“Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956):
Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict.”
Source: Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays, 1927-1984
“Whenever the communists are under fire, it [the term "red-baiter"] has served to divert attention from the subject matter to futile discussion of personal motives, the critic’s private life and other deliberate tricks of befuddlement.”
Source: The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America
“Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy's red-baiting paranoia.”
Source: Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
“The serious Sylvia was agonizing over the execution of the Rosenbergs and McCarthyism; others were delighting to dream over trousseau lingerie at Vanity Fair's showroom.”
Source: Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953
“American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.”
“And so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the “enemy of the people” is not the press. It is you.”
Source: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy
“Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.”
Source: The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
“Thus, beginning in 1955, a formidable file on Marilyn Monroe also began to accumulate in Washington [...]. They represent some of the most ludicrous waste of paper in history.”
Source: Marilyn Monroe: The Biography
“As the machinations of the end-time conspiracy seemed to become more involved, some fundamentalists felt a need to monitor the enemy. Conspiracy theorists share a passion for gathering and collating data matched only by professional intelligence agencies. In 1937, the fundamentalist Church League of America, in Wheaton, Illinois, began to compile dossiers on the enemies of Christ. By the late 1960s, the group claimed to have seven million index cards on subversives, a collection they said was second only to that of the FBI. An associate of Mclntire, Major Edgar C. Bundy, assumed control of the Church League of America in 1956. Using his experience as a former Air Force intelligence officer, Bundy built up a data bank the organization had inherited from J. B. Matthews, a former investigator for Senator McCarthy.”
Source: Architects Of Fear
“All right. Let him ask me, and I will be glad to answer. And I am not a dupe, or a dope, or a moe, or a schmoe, and everything I did - I was absolutely conscious of what I was doing, and I am not ashamed of everything I said in public or private...”