Red Scare

The Red Scare was a growing political climate of alarm about Communist influence in the United States, not simply a dispute over foreign policy. It made accusations of infiltration a powerful domestic weapon, pressed Harry S. Truman to demonstrate vigilance, and helped produce a federal loyalty-screening program he approved with serious misgivings. The program’s vast reach and meager findings revealed the gap between the threat invoked in public debate and the evidence ultimately uncovered.

The rise of the scare

In 1946, discontent over shortages and other domestic problems existed alongside a more consequential anxiety: fear that Communists were gaining influence inside the country. Reporting for The Washington Post, Edward T. Folliard found hostility to communism widespread wherever he traveled. Republicans charged that Harry S. Truman was accommodating the Soviet Union abroad while encouraging communism at home. Robert A. Taft argued that the Democratic Party was divided between Communism and Americanism, leaving its foreign policy ineffective and damaging the country’s standing.

The warnings reached beyond the federal government. Republican candidates raised the possibility of Communist infiltration in universities and even the Army. Richard Nixon, then a congressional candidate in California, attacked officials for allegedly lending support to forces he described as un-American. Such charges turned suspicion into a campaign language: a political opponent could be presented not merely as mistaken, but as failing to recognize or confront a hidden danger.

The book also sets these accusations against Truman’s own private concern. He worried about Communists and those he considered fellow travelers, and the discovery of the Ottawa spy ring made it difficult to dismiss every fear as groundless. In 1946, under pressure from Attorney General Tom C. Clark, Truman secretly agreed to continue electronic surveillance when national defense was involved. The policy had begun under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Truman was not told that the original 1940 authorization had been limited to aliens. In a San Francisco speech, J. Edgar Hoover warned that a very large number of Communists were at liberty in the country. Such statements reinforced the atmosphere in which claims of infiltration could command attention even without specific evidence of wrongdoing by particular government employees.

Political pressure and Truman’s response

By 1947, loyalty had become a test of political credibility. Republican leaders continued to demand investigations, and Truman accepted the recommendation of a special commission, Tom C. Clark, and J. Edgar Hoover that the government review the loyalty of its employees. Yet the proposal troubled him. Clark Clifford’s notes of a conversation with the President recorded Truman’s opposition to an overmighty Federal Bureau of Investigation and his fear that it might become a domestic secret-police force.

Truman’s own view of the Communist threat did not match the most alarming public claims. In a letter to former Pennsylvania governor George Earle, he said the country was safe from a Communist takeover because it had too many sensible people. But he also distinguished that judgment from the question of whether someone whose loyalty was not to the United States should hold a government job. The distinction allowed him to reject the idea that the country faced imminent capture while accepting that the government should examine its workforce.

The immediate political setting sharpened the choice. Truman worried about the House Un-American Activities Committee and the extremes its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, might pursue. By acting on loyalty reviews himself, Truman hoped to prevent the committee from defining the issue and to protect his administration from accusations of softness at home while he advocated a firmer policy toward communism abroad. His action was thus both a response to security concerns and an effort to contain a political attack before it gained further force.

On March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing a federal employee loyalty and security program. This was a peacetime step without precedent in the country’s experience. Roosevelt had authorized loyalty checks during the war, including the use of the Civil Service and Justice Department, but the new program extended the principle into peacetime. Truman placed conservative Republican lawyer Seth Richardson in charge of its Review Board, intending to demonstrate that the process would not be used simply for partisan advantage.

Scale, results, and political effect

The program’s stated purpose was twofold: to protect the government from disloyal employees and to shield innocent workers from unsupported accusations. Those aims did not remove the danger inherent in a system that invited scrutiny of political loyalty. David E. Lilienthal, familiar with the damage that self-appointed Communist hunters could inflict on loyal public servants, feared that an employee could become vulnerable to a malicious accuser. Even he conceded that some program of this kind might have to be introduced; the New York Post also described it as a logical answer to subversion. The dispute therefore concerned not only whether the government should act, but how suspicion would be tested and who might bear its costs.

The machinery soon expanded dramatically. The Federal Bureau of Investigation began conducting name checks on all two million people on federal payrolls, a task the account describes as costly and immense. By 1951, the Civil Service Commission had investigated and cleared three million employees, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation reviewing another 14,000. Several thousand employees resigned. Only 212 were dismissed for questionable loyalty, however, and no one was indicted; investigators found no evidence of espionage.

Those results sharpened the contrast between the sweeping language of the threat and what the program established. Clark Clifford later described the policy as a response to the temper of the times, while privately offering a more pointed explanation: he considered the alleged loyalty problem manufactured and believed political pressure, including Truman’s approaching 1948 campaign, had made it necessary to respond. In Clifford’s account, Truman did not regard the Communist scare as a serious substantive problem, even though the political conditions required him to acknowledge it.

The order had an immediate political payoff. A confidential report to Time’s editors said Republicans were beginning to take Truman seriously: the program undercut their claim that the administration was doing nothing about Communists in government and weakened a recurring line of attack. In that sense, a policy Truman found troubling helped establish that he would not be an easy target on the issue. Its political usefulness, however, did not settle its moral or practical costs.

Truman’s misgivings and the enduring contradiction

Truman’s unease persisted after the order was issued. He feared that J. Edgar Hoover’s organization could become the foundation of a citizen-spy system and opposed the prospect of a domestic secret police. He later defended the program as an attempt to be fair within the climate of opinion then prevailing, but in private conversation he conceded that it had been a terrible mistake.

The Red Scare thus appears through a sustained contradiction. Truman considered the country secure against Communist takeover, yet authorized a national system of loyalty investigations; he wanted to protect innocent employees, yet the program subjected millions to scrutiny and encouraged a political culture of suspicion. Its limited findings did not undo the pressure that had produced it. Instead, they clarified how political fear could transform a disputed danger into an expansive government procedure—and how a president who doubted the scale of the threat could still help institutionalize the response.