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

by David K. Johnson

Book Overview

Historian David K. Johnson relates the story of how, during the cold war, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. This work shatters the myth that homosexuality has only recently become a national political issue.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226404811
• ISBN13: 9780226404813
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 277 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A fine piece of scholarship on homophobia in government and the early gay rights struggle

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 f

I'm now a history lover!

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!

Marvelous

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.

Illuminates a Dark History

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.

Great book!

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.