When President Donald Trump announced his suspension of collective bargaining rights for federal employees, his reasoning elicited feelings of déjà vu. Trump’s March Executive Order justified busting the unions representing workers at the Veterans Administration, Treasury Department, and several other agencies with a flimsy justification of “national security.” Trump’s actions not only reveal his administration’s conception that organized labor is an enemy within, they also recall one of the most trying times for civil liberties in the United States, and the truly heroic efforts made to fight off a right-wing purge of the federal government. Now, on Veterans’ Day, we ought to look back on that history, and remember one of its principal heroes: a man named James Kutcher.
It was Democrat Harry Truman who began the attempts to ferret out the Red Menace within the federal government. In 1947, before most people had heard of Senator Joe McCarthy, President Truman signed Executive Order 9835, establishing a “loyalty program” for federal employees. A Loyalty Review Board would screen federal employees, or people applying to work for the government, to determine whether they were loyal or disloyal. Disloyalty could be established not just by sedition, espionage, sabotage, or treason, but also by “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization on what professor Robert Goldstein—author of Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, Legless Veteran—termed AGLOSO (The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations). Although aimed primarily at the Communist Party of the United States and allied organizations like the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, non-Communist left wing groups the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party were also targeted. The post-World War II Red Scare was on.
Douglas Miller and Marion Nowack surveyed the program in their book The Fifties: The Way We Really Were. From the launching of the program to Truman’s last full month in office, “6.6 million persons were investigated.” The investigations were “conducted with secret evidence, secret and often paid informers, and neither judge nor jury.” Much of the evidence presented was pure hearsay. The program failed to find any spies, “though about 500 persons were dismissed in dubious cases of ‘questionable loyalty.’”James Kutcher, a U.S. Army veteran who lost both legs to a German mortar at the Battle of San Pietro was one of the federal employees dismissed. Kutcher though, wouldn’t leave without a fight.