He became a Communist while sitting on a bench outside of Hamilton Hall.
Whittaker Chambers enrolled at Columbia in 1920. A staunch conservative, he campaigned so fiercely for Calvin Coolidge that his academics were affected. “I’m so busy with politics that I can’t keep up with my work,” he told one instructor.
He left Columbia in 1925, during his junior year. He decided to become a Communist from a vantage point known to all of us Columbia students, looking at the “little Greek shrine” and “my political hero,” the statue of Alexander Hamilton, American revolutionary.
