The Grapes of McGrath: The Supreme Court and the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations in Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath (1951)

Abstract

The so-called Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was one of the most central and widely publicized aspects of the post–World War II Red Scare, which has popularly—if inaccurately—become known as “McCarthyism.” Like many other elements of the Red Scare, the AGLOSO in fact predated the emergence of Senator Joseph McCarthy on the national political red-hunting scene. It originated in President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9835 of March 21, 1947, which required all federal civil-service employees to be screened for “loyalty” and specified that one criterion to be used in determinations that “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the Attorney General to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”1 Beginning in late 1947, the federal government began publishing AGLOSO lists, which ultimately reached almost 300 organizations, without offering the targeted groups either hearings, specific charges, or advance notice. This led Washington Post editorial writer Alan Barth to term the Attorney General's AGLOSO mandate “perhaps the most arbitrary and far-reaching power ever exercised by a single public official” in American history, effectively allowing that official to “stigmatize” and “in effect, proscribe any organization of which he disapproves.”2 Although the only officially announced purpose of the AGLOSO was to provide guidance in federal civil-service loyalty determinations, it quickly became used by a wide variety of public and private organizations as the basis for discriminating against persons alleged to be affiliated with listed organizations and the groups themselves. Thus, it was utilized by state and local governments, the military, defense contractors, hotels, the Treasury Department (in making determinations regarding tax exemption) and the State Department (in making passport decisions), to cite only a few of many examples.3 FBI Intelligence Division official A. H. Belmont wrote to Assistant FBI Director D. M. Ladd on March 18, 1952 that AGLOSO listings had been “found from experience to have substantially impeded the effectiveness of the [designated] organization.”4 Both scholars and the general press have clearly agreed with this assessment. Various scholars have written that the AGLOSO, which was massively publicized in the media, became what amounted to “an official black list”5 and “usually a kiss of death”6 to listed groups, which came to have in the public mind “authority as the definitive report on subversive organizations,” understood as a “proscription of the treasonable activity of the listed organizations”7 and the “litmus test for distinguishing between loyalty and disloyal organizations and individuals.”8 Thus, an April 28, 1949 New York Times story about the listing of additional AGLOSO organizations was headlined “Government Proscribes 36 More Groups as Subversive, 23 of Them ‘Communist,’” while a number of files related to the AGLOSO held in the Eisenhower presidential library are marked “blacklisted organizations.”9 In an article entitled “What the Attorney General's List Means,” the November, 1956 Elks Magazine began by accurately noting that “there are few Americans who have not heard of ‘the Attorney General's subversive list’” and concluded by summarizing the AGLOSO's clear message: “There is no excuse for any American citizen becoming affiliated with a group on the Attorney General's list today.”