Box Turtle Bulletin

Today in History, 1950: DC Police Estimate 3750 “Sex Perverts” in Federal Government

From The Pittsburgh Press, May 19, 1950, page 2.

Imagine seeing a headline like this one while reading the morning paper over coffee. A surprising number of newspapers used a headline very similar to the one the Pittsburgh Press used for this story.

What we now know as the McCarthy Red Scare of the 1950s, which was ostensibly about allegations of communists in the U.S. government, actually had its roots in the Lavender Scare of 1950, about which history books today are mostly silent. But for much of 1950, it was actually Congress’s obsession with the perceived threat of homosexuals in government which consumed most of the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, with Communist-hunting pretty much relegated to the background. (Feb 28, Mar 14,Mar 21, Mar 23, Mar 24, Apr 14, Apr 18, Apr 26, May 2, and May 15;).

Driving the hysteria over homosexuals in the Senate was a coalition of the Republican caucus, which was then in the minority, and Southern Democrats who were furious over President Truman’s order to integrate the Armed Forces and who worried that he might have a few more integration tricks up his sleeve. As ABC radio commentator Elmer Davis remarked in mid-May, “‘It looks as if the enemies of the State Department, and of the administration generally, have gotten hold of a more profitable issue than communism.”

That profitable issue got a greater boost when the following United Press article appeared in newspapers nationwide:

3750 Perverts Listed on Payroll

Senate Republican Leader Kenneth S. Wherry said today that Washington police estimate there are 3750 sex perverts in the Government here.

In a report to a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Wherry said police authorities testified that 300 to 400 State Department employees are “suspected or allegedly homosexual.”

The Nebraskan also said that Washington police reported they have uncovered “what purported to be a plan of Communists to sabotage and damage” Washington in case of war with Russia; that a Red Fifth Column is using sex degenerates for subversive purposes; and that “there are 1000 bad security risks” in Washington.

The report gave no details on the purported plot to sabotage Washington.

The New York Times had a more in-depth account, which revealed that Police Lieutenant Roy Blick, head of the department’s vice squad, testified that his estimate of 300 to 400 gays employees in the State Department was based on “a quick guess”:

This, he said at one point, was a “quick guess,” in the sense that it was based upon his experience that arrested persons not connected with the State Department would sometimes say: “Why don’t you go get so-and-so and so-and-so? They all belong to the same clique.”

“By doing that,” Lieutenant Blick added, “their names were put on the list and they were catalogued as such, as the suspect of being such.”

But Blick’s arrival at the 3,750 number was, by his own admission, based on pure guesswork. He gave a “quick guess” of five thousand homosexual men in the District of Columbia (out of a population of 800,000). He guessed that three-fourths of them were government jobs.

Senate Majority Leader Kenneth Wherry (R-NE)

Sen. Wherry and his Democratic counterpart, Lister Hill (D-AL), were alarmed at what they considered a lax attitude toward homosexuals in government employment, and had conducted closed-door hearings with DC police and federal agency witnesses since March 23. More than a dozen witnesses testified, including those from the State Department, Defense Department, the FBI, and D.C. police. The Navy protested that they were doing their job by removing more than 7,800 “known or alleged homosexuals” since 1947, and the Army boasted that more than 5,000 were discharged during the same period.

But Blick wound up being the star witness by suggesting that the work in rooting out homosexuals wasn’t completed. Wherry praised Blick as a “one-man watchdog of the city’s morals,” but he was disappointed that the city’s vice squad didn’t maintain a master list of arrested homosexuals to cross-check against federal employment rolls. But Blick wound up providing the crucial testimony that Wherry was looking for: a confirmation that there were “thousands” of homosexuals working in the government, far more than the 91 that the State Department acknowledged getting rid of in February (Feb 28).

Sensing a political advantage, Republicans leaked Blick’s secret testimony to the press in late March — but without Blick’s dubious methods for coming up with his number. By the time Wherry released his report to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, no one bothered to fact-check Blick’s number. His “quick guess” was simply repeated as fact. Later that July, Blick admitted to a reporter that his numbers were dubious and he regretted having been “caught between the Democrats and the Republicans.”

Oh, remember the communists? The thing that they were supposed to have been so worried about when the whole controversy started? Well, Wherry had an answer for that, too. He also passed on to reporters that D.C. police reported that they had uncovered “what purported to be a plan of Communists to sabotage and damage” Washington if war would break out. The plan involved a “Red Fifth Column” using “sex degenerates for subversive purposes,” though he didn’t give any details of the purported plot. He claimed instead to have traced a “nest of homosexuals” to the Soviet embassy.

[Additional source: Randolph W Baxter. “‘Homo-Hunting’ in the Early Cold War: Senator Kenneth Wherry and the Homophobic Side of McCarthyism,” Nebraska History 84 (Fall 2003): 119-132. Available online here (PDF: 2MB/16 pages).]