Other than the Communist Party itself, no group suffered as much scrutiny or punishment during the Red Scare as the amorphous agglomeration known as the federal workforce. Today, the U.S. government’s employment of millions of people is a familiar part of American life, if not, as we’ve recently discovered, an entirely settled matter. In the forties, when the Red Scare began in earnest, a robust federal workforce was still a new proposition, and not one that everyone in Washington was willing to concede. Republicans worried that federal employment was doing the Democrats’ work for them; with every government paycheck, a new Democrat was made. They also didn’t like what many of those workers were doing: creating regulations, dispensing Social Security, enforcing labor rights. They saw a cabal of eggheaded do-gooders intoxicated by bureaucratic power. Worst of all, Republicans alleged, the sprawling federal workforce was where Communists went to hide and wait for instructions from their Soviet masters.
Franklin Roosevelt dismissed this last charge as vicious partisan politics, which it was. But there was enough truth in it to kindle the Red Scare’s earliest flames. Beginning amid the New Deal and continuing into the Second World War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were ostensible allies, Russian intelligence recruited dozens of people inside or close to federal agencies to steal information and spy on policymakers. Toward the end of the war, the F.B.I. began to warn the Truman Administration about spies inside departments such as Agriculture, State, and Treasury, and even in top-secret programs such as the Manhattan Project. Many spies were recruited through the Communist Party, which maintained close ties with the Soviet government despite claiming that “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” When Republicans caught wind of the operation, they saw an ideal issue around which to build the 1946 midterm campaign.
“Communism vs. Republicanism” became their slogan, casting all New Dealers, liberals, and progressives as either Communist sympathizers or pathetic dupes. When the votes were counted, it was plain that the American people had chosen Republicanism, giving the G.O.P. control of the House and the Senate for the first time since the early nineteen-thirties. At that point, Truman figured he had to get out ahead of the Communist issue. In March, 1947, he signed Executive Order 9835, establishing a “loyalty program” to investigate the political sympathies, affiliations, and memberships of all federal employees. “Although the loyalty of by far the overwhelming majority of all Government employees is beyond question,” the order read, “the presence within the Government service of any disloyal or subversive person constitutes a threat to our democratic process.” The Red Scare was under way.