Loyalty Investigations and the “End of Reform”

Abstract

This chapter examines the connection between disloyalty charges and the shift toward the political center, or out of government service, by many public officials, which has been difficult to discern because of the silence that loyalty defendants maintained, even many years later. As they organized papers, gave interviews, and drafted memoirs, they typically avoided disclosing that they had been investigated and downplayed the leftism that had put them in the line of fire. Leon and Mary Dublin Keyserling were not the only former loyalty defendants to offer accounts that were distorted by an accumulation of omissions; they are not to blame for trying to protect themselves and their associates from further persecution. In addition to impeding progressive reform, policymakers' traumatic encounters with the federal employee loyalty program impoverished the primary sources on which scholars have relied to understand mid-twentieth-century American politics.