Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling

Landon R. Y. Storrs

On February 9, 1952, speaking at a Lincoln's Day dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia, where two years earlier to the day he had dramatically launched his campaign against Communists in government, Sen. Joseph McCarthy attacked President Harry S. Truman's chief economic adviser, Leon Keyserling, and his wife, Mary Dublin Keyserling, who worked in the Department of Commerce. Not only had an informant remembered Leon as sympathetic to the Communist program, McCarthy announced, but Mary once belonged to ten "Communist front" groups. Leon Keyserling, who had helped draft major pieces of the New Deal before becoming Truman's adviser, brushed off the accusations. But McCarthy renewed the attack two months later during a Senate debate on Truman's seizure of the steel industry—an action backed by Leon. This time the Wisconsin Republican claimed Mary Keyserling actually had joined the Communist party, as well as an "unlimited number" of front groups. He alleged that an investigation of Mary by the Commerce loyalty board had left some board members believing both Keyserlings perjured themselves in denying "their Communist activities." Implicating Truman in a cover-up, McCarthy claimed that only pressure from the White House was keeping the Keyserling cases from going to a grand jury. Leon denounced the accusations as an attempt "to attack me by way of my wife," and the charges against him soon faded. Mary, however, was forced to take a leave from the Commerce Department until she was cleared in January 1953. Both Keyserlings resigned from government service when Dwight D. Eisenhower took office. 1

1

Leon Keyserling was correct that his wife was an attractive target for conservative anticommunists seeking to discredit him, the Truman administration, and even the entire New Deal agenda. Perhaps because that point seems so obvious, the few scholars to note the attack on the Keyserlings mention it only briefly to illustrate the transparent partisanship of Senator McCarthy, the unreliability of ex-Communist witnesses, and the general excesses of the second red scare. 2 A closer look at the loyalty investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling underscores all those findings, but it has more to tell us as well, especially if we place her, rather than her husband, at the center of analysis. Mary would have excited anticommunist attention even had she not been married to Leon. Since the early 1930s she had belonged to a loose network of female experts and activists who advocated using the state to attack social inequalities—in class, gender, and race relations—that they argued were not just unfair but unhealthy for the nation's economy and polity. This essay uses newly accessible sources on the life of Mary Keyserling (1910–1997) to reconsider feminists' programs and influence in the 1930s and 1940s and to reassess the impact of "McCarthyism" on feminism and social policy. 3

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