Crime of “Crimes”
History Channel bloopers.

By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Movie Industry in the 1930s and 1940s. He writes from Sacramento, California.
September 8-9, 2001

hose who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana observed. But those who learn about the past from a certain History Channel feature are condemned to get some bad information, as two cases confirm.

The History Channel runs a regular feature called "History's Crimes and Trials," half-hour documentaries on cases from the Lindbergh kidnapping through Bonnie and Clyde, Lord Haw Haw, Richard Speck, Jimmy Hoffa, the Yorkshire Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, and many others.

These include rare footage and a good deal of detail, with an honest attempt to understand the background of the times. But two of the segments are absolutely unforgivable. Both deal with American cases that became rallying cries for the international Left.

One can argue whether Julius and Ethel Rosenberg should have been executed, especially Ethel. But it is not possible to argue that the couple were not Communist spies who played a major role in supplying Josef Stalin, the worse mass murderer in history, with America's nuclear secrets. But a recent segment on "History's Crimes and Trials" did just that, emphasizing the sensational elements of their trial and their illustrious supporters but ignoring the most damning evidence against the pair.

The Soviet Union and Communist Party of the United States directed the massive propaganda campaign that portrayed the Rosenbergs as innocent victims of a McCarthyite witch-hunt, fueled by anti-Communist hysteria and xenophobia. This campaign had a tactical dimension that the History Channel's recent segment on the Rosenbergs missed.

In the early 1950s, Soviet anti-Semitism was in its heyday, and the Rosenberg campaign was a diversion from Stalin's purges in Czechoslovakia, which culminated in the Slansky show trials and ensuing executions. The campaign had great success, but it went against the evidence.

Historian Ron Radosh had been a defender of the Rosenbergs, but he, unlike many on the Left who knew the Rosenbergs were Stalinist spies but kept quiet for the good of the movement, had the courage to face that evidence. In 1981, with Joyce Milton, he wrote The Rosenberg File, the definitive work proving the their guilt. The Left has never forgiven Radosh, despite subsequent evidence from Soviet archives that the Rosenbergs were in fact Stalinist agents.

Long after these revelations had settled the matter for all but the willfully blind, the History Channel's segment emphasized the campaign to support the Rosenbergs, ignored the diversionary tacits of the Communist Party, and concluded by saying that many doubt whether the Rosenbergs were in fact spies. This would be like a documentary about Al Capone expressing doubt whether the mobster had ever been involved in organized crime.

The History Channel's treatment of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was similar. The segment concluded that the two Italian immigrants were innocent and closed with a scene of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaiming a special day for the pair. During the 1920s their case was taken up by the international Left. The two Italian immigrants, both anarchists, were portrayed as victims of anti-immigrant hysteria, kangaroo-courted to their deaths in a reactionary America.

They had actually been involved in a holdup and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. New England writer Francis Russell had been one of those for whom the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti was an article of faith, not to be questioned. Mr. Russell set out to confirm their innocence but wound up making the case for Sacco's guilt in Tragedy at Dedham in 1962. In 1986, with new evidence from Sacco and Vanzetti's anarchist colleagues, he wrote Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved.

While there still may be true believers in the most die-hard ranks of the Left, for The History Channel to maintain Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence 15 years later requires an act of willful ignorance. And to proclaim the Rosenbergs' innocence requires outright falsification. Ignorance and falsification have consequences.

America has a short attention span. The only knowledge of these important cases many people will have comes through television programs. Even in this medium, the first priority should be the presentation of truth, based on the best available evidence. An outfit that gets it wrong in such clear-cut cases should not be regarded as a purveyor of truth on any other subject.

As Orwell observed, those who control the past control the present, and those who control the present control the future. Those who will control what will happen in the future must know what happened in the past, especially in the most contentious cases. They won't find out from the History Channel.

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