National Affairs: The Demonstrators

The executions touched off wild scenes and wilder words around the world.

In New York City's Union Square, barricaded by police, a crowd of 5,000 took its cue from prompters on a sound truck, wept through the time of electrocution, sang Go Down, Moses, abused President Eisenhower as "bloodthirsty," shouted a pledge to carry on the work of the Rosenbergs until "we have created a world of peace and beauty."

In Washington, a mixed crowd, cheering and sobbing, milled around the White House. The Rosenbergs' counsel, Emanuel Bloch, railed against the U.S. Government: "Much more barbaric than the Nazis . . . We are living under a military dictatorship garbed in civilian clothes . . . I don't know what animals I am dealing with, but I am convinced I am dealing with animals . . ." Later, at the Rosenbergs' funeral in New York, Bloch vented more bitterness: "Insanity, irrationality, barbarism and murder seem to be part of the feeling of those who rule us . . . I place the murder of the Rosenbergs at the door of President Eisenhower, Mr. Brownell and J. Edgar Hoover . . ."

Abroad, the Red-inspired demonstration raged on raucously. MURDER, ran the headline in London's Daily Worker. Thousands of Britons roamed their capital's West End, yelling anti-American slogans.

The anti-execution sentiment was strongest in France, where the U.S. Government point in the Rosenberg case is not understood by one citizen in 100. (From 1946 to 1950, France had a Communist, Frederic Joliot-Curie, at the head of the atomic research program.) France's non-Communist daily, Combat, even objected to the scheduling of the execution to avoid the Jewish Sabbath. Combat called this "sadistic puritanism." In Paris, a mob tried to storm the heavily guarded U.S. embassy in the Place de la Concorde; a man was shot and a thousand rioters arrested. There were echoes of the violent hate-America drive from Australia's docksides to Dublin's streets.

Red propaganda masters had called this violent tune. But most Europeans who danced to it were not Reds, and those who danced in ignorance could largely blame their non-Communist press and leaders. The details of the Rosenbergs' crime and their painstaking, patient trial by U.S. justice were meagerly reported in the foreign press.