Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations

The United States Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations was a list drawn up on April 3, 1947 at the request of the United States Attorney General (and later Supreme Court justice) Tom C. Clark. The list was intended to be a compilation of organizations seen as "subversive" by the United States government. Among those were: Communist fronts, the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party.

The Attorney General's list was first known as the Biddle list after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Attorney General Francis Biddle began tracking Soviet controlled subversive front organizations in 1941. The original list had only eleven organizations but was greatly expanded by the end of the decade to upwards of 90 organizations. It did not list individuals.

Communist groups, which emerged both in the pre-war and the post-war list, are marked by one ". In the meantime, even some trade unions that excluded members of openly communist groups from their membership lists were dissolved, partially also by government resolution.

Thousands of Americans with progressive or radical political beliefs signed petitions for, or became members of, these groups without being aware of the Communist ties of the group. Many were later persecuted and suffered personal consequences during the McCarthy era. Some others, though, were found through HUAC investigations and Venona cable intercepts, to be actively involved in Soviet sponsored espionage and related activities.

The Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations (AGLOSO) was expanded by President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9835. EO 9835 established the first Federal Employee Loyalty Program designed to root out Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. It allowed for organizations to be listed on the recommendation of certain members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) members, as designated by committee Chairman J. Parnell Thomas. Those he named initially were John McDowell, a Pennsylvania Republican, Richard Vail, an Illinois Republican, and John Wood, a Georgia Democrat. They readied their first version of the list for Attorney General Tom C. Clark within a few days. It appeared in the Federal Register on March 20, 1948.

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