The House of Chambers

ON the night he tried to kill himself, Whittaker Chambers wrote a letter to his two children. It did not include a detailed account of the Alger Hiss spy case, which had driven Chambers to what he called “spiritual exhaustion.” Instead, the letter contained simple fatherly advice: “I urged them,” he said, “never to leave the land.”

Chambers was thinking of Pipe Creek Farm, in Westminster, Md. – the family home since the 1930s and the site of the famous Pumpkin Papers incident. He lived to see it again: He botched the suicide and decided to continue testifying against Hiss. Eventually he would die on the farm, of natural causes. So would his wife. Their ashes were spread on the land – a land that their son, John Chambers, never has left.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

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ON the night he tried to kill himself, Whittaker Chambers wrote a letter to his two children. It did not include a detailed account of the Alger Hiss spy case, which had driven Chambers to what he called “spiritual exhaustion.” Instead, the letter contained simple fatherly advice: “I urged them,” he said, “never to leave the land.”

Chambers was thinking of Pipe Creek Farm, in Westminster, Md. – the family home since the 1930s and the site of the famous Pumpkin Papers incident. He lived to see it again: He botched the suicide and decided to continue testifying against Hiss. Eventually he would die on the farm, of natural causes. So would his wife. Their ashes were spread on the land – a land that their son, John Chambers, never has left.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.