Co-conspirators Greenglass then named his sister and brother-in-law, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as co-conspirators in the case. In the investigation that followed the Rosenbergs claimed they were victims of anti-Semitism. They also explained publicly they faced persecution only because of their leftist political beliefs. A jury in March 1951 found the Rosenbergs guilty of conspiring to commit espionage against the United States government. The two were sentenced to die by electrocu-tion in New York's Sing Sing prison. The severity of the punishment certainly reflected the anti-Communist wave sweeping the country during the Korean War years. Offers of clemency to the Rosenbergs in exchange for confessions brought repeated refusals. Indeed, the Rosenbergs steadfastly refused to cooperate with federal authorities. In her last letter, Ethel Rosenberg claimed she and her husband were the first victims of American fascism. Despite requests for mercy from around the world and a significant campaign in the United States to save the couple, they were executed on June 19, 1953. The conviction of the Rosenbergs stoked the fires of McCarthyism. Their execution helped bring an end to the hysteria that McCarthyism had become.
AIA 50th Anniversary AIA 50th Anniversary AIA 50th Anniversary AIA 50th Anniversary AIA 50th Anniversary by Dr. Dennis Casey HQ AIA/ HO Kelly Air Force Base, Texas
N economic and social adjustments stood in the front rank as concerns for most Americans. Millions of veterans returning home hoped soon to be reintegrated into Ameri-can life.
Beyond this, however, another concern surfaced in 1947. Investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee took on the trappings of an anti-Communist crusade. To some extent the government encouraged this direc-tion by an FBI raid in mid-1945 on the offices of a procommunist magazine "Amerasia." The raid uncov-ered a cache of classified documents that two state depart-ment employees and a naval intelligence officer passed to the periodical. Just 10 months later the Canadian government ex-posed a major spy network that had given American military information and atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during the war. In response to criticism that his admin-istration was lax on communism, President Truman ap-pointed a special commission to study what the media called the loyalty problem. Federal Loyalty Program Just two weeks after President Truman proclaimed a
campaign against communism as part of his speech in March 1947 announcing the Truman Doctrine, he issued Executive Order 9835 implementing the Federal Loyalty Program to ferret out subversives in government service. The order created the apparatus to check the loyalty of all government employees. Regrettably, local review boards accused those who had criticized American for-eign policy or those who had just advocated the unioniza-tion of federal workers as disloyal. From 1947 to 1951, loyalty boards forced nearly 3,000 federal employees to resign, most for reasons that would not hold up in court. The probe in the end uncovered no evidence of disloyalty or espionage. During the presidential campaign in 1948, HUAC investigators questioning Whitaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine and a former Soviet agent, learned that Alger Hiss had been a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. Hiss, a former law clerk for Supreme 1