by Jay Feldman
The quality of the information supplied by the FBI to HUAC may be surmised from descriptions of the committee’s reports by two of its chroniclers. In The House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1945–1950, Robert K. Carr wrote that these reports “contain so many obvious errors and grossly unfair attacks upon persons of undoubted non-Communist standing that it is often difficult to single out or evaluate the authentic information about Communists and Communist activity that they contain.” Similarly, in The Committee, Walter Goodman noted that “the reports were marred by an unfastidious use of evidence, sloppy organization and writing, rampant emotionalism, and wild charges.”17
On March 10, 1946, barely a month after Assistant Director Ladd had first proposed it, the secret FBI “educational” program got off the ground when Father John F. Cronin, an official of the National Catholic Welfare Conference—which had been identified by Martin Dies just seven years earlier as itself being controlled by Communists—made front-page news by charging that there were 2,000 Communists working for the federal government in Washington, D.C. Basing his accusations on material secretly supplied by the FBI, Cronin alleged that 130 of those 2,000 “were in key positions from which they could influence the policies” of the State Department, Treasury Department, and Budget Bureau.18 Despite his refusal to reveal his sources or to identify any individuals by name, and despite immediate and adamant denials from officials of all three agencies, Cronin’s unsubstantiated allegations marked the beginning of an onslaught of ferocious and prolonged red-baiting.
Representative Edward Rees of Kansas, the ranking minority member of the House Civil Service Committee, immediately announced that he intended to introduce a resolution calling for a “complete and thorough investigation.”19 The stampede was on, as elected officials and other public figures now rushed to outdo one another in staking out the strongest possible anti-Communist positions.
Anti-Communism was the stance, and red-baiting the tactic. Originally initiated by anti–New Deal Republicans seeking to recapture the government after fifteen years of Democratic control, both were soon enthusiastically embraced by liberals eager to dissociate themselves from any taint of Communist leanings or affiliations. In so doing, they validated the FBI’s strategy of eliminating liberals’ traditional support for radicals and radical ideas.
The FBI plan was enhanced as a result of a wave of labor turmoil that swept the country in the year and a half following the end of World War II. During the conflict, grievances had built up, and just as labor unrest had erupted following World War I, late 1945 and 1946 saw almost five thousand strikes involving more than 4.65 million workers nationwide, including general strikes in Camden, Hartford, Houston, Lancaster, Oakland, Rochester, and Stamford. The government broke an oil workers’ strike in October 1945 and a packinghouse strike the following January. Truman curtailed a rail workers’ strike in May by seizing the railroads, and in November, after the United Mine Workers walked off the job for the second time that year, he obtained a court injunction forcing them back to work. Charges of Communist influence in unions led to a public-opinion backlash against labor—in 1945 and 1946, ninety antilabor bills were introduced in the Seventy-ninth Congress—contributing to the darkening mood toward radicals and isolating Communists in the labor movement.
Tolerance was further shuttered by two spy scares in 1945–46. The Amerasia affair, though labeled an espionage case, actually involved a longtime State Department employee’s leaking classified documents to a left-wing magazine editor, who then used some of the information contained therein in a story. Three people were indicted, but with no evidence that the material had been passed to a foreign government or used for any purpose other than in the magazine piece, they were charged with unauthorized possession of government documents rather than espionage. Before their trial, however, a defense attorney learned that the FBI had illegally broken into both the magazine’s offices and the homes of the accused, and a plea bargain avoided a potentially embarrassing trial for the bureau. The second spy case involved the arrest of twenty-two people in Canada on charges of conspiring to steal information about the atomic bomb for the Soviets; the Canadian Royal Commission report on the incident alleged extensive Russian espionage in Canada and, according to a Soviet informer, in the United States as well.
On July 6, 1946, with concern now understandably heightened about spies in the State Department, Congress passed the McCarran rider to the Smith Act. The amendment gave the secretary of state “absolute discretion [to] terminate the employment of any officer or employee of the Department of State or of the Foreign Service of the United States whenever he shall deem such termination necessary or advisable in the interests of the United States.”20 The McCarran rider would become a permanent fixture in State Department appropriations bills and would later be attached to the appropriations bills of other government agencies as well.
Throughout the 1946 midterm election campaign, the Republicans hammered away at the red issue. The soon-to-be Speaker of the House, Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, promised that a Republican Congress would “put an end to the boring from within by subversionists high up in the government.”21 GOP candidates made baseless connections between Communism and the Democratic Party’s candidates. In California, the congressional challenger Richard M. Nixon emphasized his opponent’s association with the “communist-dominated” Congress of Industrial Organizations’ political action committee and accused him of “consistently voting the Moscow-PAC … line in Congress,” while in Wisconsin, the senatorial challenger Joseph McCarthy accused his opponent of enjoying “Communist support.”22 The day before the election, Martin, the House Republican leader, told Massachusetts voters their choice was the difference “between chaos, confusion, bankruptcy, state socialism or communism, and the preservation of our American life, with all its freedom and its opportunities.”23 Dispensing with all subtlety, the Republican National Committee chairman, B. Carroll Reece, advised the American people that their option in the upcoming vote was between “Communism and Republicanism.”24
The Republicans picked up fifty-four seats in the House and eleven in the Senate. With his party now in the driver’s seat, HUAC’s chairman, Parnell Thomas, announced a plan to spotlight “the sorry spectacle of having outright Communists controlling and dominating some of the most vital unions in American labor,” as well as to investigate “Communist influences in Hollywood,” “the Communist influence in our educational system,” and “Communists and Communist sympathizers in the Federal government.”25
The tone was set. The hunt was on.
Truman now faced three daunting challenges. First, from their new position of power, the Republicans, having proven the efficacy of playing the red card, accused him of being soft on Communism, both domestic and foreign. At the same time, Truman came under attack from the left wing of his own party, led by Henry Wallace, who had been fired as secretary of commerce shortly before the election for making a speech that was supposedly too conciliatory toward the Soviet Union. The progressive Democrats criticized Truman for adopting too harsh a stance toward the Soviets and for not pursuing attempts at accommodation. Finally, the president was having difficulty selling Americans on the Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-ravaged Europe, a program that was critical to American business interests.
Truman’s response to the first issue was to create, less than two weeks after the election, the Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty to study the issue of Communists in the federal government. In its report the following February, the commission wrote that while it was “unable … to state with any degree of certainty how far reaching” the problem was, there was nevertheless “sufficient evidence to convince a fair minded person that a threat exists,” and concluded that “the presence within the government of any disloyal or subversive persons … presents a problem of such importance that it must be dealt with vigorously and effectively.”26
Truman tended to regard the matter as a tempest in a teapot. “I
believe the issue has been blown up out of proportion to the actual number of possible disloyal persons we may have,” he told an official of the Democratic National Committee.27 In fact, he saw the entire business of the danger from domestic Communism as greatly exaggerated. “People are very much wrought up about the Communist ‘bugaboo,’ ” he wrote to a friend in late February, “but I am of the opinion that the country is perfectly safe as far as Communism is concerned.”28
However, with the Republicans breathing down his neck, and HUAC, led by the rabid archconservative Parnell Thomas, banging the anti-Communist drum ever more loudly and insistently, Truman saw a chance to steal their thunder on the domestic Communism issue. Following the commission’s recommendation, he established, by executive order on March 21, 1947, the Employees Loyalty Program in order to provide the country “maximum protection … against infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of its employees.”29 He later frankly admitted to a confidant “that he had signed the Order to take the ball away from Parnell Thomas.”30
The Republicans, of course, lost no time in claiming credit for the new plan. “I am glad,” said the RNC chairman, B. Carroll Reece, “that the President, however belatedly, has adopted this important part of the program supported by the Republican party and its candidates in the 1946 campaign.” House Speaker Martin backhandedly commended Truman, saying that it was “good to see that he has finally awakened to the truth of what we have been telling him for the last few years.”31
The Employees Loyalty Program was in keeping with the Hatch Act of 1939, which prevented any member of an organization advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government from gaining or continuing in federal employment, as well as with the Interdepartmental Committee on Employee Investigations, created by FDR in 1943 to investigate federal employees who advocated the overthrow of the government or belonged to an organization that advocated the same.
Truman’s new program called for a loyalty investigation of every potential new employee of executive branch departments and for the termination of “disloyal” employees. The standard for non-hiring or firing was “reasonable grounds … for belief that the person involved is disloyal to the Government of the United States,” a criterion that included membership in or “sympathetic association with” any organization the attorney general designated “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.”32
As the bureaucracy of the Employees Loyalty Program was being created, the FBI and the Civil Service Commission engaged in a power struggle over which agency would be responsible for conducting the investigations of governmental employees and job applicants. Hoover won and extended the bureau’s reach yet again.
If a loyalty investigation turned up anything suspicious, a hearing was scheduled before a departmental “loyalty board” comprising employees from the same agency as the accused. In their lack of deference to due process, the procedures for hearings in these cases were disturbingly reminiscent of those employed by the Alien Enemy Hearing Boards during World War II. There was no provision, for example, for the accused to see any evidence, and therefore no way for the accused to refute any such evidence. Neither was there any stipulation that a detailed—or, in fact, any—record of the loyalty hearing be made. Nor was a loyalty board required to make a finding based on evidence—or, indeed, to make any finding at all. Appeals were directed first to departmental authorities and then, if necessary, to the Loyalty Review Board, which was part of the Civil Service Commission. The Loyalty Review Board’s recommendations, however, were merely advisory; the final decision rested with the head of the agency.
The legal ramifications were ominous. In a letter to The New York Times, a group of four prominent legal scholars and civil libertarians, including Zechariah Chafee, addressed the shortcomings of the loyalty-hearing process. “Where is the burden of proof?” they wrote. “Is it on the accused? … There is an implication of surrender in the apparent abandonment of the elementary requirements that charges be supported, that issues be clearly assigned, and that an adjudication must be based upon evidence with which the defendant has been confronted.” The historian Henry Steele Commager raised additional legal objections, calling the loyalty program “an invitation to precisely that kind of witch-hunting which is repugnant to our constitutional system” and pointing out, “Here is the doctrine of guilt by association with a vengeance … The Alien Registration Act of 1940, directed against aliens and enacted under pressure of war, for the first time wrote that odious doctrine into American law. Now, apparently, it is here to stay.”33
There was also the fact that the departmental loyalty boards and the Loyalty Review Board, like the Alien Enemy Hearing Boards of World War II, were administrative, not judicial, bodies composed of administrative officials who were now given the power to investigate and rule on individuals’ personal convictions, opinions, affiliations, and relationships.
The essence of the Employees Loyalty Program was thought control, as Alan Barth, who covered civil liberties for The Washington Post, pointed out in 1951: “As a rule, only the unorthodox come before loyalty boards. They come before loyalty boards because someone has charged them with expressing the ‘wrong’ opinions, associating with the ‘wrong’ people, belonging to the ‘wrong’ organizations, and in general criticizing or seeking to change the existing patterns of American life.”34
But the greatest danger of the program, wrote Barth, lay in its fundamentally undemocratic underpinnings:
The inevitable effect is a corruption of the traditional American right of privacy and the development of a dangerous police power … The maintenance of … dossiers about citizens who have never been charged with any violation of law and who have no means of refuting misinformation that may have been collected concerning them is an invitation to abuses of the gravest sort. Secret dossiers are paraphernalia of a police state. They are not proper instruments of a democratic government …
It does not matter that these invasions of what were once deemed inalienable rights have been adopted for the sake of national security … Dictatorship always has its origin in the assumption that men supposed to be benevolent may be entrusted with arbitrary authority.35
Despite the criticism, the federal plan was used as a model for state and municipal loyalty programs, and the practice of blacklisting quickly crept into private industry as well. As opponents of the Employees Loyalty Program feared, the policy did indeed become the cornerstone of the hysteria, repression, red-baiting, and witch-hunting that pervaded American life for the next ten years.
While the Employees Loyalty Program was being established, Truman was devising a foreign policy designed both to undercut progressive Democrats’ attacks on him for being too harsh on the Soviet Union and to sell the American public on the Marshall Plan, for which American business interests were clamoring. In early 1947, after Britain’s decision to cut off economic aid to Greece and Turkey—the governments of which were both threatened by strong Communist movements—Truman approached skeptical Republican leaders of the new Congress to ask for $400 million in military and financial assistance to the two beleaguered countries. In a strategy session, the Republican senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan counseled, “Mr. President, if that’s what you want, there’s only one way to get it. That is to make a personal appearance before Congress and scare hell out of the country.”36
Truman took Vandenberg’s advice, and on March 12 the president introduced the Truman Doctrine in a speech to a joint session of Congress that was broadcast nationally on live radio. In his address, Truman began by warning about the “gravity of the situation which confronts the world today,” citing the threat of worldwide Communism to American national security, and went on to announce that the United States intended to vigorously oppose Soviet expansionism in Europe, as well as the spread of Communism around the globe.37
“The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will,” said Truman.
“I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Although he declared that our aid should be mainly economic, Truman also asked Congress to authorize sending troops to Greece and Turkey. He raised the specter of the domino theory, warning that if Greece fell, Turkey could follow, and then “confusion and disorder” could spread throughout the Middle East.
It worked. Truman scared hell out of the country, and Congress approved the funding, with the $250 million for Greece being divided into financial and military assistance, while the funding for Turkey was designated solely as military aid. With a stroke, Truman had enlisted the support of the American people for the plan to rebuild Europe and also trumped his left-of-center Democratic critics, whose disapproval of him for being too severe with the Russians now seemed incongruous and unseemly, given the magnitude of the threat he had described. Conversely, opposing the Truman Doctrine seemed dangerous to national security.
On the day after his speech to Congress, Truman further delineated his new hard line, telling a conference of radio journalists that although he had tried his “level best to get along with our friends the Russians …, [t]hey understand one language, and that is the language they are going to get from me at this point.”38
The Cold War was on.
Two weeks after the Truman Doctrine speech, J. Edgar Hoover went before HUAC to testify about Communist activities and influence in the United States. Calling the American Communist Party “a fifth column if there ever was one,” whose goal was “the overthrow of our Government,” Hoover charged that Communists had been “mobilizing, promoting mass meetings, sending telegrams and letters to exert pressure on Congress” in opposition to the aid package to Greece and Turkey.39
Thus, the view that opposition to the Truman Doctrine endangered national security became coupled to the notion that all such dissent was Communist inspired. Now the FBI plan, hatched a year earlier by Assistant Director Ladd, to undermine traditional liberal support of Communists by driving a wedge between the two groups began to truly bear results, as liberals began a desperate attempt to disengage themselves from any taint of radicalism.