Loyalty Decision

In 1951, the Oklahoma legislature passed a law requiring all state employees to take a loyalty oath in which they had to pledge that they had not belonged--within five years of taking the oath--to any organization which the ILS. Attorney General called subversive or a Communist front. Seven teachers at Oklahoma A. & M. refused. When they were fired, they argued in court that this was a violation of the 14th Amendment, i.e., they had been deprived of property (their salaries) without "due process of law." Last week the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the teachers.

In previous cases, the Supreme Court had upheld the right of a state or city to fire employees who belong to subversive organizations. The difference, explained Justice Tom Clark, is that other laws make allowance for the possibility that a person might have joined a subversive organization innocently. But in the Oklahoma law, said Clark, "the fact of association alone determines disloyalty ... It matters not whether association existed innocently or knowingly." A lot of "completely loyal" Americans, said Clark, in recent years learned "for the first time of the character of groups to which they had belonged." Democratic government, added Clark, "is not powerless to meet [disloyalty], but it must do so without infringing the freedoms that are the ultimate values of all democratic living."

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