James Kutcher, an SWP member who had lost both legs at San Pietro in 1943, was fired from his clerk's job at the Newark Veterans Administration in 1948 solely because the party appeared on the Attorney General's subversive list. The government then moved to evict his family from public housing and, at one point, to strip his disability pension — pursuing a double amputee veteran for his political affiliations through eight years of hearings.
Kutcher's fight, told in his book The Case of the Legless Veteran, became the loyalty-purge era's most vivid civil-liberties campaign, drawing support far beyond the left. In 1956 the courts ordered him reinstated with back pay — one of the first clear defeats of the federal loyalty-security machinery, won by the era's least likely "security risk."