Federal employee loyalty and security program

The Federal employee loyalty and security program was established by Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order No. 9835 on March 21, 1947. It made loyalty investigations a condition of federal employment in peacetime, turning a political demand to confront alleged Communist influence into a government-wide screening system. Truman presented the program as a safeguard against disloyalty and against reckless accusations, but its procedures left employees vulnerable to charges they could neither inspect nor effectively answer. Its history therefore joins an urgent political calculation to the enduring question of how a government can protect itself without weakening fairness and civil liberties.

Political Pressures and the Decision to Act

The program emerged amid growing public and congressional concern about Communist influence in government. Republican leaders had made the issue a successful campaign theme, and accusations that the New Deal administration had been infiltrated were being repeated and widely believed. Truman regarded many claims as exaggerated and worried about the reach of the House Committee on Un-American Activities under its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas. He also feared that the investigation campaign could become an instrument of accusation rather than a measured response to a demonstrated threat.

Yet those concerns did not lead Truman to reject a loyalty system. The Attorney General and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, supported screening federal workers, and the political cost of appearing indifferent to Communist activity was substantial. Truman hoped that acting first would blunt congressional attacks and prevent opponents from portraying his administration as soft on communism at home, at the same time that he was advocating a firmer policy abroad. His decision was thus both administrative and political: it accepted the need for a program while attempting to take control of an issue that might otherwise be defined by his critics.

There was a significant historical precedent, but it belonged to wartime. In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt had authorized the Civil Service to disqualify employees when there was reasonable doubt about their loyalty, and later assigned the Justice Department and FBI a role in checking government workers. Until Truman’s order, the book notes, no comparable step had been taken in peacetime. Extending loyalty screening beyond the emergency of war made the program a new and consequential feature of federal employment.

Design, Purpose, and Safeguards

Truman described the program’s purpose as twofold: to guard against disloyal employees in the federal workforce and to protect innocent employees from unfounded charges. To signal that it was not intended simply as a partisan weapon, he placed Seth Richardson, a prominent conservative Republican lawyer, in charge of the Review Board. This appointment expressed a commitment to some measure of independence, even as the program drew on investigative resources associated with the administration’s political opponents.

The system applied to all federal employees, whatever their positions. Investigators could consult FBI files and files assembled by the House Un-American Activities Committee. A worker could lose a government job if there were reasonable grounds for believing that the person was disloyal, but the order did not define disloyalty. An accused employee could not confront the people making the allegations, learn their identities, or discover precisely what charges had been made. The Attorney General could also compile a list of organizations considered subversive, giving the program a reach beyond individual conduct and into associations.

Those rules created a sharp tension between the stated goal of protecting innocent workers and the means chosen to pursue it. The absence of a defined standard made the threshold for dismissal uncertain; secrecy prevented an employee from testing the reliability or context of accusations. David Lilienthal, who understood the distress that Communist hunters could inflict on loyal public servants, considered the arrangement ominous. In his assessment, it effectively reversed the ordinary presumption that people were innocent until proved guilty. Even Lilienthal allowed that some response might be necessary, but the procedural imbalance remained central to the program’s design.

Scale and Results

The investigation expanded rapidly. The FBI began conducting name checks on all two million people on the federal payroll, a task the account describes as immense and costly. By 1951, over four years, the Civil Service Commission had investigated and cleared three million employees, while the FBI had investigated another 14,000. Several thousand employees resigned. Only 212 were dismissed as being of questionable loyalty; none was indicted, and investigators found no evidence of espionage.

The scale of the screening and the small number of dismissals stand in marked contrast. The final figures do not establish that every investigation was harmless or that suspicion had no consequences: the recorded resignations and the inability to answer secret accusations indicate otherwise. But they do show that the program did not uncover the broad espionage threat implied by the political atmosphere surrounding its creation. Clark Clifford later described the initiative as a response to the temper of the times and said he did not see how Truman could have acted differently. In a later account, however, Clifford was more direct: he recalled that the issue was political, that Truman was preparing to run in 1948, and that officials did not believe there was a serious loyalty problem.

Truman’s Misgivings and Retrospective Judgment

Truman’s acceptance of the program did not amount to confidence in every agency or measure involved. He remained deeply distrustful of Hoover’s power and feared that an FBI system of domestic surveillance could become a citizen spy system. In a private letter to Bess, he warned against allowing the country to acquire a secret-police apparatus. His misgivings exposed the contradiction within the policy: the program relied on the investigative authority of an institution whose unchecked reach Truman himself regarded with alarm.

In his memoirs, Truman defended the program as an effort to be as fair as possible under the climate of opinion at the time. In private conversations with friends, he conceded that it had been a mistake and called it terrible. That later judgment makes the program more than a record of security procedures or administrative totals. It captures a choice made under political pressure: Truman sought to forestall a more aggressive campaign by initiating a government screening system of his own, but the system’s secrecy and undefined standards compromised the protections he said he wanted to preserve. Its limited findings and heavy reach left a legacy in which political reassurance and procedural fairness had not been reconciled.