In 1949, at the second trial on perjury charges against Alger Hiss, the former State Department official accused of espionage by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, attorneys for Hiss called psychiatrist Carl Binger to the witness stand. Hoping to convince jurors that Chambers was a pathological liar, they asked Binger for his professional opinion about the mental health of Chambers based on his analysis of Chambers's copious writings and his demeanor at both trials. Binger testified that Chambers could not be trusted due to certain character defects that, according to Binger, revealed that Chambers possessed a “psychopathic personality.”Footnote 1 The traits that led to this diagnosis included Chambers's history of lying to authorities, his earlier involvement in the Communist movement, and rumors about his homosexuality. Binger argued, in standard psychiatric language, that Chambers suffered from “a disorder of character of which the outstanding features are behavior of what we might call an amoral or an asocial and delinquent nature,” which included “acts of deception and misrepresentation,” “abnormal sexuality,” and an “inability to form stable attachments.”Footnote 2 Although this defense tactic did not work due to the copious evidence against their client, Hiss's attorneys were playing upon the long-standing link in American discourse between political radicalism and psychopathology, one that served as the foundation of the emerging national security state, to impugn Chambers's character.
In many ways, however, Chambers himself recognized some truth in Binger's accusations and understood the reluctance of many Americans to believe him. He knew that his crooked teeth and disheveled appearance contrasted sharply with the charming, well-bred appearance of Hiss. Even “[my] quiet voice,” Chambers explained, “seemed guilty evidence that I could not bear to utter my own falsehoods.”Footnote 3 Chambers, however, was not looking for pity; instead, he was trying to depict the epistemological trouble facing federal authorities seeking to uncover subversive elements. Although Hiss, like other accused government officials, presented the most normal and professional appearance, this, according to Chambers, was merely a veneer that hid something disturbing underneath. In fact, investigators into Hiss's background uncovered a series of personal traumas – from the suicide of his father to the mental problems of his stepson – that paralleled similar traumas suffered by Chambers that Dr. Binger had diagnosed in court. “We learned later, of course,” explained Leslie Fiedler in 1951, “how much the genteel aspect of Hiss was itself a mask, imposed on a background of disorder and uncertainty not unlike Chambers.”Footnote 4 Hiss, according to Chambers and Fiedler, was the true psychopath, someone acting out, underneath a facade of normality, fantasies of revenge. As Chambers argued, “Mr. Hiss represents the concealed enemy against which we are fighting.”Footnote 5
As the Hiss–Chambers case demonstrated, security risks in the early Cold War were portrayed not simply as a problem of disloyal Americans engaged in espionage, but also as a problem of psychologically disturbed individuals whose patterns of behavior – from drinking habits to personal associations, political beliefs, and sexual inclinations – threatened national stability. In 1953, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which restructured the security program regarding federal employment. Beginning with the Hatch Act of 1939, the US government passed a series of laws to protect the country against domestic subversion by making loyalty to the United States the condition for federal employment. Pressured by Republicans to do even more, Eisenhower revised the loyalty program by expanding the grounds for dismissal. He continued the practice of dismissing employees who belonged, or had belonged, to political organizations deemed subversive or who supported particular political causes. But he added another category, what he referred to as “security risks”; that is, those who were not necessarily disloyal to the United States but who did not possess the proper “character” and therefore were a threat to national security.Footnote 6 The list of character traits that were grounds for dismissal was long: behavior that demonstrated an individual was not trustworthy; any treatment for mental or neurological disorders for which there was no cure; any susceptibility to coercion or pressure; and any criminal, dishonest, or immoral conduct, including alcoholism, drug addiction, and sexual perversion. Most dismissals from government employment after 1953 were for so-called security risks: employees who were believed to drink too much, those who were discovered to be homosexuals, employees who were or had been in extended psychiatric treatment, etc.
Not merely reflecting a prudish strain within American society, Eisenhower's program reflected governmental efforts to institutionalize a form of preventive security. Claiming that federal employment was a privilege and stressing that there were “dangers from within” that had to be neutralized, Eisenhower argued, in what had become conventional wisdom, that “security rather than loyalty must be the test.”Footnote 7 Historians such as Jeff Broadwater and Landon Storrs have argued that Eisenhower's program represented his capitulation to Republicans who had used the issue of Communist infiltration of the government to discredit the Truman administration and the programs of the New Deal in general.Footnote 8 But as historian William Keller has noted, many of the early national security programs, including the first loyalty investigations of federal employees, were created in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt and institutionalized under his authority by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Footnote 9 Security was not a party issue; if anything, the emergency conditions in the 1930s that prompted Roosevelt's response only became more intense, leading to escalating demands to force out into the open potential security risks. As these demands led to more investigations, the grounds for dismissal expanded. As a poster from the 1952 presidential election declared, “Let's Clean House with Ike and Dick,” a campaign promise that led to Executive Order 10450.
The expansion of reasons for disqualification from federal employment evinced the movement in the first half of the twentieth century of psychiatric discourse into the political arena and represented a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the state, domestic security, and the individual. This shift was prompted in large measure by new theories of deviance, psychopathology, and character formation developed by American psychiatrists who, under the guise of rooting out threats to security, devised categories for classifying deviant behavior (from alcoholism to homosexuality, criminality, and delinquency) and argued that such behavior could only be recognized through an intense interrogation into the backgrounds of suspects. As worries about domestic security took hold in the 1930s and 1940s, federal officials leaned upon psychiatric discourse to frame most security programs and in so doing conflated radical political commitments with other forms of unconventional behavior. Officials were worried not just about any one questionable act but about the type of character revealed by their examination into the causes of any such act. Security investigators were told to examine the political affiliations of current and aspiring federal employees as well as their “character, habits, and morals,” including but not limited to “such matters as gross immorality, excessive use of intoxicants, and lack of integrity.”Footnote 10 As a result, federal employees were questioned about their politics, education, employment history, family life, religious beliefs, sexual proclivities, financial affairs, personal appearance, or anything else deemed relevant. For example, security investigators were told “to obtain detailed information regarding all phases of an applicant's marital history as his marital relationships may have a definite bearing upon his character qualifications,” one of the many personal areas open to scrutiny by the national security state.Footnote 11
Security investigations were predicated upon a demand for complete transparency – a confession of all transgressions, however minor, that revealed the true character of employees underneath any potential mask like the one worn by Alger Hiss. Most employees brought before security review boards were forced to produce extensive autobiographical statements concerning their private lives in order to answer government charges. For instance, an engineer working as a government contractor was denied security clearance in 1953 on charges concerning his supposed “preference for the Russian or other form of totalitarian government.”Footnote 12 Forced to “scrutinize [his] entire life” in order to answer the plethora of personal questions asked by the security board, the employee chafed at the vagueness of the charges. “To refute it completely,” he explained, “I should get testimonials from everyone I have known my entire life but then there would be no room in your files for all the papers.”Footnote 13 Such confessions in which employees were coerced to reveal any questionable past actions bore no limits – the requirement to disclose political beliefs swelled into the requirement to bring into light any beliefs or actions that deviated from conventional forms of behavior. As Whittaker Chambers explained, the duty of every person called before any security agency was to “testify to every crime, every sin, every evil, that he had committed or that had beset his life, without reserve.”Footnote 14 Security officials, however, saw such forced public confessions in redemptive terms, offering those with sinful pasts an opportunity to reveal their transgressions, demonstrate the penance they had done, and begin the process of reintegrating themselves with the established order. Self-exposure became a political requirement in what critic Harold Rosenberg referred to in 1955 as the “Confession Era in the United States.”Footnote 15
PSYCHIATRY, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, AND NATIONAL SECURITY
In many ways, the Cold War national security state that was established after World War II was rooted in the federal government's response to the First Red Scare following World War I, during which the FBI and other security officials actively suppressed left-wing political movements and deported from the country foreign radicals like Emma Goldman. As historian Margot Canaday has argued, the First Red Scare, however, was prompted not just by worries over labor unrest and anarchist activities, but also by a broader reaction to the social and economic changes of industrialization that disrupted nineteenth-century work patterns and family structures.Footnote 16 The First Red Scare dovetailed with efforts by conservative moralists, Progressive groups, and religious organizations to reform society by restricting immigration, curbing prostitution, ending alcohol consumption, and reinforcing forms of social and cultural unity. Reformers linked political threats to the stability of the nation from radical organizations to the larger social chaos caused by the supposed collapse of personal morality and religious values, and they called upon social-scientific and medical experts to explain the causes of such problems and to offer policy solutions. For instance, while nineteenth-century reformers had pushed for the institutional care of the mentally ill, criminals, and alcoholics, Progressive reform groups called for the societal treatment of these problematic groups through such policies as immigration restriction, sterilization campaigns, and eugenic approaches to the management of mental diseases. Bundling together the supposed threats, from radicals emigrating from Eastern Europe to fears over social degeneracy, criminality, and moral turpitude, early twentieth-century reformers utilized the analytic tools of criminology, sociology, and other disciplines to understand the psychological and physiological differences between social, racial, and ethnic groups in order supposedly to stave off societal collapse.
While the specious theories concerning degeneration and the hereditary transmission of undesirable traits upon which Progressive Era reformers based their campaigns were delegitimized by the 1940s, general concerns about the moral and psychological health of the nation had not disappeared by the start of the Cold War and fed into efforts to fortify the nation from radical threats. Like the First Red Scare, the anti-communist movement in the 1940s and 1950s comprised a number of groups, including liberals, socialists, religious organizations, nativist associations, and conservatives.Footnote 17 As historian Ellen Schrecker has argued, McCarthyism was not “a passing aberration” connected to the worldview of one single man but a “mainstream movement” that encompassed a wide range of “McCarthyisms, each with its own agenda and modus operandi.”Footnote 18 Liberal anticommunists like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sidney Hook, for instance, argued that the reforms established by the New Deal to guarantee individual security in the face of economic and social upheavals needed to be safeguarded through a sustained investigation into the subversive actions of many Americans who had succumbed, due to their emotional failings, to the allure of totalitarian movements.Footnote 19 This liberal defense of the welfare state as a safety net to protect the material well-being of American citizens from the dislocations of modernity was obviously not shared by Republicans who viewed the New Deal state as a watered-down version of the totalitarian state in Russia and who defended the free market as the grounds for American democracy.
But while both groups disagreed about the proper antidote to the Communist menace both shared the belief that subversion was the product of an industrial order that had eroded the moral and psychological health of many Americans. While these groups were motivated by the same concerns that drove the First Red Scare, they shifted their focus from biological and anthropological explanations of deviant behavior, much of which had been delegitimized by the racial politics that had led to World War II, to strictly psychological explanations, often filtered through the language of psychoanalysis.Footnote 20 Pointing to weakening family ties and disappearing local communities, both groups, whose stances marked the spectrum of anticommunism, argued that the threat posed by Communists was part of a wider threat generated by the ongoing crisis of modernity, one prompted by massive socioeconomic transformations, ranging from rapid technological changes to total war and economic uncertainties, that had generated psychological turmoil. Whittaker Chambers was one of many who saw the threat posed by Communism in these broader terms. “Communism,” explained Chambers, “which claims to be a solution to the crisis, is itself a symptom and an irritant of the crisis.”Footnote 21 His Kierkegaardian reflections, depicting a nation spiritually and psychologically weakened, were shared by liberals such as Schlesinger who argued that the roots of radicalism in the United States rested not in the appeal of Communism itself but in the unstable mental condition of many Americans who sought to escape the burdens of modern life through refuge in totalitarian movements. Modern America, according to Schlesinger, with “its quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual, and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society,” had become a breeding ground for Communist recruitment.Footnote 22 In so arguing, conservative and anticommunist liberals translated political behavior into psychological terms, portraying Communist Party members as morally confused and, even worse, mentally ill. While the rhetoric of the Cold War was bathed in the same moralistic language of the First Red Scare, the foundations of the post-World War II national security state rested in psychiatric discourse.
In the early Cold War, any personal transgressions were subsumed under the category of psychopathology, which became the framework through which any deviant behavior, whether political or not, was viewed. The national security state sought to protect the nation from potentially dangerous individuals whose disreputable actions, depraved sexual practices, and debased political beliefs supposedly threatened the nation. For instance, while the Truman administration was fashioning the first major federal employee loyalty program in 1947 under Executive Order 9835, the US Congress, with prompting from the FBI, was holding hearings to strengthen the laws in Washington, DC to protect the public from so-called “criminal sexual psychopaths.”Footnote 23 In this way, both conservatives and anticommunist liberals blurred the distinctions between various forms of deviant behavior, arguing that deviance in all its forms had common origins and characteristics. As Senator Joseph McCarthy himself explained, “you will find that practically every active Communist is twisted mentally or physically in some way.”Footnote 24 This logic was reflected in Eisenhower's decision to expand the grounds for dismissal from federal employment by making security, not simply loyalty, the guiding standard. Under these security procedures, any psychopathological behavior became grounds for dismissal, as the problem of political subversion by Communist agents was subsumed under the general category of psychopathy.
An example of the way in which psychiatric discourse framed security problems in the Cold War and the corresponding epistemological problems in uncovering deviant behavior was the 1955 security investigations of Mary Meyer and Grace O'Lone, two nurses in the Federal Housing Administration. Following revelations by a former employee that the FHA was awash with lesbians, security investigators discovered that the two women, who had been living together in the house of O'Lone's father for ten years, had “an unusual and peculiar relationship.”Footnote 25 According to their testimony, the two women had frequently slept in the same bed, during which they would often, as Meyer explained, “place our arms about each other while lying in bed, and on occasions, one would place her knee against the other, causing pressure, which brought about a certain amount of sexual gratification to each of us.”Footnote 26 Claiming that no additional sexual activities had occurred, Meyer and O'Lone denied the charges that they were security risks. Investigators for the Loyalty and Security Review Board of the FHA engaged in an extensive search into the character of both women and, acknowledging their lack of expertise in such matters, consulted Frederick Peterson's Text-Book of Legal Medicine and Toxicology (1903) and hired a psychiatrist to help them understand such behavior. The review board sought to determine whether such actions constituted “immoral or notoriously disgraceful conduct” and, more generally, whether these two women exhibited, as one of their accusers claimed, “psychopathic” tendencies.Footnote 27
This diagnostic label was not a random association but the result of a gradual transformation in traditional understandings of deviant behavior. The concept of the psychopath was developed in the late nineteenth century by German psychiatrist J. L. Koch, who tried to distinguish between mental patients who were totally insane and those who were morally insane; that is, between those whose minds were severely damaged and those who possessed a functioning intellect but had impaired ethical capacities.Footnote 28 Koch's concept was translated into American psychiatry by Adolf Meyer and D. K. Henderson, who promoted the study of criminals in order to understand the physiological sources of this condition.Footnote 29 As the concept developed in the twentieth century, the “psychopath” came to refer to those individuals who committed antisocial acts without any corresponding feelings of guilt but who did not exhibit any cognitive defects. While psychiatrists disagreed about the etiology that produced such behaviors, most agreed that the psychopath suffered from compulsive, sometimes violent and criminal, behavior; aberrant sexual tendencies; and an enfeebled sense of morality.Footnote 30 In this way, the concept of psychopathy served to place seemingly disconnected deviant behaviors under one umbrella term. According to psychiatrists, the psychopath suffered from an underlying emotional instability that led the troubled individual either to overrule any internalized voice of authority and yield to impulsive desires or to follow slavishly, in a mechanical way, any social rules. Thus psychopathy was only identifiable by the confluence of behaviors that ranged from excessive masturbation to excessive violence.Footnote 31 In this sense, psychopathy became, as one psychiatrist explained, a “psychological waste-basket” into which most behavioral disorders were placed.Footnote 32
“Psychopathy” as a diagnostic term served to legitimize psychiatry as a profession in the United States, outside the original role of psychiatrists in the nineteenth century as wardens of state mental hospitals. As historian Elizabeth Lunbeck has demonstrated, psychiatrists in the early twentieth century remade their profession by arguing that they possessed scientific tools of analysis to aid in the treatment of the social and behavioral problems caused by recent transformations ranging from industrialization to urbanization that had upended nineteenth-century life.Footnote 33 In establishing their discipline as a scientific practice, psychiatrists furthered efforts in the early twentieth century to reform sources of vice in American life, from drug use to prostitution, alcohol, gambling, and other petty crimes, and, as a result, they displaced or at least contested the authority of other groups such as social workers, clergy members, and counselors. As a result, psychiatrists expanded their professional reach to include the entire range of human behaviors, and psychiatric language seeped into discussions about the psychopathology of everyday life, from family to marriage, sexual relations, and politics. By demonstrating that psychopathy was neither a genetic trait nor an outcome of degeneracy, psychiatrists offered tools of analysis and forms of treatment outside other Progressive Era treatments such as institutionalization and sterilization.
In the early twentieth century, psychiatry moved into other disciplines, offering a new understanding of human behavior. In particular, psychiatrists utilized the concept of psychopathology to legitimize the growing field of criminology, providing an explanation for criminal behavior that moved beyond the simplistic theories of criminal anthropology upon which the field was founded and creating a place for psychiatrists in the legal system, evidenced by the famed 1924 murder trial of Leopold and Loeb, as the arbiters of the mental state of criminal defendants.Footnote 34 Psychiatric research into criminal behavior also expanded dramatically. At Sing Sing prison in New York, for instance, Bernard Glueck, head of the prison's psychiatric clinic, conducted a study of prisoners, funded in part by the National Committee on Mental Hygiene, to determine the roots of criminal behavior.Footnote 35 Although his studies were filtered through the language of eugenics, Glueck argued that psychopathy was the root not only of criminal behavior, but also of any deviant activity such as drinking, drug use, and sexual perversion. In so arguing, psychiatrists like Glueck pressured local law-enforcement and state officials to accept their expert guidance in treating criminal behavior.Footnote 36 In 1921, for example, the Massachusetts state legislature passed the Briggs Law, which mandated the psychiatric examination of those charged with capital crimes. In 1930, the National Commission on Law Observance and Law Enforcement, in association with the American Bar Association, encouraged other states to establish psychiatric clinics to diagnose criminals, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons enlisted the United States Public Health Service to provide psychiatric services to inmates. In so doing, psychiatry helped to turn criminology into a positive science for explaining criminal behavior and established a prominent role for psychiatrists in the judicial process.
Almost all forms of transgressive behavior were redefined by psychiatrists as psychopathic. Linking various perversions into a single category, psychiatrists utilized a discursive logic that substituted a specific deviant behavior for a specific character type capable of committing such an offense. For instance, Lawrence Kolb, the medical director of the Public Health Service Narcotic Hospital in the 1930s, reframed drug addiction as a defective character trait symptomatic of psychopathy.Footnote 37 Stressing less the addictive properties of drugs, Kolb argued that the psychopathological state of the individual addict was at the root of this form of deviancy, which Kolb linked to other behaviors such as crime and homosexuality. This logic was reflected in the rise of “sexual psychopath” laws passed by states throughout the 1930s and 1940s that criminalized a range of behaviors, from sodomy to exhibitionism and homosexuality, and that imposed indefinite sentences on those diagnosed by state-sponsored psychiatrists.Footnote 38 Psychiatrists detailed in numerous books published in the 1930s and 1940s the threat to security posed by psychopathic character disorders. For instance, Benjamin Karpman, senior medical officer at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, wrote a series of books including Case Studies in the Psychopathology of Crime (1933) and The Individual Criminal: Studies in the Psychogenetics of Crime (1935), which detailed histories of numerous criminals. Karpman inaugurated the trend of psychiatrists offering for popular readership tales about the psychopathic condition of criminals, a genre that included Robert Lindner's Rebel without a Cause (1944) and Fredric Wertham's Show of Violence (1949).
Psychiatric language also filtered into the social sciences in the 1930s and 1940s, used to explain political behaviors. As political fanaticism began to sweep across Europe, American intellectuals surveyed the US for evidence of such burning embers.Footnote 39 Political scientist Harold Lasswell, for instance, offered the first study of the psychological aspects of political behavior in his 1930 book Psychopathology and Politics. Steeped in psychoanalytic theory, Lasswell interviewed patients at psychiatric hospitals including St. Elizabeths and the Boston Psychopathy Hospital to understand the relationship between psychological disorders and deviant political behavior. Challenging traditional democratic theory, Lasswell argued that all political behaviors arose from personal frustrations that were unconsciously displaced onto revolutionary movements. Pointing to recent social and economic dislocations that had disrupted family life, Lasswell claimed that more and more Americans were prone to displacing their private frustrations onto public issues and, in so doing, making themselves susceptible to the lure of radical ideologies, an argument that was repeated in numerous studies of Communism and Fascism, including Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1941) and Theodor Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Psychiatrists such as Robert Lindner, guided by the work of Lasswell, similarly treated political behavior in psychological terms, arguing that both Communism and Fascism appealed to those lacking any moral compulsion. As Lindner explained in his Rebel without a Cause, “the psychopath is not only a criminal; he is the embryonic Storm-Trooper.”Footnote 40
The popularization of psychiatric discourse was a response to broader social and economic transformations that had upended traditional nineteenth-century life, transforming family structures, economic conditions, and gender roles. Historians such as Estelle Freedman and Paula Fass have argued that the legitimization of psychiatry in the early twentieth century by public officials and social reformers was due to the need to diagnose transgressive behaviors, ranging from petty crimes to addiction, homosexuality, and murder, that appeared to be endemic problems.Footnote 41 In so doing, psychiatrists helped to establish boundaries between normal and abnormal behavior during a period of tremendous social dislocations. Urbanization had supposedly increased the sites for the proliferation of vices such as alcoholism and drug addiction. Similarly, rising unemployment during the Great Depression had led to a massive increase in jobless workers, mostly male, who became drifters and hobos, slipping away from traditional society and becoming, according to the media, habitual criminals or, even worse, sexual predators. Psychiatry was also used to police sexual boundaries that had shifted due to the growing economic independence of women during World War II and to the increased presence of homosexual communities in the 1940s in major American cities. Such changes generated fears about abnormal social and sexual behavior, and psychiatry offered an explanatory paradigm to understand such behaviors.
These discussions about the nature of psychopathology were buttressed by a broader discourse within American culture that focussed not on deviant behavior but upon the supposedly commonplace political behaviors, sexual proclivities, and personal activities of so-called average Americans. Scholars such as Anna Creadick and Julian Carter have traced the historical construction of “normality” as an epistemological category in the first half of the twentieth century, demonstrating that fears over “abnormal” social and sexual behaviors were linked to efforts by psychiatrists, physicians, and social scientists to outline the opinions, activities, and characteristics of “average” Americans.Footnote 42 Reflected in sociological studies of “typical” American communities such as Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown (1937), in the public-opinion surveys published by George Gallup or Elmo Roper in the 1940s, and in investigations into the so-called “American character” in books such as Margaret Mead's And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942) and David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), social scientists constructed an ideal of the “normal” American, one based both on a quantitative analysis of the statistical averages of the general population in terms of class, religious beliefs, bodily measurements, and sexual histories, and on a qualitative description of conventional behaviors and attitudes.Footnote 43 Such studies of “normality” created an epistemological category through which Americans came to understand their private lives and a framework through which “abnormal” behavior was marked.
As an abnormal normal man, the psychopath emerged by the 1940s as the predatory figure stalking the American landscape. The problem, according to psychiatric experts, was that the psychopath was difficult to diagnose. What made this so complicated was “the mask of sanity” that the psychopath supposedly wore. As psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley argued in The Mask of Sanity (1941), the psychopath presented logical thought processes, normal verbal and facial reactions, and an overall appearance of normality. As Cleckley explained, “so perfect is this reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him can point out in objective terms why he is not real.”Footnote 44 As a result, diagnosing psychopathy was a complicated procedure, necessitating both an examination of the outward behavior and an examination of past conduct and attitudes; in other words, psychopathy required a life history. Psychiatrists at addiction treatment centers such as the Public Health Service Narcotic Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky conducted intensive medical and psychological examinations of patients in an effort to unearth a pattern of behavior that specified the individual according to a particular identity – criminal, addict, homosexual, delinquent, etc.Footnote 45 This required delving into a patient's history, childhood upbringing, and sexual practices to determine the potential danger that an individual represented and to establish a case history to predict future behavior.Footnote 46
This metonymical logic, in which deviancy in all its forms was defined as a form of psychopathology, was the basis for the expansion of federal authority in the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, President Franklin Roosevelt turned to the FBI to confront the apparent crime wave produced by the Great Depression, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover responded by transforming the FBI, in image and in practice, into an efficient, professional organization.Footnote 47 The expansion of the FBI as both a law-enforcement and an intelligence agency paralleled the expansion of the federal government during the New Deal, as Roosevelt made security – in political, social, and personal terms – the framework of the new liberal state.Footnote 48 Offering not merely social security in the face of economic hardship but also national security in the face of enemies, both internal and external, Roosevelt transformed security into a mode of governance, placed into the hands of an expanded state power. Security meant safeguarding not just private property but the nation's productive capacity, banking system, and market relations as a whole. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt outlined this principle: “The one supreme objective for the future … can be summed up in one word: Security. And that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security – in a family of Nations.”Footnote 49 This expansive notion of security became the foundation for liberal state building, leading to government interventions into any area of American life vulnerable to collapse.
In the 1930s, Hoover appropriated this lexicon and instituted a public information campaign to alert Americans to the criminals threatening the security of American homes. “You are a victim of crime,” Hoover explained in 1938, as “thousands of communities were terrorized by the crimes of degenerates.”Footnote 50 Calling for a nationwide fingerprinting system to monitor criminals, Hoover warned, in language borrowed from psychiatric discourse, about the “dangerous, predatory criminal, preying upon society.” Describing crime in moralistic terms and viewing criminal behavior as driven by emotionally unstable individuals, Hoover argued for a “pathological and psychological study of prevention” and demanded that “every person arrested for a sex crime … be examined by an official board of capable psychiatrists.”Footnote 51 Hoover warned the nation about such psychopathological figures, those who moved from committing petty offenses such as theft and robbery, to engaging in more perverse actions such as exhibitionism and sodomy, graduating in the end to rape and murder. As he explained, “an examination of the past of these persons often will reveal that they have been repeatedly dealt with as petty offenders when, in truth, their every action was a blazing signpost pointing to a future of torture, rape, mutilation, and murder.”Footnote 52
CREATING THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
More important, however, this criminological discourse was appropriated by the FBI to institute preventive security measures to eliminate risks within the government. In 1936, as the specter of totalitarianism swept Europe, Roosevelt instructed Hoover to monitor radical political activities in the country, delegating intelligence activities to the FBI.Footnote 53 Three years later, Roosevelt centralized counterespionage activities within the FBI and instructed Hoover to investigate subversive activities, identify for possible detention foreign-born and domestic radicals, and help target federal employees with suspect loyalties. Hoover responded by instituting forms of preventive security; as he explained, “‘intelligence’ activity [seeks] information about ‘Communists and subversive elements’ which does not, in its original stage, involve an overt act or a violation of a specific statute.”Footnote 54 The goal of the FBI was to determine the potential dangerousness of individuals not merely on the basis of one singular act but on their overall character. Consequently, Hoover blurred the distinction between political radicals of different types (Communists, socialists, and anarchists) and different forms of behavior (criminal activities, political actions, and sexual proclivities). From the beginning of the FBI's security investigations, Hoover linked deviant behavior, seen through the lens of psychiatric discourse, to the political security of the nation. In 1937, for instance, Hoover began an investigation into “Sex Degenerates and Sex Offenders” and extended the program in 1942 to unearth “Sex Perverts in Government Service.”Footnote 55 Linking sex criminals to security risks, Hoover argued that “the real danger to democratic institutions is always within a country's own borders – and this danger lies in a possible breakdown of moral fiber among its citizens.”Footnote 56 In 1951, Hoover institutionalized a Sex Deviates program in which the FBI worked with the local DC police force to arrest individuals caught committing sexual offenses in public. The FBI then passed the information on to the Civil Service Commission for further investigation. That same year, Hoover testified before the House Appropriations Committee and detailed efforts to weed out “mental cases, murderers, thieves, sex deviates, and other criminally inclined misfits.”Footnote 57 As historian Athan Theoharis has argued, Hoover was less interested in espionage prosecutions under the Smith Act than in expanding intrusive and potentially illegal investigations to uncover any behavior that constituted a potential risk.Footnote 58
National security, as Hoover maintained, rested first and foremost on an epistemological problem – detecting the abnormal within the normal. In Masters of Deceit (1958), Hoover, echoing the warnings of Whittaker Chambers, argued that “we may not learn until it is too late to recognize who the communists are.”Footnote 59 Hoover, like Chambers, stressed the duplicitous nature of Communists, who sought to infiltrate social and political organizations – from civil rights groups to labor unions, youth groups, and veterans’ associations – to foster discontent. Communists, according to Hoover, turned such groups into front organizations but did so while remaining invisible from any detection. “Most communists are ordinary-looking people,” he explained, “like your seatmate on the bus, or a clerk in one of your neighborhood stores.”Footnote 60 Communists bore no distinguishing characteristics that would make them visible. In I Led Three Lives, Herbert Philbrick, the advertising-executive-turned-FBI-informant, explained the instructions given by Communist leaders to their operatives. “Maintain your normal ties,” he had been told, “and lead a perfectly normal life.”Footnote 61 According to this logic of detection, FBI investigators argued that they needed to remove the mask of sanity that hid deviant behavior. This necessitated the demand for complete transparency of all aspects of the suspected individual's history. As Hoover explained, “we must try to see the total man; that is, all the forces, events, ideas, and motivations,” a claim that became the basis for investigations into the character of federal employees.Footnote 62 In 1947, D. M. Ladd, assistant director of the FBI, testified before the President's Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty and argued that his agency, acting under the Hatch Act, had removed sixty individuals from government service, a fact that necessitated, in the wisdom of the FBI, the investigation of all federal employees.
FROM LOYALTY QUESTIONS TO SECURITY RISKS
The result was a dramatic expansion of the federal loyalty program. Prior to World War II, civil service investigations did not generally focus on the political beliefs of employees; instead, such investigations, following the guidelines of the Lloyd-La Follette Act of 1912, were limited to questions of suitability.Footnote 63 In 1939, however, the US Congress passed the Hatch Act, which prohibited federal employees from belonging to any organization advocating the overthrow of the government, a provision that was amended in later years to include specific references to Communist and Fascist organizations. Roosevelt institutionalized these security procedures by requiring in 1941 the fingerprinting of all federal employees to allow the FBI to check for criminal records and by creating the Interdepartmental Committee on Employee Investigations to aid the Attorney General in tracking down membership lists of questionable organizations. These wartime procedures were expanded after 1945, as Republicans used security concerns, especially following the investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist influence over New Deal policies, to discredit the Truman administration. In response to mounting pressures, Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which made loyalty investigations mandatory for all federal employees and empowered the Civil Service Commission to remove any person for whom there were reasonable grounds to question their loyalty.
Truman, however, was challenged by Republicans following revelations by ex-Communists such as Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers about espionage activities and by department and agency heads who worried about the lack of uniformity among standards. Consequently, Truman established the Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security within the National Security Council, which issued recommendations in 1952 that called for an expanded program that investigated questions of loyalty, security, and suitability simultaneously. Specific programs such as those instituted by the army and navy in 1940 already authorized the dismissal of employees on the grounds of national security. In 1950, Felix Larkin, general counsel for the Department of Defense, explained before the Armed Services Committee of the US Senate the various reasons several departments had begun to address this problem. “Some of these employees,” he explained, “while loyal or while there is no proof that they are disloyal, are of such characteristics or of such personal traits that it is dangerous for them to work in the sensitive job.”Footnote 64 The Interdepartmental Committee echoed such logic, arguing that “it is extremely difficult if not impossible to draw clear lines of demarcation” among loyalty, security, and suitability, and called for a single security program to merge these standards.Footnote 65
Although the recommendations of the Interdepartmental Committee were issued too late for Truman to enact, their list of suggested grounds for denial of employment, which included character defects such as mental unfitness and immoral conduct, became the foundation for the program that Eisenhower introduced under Executive Order 10450. Eisenhower's program extended Public Law 733, which gave the federal government the right to dismiss employees in eleven departments and agencies in the interest of national security, to include all federal employees. This expansion of the grounds for disqualification reflected the influence of psychiatric discourse on questions of security. For instance, as historian David Johnson has detailed, the Second Red Scare dovetailed with a Lavender Scare.Footnote 66 Following revelations in 1950 by John Peurifoy, deputy undersecretary of state, that ninety-one homosexuals had been dismissed as security risks from the State Department, federal officials worked quickly to purge so-called sex perverts from the government. In 1950, the US Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, led by Senator Clyde Hoey, investigated the problem of “homosexuals and other sex perverts in government,” arguing that such individuals were unsuitable character types due to their sexual inclinations.Footnote 67 This investigation was only part of a larger effort by government officials to address concerns about moral degeneracy in the nation's capital. In 1948, President Truman signed into law the Miller Sexual Psychopath Law, which increased penalties in Washington, DC for sex crimes including indecent exposure and sodomy, and which mandated psychiatric examination and possible institutionalization for any recidivists.Footnote 68 To enforce the law, the US Park Police started a “Pervert Elimination Campaign” to monitor public areas, and the DC police established a vice squad to track down sexual psychopaths.
But the target of Eisenhower's new security program was not simply homosexuals but a new classificatory type labeled “security risks” – those individuals whose personal behaviors hinted at the presence of psychopathic traits. CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter argued during his testimony before the Hoey Committee that perverse sexual practices were linked to a compendium of deviant behaviors, claiming that “homosexuality frequently is accompanied by other exploitable weaknesses, such as psychopathic tendencies which affect the soundness of their judgment, physical cowardice, susceptibility to pressure, and general instability.”Footnote 69 Following traditional psychiatric arguments, Hillenkoetter linked all deviant characters together. “Homosexuals,” he continued, “have a definite similarity to other illegal groups such as criminals, smugglers, black marketers, dope addicts, and so forth.”Footnote 70 This logic, which bundled together a range of disorders under the category of psychopathy, was used as well by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who crafted Eisenhower's security program. Brownell stressed that his goal was less “a hunt for subversives” and more a search for “security risks,” which included primarily “anybody [who] was a homosexual or an alcoholic or was leading an irregular, abnormal life.”Footnote 71 Homosexuality for Brownell was only one form of psychological maladjustment that marked the grounds for disqualification from federal employment.
Security investigations under Executive Order 10450, therefore, were predicated upon a complete investigation into the background of government employees in order to detect any weaknesses behind a possible mask of sanity. Since, according to psychiatric discourse, any minor moral transgression might point to a broader psychopathological condition, government investigations were designed to uncover any potentially dangerous individuals, whether or not any disloyal actions had actually occurred. As a result, security hearings included investigations into all aspects of an employee's life – from fingerprint checks to employment history, criminal records, political associations, voting records, education, religious affiliation, family life, mental status, medical records, sexual activities, personal assessments from neighbors and past employers, and any other information deemed necessary. Such findings were also cross-referenced with the information in files held by the FBI, the Civil Service Commission, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. But uncovering bare facts about questionable actions was not the only goal; more important, officials heading security boards demanded from those under questioning complete transparency of their lives. For instance, a labor relations consultant employed by the armed forces was charged under Executive Order 10450 with sympathetic association with Communist organizations. In his affidavit, the employee prepared a twenty-six-page “life history,” detailing every aspect of his upbringing, his family life, his associations, and his political and religious beliefs in order to satisfy investigators.Footnote 72
This was due in part because morals charges under Executive Order 10450 were notoriously broad, encompassing everything from demeanor and appearance to living arrangements and associations to sexual behavior and criminal records. Many security officials relied upon psychiatric discourse to diagnose any questionable behavior. As an accused State Department employee explained, investigators often appeared like a “bunch of tough cops with a smattering of Freud.”Footnote 73 For example, a clerk investigated for sympathetic associations with members of the Communist Party was questioned not only about her political activities but also about “almost every aspect” or her life, including her “character, employment, family, religion and philosophical beliefs.”Footnote 74 Although instructions were given to investigators to “not probe into the intimacies of the private life of employees,” the Civil Service Handbook issued by the Eisenhower administration stated that “the investigation of an applicant's character, habits, morals, or reputation is an extremely broad field and may cover any phase of human behavior.”Footnote 75 Dorothy Beltrone, a clerk in the Department of the Navy, for instance, was suspended from her position for fourteen months after charges of immoral conduct stemming from a sexual relationship she had had in 1932 with a man who rented a room in her house. In a letter to the Civil Service Commission in which she challenged the right of the government to question federal employees “about sex, religion and other personal beliefs and activities,” Beltrone described her interrogation by security officers who “grilled [her] from 3 to 4 hours on nothing but sexual intercourse and intimate relations in the most intricate details.”Footnote 76 Such interrogations exemplified the politics of exposure upon which the national security state was founded.
Beltrone was not alone; others experienced a similar interrogation into their sex lives by investigators looking to uncover any form of emotional or ethical impairment. For instance, Raymond Barrier, an applicant for a nonsensitive position in the Civil Aeronautics Administration in the Department of Commerce, was questioned by a loyalty board in 1954 after FBI investigators discovered his “rather unusual living arrangement.”Footnote 77 Barrier and his male roommate had invited a female friend of Barrier's sister to stay with them while she searched for employment in San Francisco, and the FBI worried about the possibility of an “immoral relationship” between her and Barrier. Often, investigators uncovered not one large transgression that established an employee as a security risk but a series of minor, disconnected ones that supposedly pointed to hidden character defects. For example, a boiler fireman working at an army ordnance department was examined for a series of minor offenses, ranging from making “anti-capitalistic” remarks to misstating his employment history and cohabitating “for some time with a woman who was not his wife.”Footnote 78 Only after submitting “a complete history of his life” was the employee cleared. In a similar case, a naval officer stationed in Japan was interrogated by officials due to the reported “emotional instability” of his wife after neighbors complained of her “excessive drinking” and rumors of the officer's infidelity.Footnote 79 In many such investigations, certain sexual activities were translated as moral degeneracy.
Not surprisingly, security officials often relied on psychiatric expertise to determine the risk that an individual posed. At the security hearing of Mary Meyer and Grace O'Lone, the two nurses at the FHA accused of having engaged in homosexual acts, officials brought in psychiatrist John Cavanagh, a member of the Mental Health Commission in Washington, DC, who subjected the two women to physical and psychiatric examinations. During the hearing, Cavanagh was questioned by investigators about the etiology of homosexuality, the nature of sexual perversion, and the psychological significance of particular sexual acts ranging from masturbation to cunnilingus. In a similar case, two machine operators charged in 1954 with having “engaged in a homosexual act” were questioned about their sexual histories by a government-sponsored psychiatrist who offered testimony at their hearings.Footnote 80 Even when psychiatrists were not present, psychiatric language guided many security decisions. A federal employee arrested for indecent exposure when he was much younger was questioned by security officials who, in the absence of any expert psychiatric testimony, turned to German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, a foundational text in the history of psychiatric understandings of psychopathologies, to comprehend the causes of exhibitionism and to understand the employee's “most depraved nature and character.”Footnote 81 Psychiatric language, often based on Freudian psychology, shaped such fears about abnormal social and sexual behavior.
However, the epistemological problem facing interrogators was determining both the veracity of the testimony of employees and the extent of their possible psychological maladjustments. Some departments and agencies such as the State Department and the Atomic Energy Commission resorted to the use of polygraph tests to discern the truthfulness of testimony.Footnote 82 But most security officials argued that those suffering from psychological disorders did not respond with the typical emotional and physical reactions that polygraph tests measured. “You can't use a lie detector on a Communist,” one declared.Footnote 83 Consequently, investigators, searching for the true character of employees, often relied upon their own observations of the mannerisms and demeanor of those under questioning. Murray Seasongood, a former member of Truman's Loyalty Review Board, argued that any employee with a troubled past that hoped for clearance needed “to show rather convincingly his renunciation of his early Communist association or sympathy.”Footnote 84 Recognizing, however, the difficulty of judging the veracity of such claims, Seasongood noted that officials “sometimes had to rely largely on the demeanor evidence of the person and the apparent sincerity of his assertions of discontinuance.”Footnote 85 In the official handbook of the US Civil Service Commission, security officials therefore were encouraged to use a “probing technique” that would “reveal as many aspects of behavior as possible,” focussing in particular on “bearing and manner,” “voice and language,” and “other personality characteristics” as revealed by “conversational” but “persistent” questioning.Footnote 86 The goal was to peer behind the veneer of normality that accused employees often presented.
Security investigations, in this sense, entailed a form of hermeneutics in which federal officials interpreted the speech, mannerisms, and appearances of those under questioning to detect what might not be completely visible or completely true. For example, Elizabeth Rakisky, a proofreader employed at the United Nations, was investigated in 1953 by the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board for a trip she made to Russia in the 1930s and for accusations that she threatened “to give up her American citizenship” soon after.Footnote 87 While Rakisky refuted such claims and denied any association with the Communist Party, the security board found reasonable doubt concerning her loyalty due to her “evasive and contradictory” testimony and her “very poor” memory about such events.Footnote 88 In the case of those accused of engaging in immoral sexual practices, investigators looked for signs of deviancy in emotional and bodily reactions, relying on stereotypes, for instance regarding the physical characteristics of homosexuals. For example, Mary Ann Sklar, a stenographer at the Public Housing Administration, was questioned by officials concerning accusations about her “morals” and “emotional stability,” in particular about claims that she had engaged in homosexual acts with a married woman.Footnote 89 In their official report, investigators diagnosed her as “an extremely emotional individual” who had difficulty maintaining her composure and answering questions directly.Footnote 90 They also interrogated her appearance, searching for “masculine mannerisms” underneath her “regular feminine attire” that included “lipstick” and “polised [sic] nails.” In the end, they gave Sklar clearance, having come to the conclusion that she was the type of woman “who longs for the friendship and affection of the male sex, but possibly because of her personality and personal appearance, has been lonely during her years.”Footnote 91 In this way, security officials became the arbiters of the difference between normal and abnormal behavior.
As a result, most defense strategies, except for the hostile ones that questioned the legality of such proceedings, focussed on portraying accused employees as moral citizens with traditional religious and family values that ran counter to Communist ideology or, in the case of those unable to conceal their past activities, as redeemed individuals who had either dispensed with their youthful transgressions or had experienced some type of conversion experience. As historian Landon Storrs has detailed, defendants highlighted their conventional lives, focussing on their religion, their tastes in music and books, their family lives, their adherence to gender norms, and their centrist political views.Footnote 92 In so doing, they tried to present themselves as loyal subjects who accepted the importance of such investigations and who acknowledged the state as the guarantor of national security. This often entailed a personal confession on the part of those who had tried to hide their past actions and a plea for forgiveness; moreover, this often meant providing a normative self-evaluation, filtered through the language of psychiatry, in which the accused recognized their personal faults and psychological weaknesses in the terms provided by security officials. As J. Edgar Hoover explained, “all great religions teach that the sinner can always redeem himself.”Footnote 93 The framework for this confessional culture was established by ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, and Elizabeth Bentley, all of whom wrote extensively about their transgressions and sought to redeem themselves through public exposure, whether in print or before Congressional committees. As Budenz explained in This Is My Story, “we hope that the recitation of our past mistakes will profit others and that the story of our positive act of good will be a source of inspiration to those tempest-tossed.”Footnote 94
A typical case involving this rehabilitative ideal was the security investigation of Tony Biondolilo, a clerk employed at the United Nations who was brought before a security review board in 1953 after FBI investigators discovered his prior membership in the Young Communist League. Questioned at length, Biondolilo portrayed his involvement in the organization as a youthful transgression, which, he argued in language that echoed the logic of the national security state, was the result of his own psychological problems. Claiming he had a naive understanding of the organization he joined, Biondolilo argued that his disloyal actions were not caused by any actual commitment to overthrowing the American government, but were simply a personal effort to overcome the psychological hang-ups with which he suffered. Handicapped because of the loss of one eye and unable to find steady employment because of the Depression, Biondolilo argued that the Young Communist League fulfilled in him an “emotional need.”Footnote 95 Eventually, however, he recognized, according to his testimony, that the organization, like any Communist group, sought to take “his spirit … [and] his soul away from him,” leading him after the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 to reject radical politics and to find his religious roots in an effort to return to an “American way of life.”Footnote 96 As the loyalty board argued in regard to its favorable rating for Biondolilo, “the employee is now married, has a child, owns a home, and is actively practicing his religion.”Footnote 97 A similar case involved Diane Burns, who was investigated in 1958 by the International Organizations Employees Loyalty Board on “suitability” matters after derogatory information was unearthed concerning her “promiscuous” behavior and “weakness for alcohol.”Footnote 98 Investigators discovered that recent marital troubles had led Burns to engage in an extramarital affair and, according to neighbors, to participate in “excessive drinking.” Her clearance was granted by officials, however, who argued that her willingness to seek treatment with Alcoholics Anonymous represented “a decisive step in the right direction.” In confessing to questionable actions, many accused employees like Biondolilo and Burns were able to convince security officials that they had recovered from the troubled condition for which they were under investigation.
CHALLENGING THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
In 1957, the Commission on Government Security, which was established by the US Congress to investigate the efficacy of the federal security program, published its official report, expressing reservations about the security procedures established by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The commission criticized the absence of uniformity in how security standards were applied across the federal government, the lack of communication between executive departments and agencies, and the poor training that security personnel received. Consequently, the commission called for the return to a strict loyalty standard and for an end to the secrecy surrounding investigations. The Eisenhower administration ignored these recommendations and repeatedly defended the efficacy of its program. The administration, for instance, claimed that during the first year of the new program, 8,008 security risks were removed from the government, the majority stemming from resignations in the face of accusations.Footnote 99 But the concerns raised by the committee reflected growing worries within the government about the scope of the security program, including the US Supreme Court, which began to hear challenges by federal employees to the legality of Eisenhower's program. In Cole v. Young (1956), for instance, the Court overturned the dismissal from federal employment of a food and drug inspector, arguing that only employees in sensitive or security-related jobs could be dismissed as security risks.
The security program also began to face challenges from the officials running review boards who balked at the vagueness of the standards they were forced to use to determine suitability for employment and who argued that they had not been given clear guidance with which to rule on specific cases. In 1963, Kimbell Johnson, director of the Bureau of Personnel Investigations, tried to clarify some of the disputed standards, noting, for instance, that the standard referring to the “use of intoxicants” was “one of the problem areas” since the official language did not provide any quantitative measures.Footnote 100 Similarly, Johnson noted that charges about homosexuality were difficult to prove, especially in cases where there was “a lack of concrete evidence of homosexual acts” and merely accusations from neighbors or colleagues. As a result, the Civil Service Commission changed the official standard in 1965, stating that “there must be clear and definite information to support a conclusion of homosexuality or sexual perversion.” However, the epistemological difficulties in determining who was or was not a security risk continued to plague the program. In 1965, for instance, a federal court in Scott v. Macy argued that the grounds for dismissal established by the Civil Service Commission were much too vague and that the federal government needed to clarify what constituted immoral conduct and what specific actions were under question.Footnote 101
More important, intellectual and social changes began to undermine the foundations of the federal security program. As historian David Johnson has detailed, gay rights organizations such as the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC challenged the legality of the security program and defended accused employees from discriminatory practices. The Mattachine Society also began to give advice to those testifying before security boards and organized a picketing campaign in 1965 to overturn federal policies. Gay rights advocates were joined by many social scientists like Erving Goffman and Howard Becker who challenged government efforts to stigmatize individuals on the basis of certain behaviors or proclivities, arguing that such behaviors were labeled deviant only on the basis of socially defined notions of normality constructed by the psychiatric profession. Oddly enough, these groups were joined by many conservatives in the 1950s who began to reject the long-standing psychiatric approach to understanding criminal or deviant behavior. Challenging the notion that such behaviors were the result of some abnormality or psychopathology, conservative thinkers such as Gary Becker and others from the Chicago school argued that such behaviors were the product of a rational choice, made by individuals who sought to maximize their own gain at the expense of others. These intellectual shifts resulted in a gradual erosion of the link made among crime, abnormal behaviors, and psychopathology that shaped the federal security program.
Equally important, many in the psychiatric community began to criticize both the policies of the Civil Service Commission and the language that their own profession had constructed that pathologized certain behaviors. Throughout the 1950s a growing number of psychiatrists, recognizing the unfairness of federal policy, chipped away at the notion of the psychopath as a diagnostic category, thereby challenging the foundations of the ubiquitous sexual psychopath laws across the country and questioning the logic that linked together so-called deviant behaviors. In 1952, for instance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association was revised to substitute the term “sociopath” for “psychopath” in referring to antisocial behaviors because the term was “more limited, as well as more specific in its application.”Footnote 102 In part, the psychiatric profession was forced to retreat from its broader efforts at diagnosing and treating psychopathological disorders in the face of growing criticisms from a rising anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s, led by a diverse group of writers and intellectuals such as Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault, Ken Kesey, Alfred Kinsey, and Erich Fromm who challenged the scientific underpinnings of psychiatry and its efforts to pathologize a broad variety of human behaviors and emotions. In response, psychiatrists tempered some of the larger claims the profession had made in the first half of the twentieth century and tried to offer more diagnostic precision to their labeling of disorders. By the 1960s, most psychiatrists turned to classifications such as “borderline personality disorder” or “antisocial personality disorder” to clarify many of the specific pathologies once defined by the concept of psychopathy. In so doing, psychiatrists began to dismantle the intellectual apparatus upon which the national security state was founded.
By the 1960s, moreover, domestic security against Soviet espionage was no longer a political priority. The embarrassment of the Army–McCarthy hearings revealed to many the excesses of the federal security program. But the search for security risks did not disappear immediately. Dismissals for sexual perversion and immoral conduct continued into the 1960s, including, for instance, twenty-eight employees fired from the State Department in 1965 for homosexuality.Footnote 103 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater made numerous accusations during the 1964 campaign about lax security procedures in the Johnson administration, and conservative anticommunist leaders like William Buckley Jr., despite efforts to clean up the image of the Republican Party, defended some of the more extreme measures taken by McCarthy and others in the 1950s. Similarly, the FBI, under Hoover's directions, shifted its focus in the 1960s from communist subversion to the civil rights movement and the New Left but continued to use the same language of security and the same tactics forged in the early Cold War. Ironically, many left-wing intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s such as Richard Hofstadter and Daniel Bell used similar pseudo-psychiatric language to examine the roots of McCarthyism, translating political behavior into psychological terms. Thus while the power of psychiatric discourse was muted by the 1960s, it never disappeared from public culture, often serving purposes on both sides of the political spectrum. Moreover, the national security state, built upon this pseudo-psychiatric discourse, was never fully dismantled, even in the 1970s when revelations about the illegal transgressions of the FBI became public. If anything, the institutional and intellectual threads that comprised the national security state were slowly untangled in the 1960s and 1970s but quickly picked up again, albeit with a different focus, in the early twenty-first century, when security concerns shifted from the subversive activities of Communist infiltrators to the terrorist plots and radicalization patterns of religious extremists.
