On September 15, 1940, William Bankhead died. He was Speaker of the US House of Representatives and father of movie star Tallulah. After a memorial service in Washington, Bankhead’s body was shipped to Jasper, Alabama, to be buried in his family’s plot. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered his entire cabinet to come with him to the burial. By thus honoring a southern politician Roosevelt was hoping to make a peace offering to the conservative Southern Democrats who were furious because he’d recently chosen as his running mate in the upcoming election the Left-leaning Henry Wallace. But on the presidential train returning to the capital, an incident occurred that would be distressing in the extreme to FDR.
The president’s security men learned of it shortly after it happened, but they kept it secret from him. He heard about it anyway, directly from the Federal Bureau of Investigation head J. Edgar Hoover, and he worried. If the public learned of the incident, his chances of being reelected could be seriously damaged. No word of it leaked before the election seven weeks later, and FDR won an unprecedented third term. But the incident on the train triggered huge repercussions for decades after.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull had been unable to attend Bankhead’s burial because he was ill, but the undersecretary had been sent in his stead. Sumner Welles was Harvard-educated and the scion of an aristocratic family that included a senator, two governors, a fabulously wealthy Astor, and even a Roosevelt. He was a tall, slender, patrician-looking man who sported Bond St. suits, silver-headed walking sticks, and a neatly trimmed moustache. He’d married appropriately (three times) and had two sons. He’d entered the US Foreign Service on the advice of FDR, at whose 1905 wedding Welles, then a twelve-year-old in short pants, had been a page. Early in his career, he negotiated protections for American investors in the Dominican Republic and he made peace among warring factions in Honduras. So it was not surprising that when Roosevelt became president, he named his old friend and distant relative to be ambassador to Cuba. When a feared socialist revolution was averted because the dictatorial Cuban president, Gerardo Machado, was persuaded to step down, Welles got the credit.1
That same year, 1933, Roosevelt nominated Welles to be undersecretary of state, and he easily won congressional approval. A short while later, he acted as the architect of the US–Latin American Good Neighbor Policy, which pledged that the United States would cease intervening in Latin American affairs but also strengthened lucrative trade agreements between the continents. By now it was widely agreed that Sumner Welles had a golden diplomatic touch, and it was assumed that when the perennially ailing secretary of state, Cordell Hull, retired, Welles would succeed him.2
On the night of September 17, 1940, on the presidential train back to Washington after Bankhead’s interment, Sumner Welles had joined Henry Wallace and several other top Roosevelt men for dinner in the dining car. Drinking whiskey after whiskey to unwind from the long, hot day, Welles was more than a little tipsy when he staggered back to his sleeping compartment. He did not sleep. About four o’clock he rang for a porter. John Stone, a black man who was the senior Pullman porter on the train, answered the ring. Welles offered him money for sex. Stone politely turned him down and retreated. But the very drunk Welles would not stop ringing the buzzer that led from his room to the porters’ quarters. Another porter finally came, and Welles made a move on him too and was refused. Again Welles rang the buzzer, and the fiasco was repeated with a third porter. In the porters’ quarters, the men shared their stories, and then the three went together to report the incidents to the conductor, who informed the Secret Service men on board.3
The following spring, William Bullitt, a presidential advisor to FDR, showed up at the Oval Office brandishing a sheaf of documents. They were about the Pullman porter affair. He wanted the president to read them. Bullitt had found out about the scandal because one of the porters had filed a complaint with the Southern Railway Company that was headquartered in Bullitt’s hometown of Philadelphia. The judge who received the documents supposedly implored Bullitt on his deathbed to make the story public.4
William Bullitt, a contentious and darkly brooding man, had several reasons for animosity to Undersecretary Welles. As a diplomat, Bullitt had negotiated relations between the United States and the Bolshevik regime, he’d been the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union and the ambassador to France, and he’d been Cordell Hull’s special assistant—all of which had given him high hopes that he might someday be the one to succeed Hull as secretary of state. And then Sumner Welles became the man of the hour and dashed his dreams. But Bullitt had even more personal reasons to be resentful of Welles. Homosexuals had ruined his life. Ten years earlier, he’d learned that his wife, Louise Bryant, was having a lesbian affair with the English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne. Bullitt and Bryant had a bitter divorce. He’d had to sue for custody of their daughter so the girl wouldn’t be contaminated by “bad and dangerous company.”5 And now the State Department, in which he’d had a long proprietary interest, was in very “bad and dangerous company.”
Roosevelt read the first page of what Bullitt handed him, said, “I know about this already,” and handed back the documents.
Bullitt, puzzled that FDR wasn’t more upset, blurted, “But Welles’s actions open the way to criminal charges . . . This could menace the presidency by provoking a public scandal. He will be your Achilles heel.”
Roosevelt answered that he was confident that no newspaper would publish anything about the affair,6 and he’d make sure there’d be no criminal charges. At J. Edgar Hoover’s suggestion, he’d already assigned a “bodyguard” to go around with Welles and prevent him from propositioning any more men.7
“Mr. President, you’re thinking of asking Americans to die in a crusade for all that’s decent in human life,” Bullitt kept on. “You can’t have among the leaders of that crusade a criminal like Welles.” Bullitt’s list of reasons why the president must get rid of Sumner Welles went on and on. FDR, appalled and sickened, would hear no more. He ended the meeting. He canceled the rest of his appointments for that day and went back to the presidential bedroom to lie down.8
Bullitt found a more open ear in the secretary of state. Cordell Hull was resentful of Sumner Welles, who shared blue bloodlines and a deep friendship with the president and seemed always to be favored by him. Since FDR would not act himself to put Welles down, Hull ordered the very-willing Bullitt to pass the Pullman porter documents on to Republican senator Owen Brewster of Maine. Brewster, an adversary of FDR’s, did what Hull and Bullitt had hoped he would: he threatened the president with a senatorial inquiry unless Welles was fired.9 The president, contemplating a run for a fourth term, knew his enemies would revel in the enormous scandal.
As soon as Sumner Welles, ever a faithful friend to the president, understood what was at stake, he didn’t have to be asked to turn in his resignation.10
But FDR had a chance to vent his rage on William Bullitt. Sometime later, when the former ambassador to France was hoping to make a run for the job of mayor of Philadelphia, he asked for the president’s endorsement. FDR famously responded to the outrageously tone-deaf request, “If I were the angel Gabriel, and you and Sumner Welles should come before me seeking admission into the Gates of Heaven, do you know what I’d say? I would say, ‘Bill Bullitt, you have defamed the name of a man who toiled for his fellow man, and you can go to hell.’ And that’s what I tell you to do now!”11 To the Democratic leaders in Philadelphia, Roosevelt said, “Cut his throat!”12 Bullitt lost the mayoral race by a wide margin.
But satisfying as FDR’s rage-fest must have felt to him, the Sumner Welles incident with the Pullman porters became the ripple that began the tidal wave of Washington’s homosexual witch hunts.
Vice President Harry Truman assumed the presidency after FDR’s death in April 1945. He inherited the virulent animosity of the Right and their smear campaigns about “creeping socialism” from which Roosevelt had suffered. Truman realized that if he hoped to be elected in 1948, he would have to show himself to be as good a Cold War Warrior as any conservative Republican or Southern Democrat. To that end, on March 21, 1947, he signed Executive Order 9835, the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which established review boards to work within all government agencies in order to fire any employee or not hire any job applicant suspected of being in any way “disloyal” to the United States.
John Peurifoy had been named assistant to the undersecretary of state the year before Truman signed Executive Order 9835. Unlike many State Department officials whose youths had been spent at Groton and Harvard (such as the effete Sumner Welles), Peurifoy had been a South Carolina farm boy. He prided himself on being a self-made man. Peurifoy had had to work as a night cashier in a restaurant to support himself when he was young, but his dreams were always grandiose. He would someday be the president of the United States, he’d announced in his high school yearbook.13 When Peurifoy first came to Washington, he’d spent his days toiling as an elevator operator in the US Senate Building and his evenings sitting in college classes. In 1938, at the age of thirty-one, he landed a job at the State Department as a $2,000-a-year clerk, but a few years later he’d quadrupled his salary and was raring for further advancement.
The wildly ambitious Peurifoy, given to wearing flamboyant neckties that a Saturday Evening Post reporter described as capable of “blinding a prairie dog at fifty paces,”14 ostensibly saw his main chance in the galloping postwar paranoia about threats to American safety, security, and normalcy. A clerk during the Sumner Welles debacle, he remembered the panic at State that homosexuals could be blackmailed by foreign powers to give up state secrets—and how FDR had virtually tied Cordell Hull’s hands. Now Peurifoy blasted the State Department’s Division of Security and Investigations for still being dangerously lax. He asked for and got permission from Secretary George Marshall to do what should have been done years ago: deal “in a direct and forthright manner” with the problem of homosexuality among State Department employees.15 Truman’s 1947 executive order gave Peurifoy the firepower he needed.
Peurifoy started an investigation of an unmarried, dandified State Department employee who, scuttlebutt said, had proclivities like those of Sumner Welles. Like the interrogation of Willie Coots in Columbia, Missouri, that led to the downfall of Professor E. K. Johnston and many more Columbia homosexuals, the first homosexual grilled was forced to cough up the names of all the homosexual employees he knew, and those were forced to cough up the names of all whom they knew.16 Peurifoy ordered that two investigators on the staff of the Security Division be assigned full-time to do nothing but detect homosexual employees and make “thorough and comprehensive inquiry” into their lives.
A couple of years later, Secretary of State George Marshall elevated John Peurifoy to the position of undersecretary of state for administration, the third-ranking position in the entire department. He was given complete jurisdiction over hirings, firings, and the “elimination of Communists and other dubious characters” from State.17 He excelled in his duties, especially with regard to “dubious characters.” If a male applicant was unmarried or in the least effeminate, Peurifoy ordered that his history be scrutinized—friends, coworkers, employers, all would get visits from State Department investigators trained in finding out whether the applicant was a pervert. Ninety-one employees were soon fired. “The Man Who Runs the State Department,” the Saturday Evening Post called Peurifoy in 1949, and observed that he was “looked upon with favor, even affection, by both Republicans and Democrats.”18
• • •
February 1950: Dean Acheson, who had succeeded George Marshall as secretary of state, was asked to appear before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee. He was accompanied by John Peurifoy as his hiring-and-firing man. Acheson thought he’d been invited to speak in support of his department’s request for appropriations. But instead, he was ambushed. For two hours, Republican senators William Knowland, Styles Bridges, and Homer Ferguson—sworn foes of President Truman and Truman’s appointees—rancorously accused Acheson of tolerating disloyalty because he wasn’t quick enough to condemn his friend Alger Hiss as a Communist spy.19
“Would a friend of a person who is a member of a Communist front be a security risk?” Bridges asked, impugning Acheson’s loyalty. “Would a person known to associate with members of a Communist front be a security risk?” Bridges kept on, intending to humiliate the now seething Acheson. The senators demanded Acheson turn over the State Department’s “loyalty files” to their crony Senator Joseph McCarthy, who’d grabbed headlines a few weeks earlier when, speaking to the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, he waved a piece of paper in the air and shouted, “I have here in my hand a list of two hundred five Communists who are still working for the State Department!”20
John Peurifoy, hoping to give his besieged boss a respite, asked to speak and offered a distracting token. The State Department had, in fact, already gotten rid of 203 people who seemed to be security risks, he told the senators. Ninety-one of them were in the “shady category, mostly homosexuals.”21
It created a conflagration. Ninety-one homosexuals in the State Department. Who had hired them, and how many more were there? And where else in government were they? Two Senate Appropriations Subcommittee members immediately volunteered to do a preliminary study: Republican Kenneth Wherry and Southern Democrat Lister Hill. They would hold closed hearings on the extent of the problem of homosexuals on US government payrolls. “We have a chance for an educational job about sexual deviations comparable to what the Surgeon General’s Office has done on venereal disease,” Hill told the press. Homosexuality needed eradicating no less than syphilis.22
Wherry and Hill interviewed more than a score of government officials about homosexuals, or “moral weaklings” as they were alternately dubbed in Wherry’s report to the Appropriations Subcommittee.23 The star of their interviews was “tough, old Lt. Roy E. Blick,” as Newsweek called him24—an eighteen-year veteran of the DC police department, a true believer in the evils of perversion, whose “Pervert Elimination Squad” employed four men to do nothing but detect and arrest homosexuals.
“Out of your eighteen years’ experience, how many homosexuals do you think there are in the District of Columbia?” Wherry asked the lieutenant.
“There are 3,750 perverts employed by government agencies,” Lieutenant Blick declared confidently—though he later admitted that his precise figure was really “a quick guess,”25 based on his “own judgment” that there were about 5,000 homosexuals in DC and about 75 percent of them worked for the government.26 In the hysterical popular press, Blick’s figure grew exponentially: “There are at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll,” the book Washington Confidential announced, “and these comprise only a fraction of the total of their kind in the city.”27 The New York Post didn’t settle for guesstimates: the Office of Naval Intelligence had the exact number, the Post announced: 7,859.28
“Is a homosexual, because he is a moral pervert, one that is an easy prey for blackmail?” Senator Wherry prodded Lieutenant Blick to expound on the dangers homosexuals posed to national security.
The lieutenant cooperated. “I would say that anything I want from an individual who is a pervert, I could get,” he answered. “I could get it quicker by the approach of exposing him than I could by offering him money.”
With such evidence in hand, Senator Wherry declared breathlessly to the Appropriations Subcommittee that “the guarding of government secrets upon which the life of our Republic may depend is lax. This sordid situation will shock the American people when they are given these facts!”29
Members of the subcommittee read Wherry’s report and concurred. They wasted no time in making a unanimous recommendation to the Senate. The entire executive branch of government must be thoroughly investigated for homosexuals—and a system must be put in place so that if an employee is fired from his job because he is homosexual, he won’t be able to turn around and find work in another government agency; he will be forever debarred from all federal jobs.30
The Senate agreed with Appropriations. A new Senate subcommittee was formed, with Clyde Hoey of North Carolina as its head. Republican senator Margaret Chase Smith, the only woman in the Senate, would serve as well. “Pervert Inquiry Ordered,” the New York Times announced to the public.31
Members of the House of Representatives weighed in too. Dr. Arthur L. Miller—the physician-congressman from Nebraska whose Miller Act threw convicted DC homosexuals into St. Elizabeth’s for indeterminate periods—ignited his fellow lawmakers by emoting on the House floor about what he’d been told by “a gentleman from the CIA”: “Mr. Göring of Germany had a complete list of all the homosexuals in the State Department, Department of Commerce, and Department of Defense. They knew who to contact when they came over here on espionage missions,” Miller asserted. “The danger of spies, the danger of blackmail, the fear of blackmail, has caused these people to sabotage our government!” No one among his listeners interrupted to ask for evidence: “And the Russians have the same list of homosexuals! They know who to contact when they come over here too!” he declaimed.32
The general public, fed on news of the ninety-one firings and hints of even more pervasive perversion at State, weighed in daily. A Washington Post reporter doing an inquiry of people standing in line for concert tickets asked one man where he worked. “The State Department,” the man answered sheepishly. Everyone in earshot burst into sniggering laughter. Another reporter got into a taxi and said, “Take me to the State Department, please.” The driver turned around in his seat to caution his passenger, “Fruits, the whole place is full of fruits.”33
• • •
The State Department stepped up its homosexual hunts; the Civil Service Commission pitched in. Together they scrutinized the files of the FBI, the vice squad, and the DC Park Police, and they created a master list of homosexuals to be purged. “Panic on the Potomac,” New York Post writer Max Lerner called it in a multipart series in July 1950.
By November 1950, five hundred more federal employees, not just in DC but in offices all over America, had been fired or forced to resign.34 That was only the beginning. In December Senator Hoey and his subcommittee issued their report: a spectacular conglomeration of pseudoscience, circular reasoning, moralism, prejudice, and scapegoating. The committee had consulted “eminent” psychiatrists and physicians, the report said, and they agreed that the indulgence in sexually perverted practices is a sign of a personality which has failed to reach sexual maturity. The subcommittee also took testimony from representatives of the FBI, CIA, and the intelligence services of the army, navy, and air force. All concurred that homosexuals constituted a security risk since homosexual acts are criminalized under federal, state, and municipal statutes; persons who commit such acts are violators and outcasts; and because acts of sexual perversion weaken the moral fiber, homosexuals will give in to blandishments by foreign espionage agents and to blackmail. On top of all that, homosexuals have a “corrosive effect” on other government workers because “these perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices.”35
To his fellow senators Hoey granted that when hunting for homosexuals, errors might be made, some employees might be falsely accused and fired; nevertheless, he said, for the sake of the nation’s security, “the American people are entitled to have errors of judgment on the part of their officials resolved on the side of caution”—that is, better to get rid of whatever number of “innocents” than to allow real homosexuals to slip through the cracks.36
President Truman was largely silent on the issue. Even if he thought that Washington was running amuck in mass hysteria, there was little he could say. It was as deadly to be soft on homosexuals as it was to be soft on Communists.37
Truman’s successor was not silent. “Let’s Clean House with Ike and Dick” was a major campaign slogan of Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower (nicknamed Ike) and his running mate, Richard Nixon. One of Eisenhower’s first presidential acts, in April 1953—he’d been in office barely three months—was to sign into law Executive Order 10450. The order specifically named as “security risks” not only Communists and subversives but those who behaved badly—the dishonest, the immoral, drunks and drug users, and sexual perverts.
Liberal Republican senator Clifford Case from New Jersey—a strong supporter of civil rights for Negroes and a passionate critic of Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts—complained on CBS’s Face the Nation that the executive order did not go far enough. Homosexuals, because they were immoral and illegal, should be removed not just from sensitive positions where there was concern about blackmail, Senator Case said, but from all government positions.38
• • •
In the first half of the twentieth century, middle-class lesbians, who rarely went to gay bars or walked the streets in male garb, were seldom hassled by police or anyone else. If you didn’t hang out in dangerous places or look like a butch stereotype, a little discretion was all that was needed to stay safe. Until the lavender witch hunts, when middle-class lesbians who were employed in the few professional jobs open to women—teacher, social worker, nurse, government worker—became victims, too.
When Betty Deran was twenty years old, she signed up for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). It was 1951. There was a war going on in Korea, she was very patriotic, she wanted to see the world—and she’d just sat through an alarming closed-door meeting with the dean of women at Northwestern University, where she was a student. A jealous roommate had told the housemother in their dorm that Deran was having a lesbian affair with another student. It was true. The housemother spoke to the dean, who summoned Deran and her lover to come to her office posthaste. The dean leveled charges, and the two young women denied them. Nothing was provable, so they were warned but not expelled. But Deran was so shaken that she left Northwestern for the WAC.39
In the military, she was an aide to a WAC major who, Deran sensed, was “a little bit too fond of me.” But the major was ordered by the general to whom she reported to break up a “nest of lesbians” in her company, and she did. Deran thought that those who were caught “were just damn stupid to be so blatant and open.” She left the military with an honorable discharge and went back to school on the GI Bill of Rights. In 1961 she got a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan.
It was a time when there were few women PhDs and almost none in so male-dominated a field. But with her superlative credentials, Deran was hired by the Treasury Department as a tax economist. It was a plum job, reserved for PhDs from the most elite universities—virtually unheard of for a female in that era. With the woman who’d become her lover, Alma Routsong (who would later write the lesbian classic Patience and Sarah under the nom de plume Isabel Miller40), Deran moved to Washington, DC. Effervescent and outgoing, deservedly sure of herself and her talents, Deran kept her lover a secret and fit in well at Treasury, despite being the only woman in her department and a head shorter than any of her colleagues.
She’d been at the Treasury Department several months, and things were going swimmingly. She was working with eminent economists, people who’d come to Treasury from professorships at Yale and Harvard, such as Stanley Surrey, who was considered the greatest tax scholar of his generation. John F. Kennedy was president, and once in a while Deran’s boss, Harvey Kooten, dropped by her office with an exhilarating tidbit such as, “Well, I was talking to JFK. He liked your memo.” Deran’s only worry—a niggling bit of anxiety—was when she realized she still hadn’t been notified that her security clearance had been okayed.
When she’d come to DC for an interview, she was told that everyone employed at Treasury must get clearance—it was merely routine, they’d said. But month after month went by, ten months, and Deran still had no word about having been cleared. “Do you realize I haven’t gotten my clearance yet?” she finally told Harvey Kooten over coffee. She’d known before she took the job that being homosexual could be a problem if one worked in a “sensitive” government position. But it never occurred to her that working for the Treasury Department, making decisions about mineral taxation, “would be a job considered vital to the security of the United States.”41
“Well, the holdup on your clearance must just be some bureaucratic tangle,” Kooten told her. But a few days later, he came into her office and closed the door behind him. He was visibly upset. “I just discovered that your clearance papers have been sitting in the code box.” That meant she was being investigated. “For homosexuality,” he was told. He had no idea what triggered the investigation. Nor did she. Had a Civil Service Commission check turned up the Dean of Women—that unsettling meeting at Northwestern when Deran was twenty years old? Since the early 1950s, when John Peurifoy started the policy at State, if anything about a federal employee in a professional position aroused suspicion—male effeminacy, short hair on a woman, no spouse—investigators questioned landlords, past bosses, acquaintances, people from the employee’s childhood even. They even placed employees under surveillance to determine whether they frequented “homosexual places” or associated with “known homosexuals.”42
“Betty, please be careful,” Kooten said. He was clearly on her side. But she had been careful. She wasn’t “blatant and open,” like the WACs in her unit who’d been caught. She didn’t go to bars or hang out with obvious types or even talk about being gay to anyone she didn’t know well.
“Couldn’t we just send Dr. Deran to a psychiatrist or something to keep her?” Stanley Surrey (who’d become assistant secretary of the Treasury that year) suggested when he learned of the problem.
She ended up leaving the Treasury Department and going to New York to take a job for which a bachelor’s degree was enough qualification—and where everyone knew “the only reason they could hire me was because I was gay and couldn’t get a clearance, and I didn’t have much choice.”43
• • •
Witch-hunt fever didn’t infect every politician in Washington, but those who tried to fight it were sorely defeated—even seasoned men like Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland. Tydings was first elected to the legislature in 1922, when he was thirty-two years old. In July 1950, when he’d been there almost thirty years, he headed a Senate subcommittee to examine McCarthy’s allegations of the infestation of subversives at the State Department. In a thunderously angry two-and-a-half-hour speech, which the Washington Post described as “one of the bitterest and most bare-fisted personal denunciations ever delivered on the Senate floor,” Tydings warned his colleagues that they’d been “hoaxed” by McCarthy’s “false and vile charges.” He implored them to take “remedial action.” He called McCarthy’s henchmen, such as Wherry and Hoey, “men of little character who would prefer to serve their own ends rather than their country.” When his speech was over and the senators got up to leave, the incensed Kenneth Wherry, bumping into a member of Tydings’s subcommittee at the door, hurled an “unprintable epithet” at him, as the Washington Post reported; and when the Democratic senator from Texas, John Connally, admonished Wherry “not to do such things on the Senate floor,” Wherry slugged him.44
But that was nothing compared to what the McCarthy faction cooked up over the next few months, when Tydings was running for reelection: it distributed all over Maryland a doctored photograph that spliced together two separate pictures: one of Tydings taken in 1938, and one of Earl Browder, a former leader of the Communist Party USA, taken in 1940. The picture they manufactured appeared to be one of Tydings cozying up to Browder, whom he’d never met personally. In the paranoid climate of post–World War II America, the phony photo did the trick. After three decades in the legislature, Tydings was defeated in that November’s election.45
McCarthy tactics were disturbing even to some conservative Republican politicians such as Harry Cain, senator from Washington State, who’d been a friend and early supporter of Joseph McCarthy and had even served on the Subversive Activities Control Board. By the mid-1950s, Cain was disgusted. McCarthy’s skill in “whipping his audience into a frenzy” reminded Cain of another orator he’d seen in 1935 in Germany, Adolf Hitler. Investigations of government employees who were “messenger boys, grain inspectors, librarians, and cancer specialists” were “sheer foolishness,” Cain warned. In an article in the mass-circulation magazine Coronet, he objected that “any suspicion of sex deviation” was bringing on a corps of security investigators and even a full-scale FBI check. He told of two young women whose jobs had nothing to do with protecting the nation’s security, but they were anyway being “hideously tortured” by a security officer who asked them “the most intimate and revolting questions and bullied them mercilessly.” It was “gestapo tactics,” or like a “lynching bee,” Cain protested. And he pleaded that the government come to its senses and stop hounding people who were not even employed in sensitive positions.46 Cain’s protests in a national magazine had no effect whatsoever. Investigations for homosexuality spread far outside the Beltway.
Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs.47 The firing of homosexual workers from nongovernmental positions was so ubiquitous, and their chances of being hired after losing a job so slim, that by 1956 the incipient homophile press was lamenting the “tragic plight” of many of its readers. They’d come to the end of their unemployment benefits, their savings had run out, and no matter their talents or training or work experiences, they couldn’t get a job because “their character investigation didn’t stand up.”48
Investigation fever seized even small businesses that had not the slightest connection to the government. National companies sprang up whose sole function was to serve employers by snooping into the background of employees or would-be employees and reporting anything that hinted at homosexuality or other undesirable traits such as drunkenness and dope addiction. One such company, Fidelifacts, made up of former FBI agents, sold their skills with a panic-inducing brochure that demanded “Do You Know Who You Are Hiring?”America had succumbed to “morality” hysteria.