The official justification for the purge was that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and could be turned into Soviet spies. But as [David] Johnson points out, investigators never found a single instance of this kind of blackmail during the Cold War. The best they could come up with was a dubious case from before the First World War, when the Russians allegedly used the homosexuality of Austria's top spy to force him to work for them. (my emphasis)

During the war you saw millions of women coming into industry for the first time, but the mores of that era maintained that women were not as valuable as men. So the general wage levels of women were lower than those of men. Before the war there was no awareness of the issue. I'm thinking even in terms of myself, and I think I'm socially aware. Before the war my main concern was the general work conditions and the positions of the men. We had a plant which employed women too, but it wasn't until more and more women entered the work force during the war that they began to make some noises about the issue.

My union was one of the unions that made equal work for equal pay one of the big planks of its programs. As far as the men were concerned, there was a selfish motive involved, too, for unless women were paid the same rate of pay they would be used to undercut wages of the men. We didn't have a great need to convince the men this was so. Our union, and a number of others, adopted the policy that women be paid the same rate as men for doing the same work.

The pressure from the unions persuaded the War Labor Board to establish the principle of "equal pay for equal work." Interestingly, however, the employers resisted the order. When we sat down to bargain with them, they would ask, "Can a woman lift as heavy a box as a man?" And so they would whittle away at the principle. To get a settlement we had to make some concessions, work out compromises. It wasn't quite a hundred percent equal pay at the time, but it was about ninety, ninety-five percent equal pay. And we lived with that all throughout the war.

[Franklin] Roosevelt's welfare state, conservatives argued, sapped the nation’s energy, drained away patriarchal vigour. Instead of sturdy husbands and firm fathers controlling their wives and children, lisping bureaucrats and female social workers were now running the show. World War Two exacerbated the problem: with so many men away at the front, and women working in the factories, male authority was further eroded. Citing these 'social and family upheavals', J. Edgar Hoover argued that 'the wartime spirit of abandon and "anything goes" led to a decline of morals among people of all ages.'

Washington was the centre of this cultural revolution. A boom town for young single people in the 1930s and 1940s, it had a tight housing market, forcing men to bunk up with men, and offered women plentiful opportunities to support themselves by government jobs. What with the anonymous cruising sites of Lafayette Park (right in front of the White House) and the company of tolerant female colleagues in the federal bureaucracy, homosexuals managed to turn Washington into a 'very gay city'. Hoover grew up in DC when it was a racist backwater of the Old South, and despite [or because of?] his own ambiguous sexuality,he was not happy about these changes. (my emphasis)

The first problem with this notion is that it assumes security is a transparent concept, unsullied by ideology and self-interest. Because it benefits everyone – ‘the most vital of all interests’, John Stuart Mill called it, which no one can ‘possibly do without’ – it is immune to politics. Yet, as Arnold Wolfers wrote years ago, security is an ‘ambiguous symbol’, which ‘may not have any precise meaning at all’. It allows political leaders to pursue partisan and ideological courses of action under the banner of a seemingly neutral, universal value. ...

There is a second problem with the notion of a 'balance' between freedom and security. Ever since warfare became the business of peoples rather than kings, security’s compass has steadily expanded beyond the barracks and high command of the military. Frederick II waged war, as Lukács wrote, 'in such a manner that the civilian population simply would not notice it'; modern war insinuates itself into ‘the inner life of a nation’. It requires the full mobilisation of a country’s resources and active support of its citizenry. Limiting freedom in the most remote parts of society can thus be justified as a legitimate act of national defence. One can find a clear and present danger in the nation’s political economy, its schools and popular culture, even in its beds, and resolve to suppress liberty there in order to avert the threat. When liberals and conservatives affirm the priority of security over freedom in wartime, they are not just endorsing government restrictions on what the press reports about the military, they are also licensing the suppression of all manner of dissent, throughout the entire social order. (my emphasis)

As attorney general in Missouri, Ashcroft nearly got cited for contempt – not usually a good career move in American politics – for fighting the court-ordered desegregation of schools in St Louis and Kansas City. As a senator, he received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University, which has barred interracial dating, and gave a friendly interview to Southern Partisan, a magazine sympathetic to the Old Confederacy. Like the biblical kings, he had his father anoint his head with oil when he became a governor and then a senator, and, after his father’s death, had the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas do the honours when Bush appointed him attorney general. Convinced that calico cats were signs of the devil, he reportedly had his team make sure that the International Court at The Hague had none on its premises.

Ashcroft's peculiar notions reflect the broader discontent of his party with the political culture bequeathed to or foisted on the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. During those years, liberals and leftists not only toppled legalised racial and gender hierarchies; they also attempted to rein in the security apparatus. They limited executive power, championed an activist judiciary, increased the rights of dissenters and criminals, and separated law enforcement from intelligence gathering. Though these reforms proved short-lived – as Cole and Dempsey show, they were significantly undermined by Reagan and Clinton – they have come to stand for the larger culture of freedom that conservatives have loathed and liberals have loved for years.

In January 2003, the office of Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, sent out a fundraising letter to supporters of the National Right to Work Foundation, a business group seeking to rid America of unions. Claiming that the labour movement 'presents a clear-and-present-danger to the security of the United States at home and the safety of our Armed Forces overseas', the letter denounced 'Big Labour Bosses . . . willing to harm freedom-loving workers, the war effort and the economy to acquire more power!'

... the US media practises a form of censorship that must be the envy of tyrants everywhere. Without the government lifting a finger, informal pressure and newsroom careerism is enough to make reporters toe the line. The former CBS news anchor Dan Rather claims that conservatives are 'all over your telephones, all over your email'. As a result, ‘you say to yourself: "You know, I think we’re right on this story. I think we’ve got it in the right context, I think we’ve got it in the right perspective, but we better pick another day."’ Those at the bottom get the message fast.