How American Bureaucrats Became Public Enemy No. 1

Yahoo

17-03-2025

The following essay is based on Clay Risen's new book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, out from Scribner on March 18.
On April 28, 1948, a physicist named Edward U. Condon took the lectern at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington. If not as famous as his former boss at the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Condon was held in nearly equal esteem by his scientific colleagues: A pioneering figure in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and radar before World War II, he was now director of the Bureau of Standards, the forerunner to today's National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he was helping construct the federal government's sprawling research infrastructure, an astounding outpouring of public resources that would lead to everything from GPS and the internet to the COVID-19 vaccine.
But Condon's speech that day was focused on a dark vision about America's future. 'There is growing in this country a wave of anti-intellectualism which is violently opposed to free speech and free expression,' he said. Thousands of government scientists, economists, and other experts were being investigated, and in many cases fired, in the name of anti-communism and national security—a campaign that Condon compared to ideological purges by the Nazis in the early days of the Third Reich.
'The last decade alone provides for us too many examples of nations where the people ignored the symptoms of totalitarianism until it was too late,' he warned. 'Anti-intellectualism precedes the totalitarian putsch, and anti-intellectualism is on the upswing here.'
As his audience undoubtedly knew, Condon spoke from painful personal experience. A year earlier, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had begun a sustained campaign against him, first in magazine articles, then in a March 1948 report that called him 'one of the weakest links in our atomic security' and accused him of 'knowingly or unknowingly' maintaining ties to Soviet spies. In Thomas' telling, Condon was part of a cabal of liberal, technocratic elites who ran the inner workings of the federal government and, out of naivete or treachery, were now fatally undermining their country in the face of the Soviet threat.
Thomas' attacks were baseless, and both Condon and his boss, Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman, resisted them. But the assault continued, and in 1951 Condon decided he had had enough. He quit the Bureau of Standards to take a job in the private sector. Still the attacks came: In 1954, when his employer, Corning Glass Works, submitted a bid for him to work on a sensitive military project, the Navy revoked his security clearance. (This also reportedly came at the urging of Vice President Richard Nixon, who wanted to undermine Harriman, who was running for governor of New York.) Rather than continue fighting, Condon left his job at Corning and spent the rest of his career teaching.
The Condon Affair, as it was known, has been largely forgotten. But it bears all the hallmarks of the worst of the Red Scare era: knee-jerk anti-intellectualism; a baseless conviction that an elite, anti-American conspiracy was pulling the strings in Washington; and a willingness to abuse the levers of political power with little foresight about the unintended consequences. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk attempt to dismantle the federal government in the name of rooting out the so-called deep state and the supposed horrors of 'woke,' they are drawing on a line of thinking that has long animated the Republican hard right. It goes back to the founding of the modern federal bureaucracy in the 1930s. Far from being a new phenomenon, paranoid anti-elitism in America has a long and surprising pedigree.
The Red Scare was about many things, but broadly speaking, it arose from the intersection of two powerful impulses that coursed through American society after World War II. One was a backlash to the massive federal intervention of the New Deal. The other was the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War, with its prospects for a nuclear-tipped global conflict. Together, these impulses unleashed an unprecedented period of political hysteria about the hidden motives of government officials—which led to the blacklists, loyalty tests, and witch hunts that defined the era, most famously under Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
The Great Depression had shocked millions of Americans into action. Between 1929 and 1933, nearly 9,000 banks failed, manufacturing output dropped by 30 percent, and a quarter of all workers had been left unemployed. In response, a new spirit of political engagement swept across the country, much of it rallying to the vision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His domestic agenda delivered hundreds of thousands of public jobs, billions of dollars in economic support, and above all, a 'New Deal' for the American people, asserting the power of the government to create guardrails around the economy.
The combination of the Great Depression and the New Deal, wrote the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., had 'made men of intellectual ability available as never before; and the government had never been so eager to hire them.' The writer Sherwood Anderson, visiting the capital in 1933, encountered several old acquaintances at the Department of Agriculture: 'I stood there in the office a few minutes and at least ten of my old western friends came in, old radicals, young ones, newspaper men etc. … There is certainly a curious exhilarating feeling.'
The bureaucratic influx was thick with graduates of the nation's best universities. Rexford Tugwell, Felix Frankfurter, Adolf Berle—acolytes of the brain trust that encircled the president—were plucked from schools like Columbia and Harvard. 'Unless an applicant can murder the broad A and present a Harvard sheepskin, he is definitely out,' complained one Michigan congressman, a bit of hyperbole about the new government elite that nevertheless revealed some truth about the high intellectual character of the expanding federal bureaucracy. Another called the New Deal a 'Phi Beta Kappa Tammany Hall.'
Even as many Americans banded together around Roosevelt and the New Deal, anger was brewing. Employers resented Roosevelt's pro-labor stance, as well as his fighting words attacking 'economic royalists.' Farmers appreciated government support but hated being told when and what to plant. Southern politicians loved the outpouring of federal aid but detested the possibility that those funds might benefit Black neighborhoods. And all of them loathed the hundreds of thousands of government regulators brought in to operate an alphabet soup of new federal agencies.
The impression that the New Deal was being run by the East Coast elite fed into conservative attacks on the Roosevelt administration as un-American. Later generations would call it the 'deep state,' but the suspicion was the same: that underneath the layers of elected officials and public figures who supposedly ran the government lay the real power, a vast cadre of anonymous bureaucrats.
Conservatives accused these bureaucrats of answering to some foreign nation or ideology. One Republican congressman from Pennsylvania said the president's National Industrial Recovery Act 'Russianizes the business of America.' In 1934 Hamilton Fish, who represented Roosevelt's home district in New York's Hudson Valley, said, 'This administration has copied the autocratic tactics of fascism, Hitlerism and communism at their worst.'
This conflict between New Deal progressives and anti-Roosevelt conservatives hummed on the edges of the 1930s and the war years of the early 1940s. But it took on a new, frightening resonance with the onset of the Cold War, as the Soviet Union replaced Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan as America's main enemy. The Cold War was an ideological battle; it would, many argued, necessitate an unblinking effort to root out domestic subversion and dissent. Spies were obviously a threat, but so too were those who advocated for, sympathized with, or even merely tolerated political beliefs that might offer an opening to communism at home. Sleepless diligence had been the watchword of the previous war; now that paranoia turned inward.
In 1947 President Harry S. Truman instituted a loyalty program requiring every federal employee to be screened for possible 'membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association' with one of the more than two dozen organizations deemed 'subversive' by the attorney general. Affiliation could mean anything: a few dollars into a collection plate at a rally, a name absent-mindedly scribbled on a petition, an innocent friendship with the wrong sort of person—all were now considered in the worst possible light.
There was every reason for the government to worry about Soviet espionage, and even Condon, in his speech to the American Physical Society, praised Truman's loyalty program. But as Condon also pointed out, the rush to absolute security was emboldening conspiracists and anti–New Deal Republicans who had spent the past decade shouting into the void about communist subversion. Suddenly they had a ready audience who may not have always believed their accusations but was now unwilling to stand in their way as they charged through liberal bastions—Hollywood, Washington, schools, civil rights groups, and unions—looking for evidence to support their allegations.
Such hunts easily spilled over into attacks against everything Roosevelt had built. During his 1946 Senate campaign, McCarthy—then a small-time Wisconsin judge—ran an ad asking, 'Tired of being pushed around? Do you like to have some government bureaucrat tell you how to manage your life? … Who's to blame for all this? Nobody but the New Deal.' He won his race handily. By 1953 the Chicago Tribune, the largest-circulation newspaper in the Midwest and the country's leading voice of the right, was openly railing against the 'Communist-controlled New Deal.'
Scientists, especially physicists, came in for particular attention. On the one hand, their contributions to stunning wartime technological breakthroughs—radar, sonar, rocketry, and above all the atomic bomb—had transformed them into an intellectual clerisy, holding the keys to the nation's future. On the other hand, many of them subscribed to the progressive politics of the New Deal era, contributing money and prestige to left-wing causes that, a decade later, made them suspect in the eyes of Red Scare vigilantes. Condon, who had stayed largely apolitical during the 1930s, was outspoken in his belief in civilian control over nuclear power; even this belief was treated like a prelude to subversion.
In theory, there were legitimate concerns. Where to draw the line between security and intellectual freedom, between diversity of ideas and unity of purpose? In practice, the concerns became excuses for wholesale attacks on America's technocratic elite, at a time when the country needed strong intellectual leadership. Nebraska Sen. Hugh Butler, a close ally of McCarthy, summed up the attitude in a 1950 speech against Dean Acheson, Truman's patrician secretary of state: 'I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism in everything he says and does, and I want to shout, 'Get out! Get Out! You stand for everything that has been wrong in the United States for years!' '
In a 1964 article in Harper's, the historian Richard Hofstadter outlined what he called 'the paranoid style' in American politics. Witch hunts and conspiracy theories had a long history, he said, going back to 17th-century Salem and the 19th-century Know Nothings. 'But the modern right wing … feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind,' Hofstadter wrote. 'Their predecessors discovered foreign conspiracies; the modern radical right finds that conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home.'
By the time Hofstadter wrote that, the Red Scare had subsided, its loudest voices pushed to the fringe of U.S. politics. But the animating spirit remained, ready to be exhumed by future generations of conspiracists and political opportunists.
Now, 70 years later, we are seeing another frightening revival. This time the alleged enemy is not Soviet communism but 'woke' ideology and DEI policies. In both cases, the primary targets have been the rank and file of the vast federal workforce, especially the seasoned lawyers, scientists, and policy experts who make and direct critical decisions affecting everyone in this country. As was the case with Condon, they have been accused, often without evidence, of being beholden to an anti-American ideology—Trump calls it 'illegal' and 'evil.'
It is too early to say which moment of empowered anti-government hysteria will have the more lasting impact. During the Red Scare, thousands of workers saw their lives pulled apart by FBI investigations; hundreds lost their jobs and even went to prison. But the nation also came to its senses, and by the mid-1950s the Red Scare had effectively ended. Today, two generations later, thousands have already lost their jobs, though the courts have yet to determine how extensive those cuts can be.
That the Trump administration was voted into office to enact a reactionary agenda just a few years after a series of heroic but invasive governmental interventions halted the deadly spread of COVID-19 is not a coincidence. Though hundreds of millions of lives were saved by the fast-tracked vaccine and lockdowns, the implementation of various protocols was swift, alarming, and, to many thousands of people, overzealous. School closures caused students to fall behind in school. Unemployment rates spiked. Conspiracy theories, especially about vaccines, spread like wildfire.
In other words, the backlash created an ideal political climate for anti-intellectual extremists like Musk and Trump to take power.
The real question is how it ends, if at all. The centrist establishment—not just in politics, but in the media, business, and civil society—is much weaker today than it was in the 1950s. Anti-government sentiment remains widespread and visceral. Anti-intellectualism and a hostility toward federal bureaucracy pervade every corner of the Trump administration. The chances of one, two, many Edward Condons to come remains a frightening possibility.
Condon himself did live to see a reemergence of trust in the federal government, at least for a time. After leaving Corning, he went to teach at Washington University, then the University of Colorado.
In the mid-1960s he was put in charge of a comprehensive review of UFO sightings, funded by the U.S. Air Force, a sure sign that the government no longer considered him a dangerous figure. In 1968 he authored the project's final report. 'Our general conclusion is that nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,' he wrote—in other words, that these sightings were complete bunk. So were allegations of government cover-ups: 'What has been miscalled secrecy has been no more than an intelligent policy of delay in releasing data so that the public does not become confused by premature publication of incomplete studies of reports.'
It was, finally, one conspiracy theory that Condon was able to bring to an end—at least for the time being.