Anna Hiss and Her Brother

I learned a lot during the years (1996 to 1998) I was researching and writing Longhorn Hoops / The History of Texas Basketball. That includes, for example, the 44-game winning streak led primarily by three-sport letterman Clyde Littlefield; cancelation of the 1927 UT-Baylor game after the Bears’ bus was hit by a train in Round Rock and killed most of the team; the Gregory Gym game in 1963 in which hundreds of UT and A&M fans fought; the smaller set-to between coaches Abe Lemons and Eddie Sutton of Arkansas in 1982; the woebegone Bob Weltlich era; and the stellar play of guard Travis Mays.

But the book’s most fascinating episodes pertain to the women. Soon after commencing my labors, I was stunned to realize that the first organized basketball game in University of Texas history did not involve the boys but the girls! Six years before Magnus Mainland (a native of Scotland, oddly enough) organized a men’s team, director of women’s physical education Eleanore Norvell set up a rudimentary game between the “Ideson team” and the “Whitis team” in the basement gym of Old Main. The date was January 13, 1900, and the Whitis players took a 3-2 victory. The fact that it was an intramural contest does not detract from the game’s significance. Soon they went “beyond the walls” by hosting teams that represented high schools from Austin, San Antonio and other cities. This, I must note, was the half-court version of the sport, as female athletes were then considered much too dainty and frail to exert themselves by actually running from one end to the other—heaven forbid. I also note that male spectators were barred, no matter how much they endeavored to get a look. The top players from those early days, such as Willie Thatcher, Alice Ramsdell, Viola Middlebrook, Helen Mobley and Eugenia Welborn, got treasured “T” sweaters and blankets.

The new women’s PE director in 1911 was Eunice Aden. She and dean of women Helen Marr Kirby kept a wary eye on the growing enthusiasm for basketball. There were occasional editorials and letters in the Daily Texan saying that things should be opened up for distaff UT students, but they inevitably retreated when the administration insisted that female modesty and dignity had to prevail. Aden’s replacement in 1921 was a tall, vivacious blue-blooded native of Baltimore named Anna Hiss. She had attended three institutions of higher learning, including one in Boston where she played basketball against the “Seven Sisters” colleges. For the next 35 years, Hiss would be among the most prominent women on campus.

A sister of Sappho for what that’s worth (when I interviewed one of Hiss’s colleagues, the lady laughed and said, “Anna wouldn’t let a man come within a mile of her”), she ran her department with a firm hand. She was loved by many and feared by the rest, never hesitating to say that she was dead-set against intercollegiate athletics for women. Hiss abhorred the male model, governed—as she saw it—by money and skewed educational values. True then, and I cannot deny that it is true today but infinitely worse.

Hiss was among a cohort of female PE professionals intent on preventing or, if need be, eradicating women’s intercollegiate sports where they already existed. Led by Lou Henry Hoover, wife of soon-to-be President Herbert Hoover, they followed a couple of maternalistic mottos: “a sport for every girl, and a girl for every sport” and “for the good of those who play.” Games—not just basketball but all sports—against outside schools stopped, and UT was back to the rather less exciting intramurals and interclass play. Hiss had no interest in producing sedentary fans but players and well-rounded individuals; she had a point system that encouraged co-eds to diversify their athletic talents. Female students at Texas could choose from such sports as swimming, golf, interpretive dance, tennis, horseback riding, fencing, field hockey and archery.

I can only speculate about what she thought of the university’s fevered campaign to erect Memorial Stadium in 1924, but as sure as water is wet, she was resolutely opposed. Football was a male sport through and through, and here you had a huge stadium with the masses just sitting and watching. My book “For Texas, I Will” was published six years before Longhorn Hoops, and I recall seeing abundant evidence showing that support among students, alumni, faculty and administrators to build the stadium was by no means unanimous. Some—and they were not all eggheads—perceived that UT was in danger of losing its educational focus.

Hiss did not hesitate to throw her weight around. She tried to prevent the University Interscholastic League (for Texas high schools) from allowing girls’ participation in any sports. She also protested the involvement of American women in the 1928, 1932 and 1936 Olympics. I have a feeling that my fellow Texan, Babe Didrikson—a three-time AAU all-American in basketball, winner of two gold medals (80-meter hurdles and javelin) and one silver medal (high jump) in track and field in the 1932 Olympics, winner of 10 LPGA tournaments and AP female athlete of the year six times—would have told Hiss to shut her trap. The Babe was known for boasting and then backing it up.

What Anna Hiss did to retard the growth of intercollegiate sports for women was in vain, of course. It seems retrograde to us now, but at the time it was considered both idealistic and progressive. If you go to page 217 of my book, you will read these lines: “While it was not clear at the time, by discouraging high-level competition and the resulting popular enthusiasm and attention, Hiss and her fellow PE professionals served to diminish athletic interests among female students. When things finally changed, decades hence, they had a lot of catching up to do. Through her remarkable energy and executive ability, Hiss installed a splendid spirit in generations of students who went on to become teachers, coaches and leaders of all kinds. In time, their students and daughters came to UT and overturned some of the policies Hiss [who died in 1972] had apparently chiseled in stone.”

She had about a decade to go in her UT career when, in 1948, her younger brother, Alger, found himself on the front page of every American newspaper. This Cold War cause célèbre is still a subject of debate; enough books have been written on it to clear a small forest. Hiss, a New Deal liberal and State Department official with degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard who sat with FDR at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, had played a major role in establishing the United Nations and might have become Secretary of State. He was accused of spying for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It mostly came down to the dueling testimonies of him and a former Communist Party USA member named Whittaker Chambers before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Chambers, who saw the light and renounced his commie views, said Hiss had been a secret member of the party and funneled information to Moscow. While some people defended him and insisted he was innocent of every charge (President Harry Truman thought the matter was no more than a “red herring”), Hiss had three very rabid opponents in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Congressman Richard Nixon and—later—Senator Joseph McCarthy. Since the statute of limitations on espionage had run out, he could not be tried on that, but perjury remained on the table. On January 21, 1950, in the second of two trials Hiss was found guilty of perjury; the verdict was upheld on appeal. He would spend three years and eight months at a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania before being granted early release. Hiss campaigned for vindication almost to the day he died—November 15, 1996.

During his trials and incarceration and upon his release, Hiss’s sister (there was a second brother, Donald, whom Chambers also sought to finger) stood by him, although she chose not to speak publicly. Students and others around her at the University of Texas knew better than to raise the issue, and the local media also seemed willing to give her a pass.

There are scholars and historians who say case closed: Hiss was a proven Communist and a spy. Many point to the Venona Papers, a trove of decoded and decrypted Soviet documents from the 1940s and 1950s (released to the public in 1995) that included reference to a shadowy person known as Ales—reputedly Hiss. Others disagree, saying that Chambers was an unmitigated, pathological liar who wanted to be a hero and the guy who would save Western democracy, that the HUAC hearings and the trials that followed were badly flawed, that Hiss was one of the most wrongly maligned figures in American history and the victim of egregious and unjust character assassination and that Nixon and Hoover were merely looking for a way to dismantle New Deal liberalism—the truth be damned.

The formidable Anna Hiss…

Alger Hiss testifies before HUAC, August 5, 1948….

Hiss before entering prison, March 22, 1951…

Anna Hiss Gym on the University of Texas campus…