Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the first and only American civilians to be executed for espionage, electrocuted at the Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, NY, 62 years ago, on June 19, 1953. The couple was, according to the New York Times, “stoic and tight-lipped to the end … .” They “went to their deaths with a composure that astonished the witnesses.”
We should take a moment on the 19th to remember the Rosenbergs. Their murders should be remembered as much for the lives lost as for what their state-sanctioned killings reveal about how far the U.S. government will go to destroy those persecuted as national-security threats.
The Rosenbergs were ostensibly executed for being spies for the Soviet Union (SU). Julius was a low-level Soviet operative, a currier of non-threatening U.S. atomic-energy information. Ethel was a former Communist Party member, Brooklyn housewife and mother of their two boys; she was sympathetic to her husband’s activities but likely played no role in them.
They were victims of Cold War hysteria, spectacles in the exercise of power. They were executed for refusing to participate in the public ritual of contrition, of bowing in loyal subjugation. They were killed for refusing to name names, identifying other alleged communists. The Times reported, “Both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, however, maintained they were completely innocent and had nothing to confess.”
The Cold War is long over and the worst of the post-9/11 terrorist hysteria is dissipating. Two recent developments are illustrative of this changing political climate: (i) the defeat the reauthorization of the Patriot Act and (ii) the widespread popular opposition to recommitting a large number of U.S. ground troops to Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State. A new anti-imperialism, anti-interventionism promoted by the libertarian right and the progressive left seems to be growing among Americans.