Status Updates From The Second Red Scare and th...

The democracies, which cannot compete [with totalitarian governments] in terms of highly centralized discipline, must seek their strength in resourceful and imaginative administration. If this be true the loyalty program is fast dissipating one of our most precious assets.1

So another reason for loyalty defendants to keep friends and associates in the dark was to prevent them from trying to help. People who had been accused also worried that they would do more harm than good if they tried to defend others. By making it dangerous to vouch for one’s associates, loyalty investigations damaged not just individuals but also ties among individuals.

like other markets, the marketplace of ideas was not really a free one. Whatever weight one assigns the loyalty investigations in the Keyserlings’ abandonment of the left, the investigations certainly caused them to attempt to erase their youthful socialism from the past. They were not unique; other high-ranking loyalty defendants similarly shifted to the center and then denied any such shift.

Their years under scrutiny as disloyalty suspects may not have been the exclusive cause for the Keyserlings’ rightward shift to the “vital center” in the 1950s, but it was a major factor. The transformation of these New Dealers into Cold War liberals was an adaptation to political repression, not a purely objective intellectual development;

To the displeasure of the Dies Committee, the CSC loyalty examiners distinguished between leftism and Communist Party membership, and they also tended to forgive Communist associations that predated the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. Although wartime loyalty-security measures evolved hastily and with little public scrutiny, they were often fairer to employees than what was to follow.

as evidence of a homoerotic “conspiracy of the gentlemen”; the patricians’ government service as inability to compete as entrepreneurs; their urbane intellectualism as “fancy-pants” effeteness; and their internationalism as lack of patriotism. Questioning the masculinity of the “imperial brotherhood” became one tactic by which ultraconservatives tried to gain control over U.S. foreign policy.

30s
Contrary to recurring suggestions that leftist faculty dominated college campuses, they were in the minority everywhere. Many would have sympathized with Caroline Ware’s complaint that the Vassar administration was hiring conventional thinkers and “steering the college firmly down the path of the genteel tradition, aided and abetted by the old guard.”

While working her way through college as a waitress, Klaus unionized her coworkers. At Columbia Law, she recalled, most of the male students were hostile, sometimes stomping their feet in class so that female students could not be heard