Sidney Lawrence Neale, a thirty-one storekeeper of 73 Barfoot Road, Saffron Lane Estate in Leicester, England, was found guilty in Nottingham Quarter Sessions of blackmailing an unnamed man, referred to as “Mr. A.” The Nottingham Evening Post that night reported the following:
Two medical reports, read in court by Neal’s [sic] counsel, described him as a homosexual, and said that he showed almost complete feminine characteristics. The identity of the victim was not given, but it was stated that he denied absolutely the grave allegations made against him by Neal [sic].
It was, of course, absolutely essential that Mr. A deny those “grave allegations.” A conviction under Britain’s sodomy law might mean a life sentence. That was a remote possibility; convictions for sodomy were practically nonexistent because the burden of proof was so high.
But another law, enacted in 1881, prohibited the commission or attempted commission “by any male person of, any act of gross indecency with an other male person.” The gross indecency law provided up to two years’ imprisonment, with or without hard labor.
And where sodomy convictions were exceeding rare, gross indecency convictions were frightfully common. Playwright Oscar Wilde was perhaps the law’s most famous victim. In 1952, mathematician Alan Turing will go to police to complain someone had broken into his home. During the investigation, Turing will acknowledge a sexual relationship with the suspect. Even though Turing is a crime victim — his home was burgled — he became ensnared with the gross indecency law, and the consequences will bring his career and life to a catastrophic end.
Which is why, despite being a blackmail victim, it was absolutely essential that Mr. A deny the “grave allegations” against him.
The trial took place at Nottingham Shire Hall on December 19. The magistrates agreed to protect Mr. A’s anonymity because, it was reasoned, victims like Mr. A wouldn’t come forward if their names were going to be dragged through the press. As the Evening Post explained during the trial:
(Prosecutor F.B. Pierce) said that blackmail was a dirty and despicable crime. Not only did it aim at the pocket of the victim but often at the mind as well. Often the victim was bled almost white before the case came to the notice of the authorities, but fortunately in this case the victim had the sense to go to a solicitor before handing over any money.
Mr. A explained what happened. He met Neale in September and they became quick friends. On October 1, they met up in Leicester, and after running some errands for Neale, they decided to go to Mr. A’s house in Nottingham for the evening. Apparently, Neale was a reasonably accomplished piano player, so Mr. A invited him in to “play the piano.” One thing led to another, and soon they realized that the last bus back to Nottingham had left Leicester for the evening. So Mr. A invited Neale to spend the night. The Evening News reported that “they slept in the same bed, wich was the only one available. The next day he took Neale back to Leicester, and had not seen him since.”
On October 29, Mr. A. received a letter from “Sid”, addressed to “My darling.” According to court evidence, the letter read:
You have had your fun and you must pay for it. It was a lousy week-end, the most boring I have ever spent … I need money badly, so naturally I turn to you. You will not miss the measly sum of £25 (about £350 today). I trust you will oblige for your sake. If not, there will be an anonymous letter in Notts police station on Wednesday morning telling them all about our little escapade, and I am sure you would not like that.
Mr. A. didn’t reply, and on November 4, he received another letter. It read: “I will give you a little longer. I am sure you would not want any scandal. A man in your position could not afford it.” It also said that the writer wasn’t afraid of prison. It also warned that the writer had written to Mr. A’s next door neighbor and to the police, telling them that Mr. A used his home for immoral purposes.
If indeed Neale had sent the letters to Mr. A’s neighbors and police, then it appears that Mr. A felt he had no choice but to go to police and lodge a complaint, which he apparently did in December. And given the law at the time, of course, Mr. A would have had to deny having committed “gross indecency” with Neale. But Neale’s defense counsel wasn’t prepared to accept that bit of fiction:
Mr. Cotes-Preedy said the fact that Neal [sic] felt strong anger that a relationship which had started satisfactorily, had been broken off, might have prompted him to write the letters in the hope of seeing this man again.
Neale was found guilty of blackmail and sentenced to for years in prison. In passing sentence, Judge A.C. Caporn urged the public to “go straight to the police or to a legal adviser” if they find themselves in a similar situation.
On the Timeline:
Jan 2, 1950: Leicester man sentenced to four years for blackmail.
Periscope:
For January 2, 1950:
Sovereign:
King George VI
Prime Minister:
Clement Attlee (Lab)
Commons:
392 (Lab)
203 (Con)
11 (Lib)
34 (Other)
Headlines: Nottingham residents find “astonishing” reception of new BBC TV signal at Sutton Coldfield. Parliament vacancies created when five Labour M.P.s are elevated to peerages in New Years Honours list; Cabinet meets to consider early general elections. Trades Union Congress set prepare to set wage stabilization policy for 1950 amid economic emergency. Minister of Fuel and Power congratulates coal miners for beating the 1949 target of 202 million tons; calls it “greatest effort since Dunkirk.” Thirteen-year-old boy arrested for shooting a doctor in Brighton.
Sources:
“Demanded money by menaces allegation.” Nottingham Evening Post (December 9, 1949): 6.
On November 27, 1949, the Palladium-Item of Richmond, Indiana, reported the following:
Prosecutor William H. Reller said he may invoke Indiana’s new Sex Crimes law in a sodomy case filed Saturday in Wayne Circuit court. John Catron, who said he lived at 40 Fort Wayne Avenue, is charged with sodomy in the affidavit filed by he prosecutor and Detective Sergeant John B. Murphy. Prosecutor Reller said he is investigating the case to determine whether the Sex Crimes law should be used.
Catron was arrested on a vagrancy charge Friday night after he admitted homosexual activities with two other men, police said. He was questioned after he came to police headquarters to make an inquiry, police reported.
Homosexuality was a very delicate topic, making it extremely difficult to figure out what was going on from sketchy newspaper reports like this. These articles tend to leave open far more questions than answers. First of all, what led Catron to go to the police station? What “inquiries” did he make? Was he a crime victim who wound up getting charged with a different crime? This wasn’t at all unusual. Many a gay man had found himself locked up after complaining that a sex partner stole something or beat him up.
And in this news report — and in all of those that follow — nowhere is there even a suggestion that Catron was having sex with minors. Newspapers of the day were not at all shy about trumpeting that sensational allegation in their pages. Nor is there any suggestion that there was any coercion, blackmail, use of force or threat of bodily harm. In fact, three days later, the Palladium-Item added this tidbit in another article:
Catron, Prosecutor Reller says, has admitted homosexual acts with two men with whom he lived.
Which, of course, brings up more questions: Who were these two men? Why weren’t they arrested? The Palladium-Item was strangely silent about all of that.
Indiana’s new Sex Crimes Law
In March of 1949, Indiana’s governor approved a brand new Sex Crimes law, and prosecutors across the state were itching to use it. The Indiana General Assembly enacted the statute while the state was gripped with a sex crime panic. The main impetus for the law sprang from the brutal rape and murder on November 13, 1947 of Mary Lois Burney, a prominent north Indianapolis suburban housewife, by Robert Watts, an African-American truck driver employed by the city. Watts, who had a criminal record stretching back to 1941, was out on a $250 bond (about $2,800 today) for an attempted rape, and yet he kept his job with the city. Watts was suspected of, but never tried for, perhaps a dozen other attacks, including the murder of Mabel Merrifield two weeks earlier.
The Watts arrest brought out all kinds of fears, not just of black men, but also that perverts were running loose in the city. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to die. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out that conviction because his confession came after a marathon six-day interrogation in which he was held without an arraignment and denied an attorney. He was tried and convicted again, and died in the electric chair in 1951.
Press reaction was only somewhat calmer when police arrested Ralph A. Williams, a mild-mannered (white) hearing-aid salesman who kidnapped and raped an eight-year-old girl. As the African-American weekly Indianapolis Recorder noticed, “So far as we have learned, there have been no community mass meetings on the question; householders have not taken to closing their doors on salesmen (any more than before); and nobody is driving around town and assaulting white pedestrians because of it.” But at least now everyone was on notice that nobody was safe and everyone was a potential suspect, no matter how ordinary or respectable they may appear to be.
Then in October, police arrested Orville Wiley, a married father of two and a former hospital orderly. He stood accused of molesting 42 children, some in hospitals, but most of them at thirteen grade schools in Hancock, Madison, and Marion counties, including four schools in east Indianapolis. He had been accused of similar crimes in 1943, but those charges were quickly forgotten after Wiley’s parents agreed to have him “submit to an operation.” There is no evidence that any kind of “operation” took place, and the case “just died, finally” without follow-up, according to the Hancock County prosecutor at the time. Judge Alex Clark spoke for many when he expressed his frustration at the maximum sentence he could give Wiley: six months in jail and a $500 fine (about $5,400 today). “There is nothing I can do about it,” complained the judge. “There must be some change in the laws and there is a definite need for some intermediate institution to take care of these cases.”
The General Assembly answered the call in 1949 with its new Sex Crimes Law. Modeled after similar sexual psychopath laws in Michigan and Illinois, it allowed for the indeterminate detention in a state mental institution of anyone deemed a “sexual psychopath.” Once committed, they would remain there “until such person shall have fully and permanently recovered from such criminal psychopathy.” To fall under this statute, a person need only be charged with a sexual crime (as long as it doesn’t involve “crime of murder or manslaughter, or rape on a female child under the age of twelve”) — he doesn’t need to be found guilty. Once charged, the defendant or the prosecutor can petition the court to proceed under the sexual psychopath statute. The court can then ask two physicians — neither of them are required to be psychiatrists — to examine the defendant. If both physicians agree that the defendant is a “sexual psychopath” (and what that means is not defined, either in the law or in psychiatry or medicine), the original charge is dropped and the defendant is locked away. For how long? Nobody can say.
The law, as written, invited abuse. A 1969 Indiana Law Review observed:
First, prosecutors can proceed against a defendant under the sexual psychopath statute even though they do not have sufficient evidence for a criminal conviction. This can occur either when there is a lack of evidence of guilt or when evidence of guilt is present, but inadmissible at a criminal trial. Second, prosecutors may threaten misdemeanor defendants with a sexual psychopathy proceeding in order to secure a guilty plea. While neither practice is illegal, both have a potential for abuse.
We will never know whether Richmond prosecutor William H. Reller had the evidence to convict John Catron because he immediately petitioned the court to invoke the sexual psychopath statute. The law wasn’t even a year old, but Reller already had some practice with it. In May 1949, Reller used it to send Enos Wicks to the state hospital in Michigan city. Wicks was accused — but not tried or convicted — of having committed sodomy. Again, the circumstances are obscure but, as with John Catron, the Palladium-Item never mentioned coercion or underage males as being a factor in Wicks’s arrest.
Indiana Hospital for Insane Criminals in Michigan City.
Catron’s case followed the same path as Wicks’s. Judge G.H. Hoelscher, the same judge who oversaw the Wicks case, named two local physicians, Drs. Louis F. Ross and Paul S. Johnson to examine Catron. (Johnson had also been called upon to examine Wicks.) Two weeks later, they came back with their verdict: Catron was, in their opinion, a “criminal psychopathic person.” After a break for the Christmas and New Years holidays, Catron was brought before Judge Hoelscher and committed to the state hospital for the criminally insane at Michigan City.
And all of that took place without the need to go through a bothersome and messy trial, with its due process and rules of evidence to get in the way.
Epilogue:
Under Indiana law, the penalty for sodomy was two to fourteen years’ imprisonment with a possible fine of $100 to $1,000 (about $1,110 to $11,100 today). In March 1952, when Catron would have been more than two years into a sentence for sodomy, he petitioned for a rehearing of his case. The same judge who sent him to Michigan city denied his petition. After that, the trail goes cold.
The case of John Catron, and Enos Wicks before him, is far from unusual. In 1957, the Indiana Law Review published a review of all of the sexual psychopath cases to date, and found sixty men were committed for sodomy. As many as thirty-two of them appear to have involved consensual relationships with adults. In the same period, only thirty-six men and three women were sent to the state prison or reformatory for sodomy.
On the Timeline:
Jan 4, 1950: Indiana’s Sexual Psychopath law ensnares a gay man.
Periscope:
For January 4, 1950:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
263 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
3 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
7.3 %
(Annual)
3.0 %
(Quarterly)
Fed discount rate:
1½ %
Inflation:
-2.1 %
Unemployment:
6.5 %
Headlines: In President Truman’s State of the Union Address, he asks Congress to extend rent controls and other emergency measures to deal with the post-war housing shortage. The U.S. State Department, angry at Hungary’s treatment of American citizens, orders the closure of Hungary’s consulates in New York and Cleveland. Coal strike forces cancellation of one-third of railroad passenger service. The New York Sun publishes its last edition. Major flooding on the Ohio River and its tributaries close sixteen main highways in Indiana and isolate two towns.
In the record stores: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “White Christmas, ” Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Yingle Bells” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “Blue Christmas” by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: Samson and Delilah, starring Hedy Lamarr, Victor Mature, George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Henry Wilcoxon.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
Newspapers and magazines (in chronological order):
Leo M. Litz. “Indignant citizens want answer to crime wave” Indianapolis News (November 13, 1947): 1.
Charles S. Preston. “Undue hysteria aroused by late crime outbreak.” Indianapolis Recorder (November 22, 1947): 1, 2. The Indianapolis Recorder was a prominent weekly newspaper serving Indiana’s African-American communities.
“Child rapist confesses. Police hold executive in assault.” Indianapolis Star (April 14, 1948): 1, 10.
Editorial: “What, no crime wave?” Indianapolis Recorder (October 24, 1948): 10. “Readers have called to our attention the comparative calm with which the daily press, radio and general public have taken the case of Ralph Aran Williams… We have even been urged to give the Williams case the ‘Watts treatment’ — that is, to describe the prisoner as a ‘burly white man,’ etc.”
“Hospital molester has record of abuse.” Indianapolis Star (October 12, 1942): 1.
“Confesses molesting 42. Fortville man bares misconduct.” Indianapolis News (October 19, 1948): 1, 18.
“Judge hits sex law weakness.” Indianapolis News (October 21, 1948): 1, 8.
“Sex criminal to be sent to state mental institution.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: May 25, 1949): 2.
“Watts: Court rules for fair hearing; new trial set for October 3.” Indianapolis Recorder (July 2, 1949): 1.
“May use new sex law in sodomy case.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: November 27, 1949): 1.
“To use sex crimes law in local case.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: November 29, 1949): 1.
“Two physicians to report in sodomy case.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: November 30, 1949): 1.
“Sex criminal report filed by 2 physicians.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: December 14, 1949): 1.
“Sex criminal will be sent to hospital.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: January 4, 1950): 2.
“Convicts’ peas for new hearings denied by judge.” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN: March 3, 1952): 2.
journal articles:
Elias S. Cohen. “Administration of the Criminal Sexual Psychopath Statute in Indiana.” Indiana Law Review 32, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 450-466. Available online here.
Anthony Granucci, Sisan Jamart Granucci. “Indiana’s Sexual Psychopath Act in operation.” Indiana Law Review 44, no. 4 (Summer 1969): 555-594. Available online here.
On January 6, 1950, California doubled its maximum penalty for sodomy from ten years imprisonment to twenty, all because heterosexual men kept abducting, raping and killing very young girls. Three heterosexual men in particular, two in California and one, believe it or not, in Idaho. Here’s how it happened.
The murder of Linda Joyce Glucoft
The Daily News of Los Angeles, November 15, 1949.
It all began on November 14, 1949, when the frantic parents of six-year-old Linda Joyce Glucoft called Los Angeles Police to report their daughter was missing. She was last seen at the home of a playmate, across the street and three doors down from her Crescent Heights Blvd. home. She had gone there to play with her friend, but her playmate had gone to a birthday party with her mother. Linda never made it back home. The next morning, police found her battered body, rapped in a blanket near the trash incinerator in her playmate’s back yard. Linda had been strangled and her head had been bashed in with an ax. Her panties were in the incinerator. The distinctive brightly-colored Indian blanket came from the playmate’s home, where the friend’s grandfather, Fred Stroble, had been staying.
Stroble, a 67-year-old retired baker and known sex offender, was missing. Police feared he had made a break for Tijuana where he was known to have friends. Stroble had already jumped bail for another sex offense the previous July when he was accused of molesting a ten-year-old girl. Prosecutors downgraded those felony charges to a misdemeanor because they didn’t think they could get a felony conviction on the testimony of a juvenile. When Stroble jumped bail, authorities thought that he had fled to Mexico City, but it turns out that he had been staying with his daughter for the past two weeks. Neighbors had no idea he was a wanted man. They said all of the children in the neighborhood liked him because he often gave them candy and ice cream.
The Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1949, page 3.
With little Linda’s brutal muder, another international manhunt, this time far more intensive, was on all over southern California and northern Mexico. Tijuana police flooded the streets, checking every motel, auto court, ranch and bar. In Los Angeles and San Diego, roadblocks were everywere. Television screens flashed with his image. Radio broadcast his description every hour. Stroble’s photo was in the hands of every customs border agent, in front of every bus driver and behind every bar. It was in one of those bars in downtown Los Angeles that someone recognized Stroble, went out and got a traffic cop’s attention, who promptly arrested Stroble and took him to headquarters.
This murder came just two years after two other shocking murders in Los Angeles. In January of 1947, police found the body of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short in a vacant lot in Leimert Park. Her naked body was cut in half at the waist and drained of blood. Newspapers quickly dubbed her the “Black Dahlia,” and the sensational case fed headlines for months to come. Police investigated over 150 suspects, but no arrests were ever made and the case went cold. And just a week before Linda Glucoft’s murder, Los Angeles police had arrested a suspect in the 1946 murder of six-year-old Rochelle Gluskoter. Her skeletal were found in an Orange County ravine in late 1947. That suspect was released due to a lack of evidence on the day Linda’s body was found.
Two more child rape/murders in the same week
Linda Glucroft’s case made the front pages of newspapers nationwide. The day after her body was found, newspapers found that they had to make room for another tragic story coming out of the small community of Burley, Idaho, where Neale Butterfield, 16, was arrested and confessed to kidnapping and murdering seven-year-old Glenda Joyce Brisbois. The autopsy showed that she was also raped, although Butterfield refused to confess to that.
The Evening Press of Santa Rosa, November 21, 1949.
And then not even a week later, seventeen-month-old Jospehine Yanez was kidnaped from her parents car near Huron, California, a small farming community near Fresno. Her parents, migrant farm workers from Mexico, had parked their car in front of a dance hall and were away for only a few minutes when their daughter was snatched. Her body was found later that night, her head jammed into a muddy field. She had been raped before she died. Police arrest Paul Guttierez, 25, a migrant farmworker who had been accused six years earlier of raping a fourteen-year-old girl under a grandstand in Fresno.
California, along with the rest of the nation, quickly found itself in the midst of a full-blown sex crime panic. The Sacramento Bee, one of many newspapers demanding that lawmakers to do something about it, found these murders “so unnecessary”:
It should be apparent by now that short term imprisonment does not rehabilitate a sex offender. The records of this state and of others are full of instances in which sex criminals have been released from jails and prisons only to repeat their crimes or commit worse ones. Until these persons can be made harmless to society, they should be kept in custody, even if that means for life. Certainly the freedom of a sex offender is no more precious than the life of an innocent 6 year old child or any other individual.
The sensationalist Long Beach Independent offered its solution:
There should be no second chance given to a proven sex pervert who molests children. … The first time a person is proven to be a sex pervert who has molested a child, that person should have the choice of submitting to an operation to remove his or her sex organs, or refusing, he or she should be permanently confined to an institution for the insane. There would be some injustices committed by such a lway but not many. The principle that it is better to let ten guilty persons go free rather than punish one innocent person does not apply to child molesters.
And nationally, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover lent his voice to the rising chorus:
The depraved sex criminal has replaced the kidnaper as a threat to the peace of mind of the parents of America. The steady rise in vicious assaults on women and children cannot continue. The time has come to call a halt. Feindish sex criminals must be treated as such. It is better to prevent brutal assaults than to later launch widespread manhunts after a child has been murdered.
The women and children of this nation can never be secure until we face one fundamental fact. There are only two satisfactory courses of action once a sex offender is identified — cure through medical attention or the more drastic alternative — incarceration fo the offender.
“Sex degenerates” were too long defended by “sob sisters.”
The Long Beach Independent, November 25, 1949.
Under pressure from the Independent and other Los Angeles-area newspapers, L.A. and Long Beach launched massive roundups of alleged child molesters and other “perverts”. According to the Independent, “tensions are such that a stranger does not pat a child on its head for fear of someone calling him a pervert.” But, it warned, “then the tension eases, and we wait for another Linda Glucoft case to again shock us.”
Dragnets went up everywhere. San Bernardino police went into action when someone reported that a man was trying to lure two small girls into his car. Police set up roadblocks throughout the city until that the “dangerous sex fiend” was just a family friend who had just stopped to chat with the youngsters for a few minutes.
California Gov. Earl Warren initially resisted calling a special session of the state Legislature to enact stronger sex crime laws. What was needed, he said, was a “down-the-line” co-operation between parents, teachers, police and parole boards to enforce the laws already on the books. He pointed to one law passed two and a half years ago requiring everyone convicted of a sex crime to register with local police. “I find now,” said Warren, “that in all that time, about only 719 persons have registered throughout the state.” This despite there being, every year, about 4,750 people who are convicted of sex crimes. “So far as we know,” said Warren, “there has never been a conviction” for anyone who failed to register.
But as pressure mounted across the state, Warren did an about face and called the Legislature back to Sacramento. Suggestions for new sex crime laws came from all directions. A conference of law enforcement officers called for the death penalty for sex crimes against children. Assemblyman James G. Chrichton (D-Fresno) proposed surgical emasculation for those convicted of sex crimes. On the first offense, the decision to castrate would be up to the judge. On the second offense, the operation would be mandatory.
A group of ten psychiatrists opposed that in a hearing before a special Assembly Committee to Investigate Sex Crimes. They urged that all sex criminals be tested “for correction and treatment” until they are rehabilitated, which many acknowledged meant they’d be locked up for life, regardless of the severity or nature of the particular crime. Consensual sodomy among adults, for instance, would be one such crime. Dr. Marcus Crahan, consulting psychiatrist for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office and the most hardline member of the group, called for building “mental prisons,” and for naming them as such instead of as hospitals. He estimated that it would take four prisons with a capacity of 2,500 inmates to handle everyone.
Homosexuals become collateral damage
But what do homosexuals have to do with any of this? After all, the sex crime panic gripping the state was caused by three men raping and killing girls. Dr. Marcus Cragan, who had urged the construction of “mental prisons,” was just one of many psychiatrist who connected the dots. At one of Fred Stroble’s preliminary hearings, Cragan testified that he had examined Stroble and found:
This man, I believe, is an endocrine type of potential homosexual. By that I mean he, like many men, evidences homosexual tendencies, but don’t know they exist. … and while he says his married life was normal, I find evidence he may have been abnormal before that, a potential sex variant. Possibly he was homosexual and didn’t know it. … It is up to us — all of us — to see that such a deed is never repeated. We can only do this by understanding what manner of man commits such a crime.
Many leading psychiatrists seemed to apply a rather simple-minded transitive law that school kids learn in mathematics: If a=c and b=c, then a=b. If child molesters are perverts and homosexuals are perverts, then there is fundamentally no difference between child molesters and homosexuals. In this regard, psychiatrists were only slightly more sophisticated in understanding the nature of gay people than math students. They just had the benefit of university degrees and professional pedigrees, and the prestige and the jargon that came with them, to buttress their arguments.
And so when Dr. J. Paul DeRiver, Los Angeles police department psychiatrist, recommended brain surgery — in other words, lobotomy — and electroshock therapy for sex offenders, he added that among those being lobotomized and shocked should include “notably, homosexuals.” He claimed that most of other sex offenders could simply be “educated out of their condition” through talking and praying with them. But homosexuals defied easy treatment because most of them were “happy in their perversion.”
Relatively cooler heads prevailed and DeRiver’s suggestion went nowhere. But Dr. George Tarjan, superintendent of Pacific Colony State Hospital in Pomona, reminded the Assembly committee that the problem that remained was enormous. He estimated that for every twenty convictions for sodomy and other homosexual acts, there were six million more acts that go unpunished.
Something needed to be done, and Assemblyman H. Allen Smith (R-Los Angeles County), a former FBI agent and a particularly notable homophobe even for 1950, was just the man to do it. He introduced several bills into the California Assembly, including one which would raise the maximum penalty for sodomy. As it stood, California’s sodomy law bore a glaring inconsistency: the maximum penalty for attempted sodomy was twenty years’ imprisonment, but completing the crime brought a maxumum of ten.
Of course, one easy fix would have been to reduce the penalty for attempted sodomy. But under the sex crime panic then sweeping the state, such a suggestion would have been impossible to consider, even if Smith had been so inclined. But of course, he wasn’t. In fact, two years later, he pushed through another bill that eliminated the maximum punishment for sodomy altogether, making it possible for a California judge to send someone so convicted to prison for life.
Smith’s bill, along with a few others, raced to passage by the full house just one day after they were introduced. Assemblyman Thomas Doyle (R-Los Angeles County) congratulated his fellow legislators. “Sex degenerates,” he said, have been defended long enough by “sob sisters.” “The sooner we put into effect stricter laws, the better. If we had whipping posts for these people, by golly, I think we would have less of it.” The Senate acted with similar haste, and passed its version the very next day, apparently with little discussion.
On January 6, 1950, Gov. Warren signed five sex crime bills into law. All of the bills were deemed emergency measures, which meant that they took effect immediately upon the governor’s signature. The bills signed included:
raising the maximum penalty for sodomy from ten years’ imprisonment to twenty;
making the killing of a child during a sex attack a first degree offense, which is punishable by death or lifetime imprisonment without parole;
making child molestation a felony if the sex offender had previously been convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct with a child;
requiring anyone convicted of sex crimes after July 1, 1944 to register with the sheriff of the county of residence;
requiring law enforcement agencies to forward fingerprints to the California Bureau of Criminal Identification for all persons arrested for sex offenses, whether they were convicted or not.
That last bill would also have profound consequences for thousands gay people. It had the effect of creating a statewide database of information about accused and convicted homosexuals, and that data was shared with the FBI, which was already assembling a national database of known sex offenders and homosexuals. That database would prove essential in the U.S. government’s drive to purge thousands of men and women accused of homosexuality from the government payroll.
Epilogue:
On signing the five bills into law, Gov. Warren said he regretted the Legislature’s failure to pass any measure taking a psychiatric approach to sex crimes. “To my mind this is the most important field for legislation because up to the present time there has been very little done so far as the study of these warped minds and their treatment is concerned,” he said. “I believe if we are to make any real progress we should enact legislation in this field.” He Included this in a special call for a March session of the Legislature. The Legislature responded with a $100,000 (about $1.1 million today) sex crime study to be conducted by the state-run Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco.
The Legislature, at the same time, also amended the state’s oral copulation law, which banned all acts of oral sex, including private consensual acts between adults, and also even including consensual acts between married couples. That law made it a felony with a maximum fifteen-year prison sentence. The amendment added an alternate misdemeanor, punishable with “up to one year in jail.” As Assemblyman Smith, the bill’s sponsor, explained, “If two men of lawful age are living together, … when (the authorities) attempt to prosecute them under (the oral copulation felony law) they find that juries in many instances are not interested in returning a guilty verdict. Further, that to sentence the subject and, in some instances, the victim, to the penitentiary only acts as a ‘quarantine’ of the individual for a period of time, and does not help in the over-all solution of the sex crime.”
In 1952, the California Legislature revisited the state’s sex crimes statutes. Assemblyman Smith sponsored another bill to eliminate the maximum penalties for rape and sodomy, allowing a lifetime sentence to be imposed for either crime. Gov. Warren signed it into law on April 17.
Meanwhile, the nation continued to follow the trials of the three men accused in the rapes and murders of the three girls that started this panic. Fred Stroble was convicted of killing Linda Joyce Glucoft and sentenced to death. He was executed in the gas chamber on July 25, 1952.
Paul Gutierrez, the twenty-five-year-old migrant farmer, was found guilty of first degree murder of seventeen-month-old Josephine Yanez. He had blamed the murder on having “blacked out” after smoking a couple of marijuana joints. The judge didn’t buy it and sentenced him to death. He was executed on December 1, 1950.
Neale Butterfield, the sixteen-year-old high school football star who kidnapped, raped and killed seven-year-old Glenda Joyce Brisbois in Burly, Idaho, pleaded guilty of first degree murder. To the astonishment of everyone in the courtroom, Judge Hugh A. Baker rejected the prosecutor’s call for the death and gave Butterfield a sentence of life imprisonment. Judge Baker cited Butterfield’s age as a factor in his decision. “It may be a mistake has been made,” said Judge Baker. “It may be it should have been held that Neale Butterfield, although but sixteen years of age, has forfeited his right to live and that justice required that forfeiture. Only time will furnish the answer and perhaps that answer will not be clear or certain.”
Fortunately, Judge Baker’s judgment proved sound. Under Idaho law, Butterfield would have been eligible for parole in 1960. He was paroled in 1962, married two years later, and lived out the rest of his life with no further apparent conflict with the law. He died in 2000.
In 1975, Gov. Edmund D. Brown, Jr., (D) signed a bill that finally legalized all private sex acts between consenting adults. The bill was the culmination of a lengthy and heated three-year battle to get the sodomy statute off of the books.
The day before, Chrysler debuted its 1950 lineup in dealer showrooms.
Headlines: Several jurors in the Fred Stroble trial nearly faint when shown fifteen photos of Linda Joyce Glucoft’s body. Congressman from Kentucky proposes federalizing sex crime laws. Britain, Norway, Denmark, and Ceylon extend diplomatic recognition to Communist China. President Truman says the U.S. will not intervene to save Chinese Nationalists on Formosa (Taiwan). U.S government warns that the continuing coal strike may force further cutbacks in rail service by coal-burning trains. Sleet and freezing rain shuts down roadways from Central Texas to Eastern Ohio; Rising floodwaters break through levees in Indiana.
In the record stores: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “White Christmas, ” Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Yingle Bells” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “Blue Christmas” by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: On the Town, starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, and Ann Miller. This film features Sinatra’s hit, “New York, New York.”
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“Child murderer seen near border.” Daily News (Los Angeles, November 15, 1949): 1, 2.
“Find Stroble fugitive from sex warrant.” Daily News (Los Angeles, November 15, 1949): 2.
“Mexico-U.S. hunt on for girl’s slayer.” Los Angeles Times (November 16, 1949): 1, 2.
“Man held in Gluskoter murder freed due to lack of evidence.” Los Angeles Times (November 16, 1949): 2.
Jack Cook. “Body of slain girl found in irrigation ditch. Glenda Joyce Brisbois, 7, believed victim of sex killer; police spread net.” Burley (ID) Herald (November 17, 1949): 1, 2.
“17-year-old [sic] youth nabbed in Idaho girl’s kidnap-murder.” Deseret News (Salt Lake City, November 18, 1949): A-1, A-2.
Associated Press. “Longer jail terms in sex cases proposed by Gordon.” Oakland Tribune (November 17, 1949): 4.
Springfield. That’s shorthand for Springfield, Missouri, home of the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. It opened in 1933 as the U.S. Hospital for Defective Delinquents and quickly became the primary medical center for the entire federal prison system. It’s where prisoners with all kinds of medical problems, including those deemed to be mentally ill, were (and are, still) sent for longer-term treatment and convalescence.
During the national sex crime panic of the Forties and Fifties, an aroused public demanded that authorities round up “sex perverts” and lock them away. City names became stand-ins for places to send these crazy people. “Send them to Lima,” they’d say in Ohio. Or, “Send them to Big Spring,” in Texas. Whether anyone actually benefitted from being sent to wherever they were sent — that was a different question entirely and few bothered to ask. The important thing was that they weren’t here anymore. They were safely locked away at Ionia or Mount Pleasant or Chattahoochee.
Or Springfield.
On January 13, 1950, the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Departments of State, Justice, Commerce and the Federal Judiciary was going over the Justice Department’s proposed budget for 1951. That morning, they examined budgets for the Anti-Trust Division, States Attorneys, U.S. Marshals, the FBI, Immigration and Naturalization — all before lunch.
When the subcommittee resumed its session at two o’clock that afternoon, it turned to the proposed budget for the Federal Prison System. Director James V. Bennett, a well-known penal reformer, defended the proposed $2.14 million increase ($23 million today) over the previous year’s budget. About midway through Bennett’s testimony, Rep. Daniel J. Flood (D-PA), grilled Bennett over the Federal Prison System’s handling of so-called “sexual psychopaths,” which, in Flood’s mind, mainly meant homosexuals. Flood posed a hypothetical situation: say there are ten check forgers. Nine are normal, but the tenth says he’s a homosexual. The nine are put on probation, but obviously not the tenth. He’s sent to Springfield. Why? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a homosexual.
Flood’s example illustrates how completely interchangeable the terms “sexual psychopath” and “homosexual” really were. The homosexual man before the judge wasn’t accused of a sex offense. He didn’t even admit to having had any particular sexual relations, let alone violent or non-consensual ones. All he did, in Flood’s example, was simply say, “I’m a homo.” And that alone, in Flood’s mind, gave the judge no other choice but to send him to Springfield.
Now, in reality, the law didn’t work that way. There were procedures in place that had to be followed before anyone could be sent away anywhere. In some jurisdictions, the procedures were very strict. But in others, it was largely left to the discretion of the judge. But not even in the loosey-goosiest jurisdiction would a forged check be a triggering offense that would endanger someone to be sent away to a psychiatric hospital. So right away, Flood’s hypothetical setup had little bearing on what could actually happen to a gay man standing before a Federal judge. But it does show what Flood thought should happen. And if anyone else in the room thought differently, they kept their peace.
And besides, that wasn’t the point of Flood’s question. What he was really trying to find out was whether the money being shipped off to Springfield was doing anybody any good.
Director Bennett’s reply that should have horrified everyone in the room. But of course, it didn’t, not any more than Flood’s hypothetical that started it all. Bennett acknowledged, more or less, that they really had no idea what they were doing. But he did suggest that having all of those these homosexuals in one place would make a good supply of subjects for medical experiments. In fact, they already conducted one experiment. It involved injecting hormones into homosexual men.
Here is the entire exchange:
Federal Prisons director James V. Bennett and Rep. Daniel J. Flood (D-PA).
Rep. Flood: Here is a refinement of the question I asked you last year. You may not remember, so we will put it altogether in one. There is a male prisoner arrested for forging a Government check. First offense; fine family, good record; comes before the judge, takes a plea. Ordinarily he would be given a suspended sentence and place on a year’s probation.
Dir. Bennett: I would think that would be likely.
Rep. Flood: Probably that would follow in 9 cases out of 10. This is the tenth case. In the course of the presentence investigation, it is developed he is a homosexual; he admits it, and there is no question about it. The judge says, “Are you?” He says, “Yes.”
It is a crime. The judge cannot give him a year on probation. The fellow is a criminal in something else. So he sends him to you and you recommend Springfield, Mo., for a year.
What are you going to do with him in Springfield, or anyplace else? He is sentenced, not for the crime to which he plead, for which he would ordinarily get a suspended sentence, but your pretrial people, presentence people, find out the fellow is a “homo.” He said he was. There is no debate about it and there is the judge and he does not know what to do, so he gives him a year, and he wonders what he will do with him. You say, “Send him to Springfield.” So he is there. What happens to him a Springfield?
Dir. Bennett: Let me, first of all, Mr. Congressman, point out that many people are in Federal court technically for one thing, for income-tax violation, say like Mr. Al Capone, but is given a 10-year sentence, not because of the flagrancy of the income-tax violation, but because he is a gangster.
Rep. Flood: That is not my case. They wanted to send Capone to jail. But they cannot do anything out it in this case. He tells them something which makes it mandatory. In other words, the judge cannot turn him loose.
Dir. Bennett: What do we do about the sex psychopath; Mr. Congressman, is that what you mean?
Rep. Flood: That is the next question that I am going to ask you. You have two psychiatrists going into Springfield, Mo., and I certainly think you need four down there.
Dir. Bennett: We need more.
Rep. Flood: What are you doing? Do you have an institution — do you consider Springfield, Mo., your special institution for homosexuals, or sexual psychopaths?
Dir. Bennett: We have been sending a considerable number of confirmed sexual psychopaths to Springfield.
Rep. Flood: Nothing is happening. It is a bad job. They are not being treated properly. Nothing is coming out. There is not much difference there than anyplace else. What are you going to do about sexual psychopaths in Federal prisons? You have a lot of them, do you not?
Dir. Bennett: Yes, sir.
Rep. Flood: Are you doing anything?
Dir. Bennett: Yes, sir. Everything possible is being done. We have been treating them by psychiatric methods to the limit of our ability.
Rep. Flood: Do you think you are curing them?
Dir. Bennett: Some of them we are helping.
Rep. Flood: So at the end of the year he is right where he was, a sexual psychopath. That is not your fault, is it?
Dir. Bennett: There isn’t much more known, Mr. Congressman, about how to treat and improve the sexual psychopath than there is how to treat cancer.
Rep. Flood: Now we are getting some place.
Dir. Bennett: We do know that in a few cases, by psychoanalytical methods, we can sometimes get to the root of an individual person’s case and troubles, but as you well know, that is an extra-ordinarily expensive method, and it takes a long time for the psychiatrist to get to the root of the evil.
Rep. Flood: Let me ask you, are you doing everything under the circumstances of medial and penological theories that can be done with sexual psychopaths in view of the money you are getting?
Dir. Bennett: No, we are not doing everything we can do, because we don’t have the personnel.
Rep. Flood: Why not?
Dir. Bennett: We simply don’t have the funds for it.
Rep. Flood: That is why I asked you. Out of the money you are getting then.
Dir. Bennett: We are doing everything we can with the funds we are getting.
Rep. Flood: You are not doing very much?
Dir. Bennett: We are not doing as much as we would like, no sir; but we are doing more than any other correctional system, or anybody else.
Rep. Flood: Are you segregating in Springfield your sexual psychopaths in the institution?
Dir. Bennett: Within the institution?
Rep. Flood: Are you segregating them within the institution?
Dir. Bennett: Yes sir. We have a special building and special psychiatrists assigned to them. Let me tell you one of the things we tried out there.
We thought that injection of hormones into the so-called passive homosexual would be helpful. We tried that, and spent quite a lot of time and effort on the matter. Some helpful results were obtained in some cases, but in other cases where the cause of sexual psychopathy was entirely mental, had no physical base, why it wasn’t very helpful. We think, Mr. Congressman, and I have recommended on several occasions, that some money be given to us for research in this problem of sex psychopathy. We have a large laboratory. We have more cases of people of that kind in our institutions than in any other one place. We could utilize these opportunities for research purposes, and this advance the knowledge of this extremely difficult affliction.
We have had, out of the Army, a large number of men who were committed to our institutions for rape, for sodomy, and other sex offenses. We have not been able to organize a research program because we have not had psychiatric assistance. There is no use, gentlemen, of talking about trying to stop abnormal sex crimes through punitive methods. It is basically a disease and we might as well recognize it as a disease, and see if we can’t find a cure.
Rep. Flood: Is it hereditary or acquired?
Dir. Bennett: I don’t know. Sometimes, at least, a person seems to be born that way.
Rep. Flood: Both?
Dir. Bennett: Yes. There are certain well-known types of so-called hermaphrodites, and some others are born that way, but the number is relatively small.
Rep. Flood: You seem to be very unhappy about the whole thing.
Dir. Bennett: I’m very unhappy about the amount of research that is being done in the field of sex psychopathy.
Rep. Flood: It is a major criminological problem in the Federal penal institutions today?
Dir. Bennett: I can think of nothing where we could make a greater contribution to law enforcement than trying to find the basis of this mental and physical affliction. Yes, it is a major problem.
Rep. Flood: That is all.
Dir. Bennett: I will, if you will permit me, Mr. Flood, send you a copy of my annual report, in which I go into the question of the sex psychopath, the number of them, and the problems they rpesent and what I think is a constructive program for their improvement.
Rep. Flood: Did you ask the Budget for money to execute your program?
Dir. Bennett: Yes, sir.
Rep. Flood: What did they do?
Dir. Bennett: It was not allowed.
Rep. Flood: The first time you asked for it?
Dir. Bennett: Well, it was the first time we asked for it in that particular form, but we have asked for money before.
Rep. Flood: Did you say please, when you presented it, or did you just make a pass at it?
Dir. Bennett: We pressed it; yes sir.
Rep. Flood: That is all.
Dir. Bennett: I would like to give you that report. The public is aroused about this problem, as you well know, and you can’t tell anything about these fellows that seem to you perfectly normal until you get them in some sort of a controlled environment where you can expose these situations, and then perhaps you can help them.
Epilogue:
I haven’t found any published papers based on the Springfield experiments. But doctors had long suspected that hormones were responsible for homosexuality in some — namely, the “constitutional” homosexuals, as opposed to those who supposedly picked it up like a cigarette habit. A lack of testosterone was at first thought to be the cause. After all, most of those homosexuals who came to the doctors’ attention were rather girly. But injecting them with testosterone only made them hornier — more homosexual, as it were.
So instead of increasing homosexuals’ sex drive, why not just decrease it instead? That’s where trying synthetic estrogen came in. That didn’t work very well either. Just a few months before Bennett’s testimony, Dr. William H. Perloff, of the Philadelphia General Hospital, published the effects of hormone treatments for all kinds of maladies. His experiments with gay men and women came to naught:
In our experience, no patient, either male or female, has shown any consistent reversal of the endocrine pattern to explain homosexual tendencies. We have never observed any correlation between the choice of the sex object and the levels of hormonal excretion. Estrogenic substances administered to homosexual females do not alter either the sexual drive or the sex object. In no patient studied in our clinic was heterosexuality produced with this type of therapy. Large doses of estrogens administered to male homosexuals will occasionally succeed in reducing their sexual drive but will not influence their sex object.
Across the pond, Dr. R.E. Hemphill at the University of Bristol reviewed the literature in 1955 and found the same results: “The direction of homosexual or heterosexual drives cannot be altered with sex hormones; but the force of sexual drive in males can be reduced by treatment with female sex hormones.” Even in cases where hormones caused an “almost complete testicular atrophy,” it still didn’t result in a “total suppression of the abnormal sex drives.”
Turning a homosexual into a heterosexual proved impossible. But turning a homosexual into a eunuch, in the eyes of the authorities at least, might just be the next best thing. There were, however, side effects. British mathematician Alan Turing, who was treated with Stilboestrol, a synthetic estrogen, after his conviction for homosexuality, suffered many of them. Impotency, mainly, which was the whole point of the treatment. But also, perhaps most startling, was gynecomastia — he grew breasts, before he killed himself in 1954.
On the Timeline:
Jan 13, 1950: The judge says “Send him to Springfield.” So he is there. Then what?
Periscope:
For JANUARY 13, 1950:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
263 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
3 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
7.3 %
(Annual)
3.0 %
(Quarterly)
Fed discount rate:
1½ %
Inflation:
-2.1 %
Unemployment:
6.5 %
“This is a mucho gay day for corn…”
Headlines: The U.N. Security Council again refuses to oust the Nationalists from the Chinese seat and hand it over to Communist representatives. Rumors persist that Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Chinese Communist leader Mao Tze Tung are negotiating a military and economic alliance. Southern Democrats and Republicans team up in the House to try to block President Truman’s Fair Deal program. Seventy thousand coal miners vow to ignore union orders to return to work on Monday. An Air Force glider crashes while landing near Columbus, Georgia, killing eleven paratrooper trainees, an instructor, and the pilot. The British Admiralty confirms that 64 men aboard the submarine HMS Truculent have died following its sinking in the Thames Estuary.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Don’t Cry, Joe” by Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes.
Currently in theaters: The Sands of Iwo Jima, starring John Wayne, John Agar, Forrest Tucker, and Adele Mara.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy(CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on the Department of Justice. Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Eighty-First Congress, Second Session (Washington, 1950). Available online here. The exchange between Bennett and Flood concerning “treatment of psychopaths” begins on page 323.
R.E. Hemphill. “Endochrine treatment in psychiatry.” British Medical Journal no. 4912, vol 1 (February 26, 1955): 501-504. Available online here.
William H. Perloff. “Role of the hormones in human sexuality.” Psychosomatic Medicine 11, no. 3 (May 1949): 133-139.
On Thursday afternoon, January 26, 1950, police in Modesto, California, arrested John Oscar Allen, a seventeen-year-old Modesto High School student, and charged him with indecent exposure. Two women reported that he had exposed himself in the Lucky Market parking lot at the corner of Tenth and L. Streets. Police picked him up and questioned him in Juvenile Hall. He quickly confessed to the crime, and under police questioning, began confessing to others.
One of those crimes, according to Allen, was when he committed “a perverse act” with Charles Lloyd Martin, 23 and a Navy veteran. Martin taught history and English at a school in Turlock, fifteen miles (25 km) southeast of Modesto. Police arrested Martin at the school that very day. Robert Lee, superintendent of Turlock schools was shocked. Martin came to Turlock with the highest recommendations, he said, and his conduct at school was above reproach. He said Martin “appeared cultured and refined.”
Police investigators followed a routine practice with Allen that they used whenever they picked up someone on morals charges, especially where homosexuality was concerned. They grilled Allen, and he coughed up a name. They grilled him some more, and he soon offered up more names. Those people were brought in and they offered names. Within a couple of days, nine gay men were rounded up in Modesto. Acting police chief William Coulson said, “The operations of these people have been under observation for some time. We finally got some definite proof,” thanks to Allen’s confession. Coulson said that the “acts” were all separate and unrelated, although most of the defendants were acquainted with each other. Cash bail was set at an astronomical $20,000 (about $225,000 today). The nine men caught up in the dragnet were:
John Oscar Allen, 17, the Modesto High school student whose arrest started it all. He was charged in juvenile court with what the Modesto Bee called “a crime against nature.” This was a euphemism for California’s sodomy statute, found in Chapter 286 of California’s penal code. I’ve found no further mention of Allen’s case in the Modesto Bee, probably because his was a juvenile case.
From the Modesto High School 1950 yearbook.
Alfred Raymond Benjamin, 19, described as a “special student”(perhaps because of his age) at Modesto High. He was charged with two counts of “crimes against nature” (sodomy). As an adult, he would have been subject to punishment of up to twenty years’ imprisonment, based on a harsher penalty set by the state legislature just three weeks ago. He lucked out. He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served thirty days in jail before going on three years’ probation.
Charles Ernest (Chick) Fanning, 24, an unemployed beauty shop operator. He was charged with “sex perversion,” which may have been the Modesto Bee’s euphemism for having sex with one of the seventeen-year-olds. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. He was released early on July 14.
Vernon Edward Jenson, 20, a florist. He was charged with “sex perversion.” He pleaded guilty and was given three years’ probation after he was examined by a Dr. Ralph Gladen, head of Modesto State Hospital. Gladen said Jenson was not a homosexual but a highly penitent “foolish kid.”
H. Edgar Leeser, 38, a radio and TV repairman. He was charged with “a crime against nature” (sodomy). He pleaded not guilty. He was released on bail after the judge lowered it to $5,000 (about $55,500 today). I haven’t found any more information about this case.
Charles Lloyd Martin, 23, the Turlock school teacher. He was charged with “sex perversion.” He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three months in jail, but was released on May 9 and placed on probation so he could enroll in a college in Kansas.
From the Modesto High School 1950 yearbook.
Rolla Hargiss Nuckles, 37, a teacher of public speaking at Modesto High. He was charged with “sex perversion.” Nuckles, also a Navy veteran and war hero, was in his second year as a teacher at Modesto High. Principal Wesley Berry said he was “shocked” at Nuckles’s arrest. Nuckles was “a man with a lot of talent and has been doing an excellent job.” Berry then pointed out the obvious, that of course a conviction of “this type” would revoke Nuckles’s teaching credentials automatically. Nuckles dodged a bullet on February 20 when the charges against him were dismissed by Judge Stanton Helsley for lack of evidence. He had been held in jail for three weeks until then.
Vernon L. Stevens, 17, unemployed. He was charged in juvenile court with indecent exposure. I’ve found no further mention of Allen in the Modesto Bee, probably due to it being a juvenile case.
Burner Gene Work, 23, a window trimmer. He was charged with “a crime against nature” (sodomy). He pleaded not guilty after his lawyer argued that the charges against him should be thrown out due to lack of evidence. He was convicted in September and sentenced to two months in the county jail and three years’ probation.
California’s age of consent was (and still is) eighteen years old, which made Allen and Stevens minors as far as consensual sex was conserned. Most states had (and still have) what are called “Romeo and Juliet” exemptions, where statutory rape laws don’t apply if the adult is within five to ten years of the minor. California had no such exemption at the time. But in 1950, age of consent laws were often overlooked where males were concerned. The old “boys will be boys” adage was very much in force, even if it also meant “perverts will be perverts.” Some level of consent appears to have been assumed, even if California law did not, strictly speaking, see it that way.
Ample evidence of that attitude can be found in the stories published by the Modesto Bee, in which no one cast the younger men as “boys” or as innocent victims, nor were any of the older men accused of “molesting” anyone. That’s probably because another dynamic was in play. In 1950, society had a very elastic view of what it meant to be a “youth,” which appears to have benefited many of the adults who were arrested. The Modesto Bee reflected those attitudes when it, in keeping with the common practice of the day, referred to all but Leeser and Nuckles as “youths” in one story or another.
Epilogue:
When I see these names in the papers, I invariably wonder what happened to them. Whenever people were arrested on a “morals charge” or for “lewd vagrancy,” their names, addresses and places of employment were typically printed in the paper. That publicity — that public shaming — only added to the sentences handed down in the courts. Teachers automatically lost their jobs. Others may have as well, or found obtaining work difficult. Some may have been shunned by their families and neighbors. It must have been an extraordinarily humiliating experience for each of these men.
But seventy years later, those very details — the names, address, employers, and so forth — are sometimes the only thing which can truly remind us that these were real people, suffering from this kind of official oppression, and not just characters in long-forgotten newspaper clippings.
Searching around the web’s vast archives yielded just scattered bits of information about most of these men. Some married, others apparently didn’t. Some apparently stayed in Modesto, as evidenced by their names appearing in city directories for many years to come. Others moved away. Burner Gene Work, who appears to have been born in Oklahoma, returned there to live out the rest of his life. Vernon Edward Jenson moved to Sacramento and married in 1954. But most just quietly, very quietly, faded from view.
One notable exception, however, is Rolla Hargiss Nuckles, the Modesto High School teacher against whom the charges were dropped.
His photo appeared in the 1950 Modesto High School yearbook, The Sycamore. He taught public speaking. “Public speaking classes take part in regional and state competition,” explained The Sycamore, “and produce a radio program over KTRB every Wednesday.” Even though Nuckles saw his charges dismissed, he was no longer teaching at Modesto in 1951. Instead, we find him back at Kansas City by April 1950, assisting in the preparations of a local theater production while there “for a visit with his mother.”
Westport High School yearbook, 1928.
Theater was very much in his blood. According to information I was able to dig up at Ancestry.com, Rolla Hargiss Nuckles was born on July 8, 1911 in Creighton, Missouri, about sixty miles (100 km) southeast of Kansas City. He attended Westport High School in Kansas City, where he was very active in school theater, speech club, and student government. He graduated in 1928, when was voted the most “ladylike boy.” (His quote: “Gayly bedight, a gallant knight.”)
After high school, he attended junior college in Kansas City but left to go on the road with a stock company. After a spell at that, he became a barker for a carnival touring Nebraska, before landing at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. There, he joined the Dramatic Club, and was president of the local chapter of the National Collegiate Players (“one of the many units in all nation-wide dramatic movements”). In 1933, his senior year, he appeared on the Dramatic Club’s performance of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” where, according to the college yearbook, “Elizabeth Crafton stole the show and Rolla Nuckles wore lace.” Nuckles appears to have been quite the performer. As a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, he was described as “perhaps the most delectable tap dancer to nauseate the Hill in some years.”
Jayhawker magazine, May 1939.
After graduating, he joined Eva LeGalluenne’s company in New York City, then jumped to the Pasadena Playhouse, then jumped back again to New York’s American Children’s Theater. By 1936, he was back at K.U., now teaching “radio speaking” for students at the university’s radio station, KFKU, and directing radio dramas and theatrical plays. The 1939 Jayhawker yearbook says he’s the “youngest member of the dramatics department.” We also learn that “His hobbies are traveling (spends part of every simmer in Mexico and the remainder working on his master’s degree at Northwestern), his bachelor apartment, and, of all things, prize fights!”
Top: Kansas City Star, July 19, 1943. Bottom: Life, August 23, 1943.
By 1940, Nuckles found himself in Tucson, Arizona, working at the Tucson Little Theater. It’s in Tucson where he filled out his draft registration card. The next thing we know, he’s in the Navy, where he wound up becoming something of a minor war hero. Nuckles was serving in the Pacific, where he was credited with directing the rescue of 161 survivors of the Cruiser U.S.S. Helena on July 16, 1943. The Helena was sunk by the Japanese in the battle of Kula Gulf. Most of its 600 to 800 crew had been picked up at sea, but another 157 survivors eventually drifted to a Japanese-held island. The Navy sent an expedition to retrieve all 157 survivors in an operation that took place right under the Japanese’s noses. “A chief rescuer was Ensign Rolla Nuckles of Kansas City, boat officer aboard one of the destroyer-transports,” reported Life magazine. “He directed successful operations of the landing boats.” Those exploits earned him an Associated Press writeup that landed on the front-page of the hometown Kansas City Star. “The pre-dawn rescue was one of the most magnificent maneuvers in the Pacific war to date,” reported the A.P. writer, “and the audacity of going into the enemy’s own backyard through waters thick with submarines made its signal success the more remarkable.”
Old Dominion College yearbook, 1968.
After the war, Nuckles hosted the radio program “Navy Reporter” for Armed Forces Radio. He wound up in Modesto in 1948 for that ill-fated teaching job. His arrest appears to have been little more than a blip in his biography. And because of the charges were dropped, it failed to interrupt his teaching career, even if he was no longer teaching in Modesto. By 1961, he was teaching English back at his old Kansas City alma mater, Westport High. He also taught drama at the State University of New York in Morrisville, Old Dominion College in Norfolk, Virginia, and St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, where he maintained a near-constant presence in the South Texas theater scene for three decades. He died in San Antonio in 2000.
Jan 26, 1950: Police in Modesto, California, round up nine men on “morals charges.”
Periscope:
For January 26, 1950:
President:
Harry S. Truman (D)
Vice-President:
Alben W. Barkley (D)
House:
263 (D)
167 (R)
2 (Other)
3 (Vacant)
Southern states:
103 (D)
2 (R)
Senate:
54 (D)
42 (R)
Southern states:
22 (D)
GDP growth:
7.3%
(Annual)
3.0%
(Quarterly)
Fed discount rate:
1½ %
Inflation:
-2.1 %
Unemployment:
6.5 %
Headlines: President Truman approves the master defense plan for the North Atlantic defense pact against Russian attack. The U.S., Britain and France invite West Germany to send consuls to Washington, London, Paris; formal ambassadorships must wait until a formal peace treaty is signed. The Soviets erect new roadblocks on highways connecting Berlin and West Germany; U.S. threatens retaliation. Four senators (three Republicans and one Democrat) offer competing proposals for a constitutional amendment eliminating the Electoral College.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley.
Opening today in theaters: Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, Millard Mitchell, Dean Jagger.
On the radio:Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“Eight are under arrest here on morals charges.” Modesto Bee (January 28, 1950): 1, 2.
Associated Press. “Eight are jailed on student’s story of sex perversion.” Sacramento Bee (January 28, 1950): 26.
“Seven men are arraigned on sex charges.” Modesto Bee (January 30, 1950): 1, 10.
“Modestan admits sex perversion charge in court” (Vernon Edward Jensen). Modesto Bee (February 7, 1950): 25.
“Sex perversion is admitted by Modesto youth” (Alfred Raymond Benjamin, H. Edgar Leeser, Charles Lloyd Martin, Burner Gene Work). Modesto Bee (February 9, 1950): 6.
“Sex perversion charge against high school teacher is dropped” (Rolla H. Nuckles). Modesto Bee (February 20, 1950): 1.
“Youth jailed on morals charge gets probation” (Vernon Edward Jensen). Modesto Bee (February 22, 1950): 13.
“Youth gets jail term on sex perversion charges” (Alfred Raymond Benjamin). Modesto Bee (March 3, 1950): 4.
Note: Ancestry.com may require a subscription for access.
Ancestry.com FisherFamily1 Family Tree. Available online at Ancestry.com (retrieved November 28, 2020).
Modesto High School. The Sycamore yearbook. (Modesto, CA: 1950). Photo and writeup of Rolla Nuckles is on page 70. Available online at Ancestry.com. Photo of Alfred Benjamin is on page 20. John Oscar Allen does not appear in this yearbook.
Old Dominion College. The Troubadour yearbook. (Norfolk, VA: 1968): p75. Available online at Ancestry.com.
State University of New York, Morrisville. Arcadian yearbook. (Morrisville, NY: 1967): 32. Available online at Ancestry.com.
University of Kansas. Jayhawker yearbook. (Lawrence, KS: 1933): 65. Available online at Ancestry.com. “Rolla Nuckles wore lace” is on page 197.
University of Kansas. Jayhawker magazine. (Lawrence, KS, May 1939): 301, 323. Available online at Ancestry.com.
Westport High School. The Herald yearbook. (Kansas City, MO: 1928): 31. Available online at Ancestry.com. The Senior ballots are on page 60.
Westport High School. The Herald yearbook. (Kansas City, MO: 1961): 8. Available online at Ancestry.com.
Dr. James M. Reinhardt’s obituary tells us that the nationally-renowned criminologist was a “personal friend of the late J. Edgar Hoover.” That may have had something to do with his gigs as a guest lecturer at the FBI’s National Academy in Washington, D.C. Reinhardt’s home base was in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he taught criminology and sociology at the University of Nebraska.
Much of his work was in high profile murder cases. But with the sex crime panic in full swing, Reinhardt adopted the mantle of a sex crime expert and published this article in the February 1950 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. I would imagine that it gives us a good idea as to what he taught the nation’s best police detectives and state and federal investigators. An abridged version of the article appears below. You can read the entire article here.
The Sex Pervert
by DR. JAMES M. REINHARDT, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Nebraska
…The unique personality traits of the potentially most dangerous types of sex perverts do not ordinarily stand open to the world. The simple exhibitionist, nuisance that he is, invariably attracts attention, while the lust murderer may slip through the crowd undetected. The feminism of the “passive” homosexual male arouses quick resentment and he is avoided by the normal male. Oftentimes, the far more dangerous “aggressive” homosexual works out his designs on young boys in the community while moving with innocent appearance among respectable people.
Even where sexually perverted individuals exhibit similar tendencies, they may differ widely in the ways to which these perverse cravings dominate the personality. Satyriasis, or even a mildly sex dominated hyperaesthesia may produce a Don Juan or a rapist. Moreover, the life histories of sex perverts, even of the same general “type,” do not always follow a common pattern. There are marked differences in the environmental and hereditary backgrounds as in the behavior of homosexuals, exhibitionists, and sadimasochists [sic] of all degrees. Nevertheless, perversion of whatever sort tends to generate new desires through a sex-fused imagination, until the individual becomes absorbed by his own perversions and can find only partial, or no satisfactions in other directions.
It is important to recognize that not all individual who engage in sexual perversions are “true” sex perverts. Very often men — and sometimes women — with low moral standards, and with exaggerated lustful dispositions will satisfy their sexual passions in whatever ways that are available. Such person, removed from restricted circumstance, will engage in normal sexuality; whereas the “true” sex pervert can find sexual gratification only in a perverted manner regardless of the circumstance. The more degenerate and brutish the perverted nature, the more it tends to dominate the whole personality. Some cases of sexual parapathy with a sadistic tinge employ an outward show of excessive kindness in the beginning approaches and turn toward brutalities as the object is won over or in the face of resistance.
The disposition of the sexually perverted individual may not tell us to what ends he will go to satisfy his lustful craving, but it may reveal the nature and direction of the perversion itself. In other words, we do not have to wait until a ex murder is committed to know that a potential sex murderer is in the field. Certain warning traits of personality are there if society is organized to be on the “look-out” for them.
Perversions are not necessarily associated with other offenses though perverts are often guilty of a variety of crimes. This is so partly because the degenerative processes predispose the individual to other criminalities, and also, the perversions push the individual into criminal situations.
Four major types of perversion give society the most concern. They are homosexuality, exhibitionism, pedophilia (perverted sex interest in children), and sadi-masochism [sic]. Rape and other serious offenses may be due to such abnormalities as satyriasis or nymphomania (women). Sex perversions are not mutually exclusive and it is this fact which complicates the problem of control. As for instance, when a homosexual manifestation is coupled with a strong sadistic compulsion.
The homosexual is distinguishable not alone by a marked attraction toward members of his own sex, but by a sexual aversion to persons of the opposite sex. There are many varieties of homosexuals, but for the most part these may be classified according to two personality types: the “passive” and the “aggressive.”
The “passive” homosexual male exhibits a decided feminine manner in his language, dress and walk. He is the least dangerous of all homosexuals because he is easily distinguishable and because he is retiring and ordinarily satisfied with one “lover.” The “aggressive type” in the male, on the other hand, may show strong masculine characteristics, is more difficult to discern, is more brutal in his designs. He often preys on young boys, and may have wealth and “family background” at his disposal. The female homosexuals show the same two types but usually in less exaggerated form.
The unsatisfactory social and sexual relations of the homosexual often tend to bring about rapid psychological and moral degeneration, which contribute to various forms of criminality, alcoholism, and other escapes.
…
The belief held by some people that all sex perverts are suffering from a sex psychopathy is, in my opinion, erroneous. The psychopathic personality, whether he is driven by sex cravings, is a blundering, irresponsible individual, and where the psychopathy has progressed, this applies to the whole range of his personality. Such a person is no more responsible and calculating in his sex conduct than in other phases of his behavior. A characteristic of the psychopath is irresponsibility in his language and his behavior. He is devoid of a fixed purpose in life, and is unable to follow or really to develop a plan of action. He seems “… always to be stumbling along without direction along the road to self-destruction,” and is unable to do anything about it. If sex gets in his way, he uses it with no regard for the stimulating object, or no consideration of the consequences. Such a one is often called a sexual psychopath. From my point of view, a “true” sexual psychopath is pulled irresistibly in the direction of pervertive sexual behavior. His whole life pattern of stupidity and degeneracy is colored by his sexually perverted nature.
On the other hand, many sex perverts, even those with brutality tendencies, are able to carry on for a considerable time without revealing openly their sexual abnormalities. They do for a time, at least, exercise judgment, hold jobs, and show some consideration for the loyalties of other people. While this lasts, such individuals could hardly be called sexual psychopaths.
It is my contention that any form of sex perversion tends to bring about the degeneration of the personality of the pervert. The sex pervert operates alone. His victims are innocent and helpless people, often mere infants or children. The sex craving of the pervert commands the whole personality. He heeds no warnings and is insensitive to consequences. The pervert who has reached the compulsive, sadistic level finds overwhelming delights in the infliction of cruel sufferings and death. The bank robber, embezzler, the forger, even the hired murderer, hopes to enhance his social security and prestige with the fruits of his crime. Not so the perverted sex criminal. His fiendish craving is devoid of any social “link.” He is the most sordidly selfish of all criminals and inherently the most intolerable.
Epilogue:
In other writings by him and about him, Dr. Reinhardt appears quite progressive. For example, in 1945 he joined forces with the Lincoln, Nebraska, Urban League, a local civil rights organization headed by Clyde Malone, to oppose efforts to block FHA housing for African-Americans on Lincoln’s north side. When residents circulated a petition against the housing project, Reinhardt pointed out that the prospective residents, as U.S. citizens, were guaranteed equal rights under the constitution. That, he said, made this petition “a strange request in a democratic community.”
When Malone died in 1951, Reinhardt wrote a letter to the local newspapers about his old friend’s passing. “Rarely have I seen, in this city, a funeral attended by so many loving and sorrowful friends. They came from all walks of life… unable to find seating room in the church sanctuary or basement, stood reverently throughout the funeral service, which lasted two hours. … The faithful heart of Clyde Malone has found a resting place beyond the reach of human prejudices. No more will doors be closed to him, nor seats be denied him, because of the color of his skin. The people of Lincoln have bowed reverently over his grave. Now what?”
A dozen years later, following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Reinhardt expressed his alarm at a new kind of political hatred he saw rising in the country. “If you don’t agree with a person, call him a Communist and people will hate him,” he told a reporter. “The trend has been to make a Communist out of everybody you disagree with.” He recalled the McCarthy hearings: “I saw respected doctors, scientists and professors called communists during those hearings. What’s worse, people believed the unfounded charges because they wanted to. It was a growing feeling of hate toward something and McCarthy gave them something to hate.”
And yet, Reinhardt wasn’t entirely ahead of his time. He still had prejudices where LGBT people were concerned. And like most “experts” of his day, his “data” amounted to little more than recasting common bigotries in scientific language.
In 1957, Reinhardt revisited his FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article for his book, Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes. Here he acknowledged that half of the forty cases he had “examined in detail” up to that point were “referred to me by police, district criminal courts, and district attorneys.” Many of them “were at the time serving sentences in reformatories or penitentiaries for crimes quite removed from sex” Based on that sample, he wrote this:
Again, my cases tend to confirm the belief that most, but not all, sexual perverts suffer a great deal from a keen sense of inadequacy. The reason, however, I am convinced, lies not primarily in the nature of the perverts anomalous sexuality per se but rather in the cultural role assigned the pervert in the social order, and in his interpretation of that role.
After seven years’ passage, he now saw “perverts” as having low self-esteem, which he traced to society’s opinion of them. That’s progress, I suppose.
One chapter of his 1957 book appears to have been a genuine attempt to understand gay people from as dispassionate a viewpoint as he could muster. His third chapter studied gay people in “what may be called a ‘natural setting'” — a private gay club set up in someone’s home, presumably somewhere in Lincoln. Reinhardt sought out two gay University of Nebraska students to guide him — his “interpreters,” he called them. He also provided a very interesting “‘gay’ glossary,” obviously with the help of his two interpreters.
And yet, his observations did little to change his biases against LGBT people. At best, he softened a few of the rougher edges of his more extreme prejudices, making them appear more nuanced and “reasonable.” More common were passages like this:
The plea for compassionate understanding and tolerance so often made by homosexuals on the ground that one’s own brother, daughter, sister, or son may become a homosexual loses force when one realizes that, as in crime and tuberculosis, the statistical chances that one’s own brother or son bay become a homosexual increases with the number of homosexuals in the community. The dangers are further multiplied if, as is shown, a considerable portion of homosexuals in any large community are preoccupied with attempts to convert young boys to homosexuality.
So what does that tell us? For one thing, it says that sensitivities to prejudices in one realm doesn’t necessarily translate to other realms. It also tells us that for some people — even for those who are very aware of the nature and operation of bigotry — their own entrenched prejudices will nevertheless remain impervious to contrary evidence.
Reinhardt continued teaching at the University of Nebraska until he retired in 1963. He died on April 23, 1974. His obituary mentions that, among other honors, he was given the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice Award. A graduate student research fellowship in criminology and delinquency has been established in his name.
On the Timeline:
This Story:
Feb 1950: The FBI’s monthly Bulletin indulges its “sex-fused imagination.”
Headlines: The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China sign a mutual defense treaty. Secretary of State Dean Acheson defends his loyalty to the U.S. and his support for Alger Hiss. The Regents of the University of California vote 12-6 to require all employees in the university system to sign a loyalty oath disavowing support for Communism. Two Klansmen are arrested for killing a retired storekeeper near Birmingham, Alabama. A month-long strike by coal miners brings supplies to the nation’s homes, schools, hospitals, factories and railroads to dangerously low levels.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “There’s No Tomorrow,” by Tony Martin, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Rag Mop” by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: Twelve O’Clock High, starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill, and Millard Mitchell.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“James Reinhardt, criminologist, dies.” Lincoln Star (April 24, 1974): 5.
Government documents:
James M. Reinhardt. “The Sex Pervert.” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 19, no. 2 (February 1950): 2-4. Available online here.
Books:
James M. Reinhardt. Sex Perversions and Sex Crimes. A monograph in the Police Science Series, V.A. Leonard, Ed. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1957). Available online here.
Click to download the text of McCarthy’s floor speech of February 20 (PDF/11.9MB)
Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin’s junior Senator started out as a most unremarkable figure. He was dubbed the “Pepsi-Cola Kid” when it came out that he benefitted from a $20,000 personal loan from the CEO while he was pushing to eliminate prices controls on sugar. He lobbied to commute the death sentences of several Waffen-SS war criminals, saying they didn’t get a fair trial. Fellow Senators avoided him. They were put off by his explosive temper and impatience. In 1949, the Senate press pool voted him “the worst U.S. Senator.”
But he was a popular speaker. Clubs, civic groups and political organizations lined up to book him for their banquets and meetings.
One such group was the Republic Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. That’s where, on February 9, 1950, he gave the speech that changed the course of his career. Towards the end of his speech in which he catalogued all that was wrong with America, he famously held up that mysterious piece of paper and said, “While I cannot take the time to name all of the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were known to the Secretary of State, and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy in the State Department.”
The next day, a Salt Lake City radio station aired a prerecorded interview. Listeners heard McCarthy say that he had the names of 57 card-carrying Communists at the State Department. The day after that, he released a letter that he had sent to President Truman asking why the State Department had discharged only 80 of 300 employees “certified” as security risks. Every time he raised the subject, his numbers kept changing. But he revealed his partisan motives when he demanded that Truman order the State Department to turn their personnel records over to him. “Failure on your part,” he wrote, “will label the Democratic party as being the bed-fellow of international communism.”
McCarthy was no longer that forgotten, unremarkable figure. He now had a sensational cause that was guaranteed to make front page headlines. And his party had an issue that might finally dislodge the Democrats from their seventeen-year lock on power.
McCarthy’s charges were long in rhetoric. But they were short in details and devoid of names. The State Department’s Undersecretary of State John E. Peurifoy was responsible for administration, including employent and security. He publicly challenged McCarthy to provide the department with his list of names. In a telegram to McCarthy, Peurifoy said, “As a loyal American you owe it to your country to inform the officials responsible for any such characters existing in the government.”
McCarthy refused, but on February 20, he held court on the floor of the Senate for five and a half hours as he read out details of 81 people he said were “security risks” at the State Department. Again, several Senators challenged him to provide names, and again McCarthy refused. Senate Majority Leader Scott W. Lucas (D-IL) interrupted McCarthy several times. Their arguments grew so acrimonious that McCarthy finally demanded a quorum call in the nearly empty chamber. After about thirty-five minutes, the sergeant-at-arms was able to round up fifteen more Senators to form a quorum. McCarthy resumed speaking, and held the Senate hostage until almost midnight.
Among those McCarthy accused, one was, supposedly, “one of our foreign ministers.” Another allegedly was a top official at the Voice of America. And another was Truman’s speechwriter. “I am doing President Truman a favor by telling him this,” said McCarthy. “He wouldn’t have this individual there if he knew it.”
Two of the eighty-one cases McCarthy weren’t particularly noteworthy at time. Case 14 and Case 62 escaped the press’s attention. But they are interesting to us today because they show how easily his Red Scare can color shift to Lavender. Case 14 came up just a before the quorum call:
Case No. 14. This is a case of pressure from a high State Department official to obtain security clearance for an individual with a bad background from the standpoint of security. He was appointed in December 1945 as a translator in the State Department.
This is an interesting case showing the extent to which some of their superior officers will go when they find that some of these very unusual individuals are going to lose their jobs. He was appointed in December 1945 as a translator in the State Department. A report from another Government investigating agency under date of January 9, 1946, advised that the subject should be dismissed as a bad security risk because he was flagrantly homosexual. He had extremely close connections with other individuals with the same tendencies, and who were active members of Communist front organizations, including the Young Communist League.
I think this is interesting, Mr. President. I asked one of our top intelligence men in Washington, one day, “Why do you find men who are so fanatically Communist? Is there something about the Communist philosophy that attracts them?”
He said, “Senator McCarthy, if you had been in this work as long as we have been, you would realize that there is something wrong with each one of these individuals. You will find that practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way.”
The State Department’s own security agency recommended the discharge of this employee on January 22, 1946. On February 19, 1946, this individual’s services were terminated with the State Department. Subsequently on April l, 1946, the action discharging this individual was rescinded and he was reinstated in his job in the State Department. In this case a CSA report of September 2, 1947, is replete with information covering the attempt of a high State Department official to induce several individuals who had signed affidavits reflecting adversely upon the employee to repudiate their affidavits. The file shows that that high State Department employee even went out and ·personally contacted the individuals who signed the affidavits, and asked them, “Won’t you repudiate them?”
This individual, according to the security files of the State Department, was a very close associate of active Soviet agents. As to whether he is in the State Department at this time or not, I frankly do not know, but in view of the fact that he was reinstated, I assume that he is.
After the quorum call, McCarthy resumed his speech with Case 16. (He skipped 15.) He got as far as Case 34 when the Senate went more or less into rebellion over McCarthy’s stream of innuendos, one-sided case presentations and lack of specifics. But the longer the debate went, the more it became clear to everyone that McCarthy wasn’t about to give up the floor. He would keep the body hostage under threat of another quorum call all night long if he had to.
Finally, he came to Case 62, which McCarthy conceded had nothing to do with Communism.
Case No. 62. This file is not important insofar as communistic activities are concerned, but rather is important because it sheds light on some rather unusual mental aberrations of certain individuals in the Department. In this connection, it perhaps should be mentioned that the types of individuals described in this file are regarded as bad security risks by most investigative agencies for the reason that they are rather easy blackmail victims. This file I recommend to the attention of any committee that cares to investigate it. It goes into some detail in regard to the peculiar — how can we put it –the peculiar mental twists. I was trying to handle this matter delicately. I think this will be of interest to the committee in that it gives a rather interesting picture of some rather unusual mental twists of these gentlemen who are tied up with some of the Communist organizations.
Also it is confirmation of what I believe I mentioned earlier this evening when I was talking about one of the top investigators in Washington. I said to him, “Why do you find so many people fanatic about communism? Is there something that is so inviting about it? Is there something mentally wrong?” He said, “You will find if you search deep enough that there is something mentally or physically wrong with every one of them.” There is certainly something wrong with this group. I might say that the new security officer has recommended that they get rid of all that type of individuals regardless of whether they are shown to have any communistic connection or not.
This is the link, in McCarthy’s mind, between Communism and homosexuality: you’d have to be crazy to be a Communist, and you’d have to be crazy to be a homosexual. In fairness to McCarthy, he was far from alone in creating this linkage. As far as most people were concerned, there was one problem: subversion and perversion, which in their minds was one and the same.
The rest of the first year of what became known as the Red Scare was actually devoted to a Lavender Scare. The latter scare grew, somewhat accidentally, out of the first. It peaked in 1953, and then was swiftly forgotten. Today’s history books ignore the Lavender Scare and leave the impression that only suspected Communists were hunted. But we can look back and see the obvious: two parallel scares, each reinforcing the other.
The Quest for Case 14’s Protector
Sens. Millerd Tydings (L) and Joseph McCarthy (R)
Case 14 figured in a spectacular showdown between, McCarthy and Sen. Millerd E. Tydings (D-MD), whose committee was named to investigate McCarthy’s accusations. The committee met on March 9, with McCarthy beings its star witness for much of the next two weeks. McCarthy had charged that “a high State Department official” had engaged in a cover-up to protect Case 14. Tydings began first day’s hearing by demanding to know this official’s name. “This is a very serious charge,” said Tydings, “that a high official in the State Department is tampering with the records to protect people who are charged with disloyal activities.”
McCarthy refused to answer. Instead, he insisted on going through each of the cases, in order, as he had done on the Senate floor. “I assure you we will get to it,” he said. “I have other cases documented for your information this morning.”
Sen. McCarthy before the Tydings Committee
Tydings then asked not for the man’s name, but whether McCarthy knew it. Again McCarthy refused to answer. Then Tydings asked even more simply if the man’s identity could be found connected with another of McCarthy’s 81 cases. Again, McCarthy refused to answer. Tydings tried another tack. He asked if the man’s name was anywhere in McCarthy’s records. McCarthy kept stonewalling, saying that he will get to it when he was ready to discuss Case 14. The two went back and forth for about forty minutes. McCarthy refused to budge.
McCarthy had two objectives by refusing to answer. First, he wanted to retain control of the headlines. Answering Tydings’s question would effectively shift the headlines away from what he wanted to disclose for the day. He, McCarthy, would decide whose name would show up in the newspapers, and he would control its timing for maximum impact.
The fact that McCarthy didn’t want this particular name in the papers is closely related to his second reason for stonewalling. It was Joseph A. Panuch. He had been the State Department’s Undersecretary for Administration until 1947. That’s when Gen. George Marshall became Secretary of State and brought in his team with him. Panuch moved on and became a contributor to Plain Talk, a Chicago-based anti-Communist magazine. That exposure made him something of a minor hero to the far right. Panuch later became a special advisor to Gen. Lucuis D. Clay, U.S. Military Governor of the American sector in Germany.
But McCarthy refused to reveal Panuch’s name. That’s because McCarthy had named him — and praised him — when discussing another unrelated individual known only as Case 41. “Joe Panuch had made considerable efforts to get this man out of the State Department,” McCarthy had said. “Here is one man who had tried to do the job of housecleaning, and the ax falls.”
In other words, the un-named man who McCarthy condemned for helping Case 14 was the very same man McCarthy praised, by name, in Case 41.
Tydings already knew the name, and McCarthy knew that Tydings already knew. Tydings knew that this man was Panuch for the same reason that most other Senators knew it. McCarthy’s had simply re-arranged and renumbered the cases from a different list compiled in 1947. The so-called “Lee List,” named for House investigator Robert E. Lee, had been compiled for a House subcommittee investigating the State Department’s security procedures. The same list was also shared with three other subcommittees in what had been a Republican-controlled Congress. Four different GOP-run subcommittees looked into the list, and all of them concluded that no further actions were necessary.
By the time McCarthy got hold of the Lee List, it was 2½ years old. By then, was so well known among other legislators that Sen. Homer Ferguson (R-MI) brought his copy to the Senate chamber to read along during McCarthy’s speech. Case 14 in McCarthy’s list was actually Case 10 of the Lee List. It read:
This is a case of pressure from a high Department official to give clearance to a subject although derogatory information is available.
The subject was appointed in December 1945 as a translator for “not over a year.” He had previously been a special attorney with the Justice Department and was in the U. S. Marines for one year during World War II.
A report of another investigative agency, under date of January 9, 1940, advised that the subject has homosexual tendencies and made suicide attempts in 1936 and 1942.
A memorandum dated January 22, 1946, by Mr. Bannerman recommended terminating the subject’s services which could be done rather easily because of his appointment being of a temporary nature. He was terminated February 19, 1946, and appealed the termination.
A memorandum dated April 1, 1946, from J. A. Panuch stated that he had interviewed the subject and reviewed various affidavits and letters of reference submitted by this subject and he rescinded the termination action of February 19, 1946. A memorandum from Mr. Panuch, dated May 28, 1946, to Mr. Fred Lyon, of the Office of Controls, referred to an opinion expressed by Mr. Lyon on May 27, 1946, that the subject was an undesirable employee because of moral depravity, and requested substantiation of Lyon’s charge in writing with evidence additional to what was already in the file. Mr. Lyon’s memorandum of May 31, 1946, to Mr. Panuch pointed out that dismissal of charges against the subject was premature because —
No complete CSA investigation had been made to determine the subject’s current personal conduct.
No interviews were had with two witnesses who had originally reported homosexual tendencies on the part of the subject and later denied their statements in affidavits.
The subject is known to have an arrest record in the District of Columbia for disorderly conduct. The facts regarding this arrest had not been checked.
Mr. Lyon pointed out that this is another case where it is necessary to either resolve all doubts in favor of the individual or the Department, and he favored the latter.
A memorandum of June 19, 1947, from the Foreign Activities Correlation Division to CSA stated information had been received from a Government security agency to the effect that the subject had been an enlisted man in the Marines and while such had shown undue interest in naval activities and had pro-German sentiments during the war. The memorandum also stated that investigation by another Government agency exposed him as a flagrant homosexual.
A CSA report of September 2. 1947. set out considerable information confirming the subject’s homosexual activities and tendencies. It also relates an interview with an attorney who originally reported the subject a homosexual to a Government agency and who subsequently on March 2, 1946, signed an affidavit contradicting his former statement. In connection with the affidavit he informed an investigator that the subject had approached him and begged him to sign a document he had written. He said he refused, but that a short time later Mr. Joseph Panuch, representing himself to be from Assistant Secretary of State Russell’s office, called him by telephone on behalf of the subject and said the subject was being ruined by statements that he had made about him. Mr. Panuch reportedly said that everyone else who had made statements against the subject’s character had retracted them and the informant was the only one holding out. Mr. Panuch then reportedly asked the informant to make an affidavit rescinding the statements made by him to another Government agency. It is noted that although Panuch said everyone else had rescinded their statements against the subject, the key witness to an incident of perversion by the subject did not sign an affidavit until March 18, 1946, whereas the informant’s affidavit was signed March 2, 1940. The CSA investigation developed quite conclusively that the subject had homosexual tendencies.
On September 12, 1947, a form memorandum from CSA to the Personnel Division stated that the subject is a homosexual.
He was still on the Department rolls as of October 29, 1947.
“The New Deal, The Fair Deal, and the Fairy Deal”
McCarthy finally submitted his list of names corresponding to his 81 cases to the Tydings Committee in March. The Tydings Committee released its report in July. Unsurprisingly, it found nothing behind any of McCarthy’s 81 charges:
We were thus confronted with the amazing spectacle of four different committees of the Eightieth Congress, which was controlled by Senator McCarthy’s own party, having considered the very same files and information which provided the predicate for the McCarthy charges — with none of these committees so much as regarding the situation as one meriting a report or citing a single State Department as disloyal.”
The two Republicans on the committee, Sens. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., (R-MA) and Bourke B. Hickenlooper (R-IA) refused to sign the report. Lodge’s objections are particularly noteworthy. A moderate Republican who would later fall out with McCarthy, Lodge objected to thirty-five missing pages of discussions that were omitted from the Committee’s published hearing transcripts. (They were later published in a separate thin volume.) The omitted portions included a lengthy dialogue between Lodge and Tydings in which Lodge objected to how the hearings were conducted. “I shall not attempt to characterize those methods and the tactics of leaving out of the printed text parts of the testimony and proceedings,” Lodge announced on the Senate floor. “I shall not characterize such methods, because I think they speak for themselves.”
Republicans were furious. Several of them had already criticized the Tydings committee for refusing to expand its investigations to include homosexuals in the State Department. Tydings insisted that the committee remain focused on Communists and other “disloyal” risks. In fact, neither Democrats nor Republicans saw any real difference between Communists and homosexuals, since everyone assumed that homosexuals could be easily blackmailed. And besides, as McCarthy had already said, Communists and homosexuals both shared certain “mental twists.” Tydings’s refusal to look into homosexuals in the State Department had already led Sen. William E. Jenner (R-IN), a close McCarthy ally, to call the Tydings Committee “Whitewash, Inc.” Its sole purpose, said Jenner, was to protect “the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the fairy deal administrations.”
Epilogue:
In 2007, Library of Congress archivist and historian John Earl Haynes made public McCarthy’s list and associated names. Case 14 was identified as Ernest Theodore Arndt. He had been discharged from the Marines “by reason of habits and traits of character,” but his discharge was changed to honorable “for the convenience of the government.” He was hired by the State Department as a translator in December 1945. He was dismissed on February 19, 1946 for “homosexual activities and tendencies.” The State Department re-hired him April 1, despite a police record for disorderly conduct and an FBI report that said “he was suspected of being homosexually inclined.”
Case 62 was identified as Isham W. Perkins. He passed an FBI background check in 1940 with flying colors when the State Department hired him. But the Lee List reports that by 1947, two informants had come forward alleging that Perkins “had the reputation “among homosexuals as being homosexuals.” A third alleged that he “goes to homosexual parties, associates with homosexuals and is ‘undoubtedly homosexual.”
Perkins left the State Department job in 1948. By 1955, he was working at the Dumbarton Oaks Library, from which he retired in 1967. Perkins has been identified as the State Department librarian in Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945. Perkins appeared as C.C. Dasham, or Dash, in these diaries when they were edited and published by Ina Russell, the niece of Carter Newman Bealer (“Jeb Alexander”). He died in Boca Raton in 1976.
Read More:
I have extracted the text of McCarthy’s floor speech of February 20 from the Congressional Record and placed it online here (PDF/11.9MB).
On the Timeline:
Previously:
Feb 9, 1950: McCarthy tells an audience in Wheeling, WV, that he has a list of 205 Communists in the State Department.
Feb 10, 1950: McCarthy tells a Salt Lake City radio station that he has the names of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department.
Feb 11, 1950: McCarthy releases a letter to Truman charging that the State Department is lax in dismissing “certified” security risks.
Headlines: Coal rationing goes into effect in many parts of the country as striking miners bring reserves to critical levels. A severe cold snap in the east with single digit temperatures further strains coal supplies. Power companies institute brown-outs to conserve coal. Miners ignore a Federal Judge’s order that they return to work.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “There’s No Tomorrow,” by Tony Martin, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Rag Mop” by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
“M’Carthy insists Truman ousts reds.” New York Times (February 12, 1950): 5.
Jay Walz. “Acheston aide asks ’57 Reds’ be named. New York Times (February 14, 1950): 16.
Harold B. Hinton. “M’Carthy charges spy for Russia has a high State Department post.” New York Times (February 21, 1950): 13.
“40 quarreling minutes: Mr. 14’s loyalty or lack of it embroils Tydings, McCarthy.” Washington Post (March 9, 1950): 1, 2.
William S. White. “Nazi tactics laid to M’Carthy foes.” New York Times (July 25, 1950): 1, 17.
Government documents:
“Communists in Government Service” Remarks by Sen. Joseph McCarthy given on February 20, 1950. 81st Cong., 2nd sess. Congressional Record 96 part 2: 1952-1981. Case 14 is given on page 1961. Case 62 is given on pages 1978-1979. The extracted remarks are available online here (PDF/11.9MB).
Remarks by Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., given on July 24, 1950. 81st Cong., 2nd sess. Congressional Record 96 part 8: 10813. Available online here.
State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation. Wednesday, March 8, 1950. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate (Tydings Committee), 81st Cong., 2nd sess. part 1: 1-32. Available online here.
State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation. Wednesday, March 8, 1950. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate (Tydings Committee), 81st Cong., 2nd sess. part 2. Available online here. McCarthy’s Case 14 (Ernest Theodore Arndt) is taken from Case 10 of the “Lee List,” given on page 1777-1778. McCarthy’s Case 62 (Isham W. Perkins) is taken from Case 73 of the “Lee List,” given on page 1796.
For almost three weeks, Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) has engaged in a public feud with the U.S. State Department, which McCarthy claimed, without evidence, is riddled with Communists. In a floor speech last week, McCarthy expanded his crusade by charging that eighty-one Communists or “fellow travelers” occupy top positions in the Truman White House. According to McCarthy, those “fellow travelers” include two homosexuals. He acknowledged that the two weren’t Communists, but he claimed that they shared “peculiar mental twists” that tie them “with some of the Communist organizations.” McCarthy equated homosexuality and Communism this way:
Also it is confirmation of what I believe I mentioned earlier this evening when I was talking about one of the top investigators in Washington. I said to him, “Why do you find so many people fanatic about communism? Is there something that is so inviting about it? Is there something mentally wrong?” He said, “You will find if you search deep enough that there is something mentally or physically wrong with every one of them.” There is certainly something wrong with this group (homosexuals). I might say that the new security officer has recommended that they get rid of all that type of individuals regardless of whether they are shown to have any communistic connection or not.
Since, in McCarthy’s view, it no longer matters whether homosexuals have shown any “communistic connection,” the search was on for homosexuals, as well as Communists. What’s more, that search was expanding beyond the halls of the State Department. McCarthy cited a case of a “security risk” who was let go from the State Department and who landed a new job at the C.I.A. This now placed every department, agency and office in the Federal government under the microscope.
L-R: Bernard L. Gladieux, Rep. John J. Rooney (R-NY)
On February 27, Bernard L. Gladieux, executive assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, appeared before a House appropriations subcommittee to testify about the department’s security program. When one thinks of classified government work, thoughts mainly turn to areas of defense, diplomacy, and intelligence. But in fact, just about every department had classified work going on under its jurisdiction, and the Commerce Department was no different. The Bureau of Standards had a hand in atomic energy, jet propulsion and guided missile research, and was about to unveil the world’s fastest computer in June. A spy in the Weather Bureau could give an invading army detailed insight into weather patterns in the U.S. The Civil Aeronautics Administration had access to classified aircraft designs and air controller systems. The Census Bureau, the Patent Office, the Office of International Trade, all of which fell under the Commerce Department, possessed detailed information that would be useful to an foreign adversary.
This was supposed to be a routine budget hearing. But budget hearings before subcommittee chairman Rep. John J. Rooney (D-NY) were never routine where increased appropriations requests were concerned. Rooney’s nickname, “The Great Needler from Brooklyn,” reflected his reputation for mercilessly badgering witnesses, especially when they’re asking for budget increases.
The hearing begins cordially enough. Since 1947, says Gladieux, the Commerce department has investigated 369 loyalty cases since March 21, 1947. Of these 273 individuals were cleared, 71 were either fired or resigned, and 25 were still under investigation. Gladieux however pointed out that of the 273 acquitted of disloyalty, 26 have nevertheless been designated as security risks but are still on the payroll, in jobs that do not involve classified material. Another six of the 25 under investigation have been designated as interim security risks. “Even if the adjudication process were to clear those people, we may still continue the security-risk designation on them,” explained Gladieux.
After going over these figures, Rooney suddenly changed the topic: “What is the policy of the Department of Commerce with regard to homosexuals?”
“If we were advised of a case of that kind we would take steps to eliminate him from the service,” said Gladieux. “We would probably first attempt to obtain his resignation, because those kinds of cases are very difficult to find the facts about; they are disagreeable, embarrassing to everyone concerned, and we would therefor attempt to get his resignation as the quickest way to dispose of the case.”
“Do you have any homosexuals employed in classified areas?” asked Rooney.
“Not that I know of,” replied Gladieux. He explained that the only way the department would come across that kind of information would be through an FBI report.
“Has anybody ever sent out a directive addressed to the heads of the various bureaus, all the way down the line, calling for the names of any people suspected of being homosexuals?”
“No,” replied Gladieux. “We have never done that.”
“Do you not think it should be done?”
“I just never thought of it.”
Rooney was incredulous. “If you have 46,000 employees, sitting at the pinnacle as you are, it is very unlikely that there would come to your attention many of these homosexuals, is that not so?”
Gladieux was now about to dig his grave. “Those things are hushed up and handled at the lowest level at which they can be handled. In all my Federal experience…”
Hushed up. Rooney exploded. “Have any been dismissed in the past three years, let us say, because it was discovered they were homosexuals?”
“Not that I know of.”
Rooney was incredulous. “Not one?”
“Not that I know of,” repeated Gladieux.
“In the whole Department?”
“No; there have been some, I believe, for other sexual delinquencies, however.”
“That is incredible, in an organization of 46,000 people!”
Gladieux tried to backtrack. “There may have been. I think you will find in most cases of that kind if information comes to the attention of a personnel officer or bureau chief, the first thing they do is to get the man in and demand his resignation. Usually it is forthcoming. I have not had experience with this subject in the Department of Commerce.”
The grilling only got worse from there. Rooney insisted that Gladieux launch a series of investigations aimed at finding those hidden homosexuals. Gladieux however complained that “we are not staffed or equipped to do it.”
“Are you not in control of your organization to the extend where you can get the word around that you wanted turned up any people who were so inclined? … Is it your idea that nothing should be done about it? … Nothing has been done it up to now, isn’t that so?”
Rooney continued: “If (the State Department) has been able to weed out similar cases — and such cases may be very dangerous as far as security is concerned … then why can you not do it in the Department of Commerce?”
Replied Gladieux, “I do not know, Congressman Rooney. I would want to discuss that at length with our personnel people to see how we could get at it. I do not minimize the problem.”
Rooney wasn’t convinced.
“The story this year is that the Department of Commerce has taken the place of the State Department; that the Department of Commerce is the outfit in Government with people honeycombed with people belonging to the Communist party.” Note the switch: until now, the testimony was focused on homosexuals, not communists. But for Rooney and many of his contemporaries, communism and homosexuality were fully conflated. Rooney continued: “And the danger is that these people will meet other people who might satisfy their desires and, in return, divulge information with regard to the security of the nation.”
Gladieux was eager to get this grilling behind him. “There is no question about it,” he agreed, “that a homosexual or, I would say, any other sexually promiscuous person is at least a potential security risk and we ought to know about it, if there is any way we can find it out.”
The fireworks were more or less over. The hearing continued, with other congressmen peppering Gladieux with questions about the Commerce Department’s security program. When Gladieux’s testimony finally drew to a close, it was Rooney’s turn to sum it all up. He wasn’t happy.
“That is all so much nice language,” said Rep. Rooney. “To me it does not mean a thing. You have come up here this afternoon to acquaint us with the situation in the Department of Commerce. The results have been nil. We have not had the cooperation from you that we have had from the Department of State. You refused to take us into your confidence with regard to these things, and I have tried to handle it in an amicable way so that if questions were raised on the floor we might have the answers to them. You have reacted in the other direction, away from us. So, now we are far apart, and we will have to stay that way. There is nothing that I can see that we can do about it.”
Epilogue:
This hearing was held in executive session, and the details didn’t become public until March 20. The headline news was that since 1947, seventy-one people had been fired or forced to quit on disloyalty charges — presumably mostly dealing with allegations of membership with communist or other “subversive” organizations. Thirty-two have been branded as security risks. They’re still on the job although they are no longer allowed access to classified information. Under Civil Service regulations, the Commerce Department is “seriously handicapped” in its ability to dismiss them. Many press reports will note Rep. Rooney’s displeasure at the department’s performance against homosexual, particlarly when compared to the State Department. United Press reports:
Rooney also accused the Commerce Department of laxity in weeding out homosexuals, and praised the State Department for vigilance in that regard. …Noting that the State Department has weeded out 91 homosexuals under its security program, Rooney said it was “incredible” that none have been found among the Commerce Department’s 46,000 employees. He suggested the department issue a special directive calling for greater alertness in the matter “all the way down the line.”
Since 1946, Congress had attached a special provision to appropriations bills for the State and Defense Departments giving those department heads “absolute discretion” to fire any government employee if it was “deemed necessary in the interest of National Security.” Known as the McCarran Rider, after Sen. Pat McCarran (D-NV), it was specifically designed to allow the State and Defense Departments to dismiss homosexuals. In the summer of 1950, Congress attached the same rider to appropriations bills for eleven federal agencies, and authorized the President to extend these dismissal powers to the entire federal government.
On the Timeline:
Previously:
Jan 25, 1950: Secretary of State Dean Acheson tells reporters, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
Feb 9, 1950: McCarthy tells an audience in Wheeling, WV, that he has a list of 205 Communists in the State Department.
Feb 10, 1950: McCarthy tells a Salt Lake City radio station that he has the names of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department.
Feb 11, 1950: McCarthy releases a letter to Truman charging that the State Department is lax in dismissing “certified” security risks.
Feb 13, 1950: Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy denies there are any known Communists in the State Department, but says that 202 employees identified as “security risks” have left the department since 1947.
Headlines: Secretary of State Dean Acheson defends his loyalty to the U.S. and his remarks about Alger Hiss. Two Klansmen are arrested for killing a retired storekeeper near Birmingham, Alabama. A month-long strike by coal miners brings supplies to the nation’s homes, schools, hospitals, factories and railroads to dangerously low levels. An escaped cougar from the Oklahoma City zoo terrorizes neighborhoods for three days before being captured; twelve hours later he’s found dead in his cage.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “There’s No Tomorrow, by Tony Martin, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Bing Crosby with Vic Schoen & His Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: The Accused, starring Loretta Young and Robert Cummings
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
United Press. “Commerce’s probe counts 27 ‘bad risks’.” New York Daily News (Mar 20, 1950): 2.
Government documents:
Departments of Commerce Appropriations for 1951. 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. Hearings beforet he Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives. Monday, February 27, 1950: 2335-2342. Available online here.
The Lavender Scare began precisely on February 28, 1950. Communists were supposed to be the day’s topic. Specifically, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s (R-WI) allegations that the State Department was crawling with them. Just three weeks earlier, McCarthy told the Republican Women’s Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 Commies on the department’s payroll. The next day, he told a Salt Lake City radio station that his list had fifty-seven names in red. The day after that, he released a letter to President Truman asking why only 80 of 300 employees “certified” as loyalty and security risks were gone.
As America moved to a post-war Cold War footing, the country’s political ground was rapidly shifting. The Great Depression and the War both kept Democrats solidly in power since 1933. But since 1945’s victory in Europe and the Pacific, an Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe, the Soviets got the bomb, China was “lost” to the Reds, and several high-profile spy cases made headlines at home. The old worries that put Democrats in power and kept them there were gone, and new ones replaced them. Democrats had held the White House for seventeen straight years. They barely kept it in 1948 by a Dewey whisker. But now with the Cold War on, Republicans saw national security as their best hope to come along in two decades, and they went for it.
For the past two years, the State Department’s star diplomat, Alger Hiss fought charges that he was a Communist spy. He testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and wound up being criminally charged. Not for spying, but for perjury. Few Americans appreciated the difference. Democratic luminaries lined up as character witnesses — Adlai Stevenson, Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, and Stanley Reed, and former Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis. Truman called it a “red herring.” The first trial ended in a hung jury. Not so the second.
Hiss’s conviction in January 1950 cemented the reputation of a young California congressman by the name of Richard Nixon as a Communist fighter. McCarthy now wanted some of that action. He gave his Wheeling speech just two weeks after Hiss’s conviction. On February 20, he stood in the well of the Senate for almost six hours and read out, one by one, 81 cases of individuals he said represented loyalty and security risks at the State Department. Two of them were homosexuals.
Loyalty Risks and Security Risks
Let’s pause here and define our terms. As lawmakers and officials brought these questions up, they typically treated them as belonging to two separate topics. Loyalty risks denoted Communists and others who acted to undermine American interests or, more commonly, were suspected to belong to groups that Conservatives labeled as “Communist front” organizations — whether they really were or not. But security risks defined people who were otherwise loyal, but who were seen as not being trustworthy. The most common examples were “alcoholic, blabbermouths and sexual perverts” — the latter term meaning homosexuals. The problem, of course, is that there were no active programs to drive alcoholics and blabbermouths from government service. But it had been a longstanding practice (and policy, in many places) to immediately dismiss anyone found to be homosexual.
That practice was reinforced in 1947 when Sen. Pat McCarran (D-NV) attached an amendment to a State Department appropriations bill giving the Secretary of State “absolute discretion” to dismiss any employee in the interest of national security. The Appropriations Committee, at the same time, warned in a letter to then-Secretary George C. Marshall of a “deliberate, calculated program” to place and keep Communists in high public offices. It also warned that the effort included, “the extensive employment in highly classified positions of admitted homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks.”
This had the effect of defining homosexuals as security risks. And in official public parlance, security risks, far more often than not, meant homosexuals. This let public officials get by with without having to utter the word homosexual directly.But by 1950, that was changing. Republicans were increasingly willing to say homosexuals when talking about employees in the Truman administration. Democrats, on the other hand, Democrats preferred to deflect that association by using security risks and other benign euphemisms.
The Lavender Scare may have started in 1950, but the purge of homosexuals had accelerated since 1947, thanks to the McCarran amendment. Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy was in charge of that program. After McCarthy began his campaign, Peurifoy denied to reporters that the State Department harbored any Communists, but he did say that 202 employees had been identified as security risks “security risks” since 1947 and had left the department. Peurifoy thought that statement would prove that the State Department had a very effective security system in place. Instead, it was like spilled blood in shark-invested waters.
“The Shady Category”
Undersecretary John E. Peurifoy and Secretary of State Dean Acheson at the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, February 28, 1950.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Undersecretary Peurifoy had been called before the Senate Appropriations Committee on February 28 to to discuss the State Department’s budget — which they did for the first half-hour or so. Then the topic abruptly shifted to two other topics. Not long before, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had told reporters that he still believed Hiss was innocent. “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” he had said. Republican Senators pelted Acheson and Peurifoy with questions about Hiss. Those questions segued neatly into Peurifoy’s statement about the 202 “security risks.”
Sen. Styles Bridges (R-NH) did most of the grilling. He asked Acheson how many people resigned or were fired as security risks under the McCarran amendment. Peurifoy understood what Bridges was getting at and jumped in. “I might answer that, sir. In this shady category that you referred to earlier, there are 91 cases sir.”
Bridges wasn’t having it. He wanted Peurifoy to say the dreaded word. “What do you mean by “shady category”?
“We are talking about people of moral weaknesses and so forth that we have gotten rid of in the Department.”
“I see,” said Bridges.
McCarran jumped in. “Now, will you make your answer a little clearer, please?”
Peurifoy finally said it: “Most of these were homosexuals, Mr. Chairman.”
“You say that there were 91?” asked McCarran.
“Yes sir. All of them were removed.”
Epilogue:
Surprisingly, this testimony barely made a ripple in the press. The Associated Press and United Press devoted just a couple of paragraphs to it. The Washington Post almost missed it altogether. It showed up in the very last paragraph, under a subheading “Other Points at Hearing.” The big story was still about Acheson’s comments about Hiss. One exception was a small evening paper in Los Angeles, which printed an editorial which said, in effect, Wait! What was that?
The following is a quote from an Associated Press story out of Washington, dated February 28, dealing with testimony about the State Department given before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee:
“The Hiss matter came up after Department Undersecretary of State John E. Peurifoy had testified that in the last 2 years the Department has rid itself of 202 employees who were under security investigation.
“He said 91 of the 202 were homosexual cases, explaining that such persons are rated bad risks because they might be blackmailed by spies.”
We confess that we were more startled by that casual statement than by any other revelation that has come out of Washington in many months. … Add to favorite swish occupations: A career in the United States State Department.
But aside from a few editorials in a couple of small newspapers, this revelation prompted very little comment. That changed dramatically in the next few weeks.
Jan 25, 1950: Secretary of State Dean Acheson tells reporters, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
Feb 9, 1950: McCarthy tells an audience in Wheeling, WV, that he has a list of 205 Communists in the State Department.
Feb 10, 1950: McCarthy tells a Salt Lake City radio station that he has the names of 57 card-carrying Communists in the State Department.
Feb 11, 1950: McCarthy releases a letter to Truman charging that the State Department is lax in dismissing “certified” security risks.
Feb 13, 1950: Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy denies there are known Communists in the State Department, but says that 202 employees identified as “security risks” have left the department since 1947.
Headlines: Secretary of State Dean Acheson defends his loyalty to the U.S. and his remarks about Alger Hiss. Two Klansmen are arrested for killing a retired storekeeper near Birmingham, Alabama. A month-long strike by coal miners brings supplies to the nation’s homes, schools, hospitals, factories and railroads to dangerously low levels. An escaped cougar from the Oklahoma City zoo terrorizes neighborhoods for three days before being captured; twelve hours later he’s found dead in his cage.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “There’s No Tomorrow, by Tony Martin, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Bing Crosby with Vic Schoen & His Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: The Accused, starring Loretta Young and Robert Cummings
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
Ferdinand Kuhn. “Denies condoning offenses, says he would not tolerate traitors in his office.” Washington Post (March 1, 1950): 1,2.
William S. White. “Never condoned disloyalty, says Acheson of Hiss stand.” New York Times (March 1, 1950): 1,2.
United Press. “Acheson denies condoning acts of Hiss ‘in any way’ The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY, March 1, 1950): 1.
Editorial: “More Light on the State Department.” Santa Monica (CA) Evening Outlook (March 2, 1950). As reprinted in in “Extension of Remarks of Hon. Donald L. Jackson of California in the House of Representatives, March 7, 1960.” 81st Cong., 2nd sess. Congressional Record 96, pt. 14: A1745. Available online here.
Government documents:
Departments of State, Justice, Commerce and the Judiciary Appropriations for 1951. 81st Cong., 2nd sess, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, U.S. Senate part 1, Tuesday, February 28, 1950: 581-639. Peurifoy’s testimony concerning the 91 security risks are on page 603. Available online here.
McCarthy speaking before the Tydings Committee, March 14, 1950.
Two months had passed since Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) began saying that he had a long list of names of Communists, Commie-sympathizers, and homosexuals in the U.S. State Departments. The numbers kept changing every time he spoke: from 205 to 57, to 220, then 81. He kept promising to hand the names over to investigators. But when the time came, McCarthy dribbled them out, a few at a time, always in public, and in ways that ensured maximum publicity — for him.
His venue now was a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, tasked with investigating McCarthy’s charges. McCarthy had been its star witness for the better part of a week when, on March 14, he publicly announced four more names. He accused Gustavo Durán, a former State Department employee now at the U.N., of being a “rabid Communist.” He accused Dr. Harlow Shapely, a Harvard astronomer, of having “a long and interesting record” of membership in Communist-front organizations. He said that Frederick Schuman, an international relations professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, sponsored several “Communist front organizations in America.” And he called Far East expert John Stewart Service a “bad security risk” whose “Communist affiliations are well known.” Durán, Shapely, and Schuman were relatively unaffected by McCarthy’s charges. None of them were State Department employees. But the State Department fired Service. He spent the next eight years trying, and ultimately succeeding, in getting his job back.
McCarthy also gave a few details about a fifth person. “Because of the sordid details of this case,” he began, “I will not make public the name of this man.” (He did provide it privately.) McCarthy prefaced this set of remarks by reminding the subcommittee of State Department Undersecretary John Peurifoy’s remarks of February 28. That’s when Peurifoy told a Senate Appropriations Committee that the State Department had already dismissed 91 homosexuals since 1947. They were dismissed as “security risks” because, the thinking went, they were vulnerable to blackmail. One of them was fired, and the rest were allowed to resign. This bothered several Senators, including McCarthy, who thought they all should have been fired.
McCarthy began this latest revelation by agreeing “with the official position of the State Department; namely, that homosexuals are poor security risks.” He then went on to describe this particular “risk”:
This individual was employed in the Foreign Service and the State Department until 1948 when he resigned for reasons unknown to me. I had received information from several sources that this man was a notorious homosexual. A check of the records of the Metropolitan Police Department indicated that these reports were true. I now hand the Chair, for your executive consideration, a copy of a police report, together with a police photograph and the official biography of this individual as it appeared in the State Department Register of April, 1948.
…You will note from the police records that this man was arrested on September 8, 1943. The charge was sexual perversion and the police report states that he was known to hang out at the men’s room, at Lafayette Park in Washington.
This man is getting about $12,000 a year now (about $130,000 today).
He was charged with disorderly conduct in connection with his perverted activities. I do not have the record of the disposition of this case available, but I am informed that he was required to post collateral of $25 on this charge and forfeited collateral.
As I previously said, this man resigned from the State Department in 1948 and shortly thereafter became employed in one of the most sensitive agencies of our Government where he now holds an important and high-paying position.
On questioning, McCarthy revealed that this man was now at the CIA. McCarthy continued:
In view of this man’s criminal record, which I have just presented to the committee, and other information concerning his lack of moral fitness, I am at a loss to understand why he was allowed to resign from the State Department.
I might say, in connection with that, it seems unusual to me, in that we have so many normal people, so many competent Americans, that we must employ so many very, very unusual men in Washington. It certainly gives the country an odd idea of the type of individuals who are running things down here.
McCarthy said he thought the State Department had allowed these homosexuals to resign “so they could take over some other Government jobs.”
(In fact, Peurifoy had testified that even though those employees had resigned, the reasons they were asked to resign were still entered into their records and forwarded to the Civil Service Commission.) McCarthy continued:
As I said earlier in this statement, I do not know why the individual who is the subject of my present case was allowed to resign; but I think it is the responsibility of this committee to find out the full facts concerning his resignation.
I also believe that the committee should immediately determine how this individual was able to stay in the Department for almost 5 years after he was arrested on a morals charge in Washington, D.C.
I also think the committee should find out how he, after leaving the State Department, was able to get a top-salaried, important position in another sensitive Government agency. It should be of considerable interest to this committee to find out who sponsored this individual or who intervened in his behalf in both the State Department and his present place of employment.
Epilogue:
McCarthy gave this testimony on Tuesday morning., early enough to make the afternoon papers. Left for the following morning’s coverage would be that afternoon’s hearings before the same subcommittee, when former Judge Dorothy Kenyon answered charges that she was a Communist fellow traveler.
Dorothy Kenyon testifying before the Tydings Committee on March 14.
The week before, Kenyon had been the first person McCarthy accused by name. According to McCarthy, Kenyon, a popular women’s and civil rights activist, was a member of twenty-eight Communist front organizations. Kenyon branded McCarthy an “an unmitigated liar” and “a coward to take shelter in the cloak of Congressional immunity.”
She demanded a hearing, and her appointment was set for the afternoon of March 14, right after McCarthy’s testimony. Kenyon’s rebuttal was as meticulous as it was devastating. The audience applauded when she was done, and Sen. Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA) apologetically said there wasn’t the slightest evidence she was eve disloyal. McCarthy himself, though, missed her performance. He decided he was needed elsewhere and was nowhere in sight. And in the days that followed, he completely lost interest in her.
On the Timeline:
Previously:
Feb 9, 1950: McCarthy tells an audience in Wheeling, WV, that he has a list of 205 Communists in the State Department.
Headlines: The deadline for filing Federal income tax returns is midnight tonight. McCarthy names four State Department associates as “bad security risks.” Dorothy Kenyon cites extensive record and documents to refute McCarthy’s charges. Witness before House Un-American Activities Committee accuses unions of aiding Communist propaganda. The witness also says that the Reds plan to use, then liquidate, liberals in their plan to take over America. Paul Robeson’s scheduled television appearance is cancelled after callers jam NBC’s switchboards. New York City authorizes $50,000 (about $530,000 today) for an experimental cloud-seeding program to relieve the city’s water shortage.
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, There’s No Tomorrow, by Tony Martin, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Quicksilver” by Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters, “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked a Cake” by Eileen Barton. “Rag Mop” by Ralph Flanagan and his Orchestra.
Currently in theaters: Love Happy, starring the Marx Brothers. Filmed in 1948, the movie includes a small walk-on part for Marylin Monroe.
On the radio: Lux Radio Theater (CBS), Jack Benny Program (CBS), Edgar Bergan & Charlie McCarthy (CBS), Amos & Andy (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), My Friend Irma (CBS), Walter Winchell’s Journal (ABC), Red Skelton Show (CBS), You Bet Your Life (NBC), Mr. Chameleon (CBS).
On television:The Lone Range (ABC), Toast of the Town/Ed Sullivan (CBS), Studio One (CBS), Captain Video and his Video Rangers (DuMont), Kraft Television Theater (NBC), The Goldbergs (CBS), Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (CBS), Candid Camera (NBC), Texaco Star Theater/Milton Berle (NBC), Hopalong Cassidy (NBC), Cavalcade of Stars/Jackie Gleason (DuMont), Meet the Press (NBC), Roller Derby (ABC).
State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation. Tuesday, March 14, 1950. Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate (Tydings Committee), 81st Cong., 2nd sess. part 1: 109-175. Available online here. The “notorious homosexual” appears on pages 128-130.
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It was, of course, absolutely essential that Mr. A deny those “grave allegations.” A conviction under Britain’s sodomy law might mean a life sentence. That was a remote possibility; convictions for sodomy were practically nonexistent because the burden of proof was so high.
Jan 2, 1950: Leicester man sentenced to four years for blackmail.
Headlines: Nottingham residents find “astonishing” reception of new BBC TV signal at Sutton Coldfield. Parliament vacancies created when five Labour M.P.s are elevated to peerages in New Years Honours list; Cabinet meets to consider early general elections. Trades Union Congress set prepare to set wage stabilization policy for 1950 amid economic emergency. Minister of Fuel and Power congratulates coal miners for beating the 1949 target of 202 million tons; calls it “greatest effort since Dunkirk.” Thirteen-year-old boy arrested for shooting a doctor in Brighton.
In the record stores: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “White Christmas, ” Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Yingle Bells” by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart), “Blue Christmas” by Russ Morgan and his Orchestra.
Jan 6, 1950: California doubles its penalty for sodomy.
Springfield. That’s shorthand for Springfield, Missouri, home of the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. It opened in 1933 as the U.S. Hospital for Defective Delinquents and quickly became the primary medical center for the entire federal prison system. It’s where prisoners with all kinds of medical problems, including those deemed to be mentally ill, were (and are, still) sent for longer-term treatment and convalescence.
In the record stores: “I Can Dream It, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “Mule Train” by Frankie Lane, “Slipping Around” by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely, “A Dreamer’s Holiday” by Perry Como, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” and “Mule Train” by Bing Crosby, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Dinah Shore, “Don’t Cry, Joe” by Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra, “There’s No Tomorrow” by Tony Martin, “The Old Master Painter” by Richard Hayes.
…The unique personality traits of the potentially most dangerous types of sex perverts do not ordinarily stand open to the world. The simple exhibitionist, nuisance that he is, invariably attracts attention, while the lust murderer may slip through the crowd undetected. The feminism of the “passive” homosexual male arouses quick resentment and he is avoided by the normal male. Oftentimes, the far more dangerous “aggressive” homosexual works out his designs on young boys in the community while moving with innocent appearance among respectable people.
In other writings by him and about him, Dr. Reinhardt appears quite progressive. For example, in 1945 he joined forces with the Lincoln, Nebraska, Urban League, a local civil rights organization headed by Clyde Malone, to oppose efforts to block FHA housing for African-Americans on Lincoln’s north side. When residents circulated a petition against the housing project, Reinhardt pointed out that the prospective residents, as U.S. citizens, were guaranteed equal rights under the constitution. That, he said, made this petition “a strange request in a democratic community.”
In the record stores: “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy” by Red Foley, “Music! Music! Music! (Put Another Nickel In)” by Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars, “Rag Mop” by the Ames Brothers, “There’s No Tomorrow,” by Tony Martin, “The Cry of the Wild Goose” by Frankie Lane, “Dear Hearts and Gentle People” by Bing Crosby, “I Can Dream, Can’t I?” by the Andrew Sisters, “I Said My Pajamas” by Tony Martin and Fran Warren, “It Isn’t Fair” by Don Cornell and the Sammy Kaye Orchestra, “Rag Mop” by Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra.
