Tea at Trianon: The Pumpkin Papers Revisited

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 3, 2016

The Pumpkin Papers Revisited

From The Carroll County Times:

Growing up in the 1940s on the family farm, a few miles north of Westminster's city limits near Union Mills, one of John Chambers' responsibilities was to take produce remnants from the porch to a compost heap some 50 feet from the house. Inevitably, seeds from discarded pumpkins took to the soil and grew into a patch of sorts, with some two dozen pumpkins at various stages of ripeness by late 1948.

From that unintended pumpkin patch came a moment of inspiration by his father, Whittaker Chambers, that turned into the biggest news story in the country and thrust the Chambers family, a cast of characters that included future President Richard Nixon, and, indeed, Carroll County into the national spotlight like never before or since.

Nearly 70 years later, it's still a common occurrence for John Chambers to be asked about the Pumpkin Papers, so named because his father hid inside a hollowed-out pumpkin five canisters containing microfilm of sensitive documents that implicated a prominent government official named Alger Hiss. (Read more.)