Authors: Ira Katznelson
But how should such citizens be identified? How should loyalty be measured? The order followed the outline of recommendations put forth by President Truman’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty, which had been appointed in November 1946 on the recommendation of a subcommittee of the House Civil Service Committee, a group chaired by Robert Ramspeck of Georgia, all but one of whose six most senior Democrats represented southern districts.
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The president’s March 1947 order commanded that investigations to determine the loyalty of the nearly 2,400,000 government workers would be overseen by a permanent Loyalty Review Board, with an initial budget of eleven million dollars. The board would inspect files held by the FBI, HUAC, the military, the Civil Service Commission, and those held by “any other appropriate government investigative or intelligence agency,” state and local police and courts, the individual’s school and college, former employers, referees, or “any other appropriate source.” “Reasonable grounds” for the “belief that the person involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States” were defined broadly. They included more than acts of spying or sabotage, or an explicit advocacy of treason, sedition, or revolution, or actions “to serve the interest of another government in preference to the interests of the United States,” such as the intentional disclosure of confidential information. “Reasonable grounds” also took in, as the dry language of the executive order defined them, “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization, movement, group, or combination of persons, designated by the Attorney-General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.”
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The order’s broad scope reached well beyond the most sensitive positions. Its capacious standards for disloyalty included associations and states of mind, and the absence of procedural guarantees or traditional trial procedures effectively suspended both constitutional and conventional standards by chartering an extrajudicial process loaded in favor of the prosecution.
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By December 1948, a professor and a graduate fellow at Yale Law School were writing an assessment of “the constant and intensive check on the loyalty of all government employees” that took note of how in circumstances of “struggle, uncertainty, fear, and confusion,” the United States had been brought “to a critical point in the matter of political and civil rights,” and had created “a rising threat to democratic institutions.”
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In effect, they argued, “a veto power on Government employment” had been placed “in the hands of the FBI.” Underscoring the Bureau’s refusal to identify confidential sources, they asserted that it had moved in the direction of a “secret police” with an “ingrown tradition of militant police methods” that could develop into a “grave and ruthless menace to the democratic process.”
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J. Edgar Hoover felt compelled to write a response. He insisted that the FBI was confined by the scope of the president’s directions and would simply “report facts ascertained during investigation of persons alleged to be disloyal.”
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From the announcement of this process until the standard was further toughened in April 1953 by President Eisenhower from evidence of disloyalty to mere doubt about loyalty,
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fully 4,765,705 federal employees had to fill out forms that initiated the loyalty investigation of each, a requirement that was unprecedented in American history. Of these, 26,236 were referred for further scrutiny, charges were issued in 12,589 cases, but just 560 were fired or not hired, and 1,776 cases were pending at the end of this period. These, a member of the Loyalty Review Board, assessed as “pretty small pickings for a program which in cost ran into the millions and which caused hardships and heartburns to many of those involved.”
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But this form of counting significantly understates the effect. Life in science became precarious. By 1949, at least twenty thousand, and perhaps as many as fifty thousand scientists, engineers, and technicians “were either not working or working with interim clearance because they were waiting to be cleared.”
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Two groups were especially vulnerable. Homosexuals became particular targets of the security scare. A 1950 report by the Subcommittee on Investigations, entitled
Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts by Government,
revealed that the committee had conducted executive sessions with psychiatrists, prosecutors, and police to understand how, because gays and lesbians lacked “the emotional stability of normal persons,” they constituted a security risk and were vulnerable to blackmail. The federal government’s chosen answer was expulsion. Taking note of how the Department of Defense had announced a policy of removal in 1949, and how the Department of State was following suit, the report concluded with a soon-to-be heeded general recommendation that “those who engage in acts of homosexuality and other perverted sex activities are unsuitable for employment in the Federal Government,” noting that “it is in the public interest to get sex perverts out of Government and keep them out.” Some five thousand federal employees soon lost their jobs to this Lavender Scare.
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Atomic scientists composed the second exposed group, especially theoretical physicists who had been political activists on the Left before World War II in such organizations as the American Association of Scientific Workers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, some of whom remained engaged after the war in efforts to contain the destructive potential of the bomb they had helped create.
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They founded local organizations like the Oak Ridge Scientists and the Atomic Scientists of Chicago; and some fashioned national lobby groups, most notably the Federation of American Scientists (which later became the Federation of Atomic Scientists, or FAS). Drawing on the legitimacy of their knowledge to affect public affairs, they were particularly interested in promoting the civilian control of atomic energy at home and international control abroad.
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With the turn to loyalty investigations, these scientists proved to be the most important targets, especially after the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic bomb. Many wondered how a country with a more primitive infrastructure, less advanced technology, and more insulated community of scientists than the United States could have developed this weapon unless it had had the critical assistance of subversive American scientists.
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Of course, scientists were not alone as objects of suspicion. Some of the most spectacular investigations during the late 1940s and early 1950s focused on labor leaders, Hollywood actors and screenwriters, and State Department officials. But scientists stood out because of their pivotal position and the demand for atomic security. Not just tens but “thousands of scientists were subjected to varying degrees of harassment concerning their loyalty, sometimes from HUAC, but more often from the federal government’s loyalty and security program.”
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An irony was at work. “Partly because what they do is so important to the national military security,” the sociologist Edward Shils wrote in a classic consideration of what he called “the torment of secrecy,” and “partly, too, because although they have an enormous responsibility conferred on them, they are not trusted, scientists . . . have come to bear the brunt of the loyalty-security measures.”
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As a result, science itself was changed, shifting from an open system that policed itself to a profession marked by compartmentalization and classification.
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Strikingly, the flagship publication
Science
began to carry articles not about its usual substantive topics, but on “loyalty clearance procedures in research laboratories” and the “loyalty and security problems of scientists.”
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To be sure, a tiny minority did, in fact, spy for the Soviet Union.
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Some, like Ted Hall, the youngest physicist at Los Alamos during the war, simply got away with it.
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Others, notably including Morton Sobell, who received a thirty-year prison term, and Julius Rosenberg, who was executed with his wife, Ethel, on June 19, 1953, almost certainly assisted in the dissemination of scientific secrets.
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But despite the overwhelming constancy and faithfulness of the country’s vast scientific community, and even though Soviet atomic spying dated almost exclusively to the period before 1945, America’s scientists were subject, more than any other group, to FBI surveillance and to investigations in Congress by HUAC and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
Not their actions, but their ideological proclivities and political leanings often moved to center stage. Sources of suspicion that made their way into FBI reports, loyalty investigations, and congressional committee plans included the “failure to show enthusiasm for cold war foreign policy; open advocacy of U.S.-Soviet accommodation, arms control, greater U.S.-Soviet cooperation in science, civil rights for African Americans, and noncentrist labor politics; insufficient expressions of antipathy toward communism of the Soviet Union; vigorously stated opposition to loyalty investigations; display of interest in Marxism or other radical political ideas; association with communist or radical family members, friends or acquaintances; attendance or participation in meetings of left-wing organizations or gatherings where supposed communists were present; [and] refusal to name and denounce friends and acquaintances.”
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Such information was frequently conveyed by confidential science informants, themselves often subjects of doubt and distrust. The line between the necessity for mechanisms to ensure probity and the creation of a climate of inhibition and fear was crossed repeatedly. As a result, the boundary between totalitarian and democratic loyalty became increasingly difficult to discern.
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All the while, Congress exerted more and more pressure for punitive internal security policies by conducting its own investigations, holding public hearings, and initiating legislation that defined limits and conditions of citizenship. The congressional committees that were concerned with national security mocked the rules of due process they seemed to follow, including the right to counsel and the right to respond to charges, by proceeding with inquiries and examinations of witnesses in which “conclusions are contained in its premises. The purpose of the investigation,” Andrew Grossman and Guy Oakes have observed, “is to present evidence, the logical force and probity of which are not subject to cross-examination, which affirms that the premises are true.”
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The key presupposition was the existence of a “Fifth Column” seeking to undermine America’s institutions and “way of life” that had to be combatted in order to keep loyal but naïve Americans from unknowingly becoming part of the plan of subversion. The purpose of these hearings was not to prove a case, as if this were a judicial proceeding, but to confirm the theory.
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One of the most visible instances was the way HUAC kept returning to Edward Condon as a security risk, despite acknowledging that he had never been a member of the Communist Party, and despite the absence of evidence of his culpability in espionage or any clandestine activity. Born, of all places, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Condon was an important nuclear physicist who helped build the bomb and draft the Atomic Energy Act. He worked in quantum mechanics, served as president of the American Physical Society in 1946 after working in the Manhattan Project, and was appointed that year by President Truman to direct the National Bureau of Standards. He strongly advocated open science across borders with the fewest possible restrictions of secrecy, and civil rather than military control of scientific research and institutions. Those views, and his affiliations with the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, a group that was placed on the attorney general’s November 1947 list of “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive” organizations, got him into trouble, ultimately leading to the loss of his security clearance in 1954.
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Not long after Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s February 7, 1950, Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he dramatically, but falsely, proclaimed to have a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department, Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950. The product of legislation sponsored in the House by HUAC chair John Wood of Georgia and in the Senate by the chair of the Internal Security Subcommittee, Nevada’s Pat McCarran,
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both Democrats, this legislation’s declared aim was “to protect the United States against certain un-American and subversive activities.” The act required “Communist front” and “Communist action” organizations to register with the federal government. It tightened laws on sabotage and espionage, lifted any statue of limitations in cases punishable by death, and made political beliefs grounds for the exclusion and deportation of “subversive aliens.” Most remarkably, it provided for the detention without trial of citizens who had joined organizations defined as seditious by a Subversive Activities Control Board during times of “an internal security emergency,” subject only to an appraisal of the basis for probable cause by a Detention Review Board.
The source of these provisions, which had not been included initially in the legislation proposed by Woods and McCarran, was the substitute bill authored by West Virginia’s Senator Kilgore. Instead of requiring the registration of suspected groups, this bill built on the model of Japanese internment during World War II “to provide for the detention of persons who may commit acts of espionage or sabotage.”
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Though intended as a means to defeat registration provisions, these detention specifications were added, as Title II, to the Internal Security Act, which was adopted by a 313–20 vote in the House and a 51–7 vote in the Senate.