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Copyright Protected
THE LYNBROOK BOTTLING COMPANY
By Art Mattson, Lynbrook Village
Historian
Originally published April 14,
1995.
From 1922 until 1930, Lynbrook had its
own bottling plant, the Lynbrook Bottling Company. It was located on Merrick Road, just
East of Lynbrook Village Hall, and across from the Lynbrook Theater. There is
a bank parking lot there today. The Lynbrook Bottling Company did not make
their own bottles. They were manufactured by a firm in Poughkeepsie
and shipped to Lynbrook. The bottles were
filled with carbonated soda in Lynbrook and sold in towns along the south shore of Long Island. There are about a dozen
known surviving bottles from the Lynbrook Bottling Company, one was found in Babylon, several were found in Lynbrook and now one in Valley Stream.
A Victim of "the
depression".
The Lynbrook Bottling Company went bankrupt in 1930, only months after the
Depression Era began. The company was the victim of a different sort of
"depression" -- a hole in the ground. The information about
"the depression" comes from Jack Bate, a former Lynbrook resident
who now lives in Evansville
Indiana. Jack's father owned
the Lynbrook Bottling Company. Although Jack was only about eight years old
when dad's bottling business went bust, he clearly remembers what happened.
Back in the 1920's bottling companies used deposit- return bottles made of
glass. A big part of the bottling company's operation involved washing out
the returned bottles for their re-use. This meant water, lot's of soapy
water. Up until 1928 the sudsy waste water simply ran off the property to the
south and west, ending in Doxey Creek, which runs along Peninsula Blvd. But in 1928-29, one of Long Island's first commuter parking lots was
constructed, right across the path of the bottling company's waste water. The
water turned the parking lot to ice in the winter and a soaking wet mess the
rest of the year. Jack Bate's father had to do something. He took the
questionable advice of a local contractor and at great expense dug a huge drainage
pit. But it wasn't nearly big enough. The soapy water overflowed the drainage
pit and flowed back into the parking lots. The Lynbrook Bottling company was
forced to close, the victim of Lynbrook's
"depression", the drainage pit that did not work.
A Strange Conclusion: The Lynbrook
Bottling Company of New Haven.
This abrupt ending led to the firm's name being continued in an unlikely
place. The bankrupt company's entire stock of bottles, all bearing the
Lynbrook Bottling Company name, were sold to a Connecticut firm, the New Haven Bottling
Company. Having just become the proud owners of thousands of "foreign
label" bottles, this company took the eminently practical step of
renaming themselves "The Lynbrook Bottling Company of New Haven". The business lasted, under
that name, until the 1970's.
The Lynbrook
Bottling Company
Addendum
The Lynbrook Bottling Company which existed 1922 until 1930 (when it went
out of business). It was located just west of the Five Corners, between Merrick Road and Langdon Place --
the location today of Fidelity Bank's parking lot. In my earlier article (the
one preceding the article printed above) I speculated that the Lynbrook
Bottling Company had been an early victim of the Depression. As things turned
out, I should have said "depression", with a small "d". I
got a call from Jack Bate, 70, a former Lynbrook resident who now lives in Evansville Indiana.
Jack's father had been the owner of the Lynbrook Bottling Company. One of
Jack's Lynbrook relatives sent him a copy of
my article. Jack called me to set the facts straight. Although Jack was only
about eight years old when his father's bottling business went bust, he
clearly remembers what happened.
Back in the 1920's all bottling companies used deposit-return bottles.
Naturally, a big part of the bottling company's operation involved washing
out the returned bottles for their reuse. This meant water, lot's of water.
Up until 1928, the soapy water simply ran off the property to the south and
west, ending in Doxey Creek. But in 1928 or 1929, one of Long
Island's first municipal parking lots was constructed,
unfortunately just south and west of the bottling company. Since the soapy
water could no longer run naturally off the property and because Lynbrook had
no sewers, Jack Bate's father took the advice of a local contractor and at
great expense built perhaps the biggest cesspool Lynbrook
has ever seen. But it wasn't big enough, and there went the Lynbrook Bottling
company, the victim of Lynbrook's biggest
"depression".
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The Rockaway Indians One Millennium Ago
How the Indians of
East Rockaway, Lynbrook and Lakeview Lived
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By Art Mattson
Lynbrook Village
Historian, President Lynbrook Historical & Preservation Society and
Director of the Friends of the East Rockaway Gristmill.
Copywrite protected © by the author February, 2001 - Article also
has appeared in Lynbrook USA
A more extensive version of this
article appears in Mr. Mattson's new book, The History Of
Lynbrook
Until recently Long Islanders were taught in school that there were 13
Indian tribes on Long Island in the 1600's
when the Europeans arrived. One of these so-called tribes was said to be the
Rockaway, who lived in our ELLM area. However anthropologists now believe
that there were no actual tribes on LI at all. Instead it was the Europeans
who arbitrarily categorized various extended-family groups into
"tribes" in order to lend a flimsy legality to buying up large
tracts of Indian land for mere pittances.
Who then were the Rockaway Indians? Long before the Europeans gave their
own names to places such as Hempstead, Brooklyn, South Hampton and Flushing, the Indians had named our area Rockaway. In
the Algonquian language "Rockaway" apparently meant "Sandy
Place", an apt description of an area including, in part, the sandy bay
beaches and tidal flats of Hewlett Bay and East Rockaway, the Old Sand Hole
Cemetery (now the Rockville Cemetery) at Lynbrook's eastern border, and the
sandy berms and sandy-bottom streams (Pine Brook and Parsons Creek) running
from Malverne and Lakeview into East Rockaway's Mill River. The term
"Rockaway Indians" refers not to a tribe, but to the many individual
families of Algonquian Indians who lived in our "Sandy Place".
The Rockaway name has stood the test of time. The English of the 1700s
gave the name "Near" Rockaway to the ELLM area, referring its
closeness to Hempstead, and "Far" Rockaway to the area further from
Hempstead. Today we still have East
Rockaway, Far Rockaway and Rockaway
Blvd.
WHERE DID THE ROCKAWAY INDIANS COME
FROM?
The first Paleo-Indians (paleo = early or primitive) arrived on Long Island about 12,500 BP (Before Present). Nothing
is known about these people except for the few, beautiful, fluted "Clovis points" they left behind. The Rockaway
Indians of 1,000 BP were Algonquians, a widely distributed North American
people which populated all of Long Island.
Unlike the Montaukett Algonquians out east who spoke a Mohegan-Pequot dialect
from Connecticut, the Rockaway Algonquians
spoke Delaware-Munsee, reflecting their connections to the Lanape Indians of
New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
The Rockaway Indians probably lived in small, extended-family groups,
organizing their lives around the "three legged stool" of hunting,
gathering and fishing. Our island geography, with its diverse food sources,
encouraged the Rockaways to roam throughout the ELLM area, from Hewlett Bay,
up Mill River
to the inland woods, fields, streams and ponds of today's Tanglewood Park,
Hempstead Lake Park
and Hall's Pond. Ocean Avenue,
with its graceful, non-engineered curves, runs for miles along these ponds
and stream banks. It is almost certainly an ancient Indian trail. Merrick Road
(named for the Merrick Indians) is another Indian trail, one which linked the
various family groups scattered along the south shore of Long Island.
Indian families gathered together for trading, for rituals and mass hunts,
though these gatherings were rare.
FISHING
The favorite location for permanent living sites among the Algonquians was
the banks of bays and tidal streams because of the easy availability of a
year-round food supply. Blue claw crabs, eels, oysters, clams, scallops,
flounder, stripers and blackfish were all found in abundance in local waters.
Fishing was often done with fish traps set in tidal creeks and bays. This was
a carefully planned activity. First, wooden stakes were stuck upright into
the silty creek or bay bottom, at low tide. Brush was woven between the
stakes to form a kind of net. The stakes were arranged in the form of a weir,
a precise pattern of channels, funnels and baffles which allowed fish to move
through the trap with the incoming tide, and be caught as the tide went out.
The Indians, standing in the shallows, would beat the water's surface with
sticks to drive fish further into the trap. Woven scoops, spears and weighted
throw-nets were used to haul the fish out.
GATHERING FOOD
Unlike the Indians of Central and South America, there was no crop
cultivation on Long Island 1,000 years ago.
Instead the Indians of the ELLM area made liberal use of "Nature's
Shopping Mall". The Rockaway Indians could find the fruits, nuts and
vegetables they needed simply by walking to their favorite gathering sites,
generally inland.
Strawberries and blueberries were favorite fruits. Vegetables included Jerusalem artichokes and
scallions. Nuts were widely available. Hickory
nuts, chestnuts, walnuts, and especially white oak acorns were ground into
flour, mixed with blue berries and honey and baked into cakes. The high
caloric content of these nut and berry cakes helped the Rockaways survive the
cold winters.
HUNTING
The ELLM area was a hunters paradise. Water was the key. The Rockaway
Indians used arrows, spears and snares to catch ducks and geese from the huge
flocks which landed along the ELLM bays, ponds and streams. Animals too
stayed close to water, so the inland streams and ponds, with their networks
of animal trails leading to water, provided an ideal place for setting
snares. Small animals such as raccoon, squirrel, possum and rabbit were
caught this way.
Larger game such as deer were killed with bows and arrows, and before that
with spears. Sometimes families would gather together for mass deer hunts.
Circles or semicircles as wide as five miles in circumference were formed.
Shouts, whistles, drumbeats, smoke and fire were all used to drive the game,
usually toward deep water. Hunters would wait in boats for the easy kill.
STONE TOOLS
Long Island does not have good flints for
stone tools. But some quartzites stones can be fashioned into arrowheads and
larger tools. About five years ago a Paleolithic (Paleo = primitive, lithic =
stone) Indian tool was found just south of Lynbrook High School.
Unfortunately the site was bulldozed for development in 1998, destroying the
site. This tool was recently evaluated by Professor John Vetter of Adelphi University's Department of
Archaeology. He declared it a genuine prehistoric tool, based on the way
flakes were purposefully broken off to make the tool sharp. The shape of the
tool, its wear-marks and the fact that it was found in a bed of discarded
clam shells all suggest that the tool was used to open clam shells. A really
close look at the tool indicates that its user (probably an Indian woman) was
right handed.
DAILY LIFE
Many aspects of their daily life 1,000 years ago demonstrated the Indians'
creative use of their natural environment. Algonquian Indians typically lived
in wigwams. These houses were built using a circular arrangement of bent
saplings, covered with bark and sealed with pitch. These houses, when
constructed properly, were waterproof. Several houses together would form a
family compound. Odd as it may sound, pots made of pieces of bark glued
together with pitch were used to boil water for cooking. This was done by
heating stones red hot in a fire, then picking them up one by one with sticks
and dropping them into the water-filled bark pot, thus boiling the water
without burning the pot.
Herbal mixtures were used as cures and for hunting rituals. One favorite
on Long Island was a dried-out mixture of
flowering sumac and flowering dogwood. The mixture was placed in a clay bowl.
Then it was lit with the flame from a burning stick. The smoke was inhaled
through a pipe, not one with a bowl as later Indians would use, but through a
straight hollow tube. Tobacco had not yet reached Long
Island 1,000 years ago.
There was as yet no wampum in 1,000 BP, but beautiful shells were searched
out and worn as adornment. Colors to decorate animal skins and pottery were
obtained from golden rod (yellow), blueberry (blue), bloodroot (red), and
wild grape (purple). Animal skins were the chief source of clothing.
CONCLUSION
We are a full millennium removed from the Indians of the year 1000, yet it
is worth taking time to contemplate how relatively comfortable a life style -
for that time -- the Rockaway and other Indian settlers on Long
Island lived. Life was certainly not as easy as we know it
today, but compared to the Europeans cities of the Middle Ages, with their
filthy open sewers, starvation, and bubonic plague, the Rockaways lived their
lives in perfect balance with nature. Unlike today's Long Islanders the
Rockaways kept their land as pristine as when they arrived. There is much we
can learn from the people of "Y1K".
============================
Sources:
Strong, John. 1997. The Algonquian Peoples of Long
Island. -- Interlaken,
NY: Empire Books.
Newsday. 1998. "Long Island, Our
Story" -- http://www.lihistory.com/
Tooker, William. 1962. Indian Place Names on Long
Island, 1911. Reprint
Port Washington:
Ira Friedman.
==================
Algonquian
Recipe for Autumn Acorn Mush
(Note: This recipe was used by the author in the Boy Scouts 45 years ago.
He is not responsible for any mistakes.)
Ingredients:
Acorns
Dried Blueberries
Honey
Fresh water
Two bark and pitch cooking baskets
Fire pit
Hot rocks (VERY hot rocks)
Tongs or deer antlers
Preparation:
-- Gather acorns in the fall. Dry them well, shell them and pick off the
skins.
-- Find a nice flat acorn pounding rock or a heavy duty wooden bowl.
-- Using a stone pestle pound away till the acorn is a fairly fine powder.
-- After pounding the acorns, you must leach them to remove the tannin.
Pile some sand into the form of a volcano, form a hollow bowl-shape at the
top. Cover it with cheesecloth. Place a thin layer of pounded acorn over the
cheesecloth and using pine needle branches as a water breaker, carefully pour
cold water over the powdered acorn. The water will seep through fairly
quickly. After a few leaches, taste a bit of the acorn and if the bitterness
has gone away, then it is ok.
-- In the meantime, make a fire pit and heat the rocks up.
-- Get the cooking baskets. Put just water in the first one, the
rock-cleaning basket. Put the pounded and leeched acorn powder along with the
sun-dried blueberries in the second basket, the cooking basket. Add water,
about 2 to 1.
-- Using two poles as tongs or using an antler, lift out a very hot rock
and dip it quickly in the cleaning water to get the ash off, then place it in
the acorn/water cooking basket. Repeat.
-- The acorn meal will be cooked in about 10 minutes. Remove rocks.
-- Stir in honey and eat the acorn mush while still hot, or let it cool
and form into cakes.
Note: While heating, if you stir the basket contents with the rocks in,
you'll wear the basket out. Just turn the rocks to mix. Knowledgeable adult
supervision is required.
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Whittaker Chambers’ House in Lynbrook
By
Arthur S. Mattson
Historian of the Village of Lynbrook
Copyright Protected - August,
2001
(Sorry, the 42 footnotes dropped
off the internet version. They will be
added later)
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INTRODUCTION
Whittaker Chambers was born in Philadelphia
on April 1, 1901. When he was three years old Chambers and his family (father
Jay, mother Laha and younger brother Richard) moved to Lynbrook,
New York, on Long
Island. Chambers grew to manhood in Lynbrook
and would live there, off and on for 40 of his 60 years [see Appendix], in a
house which still stands at 228
Earle Avenue. Chambers is one of the most recognizable
and controversial figures of the 20th Century. In 1949-50 he was the chief
witness in the perjury and spying case against Alger Hiss, in what has been
called the "Trial of the Century". After Hiss' conviction, Chambers
presented himself to the nation as a sinner and a savior -- a former
Communist and betrayer of his friends now come to save the country from the
Communist peril. He remains one of the most praised yet condemned persons of
our times. Certainly he is among the most understood. This article will try
to add to the understanding of Whittaker Chambers by looking at his life in Lynbrook. Throughout the incredible twists and turns of
his life, Chambers saw the importance Lynbrook
had on the various stages of his development. As Chambers said of Lynbrook, "No land ever again has such power over
him as that in which a man was once a child."
Two years after the trial of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers published his
autobiography, Witness. Chambers had such intensely bittersweet memories of Lynbrook that he devoted a 100-page chapter, "The
Story of a Middle-Class Family," to his formative years there. This
chapter, despite its brevity, is among the finest and most frightening of
American autobiographies ever written. He mentions his boyhood home at 228 Earle Avenue
dozens of times, spending whole paragraphs even whole pages on each room,
describing the pathos, the horror, and the occasional joy he experienced
there. The best and worst memories of his life were of growing up in Lynbrook. Even as an adult he kept returning to the
family home. From 1938 when he broke from the Communist Party, until 1950
when the Hiss trial concluded, he spent as much time in Lynbrook as at Pipe
Creek, his Maryland
farm.
As a young man Chambers rejected Lynbrook's
religious and social middle class values largely because of his unhappy
experiences growing up there. As one biographer put it, "Chambers's
earliest commitment to Communism apparently represented an effort to
extricate himself from Lynbrook and from a
family melodrama that had become unbearable." The residents of Lynbrook have had an equally unfriendly relationship
with Chambers. For almost 100 years they have at best ignored Chambers, and
at worst rejected him -- that is until now, when his boyhood home at 228 Earle
Avenue is being considered for listing on the both National and New York
State Registers of Historical Places.
WHITTAKER CHAMBERS' PLACE IN AMERICAN AND LOCAL HISTORY
In 1984 Whittaker Chambers was posthumously given the nation's highest
civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1988 his home in Maryland, Pipe Creek
Farm, site of the famous "Pumpkin Papers" incident , was placed on
the National Register of Historical Places. Despite this public recognition,
despite two best selling biographies of Chambers' life, despite Chambers'
influence on a generation of political conservatives from William F. Buckley,
Jr. to Ronald Reagan , and despite a persistent, half-century-long national
debate about his role in the Alger Hiss Trial, there are few people in
Lynbrook today who know that there is any connection between Whittaker
Chambers and this Long Island village.
Lynbrook has had other notable persons in
its history. For 30 years, beginning in 1906, the internationally famous
French chef, Henri Charpentier, creator of the crepe suzette, called the
gourmet world's attention to his Lynbrook
restaurant. "Texas"
Guinan the dance-hall queen and "Diamond Jim" Brady were
attractions in local night clubs early last century. Jack Douglas, the widely
read author and humorist, was raised here. But the lives of none of these had
the historical impact that Whittaker Chambers' life did. Nor did these others
experience the incredible personal drama of Lynbrook's
own "Spy Who Came In From The Cold."
CHAMBERS' TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY LYNBROOK
On the southeast corner of Peninsula
Boulevard and Earle Avenue, just across the street
from the Lynbrook
Baptist Church,
sits a charming turn-of-the-century frame house, number 228. It has elegant
columns and large front windows reaching low to the porch floor. The shutters
are blue, as they were when Jay Vivian (Whittaker) Chambers lived there from
the age of three in 1904 until his early 30's when he married and joined the
Communist underground.
Chambers' autobiography, Witness, tells how his experiences in Lynbrook shaped the course of his life. The book also
provides a snapshot of his Long Island
village as it was at the turn of the last century. He wrote about the rough,
working class people, the immigrants, the peddlers, and the rare
sophisticates; about the horse-drawn wagons, the railroad and the trolley;
about the wooden schoolhouse, the shacks of "Tigertown" and the
speakeasies. He mourned the continuing loss of so many trees, fields, woods
and streams to "progress". When Chambers lived there as a boy there
was a meadow running for miles beyond his house. Soon it became a four-lane
highway, Peninsula Boulevard.
Chambers loved the sights and sounds of the slow-paced country village
with its unpaved sand roadways and overarching silver maples. He recalled the
musical creak and groan of axles, the slow clop-clop of horses as they pulled
heavy wagonloads down nearby Merrick
Road, then Long Island's
great southern highway. He loved the flanking double line of 40-year-old flowering
cherry trees which he described as "domes of whiteness."
Chambers was a poet and a master of the English language. His descriptions
of Lynbrook in the early 1900`s as recorded in Witness are lyrically
beautiful yet frank:
Lynbrook was then a village of . . .
chiefly workingmen, shopkeepers, farmers and "baymen" -- men who
owned or worked oyster beds in the tidal creeks and salt marshes. The south shore of Long Island was a landscape of
unselfconscious beauty. Everything was small -- little farms, little
orchards, little unplanned villages, little white houses master-built in
exquisite, functional proportions. Birch and swamp-maple woods followed the
course of little streams that slid silently over glinting sand. It was all
saved from paltriness by the tremendous presence at its edge of the ocean,
with its separating miles of salt marsh and sweeps of sky across which fleets
of clouds rode to and from the sea.
A TROUBLED EARLY LIFE
Into this idyllic scene stepped three-year-old Chambers and his family,
altogether a poor fit in Lynbrook. His
father an artist, his mother a former actress, the family became known around
Lynbrook as "The French family".
He was an intelligent, pudgy boy, called Vivian by his parents. He wore short
pants in Lord Fauntleroy fashion long after his classmates had switched to
long ones. He was often ridiculed at school. His family's desperate poverty
forced him into the embarrassment of selling vegetables, chickens and eggs
door to door. The Chambers' Lynbrook
neighbors spread rumors (unfortunately all too true) that Whittaker's
demented grandmother, who lived with them, roamed the halls at night with a
knife in her hand. His parents` awful marital problems, including his
father's probable bisexuality, brought lengthy separations. As Chambers put
it:
Compared to us, the life around us was orderly and happy. We were not
happy. We were not a family. Our home was not a home. My father was not a
father. My mother was not a mother ... That left me absolutely alone.
Chambers went to grammar school in Lynbrook's
wooden schoolhouse on Union
Avenue. He said of his Lynbrook
education, "I was given a grounding that served me well throughout my
life." Still, he was never happy at Lynbrook's schools, finally
transferring to nearby Rockville
Centre High School,
where he found academic successes in English and Language. His social
problems continued, however, with his classmates calling him
"Girlie" and "Stinky". Chambers got his revenge when he
delivered the Class Prophecy at graduation in 1919. He foretold, among other
things, a career in prostitution for one of his least favorite classmates.
Chambers, unable to form any real friendships during his boyhood, often
wandered alone along the streams and meadows near his home. These
peregrinations became for him a near religious experience. Chambers relates
in his autobiography how, despite the absence of any religion in his home,
upon encountering a breathtaking meadow of flowers and birds he exclaimed
aloud, "God" (W. 117). He called this incident one of his life's
"highest moments."
Joining the Lynbrook National Bank right after graduation, Chambers once
again found he could not cope. A boring routine and continual quarrels with his
co-workers led him to resign. He entered Columbia
University, commuting daily from 228 Earle Avenue
to the Manhattan
campus by Long Island Railroad and subway. Chambers had tried to fit into Lynbrook's middleclass mold, but he would soon break
away from it.
THE 1920's
As Chambers put it, "When I entered [Columbia], I was a conservative in my view
of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the
time I left, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion." He
took a job at the New York Public Library and began to explore Socialism and
Communism.
One of his Lynbrook neighbors was a highly cultured woman who had
introduced young Chambers to the literature, art, music and social ideas of Germany and France. In his early twenties he
visited Europe, and saw the devastation left
by World War I. His distress at seeing the virtual destruction of European
civilization led to his joining a group of idealistic Columbia University
students in becoming members of the Communist Party in 1925.
Still living in Lynbrook, Chambers became
acutely aware also of the slow destruction of the country village he had
grown up in:
When I returned from Europe in 1923 . . .
I was living at home. I set about a definite poetic project. Its purpose was twofold.
I wished to preserve through the medium of poetry the beautiful Long Island of my boyhood before it was destroyed
forever by the advancing City. I wished to dramatize the continual defeat of
the human spirit in our time, by itself and by the environment in which it
finds itself. With my deep attachment to the earth I grew up on, the spread
of the tentacular towns across it, felling little woods, piping the shallow
brooks through culverts, burying little farms under rows of suburban houses,
struck me as an almost physical blow. Those sprawling developments, without
character or form, destroying the beauty that had been for an ugliness that
had no purpose but function and profit, seemed to epitomize all that I
dreaded in the life around me. By defacing the one part of itself that had
been intimately mine, it cut my roots and left me more than an alien, a man
without soil, and, therefore, without nation.
Social life in Lynbrook had a limited
appeal to young Whittaker. His description of the Prohibition Era and a 1922 Long Island speakeasy captures the scene while
revealing Chambers to be more a keen observer than a participant:
I was still working at the New York Public Library. I took to going home
directly after work. My brother would meet me at the Lynbrook
station. . . Prohibition was in force, but clandestine bars were everywhere,
and I sometimes stood beside the most substantial citizens. . . [E]venings
began at a little store with the lower half of the show windows painted.
Behind the store was a backroom. Here a mousey Greek served home-brewed wine.
It was red, watery, sour, rasping and very heady. The backroom was dense with
tobacco smoke, warm and cozy on cold nights.
His intellectual turmoil and the prevailing gloom at 228 Earle Avenue enveloped him. Like
the downward spiral of a Greek tragedy, Chambers' life followed a dreadful
course. One night, his brother Richard did not meet him at the Lynbrook railroad station. Chambers found him dead, a
suicide. Chambers came to believe that the same societal evils of
"vulgarity, stupidity, complacency, inhumanity, power and materialism-a
death of the spirit" which caused millions to die in World War I also
existed in the Long Island villages around
him. He believed that this suffocating "death of the spirit" had
killed his brother. One snowy night at his brothers grave, only a stone's
throw from the house at 228
Earle Avenue, Chamber's composed these lines :
Help me God (if there were God),
Before I die,
In my good time or under the hands
of the police,
To make of myself one tiny cell, a
bacterium,
To serve the organization of love
as hate,
The union of the weak to kill the
evil in power,
The outrage and the hope of the
world.
This was a decisive moment in his life. He wrote, "I now first became
a Communist. I became irreconcilable." .
THE 1930's - THE SPY YEARS
In the early years of the Depression, Chambers' writing talent and
sensitivity to the growing masses of poor - he had been poor enough as a boy
in Lynbrook to know - led him to an editorship
of the leading American Communist periodical, "The New Masses". He
was soon absorbed into the Party's anonymous secrecy where each member knew
only a single contact outside his cell, and then only by a code name.
After years of loyal service to the Party, his idealism turned to horror
when he learned of the Soviet labor camps and the mass murders under Stalin
in the late 1930's. He also discovered that the Communist Party had
penetrated to the highest levels of government in the U.S. and that Soviet intelligence
agents were using him as a conduit of government and military secrets. He
realized that his loyalty was being corrupted into treason by the Soviet spy
system. As Chambers agonized over breaking with the Party and exposing his
old friends., he looked back to Lynbrook.
THE BREAK WITH COMMUNISM - LYNBROOK'S
INFLUENCES
In his book Cold Friday, Chambers mentions two people from the Lynbrook area - an unnamed Methodist minister and a
neighbor, Dorothea Mund Ellen - who had influenced his life profoundly in his
youth. Ten years later, as he contemplated breaking with Communism, the
recollection of these two people would ease his passage:
I made friends with the son of the Methodist minister in a village not far
from my home in Lynbrook, Long Island. In my
second year at Columbia
I roomed with this boy. I was often at their house and sometimes attended
services with them. In the simple sense of goodness, few men could have been
better than that Methodist preacher. Nor was his goodness weak; it had a hard
human core. . .
Under the influence of this man and his son I tried to pray. When a decade
later, in the turmoil of my break with Communism, I once more sought to pray,
it seemed as if I were resuming an experience I had broken off rather than
abandoned.
Ms. Ellen, a highly cultured Lynbrook
neighbor, taught Chambers informally in her home. She taught him to read and
speak Greek, Latin and German and she instilled in him an appreciation for
art, music and the Bible. As Chambers put it, "This influence I was
never able to dispel even as a Communist . . . In this sense, she never
ceased to draw me from the evils of Communism even during the years when it
separated us completely."
He made the break, never to return. Fearful that his wife - he had married
Esther Shemitz, a fellow Communist, in 1931 - and his two small children
would be murdered by the Party, he moved them to a farm in Maryland, later
the site of the famous "Pumpkin Papers" incident. He was not able
to find peace and solitude there. On September 2, 1939 World War II erupted
in Europe, only days after the Soviets
signed a treacherous non-aggression pact with the Nazis. Europe
was again in flames, this time thanks to the complicit Soviets. Chambers
decided to tell U.S.
government officials all he knew about the U.S. Soviet Communist
organization. He chose to tell his story to Adolph Berle, Assistant Secretary
of State. Berle listened to Chambers' story: the vast network of operatives,
the role of the Hiss brothers, the stolen bombsight plans, and more. But all
Hell was literally breaking loose in Europe that very night as columns of
German tanks rolled into Poland.
Berle and the U.S. Government now had bigger issues to deal with, and
uncovering Soviet spies instead of Nazi saboteurs was not one of them.
Chambers' story was filed away.
For the next nine years (1940-1948) Chambers' life found quiet stability
in his family and his work. Using his considerable writing skills to
advantage, he rose to Senior Editor at TIME magazine at the enviable salary
of $30,000 a year. During this period he lived four days a week at his
mother's house in Lynbrook (his father had died years before) and commuted to
his Maryland
farm. He had done his duty as he saw it, and if the U.S. government chose to ignore
what he had told them, so be it. He would divide his life between 228 Earle
and his farm, write for Time, and be a small footnote in history for his
translation of the book Bambi from the German. But this was not to be, for
the past would not die.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECTION
In 1948 profound world and national political forces were being set into
motion. In June of that year, the Soviet Union attempted to control all of Berlin by cutting surface traffic to and from the city
of West Berlin.
The Soviet's method of gaining control was to starve the population and cut
off business with anyone not under Soviet control. From now on the Soviet
Union would be viewed publicly by the U.S. as a threat, and no longer a
wartime ally.
Under pressure from Rep. Richard Nixon and the House Un-American
Activities Committee, the FBI began a review of its wartime files. Chambers'
interviews with the State Department were uncovered. He was called on to
testify publicly against his old Communist Party contacts, including his once
close friend, Alger Hiss. Hiss had been a trusted aide to President Roosevelt
and had even been under consideration to become the first Secretary General
of the United Nations.
Chambers was reluctant to testify for many reasons. He feared that his
testimony would make him the target of the Communist Party and Hiss' highly
placed friends. Once again he feared for his family's safety, having years
before witnessed the literally murderous inclinations of the Party. He also
risked losing his prestigious editorship at TIME Magazine.
But Chambers believed it was his destiny to testify. Peter Jennings
describes the situation in his book, The Century:
Whittaker Chambers was a rarity - a man who had dug in at the foxholes of
both sides, a true "witness," as he described himself, to the
"two great faiths of our time." Once a dedicated Communist, during
the idealism of the 1930's, and an admitted spy, Chambers had since renounced
his party affiliations and, in a drama that transfixed the nation through the
fall of 1948, sat before the house Committee on Un-American Activities to
name the names of his partners in espionage.
Chambers' testimony against Hiss cost Chambers his job. He also faced a
windstorm of personal attacks - charges of mental illness, larceny and
slanderous conduct - that might have destroyed him. The pressure was so great
that one night in his room at his mother's Lynbrook
home, where he had been staying during the Hiss trial, Chambers tried but
failed to commit suicide by releasing cyanide gas. But Chambers did not waver
on the witness stand. His testimony was firm and clear. Hiss was convicted of
perjury and sent to prison.
After the trial, Chambers had initial success as a writer, particularly
with his best-seller autobiography WITNESS and its moving chapter on his life
at 228 Earle Avenue.
But the market for his work shriveled, and he soon fell into a long period of
virtual poverty. His poverty was relieved at last only when he inherited 228 Earle Avenue
upon the death of his mother in 1958. Chambers returned to Lynbrook
to supervise his mother's funeral and settle her estate. Pressed for cash, he
sold the house on April 22, 1959. Two years later, on July 9, 1961, Whittaker
Chambers died of a heart attack at his farm.
A HISTORY OF CONTRADICTIONS
Whittaker Chambers' life was filled with contradictions. He was born into
a family that lived at the edge of insanity, yet he had a warm and satisfying
family life of his own as a husband and father. His life experiences
consisted of a series of dramatic twists ranging from impoverished
door-to-door egg salesman to well-paid senior editor at TIME, from Communist
propagandist to translator of Bambi, from spy to public figure. As a youth in
Lynbrook he was (as he described himself)
both conservative and religious, but then rejected both capitalism and
religion and turned to Communism. Finally, he reversed himself once more when
he rejected the Communist Party and turned to God.
Although Chambers always felt socially apart in Lynbrook,
throughout the changing drama of his life he strongly sensed and often wrote
about the powerful influences of the village he grew up in, and of the house
he returned to so often throughout his life. As Chambers' most recent
biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, puts it in the concluding paragraph of his
biography, Whittaker Chambers: "Since early childhood, when he awoke to
the doom of Earle Avenue
and resolved in his mind to escape it, Chambers knew he would never really be
free. The instrument of history was also its captive."
But escape from Lynbrook is just part of
the story. As we have seen, Chambers also retained an idyllic, albeit
selective memory of some of the best things about his life in Lynbrook, memories which served him at key decision
points in his life. For example, he wrote this about leaving Lynbrook on his life's journey, and about his return
there during the Hiss Trial:
"I was about to set out from these quiet woods (to which I would
return at the decisive moment of the Hiss Case) on a lifelong quest for that
lost way, first in personal, then in revolutionary, then in religious
terms."
And he wrote this about how he coped with the distress of his days-old
break with Communism:
"…it was as if that spirit from my boyhood and youth took my
hand and knelt and prayed beside me …"
Chambers truly believed that "no land ever again has such power over
one as that in which a man was once a child". Now Lynbrook
may soon recognize tragic and yet heroic Whitaker Chambers as an important
historical figure, and recognize his boyhood home as worthy of a listing on
the National and State Register of Historical Places.
_______________________________________
TWO POSTSCRIPTS
CHAMBERS' IMPACT ON HISTORY
Did Whittaker Chambers' testimony truly change history? Recent documentary
evidence released from U.S.
and Soviet files shows that the U.S. government was well aware of
extensive Communist penetration, long before Chambers' testimony against
Alger Hiss. Chambers' charges merely confirmed what others had already told
federal investigators. Moreover, Alger Hiss had already been quietly pushed
out of government, due to suspicions about his loyalty. It took Richard
Nixon, then an obscure freshman member of the House of Representatives, to
see that a Hiss prosecution could become a show trial. If a conviction could
be obtained it would provide a springboard for his own political career and a
foundation for attacks on the Democratic Party then in power. Chambers'
testimony, which Nixon realized was the essential element in obtaining Hiss'
conviction, enhanced Richard Nixon's career in a spectacular way, leading him
from obscurity in 1948 to the Vice Presidency only four years later. One
thing is certain: Chambers' testimony destroyed forever the life of his
former good friend, Alger Hiss.
The pro-Hiss view sees Whittaker Chambers as a psychopathic liar and
Twentieth Century Ancient Mariner, with an albatross --- the trial and
conviction of the falsely accused Alger Hiss --- hanging around his neck.
They believe the principal result of Chambers' lies was the anti-communist
hysteria of McCarthyism and the shameful execution of the Rosenbergs, who
were spies for the Soviets, when they were U.S. allies, and who were the
parents of two young children.
Many Chambers advocates believe that Chambers' most powerful influence
came after the trial, particularly with the publication and best seller
status of WITNESS, an autobiography of undeniable literary and historical
value. One overenthusiastic Chambers supporter writes: "But his [Chambers']
testimony was not yet complete. His great heart animated the conservative
anti-communist movement that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan and,
a quarter-century after Chamber's death, the toppling of the Soviet
empire." This may be true in part, but it also is hyperbole. The truth
is somewhere between the two extremes.
THE QUESTION OF TRUTH
For almost 50 years the question of the truth of Chambers' testimony and
the validity of Hiss' conviction was hotly debated. Chambers' detractors
continue to this day to call him a "pathological personality."
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, much information has
been released in the U.S. and abroad documenting both the guilt of Alger Hiss
and the existence of a dangerous Soviet spy network in the U.S. in the 1930's
and 40's. In 1993 the Hungarian Communist-era archives were opened. A 1954
debriefing memorandum was found concerning a U.S. spy who had recently
defected to the Communist side. The memo details the defector's intimate
knowledge of Hiss' spying activities. In 1993 the U.S. State Department
declassified documents from 1946 showing that Hiss had procured unauthorized
top-secret reports on atomic energy and military intelligence. Within two
weeks Hiss had been encouraged to resign from the State Department . In 1995
the National Security Agency authorized the release of secret Soviet cables
that had been intercepted by U.S.
intelligence during World War II. The decoding operation was so secret that
even President Truman was unaware of it. Hundreds of cables refer to the
Soviet spy network and its hundreds of U.S. members. One cable dated
March 30, 1945 makes reference to Alger Hiss and his ten years of valuable
service as the "leading" Soviet spy in the U.S.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Alger Hiss Story - Search for the Truth." The Alger Hiss
Research and Publication Project of the Nation Institute.
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~th15/home.html [This site is financially supported
by the Hiss Family]
Bath, Oliver. "Warm Friday." National Review, May, 1984.
Chambers, Whittaker. Witness. Random House, New York, 1952.
________________. Cold Friday. Random House, New York, 1964.
"Chambers, Whittaker." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online,
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/9/0,5716,22669+1,00.html
"Chambers Is Dead; Hiss Case Witness." New York Times -
Obituary. William Fitzgibbon, July 12, 1961.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/reviews/chambers-obit.html
Douglas, Ann. "Review of Whittaker
Chambers: A Biography By Sam Tanenhaus," http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/chambers-review.html
"Fred Astaire Meets the Sad-sack Dostoyevskian Pudge" Time.com
NATION Nov. 25, 1996 VOL. 148 NO. 24
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/1996/dom/961125/nation.fred_astaire_meet37.html
Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey. Venona - Decoding Soviet Espionage in
America.
Yale University
Press, New Haven,
1999.
"Hiss, Alger. " Encyclopaedia Britannica Online,
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/4/0,5716,41464+1,00.html.
Jennings,
Peter and Brewster, Todd. The Century (Doubleday, NY; 1998), 312
Judis, John B. "The Two Faces of Whittaker Chambers." The New
Republic, Apr., 1984.
Kramer, Hilton. "Whittaker Chambers: the judgment of history."
The New Criterion. http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/15/feb97/hilton.htm
Mackintosh, Barry, National Registration of Historic Places Inventory -
Nomination Form "Whittaker Chambers Farm" (National Park Service,
Washington, DC; 1988).
"Reagan Honors Spy Who Recanted." NEWSDAY, 27 Mar., 1984.
"Telegram from Senator Joseph McCarthy to President Harry S.
Truman"
http://www.nara.gov/education/cc/mccarthy.html
Tanenhaus, Sam. Whittaker Chambers. Random House, New York, 1997.
"Venona - Soviet Espionage and the American Response -
1939-1957." From the CIA webpage,
http://www.odci.gov/csi/books/venona/venona.htm
"Vice Presidents of the United States - Richard Milhous
Nixon (1953-1961)" http://www.senate.gov/learning/stat_vp36.html
Weinstein, Allen. Perjury. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1972.
"Whittaker Chambers` Medal." National Review, Apr., 1984.
_____________________
APPENDIX
Whittaker Chambers' Timeline
By Arthur S. Mattson 8/11/2001
Source Key: P = Perjury T =
Tanenhaus W = Witness
YEAR /AGE / WHERE LIVED / DETAILS / SOURCE
=======================================
1901 0 Philadelpia Born April 1, 1901 W:91
1902 1 ?????????
1903 2 Brooklyn Apartment on Prospect Avenue
T:3
1904 3 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Date purchased??? T:3
1905 4 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook W:89-188
1906 5 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1907 6 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1908 7 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1909 8 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1910 9 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1911 10 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1912 11 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1913 12 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1914 13 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1915 14 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1916 15 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1917 16 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Attends Lynbrook
School W
1918 17 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook Transfers to Rockville
Centre H.S. W
1919 18 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Graduates from RVC H.S. --
Travels to DC & New Orleans P:89
1920 19 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Columbia Univ - commutes fr.
Lynbrook W:164
1921 20 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Columbia Univ - commutes fr.
Lynbrook P:89
1922 21 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Columbia Univ - commutes fr.
Lynbrook P:89
1923 22 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Left Columbia in Jr Yr -- To Europe for
Summer -- On return temporarily moved out of Earle Ave to Manhattan W:164
T:38
1924 23 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Takes eve. job at NYC Public
Libr (to 1927) -- To Atlantic Beach for summer -- Back to Columbia -- Leaves
Columbia in Dec -- Back to 228 Earle P:92, W:38, 40
1925 24 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Becomes Communist -- Employed by
Daily Worker 1925-9 T:56 W:195-6 T:49, P:71,101
1926 25 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook -- Brother dies, suicide T:54, P:71
1927 26 228 Earle Ave,
Lynbrook & Whitestone Queens -- To Whitestone Queens
in June 1927 T:61
1928 27 Whitestone Queens -- Translates "Bambi" into English
P:71
1929 28 Manhatan East Rockaway 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- To Greenwich
Vill summer -- East Rockawy fall, -- 228 Earle winter T:63
1930 29 Manhatan East Rockaway 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Manhattan -- East Rockaway "above a
store opposite the RR sta" -- Manhattan T:65
1931 30 NYC, NJ & Lynbrook -- Marries Esther T:66
1932 31 NYC, NJ & Lynbrook -- Joins
Communist underground T:86, P:71
1933 32 NYC, NJ & Lynbrook -- The spy years, 21 different addresses
T:86, 154
1934 33 DC & MD -- The spy years, 21 different addresses T:96-98,
W:336
1935 34 DC & MD -- The spy years, 21 different addresses
1936 35 DC & MD -- The spy years, 21 different addresses
1937 36 DC & MD -- The spy years, 21 different addresses T:112
1938 37 NY, MD, NJ PA -- Defects from the Party -- Hides out in FL, MD
T:136-138
1939 38 MD & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Joins Time Magazine in NYC --
Lives 5 days a wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm W:518, T:156,
T:170
1940 39 MD & 228 Earle
Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1941 40 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1942 41 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1943 42 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1944 43 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1945 44 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1946 45 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1947 46 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- Lives 5 days a
wk in Lynbrook -- Commutes weekends to MD farm
1948 47 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- HUAC Hearings
begin -- Leaves Time Magazine -- WC attempts suicide at 228 Earle W:765, 774
1949 48 MD Pipe Creek Farm & 228 Earle Ave, Lynbrook -- First Perjury
Trial (hung jury, 8-4 to convict) -- 2nd Trial begins W:765 T:412
1950 49 MD farm & 228
Earle Ave, Lynbrook
(in January only) -- Hiss convicted 1/21/50 -- Returns to writing, in MD
W:765
1951 50 Pipe Creek Farm, MD -- Writer/farmer
1952 51 Pipe Creek Farm, MD -- Writer/farmer, autobiography
"Witness" published T:461
1953 52 Pipe Creek Farm, MD -- Writer/farmer
1954 53 Pipe Creek Farm, MD -- Writer/farmer
1955 54 Creek Farm, MD -- Writer T:496
1956 55 Creek Farm, MD -- Writer
1957 56 Creek Farm, MD -- Writer
1958 57 Creek Farm, MD -- Writer -- Mother dies 06/05/1958 -- Inherits 228
Earle T:502 - Deed @ Lynbrook Building Dept Files
1959 58 Creek Farm, MD -- Sells 128 Earle 04/22/1959 -- Writer -- Travels
to Europe Deed T:507
1960 59 Creek Farm, MD -- Writer in MD
1961 60 Creek Farm, MD -- Dies July 9, 1961 T:513
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