Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations


The United States Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations was a list drawn up on April 3, 1947 at the request of the United States Attorney General Tom C. Clark. The list was intended to be a compilation of organizations seen as "subversive" by the United States government. Among those were: Communist fronts, the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party.

History

Creation

The Attorney General's list was first known as the Biddle list after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attorney General Francis Biddle began tracking Soviet controlled subversive front organizations in 1941. The original list had only eleven organizations but was greatly expanded by the end of the decade to upwards of 90 organizations. It did not list individuals.
Communist groups, which emerged both in the pre-war and the post-war list, are marked by one ". In the meantime, even some trade unions that excluded members of openly communist groups from their membership lists were dissolved, partially also by government resolution.
Thousands of Americans with progressive or radical political beliefs signed petitions for, or became members of, these groups without being aware of the Communist ties of the group. Many were later persecuted and suffered personal consequences during the McCarthy era. Some others, though, were found through HUAC investigations and Venona cable intercepts, to be actively involved in Soviet sponsored espionage and related activities.

Biddle list

AGLOSO of 4 December 1947

On December 4, 1947, US Attorney General Tom C. Clark released the "Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations".
As reported by the New York Times on the same day, the list included groups from the Biddle List plus new groups plus eleven school. Leaders of five groups--the Reverend William H. Melish of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Martic Martntz of the Armenian Progressive League of America, Howard Selsam of the Jefferson School of Social Science, Max Yergan of the Council on African Affairs, and Edward Barsky of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee--denied the government's accusation.
The next day, the New York Times reported a second batch of groups who rejected the government's accusation: William Z. Foster and Eugene Dennis of the Communist Party USA, an unnamed spokesperson for the International Workers Order, an unnamed spokesperson for the Civil Rights Congress, an unnamed spokesperson for American Youth for Democracy, Harrison L. Harley of the Samuel Adams School for Social Studies, and Walter Scott Neff of the Abraham Lincoln School.

Later history

The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations was expanded by President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835. EO 9835 established the first Federal Employee Loyalty Program designed to root out Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. It allowed for organizations to be listed on the recommendation of certain members of the House Un-American Activities Committee members, as designated by committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas. Those he named initially were John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican, Richard Vail, an Illinois Republican, and John Wood, a Georgia Democrat. They readied their first version of the list for Attorney General Tom C. Clark within a few days. It appeared in the Federal Register on March 20, 1948.
Executive Order 10450, issued by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in April 1953, expanded the Attorney General's List and added the proviso that members of the United States armed forces could not join or associate with any group on the list under threat of discharge from military service.

List as of 1959

The list went through several revisions until President Richard M. Nixon abolished it in 1974.

Impact

The list's impact was immediate but not all important. Its purpose was to provide a guide for the loyalty boards mandated by EO 9835. The Federal Bureau of Investigation began using it immediately, but it was only one of many lists they used. The HUAC maintained its own list. Membership in an organization on any such list was reported to the Justice Department and loyalty boards.

Footnotes