Storrs, L. (2006). Left-feminism, the consumer movement, and red scare politics in the united states, 1935-1960. Journal of Women's History, 18(3), 40-40-67,148. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/203248794?accountid=35812

In the United States, right-wing hostility to female consumer advocates who held federal jobs or had the ear of federal officials was an important source of the crusade against "Communists in government," a primary engine of the Second Red Scare. The hunt for communists in the U.S. government, which began in the 1930s and reached a fever pitch in the 1950s, reshaped the terrain of party politics and halted expansion of the American welfare state. Conservatives' attack on the New Deal-often seen as triggered by the rise of mass production unionism-also was a reaction to the emergence of a consumer movement that was feminist, anti-racist, and pro-labor. That movement was predominantly female and wielded more influence over federal policy than scholars have recognized. Focusing on the League of Women Shoppers, the Consumers' National Federation, and the fate of their members who obtained positions in such government agencies as the Office of Price Administration, this article argues that conservative anticommunists' gendered animosity to the consumer movement was critical to the pre-history of the federal employee loyalty program created in 1947, and that civil servants with ties to consumer groups were prominent among that program's casualties.
In May 1939, a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune warned that a "Communist-front" group called the League of Women Shoppers (LWS) was conducting an "ingenious campaign" to intimidate employers into supporting the National Labor Relations Act by threatening to boycott non-compliant companies. Many wives of officials prominent in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration were LWS officers, the article stressed, who "innocently or not" were "fellow travelers of the communist party."1 Two weeks later, the daughter-in-law of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes told the woman next to her at a luncheon that "the League of Women Shoppers is the fashionable thing to belong to in Washington now." Unknown to Mrs. Ickes, her lunch companion was an undercover agent, whose report on the LWS soon reached the Special House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities (better known as the Dies committee).2 In December, the Dies committee charged that most of the consumer groups that had burst onto the political scene since 1935-including the League of Women Shoppers, Consumers' National Federation, and several others-were controlled by Communists. Dies committee researcher J. B. Matthews claimed that the Communist party was exploiting consumer protests against "real or fancied abuses" in order to discredit "free enterprise in the United States."3
This was an early skirmish in a thirty-year war against the consumer movement, waged in the name of anticommunism by conservative business interests and their allies in government. This anticommunist campaign damaged the movement by undercutting its grassroots support, pressuring its leaders to moderate their objectives, and, until recently, hindering its visibility to scholars. But the effect on the consumer movement is only the beginning of the story. Consumer activists had the ear of federal policymakers and in some cases obtained jobs in federal agencies. This article argues that right-wing hostility to these consumer advocates was an important source of the crusade against "Communists in government." That crusade, which began in the late 1930s and reached a fever pitch in the late 1940s and early 1950s, changed the stakes of partisan politics and cramped the development of U.S. social policy. The anticommunist attack on the New Deal, which historians have often argued was triggered by the rise of mass production unionism under the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), also was a reaction against the emergence of an influential pro-labor, anti-racist, and feminist consumer movement. Indeed, it was the very conjunction of these movements-sit-down strikers demanding higher wages at the same moment that housewives demanded lower prices and higher quality-that was so alarming to American conservatives. Although the burgeoning labor and consumer movements were allied aspects of the left-liberal coalition of the New Deal era, scholars have paid far more attention to the labor aspect.4
One likely reason the consumer movement has only recently garnered attention is that it was predominantly female. Although some men were important to the consumer movement and some women were important to the labor movement, each movement's respective icon, the housewife and the male factory worker, did reflect an actual gender division of economic and political labor.5 Not only were most grassroots constituents of the consumer movement "housewives," as observers then and since have recognized, but women also ran most of its nongovernmental organizations and were among its key allies in government. A core of thinkers, activists, and policymakers were crucial to a succession of consumer initiatives that stretched from the 1930s through the 1960s. Recent scholarship documents the importance to these developments of well-known male New Dealers such as Gardiner Means, Paul Douglas, Robert Lynd, Leon Henderson, and Leon Keyserling.6 But female intellectuals and activists also were critical. They provided a thread of continuity through voluntary associations including the National Consumers' League (1898- ), League of Women Shoppers (LWS, 1935-49), Consumers' Union (1935- ), Consumers' National Federation (CNF, 1937-41), and National Association of Consumers (1946-54), in addition to consumer divisions of such women's groups as the American Association of University Women (AAUW). Pressure from these organizations helped produce a series of consumer-oriented government agencies. During the New Deal, these included the Consumers' Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration, the Office of the Consumers' Counsel in the Department of Agriculture, and the Temporary National Economic Committee. These initiatives were sustained during World War II through the National Defense Advisory Council, the Office of Civilian Defense, and, most important, the sprawling and controversial Office of Price Administration (OPA). On a more modest scale after the war, the Consumers' Advisory Committee to the President's Council of Economic Advisors and similar committees under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson tried to keep consumers' interests on the agenda. The government bodies often were headed by men, but they were staffed chiefly by women from the voluntary organizations, who created a dense web of associations between private and government consumer groups. These female experts included Persia Campbell, Caroline Ware, Mary Dublin Keyserling, and Esther Peterson, to mention just a few of the most ubiquitous examples.7
Although they did not use the term, these women were left-feminists. They pursued a vision of women's emancipation that insisted on class and racial justice as well as "pure" gender equality.8 Research in newly opened records reveals that anticommunists investigated all the consumerist women named above and many others, often at great cost to their careers. Strikingly, all the consumer-oriented male experts named above were married to consumer activists, and most of the men faced charges of communist sympathies based at least in part on their wives' associations.9 In addition to tarnishing the consumer movement and the New Deal civil service, the anticommunist attack on consumer advocates had antifeminist effects. It not only marginalized important left-feminists, it discredited their proposals on issues from housing to health care, which they correctly understood to be of particular concern to poor and working-class women.10
Historians increasingly have appreciated the consumer movement's significance for twentieth-century U.S. politics and policy. A growing literature explores how, beginning in the 1910s, liberal businessmen, labor leaders, and social scientists argued that increasing "mass purchasing power" was vital to the nation's economic and political health. Raising the living standard of the working-class majority, they believed, was not only a matter of social justice, it was good economics. The Great Depression illustrated the U.S. economy's vulnerability to "under-consumption" and brought purchasing power progressives into power in Washington. They encouraged the burgeoning labor movement and implemented minimum wage laws, social insurance, and other measures to get money into the hands of the people. They also encouraged consumer involvement in policymaking and implementation, to facilitate grassroots civic engagement and to try to ensure that employer concessions to labor unions did not come at the public's expense in the form of high prices or poor quality. An alliance of organized labor, consumers, and sympathetic policymakers challenged business prerogatives during the New Deal and World War II years, working through agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Office of Price Administration. Aided by a budget as large as the Social Security Board's and a paid and volunteer staff of over a quarter of a million, the OPA touched the daily lives of ordinary citizens more than did any other agency. By mobilizing consumers to enforce price controls and rationing, it melded central planning with participatory democracy, producing a model of a powerful interventionist state that was as alarming to the Right as it was inspiring to the Left. After the war, however, congressional and media conservatives took advantage of inflation to divide organized labor and consumers against each other, facilitating the OPA's demise and the weakening of the National Labor Relations Act with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. The Right also used the fear of communism to taint liberal policies. When the consumer movement revived in the 1960s, its objectives were less redistributive, and they were expressed in terms of the entitlement of specific categories of consumers rather than in terms of promoting the general public welfare.11
As the foregoing synopsis suggests, this new scholarship offers a useful framework for understanding twentieth-century politics and social movements. The challenge remains, however, to weave together the many threads of the consumer movement's story-incorporating its linkage not only with liberal policymakers but also with an antiracist, feminist Left, and recognizing its role in both the making of New Deal policy and the reaction against it. This article tells that story by focusing on the League of Women Shoppers, the Consumers' National Federation, and the fate of members of these groups who became government employees, particularly in the Office of Price Administration. The LWS and CNF have been studied less than the Consumers' Union, the other major consumer group of their day.12 Those two were women's groups, unlike the mixed-sex Consumers' Union, and they vividly demonstrate the ties to government officials that were a key source of strength before the Second Red Scare intensified in the late 1940s, but an Achilles' heel thereafter. The LWS also stands out for its distinctly feminine direct action tactics and for the antifeminist response it provoked. The LWS and CNF should be included along with the better-known labor, antifascist, and civil rights causes as associations that were the kiss of death for individuals facing allegations of disloyalty. Their story indicates that conservative resistance to the consumer movement was one source of the federal employee loyalty program. I conclude by briefly discussing the impact of anticommunist accusations on the government careers of Esther Peterson and Caroline Ware. They are but two of a cohort of women who have been acclaimed variously for their contributions to the women's, labor, and consumer movements, when in fact their hallmark was embracing all those causes and others as well.13
In the spring of 1939, the Consumers' National Federation and one of its member groups, the League of Women Shoppers, did several things that antagonized powerful conservatives. The CNF filed a complaint against Good Housekeeping magazine that led the Federal Trade Commission to cite its owner, Hearst Magazines, for guaranteeing fraudulent advertising. CNF executive Persia Campbell also testified before the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC), a key platform for purchasing-power progressives. She warned that representatives of various industries were setting up bogus consumer groups in an effort to co-opt the "widespread consumer impulse to organize independently."14 At that very moment, the Chicago LWS chapter was backing the American Newspaper Guild-CIO strike against Hearst's Chicago newspapers that culminated in an injunction against Hearst.15 Meanwhile, the national LWS undertook its pro-National Labor Relations Act campaign, sending questionnaires about compliance to employers and threatening to boycott violators.
Conservatives responded immediately. Although the anticommunist Right in the late 1930s was not the mighty force it would become in the Cold War era, it commanded enough leverage to put New Deal left-liberals on the defensive and thwart their hopes for extending the welfare state. Employers in labor-intensive industries bitterly resented New Deal initiatives to raise wages by recognizing union rights and reducing employment discrimination. Also hostile to the Roosevelt administration were the socalled "press lords," including William Randolph Hearst and Colonel Robert McCormick, whose media empires dominated major markets and whose syndicated columnists enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the 1930s and 1940s.16 Joining forces with congressional conservatives, these employers and newspapermen used the close associations between the consumer groups and government agencies to portray a Communist conspiracy. (Because the employer and press conservatives colluded secretly with their allies in government, unlike the consumer groups, charges of conspiracy would seem more fittingly directed at the Right.) The May 1939 article in McCormick's Chicago Tribune that labeled as fellow travelers LWS officers and, by implication, the New Deal officials who married them was only the public face of a much broader effort. In April, soon after CNF filed its complaint against Good Housekeeping, Hearst Magazines hired an undercover agent to investigate CNF's Persia Campbell. Another undercover investigator attended meetings of the Chicago LWS and obtained bank statements and arrest records of its officers. Lengthy reports on Campbell and the Chicago LWS soon reached Dies committee files.17
Dies committee researcher J. B. Matthews used these and other materials when he unveiled his full case against the consumer movement in December 1939. In a highly irregular proceeding, Matthews, whose authority rested on his credentials as an ex-Communist, testified before a subcommittee consisting solely of Martin Dies. Before other Dies committee members had seen the report, Dies released it to the press-on a Monday, an old trick designed to maximize coverage since Monday was a slow news day.18 Headlines all over the nation publicized Matthews's testimony that the Communist Party USA had decided in 1935 to use the consumer movement as a "Trojan Horse" for winning middle-class support. According to Matthews, the Communist Party leader Earl Browder himself had told the Dies committee that the LWS, CNF, and other consumer groups were Communist "transmission belts."19 Matthews linked criticism of the advertising industry with communism. Because "advertising performs an indispensable function" in the "capitalist system of free enterprise," Communists had targeted advertising as a "revolutionary tactic." He claimed that "the current government procedures against advertising and advertising media have been instigated and are being aided by these consumer organizations which are under the control of communists." His primary example was the cooperation between the Department of Agriculture's consumer counsel, Donald Montgomery, and the CNF in the complaint against Hearst's Good Housekeeping. Only with additional funding, Matthews concluded, would the Dies committee be able to undertake the thorough investigation that was urgently required.20
The Matthews report provoked a storm of protest. Consumer movement leaders did not deny that Communists participated, but they emphatically denied that Communists controlled their organizations. Eleanor Roosevelt announced at a press conference that she had been a member of the League of Women Shoppers, President Roosevelt scolded Martin Dies, and angry letters from distinguished citizens poured in to the Dies committee. Many suspected a brazen scheme to increase Dies committee funding. Journalists also discovered that Matthews had ties to an LWS rival. He had been among the principals of Consumers' Research (CR) back in 1935 when its employees went on strike; the fledgling LWS had investigated and found in favor of the strikers, and the National Labor Relations Board forced CR to rehire some of them. That outcome led to the formation of the pro-labor Consumers' Union, and it also was the catalyst for Matthews's sharp swing from left to right and his decades-long vendetta against the LWS and Consumers' Union.21 Next it came out that only days before his subcommittee appearance, Matthews had met with top advertising and corporate executives at the home of George Sokolsky, a Hearst columnist and paid lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers. (The accused organizations later found that the official copy of Matthews's report had been stenciled at Hearst Magazines.) Consumer activists who already had been calling for abolition of the Dies committee intensified their efforts. Matthews took a drubbing in the press and before the full membership of the Dies committee, and all in all it seemed he and Dies had made fools of themselves.22
J. B. Matthews was wrong that the consumers' movement was a communist plot, but he was right that it was ambitious, influential, and innovative in its tactics. The umbrella group for progressive consumer organizations, the Consumers' National Federation, served as a two-way communication medium between ordinary consumers and government officials. On one hand it developed educational materials for housewives (on the cost of living, prices, quality standards, and cooperatives, for example), and on the other it offered expert representation of "the consumer point of view" in government councils. Ultimately, the CNF wanted consumer agencies in local, state, and national governments, but its leaders recognized that vocal grassroots support was critical to creating and sustaining such agencies. As CNF leader Helen Hall put it, the group tried to create a "widespread expression of a buyers' demand to which administrators can refer . . . this is not to disparage administrative leadership itself. But these agencies can function best when the groups they are set up to serve are articulate." So the CNF tried to stimulate in cities across the nation a "conscious, educated, and [effective] consumer movement as a decentralized force in American democracy."23 CNF objectives also included distinguishing "bona fide" consumer organizations from business fronts. Opposing the campaign of "captive" consumer groups to blame high prices on union-driven wage increases, the CNF yoked consumer and labor interests together in a march against unchecked corporate profit-seeking.24
The Consumers' National Federation enjoyed easy access to the corridors of power, a fact unnoticed by historians but not by conservatives at the time. After meetings with President Roosevelt and Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in 1938, Persia Campbell reported that "'CNF' is an 'open sesame' in Washington. I never have the least difficulty in making appointments in or out of the government."25 The CNF believed its efforts were at least partly responsible for the creation of the Temporary National Economic Committee, a body whose challenge to big business has led some scholars to reperiodize New Deal policy. Recent scholarship on American state development has stressed the mutually reinforcing, dynamic interaction between grassroots and government initiatives, with particular emphasis on the effort of (male) state actors to mobilize (female) ordinary citizens as "consumers." The example of the CNF qualifies that interpretation by underscoring that voluntary organizations, often run by female experts, were essential instigators and mediators between government and grassroots, both during and between periods when purchasing power progressives were ascendant.26
The consumer movement attracted the most prominent left and liberal women of the day, as well as thousands of less famous ones. They included New Deal Democrats, independent leftists, and Communists. A 1936 list of prospective CNF members illustrates its inclusive impulse. The list featured mainstream women's clubs; liberal groups such as the Women's Trade Union League, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and Communist-affiliated groups such as the International Workers' Order, National Negro Congress, and Progressive Women's Council. Contrary to Matthews's suggestion, the original executive council of the CNF was hardly Communist-dominated; one or perhaps two of seventeen members were Communists.27
Of the CNF members, the LWS arguably pulled in the greatest star power. Virtually every well-known woman radical and liberal of the 1930s seems to have been on its letterheads, and many of them participated actively. Founded in 1935 and claiming 25,000 members in thirteen chapters by 1939, the LWS mobilized middle- and upper-class women to "use their buying power for social justice, so that the fair price which they pay as consumers will also include an American standard of living for those who make and market the goods they buy." The LWS initially specialized in investigating labor disputes and supporting female strikers in boycotts and picketing. LWS expertise on labor matters was acknowledged by the National Labor Relations Board, which occasionally asked the LWS to mediate disputes or monitor union elections. LWS members also were appointed to the boards that implemented state and District of Columbia minimum wage laws for women. During and after the Second World War, price control became a second major strategic focus. But the LWS always conceived its agenda broadly: "We work for high wages, low prices, fair profits, progressive taxation, adequate health protection and housing for all and the ending of racial, religious, or sex discrimination in employment."28
In the late 1930s and early 1940s that agenda attracted big names whose presence generated abundant newspaper coverage for the LWS, particularly in Washington and New York. "Mrs. Dean Acheson entertained the League of Women Shoppers at a membership tea at her home, with nearly 100 attending," was the caption for a typical Washington Post photograph of three elegantly dressed LWS officers holding teacups. The District's chapter quickly grew to about 500 members, including female legislators, government officials, and journalists, as well as wives of men in those occupations. The Washington newspapers covered its activities regularly, on and off the women's pages.29 In another typical event, Lillian Hellman, national league vice president, addressed the D.C. chapter at the home of Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, the prominent feminist and wife of the former governor of Pennsylvania. Also present was the star of Hellman's play "Little Foxes," Talullah Bankhead (daughter of the speaker of the house), while those who took turns pouring tea included two female judges, a congresswoman, peace activist Dorothy Detzer, and several New Deal wives.30
For these women, the consumer movement's goal of raising the living standards and political participation of ordinary people had a feminist dimension. They demanded women's rights in the workplace, but they also recognized that women, whether wage-earners or housewives, usually did the shopping and often worried as much about the price and quality of household goods as about wage rates. The Consumers' National Federation sought to "make the pay envelope, whatever it is, count for more" by fighting inflated prices and shoddy goods on many policy fronts. Helen Hall believed the movement had added "some understanding and some dignity to the job of the low-income housewife." Not only living standards but political democracy were enhanced: "Local leadership sprang up as women became aware that they could play some part in changing their conditions of life."31 Professional women too were taken more seriously when they spoke as "consumers" than when they spoke as representatives of labor or business. By the 1930s the political discourse increasingly cast "consumers" as the working-class masses, eroding the Progressive-era association between upper-class women and consumption. Still, although consumers were no longer only women, they clearly included women-more indisputably than "workers" or "employers" did. Women of all classes had greater access to the public stage when they represented themselves as consumers.32
The left-feminist consumer movement also challenged white supremacy. LWS chapters demonstrated against stores that refused to hire African Americans. The Washington league surveyed 600 women about wages and hours of their household employees and then arranged for a domestic worker, laundry worker, and hotel waitress, all African American women, to address the group. When a House committee refused to consider extending Social Security coverage to household workers, the LWS protested the racially discriminatory impact of their exclusion.33 The wider consumer movement shared the LWS's convictions. African American groups joined the Consumers' National Federation. The civil rights feminist Ella Baker was an active member of the Consumers' Advisory Committee to the Office of Price Administration and later to the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and she also was a founding officer of the postwar National Association of Consumers. Frances Williams, who was African American, and Caroline Ware, who was white, cooperated in desegregating OPA offices.34 This racial egalitarianism only deepened anticommunists' suspicions about the consumer activists.
The consumer movement used a gendered style to get results. Members of the Councils against the High Cost of Living projected a workingclass feminine image, presenting themselves as simple housewives on tight budgets.35 By contrast, the LWS deliberately took advantage of its members' class and gender status as "ladies." Its fundraising and publicity stunts included a mink coat raffle and silk-free fashion shows in support of a controversial boycott of Japanese silk. The abundant newspaper coverage of the District of Columbia league's fashion show, attended by 600 in January 1938, featured titillating close-ups of the cotton-stockinged legs of Capitol socialites.36 Cornelia Bryce Pinchot assured members that picketing was not "unladylike." Lucille Ezekiel, "wife of one of the original braintrusters," led a group of LWS members in evening gowns in picketing the Harrington Hotel to protest its lay-off of sixteen waitresses.37 Another stunt that generated plenty of newspaper photographs was picketing on roller skates, as Washington LWS members did in June 1939, bearing placards that read, "[W]e used to be patrons, now we're pickets."38 A few years later, when Capitol Hill police interfered with a women's delegation to present legislators with pro-price control petitions, LWS officers traded on their femininity by protesting the rough handling, which they claimed had sent a pregnant woman into shock.39
Conservatives noticed and deprecated the femininity of the consumer movement. They also highlighted the presence of upper-class women whenever possible. An article in Consumers' Digest, the bulletin of J. B. Matthews's old group, entitled "Halfway to Communism with the League of Women Shoppers," ridiculed women who went from a tea party to picketing. "Truly, this sets a new style in teas. . . . [W]e may expect to see worthy matrons cut short their bridge parties and teas to dash off to some strike headquarters." The author suggested that women were as fickle in their politics as they were in their shopping tastes: "The fashion forecasters, however, predict . . . it will in time be fashionable to be a lady once again."40 After a sarcastic editorial in the Pittsburgh Press made fun of lady picketers, the local league's executive retorted that there was nothing illogical about a group of fortunate women "opposing the unwise and anti-social activities of others in similar position who oppose the legitimate objectives of organized labor." In fact, she continued, "women who can afford to lunch at the Mayflower Hotel" should be "commended for not being impervious to the needs and welfare of waitresses and chambermaids."41
Critics were wrong that the LWS was a fad, an indulgence of bored ladies who joined for the parties and publicity. No doubt the group acquired a certain cachet, which helps explain why hundreds of prominent people turned out for its events. But many of the big names on its letterheads were dedicated activists, and they did not melt away at the first sign of a shift in political climate. The District of Columbia league was not intimidated by the Dies committee allegations. In May 1940 it threw a benefit party attended by 400 on the roof of the Washington Hotel. Leading New Dealers participated in satirical skits, one of which featured league president Lucille Ezekiel (whose husband was the economic advisor to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace) mocking the Dies committee with a "Martin Pies" magician act. Other distinguished performers included Abe Fortas (Interior Department) and Carol Agger (a NLRB lawyer and Fortas's wife), Leon Henderson (TNEC), Metcalfe Walling (Labor Department), and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas.42

Storrs, L. R. Y. (2007). Attacking the washington "femmocracy": Antifeminism in the cold war campaign against "communists in government". Feminist Studies, 33(1), 118-118-152,235. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/233179145?accountid=35812

IN 1951, TWO HEARST TABLOID journalists published Washington Confidential, a racy, sensationalistic account of life in the nation's capital that within weeks topped the New York Times bestseller list. The authors portrayed the home of the federal bureaucracy as an incubator of both sexual depravity and communism. Women outnumbered men by one hundred thousand, they claimed, and "g-girls" (government girls) slept their way to the top, sometimes with the help of older female bureaucrats who procured ambitious prospects from the heartland for the few government men who were not "eunuchs" or "pansies." Communist leaders took advantage of the situation, using suave Communist men to recruit "sex-starved government gals," "white girls" to recruit the many "colored men" in government jobs, and "trained good-lookers" to recruit "meek male clerks in soporific jobs at standardized sustenance-pay." Often cited as an example of McCarthy-era homophobia, Washington Confidential also was profoundly misogynistic (not to mention racist and antistatist). It described Washington as a "femmocracy" of self-supporting women, whose alleged unhappiness proved that "the emancipation of women is baloney." The book generated such a buzz that the Civil Service Commission launched a publicity campaign to improve the image of federal employees.1
The Hearst columnists who wrote Washington Confidential belonged to a network of conservatives whose influence in the media and government stoked the second red scare, which erupted after World War II much as the first drive to purge communism from American life had after World War I. This essay argues that the right-wingers who drove the "Communists-in-government" crusade were antifeminists and that they used popular antifeminism as a tool in their battle against leftists and liberals. Over forty years ago, the preeminent political historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the "real function" of the second red scare was "not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies . . . but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself."2 His list of resentments did not include fear of women's increasing sexual and economic independence, but it should have.
Hofstadter argued that nativism, religious fundamentalism, and hatred of the welfare state and the United Nations were the "deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition." In his view, these attitudes added up to an antimodern, reactionary populism.3 Subsequent scholarship demonstrated that Hofstadter's "bottom-up" interpretation neglected the role of elites, from the FBI to congressional conservatives to liberal antiCommunists, in orchestrating the second red scare. Recent studies exploring the interaction between popular and elite forces, however, confirm and extend Hofstadter's insights. Michael Heale's comparative analysis of urban red scares finds that they were most virulent where rapid change threatened old regimes. Political fundamentalists everywhere feared the trend toward a "pluralistic order and a secular, bureaucratizing state": in Detroit, however, they defended class prerogatives above all, whereas in Boston religious conflict was key, and in Atlanta maintenance of white supremacy was paramount.1
Heale focuses on the defense of class, religious, and racial hierarchies, but others stress the defense of a conservative sexual order. KyIe Cuordileone argues that domestic anticommunism was fueled by widespread anxiety about the perceived threats to American masculinity posed by totalitarianism, corporate hierarchy, and homosexuality. David Johnson and Robert Dean suggest congressional conservatives were well aware of how charges of homosexuality in government agencies would play in Peoria. This promising new work on fears of sexual modernism as an underlying force in the second red scare focuses chiefly on men whose masculinity anti-Communists deemed suspect. There was a link, however, between hostility to "deviant" men and antipathy to powerful women. Moreover, ideals of femininity were even more restrictive than norms of masculinity. Applying gender analysis to cold war politics requires attention not only to homophobia, but also to male supremacy, which affected heterosexual women as well as lesbians.5 Scholars of the Right in the 1920s and 1980s have shown that the women and men who feared homosexuality, racial and religious pluralism, and state bureaucracy were usually not too keen on feminism, either: defense of the white, Christian, heterosexual, patriarchal family often was their driving concern.6 This essay explores the significance of these recent findings for the professional women who surged into government during the New Deal and World War II. Recovering their experience illuminates the challenges facing women in public life at other historical moments, including our own.
More women held important government positions during the period from the 1930s into the 1950s than is commonly assumed, and a striking number of them were accused of Communist sympathies. Historians have noted McCarthyism's impact on women in labor unions, voluntary associations, and artistic circles, but women in government have received less attention. I offer new evidence that right-wingers viewed communism as a challenge not only to capitalist class relations but also to prevailing gender and race hierarchies. For them, the need to stabilize white male supremacy was one important reason to oppose communism. Antifeminism, an objective in and of itself, also was a means to other objectives. Leading antiCommunists deployed antifeminism to generate popular enthusiasm for their attacks on the New Deal and the Truman administration. As a result, the second red scare harmed the careers of women in government, undercut the policy goals that many of them shared, and reinforced antifeminism in the wider culture.7
Hofstadter argued that one engine of McCarthyism was popular resistance to the rise of the government expert. This resistance was intensified, I would add, by the fact that quite a few of those experts were women. The crises of the Great Depression, World War II, and the nuclear threat expanded the federal bureaucracy dramatically and also shifted power from legislators to bureaucratic experts. These career civil servants typically were better educated and more cosmopolitan than legislators. Also, at least since the "snivel service reform" battles of the 1880s, the masculinity of male civil servants had been suspect. Johnson points out that stereotypes about male bureaucrats and male homosexuals overlapped: both groups could be seen as non(re)productive, nonentrepreneurial men laboring as supplicants to other men. Moreover, federal jobs were sexually integrated at a time when most workplaces were not, which created negative perceptions of both male and female government workers. In the 1920s, conservatives' concern that the state subverted patriarchal gender norms was apparent in their fear that newly enfranchised women would vote to expand state agencies affecting women and children, empowering state administrators- many of whom were female-at the expense of male heads of household.8
During the New Deal and World War II, women's presence in the federal government increased dramatically. In 1930, only about 15 percent of federal employees were women, but by 1947, 24 percent of federal employees were women. Furthermore, in Washington (the place most closely associated with federal bureaucracy, although federal workers are employed nationwide), women comprised 45 percent of federal employees in 1947. Most were clerical workers, but not all. Professional women's opportunities in government were hardly equal to men's-women held fewer than 3 percent of the managerial and policymaking positions in 1947-but they had more options in government than they did in academia or private practice. In 1932, when Bernice Lotwin became one of the first women to graduate from the University of Wisconsin law school, the Wisconsin governor Phil LaFollette advised her to go into government because private practice was "too tough" for a "girl" to get into. Female social scientists and lawyers held jobs throughout the federal bureaucracy, particularly in the Federal Security Agency and the departments of Labor, Commerce, and Agriculture. Almost all of them were white, but professional black women too found opportunities in federal agencies, although they had even more difficulty than white women in securing positions commensurate with their abilities.9
These women's presence reflected feminist intent, not just supply and demand. Since the 1930s, liberal bureaucrats had fought sex and race discrimination in the federal civil service, not least by using the merit system and recognizing unions. A 1944 column by a woman who joined the Treasury Department after a dozen years in private industry reported, "not only did I find the Government does not discriminate. It actually bends over backwards to give [women] opportunity . . . even in the traditionally male professions. It isn't a wartime conversion to womanpower either, as has been the case to date in industry, since I find it has been going on steadily for the past decade."10 Liberals were hardly immune to sexism, and much New Deal social policy in fact reinforced traditional gender and race hierarchies. However, many New Deal liberals were influenced by the Left's theoretical commitment to gender and race equality, and relative to the Right, they were quite egalitarian. Many male New Dealers married highly educated and accomplished women. Even when liberal anti-Communists expressed anxiety about a decline in masculinity, they did not blame it on women. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., for example, worried about mass society's smothering of the individual (male) self, but he ridiculed the Right's shrill alarms about the decline of male supremacy.11
During the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, the novelty of having women in positions of authority gave them a visibility beyond their numbers. Conservatives certainly noticed, as their gripes about femmocracy suggest. The legions of g-girls in nonsupervisory positions endured sexist treatment and patronizing commentary from across the political spectrum, but it was high-ranking women with policy influence who most obviously subverted male dominance, and the Right focused on them. In 1949, George Dixon of the conservative Washington Times-Herald wrote a column on Mary Dublin Keyserling, who headed a division of the Office of International Trade in the Department of Commerce, which illuminates right-wing perceptions of liberal Washington. Dixon wrote, "A pretty woman in her thirties, who looks as if she didn't know a trade balance from a trade last, is currently up to her unruffled eyebrows in one of the most complicated problems of higher economics ever tackled by a member of her sex." He predicted that Dublin Keyserling, whose job was identifying ways to increase imports, would produce "a nice expensive report that no one will read." The report was sure to be "erudite," because "despite her creamy complexion and quiet charm, the lady trade balancer is a heavy thinker." Rather than exploring Dublin Keyserling's heavy thinking, the rest of the column described how her husband, Truman's chief economic adviser, had fallen for "the slim ex-schoolmarm with the blue-green eyes." According to Dixon, a power couple was setting Truman's economic policy. "The President listens avidly to practically everything Leon Keyserling tells him," and soon Truman would "be listening as carefully to his chief economist's missus." Dixon's column managed to imply both that the Truman administration was opening its doors to high-powered women and that it was making exceptions for attractive wives of senior officials. Neither implication was intended to endear readers to Truman's Fair Deal.12