Landon R. Y. Storrs is a professor of history at the University of Iowa and author of The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left.

Last week, as the House Intelligence Committee questioned FBI Director James Comey, it was as if two parallel hearings were taking place: one on Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and one on the torrent of leaks emanating from sources throughout the federal government—what President Donald Trump’s allies are calling the “deep state.”

The claim that an entrenched federal bureaucracy is betraying American democracy is preposterous, but it serves the Trump administration’s objectives: As the president blames a disloyal federal workforce for the messes he has made, he is simultaneously rallying popular support to slash the federal workforce and revise U.S. Civil Service laws.


Well before Trump proposed a budget that would result in widespread layoffs throughout the government, he promoted the idea that many federal workers are disloyal and pursue their own political agenda. He’s tweeted that “national security ‘leakers’ … have permeated our government for a long time.” In August, he suggested that high-ranking federal employees should be forced to sign nondisclosure agreements, worrying that they might otherwise author tell-alls about him. In January, after State Department workers began to use the long-established official “Dissent Channel” to voice their opposition to Trump’s travel ban, White House press secretary Sean Spicer delivered an ultimatum: they can “either get with the program, or they can go.” Conservative media outlets are piling on, too. Breitbart, the right-wing news site formerly led by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, recently published a top-10 list of “holdover Obama bureaucrats” whom Trump should fire immediately.

Such partisan efforts to undermine public confidence in the integrity of government workers have a long and ugly history in American politics. Proponents of limited government have almost by definition been hostile to federal “bureaucrats”—the word itself has become a slur—but that hostility has been more broadly based and widely shared at certain pivotal moments in our history. When national security threats have coincided with rapid economic and social change, Americans have been more susceptible to demagogues peddling paranoid portrayals of politically and morally suspect civil servants.

We again are living in such an era. And if the past is any guide, the attacks on the Civil Service will become uglier.



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Attacks on federal employees have long carried more than a whiff of emasculation, with the American ideal of rugged individualism weaponized against supposedly effeminate public workers bilking upstanding taxpayers. Since the “snivel service” reform battles of the 1880s, which made government employment contingent on qualifications rather than party loyalty, conservatives have questioned the masculinity of male government workers, casting them as non-entrepreneurial types who prefer to follow rules for modest pay rather than take risks in pursuit of profit. That the federal workforce was sexually integrated earlier than others invited further ridicule.

The Red Scare of the early 1920s—which followed waves of Catholic and Jewish immigration, black migration northward for wartime work, and women’s enfranchisement, not to mention the Bolshevik Revolution—included conservative attacks on government agencies, especially state and national labor and welfare departments, which employed many women. Margaret Robinson, a conservative and antisuffragist leader, warned that state bureaucracy “offers jobs for women in politics,” which could “destroy our form of government” as well as the very basis of society. But that Red Scare was short-lived, and those agencies were not powerful.

As the U.S. government expanded under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the attacks became more virulent. The challenges of the Great Depression, global war and nuclear weaponry expanded the federal bureaucracy and shifted power away from legislators to career civil servants (who often were better-educated and more cosmopolitan than elected officials). Lawmakers, especially rural conservatives, resented this change. Aided by media outlets such as the Hearst empire, they derided civil servants as eggheads, know-it-alls, and, in a pejorative phrase of the day, “short-haired women and long-haired men.” A best-selling “nonfiction” book by two Hearst journalists, Washington Confidential (1951), took readers on a gossipy, pulp-filled tour of the nation’s capital, and described its inhabitants as robots of indeterminate gender who enjoyed lifetime security on the government’s “perennial payroll.”

During the Second Red Scare, which reached a crescendo in the 1950s, this populist hostility to government experts became a useful tool for those who sought to roll back liberal policies. The anticommunist crusade spawned a sprawling federal loyalty program that did not catch any spies (other measures did that) but destroyed thousands of lives, stifled political debate and stymied effective policymaking long after the scare subsided.



When national security threats have coincided with rapid economic and social change, Americans have been more susceptible to demagogues peddling paranoid portrayals of politically and morally suspect civil servants.



The Second Red Scare’s momentum derived from claims that communist spies in government positions were serving Soviet masters. The exposure of a spy ring in Canada in 1946 increased the credibility of such charges. In 1947, President Harry Truman expanded existing procedures for weeding out employees deemed “disloyal” to the U.S. government. From 1947 to 1956, more than 5 million federal workers were screened for communist ties. Loyalty standards were vague and ever-changing; investigators looked not only for association with allegedly subversive organizations but also for subversive “tendencies”—which, depending on the eye of the beholder, sometimes included homosexuality, a woman’s use of her birth name rather than husband’s surname, “sympathy for the underdog,” and socializing across “the color line.” About 25,000 underwent the FBI’s “full field investigation,” about 2,700 were dismissed, and about 12,000 resigned. The stigma of investigation—regardless of outcome—destroyed careers. Chronic unemployment plagued the accused, as loyalty tests spread to the private sector.

The State Department was especially vulnerable to accusations. The espionage trial of former State employee Alger Hiss in 1950 made the department an obvious target for crusading anti-communist Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.). But that case reflected deeper conflicts. To men like McCarthy and Senator Richard Nixon (R-Calif.), State’s “striped-pants diplomats” represented the patrician East Coast establishment. Their careers in government signaled an inability to compete in, or disdain for, the private sector. Their internationalism suggested a dearth of patriotism. Their advanced Ivy League degrees and social exclusivity indicated condescension, with a whiff of homoeroticism. McCarthy charged that “communists and queers” at State had aided Mao Zedong’s victory in China, and he vowed to drive the “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line” out of the department.

McCarthy also appealed to his base by targeting the career women of Foggy Bottom. State was one of the agencies in which a few highly educated women had achieved positions of authority; early cohorts of white female professionals found that the government would hire them when the private sector would not. Senator McCarthy’s very first case was against the former judge Dorothy Kenyon, State’s delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women; she was cleared, but her career never recovered.

The damage went far deeper than individual lives. The purges led to an exodus of experts in fields from foreign affairs to national health insurance. Those who remained lived in fear of saying or doing anything that might strike some unknown informant as suspicious. That repressive climate weakened the government’s capacity to respond effectively to complex challenges both domestic and international.

Although some of the policy damage was irreversible, by the 1960s, McCarthyism was remembered as an embarrassing episode of national hysteria. Few politicians questioned the loyalty of public servants, and when they did, the charges did not gain much traction with voters.



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Until now. Many of the forces that fueled the last American inquisition are resurgent. The public sector is under siege by an alliance of corporate robber barons, right-wing media and free-market ideologues. Much of the population, especially but not only in rural areas, feels economically and culturally insecure in the face of globalization, multiculturalism and gender fluidity. Hostility to experts and susceptibility to conspiracy theories are rampant. Those fundamental forces weigh more heavily than the fact that President Trump’s onetime mentor was the lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand man—but that connection, too, is worrisome.

There is one key difference, of course: The Cold War is over, and Trump seems unconcerned about Soviet espionage or “un-Americanism.” Indeed, he rejects the notion of American exceptionalism, or unique moral duty, and admires Russia’s authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump demands loyalty not to a political ideology but to himself—hardly reassuring for civil servants, who may face even more capricious expectations than the anticommunists’ loyalty program imposed.

Trump’s goal is not just a smaller bureaucracy, but a more ideologically congenial one (“White House installs political aides at Cabinet agencies to be Trump’s eyes and ears,” read a Washington Post headline on Monday). Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an unofficial adviser to Trump, called for the president to clean out “leftists” from the State and Justice departments. Bannon has called not only for ridding the government of holdovers from past administrations, but for deconstructing the “administrative state.”

A government of sycophants selected for personal loyalty rather than expertise cannot check authoritarianism or protect the public interest from exploitation for private gain. The last purges ended only after the U.S. Senate censured McCarthy, the press exposed key accusers as frauds, and Supreme Court rulings reined in the federal loyalty program. Today, the demagogue is in the White House, and the Republican-controlled Congress seems disinclined to put country above party. To defend the roughly 2 million civil servants who help sustain American democracy, we need independent journalists and judges even more desperately now than we did in McCarthy’s day.