The Purge of the Civil Service
Since 1884, the federal government had been forbidden by law to inquire into the “political or religious opinions or affiliations of any applicant” for civil service employment. During World War One, however, the Civil Service Commission (CSC) conducted nearly four thousand loyalty investigations. On the eve of World War Two the Hatch Act was passed, forbidding the employment of any person with “membership in any political party or organization which advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government.” But even during the war years, the CSC forbade its investigators to inquire into any question of reading habits, union affiliations, sympathy for Loyalist Spain, or membership in a number of other organizations that under Truman and Eisenhower would be considered incompatible with federal employment.
The great hunt during the postwar years was, of course, for Communists in government. During World War Two a few hundred Communists had been employed in the new war agencies. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) actively recruited Communist veterans of the Spanish Civil War as commandos. By all accounts, those Communists in the field were highly effective and courageous soldiers; similarly, those working in Washington were reported to have performed commendably. Within a year after war’s end nearly all of them had moved on. The process of easing out the remainder was fairly quiet, at least until 1947 and the advent of Truman’s loyalty program. After 1948, virtually no Communists were uncovered in the federal civil service.
It is worth noting that during the entirety of Roosevelt’s wartime employee security program there were few more than one hundred dismissals and some thirty resignations—a great contrast to what was to follow.
In November 1946, Harry Truman, faced with a newly elected reactionary Congress and under pressure from Tom Clark, his Attorney General, established the President’s Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty. Chairman A. Devitt Vanech, Clark’s special assistant, set the tone by informing the commission of “the serious threat which even one disloyal person constitutes to the security of the United States.” Equally ominous was that most of those summoned to testify were from the FBI, Military Intelligence (G-2), and other investigating agencies. As historian David Caute notes, they were men who “by profession and cast of mind were obsessed not only by the need for total vigilance but also possessed by hatred for the New Deal.” One lieutenant colonel from G-2 testified, “A liberal is only a hop, skip, and a jump from a Communist. A Communist starts as a liberal.”
Truman inaugurated his Employees Loyalty Program on March 25, 1947. Along with it came the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. The starting point of the program was the immediate fingerprinting and processing of loyalty questionnaires from more than two million federal employees. With this information, investigators ran a “national-agency name check” through the files of the FBI, the Civil Service Commission, all military intelligence branches, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The object of this search was “derogatory information,” which was defined as anything that bore, directly or indirectly, on the question of “reasonable doubt” as to loyalty. All affiliations with suspect organizations, associations with suspect persons, and reports of behavior, expression, and opinions that might indicate some degree of sympathy with communism were extracted.
Within a few years, another development intensified the repressive nature of the program. In 1950, Congress passed Public Law 733, which permitted the suspension of an employee, without due process, for reasons of “national security.” A security risk was not necessarily disloyal, but might be someone whose character, habits, and associations made him or her potentially liable to disclose classified information, or vulnerable to blackmail. This opened personal beliefs and behavior to investigation. One woman, for instance, found herself deemed a security risk because her child arrived “too soon” after her marriage. Scott McLeod, the State Department’s chief security man, put it succinctly: “There can be no proof [of security risk], since future events are not susceptible to proof.”
As the loyalty-security apparatus grew more extensive, with ever more files and investigations, chances increased that something might turn up that could be considered derogatory—which routinely led to a “full field investigation” By 1952, more than forty thousand federal employees had undergone full-scale investigations, which entailed the interviewing of friends, neighbors, fellow students, fellow employees, former teachers and colleagues, even one’s grocer or hairdresser. This set off another round of name-checking, as all these associates had to be checked for derogatory information as well. After 1953, the Eisenhower program mandated a full investigation for every “sensitive” position, which was defined so loosely that, for example, every single position in the State Department fell under this heading.
If an employee was so unlucky as to be charged with disloyalty, he met his inquisitors at one of the two hundred agency loyalty boards1 established under the Truman program. An employee who lost out at this level was afforded an appeal to one of the fourteen regional boards, and above that to the twenty-five members of the Loyalty Review Board. These “distinguished and stalwart” men, as the Herald Tribune described them, were largely conservative and Republican, as this was Truman’s shield against right-wing criticism. Liberal intellectuals were considered too “naive” for service on any of the boards. However, as many of the charges made clear, naiveté was not the function of one’s political outlook.
This was amply demonstrated when Charles Bohlen’s confirmation as Eisenhower’s ambassador to the Soviet Union temporarily ran aground. One of the principal derogatories in his loyalty-security file was a statement by a stenographer who claimed she could detect immorality in men with her “sixth sense.” Accordingly, Bohlen’s vibrations were not on the straight and narrow. In another case, a Pentagon bootblack was accused of having donated ten dollars to the Scottsboro Defense Fund.2 The man underwent seventy FBI interviews before he was judged loyal enough to polish military shoes—even though the alleged offense occurred before he was born.
Neither the Truman nor the Eisenhower program ensured that once investigated and cleared an employee would stay cleared. With every new transfer or promotion came a new investigation. As every new law and executive order imposed increasingly stringent criteria, old cases were reviewed in light of new standards. Numerous employees found themselves investigated and cleared seven or eight times, only to be finally suspended without pay or dismissed on the same charges.
The reaction of government employees was fear and suspicion. “Loyalty Issue Keeps U.S. Employees Jittery,” announced the Herald Tribune in June 1950. In 1952, two psychologists, Marie Jahoda and Stuart Cook, published a study of the effects of the loyalty and security programs on seventy federal employees from more than a dozen agencies. Some spoke of “Gestapo methods,” “just like in Germany.” A number of those approached refused to participate, fearing an FBI ruse. Others begged off, concerned that “in an investigation I might be asked why I participated.”
The universal aim was to avoid investigation at all costs, for even if the final result was clearance, the punishment of suspension without pay, loss of reputation, and the burden of legal fees started long before the investigation was completed. Extreme caution was the only deterrent. “Why lead with your chin?” asked one respondent. “If Communists like apple pie and I do, I see no reason why I should stop eating it. But I would.” One’s reading habits were considered crucial. One man explained, “If there is only a rumor that a person reads Marx, nothing will happen to him. Of course, if the rumor turns out to be true, this is a different matter.” Others prudently limited their magazine reading to Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. Another person recalled moving into a new home only to find a stack of New Masses3 in the basement. “I didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed dangerous. So in the end I burned it.”
Involvement in any organization concerned with social reform or the spread of ideas was automatically suspect. It was better not to join any organizations at all, as one could never be sure what group might appear on the Attorney General’s list. For a short period, even the Consumers Union, publishers of Consumer Reports, was listed as subversive. Whether at work or in a social setting, controversial discussions were to be avoided. Taboo topics included admitting Red China to the UN, atomic energy, religion, and civil rights. One respondent so desired to avoid conversation that he chose to take an earlier bus to work because he had overheard some regulars on his original bus discussing politics.
By the summer of 1955 the liberal press was agitating against the abuses of the security programs, giving heart to the liberal elements in Congress. But the power of the conservatives was far too great to permit any meaningful corrective legislation. The most effective challenges came in the late 1950s, as the Supreme Court began to restore the rights of due process, including the right to cross-examine hostile witnesses. These rulings restored more than one hundred employees to their jobs and forced proceedings to be dropped against more than seventy-five others.
Between six thousand and nine thousand government employees were fired under the Truman/Eisenhower loyalty programs. At least eight thousand were forced to resign. Three went to prison (William Remington was murdered there), one died of a heart attack, and at least seven others were driven to suicide.4
In 1950, Jerry Manheim was a young and gifted physicist at IT&T. He enjoyed the defense work he was involved in and looked forward to a promising career. The promise was cut short when he was accused of being the head of a Communist ring within the laboratory. He was not cleared for nearly six years. In 1960, CBS aired The Pieces, a cautionary drama based on his experiences.1
JERRY: I was brought up in Chicago in a very middle-class home. I had no information about anything left of the Democratic Party until college. I think I was a sophomore when I saw a sign for a Socialist Study Club meeting. I didn’t know what that meant, so I went, and was very impressed with the philosophical position the group was espousing. I joined. I was drafted probably within a year of that meeting. I met Sylvia at a dance for servicemen at Local 65, and started seeing her regularly. She was working at the time as a switchboard operator at the Communist Party headquarters in New York. She arranged for me and a friend of mine to have a meeting with V. J. Jerome, who was the chief theoretician of the Communist Party at that time.
SYLVIA: Also the editor of The New Masses.
JERRY: So my friend and I went up and had this meeting with him at Communist Party headquarters. It was verbally violent. My friend was afraid they were going to throw us out the window. After we left, they told Sylvia if she wanted to keep her job, she should stop seeing me, because I was a . . . what was I?
SYLVIA: You were a “left-wing deviationist and Trotskyite.”2
JERRY: And Trotskyite? I didn’t even know I was a Trotskyite, but apparently that’s what I was. When the war ended, I attended the University of Illinois. Sylvia also went there, and we continued going to the Socialist Study Club. In 1946 we were married. Around 1949, I got a job in research and development with IT&T in New Jersey. I was working on what they called the “strip line,” which was the precursor of the printed circuit. We were also doing work on a system for a missile.
I had been there approximately ten months when I was called into the security office. They came and got me out of my lab. When I got to the office, they informed me that I was a security risk. They wouldn’t give me any information, except that I had to be out of there immediately. A security man followed me back to my office while I cleared out my radio and lunch bucket. I couldn’t even go by myself because I was such a terrible risk. [Laughs.] I was on leave without pay until it was resolved. There I was, out on my ass.
The very first thing I did was to call up the ACLU. I was a member. I told them what happened. Those were in the good ol’ Morris Ernst days. He was head of the ACLU back then. Sometime after he died, they found his private papers, and there were a whole bunch of letters that began, “Dear Edgar, What can I do for you now?”3 They said, “We can’t help you at all.” I was dumbfounded. So I said to the ACLU person, “Well, what are the names of the organizations on the Attorney General’s list?”—figuring I might’ve belonged to one of them. They said, “We won’t tell you that.” They wouldn’t even give me a list of the organizations.
I went to see this attorney, Murray Gordon, of the same firm that represented David Greenglass,4 and I liked him very much. He said he would take my case.
We found out that IT&T claimed that I was head of a Communist ring there. That was the main accusation and that’s why they fired me. Years later, through my FBI files, I discovered that I was also supposed to be the head of the Communist Party in Hartford, Connecticut. I had been to Hartford exactly once for two hours to go to the veteran’s hospital for a test.
Because IT&T was involved with the Department of Defense, the hearing was held at the Pentagon. We collected people who would go down and testify on my behalf. Of course, asking someone to testify presents a risk of sorts for them, some of it real and some imagined. People responded in ways which I never would have predicted. There were those who said, “I don’t want to have any more conversations with you, just don’t call me anymore.” Some of my close friends responded that way. Others, like a young person I knew, a member of the Young People’s Socialist League and in a defense industry, had no qualms about coming. Of all the people who went, he put himself at what I’d consider maximum risk. I don’t think I even asked him.
The hearing was held before a board of military people. The chairman was a civilian, as I recall, and the rest were all big brass from the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force. They were mainly colonel rank, or the equivalent, and they had been tapped and told, “Your next three-month assignment is to sit in Washington and listen to security cases.” They had no training in this at all. Some of them had very minimal education.
They brought up the fact that when I was in the Army, I was a member of the orientation team for our company. They said, “As a member of the orientation team, you said such-and-such about the Russians.”
I said, “That’s true, I did.”
They said, “That’s real Communist stuff.”
“I didn’t have any option. We were given all the material by the Army. My job was to pass it on to the troops at the orientation meeting.”
They said, “That’s a lie. The Army would never say that about the Russians.”
“Well, can I have some time to find the pamphlet and send you a copy of it?” They agreed to give me two weeks.
They also said that I was a member of the Party, that I was in charge of the ring at IT&T, and that they had evidence for this. None of it was true. They pointed to the fact that I had a book in my house called Political Economy by an economist named Leontiev. That was right. I picked it up for a quarter at a used-book sale. I thought it would be interesting, but I never had read it. Sylvia also testified at the hearing.
SYLVIA: I was very nervous. Colonel Rounds, who was sitting in the back, a rather rotund colonel with red cheeks, got up and said, “Mrs. Manheim, what organizations does your son Carl belong to?”
I said, “My son is five years old. He belongs to the Cub Scouts. That’s a crazy question.”
He said, “Well, I have to tell you, Mrs. Manheim, that Communist parents indoctrinate their children at young ages.” At that point, I knew in my soul that we didn’t have a chance. With that kind of reasoning, I knew it was over.
They asked me what newspapers I read. I told them that I read the New York Post, which was a good newspaper in those days, and that I occasionally read the New York Times. They said, “Why don’t you read the Journal American?” which was just one of these scandal sheets. They also asked, “Do you frequent a movie house called the Little Carnegie?” They said they saw me attend a Russian movie there. I said, “Well, yes, I like foreign films.” They also noticed that I belonged to a drama reading group, that we had a black friend, that people of other colors came to visit us. All these things fit together on a profile of a really subversive couple.
JERRY: Of course, they brought up the fact that Sylvia had worked as a switchboard operator at the Communist Party headquarters, which in their eyes was tantamount to being in the hierarchy.
That was the end of the hearing, and then I had two weeks to find the pamphlet. I went to Columbia University and found the pamphlet in the library. I wasn’t allowed to take it, as it was classified. But I cut out the pages I needed. It was that important to me. The same day that I sent in this evidence showing that what I had said was accurate, I got the verdict. They had no interest in it. The decision from the security board was that I was a security risk.
We had no idea who had accused me in the first place. They wouldn’t tell me. They protected their confidential sources. We spent a long time wondering who saw that book Political Economy in the house. It turned out that it was probably the black fellow that used to come to our house! [Laughs.] That would be ironic. We couldn’t figure anybody else that could’ve done that.
When we got the verdict, I was thrown out on my ear. I had a friend, an engineer, who was selling televisions out of his house and putting up antennas. He hired me for something like fifty dollars a week. It was an obscenely low salary. I was putting antennas up and practically killing myself in the winter, sliding off the roofs. I wasn’t that agile. I worked with him for quite a while, from ’50 to the end of ’52. Then I worked with another fellow who was trying to start an engineering company. I worked in his basement, soldering and doing various other things. After that, I got a job with a company that did some defense work. They wanted to know what my clearance level was. So I had to say, “I don’t want to do any defense work,” and I quit. This happened a couple of times. Everyone was doing defense work, so I was only around for a few months at a time. I felt like a pariah, like I was lurking around society as a shadow. It was terrible.
During this time, the FBI was always around. Sometimes they’d get into our car and talk to us, which was better than getting in their bugged car to talk to them. They were always asking about other people, and I never told them anything. But sometimes, I would be stupid and engage them in conversation. I remember them talking about Einstein, and everything they said about him was wrong. After all, I do know something about physics. It was just crazy.
SYLVIA: They even went to our neighbors and asked if we borrowed anything and if we didn’t return it. Remember the time they came to my house and asked about my mother? These two lovely young FBI men—they all came in pairs wearing three-piece suits, gray with a little vest—knocked on my door. I invited them in. They said to me, “We know that you worked for the Communist Party, and if you don’t give us the names of the people that you worked with, your mother could be deported. We know she became a citizen illegally.” They gave me twenty-four hours to make up my mind. I didn’t sleep all night. They came back the next morning, the same handsome men in their three-piece suits, and I invited them in, offered them coffee. All I said to them was, “I have to look in the mirror in the morning and face myself. I can’t give you names.”
I said, “The only people that I do remember are Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz.”5 Of course, everybody knew them. So I said, “Those are the two people that I know worked for the Party, but the other people, it’s been ten, fifteen years, I have no idea. What do you want me to do?” That was it, and they left.
JERRY: I was just going from job to job, feeling awful. Finally, I got a job teaching at Cooper Union. I worked in the math department in the engineering school. It was now ’55, and the climate had changed. We knew that if we got some new documentary evidence, we could reopen the case. Sylvia found some of the letters I’d written her when I was overseas in the Army, telling her my opinion of the Communist Party. I had an attorney friend who told me, “I think you ought to try to get Joseph Rauh to handle your case.”
I’d received a telegram from Roy Cohn to appear at Foley Square to testify, so I went to Rauh and his partners to discuss the situation. When they asked what I was planning on doing, I said, “I’m going to take the Fifth Amendment.”
Rauh said, “Why are you going to do that?”
“Because it’s nobody’s business what my politics are.”
Rauh responded, “That’s really nifty. Don’t you know they want people like you, Fifth Amendment Communists?6 How many Communists do you know?”
I said, “I don’t know anybody that I can say for sure is a Communist.”
“And you’re going to take the Fifth?”
They really leaned on me, saying that this was a stupid thing to do, and that it was very selfish of me. I understood their argument, but I wasn’t ready for it. That weekend, Rauh went to Washington. He was having lunch in some restaurant when Joe McCarthy came over and said, “Oh boy, we’re going to have your man Manheim on the stand, a Commie, and we’re going to run him into the ground.” He was gloating about the fact that they were getting me to Foley Square.
Rauh said, “He’s going to be wonderful. Manheim’s not taking the Fifth.”
“What do you mean, he’s not taking the Fifth?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. He’s not taking the Fifth.”
McCarthy was absolutely flabbergasted. The next day I got a telegram canceling my appearance at Foley Square. Rauh was absolutely right, all they wanted were Fifth Amendment Communists. [Laughs.]
So Rauh collected data and we decided to have another hearing. This time it was in New York, in some federal office. These were civilians. They said, “We want to tape-record this conversation. Just to make sure there are no errors. You’ll have an opportunity to read the transcript to make any corrections you want.” They asked about being a member of the Party. I told them I was not, nor had I ever been, a Communist. I’d never been pro-Communist.
This time, my clearance was restored. Afterwards, I decided to sue the government for the money that I lost, since I was never a risk. I had been receiving extraordinary raises when I was at IT&T, but all I could claim were the statutory raises. At this point, I was teaching for thirty-six hundred dollars; at IT&T I had been making seven thousand dollars. With just the statutory raises, they would owe me something like forty thousand dollars, a huge amount of money. The government’s position was, no, they only owed me the difference between what I made and what I would’ve made had I not received any raises. We settled on their terms. We got two thousand dollars, and the attorneys took a third. I ended up with fourteen hundred dollars, my payment for all of this agony.
Getting my clearance was very important to me psychologically, but it didn’t matter in terms of employment. I didn’t have the stomach for going back into industry. I never did.
As founder and national chairman of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), Rauh was known as anti-Communist and anti-McCarthy.
One of America’s foremost defenders of civil liberties and civil rights, he represented many of the government employees trapped in the Employees Loyalty Program.
Whatever one might say to justify the Red-baiting battles in the forties, the fight was over by the time McCarthy came in 1950. The Communists had no strength left by ’48. Whether one wants to feel it was a significant war, whether one feels the Communists were never very strong, I’ve got to leave that to the experts. But I don’t think McCarthy is the most important guy in the world. He just hurt people. There was nothing there by the time he got there. He built a demagogic, synthetic machine against an enemy that didn’t exist.
I became known as a loyalty lawyer because of the ’47 Truman program. I’m against the idea of testing anybody’s loyalty. If you have access to the hydrogen bomb, you may want to have cautionary procedures. I don’t question that. But to have this kind of procedure applying to all government employees, it was just outrageous. There was no possible justification for the Truman executive order. So I handled as many cases as I could.
I spent at least ten years of my life trying to knock out Hoover’s position on the loyalty security order. He would not put up the names of his informants except when they agreed, and generally they didn’t agree. So you knew what was said, but you didn’t know who the hell said it. You could have somebody that you had insulted say something about you that wasn’t true. You could have somebody you’d had a fistfight with say something that wasn’t true. The people running the program didn’t realize how outrageous not having confrontation was. You can’t be fined for a traffic ticket without the policeman that gave it to you, and if you want to say the policeman was drunk, you’ve got a right to say it. But you could have your loyalty impugned and lose your job without ever knowing who said what about you. It was an absolute disgrace.
In one case I handled, a federal employee was accused of having received regular shipments of Communist literature at his home. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the government witness was also the accuser. He was my client’s ex-landlord. I asked him, “You said earlier it was Communist material. How did you know it was Communist material?” He said, “Any literature that brings up the names of Karl Marx and Lenin is not about football games. When you see these names in literature you know what it is about.” Then I said, “So the literature could have been labeled as anti-Communist?” He said, “I didn’t know, it could have been. It might have been anti-Communist material.”
Well, the case was over. But it was an accident that I blew their case up, sheer accident that the government was silly enough to put on a guy that they hadn’t even questioned to see if he had the right answers.
I guess I won Hoover’s enmity. Hoover would leak my file of the cases to his senators. In 1950, Max Lowenthal published a hostile book on the FBI1 and the Washington Post decided it was too hot to handle with just one review, so they had two. Father Walsh2 of Georgetown was the pro-Hoover, and I was nominated to write the anti-Hoover review. It ran on a Sunday, and that morning the phone rang at eight o’clock. It was Justice Frankfurter.3 He said, “Joe, you really gave it to that swine Hoover!” He hated Hoover’s guts. At noon the next day, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa gave a full-dress review of my FBI file on the Senate floor. All about my loyalty cases, how I’d once been the counsel for some Polish relief operation after World War Two. Everything you could think of. The object of putting this out on the Senate floor was to discredit me, to show that I was pro-Communist.
In 1951, Charlie Murphy4 called me up and said that the President would like to see a few leaders of the ADA to talk about next year’s campaign. Truman hadn’t decided whether he was going to run in ’52. So I had a roundup of about nine or ten of us and we went over to Blair House, where he was living at the time. Each of our people had a chance to say what they thought of the Truman administration. I had arranged to go last. I said, “Mr. President, as far as I’m concerned the loyalty program is a disaster,” and I told him the story about the supposed Communist literature. Truman turned to Charlie Murphy and Dave Lloyd,5 two staff people he’d brought with him, and said, “Is Joe telling the truth? Is that really happening?” Both Charlie and Dave said, “Yes, Mr. President, we’re afraid there are cases like Joe has mentioned.” Truman said, “We’ve got to do something about it.” Now, either I didn’t get through or somebody lied to him about what they were doing, because three weeks later he signed an order that tightened the law and made it worse.6 God knows, he might have been play-acting with me. But how do you know when a President’s play-acting?
People were allowed legal representation when in front of the loyalty board, but there was only so much a lawyer could do. How can you cross-examine a piece of paper? That’s exacdy what my job was. You had the charges and a witness that didn’t show up. So you always had to ask for the witness, and when they didn’t appear, make an argument that this proves the witness is lying.
The best example of that was the William Remington7 case. I always refer to that as my little Hiss case. Remington worked in the Commerce Department and was trained as an economist. Miss Elizabeth Bentley8 was his accuser. She was this roly-poly thing. She was always portrayed as a Mata Hari, but if she was Mata Hari, I feel sorry for those guys that slept with her. She had called Bill a Communist on Meet the Press. We had no choice but to sue or give in. So we sued for libel, and eventually won, settling out of court.
At the same time, Remington was called before the loyalty board. Remington was rather an egotistical fellow and thought he could handle the loyalty hearing himself. He lost in the lower board. We appealed and just hammered on having Bentley come for cross-examination. The board asked Bentley to come, but they didn’t have subpoena powers and she didn’t show up, and we won.
Then the grand jury indicted him for perjury, for saying he wasn’t a member of the Communist Party. It was incredibly biased; the foreman of the grand jury was writing a book with Bentley and the prosecuting attorney had been Bentley’s personal lawyer.9 He was convicted and then the court of appeals reversed it. Then they reindicted him for things he said when he took the stand defending himself. They claimed that he denied knowing of the existence of the Young Communist League when he was at Dartmouth. He was convicted for a second time. The Supreme Court wouldn’t grant him a review. He was sent to a hard-core prison, Lewisburg, and given no protection there despite their awareness of anti-Communist rough talk. Bill worked at night and slept in the daytime, so it was easy to get at him. He was murdered by three car thieves.10 They crushed his brain with a sock with rocks in it. One of them was heard saying, “I’m going to get me a Commie.”
The Remington case is the best illustration of how bad the climate had become. It shows the degree of governmental wrongdoing. The government’s actions are much worse than anything Remington, a lowly employee in the Commerce Department, could possibly have done.
Joseph Rauh died on September 3, 1992, at the age of eighty-one.
Among the three unions representing government workers, the left-wing United Public Workers of America was alone in its stand against Truman’s loyalty program. Membership in the UPWA quickly became incompatible with federal employment. To Al Bernstein fell the job of defending union members summoned before the loyalty boards.
My job had a fancy title—it was called director of negotiations. In those days the issues were primitive. Government workers had really no rights. For example, some of the big issues at the time was just posting vacancies on bulletin boards, and setting up grievance procedures. The bulk of our membership consisted of blue-collar workers—prison guards, veterans’ hospitals—and they had a tough time of it. Prison guards especially were at the mercy of wardens. When I was in San Francisco I organized the prison guards on Alcatraz. And it wasn’t that difficult, because their conditions were awful. They couldn’t get leave—they were in the same spot as the prisoners except they got paid!
When the Executive Order 9835 came down, I slid into the business of representing our members who were brought up on charges. The reason being that part of my duties also had been to handle grievances—and these were grievances. It wasn’t long before my office resembled the waiting room of a very successful physician. I had a good fellow working for me named Art Stein, who was the secretary-treasurer at the time. He had to give me a hand just in screening the cases. There were hundreds of them, literally. For a couple of years I was deluged; I worked day and night.
At my home people would be coming at night hauling these envelopes they had received which were called interrogatories. These interrogatories had no substance to them, they were statements that you’re accused of this, this, and this. These people were scared to death, livelihood at stake, their neighbors being quizzed about them, their position in the community—win, lose or draw—never the same.
I soon found out what the process was about; these were kangaroo courts. No cross-examination of witnesses—in fact, no witnesses. Not only no witnesses, but no evidence. And because of that the cases became extremely difficult. The prevailing rule was guilt by association. If you ever had the courage to speak out on an issue like segregation, you were a marked man. The members of the boards would read from documents which would state, T-171 stated that so-and-so belonged to such-and-such of an organization, or T-17 stated that the employee’s brother was a member of the Communist Party, that was the extent. Some of the stuff you could identify as wiretaps. This was unadulterated, raw stuff that the FBI had turned over to the loyalty boards. They had no way of knowing whether it was any good or not.
It’s unbelievable what went on in those days. Anybody who took a stand on civil liberties or intellectual pursuits like the Washington Bookshop here in D.C.—a meeting place for people who enjoyed intellectual get-togethers—my job was to defend them. The charges were all the same. They ran from associating with your parents, if they were under suspicion, to going to this bookshop. It was something ironical—the woman who was the head of the bookshop at this time was an employee of the Interior Department, a well-respected woman, and she got hit with the charges. I represented her and we won! But the bookstore continued to be a source of charges. I’d win the case, I’d have to go in again and defend someone else for going into it.
What you did was put them on the stand and tried to deal with these questions. In practically every case you got character witnesses from their bosses, their fellow workers. That was all you could do. We were successful in many of them. Successful in the fellow didn’t lose his job, but what happened was they finally couldn’t get promotions, so they’d quit. You couldn’t win.
Of course, the union was under attack2 at the same time, and I came into my share of it. It was terrible; the wife gets affected, your kids get harassed at school. When the union blew up I was really unemployable and I knew it, so I opened a laundromat. I stayed there about five years. The FBI would stop us on the street long after I had ceased to be a union functionary. They’d show me their credentials and I would tell them, “I have nothing to say.” I later discovered that they followed me around in automobile surveillance. Here I was running a laundromat and they were following me around!
1The military and the Veterans Administration handled their loyalty problems separately, with more than five hundred loyalty boards of their own.
2On March 25, 1931, in Scottsboro, Alabama, nine young black men were framed on rape charges, quickly tried, and sentenced to death. The Communist Party’s spirited defense through the seven-year legal battle crystallized black support for the Party. In 1937, four of the defendants were released; the remaining five endured long prison sentences—the last defendant was not released until 1950.
3The New Masses was the dominant radical literary journal from its founding in 1926 to its demise in 1948. Among the artists and writers featured were Reginald Marsh, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes.
4The tallies of firings, forced resignations, mortalities, etc. that conclude these chapter introductions are necessarily often educated guesses derived from a number of secondary sources. Ralph Brown’s Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958) is the best-known of these, but only covers the period up to 1956. David Caute’s The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978) attempts a more accurate count.
1In an irony perhaps emblematic of the times, the actor who portrayed Manheim most likely had to be approved first by CBS’s own security officer. At this time, CBS still maintained its own blacklist of actors, writers, and technicians. See Mark Goodson under “Arts and Entertainment” for more on the television blacklist.
2A follower of Leon Trotsky, the archrival of Joseph Stalin, and therefore in opposition to the American Communist Party. The Trotskyists, as they preferred the term, believed the Soviet Union had degenerated under the leadership of Stalin and favored a return to the Leninist regime, which they believed was more internally democratic and internationally revolutionary. In 1941, while exiled in Mexico City, Trotsky was murdered with a mountaineering ax. The deed had been ordered by Stalin.
3Morris Ernst was not only a giant of civil liberties and the general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (1930–54), but also J. Edgar Hoover’s personal attorney and friend, a fanatic champion of the FBI, and an informant. Ernst neutralized criticism of the FBI within the ACLU, turned over privileged communications to the Bureau, and even offered to become the attorney for the Rosenbergs, so as to better assist the FBI. Irving Ferman, director of the ACLU Washington office from 1952 to 1959, was also an FBI informer. Ferman regularly sent in names of ACLU members for security checks, turned over internal documents, and informed on persons critical of the FBI.
4David Greenglass was the central prosecution witness in the Rosenberg atom spy case. His testimony ensured the convictions of his sister, Ethel, and her husband, Julius. See under “Atom Spies.”
5Bentley and Budenz were well-known ex-Communists and FBI informers.
6Pleading the Fifth Amendment was the only sure way an unfriendly witness could avoid prison and at the same time avoid testifying about his beliefs or acquaintances, who would certainly be forced to undergo the same ordeal. Pinning the tag of “Fifth Amendment Communist” to a witness was designed to leave a perception of conspiratorial activity, which would generate more sensational headlines.
1Lowenthal’s The Federal Bureau of Investigation (New York: William Sloane, 1950) was the first book to hit the stands that was critical of the FBI. To make sure it would be the last, Hoover developed a web of informants in publishing. Among them were Henry Holt and Bennett Cerf, who may have been instrumental in delaying by six years the publication of a later critique. In the meantime, both Lowenthal and his publisher found themselves grilled by HUAC; the book was denounced on the floor of the House and Senate; planted editorials condemned it and Hoover’s favored columnists trashed it; Hoover’s agents were instructed to discourage booksellers from stocking it. The author was publicly and privately smeared—he never published another book.
2Father Edmund Walsh, the Georgetown University dean who first suggested that Joe McCarthy might want to use Communists in government as his campaign theme.
3Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, for whom Lowenthal had once been a law clerk.
4Charles Murphy, who succeeded Clark Clifford as special counsel, was one of Truman’s principal advisers.
5A presidential assistant and speechwriter, David Lloyd was also a founding member of the anti-Communist ADA. In 1947, Joe McCarthy accused him and his wife of being “members of Communist-front organizations” and claimed that Lloyd had “a relative who had a financial interest in the Daily Worker.“ The source for the charges was the files of the State Department’s personnel security program. One week later, Lloyd revealed that he and his wife had belonged to a few left-wing organizations “a long time ago” and that the relative in question was his greataunt, who had died in 1941.
6In April 1951, responding to congressional cries of “soft on communism,” Truman tightened the criteria for dismissal with Executive Order 10241, only three months after he publicly voiced fears that his loyalty and security program was infringing civil liberties. Whereas under E. O. 9835 an employee would be retained if there was reasonable doubt of disloyalty, the new amendment mandated dismissal. Thus Truman reversed the burden of proof; civil servants would now have to prove their innocence. By March 1952, of the 9,300 employees who had been cleared, 2,756 were again under investigation in light of the new criterion.
7A hapless government employee whose 1936 undergraduate sabbatical as a messenger boy for the Tennessee Valley Authority included roommates who were, or may have been, Communists.
8Elizabeth Bentley, billed by the press as the “Blond Spy Queen,” worked within the Party as an FBI informer from 1945 to 1947. She then went on to become one of the more sensational professional witnesses of the period. In 1948, she accused Remington of having given her government documents to pass on to the Russians during the war.
9In a 1990 article that reviewed the case, Rauh wrote, “Working together, they [the foreman and prosecutor] called Remington’s estranged wife before the grand jury and forced her—by threatening statements, harsh and misleading questions, and denial of food—to change her earlier story that she and her husband had never been members of the Communist Party.” Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., “An Unabashed Liberal Looks at a Half-Century of the Supreme Court,” North Carolina Law Review 69, no. 1 (November 1990), p. 224.
10Remington was killed on November 22, 1954, nine months into his three-year sentence.
1The T designation, perhaps derived from the last letter of “informant,” was used by the FBI to conceal the source of information, which might have been an informer, a wiretap, or a bug. See M. Wesley Swearingen under “Hounds.”
2For another look at the assault on the United Public Workers, see Joe Sachs under “Breaking the Working Class.”