There’s nothing quite like some good old Cold War hysteria. The Red Scare and McCarthyism had spread across the United States with aggressive fervor in the early 1950s, leading to many communist supporters losing their jobs and some even losing their lives. This brings me to the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, highly publicized and filled with espionage, conspiracy and lies.
On March 6, 1951, the Rosenberg case began, lasting one month and resulting in their executions.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began as high school sweethearts, both first-generation Americans with parents who immigrated from Russia. From adolescence to adulthood, they were passionate members of the Communist Party, which would cause them to be fired from their positions in the government in the 1940s. However, aside from being active members of the party, their work was not a danger to the U.S. government until they became familiar with the Manhattan Project.
David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, joined the army in 1943 and was assigned to the secret Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tenn., without knowledge of what was being worked on. Greenglass was later transferred to Los Alamos, N.M. in 1944, after having dinner with Julius, Greenglass’s wife Ruth traveled to New Mexico and told her husband that Julius had advised her that Greenglass was working on the atom bomb.
It was over dinner sometime later, in New York City, that Julius would attempt to convince Greenglass to aid him in transferring information to the Soviets, and in January 1945, he did just that. What came after were the actions of a complicated spy ring involving different players, passing information that would allow Russia to develop the atom bomb in 1949.
Getting into all the details of the Rosenberg case would be too lengthy to write in one column, but if you are interested in learning more, the FBI.gov article, “Atom Spy Case/Rosenbergs,” would be a great place to start.
After the announcement about the bomb from the Soviets, the U.S. began its investigation into potential espionage, and members of the Rosenberg spy ring were arrested one by one. At the time, it was difficult to discover the truth of it all; the Rosenbergs denied any espionage, with other members of the ring pleading guilty in hopes of a reduced sentence. Ultimately, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death row on April 6, 1951, despite pleading not guilty.
The scope of the espionage is still not entirely known today. The release of declassified documents from the Russian government has shown that Julius was indeed a spy, and that Ethel perhaps knew of her husband’s involvement but never actively participated.
Greenglass similarly corroborated that idea in 2001 when he admitted in a television interview that he had lied about his sister being involved in hopes of receiving a lesser sentence and keeping his wife out of prison. As a result, it is difficult to say how much of the story we have is true and what was fabricated during the trial, given the environment and media frenzy surrounding it.
The nature of the Rosenberg trial and the hysteria surrounding it is truly representative of the Red Scare. It was neighbor against neighbor, with many afraid to speak out for what they believed in. Hopefully, this era will serve as a lesson to us in the future so that, as a country, we don’t follow a path of letting our fear and anger dictate our decisions.