Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Joseph N. Welch

Quote by Joseph N. Welch

Author

Joseph N. Welch
Joseph N. Welch

Joseph N. Welch was a prominent American lawyer known for his defense work during the McCarthy era. He is most famous for his powerful rebuttal of Joseph McCarthy's accusations during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, which marked a significant turning point in American history. more

You May Also Like

“I am in a state about all of this. I comb the newspapers. I listen to the commentators. And I get into fights all over the place. If a Republican knows his place and hates McCarthy and wishes to God Eisenhower would get more aggressive about these bastards, well and good and I will admit him to the brotherhood. If he says nasty things about Truman (who is rapidly becoming the Man I Love although I have been sore enough at him in my time) or still thinks taxes are coming down and we can get out of Korea‡ and we ought to fire all the Democrats in Washington and don’t worry, McCarthy-ism will blow over or alternately Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire—well, dear, I am no lady and I argue loudly and lose my temper and it’s disgraceful.”

PoliticsMccarthyism
Book:As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto: Food, Friendship, and the Making of a Masterpiece
Create image

“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.”

FreedomWritersNational SecurityMccarthyismDylan Thomas
Book:Words That Must Somehow Be Said: Selected Essays, 1927-1984
Create image

“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.”

Cold WarInquisitionMccarthyismRed ScareHuacBlacklist
Author:Archibald MacLeish
Create image

“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.”

Cold WarMccarthyismRed ScareTruman Doctrine
Book:The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
Create image