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Hollywood Ten, in U.S. history, 10 motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1947, refused to answer questions regarding their possible communist affiliations, and, after spending time in prison for contempt of Congress, were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios. The 10 were Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo.

Dalton Trumbo Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com

The group originally included the German writer Bertolt Brecht, but Brecht fled the country on the day following his inquest, and the remaining 10 were voted in contempt of Congress on November 24, 1947. Convicted in federal court the following year, they were given sentences of six months to one year in prison. (While in prison, Dmytryk broke with the rest and agreed to cooperate, admitting being a communist and giving the names of 26 others.)

With the exception of Dmytryk, the group was severely blacklisted by the film industry. Most were never again employed in Hollywood, but some did write scripts under pseudonyms. As "Robert Rich," Trumbo won an Academy Award for best screenplay for The Brave One (1956). The blacklist disappeared by the early 1960s, and Trumbo and Lardner subsequently wrote screenplays under their own names.

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Hollywood Ten | History, Accusations, & Blacklist

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Hollywood Ten, motion-picture producers, directors, and screenwriters who refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding their possible communist affiliations. They spent time in prison for contempt of Congress and were mostly blacklisted by the Hollywood studios.

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As leverage against Julius, Ethel was also indicted on what, in retrospect, appears to have been flimsy evidence. The government didn't have to prove that anything of value was delivered to the Soviets, only that the participants acted to advance their goal.

''When you're dealing with a conspiracy, you don't have to be the kingpin, you have to participate,'' says James Kilsheimer, who helped prosecute the Rosenbergs. ''You can't be partially guilty any more than you can be partially pregnant.''

But to justify the death penalty, which was invoked to press the Rosenbergs to confess and implicate others, the government left the impression that the couple had handed America's mightiest weapon to the Soviets and precipitated the Korean War.

RECORDS of the grand jury that voted the indictment remain sealed. But we now know the Soviet cables decoded before the trial provided no hard evidence of Ethel's complicity. And Mr. Greenglass has recently admitted that he lied about the most incriminating evidence against his sister. The government's strategy backfired. Ethel wouldn't budge. The Rosenbergs refused to confess and were convicted.

''She called our bluff,'' William P. Rogers, the deputy attorney general at the time, said shortly before he died in 2001.

''They had the key to the death chamber in their hands,'' Mr. Kilsheimer says. ''They never used it.''

Whatever military and technical secrets Julius delivered to the Russians -- and it now seems all but certain that, as a committed Communist, he did provide information -- the Rosenbergs proved more valuable as martyrs than as spies.

''The Soviets did win the propaganda war,'' said Robert J. Lamphere, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The war isn't over. David Greenglass is 81; Ruth Greenglass is 79. They live under a pseudonym because their surname has become synonymous with betrayal of kin and country. ''Perhaps,'' Mr. Meeropol says, ''this is David and Ruth's final punishment.''

On Thursday, Mr. Meeropol, who is 56, and his brother Michael, who is 60, (they took their adoptive parents' name) will attend a program at City Center in Manhattan to ''commemorate the Rosenbergs' resistance'' and benefit the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which Robert runs.

Michael Meeropol is chairman of the economics department at Western New England College. Would any evidence ever convince him that his father was a spy? ''If Soviet documents were verified as historically accurate, I'd certainly believe that,'' he replied.

Then what? How would he explain his father's behavior? ''I would have to do some thinking about my parents being involved in dangerous things, but I can't judge people from the 1940's,'' he said. ''He's not in the Army. He has bad eyesight. He can't make the contribution that others were making. I could argue that this was a way of doing it.''

To this day, plenty of people would argue that he's wrong.

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The Nation: The Rosenbergs, 50 Years Later; Yes, They Were Guilty. But of What Exactly?

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As leverage against Julius, Ethel was also indicted on what, in retrospect, appears to have been flimsy evidence. The government didn't have to prove that anything of value was delivered to the Soviets, only that the participants acted to advance their goal.

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Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950, a few weeks after the Korean War began. He was executed, along with his wife, Ethel, on June 19, 1953, a few weeks before it ended. The legal charge of which the Rosenbergs were convicted was vague: "Conspiracy to Commit Espionage." But in a practical sense they were held accountable for giving the so-called "secret of the atomic bomb" to the USSR.

The Rosenbergs' trial took place in March 1951. Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman pronounced the death sentence in early April. The Rosenbergs' attorneys worked for over two years to have the verdict overturned. They appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court nine times, but the Court refused to review the record. Neither President Truman nor President Eisenhower granted their requests for clemency.

Because the charge was conspiracy, the Rosenbergs' conviction required no tangible evidence that they had stolen anything or given it to anybody. The key government witnesses - (Ethel's brother and sister-in-law, David and Ruth Greenglass) - were charged with the same conspiracy and received more favorable treatment in return for testifying that the Rosenbergs were guilty.

The Greenglasses testified that Julius, with Ethel's help, recruited David into an atomic spy ring in 1944 while David worked as a machinist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the first atomic was being built. On the stand in the Rosenbergs' trial, the Greenglasses swore that David provided a sketch and an accompanying theoretical description of the bomb, to Julius Rosenberg in September 1945, and that Ethel was present and typed up David's notes. In return for their cooperation, David received a sentence of 15 years in prison and served 10 before being released; and Ruth Greenglass, who testified that she helped steal what the prosecution called "the most important scientific secret ever known to mankind," was never even indicted.

During the trial, David Greenglass also testified that he gave another set of sketches to Harry Gold, who used the recognition signal "I come from Julius" to identify himself to David when they first met. Gold testified that he was a spy courier transmitting information from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs to the Soviet Union, but that on this one occasion he received information from Greenglass.

FBI documents first made public in the late 1970's show that David Greenglass originally claimed Gold identified himself as "Dave from Pittsburgh," while Gold first said he identified himself to Greenglass as "Ben from Brooklyn." One FBI file shows that after several months in prison, but before the trial, prosecutors brought Gold and Greenglass together to iron out this discrepancy. It was at that meeting that Gold and Greenglass suddenly "remembered" the name "Julius" in the recognition signal.

The Rosenbergs testified in their own defense at their trial and denied all charges. They invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer repeated prosecution questions about their political affiliations. During the McCarthy period, many felt that such a refusal to answer was an admission of Communist Party membership and that all Communists were spies for the Soviet Union.

Following the three week trial, both Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, as was their co-defendant Morton Sobell. Sobell received a 30-year sentence while the Rosenbergs were given the death penalty. Judge Kaufman justified the death sentence as follows: "I consider your crimes worse than murder.... I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand and who knows how many millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason." He concluded that the Rosenbergs' "[l]ove for their cause dominated their lives - it was even greater than their love for their children."

Despite Kaufman's assertion about the supposed value of the information the Rosenbergs allegedly passed to the Soviets, a chorus of leading scientists including Harold Urey and J. Robert Oppenheimer stated that there was no "secret" of the Atomic Bomb. Years later, many Atomic scientists agreed with a colleague's assessment that the Greenglass material was, "too incomplete, ambiguous and even incorrect to be of any service or value to the Russians in shortening the time required to develop their nuclear bombs."

Decades later, the 1995 release by the CIA of the "VENONA" transcriptions of KGB files, caused the mainstream media to renew prior conclusions that the Rosenbergs were guilty. The transcriptions, however, do not point to the Rosenbergs' involvement in atomic espionage. The name "Julius Rosenberg" is never mentioned. According to these documents, the spy code-named "Antenna" and later "Liberal," whom the U.S. Government claims was Julius Rosenberg, was engaged in military/industrial rather than atomic espionage. One transmission reports that this code-named spy was "ignorant" of the atomic bomb project. Even more remarkably, the key reference to Antenna/Liberal's wife states that she was not an espionage agent.

Another significant development in the Rosenberg Case came in 2008, when the transcripts of the testimony of 43 of the 46 witnesses who appeared before the grand jury that indicted the Rosenbergs, were released to the public.

This material included the testimony of Ruth Greenglass, who was deceased at that point, but not that of David Greenglass, who was still alive. David's testimony was not released until 2015, following his death.

At the time of the first release of grand jury material in 2008, Morton Sobell, then in his 90's, acknowledged publicly that he, along with Julius Rosenberg, passed non-atomic, military-industrial information to the USSR. He said the primary purpose of this work was to help the USSR defeat the Nazis during World War II.

Despite this fact, these transcripts reveal startling contradictions between Ruth and David Greenglass' sworn testimony before the grand jury and at trial. Before the grand jury, neither Greenglass mentioned:

the allegedly crucial September 1945 meeting

the supposed atomic bomb sketch that they later said David gave to Julius at that meeting

any hand-written notes from David, about the sketch or bomb

Ethel Rosenberg doing any typing of these supposed notes

or Ethel's presence at the alleged meeting.

These contradictions between the Greenglasses' sworn testimony at trial and before the grand jury, coupled with FBI files indicating that Ethel was only arrested to use as a "lever" to coerce Julius into "disgorging" information, has led to growing calls for Ethel's exoneration.

The book Final Verdict, published in 2010, gave further weight to the argument that Ethel Rosenberg was wrongfully convicted and that Julius' espionage in the 1940's for the USSR, did not include any transmission of atomic information. The authors' meticulous research, in fact reveals even more information that corroborates the claim that evidence against Ethel was fabricated.

The book details the finding that when Julius Rosenberg was fired from the Army Corp of Engineers in January 1945, the USSR suspended him from all ongoing activities because they feared that the U.S. had discovered Julius was spying. The KGB files indicate Julius engaged in no further espionage activities in 1945. Thus, the supposed espionage meeting between the Rosenbergs and David Greenglass, which the Greenglasses testified took place in September 1945, would not have occurred.

Instead, Final Verdict concludes (with supporting evidence from KGB files) that Ruth Greenglass, on her own, without the Rosenbergs' involvement, met with a Soviet agent on December 21, 1945 and delivered the sketch the government called "the secret of the atomic bomb." That sketch was logged into the main KGB file center in Russia on December 27th, 1945.

This information in consistent with the failure of either Greenglass to mention the September 1945 meeting in their grand jury testimony. It supports this summary of the case:

Julius Rosenberg engaged in non-atomic espionage for the Soviet Union during the 1940's.

At least nine months after the Soviets suspended their relationship with Julius, the Greenglasses delivered atomic information of relatively little value to the Soviet Union without the Rosenbergs' assistance.

Neither Rosenberg was a member of an atomic spy ring that stole the secret of the Atomic Bomb.

The United States government knew all along that Ethel Rosenberg was not an espionage agent, and that Julius was not an atomic spy, but executed them both anyway.

© Robert Meeropol 2015

Check out press coverage about the case.

Read the proclamations honoring Ethel Rosenberg by the New York City Council and the Manhattan Borough President, issued on Ethel Rosenberg's 100th birthday, September 28, 2015.

Download the Case Summary, Case Fact Sheet, and summary of evidence that Ethel Rosenberg was not a spy.

Read The New York Times Op-Ed by Robert and Michael Meeropol calling for the exoneration of their mother, Ethel Rosenberg.

Read Robert Meeropol's blog posts (including "Surprise Ending," Parts 1,2,3) for more information on Final Verdict, by Walter and Miriam Schneir.

Listen to a public radio interview with co-author Miriam Scneir, and Rosenberg son Michael Meeropol.

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Julius Rosenberg was arrested in July 1950, a few weeks after the Korean War began. He was executed, along with his wife, Ethel, on June 19, 1953, a few weeks before it ended. The legal charge of which the Rosenbergs were convicted was vague: "Conspiracy to Commit Espionage."

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McCarthy Questioned on Anti-Communist Investigation Video - Joseph McCarthy - HISTORY.com

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Contents

1. First Red Scare: 1917-1920

2. Cold War Concerns About Communism

3. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

4. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

5. Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

6. Red Scare Impact

The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S. during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, which intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Communists were often referred to as "Reds" for their allegiance to the red Soviet flag.) The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. Federal employees were analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as U.S. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, investigated allegations of subversive elements in the government and the Hollywood film industry. The climate of fear and repression linked to the Red Scare finally began to ease by the late 1950s.

First Red Scare: 1917-1920

In the United States, labor strikes were on the rise, and the press sensationalized them as being caused by immigrants bent on bringing down the American way of life. The Sedition Act of 1918 targeted people who criticized the government, monitoring radicals and labor union leaders with the threat of deportation.

The fear turned to violence with the 1919 anarchist bombings, a series of bombs targeting law enforcement and government officials. Bombs went off in a wide number of cities including Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia, D.C., and New York City.

The first Red Scare climaxed in 1919 and 1920, when United States Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer ordered the Palmer raids, a series of violent law-enforcement raids targeting leftist radicals and anarchists. They kicked off a period of unrest that became known as the "Red Summer."

Cold War Concerns About Communism

Did you know? FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was quick to equate any kind of protest with communist subversion, including the civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King Jr. Hoover labeled King a communist and covertly worked to intimidate and discredit the civil rights leader.

Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI

The information obtained by the FBI proved essential in high-profile legal cases, including the 1949 conviction of 12 prominent leaders of the American Communist Party on charges that they had advocated the overthrow of the government. Moreover, Hoover's agents helped build the case against Julius Rosenberg (1918-53) and his wife, Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53), who were convicted of espionage in 1951. The Rosenbergs were executed two years later.

Hysteria and Growing Conservatism

Public concerns about communism were heightened by international events. In 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear bomb and communist forces led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976) took control of China. The following year saw the start of the Korean War (1950-53), which engaged U.S. troops in combat against the communist-supported forces of North Korea. The advances of communism around the world convinced many U.S. citizens that there was a real danger of "Reds" taking over their own country. Figures such as McCarthy and Hoover fanned the flames of fear by wildly exaggerating that possibility.

As the Red Scare intensified, its political climate turned increasingly conservative. Elected officials from both major parties sought to portray themselves as staunch anticommunists, and few people dared to criticize the questionable tactics used to persecute suspected radicals. Membership in leftist groups dropped as it became clear that such associations could lead to serious consequences, and dissenting voices from the left side of the political spectrum fell silent on a range of important issues. In judicial affairs, for example, support for free speech and other civil liberties eroded significantly. This trend was symbolized by the 1951 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dennis v. United States, which said that the free-speech rights of accused Communists could be restricted because their actions presented a clear and present danger to the government.

Red Scare Impact

Americans also felt the effects of the Red Scare on a personal level, and thousands of alleged communist sympathizers saw their lives disrupted. They were hounded by law enforcement, alienated from friends and family and fired from their jobs. While a small number of the accused may have been aspiring revolutionaries, most others were the victims of false allegations or had done nothing more than exercise their democratic right to join a political party.

Though the climate of fear and repression began to ease in the late 1950s, the Red Scare has continued to influence political debate in the decades since. It is often cited as an example of how unfounded fears can compromise civil liberties.
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First Red Scare: 1917-1920 Cold War Concerns About Communism Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI Hysteria and Growing Conservatism Red Scare Impact The Red Scare was hysteria over the perceived threat posed by Communists in the U.S.