For hard-core anti-Communist vigilantes, the conspiracy went back even farther. The issue of Communists in the government predated the war and had a faithful constituency; the House Committee on Un-American Activities had been consistently high in Gallup polls since its inception. To be sure, there was considerable disagreement over what a Communist was. To some it meant Soviet spies, to others it signified dues-paying members of the Communist Party of America, and to countless implacable adversaries of Franklin Roosevelt and everything he represented, Communism was a vague term embracing all advocates of social change.
No one quarreled over the first definition. Russian espionage would clearly constitute a threat to national security. On that point Americans were united, and any fuzzing of the definition served only to fragment that unity. Yet hazier interpretations of Communism had become the meat upon which ultraconservatives fed.3 To them, anyone who had altered the world they had known in their youth was suspect. If they could pin a Red label on one New Dealer and make it stick, they felt, they would discredit everything left of center in one stroke.
The rise of the loyalty issue began in the last months of the war. Like almost everything else the Committee on Un-American Activities tackled, the case of Amerasia, a reputable scholarly journal, turned into a hopeless muddle. Early in 1945 a research analyst for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), while riffling through the January 26 issue of the magazine, discovered that one article contained information from a restricted OSS report, some of it quoted verbatim. There was nothing sinister in that. Like so many governmental agencies, the OSS routinely stamped “Confidential” on virtually every document, including, in this case, an innocuous briefing which the State Department had earlier made available to American foreign correspondents in China. Despite this, a heavy-handed OSS officer raided Amerasia’s office and found other “confidential” information: reports on rice yields in selected provinces, water tables, livestock populations. The Justice Department’s prosecution fell apart when a grand jury refused to indict anyone. But the Amerasia case would never be forgotten by those who had pressed it. The charge of treason had been raised, and the fact that the topic of the classified data had been China would later seem portentous.
The “do-nothing” 80th Congress had hurt the Democrats more than anyone realized at the time. After capturing control of the Hill, the Republican leadership had projected no fewer than thirty-five major loyalty investigations. Uneasy over the Amerasia uproar, Truman named a commission in late 1946 to study possible threats to internal security, and on March 21, 1947, acting upon its recommendation, he issued Executive Order 9835 establishing a Federal Employee Loyalty Program. Nevertheless the din continued. Reluctantly, and ill-advisedly, the State Department permitted a team of congressional investigators, led by a Republican and an anti-Communist vigilante with the engaging name of Robert E. Lee, to examine its loyalty files. Lee left carrying information on 108 past, present, and prospective State Department employees. The files were completely unscreened. They included allegations, unconfirmed statements, malicious gossip, and data which had later been proved to be false. Some sources weren’t even identified. Other material reflected the biases of Lee’s team; the American Civil Liberties Union was listed as a Communist front, and a labor leader was identified as a Communist on the strength of a charge from a manufacturer whose plant he had struck. After a long lull another congressional team asked State to bring the Lee list up to date. The department replied that of the original 108, only 57 were still employed. With that, the list and its accompanying folders went back on a shelf to collect dust. But the figure 57 would be heard again.
Early in 1948 yet another House committee demanded the federal record of Dr. Edward U. Condon, the director of the National Bureau of Standards. Learning that Condon had become the victim of a whispering campaign, Truman declared that he was fed up with Republican fishing expeditions. On March 13 he directed all government offices to keep personnel files in strictest confidence; any congressional requests or subpoenas for them were to be rejected. The President’s position had become intolerable—isolated passages in the files, wrenched from context, were implicating the administration as a helpless accomplice in slander—but his directive solved nothing. Freed from the hazard that official records might contradict them, the vigilantes merely stepped up their recklessness; Nixon of California, for example, flatly stated that Democrats were responsible for “the unimpeded growth of the Communist conspiracy in the United States.” The Democratic leadership heatedly denied it, though some of their backbenchers chimed in with the opposition. On February 21 Congressman John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts said that at Yalta a “sick” Roosevelt, on the advice of General Marshall and other chiefs of staff, “gave” the Kuriles and other strategic places to the USSR. The administration had tried to force Chiang into a coalition with Mao, he said. President Truman had even treated Madame Chiang with “indifference,” if not “contempt.” The State Department had squandered America’s wartime gains by listening to such advisers as Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University. “This,” Kennedy concluded, “is the tragic story of China, whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men saved, our diplomats and our President have frittered away.”
The fact that Kennedy briefly found common cause with the vigilantes has long been forgotten, possibly because of his later career. Others in the China debate had become more inflammatory. As early as October 1947 William C. Bullitt, ex-ambassador to France and a zealous vigilante, had published a “Report on China” in Life charging that Washington bureaucrats were shackling Chiang by withholding arms from him. The Luce publications were vehement on the issue; Henry Luce had been born in China’s Shantung province, the son of a missionary, and he had become a key figure in what was beginning to be called the “China Lobby”—men whose commitment to the Kuomintang was so great that it seemed to preclude all else, including their allegiance to the United States. The September 6, 1948, issue of Life declared that Yalta had been the “high tide” of appeasement. After that the level of rhetoric descended rapidly. Republicans began referring to their congressional adversaries as members of “the party of treason”—a slur that Rayburn attributed to Nixon, and never forgave. Mundt of South Dakota demanded that the President “ferret out” those on the federal payroll “whose Soviet leanings have contributed so greatly to the deplorable mess of our foreign policy.”4 Congressman Harold Velde of Illinois announced that Soviet spies were “infesting the entire country,” like gypsy moths; Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania charged that Dean Acheson was on Joseph Stalin’s payroll. To Jenner of Indiana, every American whose advice to Chiang Kai-shek had failed to stanch the Red tide was, almost by definition, a criminal. Jenner called General Marshall “a front man for traitors,” a “living lie” who had joined hands “with this criminal crowd of traitors and Communist appeasers who, under the continuing influence of Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson, are still selling America down the river.”
Each excess seemed to surpass the last. Democrats on the Hill thought the opposition touched bottom in December 1949, when Republicans in both houses of Congress overwhelmingly resolved that the Secretary of State had lost the confidence of the country, could not regain it, and should be fired by the President. Eventually this singular resolution reached the desk of Harry Truman, who promptly ripped it in half. But that wasn’t the bottom. They hadn’t even begun to see the bottom.
***
The liberal community regarded Republican vigilantes as stage heavies. Certainly some of them were behaving as though they had not only been cast as villains but were enjoying every minute of it. On a typical afternoon spectators might enter the Senate visitors’ gallery to hear the administration denounced as one of “egg-sucking phony liberals” whose “pitiful squealing” would “hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers” who had “sold China into atheistic slavery.” The ripest phrases were reserved for those “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line in the St
ate Department” who were “spewing the Kremlin’s malignant smear” while “the Red Dean” (Acheson) “whined” and “whimpered” and “cringed” as he “slobbered over the shoes of his Muscovite masters.” There were times when correspondents wondered whether anti-American polemics in the Soviet Politburo could possibly be as scathing as those heard under the Capitol dome.
Occasionally the voice of reason was heard on the Hill, most memorably when a Joint Congressional Committee was pondering the nomination of David E. Lilienthal, a distinguished public servant, for the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission. Senator Kenneth D. McKellar of Tennessee, a Democratic vigilante, insisted that Lilienthal had harbored Communists in the TVA. Did he, McKellar asked Lilienthal, carry in his head a blueprint for Soviet revolution? The witness replied in part:
This I do carry in my head. Senator…. One of the tenets of democracy… is a… repugnance to anyone who would steal from a human being that which is most precious to him—his good name—either by imputing things to him by innuendo or by insinuation. And it is especially an unhappy circumstance that occasionally that is done in the name of democracy. This, I think, can tear our country apart and destroy it if we carry it further…. This I deeply believe.
Such moments were rare, and apart from heartening men of good will, they achieved almost nothing. The Lilienthals of America erred in assuming that fear of internal subversion could be resolved by evidence and reason. It couldn’t; otherwise there would have been no crisis in the first place. The anti-Communist terror was pathological. It would have to run its course before the delirium could end. In the meantime it would be a savage force in the hands of men who had fathomed how to use it. Senator Taft understood it. He knew precisely what he and his fellow Republicans were doing, and he knew why. After a vigilante exercise in verbal overkill (“The greatest Kremlin asset in our history has been the pro-Communist group in the State Department who promoted at every opportunity the Communist cause in China”) Taft cut close to the bone when he told reporters: “The only way to get rid of Communists in the State Department is to change the head of government.” In other words, he was warming up for 1952, when the people would have an opportunity to choose a new President, hopefully Robert A. Taft. Tom Coleman, the Republican boss in Wisconsin and a Taft supporter, was more explicit. “It all comes down to this,” he said. “Are we going to try to win an election or aren’t we?”
But Democrats liked to win, too. Harry Truman was well aware that the stain of suspicion was spreading. Moreover, other issues were at stake for him. The Republicans were hunting witches, but the NKVD had been running real agents from Moscow, and the country’s chief executive was responsible for its internal security. Truman’s first inkling that the NKVD was at large in North America had come shortly after that evening in September 1945 when a Russian cipher clerk named Igor Gouzenko, stationed in the Soviet embassy at Ottawa on the staff of the military attaché, snatched up an armful of incriminating documents—all he could carry—and staggered out into the night and political asylum. The Canadians established a commission to investigate the Gouzenko papers. It uncovered a widespread apparatus of English and Canadian citizens whose trail ultimately led to two British physicists with Most Secret clearance: Dr. Alan Nunn May and Dr. Klaus Fuchs. The net comprised dedicated Communists and participants in a scheme, which had been largely successful, to pry loose atomic and other defense secrets Washington had shared with its Canadian allies.
At first the President appears to have been slow in grasping the implications of the Ottawa ring. The following February J. Edgar Hoover sent Truman confessions from Communist agents Elizabeth Bentley, a former employee in the Italian Library of Information in New York, and Whittaker Chambers. The Bentley and Chambers cases hardly qualified as FBI exploits. It was now seven years since Chambers had first tried to find someone in the government who would take him seriously, and when Miss Bentley first tried to turn herself in at the FBI’s New Haven office, she had been ignored; agents believed her only after seeing a Soviet operative slip her two thousand dollars in a sidewalk stakeout. She and Chambers were strangers to one another, but they had this in common: their statements were sufficiently fantastic to raise questions about their sanity. Miss Bentley, a middle-aged Vassar graduate, declared that for five years she had served as a Soviet courier, picking up highly classified documents in Washington and turning them over to her Russian contact in New York. Among thirty-odd former government employees she accused of treachery were Lauchlin Currie, who had served as special assistant to President Roosevelt from 1939 to 1945, headed two missions to China, and now headed a Park Avenue import-export firm; Harry Dexter White, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and the current executive director of the International Monetary Fund; and William W. Remington, a handsome young Dartmouth graduate who had become a rising star in the Department of Commerce. Chambers identified nine of the brighter lights in the Roosevelt administration as Communist party members, notably Alger Hiss, who was about to leave the State Department to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Like others who had heard them out, Truman was skeptical. The Canadian ring had shaken him, however, and in that autumn’s off-year election several GOP congressional candidates had used fallout from the Amerasia case to raise doubts about the administration. In response, on December 4 Attorney General Tom C. Clark made public a list of ninety organizations which in the opinion of the Justice Department were Communist fronts. Throughout the following year the list was repeatedly expanded—on one day, May 27, 1948, thirty-two additions were made. Suspicion fell upon everyone who had ever belonged to, say, the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, even though its original purpose had been confined to contributing food and medicine to America’s Russian ally. Civil servants who had thus “followed the party line” were dismissed. In the vernacular of the time, they had been found to be “bad security risks.”
At the time, the Truman administration’s most spectacular contribution to vigilantism seemed to be its invocation of the Smith Act of 1940 to try eleven leaders of the Communist Party of America. The real terror seldom reached newsprint, however, because it was so ordinary, like being jobless in 1932. Apart from its other outrages, Executive Order 9835 encouraged Americans to snoop on colleagues, friends, neighbors, and even relatives. Furthermore, the loyalty program was an administrative monstrosity. On May 22, 1947, the FBI began stalking “disloyal and subversive persons” by conducting a “name check” of the two million people on federal payrolls, from mailmen to cabinet members. In addition, the bureau was answerable for disloyalty among the five hundred thousand annual applicants for government jobs. “Derogatory information” about an individual brought a “full field investigation” into his past, sometimes all the way back to childhood, with agents interrogating those who remembered him, or thought they remembered him, about his habits, associates, and convictions. Accumulated data were weighed by a regional loyalty board which could either dismiss charges or hold a hearing and reach a verdict. Adverse decisions could be appealed to a National Loyalty Review Board in Washington, whose rulings were final.
On what grounds could a good and faithful letter carrier, say, be fired? Pink slips went to those who had committed treason, engaged in espionage, advocated violent overthrow of the government (already forbidden by the Hatch Act), disclosed official confidences, or belonged to an association which the attorney general defined as subversive. Proof that a man had engaged in any of these activities need not be absolute; “reasonable grounds for belief” of subversion was enough. The ground rules for hearings were Kafkaesque. Charges were to be stated “specifically and completely” only if, in the judgment of the employing department, “security considerations permit.” If not, the accused wasn’t even told how or where he was said to have slipped. He might have learned of it if he had been granted the time-honored right to confront his accuser, but this, too, was denied him. FBI policy held that identification of
informants would hamper future investigations, thus jeopardizing national security. Similarly, the attorney general’s list of proscribed organizations, which had been drawn up by the FBI, was above challenge. The groups on it were not allowed to argue their innocence. If a civil servant had held membership in one of them—or, in many cases, if he merely knew someone who belonged—he was given notice. Guilt was, quite literally, by association.
Those victims who were privileged to know why they were being fired received a form which began, “The evidence indicates that,” and continued with such accusations as these, taken from files of the time:
Since 1943 you have been a close associate of—, an individual who, evidence in our files indicates, has displayed an active, sympathetic interest in the principles and policies of the Communist Party.
Your name appeared in an article in the 4 April 1946 edition of the York Gazette and Daily as a sponsor of a Philadelphia, Pa. mass meeting… sponsored by the National Committee to Win the Peace. The National Committee to Win the Peace has been cited by the Attorney General as Communist.
During your period of employment by Williams College, in Williams-town, Mass., you made statements to the effect that you believed “the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings in Washington, D.C. are a greater threat to civil liberties than the Communist Party because they infringe upon free speech….”
Your name appeared among the signers of an open letter… of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties dated 28 December 1941 and urging speedier shipments of arms to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The National Federation for Constitutional Liberties has been cited by the Attorney General as Communist.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 74