In New York, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. The trial, conducted at the height of Cold War anticommunist hysteria, featured controversial testimony from David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, whose evidence was later shown to be fabricated or exaggerated. Despite international appeals for clemency, both were executed in 1953, becoming the only American civilians put to death for espionage during the Cold War.

The Rosenberg case generated a significant body of poetry exploring Cold War paranoia, state violence, and the destruction of families by political persecution. Poets from Muriel Rukeyser, who wrote about the case, to the protest poetry of the 1960s referenced the Rosenbergs as symbols of governmental overreach. The case influenced the tradition of American political poetry that examines how the law becomes an instrument of ideological warfare, a theme central to the work of poets like Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg.