All the News That Was Fit to Print Ten Years Ago

New York Times:

For instance, while much has been written about the F.B.I.’s first and most influential director, J. Edgar Hoover, and his hunt for communists and his suspicion of the civil rights movement, little attention has been paid to his effort to unmask gays in government and academia.

Ahem:

According to John Cheever, 1948 was ‘the year everybody in the United States was worried about homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.’ The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’.

The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’.

The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria’s top spy to force him to work for them.

The real justification was even more suspect: gays were social misfits whose pathology made them susceptible to Communist indoctrination. Many conservatives also believed that the Communist Party was a movement of and for libertines, and the Soviet Union a haven of free love and open marriage. Gays, they concluded, couldn’t resist this freedom from bourgeois constraint. Drawing parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire, McCarthy regarded homosexuality as a cultural degeneracy that could only weaken the United States. It was, as one tabloid put it, ‘Stalin’s Atom Bomb’.

How could a nation confronting so many foreign threats allow itself to be sidetracked like this? (This is not just a question for historians: in recent months, Congress has devoted considerable energy to debating gay marriage, while in the last 13 years the US military has fired 55 of its Arabic speakers for being gay; the most recent was uncovered after investigators asked him if he had ever participated in community theatre.) With the Soviets in possession of the bomb and Korea on the march, why was Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, dispatched to Congress to defend his heterosexuality and that of his ‘powder puff diplomats’? Didn’t he have more important things to do than host rowdy gatherings of politicians and journalists that were

reminiscent of ‘stag parties’, featuring copious amounts of Scotch and bourbon, and smiling women ‘whose identity remained undisclosed’. As one senator remarked, ‘It reminded me somewhat of the fraternity rushing season at college.’ Dean Acheson tried to appear as ‘one of the boys’, slapping senators on the back. A journalist reported that ‘his hair was rumpled, his tie awry. The stiff and precise manner and speech which have antagonised many of us had disappeared. He even seemed to have removed the wax from his moustache.’

Johnson’s book is one of the most instructive histories of the domestic Cold War to have appeared in years…

 The rest of the Times piece is actually quite interesting, so make sure to check it out. Just wanting to correct the record a bit.

8 Comments

  1. prayerwarriorpsychicnot May 21, 2014 at 1:10 pm | #

    Reblogged this on Citizens, not serfs.

  2. Jim Brash May 21, 2014 at 1:23 pm | #

    The history of conservatism seems bizarre at times. Seeing “commies” everywhere, exposing gays in government, and propaganda films like Reefer Madness. At other times its downright dangerous and fascist with people like Father Coughlin and Mayor Hague at its visible head. But no matter what it always has its foundation in the American establishment. Just a few thoughts.

  3. Bart May 21, 2014 at 1:32 pm | #

    “Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’”

    Possibly something the good Senator himself never did.

  4. Blinkenlights der Gutenberg May 21, 2014 at 1:44 pm | #

    “That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists.”

    There must have been at least 10 times as many ‘perverts’ as communists, though; perhaps closer to 100 times. (The USA’s largest communist party, at its peak, had a membership of 0.06% of the population, whereas homosexuality is usually estimated at around 4% of the population.)

  5. Glenn May 21, 2014 at 10:09 pm | #

    If terrorism is affecting political change for weakening state control by outsider’s use of violence, then timorism is affecting political stability for strengthening state control by insider’s use of fear.

  6. Cavoyo May 22, 2014 at 10:18 pm | #

    Unrelated: A school is teaching children important life lessons. Namely, that only people with money get to use the bathroom at work. http://www.wric.com/story/25573747/elementary-school-pay-to-potty-rule-outrages-parents

  7. Porcupine Eater May 25, 2014 at 8:28 am | #

    Poor gays couldn’t get a break. Hoover says they were vulnerable to possible Soviet indoctrination while the Soviets were busy putting them in mental hospitals and gulags (the bourgeois corruption of socialist heterosexual marriage of course.) Although I should note their temporary legal status under Lenin. Let’s not forget the Soviet propaganda campaign to tar the Nazis as a giant gay pedophile cult while the Nazis were throwing gays in gas chambers. Orwell had no love for the gays and smeared them as decadent elitists. Surprisingly the Tories had a fair share of homosexuals in their ranks and the gay rights struggle didn’t really become a movement of the left until the Stonewall incident.

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