Executive Order 9835
[1] The order established the first general loyalty program in the United States, designed to root out communist influence in the U.S. federal government.
At the same time, he advised the Loyalty Review Board to limit the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to avoid a witch hunt.
As U.S. relations with the Soviet Union rapidly deteriorated following World War II, there were accompanying concerns about government infiltration by communists.
[4] As the U.S. fell from being wartime allies to staunch adversaries with the USSR, American obsession with perceived dangers associated with the Soviet Union, and communists in general, began to grow.
The Republican Party, assisted by a coalition that included the Catholic Church, the FBI and private entrepreneurs, worked to inflame public fear and suspicion.
[4] Fresh investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) ensured that the issue would stay on the minds of constituents, and Republicans found a niche they could use for an election advantage.
Truman's commission consisted of representatives from six government departments under the chairmanship of Special Assistant to the Attorney General A. Devitt Vanech, who was close to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at the time.
[4] Contemporary observers as well as historians have characterized Truman's action surrounding TCEL and the 1947 executive order as purely politically motivated.
White House Counsel Clark Clifford wrote in his 1991 memoir that his "greatest regret" from his decades in government was his failure to "make more of an effort to kill the loyalty program at its inception, in 1946-47."
The list came into being after Truman signed EO 9835, both the order and AGLOSO established more than two years before Senator Joseph McCarthy's first allegations of Communist infiltration in the U.S. government in early 1950.
Despite the widespread publicity, the Justice Department and other agencies refused to release more than small amounts of information on other aspects of the list besides its contents.
Little was made at the time of the revelation that AGLOSO was nothing new; in fact, the government had been keeping a secret list to aid in screening for federal employee loyalty since 1940.
According to FBI documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act nearly 60 years later,[4] AGLOSO was born on or about April 3, 1947 when the bureau responded to a March 27 request from the Attorney General for a list of "organizations thought to be subversive."
[citation needed] According to one historian, "By mid-1952, when more than 4 million people, actual or prospective employees, had gone through the check, boards had … dismissed or denied employment to 378….
The enforcement of employment suspension for issues such as sexual perversion was also weakened by the US Supreme Court's Cole v Young ruling in 1956[10] and the US Civil Service Commission formally reversed its discriminatory hiring policy against gays and lesbians in 1975.
[citation needed] In 1977, under the guidance of Jimmy Carter, Executive Order 9835's provision which enforced the barring of employment of gays in the foreign service, as well as a policy which required the Internal Revenue Service to enforce LGBT education and charity groups to publicly state that homosexuality is a "sickness, disturbance, or diseased pathology," was repealed.
