Secret Agents

by Garber, Marjorie; Walkowitz, Rebecca L.

• ISBN13: 9780415911207
• ISBN10: 0415911206
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-07-01
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage. The 1950s trial of the Rosenbergs on charges of "Atomic Spying" and "stealing the secrets of the Atomic bomb" was a major event of Cold War America, galvanizing public opinion on all sides of the question. Had they in fact passed atomic secrets on to the Russians, secrets so vital that they enabled the Soviet Union to build its own atomic bomb? Or were they set up by a government eager for scapegoats in an era of conspiracy politics? American Jews and the American Left, as public opinion, were deeply divided by the case, which came to stand in many minds for the paranoia of the Cold War. Feminism, civil rights, the death penalty, due process, homosexuality--these issues were all crucial to Rosenberg case and the McCarthy era. Examining thebroad issues as well as telling details, from the "Jell-O" box evidence in the Rosenberg case to the development of television and the atomic bomb,Secret Agentsconnects "that" time and "this" time, demonstrating that an awareness of history in high culture and popular culture, literature, politics and the arts has never been more important -- or more contested -- than it is now. Secret Agentspresents essays by lawyers, cultural critics, social historians and historians of science, as well as a reconsideration of the Rosenbergs by their younger son, Robert Meeropol.Secret Agentsgives new resonance to a history we have for too long been willing to forget. Contributors:Joyce Antler, Marie Ashe, Michael Cadden, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Thomas

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Secret Agents	p. 1
Jell-O	p. 11
The Rosenbergs and the Crimes of a Century	p. 23
TV, the Bomb, and the Body: Other Cold War Secrets	p. 31
The Secret about Secrets	p. 47
Censorship of American Uranium Mine Epidemiology in the 1950s	p. 59
The Trial of J. Edgar Hoover	p. 77
Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn	p. 93
Flash Back, Flash Forward: The Fifties, the Nineties, and the Transformed Politics of Remote Control	p. 107
Before the Rosenbergs: Espionage Scenarios in the Early Cold War	p. 127
Helplessness and Heartlessness: Irving Howe, James Bond, and the Rosenbergs	p. 143
The Rosenberg Case and the New York Intellectuals	p. 155
The Rosenberg Letters	p. 171
The Suffering Body: Ethel Rosenberg in the Hands of the Writers	p. 183
A Bond of Sisterhood: Ethel Rosenberg, Molly Goldberg, and Radical Jewish Women of the 1950s	p. 197
The Bell Jar and the Ghost of Ethel Rosenberg	p. 215
Rosenberg Realities	p. 235
Some Remarks about Trials	p. 253
Jews and McCarthyism: A View from the Bronx	p. 257
Contrasting Fates of Repression: A Comment on Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee	p. 265
Arbitrary Convictions? The Rosenberg Case, the Death Penalty, and Democratic Culture	p. 275
The Work of the State	p. 291
Index	p. 301
Contributors	p. 307
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