI and NSA had judged, but someone else. If it could be proved, this claim would have significant implications for the history of the case and for historical interpretations of the Cold War era, and might affect current politics in the field of intelligence. It would call into question the credibility of US intelligence efforts in the nineteen fifties and raised new doubts about the validity of its current threat assessments under careful examination. However, ever, the Bird Chevanyah assertion is built on thin reeds, suppositions, and unsupportables. Ifs then that's but the stubborn efforts to exonerate Hiss, even if unsuccessful, will nevertheless have consequences for innocent bystanders and the conduct of intelligence today. That other person that Bird and Shrevenyah named was a man named Wilder Foot. While he did have some overlap with Hiss and thus Ales in terms of positions and locations in the nineteen thirties, he'd been living in Vermont, which for some, including Edward Mark, disqualifies him from being the Soviet operative in Washington at the time. While a lot of people are convinced that Algerhiss was a spy for the Soviets, there are still and probably will always be people who have doubts about that because his accusation and trial happened during the start of that Second Red Scare in the US, when scapegoats being sought to reassure the general public that the government was seeking out and prosecuting communists, and you can find books that very thoroughly lay out a case for almost any possible angle or belief that you can think of. For this one, there are books that state very confidently that Hiss was a spy. There are books that say very confidently that Hiss was innocent. There are others that say Hiss may not have been innocent, but he wasn't ales, or that he was set up. Really, anything you could think of is available, including Alger Hisss's own version of the story. Additionally, it's an inherently compelling story no matter which version you believe. Right, a Communist spy in the highest levels of government or a wrongfully convicted man fighting to regain his good name are both pretty interesting topics, and as Edward Mark put it, quote, the history of the controversy over his's true allegiance is so long and involved that years of study might not guarantee full mastery of it. That is algebras as we know it, m M, as we know it. I have listener mail that's sort of related. Okay, this is from our listener May, who wrote to us about our Vidcan Quizzling episode, and May writes, hello, friends, I wanted to drop a note to say thank you for your episode on vidcoan Quizzling. I'm playing catch up, so this is a bit late. As a high school history teacher, I was glad to hear of more World War Two history that wasn't the classic items we tend to talk about, though those are rather important. New information creates not only deeper knowledge of the history as a whole, but further interest as well. I wanted to let you know that I am adding Quizzling to my World War Two unit as best as I can, because it should be taught. I fear I won't be able to give as much detail time is a precious commodity to the classroom teacher. I'm excited to bring this story in, especially the coupe I radio tactic. Side note, I had just taught the bubonic plague as a cause of the Renaissance when I heard the Unearthed episode mentioning new research showing that the plague spread by body lice. My students were super grossed out to learn this, which is always fun. On that note, I just wanted to also let you know how much it pains myself and my colleagues to leave things out of the curriculum because we simply don't have time. I teach Western Civilization Part two to ninth graders, covering about six hundred years of history in one year. Yikes. History is unique in its curriculum because it literally grows with every passing year. We are now expected to make it through nine to eleven, whereas when I was a kid, we were lucky if we made it to Watergate, let alone the end of the Cold War and about ten years. I expect teaching the pandemic will be the ending point. I so appreciate your comments specifying that you weren't criticizing teachers, but I wanted to bring this problem to your mind. In case you weren't aware of the teaching history dilemma, this has always been and will always be a problem. Thank you for all you both do. Your research and delivery is top notch, and I constantly encourage my students and colleagues to check out your show. I listen when doing parking duty, and the students now ask me what the particular episode is about while I help them cross the parking lot. My pet tax comes from our free range chickens, Marshmallow the rooster and his girls, Brownie Cocoa and John Deere. Can you guess these were named by my kids. Marshmallow takes his duty of providing and protecting his ladies quite seriously and often scratches up bugs for them to eat. In case you didn't know, an adolescent rooster learning to crow sounds like a rubber chicken see attached video. And we had two roosters. May this is wonderful one. I'm so incredibly touched that you would include something because you've heard about it on our show. That's incredibly kind and lovely of you to tell us two. I am obsessed with Marshmallow. I grew up we had a small farm, so I grew up with free ranging roosters and chickens that were on our property, and I never loved the roosters. They were always very mean to me. But Marshmallow is very beautiful, and I wish he would accept hugs, but I doubt it. And three, I wanted to say, like I I appreciate also from a teacher's perspective, how hard it is, especially when you're trying to engage students to get all of the stuff in. I know we run into it just doing our show, where it's like okay, but I have like a finite amount of time in an episode to talk about a thing, and I got to cut stuff, and I know that's painful. So I can only imagine when you're trying to do a comprehensive history that's very, very hard. So I appreciate it. My hat is always off to teachers. Thank you to all the educators. And I had not thought about the way that what you're expected to teach might shift so so drastically based on big events in history that happen, but they do shape our world, so I understand why they would want them to be included. But also that's a lot more work to add to people's plates. So thank you again for all the teachers, all the teachers, and especially history teachers. I super appreciate it. Thank you. May I hope this school year is the best one ever and that it's only the least of those to come. It will only get better. If you would like to write to us and share your chicken pictures or your thoughts on history or anything else for that matter, you can do so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's another one where I don't know how it got on my list. You've had a lot of those lately. I know, I don't. I guess I'm clearing out what was that? Why did I get I mean, this is a weird one for me because I feel like Algerhiss got talked about in my home growing up a lot. Yeah. And I don't know if I just had one parent or the other who was fascinated by the whole thing, yeah, or if it was some sort of like Boogeyman of treason or like what it was, uh huh. But then it came up recently. Maybe this is how it got on my list, because I do remember it came up recently in like a social group setting and I made a joke about calling someone an alger Hiss and everybody looked at me like, oh, Holly's talking about history things again, and I'm like, I mean, not history history, And I realize people even our age don't know this story. Well. I had instant name recognition. Yeah, and then my mind kind of fished around, going was this person though, right, he's one of those people that I would be like, we should never do an episode on that. Everybody knows that, but clearly they don't, so now it's on the list. I guess that's probably how it got on the list. Alter Hiss is a really important moment historically. His case, his accusations of spying for an enemy of the US while working at very high levels of the US government, is one of the things that people say really catalyze the McCarthy era and the really really aggressive seeking and prosecuting of people during that Second Red Scare. It's a very fascinating story of someone who by all accounts was incredibly high achieving and successful and then suddenly being accused of something pretty terrible. And also, this is an interesting one because you have the story of who he was, the story of this big event and how it played out, and then a whole thing that goes on after the fact as people try to untangle the truth, which, by the way, spoiler alert, if you want a definitive answer, you're not going to get it here, because I don't think we can ever have one yeah, about his level of gil. Some people feel like there's a definitive answer. I still feel like there's enough questions that I don't feel like we could give one. But we're talking about Alger Hiss today. Alger Hiss was born November eleventh, nineteen oh four, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Charles Alger and Mary Lavinia Hugh's Hiss. He had four siblings, but their family grew rapidly when Alger's uncle died and his father, Charles took on the care of his sister in law and seven children. Business and financial stress cause Charles to fall into a depression, and he died by suicide when Alger was still a toddler. The his family experienced several other painful losses. When Alger was in his early adulthood, he lost a brother to kidney disease and a sister to suicide. As for Alger, he was a really popular student and academically he was an achiever. He attended high school in Baltimore and then received his undergraduate degree from JOHNS Hopkins in nineteen twenty six. Following that, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, and he graduated from that program in nineteen twenty nine, and his was really a star law student, and he became a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes right after graduation, and he worked for him for a year before joining a pretty prestigious law firm. In nineteen thirty three, his started working for President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration as an attorney. From there, Hiss served in a number of roles. He worked on the legal team that defended the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which was in charge of distributing subsidies to farmers as part of a larger initiative to minimize surplus and increase market rates of agricultural products. This was to help support the farmers financially. He also served on the NI Committee, which investigated war profiteering. In nineteen thirty six, Hiss joined the State Department, working in the office of Francis B. Sayer, who was the Assistant Secretary of State briefly before joining the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. Then in nineteen forty four he moved into the Office of Special Political Affairs as its director. Yes, so clearly this was a man on a pretty impressive career trajectory. In nineteen forty five, having become a trusted member of the Roosevelt administration, Hiss went to the Yalta Conference as one of Roosevelt's advisors. On that trip, he reported to Under Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. The Alta Conference was a meeting where President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met to discuss a possible situation where the Soviets would fight against Japan in the ongoing war. The Allies were doing pretty well in Europe at that point, and they felt like they could be victorious, but there were real concerns about the possibility of a Pacific theater conflict just dragging on forever and depleting everyone's resources. Ultimately, Stalin did agree to join forces, but that came with a price. The Soviets would gain significant power in Manchuria in exchange for their cooperation in fighting the Japanese. This was a very significant and high profile event, and Hiss was right in the middle of it. In nineteen forty six, Hiss left his government work and became the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sometimes this is characterized as him being forced out of the State Department. Regardless of exactly how this transition played out, there were things happening during these years that would change Hiss's life forever. So before we move on, we need to talk about another major player in this story, and that is Whittaker Chambers. He was born Jay Vivian Chambers on April first, nineteen oh one, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and he grew up on Long Island and attended Columbia University, where he was the editor of The Morning Side, which was the school's literary paper. And it was during this time that he changed his first name to Whittaker, which had been his mother's maiden name. In the nineteen twenties, Whittaker joined the Communist Party and wrote for a number of Communist and Marxist papers. By the mid nineteen thirties, he had been recruited by Soviet agents to work as part of their network in New York, but he became disillusioned with Communism in the late nineteen thirties as he saw the Soviet Union prosecuting Bolshevik's and sentencing them to prison or to death. He eventually went to the Roosevelt administration to warn that communists backed by the USSR were secretly working in the US government. Yeah, we'll get into more detail on that in just a moment. But in nineteen thirty nine, Chambers's journalism career really took off when he was hired by Time magazine. He initially worked there as a writer, and then he worked his way up to special editor. His most famous piece of writing while working there was a political fairy tale titled The Ghosts on the Roof, And if you've never read that particular piece of writing, it opens to my mind rather spectacularly with quote with the softness of bats. Seven ghosts settled down on the flat roof of the Levadia Palace at Yalta. They found someone else already there, a statuesque female figure crouching with her eye glued to one of the holes in the roof. It had been through the Russian Revolution, three years of Civil War, twenty one years of socialist reconstruction, the German invasion, and the Russian reoccupation. Madam said the foremost ghost, an imperious woman with a bullet hole in her head. What are you doing on our roof? The mysterious female figure turns out to be Cleo the muse of history, and when she sees Nicholas the Second, the last Emperor of Russia, she's at first happy to see him, but as Nicholas explains the current state of global politics to her, she becomes chagrined, telling him at one point quote, I think I liked you better Nicholas, when you were only a weakling Czar. You are becoming a realist. This entire article is a scathing review of the Yalta Conference. That article was of course written shortly after the Alta Conference took place, but back in nineteen thirty nine, the same year he started working for Time, Chambers had a meeting with the Assistant Secretary of State atolf A Burrel, and this is where he gave his warning to the government about so spies. He told Burle that he knew of eighteen people in the government who were communists and who were working against US interests, and one of those people was Alger Hiss. Burle took the Chambers list to President Roosevelt, but there was no action taken. It seems that the president didn't put a lot of stock in Chambers's claim, and moreover, the government's focus was on Germany and Hitler at that time, but Burle was concerned enough to follow up on the information the following year, this time taking Chambers's list to the FBI, and the FBI did talk to Chambers, but it took two years before he did. He met with Bureau officials twice, first in nineteen forty two and then again in nineteen forty five. The House on American Activities Committee, which had been formed in nineteen thirty eight to investigate possible communist activities in the US, subpoenaed Chambers in the summer of nineteen forty eight to question him about what he knew of Communist activity in the States. He told the committee that he had been part of the Communist Party from nineteen twenty four until nineteen thirty seven or nineteen thirty eight. He stated that he knew seven officials in the US government who had been part of a spy ring in the nineteen thirties, and that ring was funneling information to the Soviets, and he specifically named Alger Hisss as one of these officials. Coming up, we will talk about Hiss's reaction to those allegations, but first we'll pause for a sponsor break. Once that accusation that he was a spy for the Soviets was made. Algerhiss vehemently denied it, but even after his appearance before the committee, Whittaker Chambers continued to accuse Hiss of spying for the Soviet Union, and he did so publicly. He went on news shows and repeated the story over and over, and this led Hiss to sue Chambers for slander. But Chambers was also adamant that he was telling the truth and his accusations were accurate. At the end of nineteen forty eight, on December sixth, the sworn testimony of Chambers was released publicly by the House Committee. At that point, everyone learned that Chambers testified that he too had been a member of the espionage ring, which was how he knew that Hiss was. Chambers gave detailed information about State Department papers being handed off to him by Hiss with the intent that they would in turn be given to the Soviets. To prove that he was telling the truth, Chambers produced documents that he said had been handed over to him by Alger Hiss to give to the Soviets during their time as spy ring collaborators. Those documents included dozens of typed pages which Chambers said Alger's wife Prisons Scilla, had typed, along with several pages of handwritten communicates that Chambers said were written by his himself. These documents came to be known as the Baltimore Papers, and Chambers had kept these papers as evidence in case he ever faced threats from the Communist Party. Once he left, those papers were given to Hiss's legal team as evidence that Chambers had not committed libel, with the exception of one part of the document's package, and that was five rolls of thirty five millimeter film. Chambers believed that Hiss's legal team intended to steal the film, so he hid it in a hollowed out pumpkin on his family farm, and he told the House on American Activities Committee where it was. Soon there were agents at the farm with a subpoena. They found and confiscated the film. This was supposed to be turned over to the FBI, but it was developed by the committee instead. The film showed fo of government documents that sounds like it could be sort of thrilling, but the documents in question were actually pretty benign. Some of them were Navy documents, which were incredibly boring. They literally talked about things like paint colors on fire extinguishers. The other papers were State Department papers that weren't especially important in terms of holding secrets, but they still were not things that people should have been sharing. His would later offer his own commentary on these documents in The Real World magazine in nineteen seventy six, stating that according to Chambers and Richard Nixon, the documents had been quote turned over to Chambers in the thirties for the reading pleasure of the Russians. When Chambers, then an experienced publicist himself as a time editor, produced these stills shortly after Halloween nineteen forty eight from a scooped out pumpkin on his farm in Maryland, Nixon, then a freshman congressman from California, went into action, holding them up for the newsreel cameras. He said the papers of which they were copies were all from the State Department and were proof of quote, the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been launched against the government in the history of America. The message intended and conveyed was that microfilms and spies go together, Chambers had come up with five rolls of film, two of them already developed, proved to contain fifty five frames of dull State Department documents about routine trade negotiations with Germany, all of which had nothing to do with my department, let alone me, plus three documents, three very ordinary cables that had passed over my desk on their way to other people's desks or to the incinerator. If you noted that mention of Nixon, he was right in the middle of the his case. As a member of the House an American Activities Committee. He had been part of the committee since nineteen forty seven. When the Chambers accusations were made. He had backed Whittaker chambers version of the story. Nixon also surely saw an opportunity to make a name for himself as somebody who was tough on communists. He had introduced a bill in his short time as Senator to make it mandatory for anyone who aligned with the Communist Party to register with the US government. That did not get past the Senate, but when Chambers offered up the names of government officials who he claimed were communists, Nixon jumped on it. The alger Hiss scandal and the Pumpkin Papers, as the films came to be known, catapulted Nixon into the public eye, and they paved the way for his high profile political career. Yeah, we're not going to rehash his whole political career because it's outside the scope of this, but this is really where everybody suddenly knew who he was, and a grand jury investigation began, and both Chambers and his testified. His had denied that he had given any papers to Chambers, and he also stated before the grand jury that he had not spoken to Chambers since January first, nineteen thirty seven. Hiss continued to assert his innocence, but he was indicted on December fifteenth, nine days after the Chambers testimony had been released by the House and thirteen days after the seizure of the Pumpkin Papers. The indictment was for two charges of perjury, based on the documents produced by Chambers that he claimed showed that Hiss had absolutely passed him papers. Hiss could not be tried for espionage because there was a five year statute of limitations on espionage charges and all of this had happened in the thirties, but he could be charged for perjury, to which Hiss also pleaded not guilty, and a lot of people came to alger Hiss's defense, noting that those papers that were being waived around were things that a lot of people had access to. Some of those people weren't even government employees, so the papers that Chambers produced could have come from almost anywhere. Hiss's trial began on May thirty first, nineteen forty nine, and continued until July eighth. The result was a hung jury. A second trial started on November nineteenth, nineteen forty nine, that concluded in January of nineteen fifty with a guilty verdict. His was convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years in prison. One of the key pieces of evidence had been expert testimony regarding the woodstock typewriter that was used to type up the documents Chambers had produced. It was determined that the typewriter in question was one that belonged to Priscilla Hiss. This was an issue that Hiss's legal team doggedly pursued after the trial, trying to get a retrial in the case based on evidence they were compiling that there had been a forgery of the unique characteristics of the Hiss family typewriter. A judge denied that most though, and Hiss went to prison. Yeah, that whole typewriter story is its own kind of fun side thing. I'll talk a little bit about it in Behind the Scenes on Friday, and coming up, we're going to talk about the rest of Algerhiss's life and the life his case continues to have decades after his death. But first we will hear from his sponsors that keep the show going. Algerhiss was released from prison in nineteen fifty four after serving forty four months of his sentence, and he never ever wavered in proclaiming his innocence. Over the next several decades after his release, supporters of Hiss continued to defend him and assert that he had been wrongly convicted. And this case remained really important to people because the details of it impact what we know about the Cold War and global politics, as well as the state of US intelligence, both at the time that Hiss was accused of spying and in the years since, because in some cases, current methods have built on those that were used then. Plus, if information came to light that cleared Hiss, it would be proof that he had been wrongfully convicted, and that would likely catalyze a fresh analysis of the handling of his case. In nineteen seventy eight, Alan Weinstein published a book about the Hiss case called Perjury, in which he builds a pretty well supported and logical chain of events and information that seems pretty conclusively damning of Alge Hiss. It was convincing enough that support for Hiss really wanes to a degree after its publication. In nineteen seventy nine, Hiss tried unsuccessfully to have his conviction overturned, claiming misconduct of the prosecutors in his case. He had been taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to request any and all documents he could get related to his case. All was trying to get more information and hoping to find some detail that remained that would clear his name. In nineteen ninety two, after the archives of the former Soviet Union were opened, Hiss hoped that new light could be shed on his situation, so he asked the Russian government to look into available records for any information about him or his alleged involvement with Soviet intelligence. That request was honored, and after several months, Russian chairman of the Military Intelligence Archives, General Dmitri A. Vol Kaganov, announced that they found nothing about Hiss in the Soviet record. While this seemed to some like a step toward exoneration, a lot of people made the point that it was unlikely that every facet of a massive secret spy ring would be mentioned in any kind of record. It also appeared that not all intelligence files were actually searched, so there was just no real resolution from the effort. And in what's a little bit of a letdown in how this story plays out, His died on November fifteenth of nineteen ninety six. He was ninety two at the time, and he had been trying to clear his name for more than forty years. His wife, Priscilla, had died in nineteen eighty five, and he remarried in nineteen eighty six to Isabel Johnson, who survived him. He had been readmitted to the Massachusetts bar in the mid nineteen seventies, so he did leave a legacy of being the first lawyer to ever do so after disbarment in the state of Massachusetts. That same year that his died, new evidence came to light when missives that US intelligence had intercepted during World War II from the Soviets were released. The documents involved were part of what was called the Venona Project, which began in February of nineteen forty three and was focused on cracking the encryption of intercepted Soviet messages and using the information within them to the advantage of the United States. This program continued until nineteen eighty, and starting in nineteen ninety five, batches of these top secret documents were declassified and released to the public once decrypted. One of these documents, known as Cable number eighteen twenty two, included mentions of an agent referred to as Ales Alees, who many have come to believe is in fact Algerhiss. This was a communication intercepted as it was sent from Anatoly Gorski, a member of the US Soviet State Security Agency home to the USSR from Washington, and that pertinent document, dated March thirtieth, nineteen forty five, includes the following bullet points sent from Washington to Moscow. One. Ales has been working with the neighbors Sosaid or so Seti continuously since nineteen thirty five two. For some years past, he has been the leader of a small group of the neighbour's probationers, for the most part consisting of his relations. Three. The group and Ale's himself work on obtaining military information. Only materials on the bank allegedly interest the neighbors very little, and he does not produce them regularly. Four. All the last few years, Ales has been working with Paul pol who also meets other members of the group occasionally. Five. Recently, Ales and his whole group were awarded Soviet decorations. Six after the Yalta Conference, when he had gone on to Moscow, a Soviet personage in a very responsible position allegedly got in touch with Ales and at the behest of the military neighbors passed on to him their gratitude and so on. You can view this document and the other released Venona documents online at the nsay's website. There are notes at the bottom which explain what the code names are believed to be. So SETI, the neighbors are quote members of another Soviet intelligence organization here probably the GRU, the bank is the State Department, and Ales is listed as probably alger Hisss. So how did anyone come to that conclusion? Well, the key points are those mentions of the Yalta Conference and the Soviet decorations. In two thousand and nine, a historian named Edward Mark published an article in Journal of Cold War Studies titled in re Algerhiss, a final verdict from the Archives of the KGB, and in it he actually references another article that he wrote six years earlier, in which he laid out the case that he believed pointed squarely to Algerhiss being Ales. He wrote, quote, I matched the clues given in Cable number eighteen twenty two against the biographies of all the members of the small party that Secretary of State Edward R. Statinius led to Moscow after the Yalta Conference of February nineteen forty five. As Gorski's message left little room for doubt that Ales had been one of Statinius's party, I concluded that gorsky He's profile of Ales closely matched Alger Hisss and that there was no other plausible candidate in the small universe of suspects. Mark was not the only person to come to that conclusion, although he does also note that it is possible that Hiss was a spy and yet not the Ales mentioned in Cable number eighteen twenty two. The identity of Ales had been swirling in fresh controversy for several years by the time Edward Mark wrote his two thousand and nine article, including several events he alluded to. One issue that has often been argued over is just how much faith should be put in the Venona document that mentioned Ales and its footnote that equates Ales with alger Hiss. For one, there's really no confirmation that the Venona decryption was accurate. The work done to tease out the messages that were intercepted by the FBI and the NSA that was incredibly difficult and arduous. There was a thing like a Rosetta stone to guide them. That means that at times decryption experts had to make some leaps of faith in their work, and that means there could be errors. Critics of the Venona documents note that the translations of them didn't really incorporate cultural context or nuance, so it's possible that really important information was missed or misconstrued. And the other big thing that detractors have focused on is that while it's possible to triangulate the likelihood that Ales was Hiss, the NSA and FBI never showed their work in terms of how they determined that to be the case. It appears in the document eighteen twenty two footnote. And while a lot of people took that is fact, other people questioned it. In two thousand and two, one of Alger Hisss's lawyers wrote an article that was published in Intelligence and National Security which called just about everything about the Venona cable regarding Hiss into question. Yes, cable's plural, because it turned out there were other mentions of Hiss, mentions that the lawyer John Lowenthal thought actually helped the Hiss case. That document was number fifteen seventy nine of the Venona files, and it mentioned Algerhiss, not by any code but by name. That message was intercepted on September twenty eighth, nineteen forty three, and after information about money needs the missive reads quote the neighbor so said, has reported that one group unrecovered from the State Department by the name of Hiss. So that unrecovered segment of cable leaves a lot of context missing. But what we do know, and it's noted at the bottom of the decryptied document, is that Algerhiss was working at the State Department at the time as assistant advisor for the Far East. Lowenthal stated in his article that if Hiss was a spy, there's almost no way that he would be mentioned by his real name in secret communications. He also notes that the way this reads, it seems as though he's being introduced as someone the folks back in Moscow had not heard of before. Lowenthal argued that Algerhiss didn't actually match up with the identity of Ales based on the information that was relayed about Ales in document in eighteen twenty two. One of the things he pointed out was that his had been accused of sharing State Department documents, but that document eighteen twenty two specifically says that Ales is concerned only with military documents. Lowenthal also noted the problems with presuming the Venona documents were accurate, and even kind of hinted at the idea that the NSA and the FBI might have fudged some information to make Hiss look guilty, although he really offered no evidence for that. Yeah, he definitely was like, this was a case where they wanted to prosecute someone, and that seemed like a good someone. But he's really just going on conjecture. The two thousand and three article that Edward Mark wrote and referenced in his two thousand and nine write up was something of a response to the Lowenthal claims. Mark was very diligent and careful in his tracking of the movements of the State Department members who matched up with all of the evidence in document eighteen twenty two, and he also noted that there was precedent for Soviets using spies, real names and communications generally by accident, So there was no reason to assume that that second document that Lowenthal invoked was truly disqualifying of Hiss being Ales. Well into the two thousands, there were new developments in the story. In two thousand and five, the original untranslated version of Cable eighteen twenty two was released. It showed that nothing had been added or omitted to the information. Moreover, the decryption on which the entire Ale's case had been base did appear to have been correct, per an account written in two thousand seven by John Erman for Studies in Intelligence. Quote in April two thousand seven, a prominent American historian Ky Bird and his Russian collaborator, historians Vetlana Charvanaya, stepped forward at a conference to claim that the central piece of evidence against Hiss, an intercepted cable in the Venona Series number eighteen twenty two, naming a Soviet asset. Ayles did not refer to Hiss, as the FBI and NSA had judged, but someone else. If it could be proved, this claim would have significant implications for the history of the case and for historical interpretations of the Cold War era, and might affect current politics in the field of intelligence. It would call into question the credibility of US intelligence efforts in the nineteen fifties and raised new doubts about the validity of its current threat assessments under careful examination. However, ever, the Bird Chevanyah assertion is built on thin reeds, suppositions, and unsupportables. Ifs then that's but the stubborn efforts to exonerate Hiss, even if unsuccessful, will nevertheless have consequences for innocent bystanders and the conduct of intelligence today. That other person that Bird and Shrevenyah named was a man named Wilder Foot. While he did have some overlap with Hiss and thus Ales in terms of positions and locations in the nineteen thirties, he'd been living in Vermont, which for some, including Edward Mark, disqualifies him from being the Soviet operative in Washington at the time. While a lot of people are convinced that Algerhiss was a spy for the Soviets, there are still and probably will always be people who have doubts about that because his accusation and trial happened during the start of that Second Red Scare in the US, when scapegoats being sought to reassure the general public that the government was seeking out and prosecuting communists, and you can find books that very thoroughly lay out a case for almost any possible angle or belief that you can think of. For this one, there are books that state very confidently that Hiss was a spy. There are books that say very confidently that Hiss was innocent. There are others that say Hiss may not have been innocent, but he wasn't ales, or that he was set up. Really, anything you could think of is available, including Alger Hisss's own version of the story. Additionally, it's an inherently compelling story no matter which version you believe. Right, a Communist spy in the highest levels of government or a wrongfully convicted man fighting to regain his good name are both pretty interesting topics, and as Edward Mark put it, quote, the history of the controversy over his's true allegiance is so long and involved that years of study might not guarantee full mastery of it. That is algebras as we know it, m M, as we know it. I have listener mail that's sort of related. Okay, this is from our listener May, who wrote to us about our Vidcan Quizzling episode, and May writes, hello, friends, I wanted to drop a note to say thank you for your episode on vidcoan Quizzling. I'm playing catch up, so this is a bit late. As a high school history teacher, I was glad to hear of more World War Two history that wasn't the classic items we tend to talk about, though those are rather important. New information creates not only deeper knowledge of the history as a whole, but further interest as well. I wanted to let you know that I am adding Quizzling to my World War Two unit as best as I can, because it should be taught. I fear I won't be able to give as much detail time is a precious commodity to the classroom teacher. I'm excited to bring this story in, especially the coupe I radio tactic. Side note, I had just taught the bubonic plague as a cause of the Renaissance when I heard the Unearthed episode mentioning new research showing that the plague spread by body lice. My students were super grossed out to learn this, which is always fun. On that note, I just wanted to also let you know how much it pains myself and my colleagues to leave things out of the curriculum because we simply don't have time. I teach Western Civilization Part two to ninth graders, covering about six hundred years of history in one year. Yikes. History is unique in its curriculum because it literally grows with every passing year. We are now expected to make it through nine to eleven, whereas when I was a kid, we were lucky if we made it to Watergate, let alone the end of the Cold War and about ten years. I expect teaching the pandemic will be the ending point. I so appreciate your comments specifying that you weren't criticizing teachers, but I wanted to bring this problem to your mind. In case you weren't aware of the teaching history dilemma, this has always been and will always be a problem. Thank you for all you both do. Your research and delivery is top notch, and I constantly encourage my students and colleagues to check out your show. I listen when doing parking duty, and the students now ask me what the particular episode is about while I help them cross the parking lot. My pet tax comes from our free range chickens, Marshmallow the rooster and his girls, Brownie Cocoa and John Deere. Can you guess these were named by my kids. Marshmallow takes his duty of providing and protecting his ladies quite seriously and often scratches up bugs for them to eat. In case you didn't know, an adolescent rooster learning to crow sounds like a rubber chicken see attached video. And we had two roosters. May this is wonderful one. I'm so incredibly touched that you would include something because you've heard about it on our show. That's incredibly kind and lovely of you to tell us two. I am obsessed with Marshmallow. I grew up we had a small farm, so I grew up with free ranging roosters and chickens that were on our property, and I never loved the roosters. They were always very mean to me. But Marshmallow is very beautiful, and I wish he would accept hugs, but I doubt it. And three, I wanted to say, like I I appreciate also from a teacher's perspective, how hard it is, especially when you're trying to engage students to get all of the stuff in. I know we run into it just doing our show, where it's like okay, but I have like a finite amount of time in an episode to talk about a thing, and I got to cut stuff, and I know that's painful. So I can only imagine when you're trying to do a comprehensive history that's very, very hard. So I appreciate it. My hat is always off to teachers. Thank you to all the educators. And I had not thought about the way that what you're expected to teach might shift so so drastically based on big events in history that happen, but they do shape our world, so I understand why they would want them to be included. But also that's a lot more work to add to people's plates. So thank you again for all the teachers, all the teachers, and especially history teachers. I super appreciate it. Thank you. May I hope this school year is the best one ever and that it's only the least of those to come. It will only get better. If you would like to write to us and share your chicken pictures or your thoughts on history or anything else for that matter, you can do so at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.