ABSTRACT
On Saturday June 20th, 1953, my father announced, without warning or explanation, that I was not to read the newspapers on that day. The Toronto Globe and Mail, the Toronto Telegram, and the Toronto Star for that Saturday, summarily disappeared from the house. As a 12-year-old avid reader and student, I had a vague idea that this unexplained but draconian prohibition had something to do with death. I remember hunting through later editions of the newspapers, my father’s sanctions having made me actually now anxiously curious. The material he sought to shield me from was the account of the death in the electric chair, of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an execution that took place in Sing Sing, a prison in the town of Ossining along the bucolic Hudson River. After a number of years of trials, appeals, protests, and passionate argument about spying, the Cold War, and the death penalty, and a final last ditch attempt to stay the execution, the Rosenbergs were executed early on a Friday evening (8 p.m.), designed in a stunningly insensitive but surely not unconscious move in relation to the Sabbath (which would begin at 11 p.m.). This occurred as the state pursued the death of this couple relentlessly and despite a massive international movement arguing for clemency and basic justice. Now after half a century and a life both of activism, of protest, of feminism, and of psychoanalysis, I can see that this trial and execution was a sequence of events, unfolding with inexorable horror, that marked the generation of the Rosenbergs’ peers but also my generation, the cohort of their children, Robert and Michael, who were 6 and 10 respectively at the time of their parents’ deaths. The arrest, trial, and execution of the Rosenbergs is the dark center of the postwar Cold War and McCarthyism
hysteria that swept America. Black lists, jobs and pensions lost, careers destroyed: these casualties are simply the most visible. The toll on the physical health, mental health, and on the psychic and political resilience of the wide spectrum of progressive persons who would have felt at risk is probably incalculable, certainly very far reaching. The Cold War historian Ellen Schrecker (1999) describes the tactic of intimidation and hostile surveillance that dogged thousands of progressive and left wing Americans after the Second World War. At the heart of that activity was the execution for espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Although others were suspected or even known to have passed information, no other arrests resulted in the death penalty or in execution. These deaths were the horrifying specter that caught the heart and mind of anyone on the left in that period, probably anyone even mildly progressive. This seems to have been, as many have argued, the government’s intention. At the time, these events were highly traumatic, marking the consciousness of progressive persons worldwide. In this chapter I want to pursue the idea that these events cast a long dark shadow, operating at both conscious and unconscious levels. I believe that for my generation, the 1950s, including these events and these executions, are much more determinative than we had imagined. I include in this generational roll call people engaged in anti war activism, civil rights work, second wave feminism, gay liberation, coming into political consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, with the eruption of anti war protest and identity politics. Even as the politics of the 1960s, cultural and more traditionally political, were seen as a break for freedom, as explosive change and cultural transformation, I think this tragic and difficult postwar and Cold War past followed us, haunted us, entered mind and heart, led us, and accompanied us. Nachtraglichkeit is the filter through which to see the impact of these events. Looking back at the context of the Cold War and postwar repressive environment and looking forward to the 1960s and the activism of civil rights, anti war work and feminism and gay liberation, the linked worlds of Old and New Left, I see the persistence, the reverberations, and the pervasive reach of this trial and these deaths. It might be better to think of the notion of caesura (Bion, 1962; Civitarese, 2008) to describe and frame the experience of continuity and discontinuity between the decades of the postwar and the years around and after 1968.
