Martha Gellhorn Quotes
Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.
Gellhorn, Martha. The View from the Ground. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
The Red Scare had affected much of the country. The House Un-American Activities Committee had frightened much of the country claiming that the Communists had infiltrated the government. But when facts and proof were demanded, all they came up with some workers in the Hollywood film industry who had gone to communist meetings and some who had joined the party before the War when The Great Depression was still plaguing the country. The Hollywood and TV executives caved in to the political demagogues and fired and blacklisted not only the communists but those who refused to testify. The actors and musicians could not work for several years until the country came to its senses, but the screenwriters wrote under false names. At least one Academy award was won that way.
H. S. Tsien was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the major technical leaders of the American Space and Missile Programs. In the Red Scare of the 1950s some nativist conservative members of Congress and others managed to get his security clearance removed on the grounds that he had Communist Sympathies. Like many other American Citizens, he disapproved of the Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-shek even though Chiang was the anti-Communist bulwark in China. Since his work was space and missiles, he had little professional to do and when Chiang Kai-shek was defeated in China and pushed to Taiwan, H. S. Tsien ended up going to China and starting their rocketry program. (He is known as the “Father of Chinese Rocketry”). He is the only scientist who was an early leader in the space programs of two different nations. Kimball, whose naval missiles were all in part developed by H. S. Tsien’s work, was furious, but at the time with McCarthyism riding high, his criticism was met by accusations that he was a Communist sympathizer.
Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century.
