![]() ![]() They just stopped showing up to work one day. This information then became the basis for federal employers to investigate or terminate someone's employment.ĪRABLOUEI: Most people didn't challenge their dismissals. ![]() The Postal Service tracked correspondence. Let's get rid of all of these undesirables who have infiltrated the federal government.ĪRABLOUEI: Within months of taking office, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which explicitly states that people who engage in so-called sexual perversion can't serve in any branches of the government.ĪBDELFATAH: An entire system of surveillance was put in place to uncover people's most intimate relations. ![]() JOHNSON: The Republicans' campaign slogan in 1952 is, let's clean house. In the next election cycle, presidential candidate Dwight D. And to this day, that's still true.ĪRABLOUEI: This fear-mongering became a powerful political tool. JOHNSON: There was no evidence that any gay man or lesbian was being blackmailed by foreign agents. JOHNSON: There was almost no one who stood up to object to it. And so to prevent that threat, they should be fired from government jobs. JOHNSON: It wasn't that they were communists themselves, but because they were hiding, presumably, therefore vulnerable to blackmail.ĪBDELFATAH: The idea was that their presumed fear of being outed would make them easy targets for Soviet spies. ![]() MARGOT CANADAY: A lavender brush and a red brush - this sort of idea that they're both kind of a threat to traditional American values, the family and the sort of traditional political values.ĪBDELFATAH: That's Margot Canaday, professor of history at Princeton University.ĬANADAY: There's this sort of notion of, it's this mysterious and lurking and malignant force that threatens the very fiber of American society. JOHNSON: And it turned out that several on this list were actually homosexuals that had been removed from the State Department because they considered them to be security risks.ĪBDELFATAH: As part of the Red Scare, Senator McCarthy also targeted gay and lesbian government employees as potential threats in what's come to be known as the Lavender Scare. He's a history professor at the University of South Florida.ĪRABLOUEI: And he says there was another key detail from the list that was confirmed by a State Department official later. RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: This is David K. And they also all weren't card-carrying communists. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Joseph McCarthy) I have here in my hand a list of 205 - a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.ĭAVID K JOHNSON: It turns out there weren't 205 people because the number kept changing. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Joseph McCarthy) Today we are engaged in a final all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.ĪRABLOUEI: There isn't a recording of the speech. RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a now-infamous speech warning of communist infiltration of the U.S. Here are hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei. NPR's podcast Throughline takes us back to the mid 20th century to a period known as the Lavender Scare. This year alone, the ACLU is tracking nearly 500 bills in state legislatures across the country aimed at the LGBTQ community - laws banning gender-affirming care, targeting drag performances and censoring school curriculum. ![]()
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