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Workers Vanguard No. 1026
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14 June 2013
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From the Archives of Marxism
19 June 1953: The Cold War Execution of the Rosenbergs
Militant, 29 June 1953
Sixty years ago this month, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Jewish
Communists from New York, were murdered by the U.S. capitalist state for the
alleged crime of spying for the Soviet Union. Against the backdrop of
bloodcurdling cries to “fry the Reds,” the Rosenbergs were subjected to a
grotesque show trial on charges of “conspiring” to pass the “secret of the
atomic bomb” to the USSR during World War II. The frame-up featured perjured
testimony and concocted evidence as well as the stoking of anti-Semitism. With
the trial coming at the height of McCarthyite anti-Communist hysteria, this was
enough to secure a conviction.
Judge Irving Kaufman consulted with the prosecution before
condemning the Rosenbergs to death. During sentencing, he took the opportunity
to accuse the Rosenbergs of treason—defined by the Constitution as giving aid
and comfort to the enemy in wartime—even though the Soviet Union was an ally of
the U.S. during World War II! While liberal and social-democratic apologists for
the government have come forward over the years claiming to “prove” the
Rosenbergs’ guilt, these attempts have all fallen apart under the slightest
scrutiny.
As the Militant (27 October 1952), published by the
then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), wrote in an editorial following
the Supreme Court’s refusal to review the conviction: “The Rosenberg decision
above all else was an act of ruling-class terror by a state that is preparing a
war of world conquest, a war directed primarily against the Soviet Union.... It
was far more a political than a spy trial. There is no other way to explain why
the Rosenbergs, who were charged with playing the least important role of all
those involved in the atomic espionage, should alone have been given the
ultimate sentence.”
For Marxists, the central issue in the Rosenberg case was the
defense of the Soviet workers state against imperialism. The U.S. had emerged
from World War II as the predominant imperialist power, with a monopoly on
atomic weapons. The main impediment to its world designs was the Soviet Union,
which had issued out of the 1917 seizure of power by the Bolshevik-led working
class in Russia. Despite its subsequent degeneration under Stalinist
bureaucratic misrule, the USSR continued to embody key social gains of the
October Revolution, centrally a planned economy and collectivized property. It
was an urgent task of the working class to defend the Soviet Union—just as we
Spartacists today defend the bureaucratically deformed workers states of China,
Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.
Julius Rosenberg was arrested less than a year after the first
Soviet A-bomb test threw the U.S. rulers into a frenzy. As we wrote in “They’re
Trying to Kill the Rosenbergs All Over Again” (WV No. 340, 21 October
1983):
“Those who helped the Russians achieve nuclear capacity did a
great service for humanity. Had U.S. imperialism maintained a nuclear monopoly,
it would have meant historic defeats for the international proletariat. It would
have meant nuclear destruction from Southeast Asia to Latin America. Who can
doubt that U.S. imperialism would have destroyed Vietnam totally with nuclear
weapons if they did not fear a retaliatory Soviet strike? Would Cuba exist today
if the U.S. had a nuclear monopoly?”
The late 1940s and ’50s in the U.S. was a time of widespread
persecution of Communists, labor militants, other leftists and also some
liberals classified as “Communist sympathizers.” Witchhunters such as Senator
Joseph McCarthy destroyed the careers of such “subversives” in all walks of
American life, but especially the labor movement. Some 25,000 union members,
many of them key leaders of the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s, were purged,
in some cases leading to the destruction of whole unions. Thousands more were
tracked down by the FBI and driven from their jobs, only to continue to be
hounded and witchhunted due to employer blacklists.
While belatedly coming to the defense of the Rosenbergs amid the
Cold War atmosphere of repression, the SWP correctly recognized the centrality
of the Soviet Union in the Rosenberg case and hailed the USSR’s nuclear
capacity. In contrast, most of the rest of the left in the United States refused
to defend the Rosenbergs. This included their comrades in the leadership of the
Communist Party (CP), who did not even mention the case until after the trial
was over and the death sentence had already been handed down. When the CP did
take up the case, it neither denounced the political frame-up nor defended the
Rosenbergs as victims of the capitalist state. The Daily Worker (6 April
1951) merely accused the government of “bad faith” similar to its refusal “to
negotiate peace in Korea,” where the U.S. imperialists and their allies were
fighting a war against the North Korean and Chinese workers states.
In recent years, the American nuclear cowboys have raised a hue and
cry over the efforts of North Korea to develop and test nuclear weapons and
adequate delivery systems—capacity that Marxists support. The U.S. imperialists
have also played up Iran’s alleged nuclear program to impose withering sanctions
to the detriment of its working masses and poor. In fact, possession of nuclear
weapons is the only true measure of national sovereignty in today’s world, as
Saddam Hussein, who did not possess “weapons of mass destruction,” learned the
hard way.
The article we reprint below appeared in the Militant (29
June 1953) following the Rosenbergs’ execution. It highlights how the
anti-Communist trade-union bureaucracy, which sealed its hold on the labor
movement through the red purges, was deaf to appeals on behalf of the
Rosenbergs. Following in their footsteps, today’s labor statesmen widely embrace
the “war on terror,” the latest crusade undertaken by the capitalist rulers
after the fading of the “Red menace” with the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary
destruction of the USSR. The vast expansion of the repressive powers of the
state in the name of fighting terrorism is, as with the anti-Soviet McCarthyite
frenzy, ultimately aimed at the working class, the potential gravediggers of the
capitalist system. For more on the case, see “Hail the Heroic Rosenbergs!”
(WV No. 923, 24 October 2008).
* * *
The smell of the auto-da-fe—the burning of heretics—hangs over the
land. With the legal murder on June 19 of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the modern
inquisition has sent its first two victims to the stake.
Their inquisitors kept the Rosenbergs on the wrack for weeks and
months, offering the condemned couple their lives in return for “recantations”
and “confessions.” The Rosenbergs declared their innocence to the end. They
refused to “abjure” themselves and spurned the role of stoolpigeons and
perjurers as demanded by the Eisenhower administration, with its Department of
Justice and FBI.
Enraged that their odious compact was refused, the witch hunters in
obscene haste shoved aside a last-minute stay of execution granted by Justice
Douglas and claimed their blood-victims.
The whole prestige and authority of the U.S. government was
mobilized to give the odor of legal sanctity to the burnings. Eisenhower and the
Supreme Court themselves, in effect, pulled the electric-chair switch. A
cold-blooded six-to-three decision of the hastily reconvened Supreme Court
vacated Justice Douglas’ stay, granted the day before. A few hours later
Eisenhower denied executive clemency, thus sealing the Rosenbergs’ doom.
Eisenhower prated about the “fullest measure of justice and due
process of law” allegedly extended the Rosenbergs. Only the most gullible really
believe that. This was a political assassination. That is how virtually the
entire world views it. This is shown by the wave of outrage and revulsion that
has swept the globe at the sadistic haste with which the Rosenbergs were rushed
to their death.
World-Wide Protest
The protests were most widespread and vocal precisely in those
countries of Western Europe where American influence is reputed to be greatest.
All sections of the French union movement—including the Catholic right—called
for clemency to the Rosenbergs. All the Italian unions strongly voiced similar
demands. Some of the leading conservative British trades unions, most notably
the huge Transport and General Workers Union with 1,300,000 members, openly
joined the protest movement.
In addition, the closest allies of the American capitalists—from
the Pope himself to the president of France—warned against carrying through the
execution because of the blow it would deal Washington’s already shaky prestige
among the masses of Western Europe.
Thousands among scientific, cultural, educational and religious
circles here and abroad addressed appeals to Eisenhower for clemency. Some 2,800
Protestant clergymen in America voiced their opposition to the death penalty for
the Rosenbergs. Eminent atomic scientists Dr. Albert Einstein and Dr. Harold C.
Urey (who, incidentally, ridiculed the notion that the accused and the informer
against them could have understood or conveyed atomic information) denounced the
conviction of the Rosenbergs as well as their sentence.
But the one progressive force that might have prevented the murder
of the Rosenbergs was shamefully silent. The 17,000,000-member American trade
union movement uttered no word of protest or indignation at the witch-burning.
With the notable exception of Hugo Ernst, head of the AFL Hotel and Restaurant
Employees, not one leading American trade-union figure had the simple human
decency and political intelligence to speak out against the political killing of
the Rosenbergs.
It is inconceivable that the labor leaders did not know the
tissue-paper flimsiness of the government’s case against the Rosenbergs and the
atmosphere of the anti-communist witch hunt that made a fair trial for them
impossible. Yet they were too cowardly, too opportunist, too eager to
demonstrate their subservience to the capitalist government and their own rabid
anti-communism to demand justice and clemency for the Rosenbergs.
For their blind treachery they themselves may yet pay a terrible
price at the hands of the witch hunters, whose ultimate objective is nothing
less than the crushing of the American labor movement. The smell of the blood of
the Rosenbergs will undoubtedly excite the appetites of the McCarthyites and
embolden them to seek bigger and juicier prey—including and especially the
trade-union leaders.
Why has the case of the Rosenbergs raised such an outcry everywhere
that free opinion still finds room to express itself? Why do many who remained
silent while U.S. imperialism burned alive several million Koreans or
annihilated two whole Japanese cities with atom bombs now cry out at the
spectacle of two obscure Americans being killed after what appear to be
exhaustive legal proceedings?
Deaths in war seem impersonal and are frequently excused as the
regrettable but unavoidable hazards of military struggle. But the Rosenberg case
spotlights the nature of U.S. capitalism in all its brutality and
vindictiveness. This was deliberate, premeditated murder intended to intimidate
into silence all who would oppose American imperialism in any way. It is a
symbol of all that the world has come to hate of the ruthless arrogance and
aggressive drive of the American ruling class.
Their pretense that the Rosenbergs got all the benefits of the law
makes the actions of Eisenhower and the Supreme Court seem all the more
hypocritical. As Justice Black pointed out in his strong dissenting opinion, not
only is “judicial haste…peculiarly out of place where the death penalty is
imposed,” but the Supreme Court “has never reviewed this record and has never
affirmed the fairness of the trial…” Indeed, the court refused on a number of
occasions to review the central question: Did the Rosenbergs get a fair
trial?
Could a fair trial have been possible in the witch-hunt atmosphere
and with the whole capitalist government lined up to burn the Rosenbergs,
regardless of their guilt or innocence, to make of them a terrifying example?
The Eisenhower administration feared to wait any longer the test of
public opinion. It feared that each day would see the protest and indignation
grow, not only abroad but at home. The juridical case against the Rosenbergs was
coming apart at the seams. It was becoming known that the Rosenbergs were
actually charged not with committing espionage, but with mere
“conspiracy”—agreement to commit—such acts. No tangible evidence was put forward
even for this nebulous charge except the claims of a single informer who feared
his own neck was at stake if he did not testify as demanded by the FBI. They
rushed to kill the Rosenbergs precisely because the case could not stand up
under further close public examination.
Act of Class Hate
This was a deed of class hate and class vengeance. The brutal
American capitalist class has sadistically vented on the helpless bodies of the
Rosenbergs its rage and frustration at the setbacks it has received abroad from
the forces of the colonial and socialist revolutions and for the impediments
raised by the revolutionary masses on all the continents to its schemes of world
conquest.
The murder of the Rosenbergs shows how far the witch hunters are
prepared to go to suppress free thought and political freedom in America. It is
the extreme expression of a system of terrorism that has already put a gag over
education, literature, the arts and sciences and public service that has sent
hundreds to prison for their political views and cost thousands their jobs. It
has placed shackles of fear on the American mind. And it will not be halted
until the American labor movement—ultimate target of the witch hunters—stands
forth with a mighty fist in the face of the witch hunters and declares: “Not
another step!”
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