Julius Rosenberg Quotes

Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy's red-baiting paranoia.

THIS DEATH sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. There had to be hysteria and a fear sent through America in order to get increased war budgets. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna give five years for a Smith Act prosecution or one year for Contempt of Court, but we're gonna kill ya!

Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. -- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in their last letter to their sons, June 19, 1953.

In 1951, 20-year-old [Jim]Jones [of Jonestown massacre fame] began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. He became flustered with harassment during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding an event that he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending. He also became frustrated with the persecution of open and accused communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Jones said he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church." Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist.

The power to execute invests a near absolute power in the state. As Robert Meeropol has suggested, the granting of such absolute power most surely tends to corrupt, and especially to corrupt democracy. Meeropol’s own parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed in 1953 when he was six years old.

In the 1930s and 1940s, non-Jewish Jews were among the leading pro-Soviet and anti-American agitators. During these two decades Jews constituted half of the membership of the American Communist Party.III Two alienated Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were convicted in the early 1950s of helping to smuggle America’s atom bomb technology to Stalin. A study by Professor Joseph Adelson in the early 1960s of the relationship between political orientation and personal background among undergraduates at the University of Michigan revealed that 90 percent of radical students came from Jewish backgrounds.20 A national survey sponsored by the American Council of Education in 1966-67 revealed that the “best single predictor of campus protest was the presence of a substantial number of students from Jewish families.” In 1970, a Harris study showed that 23 percent of Jewish college students termed themselves “far Left” versus 4 percent of Protestants and 2 percent of Catholics.