Howard Fast Quotes

Now, I feel that if somebody looks through all the numbers through all those years, they will find one for Julius Rosenberg, and it is worth finding if it is such an important issue.

I'm a Red-baiter; I'm a witch-hunter if the witches are Communists.

The crusade against Communism was even more imaginary than the specter of Communism.

My children, as long as you live, the shadow of the Hiss Case will brush you. In every pair of eyes that rests on you, you will see pass, like a cloud passing behind a woods in winter, the memory of your father - dissembled in friendly eyes, lurking in unfriendly eyes.

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

Joe McCarthy and his Senate hearings were like witch-hunts.

I was studying American politicians who were searching - allegedly - for American communists because it would put them on the front pages of the papers in their home towns.

Annie Lee Moss was a black woman who worked for the Army as a code clerk in the Pentagon. She was identified by an undercover agent of the FBI as a member of the Communist Party. Moss denied it, the Democrats sprang to her defense, and she has been treated ever since as an innocent victim of McCarthy.

Are you now or have you ever been a member of a Godless conspiracy controlled by a foreign power?

If communism in Hollywood is now mythical, it is only because this Committee conducted three investigations to bring it about. The industry itself did certainly not accomplish this.

In the McCarthy era, people were losing their jobs--there was this blanket feeling that no one should not say anything about anything, McCarthy and his people were just sitting around calling meetings, calling up people before them, and ruining their lives.

“[T]he manufactured image of the domestic Communist, cultivated and propagated by [J. Edgar] Hoover, the Catholic Church, the American Legion, and political opportunists, made of Communists something less than full humans, full citizens, fully rights-endowed …

People are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo.

It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go.

No bolder seditionist ever moved amongst us as Senator Joseph McCarthy.

So much of the bitterness that the term 'McCarthyism' evokes refers to the probe begun in New Jersey in the summer of 1953 - both in the laboratories of Fort Monmouth and in the surrounding communities of Red Bank and Belmar, where some of the best scientists and engineers in America worked.

My grandfather was an American Communist, and he married my grandmother, who was a Russian Communist. During the 1950s, the McCarthy era, my family was viciously persecuted.

I knew people who were real Communists but never made it onto the blacklist and kept on working. There were also people reputed to be Communists who weren't.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

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.

There is no doubt that America is now the prime target of international communism.

In the atmosphere existing in this country today, the charge that someone is a Communist is so common that hardly anyone active in public life escapes it.

McCarthyism

In the immortal words of Dean Acheson, I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy.

Attacking communists was generally nothing more than a smokescreen for attacking the CIO.