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The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government

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Rarely does a work of history both capture a particular moment in time and resonate so deeply with issues alive in contemporary public culture. As the country debates the possibility of gay marriage and the possible meanings of these unions, David Johnson's The Lavender Scare reminds us that homosexuality has at least one other time been conjured up as the nation's "bugaboo" during a period of political shifts and broad cultural change. In an account that is as riveting as it is sobering, Johnson shows how "containment of sexuality was as central to 1950s America as containment of communism." The issue of homosexuality sat at the center of discussions about "national security" during the Cold War period, resulting in the persecution and ouster of hundreds of gay (and suspected gay) federal workers.
The book is written with marvelous grace and sensitivity. Johnson's brilliant skill at research and powers of analysis are in evidence on every page. Much to his credit, Johnson has used those skills to give voice to those from whom otherwise we might never have heard. The impressive narrative structure of The Lavender Scare makes it read like a fine novel. And the callous devastation, the lives lost and ruined by the tactics of a government in search of a moral center after WWII, makes one wish it were a work of fiction. But it is far from that.
The Lavender Scare, rather, is a work of consummate historical research and writing. The enduring contribution of the book is that it shows how the "McCarthy Era" had much less to do with "the Communist threat" and much more to do with homosexuality and "moral panic" than we could have possibly imagined. We will never again be able to think of the Cold War period in quite the same way. Johnson has complexified and clarified perhaps the most vital time in Post WWII American history. The book is certain take its place alongside George Chauncey's magisterial Gay New York.

Cold war and McCarthyism are familiar topics from historians as America's fear of Communists and its reaction to this fear are interpreted from every side of the political spectrum. David K. Johnson does something different and, in its special way, far more important. The author, in The Lavender Scare, looks at how the cold war fears were used to hound gay men and women out of the federal service and how this continued unabated long after the Communist hysteria died down. It is fascinating, and horrifying, to witness how politicians used their fear and ignorance of "the perverts" for their own political ends and used the fear of Communists as a cover for their attacks. The case presented in this book is well researched and the voices from both sides are used, even from those voices of the gay men and lesbians which had to be silent at the time. This books holds valuable lessons (and warnings) for our own fraught times. A valuable addition to the literature of the history of the Cold War.

Johnson does a great job of reporting on the horrible way gays and lesbians were treated by the federal government during the McCarthy era. He puts the action of the government in the context. And, by recounting the personal stories of many of the federal workers who lost their livelihoods during these purges, Johnson adds depth and feeling to what otherwise could have been a dry academic work.

This book is an excellent piece of history and well written. The author extensively researches private correspondence involving homosexuals and homosexual activists, newspaper reports, congressional reports and so on. The author makes use of the records of the most extensive congressional investigation into homosexuality among government employees, the Senate committee chaired by Senator Clyde Hoey, records which were closed to researchers until 2000. He also makes use of personal interviews and other biographic records that gives a picture of what homosexual life was like in Washington D.C from the 1940's to 1960's.

An important point the author makes is how previous historians have usually downplayed or, more often than not, completely ignored, the prominence of the homosexual issue during the McCarthy era. Part of the reason for this, the author suggests, is that historians have used Senator McCarthy's public pronouncements to provide them with a measure of the public focus on gay people. In his initial speeches in early 1950, McCarthy linked homosexual behavior with adherence to communist doctrines, but then, for no clear reason, ignored the homosexual issue for the rest of his career. Dr. Johnson shows what he says other historians have ignored, that other politicians picked up the issue and were successful in using in it. The Lavender Scare picked up steam in early 1950 when under-secretary of state John Peurifoy stated before a Senate committee that 91 employees from the State Department had been fired for homosexual activity. Pretty soon, newspaper reports indicated that while a quarter of the letters to McCarthy's office were about communists, the other three quarters expressed fear and anger about homosexuals employed by the federal government. President Truman's advisors told him that the public worried more about homosexuals in government than communists. In particular, the state department was seen in the public mind as a haven for homosexuals. In his syndicated column, the reactionary Westbrook Pegler continually stressed a connection between homosexuality and the State Department. The right wing continually tried to link liberal Democrats to homosexuality, portraying the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as being populated by effete, unmanly intellectuals and bureaucrats who raised the taxes of hardworking Americans and sold out to the Soviet Union at Yalta. There was much speculation that homosexuals had been placed in the State Department by Sumner Welles, who had been the number two official in Roosevelt's State Department. Welles had been forced to quietly resign after he drunkenly propositioned several male porters while travelling by rail with Roosevelt's entourage in 1943. Homosexuality would be used against Charles Bohlen, who had been one of the US architects of the Yalta accords, in guilt by association way in 1953, during his confirmation hearings to be ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bohlen was not gay but had a friendship with a gay State Department official named Charles Bohlen. Bohlen got the ambassadorship but his friend lost his job.

The official justification for firing homosexuals was 1) a foreign power, mainly the Soviets, could lure homosexuals in sensitive government posts into compromising positions and blackmail them into being spies 2) homosexuals demoralized fellow government employees with their "abnormal" behavior. The spying/blackmail issue was that which was most prominently played up. The Soviets were trying to lure female government employees into lesbianism so they could blackmail them into being spies, Senator Kenneth Wherry claimed. Dr. Johnson shows that during the Hoey Committee hearings, Senators looked for statements from medical experts that would substantiate their belief that homosexuals had weaker moral fibers, a greater vulnerability to becoming spies than heterosexual folks. The medical officials responded that no evidence existed for these claims but the committee ignored them. The Committee seized on the claim of the director of the CIA that, in the early 20th century, the chief of Austrian intelligence had been caught in a homosexual act by Czarist Russian agents and, in return for not making evidence of the homosexuality public, forced him to become a Russian spy. Johnson argues that, in reality, while this intelligence chief may have been gay, there was no evidence that he became a spy because the Russians threatened to use his gayness against him. Homosexuality was again cited as a cause for the defection to the Soviet Union of two NSA analysts in 1960. The lead NSA analyst seemed to have been gay but no evidence exists that the Russians used his homosexuality to blackmail him.

Homosexuality ranked as a very prominent "security risk" in the eyes of government officials. In 1953, State Department official Carlisle Hummelsine told congress that of the 654 dismissals or forced resignations of employees on "loyalty" or security grounds in the Department since 1947, 402 were because of homosexual behavior. Especially after Eisenhower became president in 1953, security specialists swarmed over all government agencies, using gossip from informers or background checks, to bully alleged homosexual government employees into resigning. The standard of the federal government was that even one homosexual experience in an adult's life, no matter how far in the distant past, automatically disqualified one for government employment. The number of people fired or whose application for employment in the federal government was rejected on the grounds of homosexuality, ran into the thousands. Many were subsequently blacklisted from gainful employment. A handful of people have been documented to subsequently have committed suicide, though this number is probably much higher.

The Lavender Scare is held by Dr. Johnson, I think quite plausibly, to have started the Gay Rights movement. It was not the Stonewall Riots of 1969 as is commonly believed. Frank Kameny, who had been fired as an astronomer with the navy (at the dawn of the space race) in 1957 for being gay, helped build on tentative gay organizational efforts in the 1950's. Kameny's organization The Mattachine Society of Washington gained national attention with a series of pickets before federal government offices, including the White House, in 1965. Kameny helped start legal challenges against the federal government's discrimination against gay people.

I am reviewing this book based on the Kindle version. The only problem i have with the Kindle version is that the footnotes, which in a book like this are very important, are not directly accessible as with other Kindle books. I can see the footnote number, but cannot click on the number to get to the actual note. I hope the producers of this book will correct this problem.

As for the content, this well written book was an eye opener for me. The author lays out the events in a manner that makes clear how the homosexual panic took hold as a tool for the Republicans wanting to oust a Democratic president and cast aspersions on the New Deal. It also reveals how some in the press used it as a means to improve their circulation by playing on the public's fear of the gay/lesbian "other". When i was taught about the McCarthy era there was NO information provided about the attack on the gay/lesbian community. This book is the only one to bring this dark period of hysteria into the cold light of day where i hope we will learn some important lessons.

I recommend highly this book and Making Gay History as two of the best books on LGBT history available today.

I've always been fascinated by the McCarthy era. It always seemed to me that the nation teetered on the brink of totalitarianism for several years during the 1950s. Fortunately, the nation managed to pull itself back from the brink.

In The Lavender Scare author David K. Johnson sheds light into the dark corner or the McCarthy era and uncovers a time when the federal government targeted gay and lesbian employees for prosecution and firing because it was believed that simply being gay made then more vulnerable to blackmail by foreign agents. (It doesn't seem to have occurred to the government that a straight married man involved in an affair stood the same risk of blackmail.)

Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy often gets credit for starting the "lavender scare" along with the witch hunts seeking to oust current and former Communists from the government. However, as Johnson points out, McCarthy actually had little to do directly with the anti-homosexual purges. But in the mind of the public in the 1950s McCarthy was forever linked with the lavender scare because the public did not see the distinction between the issues of disloyalty posed by Communists and the potential security risks posed by gays and lesbians.

The anti-gay purges began in the State Department but soon spread to all federal offices as well as private companies that held government contracts. While Washington, D.C. had a reputation for tolerance before World War II, the post-war years saw that tolerance reversed. Vice officers busted hapless men for as little as making eye contact in bars, in parks and on the street. Law enforcement agencies were only too happy to share their arrest reports with government officials. Gays and lesbians were arrested at private dinner parties and interrogated to identify their friends. When a gay employee was identified, Civil Service investigators were called in for coercive interogations.

During the darkest days of the lavender scare many gays and lesbians simply "disappeared." Some moved back to their home towns in the hope their shame wouldn't follow them. Some had to take menial jobs because the careers they had prepared for were forever barred to them. Some chose to end their own lives. And some found a new calling. Among them were Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society in California and Frank Kameny who founded the Mattachine Society of Washington.

Kameny especially comes across as a hero. Once an astronomer who was working under a government contract, when rumors of his homosexuality began to spread he was called Washington and fired. He began a court fight that ultimately proved futile, but along they way he gained the courage to come out as a gay man and speak publicly about the devastation of the government's anti-gay purges.

I've encountered references to the anti-gay purges in various histories of the time that I read. Lavender Scare is the first book I've ever read to deal specifically with the subject. It seems well researched and a work of solid scholarship in addition to being a very readable book.

I bought this book for the library of our chapter of Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). It details the extent of the anti-gay witch-hunts that existed during the Cold War and acts as a warning that such persecution is far from extinguished. The book is a partial answer to those uninformed people who wonder why gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people are not satisfied with the status quo. It isn't an easy read, but those who search for truth and justice don't expect to be entertained.

What a great book! I never liked any type of history. I almost failed it in high school. This book has changed that for me. The only reason I read this book in the first place was because the author is a friend of mine, so I felt obligated to read it. Otherwise I never would have considered it. Well, I was glued to it the entire time reading it. Not only did I find it riveting, angering, thought provoking and scary, but I actually learned a lot about history that I never paid attention to in high school! I also found it quite timely, and I feel like we're going through many of the same things in politics now. (John Ashcroft = Joe McCarthy)

This book is a must read!

A very readable book on modern history of a segment of society that might go unnoticed. We all know about the Stonewall Riots and the importance they played in the history of gays and lesbians in the United States. THE LAVENDER SCARE puts that event in perspective and points out how this was only a part of the fabric started by brave men and women who finally decided to speak out against government oppression long before Stonewall.

David K. Johnson's history is an excellent, well documented, and captiviating account of a largely forgotten aspect of the Cold War and McCarthy period. While the reputation of Senator McCarthy is alive today, few people are aware of how the anticommunist and anti-gay purges affected life for all Americans, creating a bitter climate of fear and recrimination that felt nation-wide. The political spirit of that time will resonate for everyone who reads the news today, as political leaders are motivated not by a sense of justice, but by a fear of getting branded as being on the "wrong side" of a political issue. As Mr. Johnson points out, the only blackmailing government workers were subject to was that from their own employers. The fear, ignorance, prejudice of that time is brought vividly back to life in Mr. Johnson's book, as is the extraordinary intellence and bravery of the few souls who sought to make a just change in thier country. This is truly an important tale of freedom in America.