When dissenters are tried, so are the policies of a government.
A trial of a dissenter brings into public light matters of morality or wisdom for all to see. If a genuine appeal to conscience is to be made, those who break the law do so in order to demonstrate that the law is wrong.
A trial is the forum to air the issue. In such a trial the government is reluctant to have public attention focused on the question of rightness, only the legal issue surrounding the broken law. Yet the government needs to try dissenters in order to demonstrate that it is “doing something” about troublemakers, perhaps subversives, who are taking the law into their own hands. In such cases the government is eager to raise a moral question: the rightness of the law. Whether the defendants want to bring the question of wrong to the attention of the public or the government does, trials of dissenters are appeals to conscience.Among fourteen people arrested for demonstrating against the navy’s first Trident nuclear submarine in 1982 was Ruth Youngdahl Nelson, 78, the American Mother of the Year in 1973. The Justice Department quickly dropped the charges. Although President Reagan had declared an emergency in the Bangor, Washington, area before the protest began, thereby increasing the penalty from a $1,000 fine or one year in jail to $10,000 and ten years, the government was, in all likelihood, not desirous of the media coverage her trial would have generated. As it was, the protest and arrest begat headlines such as “Mother of the Year Arrested in Nuclear Sub Protest.” Mrs. Nelson and the other protesters, since they were challenging the Trident submarine as part of a first-strike nuclear policy, were disappointed to have their efforts in civil disobedience cut short when the charges were dropped.1
By contrast, the government arrested, prosecuted, and executed Ethel Rosenberg in spite of flimsy evidence.
Whatever might be said about the evidence against Julius Rosenberg,2 Ethel was the victim of J. Edgar Hoover’s zealous crusade. Throughout the events of the Rosenberg case the government sought publicity. Klaus Fuchs had engaged in genuine and significant atomic bomb spying.3 He confessed in England and set off a round of arrests in the United States. Hoover and the prosecution puffed out the Fuchs connection into a vast chimera around the Rosenbergs. What real evidence they had of Soviet espionage was magnified. Concerning Ethel they had none. After Julius had been arrested, Hoover told Attorney General J. Howard McGrath that “there is no question if Julius Rosenberg would furnish details of his extensive espionage activities it would be possible to proceed against other individuals…proceeding against his wife might serve as a lever in this matter.”4Robert Cecil and Edward Coke in 1605, like Hoover and the prosecutors in 1951, parlayed a real but limited Gunpowder Plot involving Guy Fawkes and a dozen conspirators into a colossus. Later in the century Titus Oates tied together another knot of lies in the Popish Plot. Both fed on the fear and prejudice in anti-Catholicism. Yet the basic facts in the original Gunpowder Plot were true. Fr. Henry Garnet, who had a tenuous connection with the actual Gunpowder plotters, was tried and executed as the mastermind of a treasonous plot against all England, boundless in reach and unfathomable in perfidy. Likewise, the Rosenbergs, with Julius’s slender links to spy activities, were depicted by Judge Kaufman as
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 50,000 and who knows but what that millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.5
As the Gunpowder and the Rosenberg trials demonstrate, momentous trials of dissenters, after a passage of time, take on a life of their own.
For a while, perhaps a long while, the intent of a Cecil and a Coke, a Hoover and a Kaufman might succeed. The specter of the Gunpowder Plot can be raised over and over against Catholics for two or more generations. In some quarters the meaning of Guy Fawkes Day is anti-Catholic to this day, although it has become for most Britons a civic celebration—the Fourth of July and Halloween in one. The Rosenberg trial and the trial of Alger Hiss served those who sought to discredit dissenters as subversive. It worked well during the 1950s and on occasion thereafter, but, while the debate surrounding the Rosenberg and Hiss trials continues,6 the incantational effect of the trials works no more.The symbolic struggle represented by the Rosenberg and the Hiss trials, and in the previous generation the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, document the political profile of an era. Were Sacco and Vanzetti framed?7 Or Hiss? Were the Rosenbergs? Were these trials part of a campaign to stir up a red scare hysteria? Apart from any of the facts in the cases, the answers to these questions have shaped the contours of politics since the trials. The political faith, belief, and, for many, dogmatics arise from the meaning such trials have generated. The Sacco-Vanzetti, Hiss, and Rosenberg trials are hardly the first, and the Gunpowder Plot trial was not the first either. At least since the trial of Socrates, trials of dissenters have shaped our sense of public morality. The life of their own which such trials achieve, independent of the facts concerning guilt or innocence, is our public reservoir from which we draw our conscience. We need real human beings, not abstract rules, in order to know what is right and what is wrong.