On this day (November 11) in 1922, Whittaker Chambers was at the center of his first, but certainly not last, controversy.
In decades to come, Chambers would gain fame as a former Soviet spy turned anti-Communist, nemesis of Alger Hiss and deflater of Ayn Rand, and hero to the likes of Ronald Reagan. But at the time, Chambers was a 21-year-old Columbia University undergraduate who'd recently lost his job as editor-in-chief of a campus literary magazine, Morningside.
Chambers had been forced to resign in late October over a sketch he had published in the magazine, called "A Play for Puppets." According to an account in the New York Tribune, Chambers's piece, whose characters included Jesus Christ, the voice of God, an angel, and a couple of Roman centurions, "was believed to have overstepped the bounds of cleverness and propriety." The newspaper added that it was written with "a distinctly Wildean flavor."
A November 11 newspaper account said that Chambers had been reluctant to discuss the matter with reporters, fearing that he'd be expelled from the university. But it quoted him defending the piece: "I am not ashamed of the play. I do not consider it either blasphemous or anti-Christian. I put it forward simply as literature, without any aim at propaganda, and I have no apologies to make. I am sorry that the place was not civilized enough to take the play as it was written."
Whittaker Chambers's magazine career was not over, however. He would spend about a decade as an editor at Time magazine and later have a short stint at William F. Buckley's National Review. Chambers died in 1961.