Eyeglasses are a common feature on the faces of many people around the world. We are accustomed to waiting an hour from start to finish for a pair of glasses that correct our vision and are often taken for granted as is much technology of our era. 
Initially eyeglasses just helped with farsightedness but when Johannes Kepler explained how concave and convex lenses worked in 1604 they were developed to correct nearsightedness too. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin grew tired of switching eyeglasses so he developed the bifocal which meant he could wear one pair of glasses to correct both near and farsightedness. Sunglasses were developed in 1929 by Sam Foster who convinced an Atlantic City store to carry his FosterGrant brand and they became an instant success. Movie stars were often seen in his glasses and he is due credit for creating the first eye protection from ultraviolet rays.
America during the red scare was a very different place. The main fears of the day were not the goings on of the Middle East or the walls between countries; rather, people feared the loyalties of their own neighbors. As the Cold War with Russia emerged at the end of World War II, the lure of communistic thought sent shivers down the spines of patriotic Americans. Everywhere one looked someone was being accused of socialist ties, communist sentiments and worst of all, spying for the Russians. One of the most highlighted cases from the post war period was that of Alger Hiss.
Born in Baltimore in 1904, Hiss studied law at John Hopkins and Harvard and began a promising career as law clerk for the prestigious Oliver Wendell Holmes. From this esteemed beginning, Hiss went on to hold a number of positions in the Roosevelt Administration. America in the 1930s was a nation of unrest and uncertainty about the viability and longevity of the capitalist system. The stock market crash of 1929 coupled with the Dust Bowl in the mid west, left many searching for alternative ideologies.
One of these searchers was Whittaker Chambers. Chambers came from a broken Philadelphia home and in 1924 began to see the failure of his home life as an analogy for the failure of the capitalist system. In 1925, he became a devout Marxists and joined the communist party. Later, Chambers would defect from the party and become one of its biggest enemies.
As Chambers affirmed his commitment to the Communist ideology, Hiss held a number of important offices in the United States government. Work with the department of Agriculture and State Department led Hiss to serve as Roosevelt’s assistant during the Yalta Conference in 1945 and Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations. In 1949, Hiss left public office to work towards international peace as the president of the Carnegie Endowment. A rich and diverse career would have been Hiss legacy if Chambers and his associates hadn’t made him the target of an FBI espionage investigation.
Whittaker Chambers was a writer and editor who while working for TIME magazine confessed to being a communist during the 1930s before the House on Un American Activities. He chose to point to Hiss as a fellow believer who had worked actively in the party from 1933 to 1938. The FBI and NSA investigated the State department during the time Hiss served and found what they believed to be evidence of Hiss disloyalty.
After two grand jury trials, the first resulting in a hung jury, Hiss was sentence to five years in prison after being found guilty of spying for the Russians. Documents from the Yalta conference in 1945 indicated a Russian American spy was with FDR at the conference. This coupled with Chambers’ accusation was enough to put Hiss away for five years and destroy the reputation of one of America’s dedicated civil servants. Hiss tried to prove his innocence throughout his life, suing both Chambers for libel and the United States government fort wrongful imprisonment.
It would take until 1992 for Russian documents that showed Hiss had no involvement with espionage to surface. Hiss passed away just four years later in 1996. And even after his death and the lack of material evidence, historians still remain divided on the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss.
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The trial set the precedent for many things to come including by some accounts, the McCarthy era, the election of Richard Nixon, the founding principals of the modern conservative movement and even the election of Ronald Reagan. The story of Alger Hiss does show the gravity of accusation and the means by which fear of other ideologies can be carried to extremes. | |||||||||||
Tags: 1924, 1925, 1929, 1930s, 1945, 1949, Alger Hiss, Carnegie Endowment, Classic 1950s and 1960s Communism Films, Classic Anti Communism Propaganda Cartoons and Animations, Cold War, Communism, Depression, Dust Bowl, FBI communist investigations, FDR, Hiss legacy, House Committee of Un-American Acitivities, Marxism, McCarthyism, Nixon, Red Scare, Regan, Russian spies, Secretary General of the United Nations, Soviet Cold War Era Gas Mask - Adult, Stock Market Crash, Vintage Civil Defense Film Library, Whittaker Chambers, World War II, WW2, Yalta conference
Elevators are a commonplace fixture in multi-story or high-rise buildings in all parts of the globe. They are often taken for granted since they have become so universally adopted but we only need to look at the history of them to see what engineering marvels they are. Early elevators were mentioned in Roman texts as being developed by Archimedes in around 236 B.C. but these were basically small cabs attached to a rope and were operated by human or animal power. Different types of elevating mechanisms were developed in the 18th and 19th century. In Russia, a man named Ivan Kulibin designed an elevator in 1793 that used a screw mechanism to raise and lower the unit. During the 19th century there were many types of elevators employed but they were very simple devices used primarily to carry cargo. They used hydraulics to operate the elevators employing a pump that would apply water pressure sent through a steel column to make the elevator ascend and descend. They used a system of counterbalances to prevent the hydraulic system from carrying the full load but it was not a practical system, especially for taller structures since the hydraulic system had to be buried in the ground as deep as the building was tall.
Elisha Otis developed the safe type of elevator we are familiar with in 1852. A set of rollers would lock the elevator into place if something happened and the elevator began to drop too fast. He gave a demonstration of it in 1854 at an exposition at New York’s Crystal Palace. Otis passenger elevators were first installed in a building on Broadway in New York. Actually, during the construction of the Cooper Union building in 1853, Cooper included an elevator shaft in his design because he was certain someone would develop a practical passenger elevator. The Otis Elevator Company (owned by United Technologies Corp.) is the largest manufacturer of elevator equipment in the world. Stairs were actually banned from new building construction in 1962 but that was soon changed as wisdom prevailed.
Thousands out of work, the prices of stocks and shares free falling, natural disasters and a country crying out for change. It could be America today but in fact, it’s the combination of events that led to what is now known as the Great Depression. With overworked top soil ripped from the earth by prairie winds leading to the mass failure of America’s farming community coupled with dire consequences of a decade of overspending and credit buying, in 1929 the United States faced a disaster on a national level that no-one could have foreseen and no-one felt able to prevent.
FDR tried, for better or worse, to accommodate everyone and constantly fought off accusations of socialistic ideas. His hope was not to change the capitalist system but provide a temporary band-aid to an unstable economy through what seemed the only feasible solution. 
