"Politics in the Pumpkin Patch": A Response

Abstract

SINCE 1960, National Park Service historians have nominated and secretaries of the interior have designated some 1,900 properties throughout the United States as national historic landmarks. The designation, recognizing a property's national significance in commemorating some aspect of American history, has been conferred upon places as diverse as Mount Vernon, W.E.B. DuBois's boyhood homesite, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and the Westminster College gymnasium where Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech. On May 17, 1988, Secretary of the Interior Donald Paul Hodel added the Whittaker Chambers farm near Westminster, Maryland, to the landmarks roster. An ex-Communist and Time magazine editor, Chambers startled the nation in August 1948 with testimony that Alger Hiss, a former State Department official of impeccable establishment credentials, had also been an active Communist during the 1930s. In a highly publicized episode at his farm that December, Chambers pulled from a hollow pumpkin and turned over to congressional investigators microfilms of secret State Department documents that he said Hiss had given him for passage to a Soviet agent. Following two dramatic trials at which Chambers was the principal government witness, Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950 for denying this activity before a grand jury and imprisoned for nearly four