Can a President Use an Executive Order to Require Loyalty? (Yes.)

Kidding or not, President Trump said yesterday that Kim Jung Un’s people sit up when he speaks, and “I want my people to do the same.”

Can a U.S. president issue—and enforce—a loyalty order?

The precedent for this is Executive Order 9835, signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. Truman was accused of being soft on Communism by Republicans. The order applied to all federal employees.

The order declared “there shall be a loyalty investigation of every person entering civilian employment” in any facet of the executive branch of the U.S. government. It provided for termination of employment of disloyal employees.

To put the EO into effect, Truman named a Loyalty Review Board. In concert with the FBI, the program investigated over 3 million government employees. About 300 Americans lost their jobs.

The program looked for “derogatory information” on employees. If these individuals were active in civil rights groups, this was treated as derogatory information.

The program penalized blacks especially harshly. Prof. Mark Buford’s research recounts news stories from black newspapers reporting that “FBI agents and loyalty board personnel are including reports of interracial association in the category of ‘derogatory’ information against federal workers in loyalty proceedings.” Truman’s Attorney General identified “interracial groups active in the fight for Negro civil rights” as subversives.

President Eisenhower revoked the order with his EO (10450) in April 1953.

Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph McCarthy took up where Truman left off. He used Congress to investigate “disloyal” Americans for subversion. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators, and labor union activists.

McCarthy and Donald Trump’s mentor, a lawyer named Roy Cohn, launched a parallel loyalty program aimed at then-suspected homosexuals. Called the “Lavender Scare,” McCarthy used his Senate powers to orchestrate the mass firings of gays and lesbians who worked for the U.S. government in the 1950s from the United States government.

All of these “loyalty” programs spilled over into private sector and state employment. Professors, union leaders, school teachers, civil rights activists, and suspected gays and lesbians lost their jobs due to damaging insinuations about their lack of loyalty. 
And that was before Twitter.

CARTOON BY KEVIN SIERS, CHARLOTTE OBSERVER (2017)