Philip Rubenstein
America’s Red Scare, Part 3: The Bomb, the Rosenbergs, HUAC, the Blacklist

Philip Rubenstein | America’s Red Scare, Part 3: The Bomb, the Rosenbergs, HUAC, the Blacklist | 07.22.21

- When you are ready, we’re going to hand over to you for the “Red Scare, Part Three.” Looking forward to having you back with us and thank you very much and looking forward to today. Thanks.

• There are still more people arriving, but I think, given the time and given the fact that there’s another session on tonight that Trudy’s giving, I think it’s probably a good idea to start. So first of all, welcome everyone. Welcome to Lockdown University once again with a lovely new logo on display. And for the next hour, I’m going to be continuing the Red Scare, the American Red Scare series. The first two we did earlier in the year. And after this one, there’s one more to come, which is next Wednesday. So if you enjoy this one, hopefully you’ll tune in then. So let me just share the screen. Here we go.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

So this, of course, is Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. And on the 19th of June, 1953, just after 8 p.m., Ethel and Julius were executed at Sing Sing Prison. The execution, interestingly, had been scheduled for three hours later, for 11 o'clock. But it was a Friday night, and after numerous appeals failed, their attorney, a man called Emmanuel Bloch, in a last role of the dice, appealed to the judge and said, “Look, it’s the Jewish Sabbath, so perhaps we could just delay by 24 hours.” Unfortunately for him, the tactic backfired because the judge, Irving Kaufman, decided that instead of delaying, he’d bring the execution forward by three hours. And so at 8 o'clock, before sunset and before Shabbat came in, they were executed. Julius was first. He died after one shock, or application of the shock. Ethel was next, and she wasn’t so lucky. It took five massive jots of electricity pumped through her body before she died. Ethel, a 37 year-old-woman and mother of two young boys.

The Rosenbergs had been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, and they are still today the only Americans who’ve ever been executed in peacetime for the crime of espionage. So I want to spend the next hour thinking about what was it that happened between 1945, after the jubilation and relief that greeted the end of World War II, to the day in July, 1950 when first Julius was arrested and then a month later, Ethel was similarly arrested on the crime of espionage. And what we’ll discover is that the Red Scare didn’t happen immediately. It was a slow burn. And over those five fateful years, we’re going to see that the political climate in America gradually turned more conservative. The toleration of witch hunts gradually grew, and dissenting voices gradually turned silent.

To truly understand the Rosenberg case, I think that we have to go back two decades to the 1930s. And those of you who listened to the last lecture, for you, hopefully this will just be covering some familiar ground. And the reason to go back to the 30s is that it was the 30s that was the heyday for support for communism in the US. Why the 1930s? Why were so many people attracted by the ideas and the ideals of communism and by the experiment that was then underway in the Soviet Union? And there isn’t just one answer, but certainly the great spur of interest in communism was the Great Depression. For many, it was interpreted as a gigantic failure for capitalism. And people were searching for answers and searching for solutions. And remember, this is before FDR came along and offered his solution, which was the New Deal.

Support grew and grew and had romantic attachments that came with the cause celebre that was the Republican cause of the Spanish Civil War. And it grew even more when Moscow tried a new tactic in the 1930s. Suddenly, we had in America what was known as “communism with a smile.” And Earl Browder, who was the head of the Communist Party at the time, had a new motto, which was, “Communism is Americanism.” And the Communist Party opened its doors and welcomed anyone and everyone. But Moscow had a more nefarious trick up its sleeve.

They decided that they would fund and secretly create hundreds of front organisations. These were organisations for motherhood and apple pie liberal causes. Against poverty, for education, for peace. And the idea was to create these organisations with bland sounding names, attract millions of Americans, or hundreds of thousands, certainly, and no one would know that these organisations were secretly run by and funded by Moscow. And it’s really important to understand what Moscow was doing because the hundreds of thousands who were members of these organisations in the 30s, who had no idea about the connection to Soviet communism, were many of the very same people who got caught up in the web that was spun by the House Un-American Activities Committee and by Joe McCarthy in the 40s and 50s, who decided not to discriminate between a front organisation and genuine membership of the Communist Party.

And what can we say about the Jewish community in those years? Well, the Jewish experience of the 1930s was very largely still coloured by the experience of antisemitism. Jews felt, more than they ever had done in the US until then, the great outsiders, and certainly, the Great Depression had left most of them, if they hadn’t been feeling that before, certainly feeling that during and after. Many Jews were attracted as a result by communism. 15% of the Communist Party membership in the US were made up of Jewish members. Some joined because of the idea of communism and the their attraction towards the idea.

But many more joined because they just feel excluded from the mainstream. And the Communist Party was an open door to them. And over this decade, anti-Semitism increases, if anything, and it increases dramatically as Jews feel it in every aspect of their life. In 1938, a national poll is conducted across the US looking into the extent to which antisemitism exists and persists. And it found that 60% of respondents held a low opinion of Jews, using words like greedy, dishonest, and pushy. And 40% felt they had too much power in the US. And suddenly, an idea starts to take root. And the idea is that Jews are somehow un-American. Even people who don’t see themselves as Jew haters see Jews as somehow different, clannish, prone to radical ideas, not true Americans.

And so it’s against this backdrop in 1938 that the House Un-American Activities Committee is formed. And you’ll see the man in the middle there is the first chairman whose name is Martin Dies Jr. Dies was a southern Democrat. And it’s fair to say he was a venal, blustering racist who hated black people, who hated foreigners of any kind and who also hated big government. He was the ideal choice for the role because he was chosen rather than self-elected. The person who wanted the job was Sam Dickstein, who was a Jewish Democrat New Yorker, who believed that HUAC should be there, not only to look at communist subversion, but also to investigate and stop Nazi propaganda.

But Jack Garner, FDR’s vice president, made sure that Dickstein was sidelined and Martin Dies got the job. And the reason he wanted him to have the job is that by now, Jack Garner was the viper in the nest. Jack Garner had turned against his boss and he turned against the New Deal, which he absolutely despised. And his idea was that HUAC would be a cover to undermine the New Deal by making a link between New Deal programmes and New Deal staffers with communist subversion. Martin Dies was everything that Jack Garner hoped he would be and more. In fact, he was the prototype for Joe McCarthy. And you can see in this quote, Joe McCarthy acknowledging his debt to Dies.

Everything that Joe McCarthy would do in the 1950s, Dies was doing in the 1930s. He had a spray-gun approach, spraying accusations anywhere and everywhere, not caring whether or not they landed on the innocent or the guilty. His tactics were lies, smears and insinuations, sometimes with evidence, but usually without. The tools he used were witness intimidation, subpoenas, aggressive questioning, and citations for contempt. And he started laterally to name names. He’d get hold of names of New Deal programme staffers and he’d read them into the record, implying that somehow these people had been affiliates of organisations which had communist links earlier in the 30s.

The interesting thing is that HUAC was set up in the late 30s when the influence of communism had dramatically waned from its heyday in the early 1930s. And the New Deal had largely put pay to it. But even at its absolute height in 1932 when FDR was standing for his first incumbency as president, you can see, I mean the Communist candidates are all the ones who are in red. And if you add up the percentage of the total votes that they got throughout the country, it adds up to about 2 ½%. So this was at their absolute height. But by 1938, it had dramatically declined.

First, as I said, because of the New Deal, but much more importantly, in August 1938, Stalin and Hitler signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and they go into alliance together. And this so disgusts most members, particularly the Jewish members, that membership of the Communist Party and interest in communism in the US falls off a cliff. So the question, I suppose, is this, if popular support for communism and for the party and for the Soviet Union has all but died away in the late 1930s, what is it that happened between 1945 and 1950 that’s going to lead to the fateful day when the Rosenbergs were arrested and three years later when they’re sent to the electric chair?

I think the clue to the answer is the famous definition of history, which is one damn thing after another. 1945, in February, the Yalta Agreement is signed by the three allies, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. It’s signed in the Soviet resort of Yalta. And amongst other things, the agreement has a plan for separate spheres of influence in Europe. Within a month, Stalin has reneged on many of his promises, and it’s very clear that Stalin’s agenda is going to be to widen his sphere as much as possible and to gain influence across eastern and central Europe. Many Americans blame Roosevelt for his naivety.

But Roosevelt was seriously ill during the Yalta negotiations and he dies only two months later in April 1945. His successor is Harry Truman who’s determined not to make the same mistakes. In the month after Yalta, Churchill did a tour of the US and in Fulton, Missouri, he made the kind of speech that only Winston Churchill ever could make, where he gave us the abiding metaphor that we still live with for the description of the divide between East and West. It’s a speech at a college in Fulton. He says, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”

When we think of blacklists, we think of the House Un-American Committee, we think of Joe McCarthy, we think of Hollywood. But in truth, the first blacklist was signed into creation by a Democratic president, Harry Truman. And it came with an executive order in March 1947, where Truman created the Federal Employees Loyalty Programme, which established loyalty review boards to determine the Americanism of federal government employees, some two million of them across the US. It required all employees to take an oath of loyalty to the US government. But more importantly, it recommended that those who were suspected of being un-American could be dismissed from their jobs.

Now, Truman’s motivation was pure politics. Truman was not an ideologue. He was in a bind. His popularity had sunk to an all-time low after the congressional elections the previous November when the Republicans swept both houses for the first time for many years. Truman knew the Communist Party was a spent force by 1947. But communism had become a potent issue that was being used by Republicans to attack him, and he had to neuter the issue. And hence the reason for the loyalty oath. Truman’s mistake was not the executive order. Truman’s mistake was to delegate all of the authority to design a programme and to implement the programme to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Because in Hoover’s hands, it became a purge. Hoover was determined to root out anyone and everyone who qualified, as far as he was concerned, as being unAmerican and a potential subversive. And of course, that definition was much wider than Truman would’ve allowed for. The number of employees who were dismissed or who left before they were dismissed is still disputed today by historians, But we know it’s in the hundreds, if not in the thousands, over the course of the next few years. Six months later, HUAC decided that they would follow suit by investigating Hollywood.

When we think of the investigation into Hollywood, we focus very much on this period. And one of the things that’s not particularly well known, which I recently discovered, is that the attempt to finger Hollywood for communist subversion actually started much earlier. It actually started when Martin Dies was still the chairman of HUAC back in 1940. And Dies had been given a list of potential communist subversives, which included Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney and Frederick March, who are all pictured here. He makes a trip to Hollywood.

He’s wined and dined by a canny studio executive by the name of Frank Freeman, who introduces him to Errol Flynn and lets him get his photo taken with Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. And the rumour goes that he was paid off. But whatever the case, Dies returns and he drops the issue. Unfortunately, by 1947, there’s a very different cast of characters who are running HUAC. And most important of all, the voice and the conscience of HUAC is this man, a southern Democrat by the name of John E. Rankin. Rankin wasn’t the chairman. The chairman was a Republican by the name of J. Parnell Thomas.

But he was the heart and soul of the committee. He was known popularly as an equal opportunities bigot because he was deeply racist towards African Americans, Japanese Americans, as well as Jews. He opposed attempts to allow interracial marriage in his own state and across the US. And when HUAC was asked to investigate the Ku Klux Klan for murder and violence, he was the one who quashed any attempt to investigate them on the grounds that the KKK is an old American institution. Rankin had many obsessions, but one of them was that the Jews were the enemy of Christian America.

Announcing the investigation into Hollywood, John E. Rankin declares that they’re “on the trail of the tarantula” and he denounces what he calls “the alien minded communistic enemies of Christianity and their stooges who are trying to get control of the press of this country. They’re taking over the radio and the motion picture industry. They want to spread their unAmerican propaganda as well as their loathsome, lying, immoral anti-Christian filth before the eyes of your children in every community in America.” So Hollywood, controlled as it is in Rankin’s eyes by Jews, is the perfect quarry for he and his friends. HUAC investigates the charge that communists are infiltrating the movies with subversive propaganda. And they hold hearings over the month of October 1947.

The first week they have so-called friendly witnesses, which includes luminaries such as Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, Walt Disney, of course, and Ronald Reagan, who’s then president of the Screen Actors Guild. The second week was reserved for the so-called unfriendly witnesses, those who’ve refused to cooperate. 11 of them are screenwriters who’d been members of the Communist Party who all refused to cooperate with the committee until they were subpoenaed. One of the 11 is Bertolt Brecht, who eventually cooperates and then flees the country. So that leaves 10, who are known to the rest of us as the Hollywood Ten, and they decide to challenge the committee.

They contend that the committee has no right to investigate their associations because they’re protected by the First Amendment, which of course guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of association. And the scenes that week are often completely unruly with J. Parnell Thomas banging his gavel repeatedly as he, over and over again, demands and asks the question that will become famous for the next few years: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

So I just want to show a short clip just to give you a flavour of what was happening over the course of those two weeks.

[Clip begins]

• [Announcer] At home, Americans feared Red subversion. Congress revived the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1947, the committee investigated Hollywood, factory of America’s imagination.

• [Thomas] Have you observed any communistic information in any scripts?

• Well, I have turned down quite a few scripts because I thought they were tinged with communistic ideas. They haven’t attempted to use me, I don’t think, because, apparently, they know that I’m not very sympathetic to communism. There has been a small group within the Screen Actors Guild which has consistently opposed the policy of the guild board and officers or the guild itself as evidenced by the vote on various issues. That small clique has been referred to, as been discussed, as more or less following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party. If I had my way about it, they’d all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.

• [Announcer] 10 witnesses, the Hollywood Ten, defied the committee’s right to ask about their beliefs.

• [Thomas] Are you a member of the Communist Party or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

• It’s unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism.

• [Thomas] That’s not the question. That’s not the question. The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

• I’m framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his answer to the question-

• [Thomas] Then you deny-

• Which invades his, absolutely invades his right.

• [Thomas] Then you deny, you refuse to answer that question. Is that correct?

• I have told you that I will offer my beliefs-

• [Thomas] All right. Excuse the witness.

• my affiliations and everything else to the American public, and they will know where I stand as they do from what I have written.

• [Thomas] Stand away from the stand.

• I have been working for Americanism for many years-

• [Thomas] Stand away from the stand!

• I fight for the Bill of Rights which you are trying to destroy.

• [Thomas] Take this man away from the stand.

• [Announcer] Others from the film industry demonstrated their support for the constitutional rights of the 10.

• [Thomas] Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

• I believe I have the right to be confronted with any evidence which supports this question. I should like to see what you have.

• [Thomas] Oh, well, you would.

• Yeah.

• [Thomas] Well, you’ll pretty soon.

[Clip end]

• I’ve watched that clip several times, and I just find it so interesting for so many reasons. One of which, you know, even the way that Gary Cooper has just been nervously fiddling with his watch and looking at his fingertips as he’s giving evidence. The sense of theatrics that everyone is using, particularly the committee to make sure that they gain, say, the press and the public on their side. And also just a reminder that one of the great drivers of HUAC and all these investigations is raw politics.

At the very beginning of the clip, you may have noticed a young Richard Nixon. And in the middle, of course, was Ronald Reagan. So that’s two US presidents whose careers are going to be built on their anti-communist credentials, which they burnish in this period. Back to the Hollywood Ten. They’re cited for contempt of Congress. And even though they take their appeal all the way to Supreme Court, the citations are upheld in every hearing in every court. And each of them serves a prison sentence. Of the Hollywood Ten, six are Jews.

That’s John Howard Lawson, who we saw in the clip, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz. And this point wasn’t lost on Rankin. On the floor of the House when they’re discussing the contempt citation, he makes the most extraordinary speech, which is little more than just reading a list of names on a petition in favour of First Amendment rights. This is just an extract from it. He says, “One of the names is Danny Kaye. We found his real name was David Daniel Kaminsky. Then there was Eddie Canter, whose real name is Edward Itzkowitz. There is one who calls himself Edward G. Robinson, and his real name is Emmanuel Goldenberg.”

So how did the studio bosses respond to all of this? Did they proudly stand by the Hollywood Ten? Did they stand up for freedom of speech and freedom of association? I’m afraid to say they did not. The following week after the contempt citation, Eric Johnson, who was president of the producers association, assembled all the big bosses, the major studio bosses, the Louis B. Mayers, the Sam Goldwynns, the Harry Cohens, et cetera, to a meeting in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. And after much shouting and many protestations, they all issued and signed a press release, which has since become known as the Waldorf Statement.

Now, the statement deplores the actions of the Hollywood Ten and announces that all of them are going to be discharged. But it does much more than that because what it does is to say that the producers will never again knowingly ever employ a communist. And with that stroke of the pen, the blacklist is ushered in, not by HUAC, but by the studio bosses. 15 moguls sign, 10 of whom are Jewish. It’s very easy, many years later, and looking back on this act, to see what they did as craven and cowardly. But I don’t want to absolve them.

I do, however, think that their agreement to signing this was born out of a very deep and legitimate fear that they never lost because all of them harboured a secret fear that everything they’d worked for, everything they’d built, was going to be snatched away from them. A feeling that someday soon these refugees and children of refugees would get the tap on the shoulder and be told the game was up.

This is Lillian Hellman. I love this photo because she just looks like she just doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything. Lillian Hellman, of course, was the brilliant writer who, among other credits, wrote “Little Foxes.” She was Jewish and she was one of the brave souls who did stand up to HUAC. And even though she refused to play HUAC’s game, she understood these men and she understood their motivation. And this is what she said about their drivers, about the moguls. “These men were born in foreign lands and they inherited foreign fears. It would not have been possible in Russia or Poland, but it was possible here to offer the Cossacks a bowl of soup.”

There’s a coda, by the way, to the story. I probably shouldn’t tell it because I fear that I might run out of time later, but I’m going to anyway ‘cause I can’t resist. A year after the hearings, J. Parnell Thomas, who was the chairman, is indicted for defrauding the government because he’s been claiming money for non-existent members of staff. So he’s defrauded. Ironically, he takes the Fifth Amendment and refuses to incriminate himself, but he’s convicted and he’s sent for 18 months to Danbury Prison. And it’s the same prison that a number of the Hollywood 10 are going to be sent and where they serve their sentences.

On one afternoon, Lester Cole and Parnell Thomas find themselves face to face because they’re both working in the prison yard. Lester Cole is cutting grass, and Thomas is cleaning out the nearby chicken shed. Thomas can’t resist, so he yells out, “Hey, Bolshie, I see you still got your sickle.” Now, never take on a screenwriter because Cole replies, “And I see you are still picking up chicken shit.” So the key events that lead up to the Rosenberg arrest are starting to build and build and build. In 1948 alone, Czechoslovakia falls to communist rule. And in 1948 in June, the Soviets decide to blockade West Berlin, which, of course, is completely surrounded by East Germany. And Truman responds with one of the most extraordinary acts of the 20th century with the Berlin airlift.

So for nearly a year, the Americans are delivering somewhere in the region of 1.5 million tonnes of supplies via 200,000 separate flights before the blockade is finally lifted. These two events, probably as much as anything else, really signal that the wartime alliance between the Soviets and the US and the allies is well and truly over. And they also provide just the right atmosphere and background for HUAC to have its first successful hit, which is the so-called Alger Hiss affair. Alger Hiss was a senior official in the State Department. I picked this photo because you can see in his kind of patrician-like way he’s looking rather bored and aloof from the proceedings. Hiss, it was discovered at the very end of the proceedings, had spied for the Soviets.

But the funny thing is that most of the members of HUAC couldn’t quite believe it. And the reason is that his accuser was a man called Whitaker Chambers, who was something of a shady character who was fairly slovenly dressed, whose personal hygiene, apparently, left something to be desired. In contrast with Alger Hiss, who was the very essence of the Eastern establishment. He was a patrician. He came from a good family. He went to the best schools. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School, and he’d even interned for a Supreme Court judge. And here was Chambers having the temerity of accusing him, of having been a fellow traveller, a member of the Communist Party, which Hiss strenuously and repeatedly denied.

Most of the committee were happy to give up the inquiry except for one junior member, Richard Millhouse Nixon. Richard Nixon had spotted earlier than most the potent political potential of the anti-communist issue. He’d won his first congressional race in 1946, only two years earlier, by means of a savage red baiting of his poor, pleasant liberal opponent who didn’t know what had hit him. And when Nixon was elected, he wasted no time in asking for membership of HUAC. Now he was determined to push the Hiss case for all it was worth. He had one ace up his sleeve, which is that J. Edgar Hoover was secretly feeding him information.

And it was through Hoover’s manipulations that it finally came out that Hiss was not only a member of the Communist Party back in the 1930s, but he’d been trading secrets with the Soviets. And so Hiss was convicted by a grand jury of perjury for which he served a total of 3 ½ years in penitentiary. There was a political dimension, too, in the Hiss case. Remember, this was a strike against the Democrats, and Hiss represented the Democrat establishment. He had been a senior official under FDR and a senior official under Truman. He’d been associated in the early years with the New Deal. And the Republicans were desperate for a strike. They’d spent the last 16 years out of the White House and they were determined to use anything and everything, certainly on the anti-communist issue, as a lever to get back in.

The big shock, however, came a year later in August 1949 when the Soviets tested their first A-bomb. Until the summer of 1949, America believed it had a monopoly on the atom bomb. And America basked in that for a period of four years. That monopoly gave them an edge in the immediate post-war era. And their defence plans were completely premised on their superiority and their exclusive control of the bomb. They still believed that they were five years ahead of the Soviets when the bomb was tested in 1949.

Curtis LeMay, General Curtis LeMay, who was famous as the head of strategic bombing command for the Americans, who never minced words, was reported to have said, “Joe One ended the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.” Truman was in abject shock when he first heard the news. “Are you sure,” he kept asking. “Are you absolutely sure?” As for the public, the fear of communism, that had been bubbling away these past four years, suddenly was tangible because now communism wasn’t just about ideas.

Now communism was a bomb, the same kind of bomb that they had seen exploding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the same kind of bomb that could happen here. And it filled people with absolute dread. Those of you who grew up in the US in the 1950s will remember this. And certainly those of you who grew up in the 1950s elsewhere will remember it. And you’ll remember “Duck and Cover,” which was a a nine-minute long film that was shown to millions of school children over the course of that decade and was part of the civil defence strategy.

And I’m just going to show a short excerpt of it because it will bring back some memories. And for those of you who’ve never seen it, you’ll get a sense of the way that the threat of the bomb was just being normalised into everyday life in the US. It starts with a cartoon character called Bert the Turtle. And Bert responds to danger by ducking and covering. So I’m just going to play this. It’s just going to last just over a minute.

[Clip begins]

• ♪ Duck and Cover ♪

• [Announcer] Be sure and remember what Bert the Turtle just did, friends, because every one of us must remember to do the same thing. That’s what this film is all about. Duck and cover. Paul and Patty know this. No matter where they go or what they do, they always try to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes right then. It’s a bomb! Duck and cover!

Sundays, holidays, vacation time, we must be ready every day all the time to do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes. Duck and cover! That’s the first thing to do, duck and cover. First, you duck, then you cover. You duck and cover tight. Duck and cover under the table. It’s a bomb, duck can cover!

♪ He did what we all must learn to do ♪ ♪ You and you and you and you ♪ ♪ Duck and cover ♪

[Clip ends]

• I’m not going to provide any commentary to that because I can’t think of anything to say other than what you’ve just seen. Before we get onto the Rosenbergs, let me ask a question, which is how does a country respond when it finds someone in its midst who’s been passing atomic secrets to the Soviets? And it would seem that the answer is it depends who you are. It depends where you are. And it depends when you’re discovered.

This is Klaus Fuchs. Klaus Fuchs was a German-born nuclear physicist living in England. Fuchs was an extraordinary man, very talented physicist. He came from a family which was socialist, pacifist, and Quaker. His family had been appalled by the horrors of World War I and were even more appalled by the rise of Hitler. And he left Germany and fled to England after the Reichstag fire in 1933. Pretty soon on he is taken to Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project, of course, was being worked on along with a small group of British scientists who were sent over there to assist the US effort to build the bomb.

And unbeknownst to any of his colleagues, he, every week, gets into his beaten up car and he drives an hour or so to a local fair where he meets with his contact and passes documentation in relation to the development of the bomb. He returns to England. And in 1949, intercepted cables by the US are passed to British authorities who interview him and get him to confess to the fact that he’d been passing Soviets secrets during the war and after the war. He’s arrested. And here’s what’s interesting. The British approached this in a very different way. Fuchs pleads guilty, and for the British authorities, this becomes an opportunity to rush proceedings through the system. Fuchs’ trial lasts all of 90 minutes.

The tragic end that Ethel and Julius received turns on the fact that they weren’t caught in England, but they were caught in the US because for the British, Klaus Fuchs was an embarrassment, an embarrassment to be played down. It was embarrassing that he was given such top-level security clearance. And it was an embarrassment because the British didn’t want anyone to know that they too were building a bomb and they didn’t want questions being raised publicly. Whereas the British approach was to minimise publicity, the American authorities in comparable cases magnified the importance of proceedings. So what happened in the months leading to the arrest of Julius Rosenberg?

Well, quite a lot it would seem. Chairman Mao finally defeated Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Party took control of China. Joseph McCarthy made his famous speech in Wheeling, Wisconsin, where he held in his hand a list of alleged communist subversives who were working in the State Department and spent the next five months on a barnstorming tour with any journalist who was prepared to listen to him. Klaus Fuchs was convicted as a spy. And most shocking of all to the Americans, North Korea invaded the South.

Now, at the time, US intelligence of the Soviet Union and China was at a fairly preliminary stage, and it was still seen that communism was something of a monolith. And the way that Truman and others in the administration saw the North Korean invasion is that this was the latest feat of global communism. And Truman asked himself the question, and he wrote in his diary that this could be the preliminary stage to World War II. So by the time that Julius Rosenberg is arrested in July 1950, America is in the grip of a full-blown Red panic. I put this photograph in because I just found it extraordinary. I mean, just look at what they’re wearing. Julius has got this beautiful double breasted suit on.

This is their arrest photo. And, I mean, Ethel looks like she’s off to a cocktail party in that gorgeous satin, white or cream day dress And those white gloves. Julius may have been expecting his arrest because the previous month, Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested for the same crime of espionage. And a month later, sure enough, Ethel was arrested by the FBI, again, charged with espionage. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, like David Greenglass and like David’s wife, Ruth, had all been members of the Communist Party. Like a lot of Jews, they joined the movement in the 1930s when it seemed like a means to fight against fascism.

But unlike many others, they’d stuck with it through the Nazi-Soviet Pact. So David was the first to be arrested. And for David, the order of the day was self-preservation. He quickly admitted his guilt, and to reduce his own sentence and to exonerate Ruth completely, she was offered an immunity deal, he decided to turn in his sister and his brother-in-law. So the Rosenbergs were arrested. J. Edgar Hoover, because Hoover’s hand is never far away from any of this in the 40s and 50s, just as it never was in the 1920s in the first Red scare, J. Edgar Hoover had decided to paint the Rosenbergs, particularly Julius, as the great mastermind, the great ringleader who had recruited Americans to spy against their own country.

Among others he’d recruited, Morton Sobell, an engineer who was also charged and who also featured in the trial. He’d also recruited David, his own brother-in-law, to pass secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians. David had worked at Los Alamos and had indeed passed on files to Julius, although pretty much all the information that was given to the Soviets was fairly low grade. The case against Ethel was flimsy. I mean, Ethel’s real crime was that she was married to Julius.

But there was an ambitious assistant prosecutor by the name of Roy Cohn, who put inordinate pressure on David and on Ruth to say that Ethel had typed up information, the information that was passed onto the Soviets and to make her into an accomplice. And during the trial, Roy Cohn falsely claimed, again and again, that it was Ethel who was the mastermind of the whole conspiracy. The Rosenbergs, along with Morton Sobell, were found guilty of espionage. Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and he ended up serving 18 in Alcatraz.

So the judge now had to consider what sentence he was going to apply to Ethel and Julius. Hoover, who was aware of how tenuous the case was against Ethel, was very nervous about the idea of execution because he felt that if a young mother was seen to go to the electric chair, it would turn America against Red baiting and against the hunt for communists. So he argued against it. But Cohn was persistent and Cohn lobbied the judge, and through his lobbying, Judge Irving Kaufman agreed and sentenced both of them to the chair.

I just want to show a short newsreel, which was made at the time, just to give a kind of a flavour of contemporary reporting of these events.

[Clip begins]

• [Announcer] One of the greatest peacetime spy dramas in the nation’s history reaches its climax as Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell, convicted of revealing atomic secrets to the Russians, enter the federal building in New York to hear their doom. Another of the spy ring, Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg, who, with her husband, was convicted of actually transmitting the secrets to Russia through Soviet diplomatic channels.

The ring was first uncovered following the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in England. David Greenglass, Mrs. Rosenberg’s brother, confessed theft of the secrets while stationed at the Los Alamos atomic project. He later became the government’s chief witness in the prosecution of Sobell and the Rosenbergs. It is a stern jurist they face in Judge Irving Kaufman. After administering a tongue lashing in which he charged them with the indirect death of thousands of men in Korea, he sentenced both Rosenberg’s to death in the electric chair and Sobell to 30 years in prison.

At the time these pictures were made, Greenglass still had to hear his fate. It is the first time in peacetime that such a death penalty has been handed down. And while appeals to the highest courts are planned, it certainly appears that the spies are headed along a one-way street.

[Clip ends]

• A one-way street. On the 19th of June, 1953, Ethel and Julius write their very final letter to their children. “We wish we may have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you. Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy.”

And that night at 8 p.m., they were executed, still the only Americans ever to be put to death for espionage. And Ethel is the only American woman ever to be executed in the US for a crime other than murder. Many years later, Alan Dershowitz wrote, "The Rosenbergs were guilty and framed.” As for the Jewish community, how did they respond? Because the Rosenberg trial was also an important moment, as well as in the Cold War, in the history of the Jews of America.

What’s fascinating is that the trial itself was largely a Jewish affair. The defendants were Jewish. The Rosenberg’s attorney, Emmanuel Bloch, was Jewish. The chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, was Jewish. And it was because of a Jewish assistant prosecutor, Roy Cohn, and the Jewish trial judge, Irving Kaufman, that they were eventually sentenced to death. “For many in the community,” writes Arthur Hertzberg, the great historian of Jewish America, “the trial was an opportunity to prove their patriotism and to distance themselves from the Rosenbergs and everything they stood for.”

Ethel and Julius were buried two days after their death and they were buried far away in Long Island because the cemetery in Long Island was the only one for many miles, the only Jewish cemetery that would accept their bodies for burial. I was trying to figure out how to end today and I thought that what I would do is actually end on a song. And the song is one of my favourites of the great American patriotic songs. And they’re all so wonderful and amazing and celebratory.

But this one is “God Bless America.” “God Bless America,” unlike, for example, “Star Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful” is very different. You take “America the Beautiful,” which is a great celebration of American virtues. “America the Beautiful,” it’s written in the late 19th century by a very talented college professor called Katharine Lee Bates. And it opens with the lines, “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” The first lines of “God Bless America” are very different. “While the storm clouds gather far across the sea.”

There’s a message here and the message is trouble is never far away. “God Bless America,” of course, was written by Irving Berlin, and Irving Berlin was born in May 1988 as Israel Beilin. He was born in the Russian Empire and he was one of eight children. And like so many hundreds of thousands, the Beilins fled Russia and they immigrated to the US to escape poverty and pogroms. Irving Berlin wrote the song when he was 20, and it was released two decades later in 1938.

And it became one of the songs of the 1940s that was played again and again and again on the radio. And I just want to play an extract by the great Kate Smith who made the song famous. And I’m just going to ask you to pay special attention to the words in the chorus.

[Clip begins]

• Hello everybody. It is my happy privilege to introduce a new song, “God Bless America”

♪ While the storm clouds gather far across the sea ♪ ♪ Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free ♪ ♪ Let us all be grateful for a land so fair ♪ ♪ As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer ♪ ♪ God bless America, land that I love ♪ ♪ Stand beside her and guide her ♪ ♪ Through the night with the light from above ♪ ♪ From the mountains to the prairies ♪ ♪ To the oceans white with foam ♪ ♪ God bless America, my home sweet home ♪

• I have to say, I always find that that song incredibly stirring. But the words of the chorus are “God bless America, land that I love, stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from above.” And it’s more prayer than song. It’s a prayer that is written not by one person, but by two people. It’s written by Irving Berlin who declares, “America, land that I love.” But it’s also written by Israel Beilin who’s praying, “Please, God, this time let it be okay.”

• Thank you for what is a most brilliant presentation. Will you answer questions?

Q&A and Comments

• Yeah, sure. So we have a few hellos. Hello to Jane and hello to Valerie, as well as to Keita. Wendy Shirley is wishing your son-in-law and grandson a full and speedy recovery.

My apologies to Lawrence Fox. I got my date wrong there for the Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in 39, not 38.

Jonathan Matthew says it was Goebbels who first used the phrase “iron curtain.” Gosh, I must look this up. That’s fascinating. Jonathan, if you’ve got any more information on that, please do pass it on.

David Sefton points out that J. Edgar Hoover fed McCarthy the names of suspected communists. He was known to be antisemitic. Certainly, next week when we talk about McCarthy, we’ll be coming back to Hoover. All roads lead to Hoover, always lead to Hoover.

Q: Romi says, “Do you think the fact that a lot of Jews immigrated from Russia in the 20s to America contributed to ideas that they were communists and fueled antisemitism? Surely antisemitism was less in the US than in Russia at the time.” A: Yes, undoubtedly. The fact that so many immigrated over such a period of time was definitely a contributor, certainly in the 1920s, not only Jews but Italians and Slavs who came across as well. The anti-foreigner feeling in the US in the early 1920s was extraordinary, and the immigration laws that were passed at the time were absolutely punitive.

Monty mentions there’s a book that’s recently been published written by Anne Sebba, and it’s a book which is called “Ethel Rosenberg: American Tragedy.” Some of you may already have read it. It’s very interesting. Anne Sebba is a very good writer. The book, as Monty says, has been very well received. And certainly, for those of you who are interested in the era, she writes a lot about the era as well as the Rosenbergs. It’s a very useful read.

Pam Garfield has corrected me that the speech that was made by McCarthy was Wheeling in West Virginia, not Wisconsin. My apologies. I got that confused because McCarthy was the senator for Wisconsin. So thank you very much for that correction.

Q: Andrea asks, “Would you like to mention the appearance before HUAC of Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson?” A: Absolutely. I mean, there is so much that I’ve left out. The story is so much richer than anything I’ve just had the opportunity to say. As I said, next week we’re going to be covering the years from 1950 until the late 50s. So we’ll be looking at McCarthy, McCarthyism, a lot more on Roy Cohn and also on naming names. When you’re asked to name names, what you do? And it’s fascinating how so many people responded in such different ways and what it did to their reputations over the next 40 years.

So Wendy, I think we should probably leave it there. We should give everyone a break before Trudy’s next lecture on Alexander Corder. And back to you.

• No, no, I just want to thank you very, very much. It’s really, I mean very touching and very heartbreaking, you know, and just how different the Americans and the English responded to these events. So, all right, Foster, thank you very much. It was really brilliant. We all enjoyed it, and thank you everybody for joining us and forward see you next week, and we will chat before.

• Look forward to it. Okay, all right.

• Thank you.

• Bye-bye.

• [Wendy] Bye-bye, everyone. Thanks