by Jay Feldman
J. Edgar Hoover also took up the theme, saying there was “no room in America for Communists or Communist sympathies in our educational system. Every Communist uprooted from our educational system is one more assurance that it will not degenerate into a medium of propaganda for Marxism.”17 On March 26, Hoover sent out an order to twenty-four field offices, instructing the agents in charge to prepare reports on “subversives” at fifty-six institutions of higher learning, ranging in prestige and influence from Harvard University to Brooklyn College to Fisk University to Contra Costa Junior College.
Anxious to dissociate themselves from any taint of subversion, liberals rushed to support a policy of keeping Communists out of the teaching ranks. “The right of the Communist to teach should be denied,” wrote the Socialist Norman Thomas. “The proven Communist has no place in our schools.”18 Time magazine reported, “Most top educators seemed to agree that … Communists should be barred from teaching.”19 While Barnard’s president, Millicent C. McIntosh, decried the “almost pathological fear of Russia” that had stifled the “free exchange of ideas,” she also proclaimed, “If a teacher is a Communist … he is not fit to teach.”20 McIntosh even advocated institutions of higher learning conducting their own witch hunts, in order to keep Congress from carrying out such purges.
McIntosh was alluding to the ongoing investigations of the teaching profession by HUAC and SISS, which were holding a series of hearings in various cities that would eventually include Boston, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and others.
The committees’ purpose in taking their shows on the road was spelled out by the Pennsylvania Democrat Francis Walter, who chaired HUAC from 1955 to 1963. “By this means,” explained Walter, “active Communists will be exposed before their neighbors and fellow workers, and I have every confidence that the loyal Americans who work with them will do the rest of the job.”21 This was exactly what happened in Flint, Michigan, when HUAC came to town. Automobile workers who had been subpoenaed and appeared before the committee were dragged from their factories and beaten by mobs. Some families were evicted from their homes and forced into hiding, and the office of a lawyer who had represented the subpoenaed workers was smeared with red paint. Michigan’s representative Kit Clardy, a HUAC member and outspoken McCarthy supporter whose district included Flint, was delighted. “This is the best kind of reaction there could have been to our hearings,” he gloated.22
In mid-1953, The Harvard Crimson reported that of the more than one hundred college and university professors who had invoked the Fifth Amendment before one of the congressional investigating committees, fifty-four had been fired or suspended, and more than a hundred grade-school teachers had been similarly discharged or suspended for refusing to cooperate.
In California, the Dilworth Act of 1953 required that all teachers take a non-Communist oath or be dismissed. The law also conferred investigative powers on local school boards, and the same year another statute, the Luckel Act, gave the state board of education the same authority. More than a hundred teachers lost their jobs, and an equal number were refused employment.
The most extensive and unremitting educational purge took place in New York City. It started in 1949, with the passage of the Feinberg Law, a state statute aimed at “elimination of subversive persons from the public school system.”23 Under the law, membership in any organization that the state board of regents determined to be “subversive” was considered “prima facie evidence of disqualification” to teach in the state’s public schools. Each school district was required to conduct an annual investigation, complete with written reports, of all teachers and other school employees to determine if they had committed “subversive acts” or belonged to “subversive organizations.” Those found guilty were to be fired. The legislation painted with such a broad brush that “subversive” activities could be construed to include publishing articles, distributing literature, or endorsing someone else’s article or speech—whether these activities occurred during school or not. A teachers’ union spokesperson called the act “the most vicious, sweeping heresy hunt ever conjured up … [T]he Feinberg Law is not aimed at subversive teaching but is a weapon for terrorizing all teachers … into abject, cowardly submission to authority.”24 The Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas wrote, “The law inevitably turns the school system into a spying project.”25
On May 3, 1950, eight New York City teachers were suspended without pay. At their hearings, although the examiner declared in each case, “I have heard no proof of any conduct unbecoming a teacher … in the classroom or in extracurricular activity,” he nevertheless recommended their dismissals.26 The eight teachers were released for insubordination under Section 903 of the city charter, by which a city employee could be fired for refusing to answer official questions concerning official conduct.
In January 1951, the board of education assigned New York City’s assistant corporation counsel, Saul Moskoff, to conduct investigations of public school teachers. At board headquarters, Moskoff set up an office that included complete files on suspected teachers and a comprehensive card file titled “Communism in the New York Schools.”27 The office also contained an interrogation room, complete with recording devices and a two-way mirror through which suspected teachers could be secretly observed. They were questioned about “what books they read, what people they knew, what feelings they harbored about Spain, whether they voted for the ALP [American Labor Party] and about the … petitions they had signed.”28
By the time SISS began its fall 1952 hearings in New York City, twenty-four teachers had been dismissed, and forty-nine more had resigned or retired while being investigated. SISS subpoenaed the entire leadership of the left-wing teachers’ union, every one of whom was fired for taking the Fifth. In all, the committee called twenty-five New York City teachers; the board of education dismissed thirteen of them without any hearings.
New York City’s educational witch hunt continued throughout the rest of the decade. In March 1955, the board of education voted 7–1 to require teachers to inform on their colleagues when so ordered by the superintendent of schools. Five who refused to do so were suspended without pay.
Parallel carnage occurred at the city’s five municipal colleges, where by June 1953 there had been fourteen dismissals. In September, the board of higher education created a special committee to interrogate all of the system’s nineteen hundred teachers. The next April, three professors at Hunter College were fired, and dozens more dismissals followed.
The casualty figures from the New York City inquisition are stark. On the K–12 level, 38 teachers were discharged, and 283 more either resigned or retired after being investigated and questioned. In all, 321 individuals, the vast majority of them Jewish, lost their jobs. According to a 1971 New York Times report, some of the released teachers took positions in private schools—often at greatly reduced salaries—others went into higher education, a few became psychologists, and many worked at nonteaching jobs. In the city colleges, 58 individuals either were fired, resigned, or retired. Hundreds more at both the K–12 and the college levels were interrogated and “absolved.”29
Reflecting on the effect of the educational purge, one dismissed New York City teacher uttered what could very well be the slogan of the decade: “There were many wrecked lives.”30
On other fronts, the Eisenhower administration continued to perpetuate the red scare. In October 1953, six months after the president’s new loyalty program went into effect, the White House claimed that 1,456 government employees had been dismissed since the introduction of the new regulations. Over the next year, the announced numbers steadily climbed, until several weeks before the 1954 midterm elections, the Civil Service Commission, at Vice President Nixon’s urging, disclosed that nearly 7,000 federal workers had been fired or had resigned under the Eisenhower program. On the campaign trail, Nixon triumphantly proclaimed, “We’re kicking the Communists and fellow travelers and security risks out of government … by the thousands.”31
But after the election, in which the Democrats recaptured Congress, the CSC admitted that of those “thousands” who had left their government positions, over 90 percent did so through ordinary procedures—a mere 342 had been dismissed as a result of the security-review process, and half of those had been hired since Eisenhower took office.
What percentage of those 342 “security risks” represented any real danger to the nation has never been determined, but as the case of Abraham Chasanow indicates, the security-review process was dangerously fallible. Chasanow, a twenty-three-year employee of the Navy’s Hydrographic Office, was suspended without pay on July 29, 1953, on the word of “unidentified informants” who accused him of “Left-Wing associations.”32 Chasanow was dismissed the following April, and it was only when his attorney presented additional evidence to Assistant Secretary of the Navy James H. Smith Jr. that the latter established a special hearing board to reconsider the case. When the credibility of Chasanow’s accusers crumbled, he was reinstated with back pay on September 1, 1954, after a “thirteen-month nightmare.”
In reinstating Chasanow, Smith conceded that the Navy was “probably a little naïve” in not checking the accuracy of the accusations sooner. Chasanow believed that the accusations against him came either from anti-Semites or from opponents of the cooperative housing project he had been instrumental in developing. In a letter about the case to the secretary of the Navy, the chairman of the executive committee of the American Jewish Congress wrote that “under the present loyalty program there is far too much room for action based on suspicion, arbitrary conjecture and secrecy.”33 There were other instances in which falsely accused government employees were dismissed and later reinstated, but how many cases there were in which accused employees were similarly blameless but never returned to their jobs can only be surmised.
The witch-hunters pressed on. Between 1953 and 1956, forty-two more Communist leaders were indicted for violations of the Smith Act. In May 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell upheld the long-standing tradition of wanton, extralegal spying on civilians by governmental agencies when he authorized the FBI to use surveillance microphones in uncovering the activities of “espionage agents, possible saboteurs, and subversive persons.” Brownell stressed that such surveillance did not have to be limited to developing “evidence for prosecution.”34
The same year, encouraged by the Eisenhower administration, Congress passed a rash of new antisubversive laws, including statutes revoking the citizenship of individuals convicted of advocating violent overthrow of the government; requiring Communist organizations to register all printing equipment; broadening the definitions of sabotage and espionage; and making peacetime espionage a capital crime.
The most repressive new law was the Communist Control Act of 1954, which extended the Internal Security Act of 1950. The law outlawed the Communist Party, and as an outlawed entity it was not entitled to any of the “rights, privileges, and immunities” that legal organizations enjoyed.35 The Communist Party was, at last, illegitimate, a step that even the rabidly anti-Communist J. Edgar Hoover had advised against in 1948.36
The Communist Control Act constrained labor unions as well. Section 13A(a) established that any union designated as “Communist-infiltrated” by the attorney general and the Subversive Activities Control Board lost all “rights, privileges, and immunities” normally granted to labor organizations under existing law.
The Eisenhower administration also went after left-wing labor leaders. By 1956, it had achieved twenty perjury convictions of individuals who had taken the non-Communist oath required by the draconian Taft-Hartley Act.
While the government was conducting its campaign against Communists, fellow travelers, and other left-wing “subversives,” it was also carrying on a parallel scapegoating of another minority group. This effort began in 1947, when a State Department board set up to create departmental security guidelines determined that in addition to Communists and their associates, employees who evidenced “habitual drunkenness, sexual perversion, moral turpitude, financial irresponsibility or criminal record” were to be purged from the agency. Such individuals, it was argued, while perhaps not guilty of disloyalty, were nonetheless considered to possess “such basic weakness of character or lack of judgment” that they might unwittingly be compromised by an association with subversives, who would then employ blackmail to obtain state secrets.37
The seemingly inclusive grouping was a smoke screen; the new guidelines were aimed primarily and almost exclusively at gays. By the beginning of 1950, ninety-one homosexuals—eighty-nine men and two women—either were dismissed from the State Department or resigned while under investigation.
On February 28, 1950, not three weeks after McCarthy’s Wheeling address and just eight days after his five-hour speech to the Senate, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Deputy Undersecretary for Administration John Peurifoy appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Acheson outlined the main categories of security risks, including members of the Communist, Nazi, and Fascist parties, persons engaged in espionage or who had knowingly divulged classified information, and persons who, while not being any of those, had habitually associated with such people. Acheson then indicated another category of security risk: any individual who had, “as a matter of character, any defect … which could be preyed upon or which might be used by somebody who was attempting to penetrate into the Department.” Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, the committee’s ranking Republican, asked Acheson, “Such as homosexuality or a person with a criminal record?” to which the secretary of state responded, “That would be included.”38
Bridges pressed Acheson for more specifics, wanting to know how many employees had been dismissed under the McCarran rider, by which the secretary of state had absolute discretion to fire any employee for security reasons.39 When Acheson said there had been only one, Bridges wanted to know how many others had resigned while under investigation.
Peurifoy jumped in and answered, “In this shady category that you referred to earlier, there are 91 cases, sir.”
Bridges was not satisfied. “What do you mean by ‘shady category’?” he demanded.
Peurifoy responded, “We are talking about people of moral weakness and so forth that we have gotten rid of in the Department.”
Pat McCarran insisted, “Now will you make your answer a little clearer, please?”
Having run out of wiggle room, Peurifoy admitted, “Most of these were homosexuals.”
Peurifoy’s disclosure was a bombshell. All of a sudden the issue of “perverts” in the government became headline news and a rallying point for the Republicans. In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, McCarthy disdainfully lumped “Communists and queers” together.40 The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Guy George Gabrielson, informed seven thousand party workers, “Perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years.”41 And on the floor of the Senate, the McCarthyite Kenneth Wherry demanded to know, “Who could be more dangerous to the United States of America than a pervert?”42 Following the logic of his mentor McCarthy, Wherry conflated Communists and homosexuals. “You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives,” he told the New York Post’s Max Lerner. “Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.”43
In May, a Senate panel was assigned to investigate the issue of homosexuals in the government, headed by Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments. Despite the widely accepted belief that “perverts are … poor security risks because of their vulnerability to blackmail,” the Hoey Committee found no evidence to support that position.44 On the contrary, it was unable to establish a single instance in which an American homosexual had been blackmailed into divulgin
g classified information. Nevertheless, the committee’s December 1950 report stated unequivocally that “sex perverts in Government constitute security risks” and that “one homosexual can pollute a Government office.”45 It was now official: gays, lesbians, and other sexual “deviates” were fully as dangerous as “subversives.”
In March 1951, the State Department security officer Carlisle Humelsine wrote a letter to all mission chiefs in the department, alerting them to the “problem” of homosexual employees and asking them to get rid of “this influence.”46
In the next two years, 53 more gays were separated from the State Department. By the time Eisenhower took office at the beginning of 1953, there had been 144 dismissals and/or resignations.
Early in the Eisenhower administration, Humelsine testified about “a homosexual as a security risk” before an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He told the committee, “This has been a problem, as you all know, that has plagued the Department of State and Foreign Service.”47 At the time of Humelsine’s testimony, 258 more State Department employees had been fired or had resigned, bringing the total number of gays and lesbians who had left the service to 402.
Now Scott McLeod, the new head of the State Department’s Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, took over the purge. McLeod had already overseen the firing of sixteen “moral deviates” and five “security risks” in his first ten days on the job.48 By the end of March, one department security officer proudly proclaimed, “Our batting average [is] now one a day.”49
Making the discovery and dismissal of homosexuals a major component of his crusade, McLeod created the “Miscellaneous M Unit” to investigate homosexuality cases. The “queer” hunt now became an integral facet of the larger witch hunt. According to internal State Department memos, 192 employees were dismissed in the first nine months of 1953, for “Security (Exclusive of Homosexuality),” while 114 were let go for “Security (Homosexuals).”50