Quotes About McCarthyism

At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.

McCarthy was an Irish Catholic small-town judge and a dipsomaniac with a vengeful streak and an exaggerated war record as a Marine tail gunner (he had not actually flown in combat). "Ignorant, crude, boastful, unaware of either intellectual or social refinements

McCarthy's drinking and his arrogance were finally his downfall—he flew too close to the sun. As chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he went after the State Department and the Voice of America. His tactics were always the same—bluster replaced reason.

In 1950, he was accorded the dubious honor of being the first prominent scientist to appear on the earliest of Senator Joseph McCarthy's famous lists of crypto-communists.

The task of getting rid of Oppenheimer was far too important to leave to the clownish, sensation-seeking senator from Wisconsin. It would require careful planning and skillful maneuvering. After leaving Hoover, Strauss returned to his office and wrote to Senator Robert Taft, urging him to block McCarthy if he attempted to launch an investigation of Oppenheimer. It would be "a mistake," he wrote. "In the first place some of the evidence will not stand up.

The bottom line is that Robert always wished to be, and was, free to think for himself and to make his own political choices. Commitments have to be put in perspective to be understood, and the failure to do that was the most damaging characteristic of the McCarthy period. The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.

McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty

American history has always had elements of what we now think of as Trumpism - Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Father Coughlin. It's not as if these things haven't always existed, and they were powerful. The big difference is Trump is president.

There was a very serious communist strain among American intellectuals before the war. America was a more tolerant place in those days, and Communists were not treated as pariahs. That ended with the McCarthy era.

was a little girl when Joseph McCarthy launched his big campaign against Communism. He managed to scare people into thinking there were Communists everywhere: in the Congress, in their backyards, waiting in the bushes to overthrow the government." "Were there?" "Oh, maybe a few. But most of them were too busy smoking marijuana to overthrow anything.

All of these charges by McCarthy were a way of getting the Democrats out of power. The Democrats had controlled the government for 20 years, and the New Deal had helped a lot of people. So Republicans turned instead to saying that the Democrats were soft on communism, which was ridiculous.

Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society launched an anti-Communist crusade that won the support of millions of Americans in the 1950s.

While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205.

In large measure, his clientele were millennials, that generation born between 1980 and 2000. Defined by the Internet, the iPhone, and a lack of economic opportunity, at least according to the human media, they were a demographic of lost moralists, committed to saving each other, preserving the rights of everyone, and championing a false utopia of mandated liberal thinking that made McCarthyism looked nuanced.

Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him.

The author of McCarthyism was given the distinction of addressing the Republican National Convention. This strikes terror in the hearts of honest men.

Writings on McCarthyism, including Naming Names, by Victor S. Navasky, and The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, by Ellen Schrecker and Phillip Deery, provided a chilling glimpse into how all-pervasive fear can become; Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, by Geoffrey R. Stone, cataloged dozens of historical examples with eerie resonances to our current times; and books such as Ronald C. Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark: The City

The crisis of the 1860s represented a far greater threat to the survival of the United States than did World War I, World War II, Communism in the 1950s, or terrorism today. Yet compared with the draconian enforcement of espionage and sedition laws in World War I, the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the National Security State of our own time, the infringement of civil liberties from 1861 to 1865 seems mild indeed.

He could not deny what he still believed in his heart of hearts: that the censure of McCarthy would, despite everything, be a victory for the Communists

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

Reporters were ill paid in those days and lacked the resources in staff or money to dig deeply into McCarthy's charges. The Washington press corps was small. It was not until later, amid growing anger about a cover-up during the Vietnam War, that significant numbers of reporters became obstreperous in challenging official sources. Only in the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate, did this attitude become widespread among political journalists in the United States.

Everything finally unraveled for McCarthy in early 1954. In March and April, Edward R. Murrow, a widely respected investigative reporter, ran a series of programs concerning McCarthy on See It Now, a CBS network production. It was the first time that television—which had expanded by then to 25 million households—had exposed him in any major way. For the most part Murrow let McCarthy's bullying words and truculent actions speak for themselves.

Resurrecting the tactics of Joe McCarthy, Agnew called Humphrey squishy soft on communism. He observed, If you've seen one slum, you've seen them all. The Washington Post concluded that Agnew was perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul.55

Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having "Communist" support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country.