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Unlock This CourseBy 1948 many Americans already feared that Communists were hidden inside their country. What they did not have was proof. Loyalty checks on government workers had found no spies at all. Then two court cases seemed to supply the missing proof. One involved a top government official. The other involved the secrets of the atomic bomb. Together they are a key reason why the Red Scare grew so strong.
Key terms:
Alger Hiss looked like the last person who could be a traitor. He was a well-educated lawyer who had worked in the State Department, the part of the government that deals with foreign countries. In February 1945 he was one of President Roosevelt's advisers at the Yalta Conference, where Roosevelt met the Soviet leader Stalin. Later that year he helped to set up the United Nations.
In August 1948 Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine and a former Communist, told HUAC that Hiss had belonged to a secret Communist group in the 1930s. Hiss denied it under oath. President Truman called the hearings a 'red herring', meaning a distraction. Most of the committee was ready to give up, but a young Congressman from California, Richard Nixon, kept digging.
Hiss took Chambers to court for damaging his good name. Chambers then went further and said Hiss had been a spy. In December 1948 he led investigators to his farm in Maryland and pulled rolls of microfilm out of a hollowed-out pumpkin. The film showed State Department documents from 1938. Newspapers called them the 'Pumpkin Papers'.
Hiss could not be put on trial for espionage. Too many years had passed, and American law set a time limit for bringing that charge. He was charged with perjury instead, for telling a grand jury (a panel that decides whether a case should go to trial) that he had never given documents to Chambers. His first trial in 1949 ended with the jury unable to agree. At a second trial, in January 1950, he was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. He insisted he was innocent for the rest of his life.
The second case began in Britain. In early 1950 Klaus Fuchs, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, confessed that he had passed atomic secrets to the USSR. He was arrested in February. The FBI followed the trail from Fuchs to the man who had carried his information, and from him to David Greenglass, who had worked as a machinist at Los Alamos, the laboratory where the bomb was built. Greenglass said he had been drawn into spying by his sister's husband, Julius Rosenberg.
Julius Rosenberg was an electrical engineer from New York. He and his wife Ethel had both been members of the Communist Party, and they had two young sons. Both were arrested in the summer of 1950, only weeks after the Korean War began.
Their trial opened in New York in March 1951. Greenglass was the main witness. He said he had given Julius sketches and notes about the bomb, and that Ethel had typed up the notes. The Rosenbergs denied everything. On 29 March 1951 they were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, which means plotting with others to spy.
The judge, Irving Kaufman, sentenced them both to death. He told them, 'I consider your crime worse than murder', and blamed them for helping the USSR to get the bomb early and so for American deaths in Korea. Greenglass, who had helped the prosecution, was given 15 years in prison.
Two years of appeals followed. There were protests in the USA and abroad, and the Pope and the scientist Albert Einstein were among those who asked for clemency. President Eisenhower refused. On 19 June 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York. They were the first American civilians to be executed for espionage.
If a respected official who had advised the President at Yalta could be a secret Communist, then anyone could be. The case made HUAC look right and its critics, including Truman, look careless. Republicans said Truman's Democrats were 'soft on Communism'. It also made Nixon famous: he was elected to the Senate in 1950 and became Vice-President in 1953.
Americans had been shocked when the USSR tested an atomic bomb in 1949. Now there seemed to be an answer: spies had stolen the secret. The Rosenbergs were also an ordinary-looking married couple, so the spy next door might be anyone. The death sentences showed how serious the danger was thought to be.
Timing mattered too. Hiss was convicted in January 1950, Fuchs was arrested in February, the Korean War began in June and the Rosenbergs were arrested that summer. Each piece of news made the last one more frightening. The fear of spies no longer rested on rumour. It rested on court verdicts, and that made new accusations much easier to believe. You will see who took advantage of this in McCarthy's Methods and the Growth of Opposition.
Soviet messages decoded by American intelligence were made public in 1995. They showed that Julius Rosenberg really had been a Soviet spy. The case against Ethel was much weaker, and Greenglass later admitted that he had lied in court about her typing the notes. The most valuable atomic secrets had come from Fuchs. Historians still argue about Hiss, although many now think he probably did pass documents.
Don't say Hiss was convicted of spying. He was convicted of perjury, because the time limit for an espionage charge had run out. Don't say the Rosenbergs were executed in 1951: they were sentenced in 1951 and executed in 1953. And don't just tell the story of the trials. The exam asks what the cases led to, so always finish with the effect on American fears.
Explain two effects of the Hiss and Rosenberg cases on the USA. [8 marks]
One effect was that fear of Communist spies inside the government grew much deeper. Hiss was a respected State Department official who had been at Yalta in 1945, so his conviction for perjury in January 1950 seemed to prove that traitors had reached the very top. Because it was HUAC that had exposed him, the case also made the hunt for Communists look justified. This led many Americans to support more investigations and to believe new accusations, and it turned Richard Nixon into a national figure.
A second effect was that Americans blamed spies for the nuclear danger they now faced, which made attitudes to Communists far harsher. The USSR had tested an atomic bomb in 1949, and the Rosenbergs' conviction in March 1951 seemed to explain how it had been built so soon. As the trial took place during the Korean War, Judge Kaufman called their crime 'worse than murder' and sentenced them to death. Their execution in June 1953 showed that Communists were now seen as deadly enemies, not just as people with different ideas.
What lifts this to the top level: it gives two separate effects, backs each with precise names and dates, and explains step by step how the case led to the effect.
One effect alone cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks, however well you write it. Use one case for each effect, so your two paragraphs cannot blur into one: Hiss for fear of spies in government, the Rosenbergs for fear about the bomb.