Notes from the Lampert Library
Some of you must remember scrambling to hide under school desks or running to find a place to sit against the corridor walls, bent over with your head in your lap. Today, this “duck and cover” drill seems bizarre but in the early 1950s, when the shriek of the air raid siren rang through the school, we kids and our teachers knew what to do to keep ourselves safe.
On June 19, 1953 one of the saddest days in the fight against Communism and the Red Scare occurred. I remember seeing the headline in the local paper although I was just a young kid. That was the day that Ethel Rosenberg and her husband Julius were executed for spying and passing the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviets.
Ethel was only the second American woman put to death by the Federal government. She could have saved herself, even at the last moment, by admitting the couple’s guilt, but she insisted on innocence to the end. Ethel’s son Michael Meeropol said “Her response was to stand by him and stand by that incredible commitment. And that way…we get to grow up respecting and loving them.”
They were Jews; we were Jews. They had two kids around the same age as my brother and I were. How could a mother be executed? And what did it mean that they were Jews? After all, many of the kids in my class thought that I had killed Jesus. And now these other Jews had betrayed the U.S. to her archenemy.
Many years have passed since those headlines. People still debate the Rosenberg case. Although even their sons now believe that there was some spying going on, few still believe that what the Rosenbergs did caused any long term harm. They were really quite small fish in the spy pond.
So why were they-especially Ethel, a woman and mother of young children-executed? There has been much speculation, research, and conjecture. Maybe it was the times; or it was the judge; it could have been Ethel’s unsympathetic expression, stoicism and lack of tears that convinced the jury that she loved Communism more than she loved her family.
Ethel and Julius, like many young immigrant or first generation Jewish Americans of the time, were committed Communists. The American Communist party had lofty goals such as fighting Fascism and racism and supporting unions. These goals spoke to that generation who saw Fascism on the rise in Europe.
The Rosenbergs were arrested in 1950; Ethel was turned in by her younger brother David Greenglass, who worked on the top secret Manhattan Project in both Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. He may have been trying to protect his own family. Greenglass later admitted to lying about some information.
The case so inflamed everyone that Irving Kaufman, the presiding judge, called the Rosenbergs’ crime “ worse than murder…causing the Communist aggression in Korea.” In effect, he accused the couple of causing the Korean War.
Jewish organizations distanced themselves from the Rosenbergs and their cause. There were already many Jews accused of being Communists or fellow travelers and organizations did not want to be associated in any direct way with Communism or Communists. The American Jewish Committee even endorsed the guilty verdict. Pleas for clemency were turned down by Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
The Rosenbergs, their trial and execution became part of plays (Kushner’s Angels in America), the subject of novels (Doctorow’s Book of Daniel), the focus of documentaries (Ivy Meeropol’s Heir to an Execution), biographies and legal studies. The Rosenbergs’ sons, who were adopted and changed their names to Meeropol, even wrote about their parents.
Nothing, of course, will change history. But looking back it’s easy to see how hysteria and fear can influence decision making and objectivity.
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