Stuff You Should Know
The Rosenbergs
Thu, 29 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000
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Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage in 1953. Whether or not they were both guilty remains unclear, though most historians believe that at least Ethel was innocent. Learn all about this historical stain in today's episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?
For sure. And Ice-T didn't care. He's like, just watch. I'll be back in the most surprising way you can possibly imagine. As literal Ice-T? He's like, well, not that surprising. Right. The second most surprising thing. You mean you play a cop on a TV show? He said, yep, bingo. That's what he was known to say, bingo.
Oh, man. We're getting really sidetracked. This is a fun one. Who knew the Rosenbergs were going to bring this out? I did not know.
So it was a three-week trial in all. Like you said, they, till the end, said they were not guilty. The trial concluded in March of 1951, guilty all three defendants. Sentenced the third guy, Morton Sobel, to 30 years in prison. Sentenced the Rosenbergs to death, saying their crime was worse than murder and that their work caused the communist aggression in Korea.
So they were really taking the fall for a lot here. There were a lot of appeals that were launched by Manny Block and company petitioning the Supreme Court delayed things by a couple of years. All of those failed. But he did launch a pretty successful media campaign that got a lot of people very interested in the Rosenberg's sentence.
Yeah, he finally got a newspaper to agree to look into the case. It was the National Guardian, a very left-wing paper. And they investigated it and produced a very sympathetic, what I take to be long-form article on the Rosenberg case. And that...
That article created a bunch of other press, which spread further and further, really drummed up public sympathy to the point where they were holding vigils where a thousand people would show up in cities around the world in support of them. People thought like, this is not right. Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, the Pope, they all said like, these people should not be executed.
Certainly not Ethel should be executed. And the judge is like, I can't hear you. He had his fingers in his ears like, la, la, la.
Yeah, and there are historians that say like this all just sort of organically came about because of this press. The DOJ, of course, was like, no, no, no. The Communist Party of the United States and the Communist Party overall launched a propaganda campaign on behalf of the Rosenbergs. So, you know, it's a bit of a he said, she said, or they said, they said in this case. Right.
But here's the deal on the execution. You said it was a game of chicken early on, and I'm sure people that noticed that that mention were like, what is Josh talking about, a game of chicken? And this is what you were talking about, was the idea was even Herbert Hoover did not want to execute them.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of the Rosenberg case?
And the boys, it's just still hard to believe they didn't, not that one of them didn't, you know, for the sake of being a parent to their kids, didn't recant, but they didn't. And those boys, Robert and Michael, were adopted by Ann and Abel Mirapole. Little interesting side note here. Abel wrote the song Strange Fruit. Which, have you ever heard the Susie and the Banshees version of that?
Ooh, no, but that's great. Yeah, it's really good. That's how I first heard that song. Another reference to the first Lollapalooza, even. Who knew? Wow, that's really something. Wow. I know, right? Did not expect that. Billy Joel is spinning in his piano stool right now. He's like, I know I should have accepted that offer.
I know. Michael got a PhD in economics, and Robert Rosenberg became an attorney.
And both of them, they've dedicated their lives to trying to clear their parents' names. Finally, after years and years and years, they admitted, like, okay, dad was a spy, but not mom. Yeah. And you said that they were criticized by some people for basically choosing loyalty to Joseph Stalin over their two children and leaving them behind. And David Greenglass, again, who lied— Wow.
That's what I said, too. Yeah. And, oh, I should say real quick, the reason that the brothers, the sons, finally were like, OK, dad was a spy was because those Venona cables we talked about earlier. Yeah, they were finally released starting in the 90s. And it showed quite clearly that Julius was a very enthusiastic spy for the Soviet Union and probably.
So Ethel definitely knew about it, but she may have been involved in recruiting Ruth. And if she did that, she was definitely a spy. But again, that doesn't change most people's thoughts that they probably should not have been executed.
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Because, I mean, that's a that's a whole different argument. You know, it's like maybe they were guilty, but you should not have put them to death. That's what a lot of people seem to think.
Yeah, I mean, including people from their own spy ring didn't even come close to the death sentence. It was just specifically leverage that just never got taken away because the government wasn't about to be like, oh, okay, you got us. All right, we won't kill you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't do that. It's just crazy.
Boy, this was a fun one and there was a lot of jokes. I hope it didn't come across as insensitive. I mean, that's kind of what we do here. So not be insensitive, but just try to, you know, kind of make jokes about stuff. Yeah, if you can't laugh about everything, then what can you laugh at? Nothing. Exactly. Actually, I don't know if that's exactly true, but still. Yeah. Since Chuck said exactly.
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