"The Lavender Scare"-- An Integral Part Of Conservatism

The film based on this book should be out soon

I was born just as a wave of paranoia swept the United States that gay people were a threat to national security. The idea was that gays, forced to stay in the closet and petrified about exposure, could be blackmailed by the country's enemies. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy-- who employed vicious right-wing closet queen Roy Cohn on his staff-- was more obsessed with gays (almost as much as Santorum or Bachmann or Foxx is today) than he was with Communists.

Today life in the closet is fading; it would fade even faster if conservatives didn't see it as a rich field to mine in terms of demagoguery. Democratic politicians-- from Barney Frank and Kyrsten Sinema to Tammy Baldwin and Ed Potosnak-- can't be blackmailed. They're not in any closets. Whereas Republican politicians when outed are always politically ruined. Today dozens of them-- from Patrick McHenry, Mark Kirk, Aaron Schock and Adrian Smith to Larry Craig, Rick Perry, David Dreier and Lindsey Graham-- are cowering in closets even though it is widely known in Washington that they're obsessed with secret and dangerous, thrilling sex with young men.

In October 2006, Corey Robin reviewed David Johnson's The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government in the London Review of Books, a piece he turned into a chapter of his amazing new book, The Reactionary Mind.

[I]n 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the government than about Communists.’ The executive branch responded immediately. That year, the State Department fired ‘perverts’ at the rate of one a day, more than twice the figure for suspected Communists. Charges of homosexuality ultimately accounted for a quarter to a half of all dismissals in the State and Commerce Departments, and in the CIA. Only 25 per cent of Joseph McCarthy’s fan letters complained of ‘red infiltration’; the rest fretted about ‘sex depravity’.

The scare lasted from 1947 to the 1970s, and in The Lavender Scare David Johnson estimates that thousands lost their jobs. The men and women charged with rinsing the pink from the Potomac were astonishingly ignorant about their quarry. Senator Clyde Hoey, head of the first congressional inquiry into the threat, had to ask an aide: ‘Can you please tell me, what can two women possibly do?’ Senator Margaret Chase Smith asked one Hoey Committee witness whether there wasn’t a ‘quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things’.

The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria’s top spy to force him to work for them.

The real justification was even more suspect: gays were social misfits whose pathology made them susceptible to Communist indoctrination. Many conservatives also believed that the Communist Party was a movement of and for libertines, and the Soviet Union a haven of free love and open marriage. Gays, they concluded, couldn’t resist this freedom from bourgeois constraint. Drawing parallels with the decline of the Roman Empire, McCarthy regarded homosexuality as a cultural degeneracy that could only weaken the United States. It was, as one tabloid put it, ‘Stalin’s Atom Bomb’.

How could a nation confronting so many foreign threats allow itself to be sidetracked like this? (This is not just a question for historians: in recent months, Congress has devoted considerable energy to debating gay marriage, while in the last 13 years the US military has fired 55 of its Arabic speakers for being gay; the most recent was uncovered after investigators asked him if he had ever participated in community theatre.) With the Soviets in possession of the bomb and Korea on the march, why was Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, dispatched to Congress to defend his heterosexuality and that of his ‘powder puff diplomats’? Didn’t he have more important things to do than host rowdy gatherings of politicians and journalists that were reminiscent of ‘stag parties’, featuring copious amounts of Scotch and bourbon, and smiling women ‘whose identity remained undisclosed’. As one senator remarked, ‘It reminded me somewhat of the fraternity rushing season at college.’ Dean Acheson tried to appear as ‘one of the boys’, slapping senators on the back. A journalist reported that ‘his hair was rumpled, his tie awry. The stiff and precise manner and speech which have antagonised many of us had disappeared. He even seemed to have removed the wax from his moustache.’

Johnson’s book is one of the most instructive histories of the domestic Cold War to have appeared in years, but its reach extends beyond its immediate subject to the question, which vexes us today, of achieving the right balance between freedom and security. The book suggests not only that we seldom strike the right balance but that the concept of "balance" may itself be deeply flawed. "The synergy between national security and conservative anxiety is hardly new," he writes.

[T]he Lavender Scare reflected a general backlash against the loosening of sexual mores and gender roles that resulted from the New Deal and the Second World War. Roosevelt’s welfare state, conservatives argued, sapped the nation’s energy, drained away patriarchal vigour. Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and female social workers were now running the show. World War Two exacerbated the problem: with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded. Citing these ‘social and family upheavals’, J. Edgar Hoover argued that ‘the wartime spirit of abandon and “anything goes” led to a decline of morals among people of all ages.’

Washington was the centre of this cultural revolution. A boom town for young single people in the 1930s and 1940s, it had a tight housing market, forcing men to bunk up with men, and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a ‘very gay city’. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite his own ambiguous sexuality, he was not happy about these changes.

After the war conservatives stirred a panic about gender roles-- ‘A great emphasis,’ according to Cheever, ‘by way of defence, was put upon manliness, athletics, hunting, fishing and conservative clothing, but the lonely wife wondered, glancingly, about her husband at his hunting camp, and the husband wondered with whom he shared a rude bed of pines. Was he? Had he? Did he want to? Had he ever?’-- and deftly turned the public against a government bent on making everyone gay. The New Deal, they claimed, was a Queer Deal; America was run by ‘fairies and Fair Dealers’ (Truman called his domestic programme the Fair Deal). Because of this ungodly union of Democrats, Communists and fags, the United States was now vulnerable to the Soviet Union.

Today’s conservatives believe that decades of domestic reform, driven this time by an excessive tenderness about the constitution, have created a devitalised society that lacks the will and wherewithal to face down foreign threats. That is why Bush promised after 9/11 that there would be ‘no yielding. No equivocation. No lawyering this thing to death.’ It’s also why Ashcroft bridled at the notion that the US government should read al-Qaida ‘the Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defence lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV’. It’s not clear who, if anyone, was recommending such a policy, but that Ashcroft felt compelled to denounce it gives an indication of what he thinks is at issue when he talks about security. Conservatives certainly believe that the Patriot Act and other restrictions on civil liberties will protect the American people: whether or not it’s from terrorism that they’re being protected is another question.

....The notion of a balance between freedom and security mistakenly assumes that its benefits and burdens will be distributed equally among all members of society. Cole and Dempsey point out that some members of society, often the most marginalised and despised-- gays and leftists during the Cold War, Arabs and Muslims (and gays and leftists to a lesser degree) today-- are always forced to give up their freedoms so that the rest can enjoy their security. Indeed, it is precisely because these groups are powerless, and not because they are dangerous, that the powerful can require them to bear the cost. (Two per cent of American men aged between 18 and 21 are arrested for drunk driving, yet the Supreme Court has ruled that that does not justify denying men of that age the right to buy alcohol. Many fewer than 2 per cent of Arabs and Muslims in the United States are engaged in terrorist activity but the US government has denied these groups far more fundamental rights.) What the metaphor of balance between freedom and security conceals is the fundamental imbalance of power between groups in society; unequal costs are paid in return for unequal gains.

In No Equal Justice (1999), David Cole turned a commonplace-- that white and/or wealthy Americans get better treatment from the cops and courts than black and/ or poor citizens-- into a startling theorisation of the dual justice system that prevails in America. Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom. So what does America do? It does both: it formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor. White, wealthy America gets maximal freedom and maximal safety, and ‘sidesteps the difficult question of how much constitutional protection we could afford if we were willing to ensure that it was enjoyed equally by all people’.

In Enemy Aliens and Terrorism and the Constitution, Cole extends this argument to non-citizens in wartime. Ever since the Alien Act of 1798, America’s first impulse when faced with a foreign threat has been to restrict the rights of immigrants. Cole argues that the appeal of such measures is similar to the appeal of the dual system of criminal justice. It is a ‘politically tempting way to mediate the tension between liberty and security. Citizens need not forgo their rights’ in order to be-- or to feel-- protected. Non-citizens forgo theirs, and because they ‘have no direct voice in the democratic process by which to register their objections’, few people complain.

After 9/11, Cole points out, security measures that would have affected all citizens-- such as Operation TIPS, in which utility employees, delivery men and other individuals were to spy on their fellow citizens, or the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness programme, a massive surveillance project of public and private computer records – were quickly blocked, even by leading Republicans. But measures affecting non-citizens, particularly Muslims and Arabs, received overwhelming public support. Perhaps that is why, a year after 9/11, believed themselves to have sacrificed basic rights and liberties.

But there is one difference between the treatment of aliens in wartime and the treatment of blacks and the poor in peacetime. As Cole argues, wartime measures inflicted on non-citizens eventually influence measures against US citizens, especially liberals or progressives, or those with the wrong skin colour. In 1942, the federal government put Japanese non-citizens and Japanese-Americans in internment camps (on the assumption that even if they were citizens, their racial heritage made them aliens). Several years later, the FBI compiled a secret list of 12,000 citizens to be detained in the event of a national emergency-- an initiative ratified in 1950 by the passage of the Internal Security Act, which remained on the books until 1971. Whether or not a similar mutation will occur in the war on terror is anyone’s guess, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

When we speak about a balance beteeen freedom and security what we really mean is a balance between power and powerlessness. It makes perfect sense for conservatives to use the metaphor, for it conceals and protects their natural constituency. The real question is: why do liberals oblige them?

It was liberals who first argued that individuals should be free to say and do whatever they wish, as long as they don’t harm anyone else. Liberal democracies should use coercion only to punish acts or attempted acts of harm, including threats to the security of the nation. One can see variants of this argument in Locke’s account of religious toleration, which could be sacrificed only for ‘the safety and security of the commonwealth’; Mill’s theory of liberty, which could be limited only to avert harm; and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s defence of freedom of speech, which could be abridged only to thwart ‘a clear and present danger’.

The problem with these arguments is that it is nearly impossible to define harm-- or danger, threat, menace-- in a neutral way. Every definition of harm and its national security cognates rests on ideological assumptions about human nature, morality and the good life. And in this regard, liberals are as guilty as conservatives. The only difference is that they have less power to act on their convictions-- and to stop their opponents from acting on theirs.

In 1957, while the US was conducting its purge of homosexuals, the Wolfenden Committee in the UK recommended, among other things, that gay sex between consenting adults in private be decriminalised. Speaking at the British Academy in March 1959, the conservative jurist Patrick Devlin bridled at the committee’s contention that there is ‘a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business’ and that only concrete acts of injury or harm should be prosecuted and punished by law. Not so, Devlin said: ‘What makes a society of any sort is community of ideas, not only political ideas but also ideas about the way its members should behave and govern their lives.’ Any challenge to those ideas-- no matter how private, incidental or symbolic-- undermined social cohesion and posed as great a threat to the civic order as treason. In the same way that treason could lead to the overthrow of a government, homosexuality could produce a ‘loosening of moral bonds’, which ‘is often the first stage of disintegration’. Thus, ‘the suppression of vice is as much the law’s business as the suppression of subversive activities.’

The liberal philosopher H.L.A. Hart’s response was fast, and furious. ‘It is grotesque,’ he declared, ‘to think of the homosexual behaviour of two adults in private as in any way like treason or sedition.’ Not just grotesque but obtuse: Devlin mistakenly assumed ‘that deviation from a general moral code is bound to affect that code, and to lead not merely to its modification but to its destruction.’ If one man’s private acts did alter a society’s beliefs-- a big if, Hart insisted-- such a shift would constitute not a collapse but a transformation of social morality. The proper political analogue to gay sex, then, was not treason but ‘a peaceful change’ in a form of government.

Critics tend to think that Hart got the better of Devlin. But I wonder. Hart, after all, never defined harm with any precision or persuasiveness, and it’s not clear that he could have. So what was to stop Devlin from claiming that homosexuality was as harmful as treason-- or, as his American counterparts claimed, that homosexuality was treason? Very little, it seems, either politically or philosophically. For when harm comes in shades of grey, someone, somewhere, will inevitably see it in lavender and pink-- or some other disfavoured colour of the rainbow.

By the way, if you've come this far, please consider clicking on this link, and helping Blue America replace Congress' most homophobic members with supporters of equality. As the Guardian pointed out this morning, "frustrated American conservatives are exploiting gay paranoia to make up for a drought of ideas on how to fix the economy." It's not just horribly divisive, it's very dangerous.

You may have heard some pious bologna from Rick Santorum at the GOP debate this morning about how he's not a bigot. But when Bill Clinton appointed James Hormel to be the first openly gay U.S. ambassador, it was the homophobic Santorum who screeched loudest, insisting that it was was “a complete insult to Catholics.”