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The Left Still in Denial about Hiss and Other Communist Spies
There's no such thing as a bad leftist, or so most textbooks in the public schools seem to suggest. The authors of popular textbooks are also loathe to admit that leftists like Alger Hiss were actually spies - Communist spies - who were working to betray their country. Parents, be sure to correct the leftist propaganda in your kids' textbooks. Let your kids know that evidence from the Soviet Union now thoroughly establishes the fact that Alger Hiss was a spy, along with other darlings of the Left like the Rosenbergs and Harry Dexter White.
The Weekly Standard (March 21, 2005, pp. 18-19), has a great article, "Professors of Denial" by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, which addresses the resolute refusal of leftist professors to admit the truth about past Communist spies. Here is an excerpt:
SINCE THE END OF THE Cold War, documents released from American and Soviet archives have convinced most Americans that long-disputed spy charges against Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Lauchlin Currie, and Harry Dexter White, among others, were accurate, and that hundreds of Americans worked for Soviet intelligence services during the 1930s and 1940s. What has gone largely unnoticed is the frantic rear-guard action by a handful of academics to discredit the new evidence and exonerate these onetime spies. While some who insisted that Hiss and the others were innocent have finally given up the ghost, others concede Hiss and company's guilt but urge us to see their espionage as an expression of true American patriotism. And a few holdouts have refused to admit that the evidence from Russian and American archives is, in fact, overwhelming. Meanwhile, a depressingly large number of high school and college history textbooks still present the Rosenberg and Hiss cases as unresolved or ambiguous and minimize the extent of Soviet spying.