The anti-Communist scare

The anti-Communist scare became both a public anxiety and a political test for Harry S. Truman: while he questioned whether Communist influence posed the sweeping threat his critics alleged, he authorized a peacetime program to investigate federal employees’ loyalty. The episode reveals how fear of infiltration could drive policy even when the President doubted the underlying case, and how a measure intended to blunt political attacks could leave a lasting mark on civil liberties.

A fear gains political force

By 1946, concern about Communist influence was rising alongside discontent over shortages and other postwar problems. Those concerns were not interchangeable: the book describes fear of Communist influence and infiltration as more consequential in the long run than discontent over meat shortages. Reporting from across the country reflected a widespread hostility toward communism, while Republicans accused Truman of appeasing the Soviet Union abroad and fostering communism at home. Their charge turned foreign policy into a domestic political weapon, presenting the Democratic administration as divided or compromised.

Republican warnings ranged from alleged infiltration of universities and the Army to claims that officials were serving un-American interests. The political force of those accusations was intensified by the discovery of the Ottawa spy ring, which gave grounds for concern even as the scale of the supposed domestic threat remained disputed. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover publicly warned of a large Communist presence in the country. In the book’s account, alarm over espionage, partisan attacks, and fears about the expanding power of the Soviet Union reinforced one another, making the scare a powerful feature of political debate.

Truman’s own private anxieties did not simply mirror the claims made by his opponents. He was wary of what he called Reds and fellow travelers, and the spy-ring revelations could not be dismissed as baseless. Yet he also believed that too much was being made of the Communist threat and considered the country safe because most people were, in his view, sensible. The tension between acknowledging a real security concern and resisting an inflated public alarm shaped his response.

Truman’s reluctant security response

In the summer of 1946, under pressure from Attorney General Tom C. Clark, Truman secretly agreed to continue electronic surveillance in cases involving national defense. The policy had begun under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Clark did not tell Truman that Roosevelt’s original 1940 authorization applied only to aliens. The episode illustrates how security measures could persist while the scope of their original justification changed: Truman approved continuation without being given that important limitation.

The next year, the political demand for action grew. Republicans pressed for investigations and presented alleged Communist penetration of government as evidence of Democratic failure. Attorney General Tom C. Clark and J. Edgar Hoover argued that even a small number of disloyal employees could threaten national security; Hoover also sought broad authority to remove public servants whose political views were suspect. Suspicion focused especially on the State Department, while accusations that the New Deal had been riddled with Communists circulated despite their lack of substantiation.

Truman was particularly concerned about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its chairman, J. Parnell Thomas. He feared that the committee might take the loyalty issue to extremes. Moving first, he hoped, could forestall its attacks and prevent his administration from being accused of weakness at home while he pursued a tougher policy toward communism abroad. His choice was therefore both a security measure and a response to the political conditions surrounding his presidency.

The loyalty program and its political uses

On March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing the Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. It created an elaborate system of loyalty reviews and brought a form of federal employee screening into peacetime. Roosevelt had taken steps to disqualify or investigate government workers during the Second World War; until Truman’s order, the account notes, no comparable step had been taken in peacetime.

The order answered a political vulnerability with a conspicuous show of action. A confidential assessment from Time’s Capitol Hill correspondent described its immediate effect: Republicans began taking Truman seriously, and the charge that Communists were in government while nothing was being done became harder to sustain. In the short term, the measure undercut a favored line of attack and demonstrated that Truman would not simply yield the issue to his critics. The benefit was political, but the program’s reach and consequences extended beyond that immediate contest.

Truman’s reservations persisted alongside the program. He was strongly opposed to the FBI’s power and feared that it might develop into a Gestapo-like citizen surveillance system. He also rejected the assumption that politically suspect views were enough to establish disloyalty. In this, the policy contained a fundamental contradiction: it sought to reassure the public and head off congressional attacks by empowering a loyalty-review system whose potential excesses alarmed the President who had authorized it.

Retrospect and significance

Clark Clifford later characterized the program as a political problem shaped by the 1948 election: in his account, there had been no serious underlying loyalty crisis, Truman did not attach fundamental importance to the Communist scare, and political pressure nevertheless made a response seem necessary. That retrospective assessment emphasizes the difference between the public justification for the program and the political calculations behind its creation. The account also notes that Clifford’s own family had been affected by the program, underscoring that its consequences were not merely theoretical.

In his later memoirs, Truman defended the program as an attempt to be fair under the prevailing climate of opinion. In private conversation with friends, however, he acknowledged that it had been a terrible mistake. Those judgments frame the episode as more than a straightforward choice between vigilance and indifference. The scare narrowed the room for political disagreement: Truman doubted the scale of the danger, feared the investigative power of the FBI, and still chose a federal loyalty system to counter accusations of weakness. Its immediate political success did not resolve that conflict; it made the conflict part of policy.