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WHAT HAPPENED THE LAST TIME A PRESIDENT PURGED THE BUREAUCRACY  
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Clay Risen
February 6, 2025
Politico
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_ The impact can linger not just for years but decades. _

The 1947 pamphlet "Is This Tomorrow? America under Communism!"
produced by the Catholic Catechetical Guild Educational Society was
part of a "Red Scare" in the U.S. that raised fears about the horrors
of a communist takeover., Wikimedia Commons

 

On Jan. 22, 1953, his first day as secretary of state, John Foster
Dulles addressed a group of diplomats at his department’s still-new
headquarters in Washington’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood. For years,
the State Department had come under fire from Republicans and
conservative activists as a haven for Communist spies and sympathizers
— and not without reason, since one of its rising stars, Alger Hiss,
had been convicted of perjury in January 1950 for lying about giving
secret government documents to a Soviet spy.

The failure to find more Hisses, and the fact that Hiss’ actions had
taken place over a decade in the past, did nothing to appease men like
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who shot to national prominence just weeks after
Hiss’ conviction with his claim to have a list of hundreds of spies
within the State Department. By the time Dulles arrived that morning,
public faith in the department, and morale within it, had cratered.

With his opening speech to his new employees, Dulles made clear that
while he was their boss, he was not on their side. “Dulles’s words
were as cold and raw as the weather” that day, wrote the diplomat
Charles Bohlen. Dulles announced that starting that day, he expected
not just loyalty but “positive loyalty” from his charges, making
clear that he would fire anyone whose commitment to anti-communism was
less than zealous. “It was a declaration by the Secretary of State
that the department was indeed suspect,” Bohlen wrote. “The remark
disgusted some Foreign Service officers, infuriated others, and
displeased even those who were looking forward to the new
administration.”

President Dwight Eisenhower and secretary of state John Foster Dulles
talk at the White House in 1958. On Dulles' first day, he made clear
to his employees that while he was their boss, he was not on their
side. | Bill Allen/AP

So began what — until now — was the largest purge of
“disloyal” government workers in U.S. history.

Similar scenes soon played out across the federal government under the
new administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican
elected president in two decades. Though the State Department was
ground zero for the anti-communist purges, FBI agents scoured the
files of thousands of employees across the federal government. In
April 1953, Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which opened an
energetic campaign to investigate thousands of potential security
threats throughout the government.

“We like to think we are plugging the entries but opening the
exits,” said White House press secretary James Hagerty.

Though the State Department was ground zero for the anti-communist
purges, FBI agents scoured the files of thousands of employees across
the federal government. | NARA

Over the next four months, 1,456 federal employees were fired, despite
the fact that no one was ever found to be involved in espionage. Many
were removed simply for being gay, which the order had explicitly
defined as a security risk. Air Force Lt. Milo Radulovich was forced
to resign his commission simply because his sister was a suspected
communist. Others, like cartographer Abraham Chasanow, were pushed out
on the basis on flimsy rumors of suspicious political beliefs.

The widespread political purges of the early 1950s echo clearly today.
Seventy years ago, the reasonable pretext of hunting Soviet agents
opened the way to a yearslong, paranoid campaign, motivated by
outlandish conspiracy theories, that destroyed countless careers but
did nothing to improve America’s security.

Today, a stated desire to check the excesses of diversity, equity and
inclusion programs has already been used to justify whirlwind firings
and closures of entire federal offices. So it may be wise to consider
the consequences of that previous era of purges, part of what came to
be known as the “Red Scare.”

At a time of intense geopolitical competition, the United States
kneecapped itself, removing thousands of valuable employees and
forcing those who remained into unhappy conformity. It is hard not to
see the same mistake being repeated today.

President Harry Truman speaks in 1945. Two years later, Truman issued
an executive order to screen federal employees for "disloyalty." | AP

THE HUNT FOR disloyal public servants did not begin with Eisenhower
and Dulles. Following the 1946 midterm elections, in which Republicans
took control of both the House and the Senate with a campaign built on
anti-communist attacks, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive
Order 9835. It ordered the Civil Service Commission to screen the
background of every current and new federal employee, well over a
million people, for evidence of “disloyalty,” a term that was left
ominously undefined. The screening drew on files from across the
government, as well as police departments, former employers, even
college transcripts. Truman also instructed his attorney general, Tom
Clark, to devise a list of “subversive” organizations; current or
former membership in just one would constitute a bright red flag.

If something suspicious came up in the initial screen, even the
smallest doubt, the FBI would conduct a full field investigation,
digging into every corner of a person’s life. Any derogatory
information went into a file. It was then up to the department or
agency involved to decide what to do with the employee. In theory, it
might mean discipline or reassignment, though in practice most people
who reached that point lost their job.

The flaws were apparent to anyone who took the time to read the order
itself. Writing in _The New York Times_, a quartet of Harvard Law
professors worried the program would “miss genuine culprits,
victimize innocent persons, discourage entry into the public service
and leave both the government and the American people with a hangover
sense of futility and indignity.”

On Dec. 15, 1950, the Hoey committee released this report, concluding
that homosexuals were "unsuitable for employment in the Federal
Government" and constituted "security risks in positions of public
trust." | NARA

And that is what happened. The loyalty program’s first director,
Seth Richardson, insisted that the government had a complete right to
discharge employees, “without extending to such employee any hearing
whatsoever.” In one case, James Kutcher, who lost both his legs in
World War II, was fired from the Veterans Administration because, a
decade earlier, he had been a member of the Socialist Workers Party,
an anti-Stalinist organization that Clark had nevertheless added to
his subversives list.

Dozens of Black employees were subjected to harassing, invasive
investigations because, outside of work, they were involved in civil
rights activity, which was considered potentially subversive. The same
happened to pro-labor employees. During its five and a half years in
operation, Truman’s loyalty program conducted 4.76 million
background checks, including 2 million current employees and 500,000
new hires each year. The screens resulted in 26,236 FBI
investigations. Of those, 6,828 people resigned or withdrew their
applications, and 560 were fired.

Not a single spy was ever discovered by the program. Its defenders
argued that it succeeded by deterring potential subversives. But it
also likely deterred many bright, talented people from applying in the
first place, especially if they had dabbled in progressive politics in
college. The same went for then-current federal employees: The order
put a premium on submission and raised the price for individual
expression.

While it is impossible to quantify a counterfactual, the cost of the
anti-communist purges of the 1950s was clearly enormous and played out
not just over the subsequent years but over decades. | Courtesy of
Clay Risen

In his memoirs, Truman defended the rationale behind the program but
admitted that it was deeply flawed in practice. He called the program
the best he could do “under the climate of opinion that then
existed.” To friends he admitted, “Yes, it was terrible.”

Among Truman’s targets were gay and lesbian employees of the
government, especially in the State Department. In the retrograde
spirit of the immediate postwar era, homosexuality was associated with
weakness, femininity and progressivism. One writer, warning of the
“sisterhood in our State Department,” wrote that “in American
statecraft, where you need desperately a man of iron, you often get a
nance.” In what later became known as the Lavender Scare, Congress
ordered government agencies — from State to the American Battlefield
Monuments Commission — to investigate any employee suspected of
being homosexual, an ill-defined category that might mean anything
from middle-age bachelorhood to, paradoxically, “Don Juanism,” or
an energetic sex drive.

Yet another target were the so-called China Hands, a loose collection
of academics and Foreign Service officers with deep experience in
China. As the pro-Western Nationalists lost ground to the Communists
under Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War following World War II,
despite massive American support, the China Hands recommended caution,
arguing that Mao’s victory was inevitable, and that U.S. policy
could exploit cracks between him and Moscow. In retrospect, it was
wise advice — but following Mao’s victory in 1949, it was taken as
evidence that the China Hands had not only been “soft on
communism,” but had been the core of a pro-communist conspiracy
within the State Department.

One by one, the China Hands fell: Esteemed diplomats like John Stewart
Service, John Paton Davies and O. Edmund Clubb were drummed out of the
Foreign Service, some under Truman, others under Eisenhower. John F.
Melby was dismissed simply because he had an affair with Lillian
Hellman, a progressive playwright who had refused to “name names”
before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The China Hands were relatively few in number, but the decimation of
their ranks sent a clear signal to the rest of the foreign-policy
establishment: Dissent at your own risk; retribution will be swift.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy testifies against the U.S. Army during the
Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. The Wisconsin Republican shot to
national prominence after claiming to have a list of spies in the
State Department. | Getty Images

WHILE IT IS impossible to quantify a counterfactual, the cost of the
anti-communist purges of the 1950s was clearly enormous and played out
not just over the subsequent years but over decades. For instance, had
expertise not been purged and dissent not been punished so severely
across the government during the early 1950s, wiser heads might well
have raised the right objections to America’s short-sighted
anti-communism in East Asia, above all its rush to intervene in
Vietnam. Does the Trump administration run the same risk of
short-sightedness today?

Aside from historical parallels, there is another insight connecting
then and now. The Red Scare eventually ended. Journalist Edward R.
Murrow helped turn the tide, including with a long news report on the
case of Lt. Radulovich. The Supreme Court in 1956 put limits on
Eisenhower’s executive order. By the mid-1950s, voters, happy with
the conservative stability wrought by Eisenhower, stopped backing
candidates who ran on hardcore red-baiting platforms. Joseph McCarthy,
who had captured the American political imagination for years, saw his
support collapse in 1954 during his televised, and ill-advised,
confrontation with the U.S. Army over an allegedly subversive military
dentist. And Eisenhower, despite — or because of — his earlier
efforts, was able to push out the hardcore anti-communist
conspiracists who had, for a brief moment, captured the American
imagination.

Today, the Trump administration's desire to check the excesses of
diversity, equity and inclusion programs has already been used to
justify whirlwind firings and closures of entire federal offices. |
Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO

But they did not go quietly. Men like Alfred Kohlberg, a textile
magnate and a key supporter of McCarthy, and Robert Welch Jr., the
founder of the John Birch Society, saw Eisenhower as a prisoner of the
communist cabal they had hoped to defeat. If they remained on the
fringe of American politics, it was still a sizable swatch: “None
Dare Call It Treason,” John Stormer’s 1964 book alleging the
continuation of a pro-communist cabal at the top of the U.S.
government, sold millions of copies. Over time the belief that the
liberal wing of American politics and the federal bureaucracy were
controlled by an “enemy within” became a litmus test for
hard-right demagogues, linking the Red Scare era through the Pat
Buchanan insurgency of the 1990s to today. When President Trump
declared a moratorium on federal spending to root out “Marxist”
elements in the government, he was drawing on a 75-year-old obsession.

It can be tempting to say that just as the Red Scare petered out, so
too will the current hunt for “disloyal” elements. But for all the
parallels, there’s an important difference: Loyalty then meant
loyalty to the United States; today Trump demands loyalty
to _himself _and his agenda.

Once the public realizes the destructiveness of the purges conducted
in Trump’s name, will he halt them? That remains an unsettlingly
open question.

Flowers were placed outside of the USAID headquarters in Washington.
Elon Musk, tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government
Efficiency (DOGE), said in a social media post that he and Trump will
shut down the foreign assistance agency. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

_CLAY RISEN is the author of RED SCARE: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and
the Making of Modern America, out from Scribner on March 18, 2025_

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* Red Scare
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* McCarthyism
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