Fifty Years Ago, the Government Kept the Sabbath

Chris O'Carroll

And speaking of dying of shock. The occasion was a 50th anniversary commemoration of June 19, 1953, the day the U.S. government killed Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in Sing Sing’s electric chair. The 19th was a Thursday this year, but it fell on a Friday back then. The electrocutions were moved up to just before sundown so as not to profane the Jewish sabbath. The Cold War crusade against the international communist conspiracy, much like today’s war on terrorism, was noted for its ethnic and religious sensitivity.

The venue for the memorial gathering was Manhattan’s City Center on West 55th St., a little way uptown from Union Square, where several thousand Rosenberg supporters and death penalty opponents had demonstrated on the night of the executions. The City Center’s elevators were out of commission, so some folks who were old enough to have been at Union Square in 1953 had to be spry enough in 2003 to make it up what seemed like several thousand commemorative flights of stairs to their balcony seats.

Even without Seeger and Sarandon on the stage, the event boasted a pretty good cast. Tovah Feldshuh (currently starring as Golda Meir in a one-woman show at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre) and Peter Yarrow (appearing sans Paul & Mary) read from the Rosenbergs’ prison letters. Bill T. Jones danced. Martín Espada read a couple of poems. (If you’re not familiar with Espada’s work, please consider this a recommendation. He’s one political poet who writes real poetry, not just polemical tracts in verse form.) Harry Belafonte read a letter from Mumia Abu Jamal on Pennsylvania’s death row. Ronnie Gilbert and Holly Near treated the crowd to an assortment of folk classics and activist anthems. Gilbert, who sang leaning on a cane, is a little bit younger than the 84-year-old Pete Seeger, but only a little bit. She and Pete used to perform together in the Weavers, a folk quartet known for labor and civil rights songs back in the Cold War days when rabid nationalism was in flower and an artist could be branded a traitor for dissenting from the military-industrial party line. Thank God nothing like that could happen today.

The evening at the City Center was a way to bear witness that we haven’t forgotten. The show was also a money-raising event for the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a small, specialized charitable organization founded in 1990 by attorney Robert Meeropol. Author of An Execution in the Family and co-author with his older brother, economist Michael Meeropol, of We Are Your Sons, Robert was one of the two boys orphaned as the sun set on that Friday in 1953. They both took the last name of the family friends who adopted them, and when you hear either of them say “my father” and “my mother,” you have to pay careful attention to the context to sort out whether they’re talking about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Abel and Anne Meeropol. (One item on the City Center program was Janiece Thompson’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song authored by Abel Meeropol. The brothers can trace their politics and their activism to both sets of parents.)

According to its mission statement, “The Rosenberg Fund for Children was established to provide for the educational and emotional needs of children whose parents have suffered because of their progressive activities and who, therefore, are no longer able to provide fully for their children. The RFC also provides grants for the educational and emotional needs of targeted activist youth.” ()

In practice, that translates into money for lessons, educational supplies, therapists, camp - you know, kid stuff. Robert Meeropol is mindful of all the nurturing he and his brother received in the 1950s and ’60s from an extended family of activist friends and supporters. Through the Rosenberg Fund for Children, he can pass on the same practical expressions of love and concern to subsequent generations of children. In its first 13 years, the RFC has pooled a lot of small contributions and given out grants totaling $1.1 million. Petty cash by the standards of Big Philanthropy, but enough to make a difference in a few lives.

As acts of official barbarity go, June 19, 1953 took a relatively small toll. Heck, more people died at Kent State 17 years later than in the Sing Sing death chamber that night. To say nothing of Wounded Knee, My Lai, or civilian casualties in Kabul and Baghdad. Michael Meeropol has said, most recently in an interview with The Boston Globe, but on other occasions as well, that he was angrier about the Vietnam war than about the deaths of his parents. Both brothers have said many times that dwelling on the evils of the past does no good unless it somehow helps us to contend with the evils of the present and lay the groundwork for a better future. One theme of the City Center event was that we were there not to mourn martyrdom but to celebrate activism.

When I talk about the Rosenberg/Meeropol family and the RFC, I do so with no pretence of dispassion. Although I’ve rarely met Robert, and can’t claim to be acquainted with him except as a public figure, Michael and I have known each other for years. His wife and mine were in graduate school together and both became close friends with a history professor whose theatre professor husband is a longtime mentor and friend of mine. When the six of us get together for dinner, I’m the only one in the room without a doctorate. They let me sit at the big table, though, and they’re real nice about talking in one- and two-syllable words. We’ve watched each other’s children grow to adulthood, which is more than Ethel and Julius got to do with their family friends. These days we’re all watching with admiration as Michael’s writer and filmmaker daughter, Ivy Meeropol, puts the finishing touches on an HBO documentary about her grandparents.

The cruelties and excesses of the McCarthy era are, if not as numberless as the stars and the sands, certainly too numerous to detail here. Yet the Rosenberg case stood out then and it stands out still today. Dalton Trumbo survived to write Spartacus. Alger Hiss lived into his 90s. Ruined careers and blighted lives are not trivial concerns, but for raw inhumanity, no Cold War injustice surpasses the Rosenberg executions.

It was once an article of faith on the American left that both Rosenbergs were entirely innocent, railroaded for being Jews, erstwhile Communist Party members, and activists on behalf of labor, civil rights, and other subversive causes. Today, in light of intelligence data that has become available since the demise of the Soviet Union, many who decry the executions are willing to concede that Julius might indeed have been involved in pro-Soviet espionage efforts. However, nobody of any intellectual integrity gives credence to the government claim that he gave Moscow “the secret of the atomic bomb.” All the physics knowledge required to design an A-bomb was available to any 1950s scientist who took the trouble to stay up to date with the literature in the field. There was no secret. Fifty years later, everybody from Osama bin Laden to the geeky kid at the high school science fair knows the “secret.” But al Qaeda is still hitting its targets with old fashion chemical explosives, and kids are bringing mere guns to school. It turns out that knowing how to build a nuke is a long way from possessing the economic and technological wherewithal to put that not-so-secret knowledge to use. And nothing Julius Rosenberg was accused of passing to the Soviets could have moved them an inch closer to bomb-making capability.

The same Soviet intelligence material that seems to implicate Julius also supports the conclusion that Ethel was as innocent as her supporters have always maintained. Her arrest was a cold-blooded tactic to coerce a confession from her husband. Her conviction was based on perjured testimony. And her death sentence (like her husband’s) was a piece of psychological torture intended to thumbscrew the couple into informing on fellow leftists. As one venomously anti-Rosenberg press account of the executions put it, Julius and Ethel were killed because they “would not reveal their accomplices in the great and probably continuing atomic espionage activity.” (It’s not clear why the spy work was probably continuing if the Soviets had already acquired the secret of the bomb, but with national security at stake, it would be un-American to quibble.)

There were more than 2,700 of us at the City Center for the June 19 event; we were just one seat shy a capacity crowd by the organizers’ count. Evidently, the country is still plagued by a few malcontents who are unaware that we live under a freedom-loving regime that would never abuse its power to deprive people of life and liberty. If Pete Seeger had been on stage that night, we probably would have done more singing along than we did, but Ronnie Gilbert, Holly Near, and Peter Yarrow did a pretty good job of getting us to raise our voices with theirs on such familiar numbers as “This Little Light of Mine” and “Good Night Irene.” It was the latter song, led by Gilbert, that closed the program, ending the evening on an upbeat note in keeping with the theme of celebration, not mourning.

You might have to wait another 25 or 50 years for a similar anniversary gathering, but you have until July 20 to catch a related art exhibit, “We Remember: Art and the Rosenbergs,” at the Puffin Room gallery in Soho. (http://www.puffinroom.org)

Miscellaneous notes on earlier columns:

Last month (“Never Bet Against the Avalanche”), I noted the demise of New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain and predicted that the disappearance of that icon would quickly be compensated by the appearance of a new Virgin Mary apparition “in a bakery item or the whorls of a tree stump.” I’m here today to acknowledge that I got that one wrong. The latest apparition of Our Lady to attract crowds of pilgrims (starting the second week in June) has actually occurred in a hospital window in Milton, Massachusetts. Secular humanist spoilsports are talking about effects of light, chemical reactions, and moisture trapped between panes of glass. But rosary-fingering throngs in the hospital parking lot are unmoved by such nay saying.

In April (“The Law Is an Arse”), I did a little bit better when I hedged my bets by forecasting “a strong likelihood” that the Supreme Court would overturn its idiotic 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision and rule that state laws against oral and anal sex are violations of the constitutional right to privacy. In a 6-3 ruling announced on June 26, the Court did just that. In a dissent described by many commentators as “scathing,” although “loony” and “petulant” might be more appropriate adjectives, Antonin Scalia railed that the decision was an abomination because it would, among other evils, invalidate state laws against fornication and masturbation. He listed whacking off and pre-marital screwing around along with bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, adultery, bestiality and obscenity as activities that he believes can no longer be outlawed now that Bowers v. Hardwick has been overturned. For some reason, he did not include contraception and interracial marriage on his list, although his ideologically skewed reading of the Constitution stands squarely opposed to landmark privacy decisions that have upheld the right to engage in those once widely forbidden practices. The Supreme Court, Scalia groused in a couple of especially revealing passages, “has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda” and “has taken sides in the culture war.” He might not be so het up if only they’d taken his side.

Chris O'Carroll