The Lavender Scare was a Bipartisan Affair
I watched the documentary The Lavender Scare and found it of general interest but I thought slightly inaccurate in the thesis it portrayed. It was accurate in what it did say but the problem lies with what was omitted.
The film starts speaking of the 1930s and makes a comment about gay and lesbian people didn’t have “even a hint” of the persecution that was to come. This implies a golden period for homosexuals that would come crashing down unexpectedly and they were quite clear as to who should shoulder the blame.
The problem is this isn’t the whole truth. There was a huge hint this was coming but the documentary conveniently started it’s history one decade later. Between 1919 and 1922 the federal government conducted the first gay witch-hunt at the federal level. Now, some apologists on the Left argued this was “nothing new” and mention how local police had done such things for years — and they had. But the might and power of the federal government — far more significant than some local police department — had NEVER been involved in an open campaign to find and prosecute people for being gay until 1919-1922.
That is a huge difference and one which opened the door for the “lavender scare” that was to come. What we see are some people not wanting to mention how the first anti-gay witch-hunt was conducted by none other than Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Many who chronicle FDR’s life have endowed him with sainthood and mentioning how he instituted the first federal witch-hunt of gays doesn’t serve that agenda — so the truth about Roosevelt’s actions get overlooked, swept under the rug, whitewashed and forgotten.
Consider the documentary on the Roosevelts by Ken Burns on PBS. Michelangelo Signorile, at Huffington Post took Burns and PBS to task for the whitewashing of FDR when it aired:
How could we not hear about the scandalous anti-gay witch-hunt beginning in 1919 in Newport (Rhode Island) overseen by then assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt? As detailed in historian John Loughery’s 1998 book The Other Side of Silence, Navy sailors were recruited to entrap other men to have sex with them, with the undercover “operatives” engaging in sex to orgasmic completion — oral, and yes, some anal — with the men they entrapped, and logging all of this in their own reports.
At first, the sting focused on men in the Navy, in an attempt to clean up what was seen as “moral conditions” at the Newport base, but it soon expanded to the civilian population in Newport and resulted in the arrests and sometimes imprisonment of 17 sailors and a prominent Episcopal Navy chaplain. When the methods of the witch-hunt became known there were headlines across the country, legal inquires and a hearing and denouncement from a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. The Senate report called FDR’s behavior “reprehensible,” and stated that the actions “violated the code of the American citizen and ignored the rights of every American boy who enlisted in the navy to fight for his country.” The New York Times went with the headline, “LAY NAVY SCANDAL TO F. D. ROOSEVELT, DETAILS ARE UNPRINTABLE.”
How could we not hear of it? Simple: it doesn’t support the mythology surrounding F.D.R — the man was a racist, anti-Semite and the only president to incarcerate Americans in camps due to their ethnicity — he was never some great beacon of liberal tolerance—classical or progressive.
What would happen in the 1950s should not have been a total surprise — the Roosevelt witch-hunt in Newport was a loud and clear warning.
This brings us to the second problem I had with the documentary — as it discusses the “lavender scare” it mentions two names as guilty parties — but only two: Joseph McCarthy and Dwight Eisenhower. Missing from the narrative is the fact anti-gay witch-hunts had support from both sides of the aisle. That Democrats today have adopted liberal tolerance doesn’t mean we sweep under the rug the ugly history of the past.
Judith Adkins, archivist at the National Archives, has a slightly different take than what was presented in The Lavender Scare. She writes:
Beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the federal workforce because of their sexuality. Dubbed the Lavender Scare, this wave of repression was also bound up with anti-Communism and fueled by the power of congressional investigation.
Her timeline for the “lavender scare” starts in the late 1940s, but the evil Eisenhower didn’t take office until 1953 and it covers the administrations of four presidents—three of them were Democrats. She notes the U.S. Congress in 1948 passed an act labeling all gays as mentally ill and unfit for government jobs. The first federal investigation of gay and lesbian employees took place from March to May 1950 while Harry S Truman occupied the White House.
A committee of just two Senators, Republican Kenneth Wherry and Democrat J. Lister Hill, brought in police with experience at arresting gays to testify:
“The senators heard testimony from Lt. Roy Blick, head of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s vice squad. Blick claimed that 5,000 homosexuals lived in D.C. and that about 3,700 of them were federal employees. These figures were highly speculative but dramatic and widely reported by the press.
Wherry and Hill also questioned government officials, including representatives from the State Department, the Defense Department, military intelligence, and the Civil Service Commission, the agency that oversaw civilian employees of the federal government.
In particular, Wherry wanted to know whether any of the “91 moral weaklings” fired from State had made their way back into government service. The CSC looked into the matter, determined that 13 had indeed been rehired, and outlined the steps it was taking to remove them. Wherry concluded that no coordinated system existed to guarantee that the files of personnel separated for homosexuality were appropriately flagged.
Commissioner Harry Mitchell of the CSC sent the committee suggestions for a “routine procedure to rid the offices of Government of moral perverts and guard against their admission.” Henceforth, arresting authorities would report the real nature of each arrest to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which would alert the CSC, which would in turn take appropriate action to pursue removal.
This was followed with a bigger investigation to weed out homosexuals from federal employment — the Hoey Committee, led by Democratic Senator Clyde Hoey, with the help of fellow Democratic Senators James Eastland, John McClellan, and Herbert O’Conor. These four were joined by three Republicans. Senator McCarthy was supposed to be on the committee but had resigned his seat temporarily and didn’t serve.
This Democratically controlled committee pressured government agencies to explain what they were doing to remove gay employees.
The staff first contacted a wide range of federal agencies to ascertain the number of suspected homosexuals investigated or removed from employment and to inquire about the agency’s related policies and procedures and its general stance on the suitability of gay employees. A questionnaire went out to all branches of the military plus 53 civilian departments and agencies, ranging from the large and prominent, like State, Treasury, and Justice, to the small and obscure, like the American Battle Monument Commission and the Philippine War Damage Commission. Committee investigators then interviewed agency officials and summarized these conversations in memoranda.
Most agencies came out strongly against the suitability of homosexual employees
On December 15, 1950 the committee issued a final report Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government claiming some 5,000 gay men and lesbians were discharged from federal jobs. The report said all homosexuals should be fired and posed a threat to the security of the United States. But it is still some years before Dwight Eisenhower can be blamed for any part of it. This report set the agenda for the Lavender Scare and the main authors were Democrats, not Republicans — which doesn’t mean Republicans didn’t support the idea.
Judith Adkins wrote the Hoey Report:
…was widely promulgated and highly influential. It shaped government agency security manuals for years to come. It was sent abroad to U.S. embassies and to foreign intelligence agencies. The report carried the authority of Congress and so was taken as official proof that gay people did indeed threaten national security. The U.S. government and even foreign governments repeatedly quoted it to justify discrimination.
Most significantly, the 1950 congressional investigations and the Hoey committee’s final report helped institutionalize discrimination by laying the groundwork for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 Executive Order #10450, “Security Requirements for Government Employment.”
That order explicitly added sexuality to the criteria used to determine suitability for federal employment. With the stroke of a pen, the President effectively banned gay men and lesbians from all jobs in the U.S. government — the country’s largest employer.
This is what was missing from the documentary. Most viewers would be left with the impression the witch-hunt was the work of two men, and Republicans at that. In fact, it was a bipartisan attack on the civil rights of gay people and many of its leading architects were Democrats. Yes, Democrats have changed, and today’s party leaders shouldn’t be held accountable for sins committed by individuals they did not know. But neither should we sweep the bipartisan nature of this attack under the rug.
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