These students known to history, insofar as they as they are known to history, as the Lane Rebels, stayed for a time in Cincinnati, teaching black people and helping fugitives, supported by the New York merchant brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan, until the Tappans found and underwrote this college [Oberlin] for them. The Tappan brothers funded antislavery causes patiently for decades, though they were mobbed and their warehouses were burned to the ground. Lewis Tappan appears in the movie Amistad as the wan and tremulous fanatic who whispers that he wants the Africans who seized the ship to be killed, in order to advance the cause of abolition. The film is accurate only in one particular - Lewis Tappan did indeed organize the Africans' defense.
Marilynne Robinson: Who Was Oberlin?
The lore of the Rosenbergs, which turns out to have been, from the start, founded in blatant lies told by Communists and their dupes and their lawyers, held that both of them were totally innocent. Unable to sustain that lie for their dupes about Julius, they have transferred all of it to the unlikely claim that Ethel was entirely unaware and uninvolved in the espionage her husband, her brother, very possibly her sister-in-law were involved in as the fall-back position. That and the traditional, absurdly made claim that Judge Irving Kaufman, unlike the Commies at least a nominally observant Jew, was part of an antisemitic conspiracy to fry the Rosenbergs because they were Jewish is a pious myth of the play-left. Mostly believed by most of those who have ever even heard of any of this BS because they saw some mention of them in something such as a Woody Allen movie or Next Stop Greenwich Village or heard someone who had read an article in The Nation spouting what it said. The more intellectual of that clique are the ones who read the article in The Nation.
Why should I hold the slightest interest in believing that Ethel Rosenberg was innocent when I was a victim of that lie told by alleged journalists and scholars of the Marxist left for decades? They lied to me, I don't trust them.
I say that even as I admit I loved the fantasy deathbed scene of Roy Cohn and Ethel in Angels in America as done by Streep and Pacino. I can't claim along with Ethel's ghost that my anger at being lied to is like a star that "burns acid-green" but it's cooled my willingness to go along with maintaining that the people who make such use of the Rosenbergs are to be trusted.
It's the greatness of Tony Kushner that he presents the figures in more complexity than the myths of the commies and their fellow travelers on the one hand or the fans of Roy Cohn on the other but I'm not going to mistake that for history.
The greatness of Streep and Pacino in that scene is also useful to show how dangerous the presentation of real historical figures in drama can be. It took me a long time to learn to not trust my affections for actors as it colored my view of history and historical figures. Knowing how hard it was for me to overcome that manipulation, I understand why so many of what I mistook as my fellow lefties are unable to do that. And, as my list of the movie resources of neo-fascist reaction shows, silly play-lefties aren't the only ones dangerously falling for that show-biz BS. It's better for playwrights and novelists and movie script writers to stick to the strict facts or they should forego using real history and real people because if they exercise any "artistic license" in that they will turn themselves into liars of a provably dangerous type.
Update: I absolutely reject the Weavers, Pete Seeger "which side are you on" bullshit. I AM UNDER NO MORAL OR INTELLECTUAL OBLIGATION TO CHOOSE EITHER "THE ROSENBERGS" OR ROY COHN, which, by the way, in this context means sides, not people. I CAN REJECT BOTH SIDES, I CAN DISDAIN THEM BOTH OR DESPISE THEM BOTH. Acceptance may be a binary, yes or no, reject or accept proposition, non-acceptance is done under no such condition of absolute binary choice. Sometimes even the less objectionable side makes itself unacceptable, which frequently happens when the "left side" is involved with anti-democratic shit like Marxism.
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