Indeed, to delve deeper into the intricate fabric of 1947, we must critically examine President Harry S. Truman’s Executive Order 9855, which initiated a loyalty program for federal employees. This action, far from being an isolated incident, was a pivotal move, directly reflecting the burgeoning Cold War anxieties and the shifting domestic political landscape post-World War II. It marked a significant stride in constructing what would become the pervasive “national security state”, fundamentally altering the relationship between the government and its citizenry.
The program was unveiled in March 1947, amidst a period of profound transition for the United States. Truman, who had only met Franklin D. Roosevelt once or twice before becoming president in April 1945, inherited immense challenges both at home and abroad. Domestically, there was widespread concern about the economy, with fears of a return to the Great Depression, despite the wartime boom. Labor strikes were rampant, and Truman’s popularity had plummeted from an initial 87% to a mere 32% by mid-1946. The 1946 midterm elections had been a significant blow to the Democrats, who lost control of both the Senate and House for the first time since the Depression, giving Republicans a national mandate to push back against the New Deal and intensify their rhetoric against communism.
In this charged environment, the Truman administration faced accusations from Republicans of being “soft” on communism and even harboring Communists within the State Department. The loyalty program, then, served multiple purposes. It was a direct response to this political pressure, an attempt by Truman to “shore up his left by supporting civil rights and giving labor what they wanted,” but also to counter the conservative narrative that Washington was “awash with Communists”. From the administration’s perspective, it solidified a unified national front, essential for the “militarization of the budget” and the “suppression of domestic opposition” to its foreign policy.
Executive Order 9855 authorized the dismissal of any government employee who was found to be associated with organizations deemed “Communist, fascist, or simply subversive”. What ensued, however, was far from a nuanced investigation. An “overzealous attorney general’s office” transformed the program into a “witch hunt”. The scrutiny was intense and personal, examining everything from individuals’ memberships in organizations to their sexual habits, personal associations, and political affiliations, both past and present. Disturbingly, “malicious gossip, assumptions, and innuendo often became facts” that were used as grounds for suspicion and dismissal.
The sheer scale of the program was staggering. Between its launch in March 1947 and December 1952, an estimated 6.6 million persons were investigated. Despite this massive undertaking, “not a single case of espionage was uncovered,” though approximately 500 individuals were dismissed in what were described as “dubious cases of ‘questionable loyalty'”. Another 6,000 employees chose to resign rather than face the opaque process, which was conducted with “secret evidence, secret and often paid informers, and neither judge nor jury”.
This official Red hunt, despite its failure to unearth actual subversion, “gave popular credence to the notion that the government was riddled with spies”. It directly contributed to the “climate of fear” and “hysteria about Communism” that escalated the military budget and shaped the nascent national security state. As noted in the sources, Truman himself, despite later complaining of the “great wave of hysteria,” was largely responsible for creating it through his “commitment to victory over communism”.
The loyalty program played a crucial role in “weakening and isolating the left,” which had been an influential force during the Great Depression and World War II. It helped forge a “national consensus excluding the radicals” and aligning “conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, around the policies of cold war and anti-Communism”. This meant that even liberals, in this new anti-Communist mood, could be persuaded to “support repressive moves at home which in ordinary times would be seen as violating the liberal tradition of tolerance”. Indeed, the program set the stage for later figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who “could go even further than Truman” in his anti-Communist crusade.
The broader context of Truman’s presidency reveals his complex approach. While he aimed to extend the New Deal’s liberal policies domestically, exemplified by his “Fair Deal” program, he was often willing to “sacrifice domestic legislation to further his foreign policy agenda”. His recognition of Israel in 1948, for instance, was influenced by both moral conviction and the political need to secure the Jewish vote in key states like New York. Internationally, Truman’s administration was committed to America’s economic preeminence, pushing for an “Open Door Policy” and the Bretton Woods system to establish a dollar-based international monetary order, effectively shifting “the financial center of the world from London to the United States Treasury”.
However, Truman’s views on the intelligence apparatus he helped create were not static. While the National Security Act of 1947 established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council, and Dulles would later claim that Truman “approved the organization in CIA of a new office to carry out covert operations”, Truman later expressed profound regret. In 1963, he published an op-ed stating he “never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations”. He felt the agency had become “an operational and at times a policy-making arm of Government” and was “casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society”. He even privately confided that establishing the CIA was a “mistake” and that it had become “a government all of its own and all secret”. This perspective underscores the unintended consequences and evolving nature of the powerful mechanisms put in place during the formative years of the Cold War.
In essence, Executive Order 9855 was a critical component of the post-war restructuring of American power. It was a domestic policy steeped in foreign policy anxieties, designed to create internal ideological unity to support a new era of global engagement. While ostensibly aimed at security, its true impact was the suppression of dissent and the normalization of an “us-and-them” mentality, cementing a political consensus that would endure for decades, setting a divisive “template” for future confrontations.