On
April 5, 1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for nuclear espionage. There was never much doubt that
Julius, an electrical engineer, had
been a Soviet agent since at least
1942 when he was in the Army Signal
Corps at the Engineering
Laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey. During that time, he passed
on secret research on electronics, communications, radar,
and guided missile controls to the Soviets, then American Allies against the Nazis. Julius was fired in 1945 when his pre-war membership in the Communist Party surfaced but remained
an intelligence agent charged with
building a spy network with
particular interest in the super
secret development of the atomic
bomb.
The extent of his wife Ethel’s involvement in all of this was open to question. Some believed she
was completely innocent and had been
duped by her husband. Others believed she was marginally involved
as a sometimes courier and errand runner. The most damning
accusation was simply that she typed
up some notes on the development of the implosion-type atomic bomb—the Fat
Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. But she did connect her husband to her brother in law David Greenglass who was
working on the top-secret Manhattan Project
at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
in New Mexico.
When
Greenglass was arrested for stealing atomic secrets, he implicated his brother
in law saying he had passed documents to him on a Manhattan Street Corner. Shortly
before the Rosenbergs went on trial Greenglass and his wife Ruth, Ethel’s sister, suddenly changed
their story and claimed that the information had been passed in the Rosenberg apartment and they had watched Ethel
type up Greenglass’s handwritten notes. That was enough for Federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Ethel as well as
her husband.
Ethel,
the mother of two young sons, was
always a more sympathetic character than
her husband even as she loyally stood by
his side. Not only did she refuse to testify against him,
but she echoed his stand on the Fifth Amendment against
self-incrimination and refusal to either acknowledge membership in the Communist Party or name Party associates and/or
other members of the spy ring. Her participation still seemed so limited
that almost no one expected that she would receive the death penalty. And yet she did.
Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers later said that
the death sentence was imposed on Ethel in
an effort to extract a
full confession from Julius, but “She called our bluff.”
There
may have also been the subtle effects
or anti-Semitism—or the fear of stirring up anti-Semitism during the already superheated hysteria of the Post-war Red Scare. Both the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol and Judge Irving Kaufman were Jewish. Another rising young Federal prosecutor, Roy Cohn, soon to be notorious as the ruthless chief council to Senator
Joseph McCarthy, claimed that he had influence
over both men and convinced them that unless both were found guilty and
given the maximum sentence a wave of anti-Semitism would sweep the U.S. and fundamentally endanger Jews.
Of course, Cohn was a notorious liar,
and his account may not be reliable.
In
this country outside of the besieged far
left the Rosenbergs got little support. Communists,
“fellow travelers” and the labor left were all under heavy attack and the well-oiled defense committees with decades of experience in
high profile cases were both overwhelmed with cases of persecution and
themselves the targets of investigations and prosecutions. The
liberal American Civil Liberties Union was
falling all over itself to get disentangled from the Communists and
flatly refused to support defense efforts.
No major American Jewish
organization including the Anti-Defamation
League of B’nai B’rith spoke out for them and many publicly denounced them. Only
the most steadfastly loyal of the
old Jewish Labor left, especially the
New York needle trades kept up the motions of defense work.
In Europe, especially France, where virtually the entire artistic and literary
intelegencia was Marxist of one
stripe or another, the Rosenbergs became a great cause celeb. Charges that they were victims of
anti-Semitism were widespread and their case was compared to the famous French travesty of justice, the Dreyfus Affair. Jean-Paul Sartre scathingly wrote that
the case was:
…a legal lynching
which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have
quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic,
witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices—we are here getting to the point: your
country is sick with fear ... you are afraid of the shadow of your own bomb.
International
artists including Pablo Picasso,
Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and writers Nelson Algren, Bertolt Brecht,
and Dashiell Hammett were all vocal
in the defense movement. Albert Einstein, who probably knew that
the Rosenbergs had not given the Soviets anything of real value, lent
his enormous prestige to the effort and staunchly anti-Communist Pope Pius XII even made a direct appeal to President Dwight Eisenhower for clemency. Ike was
unmoved.
He refused to intervene.
Finally,
after all appeals had been exhausted Julius and the Ethel were transferred to New York state’s Sing Sing prison because
the Federal Bureau of Prisons no longer operated any means of execution. On Friday June 19, 1953 at 8 pm—before sundown marked the beginning of the
Jewish sabbath,
Julius was strapped into the electric
chair and died after the first jolt.
Ethel proved tougher. Her heart was still beating after three shocks. Two more needed to be applied after which witnesses saw a puff of smoke escape from her skull.
In retrospect, America turned out to be pretty queasy about executing a
woman. Ethel was, after all, the only
the second woman ever executed by
the Feds. The other was Mary Surat whose Maryland inn had been used as a meeting place by John Wilks Booth and his accomplices in the plot to kill not
only Abraham Lincoln but the Vice President and Secretaries of War and State.
As
the Cold War dragged on and other high profile Soviet spies escaped the death penalty—some traded
in spy swaps—the nagging
suspicion that anti-Semitism may have played a part after all. The Rosenbergs were the only spies executed.
By
the early 1960’s legal scholars were
swinging to the opinion that, as
one put it, they were guilty, but lynched meaning that the evidence did not support the severe penalty and that there were
several improprieties by the government in their rush to get the desired out-come.
Meanwhile
the Rosenberg’s two orphaned sons were
adopted and raised by a sympathetic family. When they grew up Michael and Robert Meeropol,
spent years trying to prove their parent’s innocence including co-authoring
the widely read We Are Your Sons: The Legacy of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in
1975.
After
the fall of Communism in the
Soviet Union, KGB files revealed
that Julius Rosenberg was, indeed, at the center of a large and active
espionage ring and that Ethel was rather marginally involved but aware of the
activities. But the sketches and notes
on the Fat Boy bomb turned out to have little or no value to the Soviet
atomic program.
The
sons now acknowledge that but maintain their parents did not deserve to
die. Robert wrote an additional memoir, An Execution in the Family: One
Son’s Journey in 2003. Michael’s
daughter Ivy Meeropol directed a 2004 documentary about her grandparents,
Heir
to an Execution, which was featured
at the Sundance Film Festival.
The
case has been explored in several cultural media. E.L. Doctorow’s 1971 novel The Book of Daniel was
based on the case as seen through the
eyes of a fictional son and
was made into 1983 film Daniel.
Another novel, Robert
Coover’s The Public Burning, also
covered the case and was partially narrated by Richard Nixon. In
Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play
Angels
in America the ghost of
Ethel Rosenberg haunts Roy Cohn, now a bitter repressed
homosexual dying of AIDS. The
main character in Sylvia Plath’s novel, The
Bell Jar, is morbidly fascinated
with the Rosenberg case. Bob Dylan wrote one of his early ballads about them.
And
many poets have also been inspired. But
we will start with Ethel herself, penned
for her sons after being transferred to Sing Sing to await execution.
If We Die
You shall know, my sons, shall know
why we leave the song unsung,
the book unread, the work undone
to rest beneath the sod.
Mourn no more, my sons, no more
why the lies and smears were framed,
the tears we shed, the hurt we bore
to all shall be proclaimed.
Earth shall smile, my sons, shall
smile
and green above our resting place,
the killing end, the world rejoice
in brotherhood and peace.
Work and build, my sons, and build
a monument to love and joy,
to human worth, to faith we kept
for you, my sons, for you.
—Ethel
Rosenberg
Ossining. N.Y., January 24, 1953
I
love this piece by a semi-anonymous high
school student named Eileen from
Troy, Michigan who contributing as Misseilli has had over 100 verses
published in the online version of Teen Ink and several selected for
their print editions. I can see why. I loved the poem but was taken aback by the reference
to heaven, which did not seem to jibe
with the Rosenbergs’ good Marxist
atheism. Then in my research for this blog entry and found the report
of the puff of smoke over Ethel’s head at her execution. Ah, Grasshopper,
you are deeper than your years.
Rosenberg
The lightning tore through
The guilt and the shame,
Scorching the veins until
They were burnt black.
The fire serrated the lungs
But the heart stood whole
And ebbed the storm that
Ravaged the rosy brain.
Peace slipped through the
Pores and before she felt it,
They saw her soul rise from
Her skull and sway the
Empty steel rafters that hid
Heaven from men’s eyes.
—Misseilli
Adrienne Rich was 82 when she died in California in 2012, a long way from the life of privilege and learning into which she was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. She had gone on to be one of the pioneering female voices of the Beats and a prophetic feminist voice, poet, and activist. In For Ethel Rosenberg, she richly entwined personal memoir with the sacrifice of the woman who fascinates her.
For Ethel Rosenberg ·
convicted, with her husband, of “conspiracy
to commit espionage”;
killed in the electric chair June 19, 1953
Europe 1953:
throughout my
random sleepwalk the words
scratched
on walls, on pavements painted over railway arches Liberez les Rosenberg!
Escaping from
home I found home everywhere:
the Jewish question, Communism
marriage itself
a
question of loyalty or punishment
my
Jewish father writing me letters of seventeen pages finely inscribed
harangues
questions of loyalty and punishment
One week before my wedding
that couple gets the chair the volts grapple her, don't
kill her fast enough
Liberez les Rosenberg!
I hadn’t realized
our family arguments were so important
my narrow
understanding of crime of punishment
no language for this torment
mystery
of that marriage always both faces
on every front page in the world
Something so shocking so unfathomable
it must be pushed aside
II
She sank however into my soul.
A weight of sadness
I hardly can register how deep
her memory has sunk that wife and mother
like so many
who
seemed to get nothing out of any of it except her children
that daughter of a family like so many
needing its
female monster
she,
actually wishing to be an
artist
wanting out of poverty possibly also
really wanting
revolution
that woman strapped in the chair
no fear and no regrets
charged by posterity
not with selling secrets to the
Communists but with wanting to distinguish herself
being a bad daughter a bad mother
And I walking to
my wedding
by the same token a bad daughter
a bad sister my forces focused
on that hardly revolutionary effort Her life and death the
possible ranges of disloyalty
so painful so unfathomable they must be
pushed aside ignored for years
III
Her mother
testifies against her Her brother testifies against her After her death
she becomes a natural prey for
pornographers her death itself a scene
her body sizzling half strapped
whipped like a sail
She
becomes the extremist victim described
nonetheless as rigid of will
what are her politics by then no one knows
Her figure sinks
into my soul a drowned statue
sealed in lead
For years it has lain there
unabsorbed first as part of that dead couple
on the front pages of the world the week
I gave myself in marriage
then slowly severing
drifting apart a separate death a
life unto itself
no longer the Rosenbergs
no longer the
chosen scapegoat the family monster
till I hear how she sang a prostitute to sleep
in the Women's House of Detention
Ethel Greenglass
Rosenberg would you have marched to take back the night collected signatures
for battered women who kill What would you have to tell us
would you have burst the net
IV
Why do I even want to call her up
to console my pain (she feels no
pain at all) why do I wish to put
such questions
to ease myself
(she feels no pain at all
she
finally burned to death like so many) why all this exercise of hindsight?
Since if I imagine her at all I have
to imagine first
the pain
inflicted on her by women
her mother testifies against her
her sister-in-law testifies against her
and how she sees it
not the impersonal forces not the
historical reasons why they might have hated her
strength
If
I have held her at arm’s length till now if I have still believed it was
my loyalty, my punishment at stake
if I dare imagine her surviving
I must be fair to what she must have
lived through I must allow her to be at
last
political in her ways not in mine
her urgencies perhaps impervious to me defining
revolution as she defines it
or, bored to the marrow of her bones with “politics”
bored with the vast boredom of long pain
small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties
liking her room her private life living alone perhaps
no one you could interview maybe filling a notebook
herself with secrets she has never sold
—Adrienne Rich
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