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Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg was born on September 28, 1915. Along with her parents and 3 brothers, David, Sam and Bernard, she lived on Sheriff Street in the Lower East Side of New York City (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 1). Mr. and Mrs. Greenglass raised their children in a strict Jewish home. They attended both Hebrew and public schools growing up (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 1).
Ethel Greenglass attended Seward Park High School where she graduated 1 year early in hopes that she would go on to college (Green 601). Like many young girls, Miss Greenglass also had dreams of singing and acting, but her parents quickly dismissed these dreams with reality. She was forced to give up her dream temporarily and enlist in a typing class. Ethel Greenglass kept her singing dream alive by performing at nightclubs in talent competitions. She was offered a job as a professional singer, but at her parents requests she refused (Ethel Rosenberg, pars. 3 - 4). In mid 1931, Greenglass got a job at the National New York Shipping and Packing Company as a stenographer (Green 601).
She became involved in citywide strikes during the peak of the depression to improve working conditions and salaries for women. Ethel Greenglass, along with her female co-workers formed a group, which was later known as the Ladies Apparel Shipping Clerks Union. In 1935, they went on strike in hopes of improving their working hours and raise their salaries. The womens success did not long.
Although the women successfully shut down the Company for one day, Miss Greenglass was fired (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 9). In 1937, Ethel Greenglass was involved in a group called the International Seamen's Union. She was asked to sing at their New Years Eve dance, where she finally met Julius Rosenberg. They were introduced by a mutual friend and from then on they knew they were meant to be together (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 10). Ethel Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg were married on June 18, 1939. The young couple moved into an East Side flat (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 11).
Julius Rosenberg was a junior engineer at the Army Signal Corps. He made only two-thousand dollars a year (Ethel Rosenberg, pars. 10 - 11). But in 1945 he got fired from his job after being accused of being involved with the Communist party. With little time and money, Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother, formed their own machine shop (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 13). During this time Ethel Rosenberg was a member of the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists and Technicians.
This group raised money for underprivileged children in Spain (Green 602). In 1943 Michael Rosenberg was born to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It was then that the young mother retired from union involvements to be a full-time mother. Four years after Michael Rosenberg was born came the birth of the Rosenberg's second child, Robby (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 12).
During Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's early marriage years, the Cold war broke out between Russia and the United States. President Harry S. Truman oversaw the production of the first atomic bomb ever made. This event was referred to as the Manhattan Project (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 14).
Highly respected officials such as, Joseph McCarthy and Edgar Hoover thought that among the United States Government there were communist spies who were stealing secrets about the United States nuclear weapons and selling them to Russia. As a result of the fear of Russian Spies, the United States started a witch hunt (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 15) to catch any unreliable American (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 15). Throughout this extensive manhunt, the government stumbled upon Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. During the Cold War, David Greenglass worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the Manhattan Project. Greenglass admitted to stealing the secrets under the request of Mr.
Rosenberg (Nash 428 - 429). He also stated that Julius Rosenberg hired Harry Gold to take the secrets and give them to the Russians. Gold was caught by Igor Gouzenko, who was supplying information to the United States, and arrested (Nash 429). In July of 1950, Mr. Rosenberg was arrested at his apartment for the accusation of involved with a Soviet spy ring. He completely denied all charges brought against him by his brother-in-law (Green 603).
Twenty-five days after Julius Rosenberg's imprisonment came his wifes arrest. The police accused Mrs. Rosenberg of being a spy because her husband was one (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 16). The only reason Ethel Rosenberg was arrested was to force her husband to confess so they would both receive a lesser punishment (Fowler 48).
The press was printing stories about the Rosenberg's before the trial even began. It is thought that the portrayal of the Rosenberg's by the newspapers doomed (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 17) the outcome of the trial (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 17). During the trial, the Rosenberg's knew they did not stand a chance against the unthinkable sentence they would receive. The prosecutions testimony included the drawing that David Greenglass sold to the Russians traced back to Julius Rosenberg and that he was given money for the drawing. Greenglass was the only person proven to be part of the link (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 18). It did not come as a surprise to Ethel or Julius Rosenberg when Judge Irving Kaufman presented them with the death penalty (Nash 430).
The couple was charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act by passing secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union (Parrish). The judge also held The Rosenberg's accountable for the deaths that occurred during the Korean War (Parrish). J. Edgar Hoover thought that a thirty-seven year sentence would accommodate Ethel Rosenberg because she was the mother of two small children (Green 603), but the jury did not considerate it (Green 603).
With a 6 - 3 vote (Parrish), Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed by means of the electric chair on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 20). Anne and Abel Meeropol adopted Michael and Robby Rosenberg in 1957. (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 21). In 1975 the Rosenberg boys filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the FBI files on their parents (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 21). The FBI gave Michael and Robby Rosenberg around 200, 000 pages of information about the trial and what really happened, but mysteriously a good portion of the files has been deleted for national security reasons (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 21). After reviewing the files attained from the FBI, a vast number of people have concluded that there was no real proof that the Rosenberg's were involved in a spy ring or had to do with any part of the crime against them (Ethel Rosenberg, par. 21). Works Cited Ethel Rosenberg.
U X L Biographies. U X L, 1999. Reproduced in Student Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI. : Gale Group.
Dec. , 2000. web Fowler, Will. The Secret World of the Spy. London: Bison Books Ltd. , 1994. Green, Carol Hurd. Ethel Rosenberg.
Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Eds. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green. MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980. Nash, Robert Jay. Spies: A Narrative Encyclopedia of Dirty Deeds and Double Dealing from Biblical Times to Today.
New York: M. Evens and Company Inc. , 1997. Parrish, Michael E. Rosenberg V.
United States. The Supreme Court. Ed. Philip Weinburg. New York: Macmillan Library Reference U. S.
A. , 1999. Shnayerson, Robert. The Illustrated History of The Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. , 1986.
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