Crime and Prejudice

Along with periodical dictums on American freedom by those stern guardians of national safety J. Parnell Thomas and John Rankin, a statement by another authority has been receiving considerable publicity lately. His name-Thomas Jefferson. His words-"If there be any among you who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it."

But for one major exception, Jefferson's policy would stand today as universally right as it stood in 1801. The exception-civil service-has created an issue which both Rankin reactionaries and radicals consistently confound. On the one hand, the cavilling investigations by Rankin and Thomas suggest that anybody can be a dangerous enemy to the nation's security, while on the other, the radicals claim that nobody can hurt the country as long as true democracy is strong and vital. The fact is that, unlike movie stars, unlike writers, and unlike teachers, many civil service employees are in charge of business which must be carried out completely and unquestionably without any "wish to dissolve the Union." These are the men who handle or have access to secret diplomatic and military information in a world far more complex and explosive than Thomas Jefferson's.

Last March, in an effort to stave off Congressional investigations, frequently known as "witch hunts," in the civil service, President Truman issued an Executive Order making possible "loyalty tests" for some two million government employees. In addition, the Civil Service Commission was ordered to create a "review board." In the action of this board, which meets for the first time tomorrow, will lie the success or failure of the President's program. Without forceful moves on the part of the board, the examinations can easily fulfill the raucous predictions of those who are already waving their manifestos and shouting "police state."

The main job of the review board is to hear appeals from men who have been found "disloyal" by the FBI and their own departments. Before these appeals can mean anything, the board must demand that the original Executive Order be tightened in several respects. As it stands, to take just one example, a department may fire an employee without revealing the charges against him. This has actually happened recently in the case of ten State Department employees. How can such men appeal, beyond calling in friends and high-school football coaches to testify to their fine characters?

It is true that in many cases to present the board with full details and witnesses would be to reveal secret FBI methods and perhaps even to lay open an entire chain of counter-espionage. In such cases, as Associate Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger declared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine recently, "the FBI must, choose between the chain and the conviction." For it is true, in every case, that the government's loyalty program, unless it provides stringent safeguards for the individual, will pass over the line of necessary security and become just that sort of unnecessary purge that Americans have denounced, from Thomas Jefferson's time to ours.