Florida's Inquisition Against "Immoral" Professors, and How Two University Presidents Responded

James E. Congleton led a careful life.

The 57-year-old English professor never smoked cigarettes. He never drank to excess. A slightly built man with glasses who wore his hair neatly combed, he had given more than 20 years of hard work to the University of Florida. His profession, along with his family, was his world. He and his wife had just celebrated their only child’s marriage at the Hotel Thomas, a swanky establishment in central Gainesville.

But on January 5, 1959, inside that same hotel, Congleton’s careful life verged on collapse.

A state committee had been scouring the area for homosexuals. At the time, homosexuality was considered not only a societal sin but a crime. The committee thought supposed deviants had found cover at the university, and it deployed bare-knuckled tactics — stakeouts, paid informants, veiled threats of publicity or prosecution — to smoke them out. Congleton had been accused a month earlier of seeking sexual contact with an undercover officer in the men’s bathroom of the local courthouse.

Panicked, with everything to lose, the professor had given the committee what it wanted. During a series of interviews, he had named names, perhaps hoping to extract mercy.

On that evening in January, Congleton was called to Room 10 of the Hotel Thomas for yet another interrogation. In the presence of a state senator, a lawyer, a university police officer, and a burly sleuth, Congleton made another appeal for understanding. He told the room he’d sought medical treatment for his “disorder.” While on a Fulbright overseas, he’d prayed “a thousand times at every shrine in Europe” that he would never return to the courthouse bathroom.

Those prayers were not answered. But now, he swore, he would fix himself. This time it would be different. He’d tell his doctors to “either cure me or kill me.”

“I would rather be dead,” the professor said, “than go through this any longer.”

Congleton is one of countless professors and students — estimates vary — who were steamrolled by the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, seven state lawmakers and their hired snoops ripped through Florida’s public universities, searching for evidence of homosexuality, as well as communism and anything else deemed subversive. They worried that professors could corrupt vulnerable students, seducing them into radical beliefs or repugnant behavior.

The University of Florida and the University of South Florida, in particular, suffered from these investigations. Faced with an antagonistic state-sanctioned body, presidents of UF and USF considered how to protect their institutions. They made different choices. One remained mostly quiet and let the inquest run its course. The other waged a public fight, which eventually helped bring the committee to its knees.

The committee’s attack and the presidents’ responses to it are a funhouse-mirror image of today’s increasingly politicized public universities. The extreme homophobia and spy craft can seem, in 2022, cartoonish. But look closer and you’ll spot features you recognize: Moral panic. Legislative intrusion onto campus. University presidents weighing their institutional missions against the risk of angering lawmakers. Deep public skepticism of what’s being taught in college classrooms.