Rosenberg Case Research Articles

Postmodern History Writing—The Preservations and Alterations of History in The Public Burning

Robert Coover’s The Public Burning is a quintessential example of postmodern historiographic metafiction, presenting a bold reinterpretation of the history concerning the Rosenberg case. In this novel, Coover constructed an absurd world that blurs the lines between fictionality and reality, as well as history and text. He tried to tint a sense of historical reality in his fiction, which is a counterpart to the absurdity in real history, showcasing his reflections on social reality. Through this lens, Coover critiques the mechanisms of power and media that shape public perception. Drawing on New Historicism, which emphasizes the interplay between literature and history within broader cultural frameworks, this paper will analyze Coover’s innovative writing techniques in The Public Burning. It will explore his motivations and intentions behind the preservation and alteration of historical narratives, as well as the significance of historiographic metafiction in illuminating the complexities of historical representation and the ultimate impact on societal understanding.

Judge Irving Kaufman, the Liberal Establishment, and the Rosenberg Case

Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, examines a recent biography of Irving R. Kaufman, the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death. Using his own deep research into his parents' case, Meeropol shows how Kaufman's virulent anti-Communism led him to put his thumb on the scales of justice, despite the later progressive liberalism for which he is often lauded. This in turn reveals a key contradiction: "Liberal democracy is fine as long as the basis of the system is not threatened. When it is…'dangerous' people—Communists and other leftists—are dealt with by any means necessary."

THE SECOND RED SCARE: AN ERA OF UNJUSTIFIED FEAR

This essay analyzes how the federal government, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the Rosenberg case both shed light and distorted the threat of the communists to the American public. This work interprets how the Second Red Scare’s public opinion was based on fallacious information.

“A Spy Who Turned His Family In”: Revisiting David Greenglass and the Rosenberg Case

“Doubtless if that [Greenglass] testimony were disregarded, the convictions could not stand.” (Opinion of the US Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)Eth...

Lori Clune, Executing the Rosenbergs: Death & Diplomacy in a Cold War World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 261 pp. $29.95.

Lori Clune, <i>Executing the Rosenbergs: Death &amp; Diplomacy in a Cold War World</i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 261 pp. $29.95.

“Never Losing Faith”: An Analysis of the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, 1951–1953

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested by the FBI in July 1950, put on trial in March 1951, and received the death sentence in April of that year. Their electrocution two years later, on 19 June ...

Securing justice? The Australian campaign to save the Rosenbergs

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs”, recalled Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Others recalled this event differently: as legal murder and a flagrant miscarriage of justice. The electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in June 1953, on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, was unprecedented in the history of the United States and aroused international outrage. Although there are scattered studies of the worldwide protest movement, none has examined the Australian dimension. This paper, therefore, fills a historiographical gap by exploring the genesis, development, and activities of the Australian campaign to pressure the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to grant clemency to the Rosenbergs. That campaign faced several obstacles: one was the liaison and intelligence sharing between the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and US Consular and Embassy officials in Sydney and Canberra and another was the infiltration of its leadership by an important ASIO operative. Drawing on the extensive papers of the New York-based Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, the article will illuminate the close transnational connection between the Australian and American campaigns and challenge the customary characterisation of the Rosenberg clemency committees as “fronts” for the Communist Party or products of Moscow's machinations.

"Strange Fruit": Representations of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in Children's and Young Adult Nonfiction

This essay looks at representations of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in interactive nonfiction for young readers, and both examines the kinds of interactivity of these texts, and considers developments in what we know about the Rosenberg case. The various ways in which these texts invite reader participation, namely in placing readers in the position of jurors for the Rosenberg case, as well as developments such as the 1995 release of the Venona documents, open narrative possibilities that ultimately resist master narrative.

Not Naming Names: Julius Rosenberg’s Decidedly Political Decision

I would like to expand on a couple of areas from Staughton Lynd's thought-provoking essay ("Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?" MR, March 2011) on the case of my parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Though Staughton is too modest to "have a go" at the validity of the analysis presented in Walter Schneir's Final Verdict, I think it is important to note that unlike the authors of Venona, whose work is quoted in the article, Schneir is the first writer to take the most recently released materials from the former Soviet Union and subject them to a close analysis in comparison to what we had always "believed" we knew about the case.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?

For more than forty years, defenders of the Rosenbergs have offered an argument unchanged in its essentials. The prosecution obtained the ultimate punishment…[—and that] punishment…was disproportionate and barbaric. However, the Rosenbergs' defenders now concede that "Julius Rosenberg, code-named 'Antenna' and later 'Liberal,' had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union."… The reason for this turnaround is that in 1995 the federal government made public a series of cables, referred to as the "Venona" messages, which were exchanged between the Soviet government and its operatives in the United States during and after the Second World War.… At the end of the play [Waiting for Lefty] a man runs up the center aisle carrying important information that the title character has been killed. These days, I want to shout out to the audience, as did that man, but with a different message. My imagined dramatic scene goes as follows. "Wait, wait!… Listen to me. Please listen.… You've heard the Thesis of the defense. You've heard the Antithesis of the prosecution. Don't you want to hear the Synthesis?"This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Venona Project and Cold War Espionage

On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death in the electric chair. Their crime? Conspiracy. Convicted of providing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the Rosenbergs were the only people put to death in the United States for espionage during the Cold War. The Rosenberg case illuminates a highly charged debate on recently declassified U. S. government records that bear on the subject of Cold War espionage—the Venona documents. Using these primary sources to introduce students to the general topic of Cold War espionage, and the specific case of the Rosenbergs, provides a fruitful opportunity to address the interpretive nature of history and the evaluation of evidence, in addition to injecting a compelling drama into our narrative of the Cold War. One of the most intriguing aspects of the Cold War relationship between the Americans and the Soviets was the development of vast networks of spies...

Taking Great Cases: Lessons from the Rosenberg Case

The most watched case of the 1952 Supreme Court Term was not Brown v. Board of Education, but the case of convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Brown and Rosenberg demonstrate the Court's different approaches toward taking cases. The Brown Court is often criticized for having done too much; the Rosenberg Court is criticized for not having done enough. Rosenberg divided the country and divided the Court, which repeatedly refused to take the case. Instead, Justice Douglas granted a last-minute stay of execution about whether they had been tried under the wrong federal statute. The Court quickly vacated the stay, and the Rosenbergs were executed the next day. Rosenberg was a Bush v. Gore moment that alienated people who held the Court in high institutional regard. Based on newly discovered documents and interviews with key participants, this Article explains why the Court refused to grant certiorari in the one of the most famous spy cases in American history. It reorients legal scholarship about the case away from Douglas's stay and toward contemporaneous allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and perjury. And it argues that just because some great cases might make bad law does not mean the Court should refuse to take them. It explains the taking great cases theory, applies it to Rosenberg and Bush v. Gore, and contends that, especially in cases about separation of powers and minority rights, the Court should err on the side of granting certiorari in cases of great public interest.

REVIEWING THE ROSENBERGS: DONALD FREED'SINQUESTAND ITS JURORS

It is useful to begin with some immutable facts: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died on the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on Friday, 19 June 1953, and were pronounced dead at 8∶06 and 8∶17p.m., respectively. Nearly seventeen years later, on 23 April 1970, Donald Freed'sInquestopened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. The play about the Rosenberg case ran for eight previews and twenty-eight performances, closing just twenty-three days after its premiere. In its first minutes,Inquestalerted the audience that “every word you will hear or see on this stage is a documented quotation or reconstruction from events.” Freed asserts that he used only primary sources, no matter how “bizarre or poisoned” the words might have seemed, to construct his script. He employed these sources in three distinct ways and, accordingly, called for a divided stage to present the play. In Stage A, the players enacted portions of the 1951–3 court transcripts, whereas Stage B served as a plastic space, where flashback scenes of the characters' out-of-trial lives, pieced from letters, tapes, memos, and other available archival sources, interrupted the legal proceedings. Finally, relying on a large, partitioned screen situated upstage and on voice-over recordings, Freed assembled photographs, newspaper headlines, visual evidence submitted in the courtroom, and quotations from public figures to comment on the Rosenberg saga. The playwright thus toyed with time and place, offering the central story of the trial in a nonlinear manner. He bombarded the audience with projections and sounds to reinforce the reality on which the play was based and, at the same time, to evoke a nightmarish, multimedia world.

Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender by Betty Joseph (review)

802 Reviews to be analysed in terms of York's interest in sophisticated narratology, the relation of fact to fiction, close attention to the specificity of the real world, and a keen desire to report on the condition of their country? The Natural (hardly a narrative so much as a description of characters' sensations, as York argues) is an odd choice to explore the relation of fiction to history. Why not The Fixer? The discussion of Mr Sammler's Planet hardly touches on the Holocaust. Smiley did write a historical novel (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton). Ford's The Sportswriter is only tangentially relevant to the book's subtitle. There is much more to be said about the politics of Doctorow's representation of the Rosenberg case than York allows for,and Blonde (Joyce Carol Oates) would have benefited from some consideration of other discussions of the relation of biography to fiction, and of Marilyn Monroe as icon. Anyone who knows anything about American fiction will find this a deeply disap? pointing book. University of Nottingham Judie Newman Reading The East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender. By Betty Joseph. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. $45 (pbk $18). ISBN 0-226-41203-2 (pbk 0-226-41202-4). In late December 1774 Bishnukumari, the rani of the rich Bengali province of Burdwan , sent a petition to the then governor-general of British India, Warren Hastings. In the petition Bishnukumari, recently widowed, informed the governor-general and his ruling council that she was the victim of a greedy and violent plot concocted by her British East India Company-appointed minister Bridjoo Kishore and John Graham, the revenue collector of the province. Together, they had starved her for a week and by snatching away her young son, compelled her to surrender the family seals, which were required to authenticate all officialdocuments. As a result, they now controlled all her lands, revenues, and in effectthe relationship between Burdwan and the East India Company. The rani's petition split the ruling council, with Hastings and his supporter Richard Barwell dismissing her as a conniving, hysterical subject, but the rest of the members, led by Francis, proposing to conduct a thorough investigation and ordering the accused to respond in detail to the charges. So began the rara's twenty-five-year campaign to keep control of her family's traditional power and her own agency against the overwhelming administrative, legal, economic, military,and cultural firepower of the colonizing forces, all minutely recorded in the archives of the East India Company. What does the trajectory of the rani's fate preserved in the colonial archives tell us about the structural role of gender in the deployment of colonial power? Does a focus on gender in the archives reveal a connection between the literary and historical figurations of colonial power? In many ways, the reading of the rani of Burdwan incident is at the heart of Betty Joseph's fine, nuanced study of what she calls the 'colonial currencies ofgender'. 'Contrary to common perception,' Joseph states in her introduction, 'women are everywhere in the colonial archive, albeit in a fragmented and dispersed way' (p. 3). But it is precisely these partial and incomplete appearances that can provide an opportunity to usher in a new reading of the nature of archives and that of colonialism. The archive's status as one of the pre-eminent sources of colonial power can no longer be doubted aftersuch works as Thomas Richards's The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy ofEmpire (London: Verso, 1993). And by drawing on other seminal works by Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Gauri Vishwanathan, Joseph draws our attention to the existence of another 'unofficial' archive constituted by the literary texts, especially the novel. This second kind of MLR, 100.3, 2005 803 archive, Joseph suggests, 'always challenges the firstone's monopoly over colonial truth, but it is impossible to get at fully' (p. 15). Joseph takes a period of 120 years in which the British East India Company de? veloped its monopoly on South Asian trade into a ruthless colonizing force, and by analysing the exchanges between these two...

The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents

PART ONE: THE AGE OF MCCARTHYISM 1 American Communist Party 2 Growth of the Anti-Communist Network 3 Communism and National Security: Menace Emerges 4 State Steps In: Setting the Anticommunist Agenda 5 Communists in Government and the Big Spy Cases 6 Atomic Espionage 7 Loyalty-Security Program 8 Assault on the Communist Party 9 Destruction of the Communist Fronts and Unions 10 Congressional Committees and Unfriendly Witnesses 11 Redbaiting and Careerism: Joseph McCarthy at Work 12 Congressional Investigations and the Loss of China 13 Anticommunism at the State and Local Levels 14 Blacklists and Other Economic sanctions 15 Liberals and McCarthyism 16 Legacy of McCarthyism 17 Interpreting McCarthyism: A Bibliographical Essay PART TWO: DOCUMENTS 1 World of American Communism: Party Members Talk About Their Experiences 2 From the Communist Party's Perspective: William Z.Foster Looks at the World in 1947 3 Communist Menace: An American Legion View 4 To Quarantine Communism: J.Edgar Hoover Speaks to the American People 5 Communist Spies in the State Department: Emergence of the Hiss Case 6 Atom Spies or Cold War Martyrs? Rosenberg Case 7 Truman Administration Deals with the Communist Menace: 1947 Loyalty-Security Program E.O.9835 8 A Political Test for Employment: Loyalty Security Program in Operation 9 Guilt by Designation: Attorney General's List 10 Communism in Court: Excerpts from the 1949 Smith Act Trial of the Communist Party's Eleven Top Leaders Outlawing the Communist Party: Supreme Court Upholds the Smith Act 12 A Liberal Opposes Anticommunist Legislation: Truman Vetoes the Internal Security Act of 1950 13 Purging the Labour Movement: CIO Expels Its Left-wing Unions 14 Dilemma of an Unfriendly Witness: Lillian Hellman Takes the Fifth Amendment 15 You Now ... ?HUAC Investigates Hollywood 16 I Have in My Hand...:Senator Joseph McCarthy Charges That There Are Communists In the State Department 17 Hollywood Blacklist Begins: Studio Heads Fire the Hollywood Ten 18 Blacklisters' Bible: Red Channels 19 Blacklist In Operation: Testimony From the John Henry Faulk Trial of 1962 20 Unfriendly Witnesses and their Lawyers: HUAC Testimony of Robert Treuhaft 21 A Liberal Deplores the Witch-Hunt: Supreme Court Justice William O.Douglas On The Black Silence of Fear.

Reading the Rosenbergs after Venona

IN THE SUMMER OF 1950, first Julius and then Ethel Rosenberg were arrested on charges of conspiring to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Morton Sobell, a former classmate of Julius', was also arrested and charged with being part of the Rosenberg spy network. Played out against the hysteria generated by the onset of the Korean War, and the Smith Act, and the prosecution of the leadership of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), the Rosenberg trial in March 1951 took a brief two weeks to complete and ended with the jury delivering a guilty verdict. ' On 5 April 1951, the presiding judge, Irving Kaufman, sentenced Morton Sobell to thirty years, and Ethel and Julius to death. Their executions were delayed until 19 June 1953 as various appeals were pursued. These barebones facts do not adequately convey the controversy surrounding the trial, sentencing, and execution of the Rosenbergs. From the time of their trial to the present, the Rosenbergs have been viewed by some as victims of the Cold War and by others as traitors to their country. The prevailing political climate of the US determines which of these interpretations is in the ascendant. During the repressive 1950s, popular and official views of the case coalesced: it was commonly believed that the Rosenbergs were Communist spies who deserved to die. In the more liberal 1960s and 1970s the Rosenbergs were seen as victims of Cold War hysteria, their trial and execution a miscarriage of justice. By the 1980s, in response to a right-wing shift in American politics, the Rosenberg case was once again subject to revisionist impulses. In the new conservative moment, it was argued that Julius Rosenberg was most assuredly guilty of some kind of espionage, even if

Cold War Correspondents: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady, and the Political Economy of Beat Letters

On June 23, 1953, an aspiring poet employed as a copyboy for New York World Telegram wrote a long letter to an old friend in San Jose. The letter ends by reproducing a telegraph sent to President Eisenhower protesting what David Caute has called the midsummer's night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria (62)--the electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, so-called spies: are pathetic, government Will sordid, execution obscene America caught in crucifixion machine only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror (Ginsberg, As Ever 150). Since copyboy was Allen Ginsberg and friend Neal Cassady, letter witnesses a precise intersection of dominant narrative action of early Cold War America and its dissident counternarrative as represented by key figures in emergent Beat movement. However, in context of exemplary character of Beat cultural politics, Ginsberg's telegram of public protest is not just atyp ical--his friends were shocked at him for doing anything outright about his political complaints (Carolyn Cassady, Off Road 222)--but anomalous. What's important is not intersecting of narratives, personal and political, dominant and dissenting, but their correspondence. Defining relation between Cold War and Beat generation along double axis private/public and personal/political, Ginsberg's letter turns out to be a key document, and this unlikely point of departure brings to light a scene that is central to what might be termed political economy of Beat letters. The Rosenberg case was one of a series of national and highly public trials stamped by paranoid style of American politics, a style that responded to global stalemate by waging domestic war on enemies within. This was a total conflict fought on microscopic scale and through inflated symbolic dramas, so that early Cold War years were marked by an unprecedented politicization of culture and by conscription of private life in name of national security. The key to political containment abroad was, then, personal self-containment at home, and Cold War penetration of private by public was as much a matter of patriotic self-policing and voluntary self-censorship as of panoptic state surveillance. In context of this disciplinary and demonizing feature of Cold War culture, hyperbolic escalation of Rosenbergs into evil atom spies--condemned to death by Judge Irving Kaufman for a diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation (qtd. in Caute 67)--represented a definitive es calation of local. The Rosenberg case did not prove that scientific secrets vital to national security had been betrayed. Rather, it proved assumption that an absolute secret existed in first place--what Caute called Myth of Vital Secret--and that it might be given away by what passed for ordinary men and women. Absolute secrets demand absolute secrecy. The Secret therefore motivates all secrets of everyday life and equals their apocalyptically scaled-up master narrative: it symbolized total implications of mundane acts in a war whose front line was, ideally, not just here or there but everywhere and implicating everyone. What turned Rosenberg case into a central document in this politicized field of Cold War culture was its transformation into a particular kind of text-an epistolary text. I refer to Death House Letters, correspondence between Ethel and Julius from their cells in Sing Sing. This notorious exchange served as vital political propaganda for Rosenbergs at time and was then used as an essential text against their intellectual sympathizers in aftermath of their deaths. Here I refer to articles in Commentary and Encounter by Robert Warshaw and Leslie Fiedler respectively, two cultural critics who took it upon themselves to subject Rosenbergs to a second trial, this time by New Critical close readings of their letters. …

A Note on 1930s Nostalgia and The Public Burning

In how many ways does Robert Coover create the quintessential postmodern fictions? Let me not count the ways but simply point out the obvious: Coover, like E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel and Thomas Pynchon in Vineland, pays homage to and parodies the modernist experiments of John Dos Passos in the realm of political fiction. Thus, Coover plays with four of Dos Passos's special tropes: the use of popular culture as continuous background; sympathetic portrayals of the childhoods of his protagonists, who tun more grim as adults; a dependence on trials (Sacco-Vanzetti informs USA as fiercely as the Rosenberg case The Public Burning); and a stubborn authorial dependence on the split political psyche of the 1930s—hope-defeat, commitment-betrayal, left-right, poverty-wealth.

Fictional contamination of hegemonical texts: History, fiction, and the Rosenberg case

Fictional contamination of hegemonical texts: History, fiction, and the Rosenberg case

Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America.

Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America.