The New Deal programs were designed to be economic investments to relieve the suffering and to put people back to work, to calm the mounting fear and to rout the sense of hopelessness, unrest and hardship caused by the Depression. They were unprecedented and they permanently altered the economic, social and governmental landscapes. They included Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, price supports, the building of an interstate highway system and rural electrification through the Tennessee Valley Authority. The programs also instituted government regulation of banking and the stock market to protect bank depositors against bank failures (which occurred frequently after the stock market crash of 1929) and investors from stock market failures, then a common Wall Street nightmare. In addition, the New Deal created the National Housing Act under which the Federal Housing Administration offered home loans and mortgage insurance to benefit mostly low- and middle-income home buyers.

The massive spending stimulated recovery by funneling money into the economy as payments for material, equipment and labor. It thus increased the national purchasing power until the economy could expand and private industry could recover enough to begin hiring again. At the same time, the WPA programs took care of the needs of some of the country's infrastructure, including the construction of public buildings, bridges, roadways and airports, as well as conservation work in the national parks and forests. It also conducted an education program through the National Youth Administration, training young people and helping them find work. More critically, the New Deal Farm Security Administration provided emergency loans to farmers to rescue them from impending bankruptcy.

Not least among the programs was the Federal Arts Project; it gave dignified and creative work to scores of unemployed theater people, artists, writers, teachers and musicians and it brought the arts to millions of Americans.

For example, the Music Project's many symphony orchestras gave about four thousand performances a month before 150 million people, more than half of whom had never heard a live orchestra before. Thousands more learned to play or sing at its many teaching centers.

The Theater Project's companies played to over 25 million people, most of whom had never seen a stage play before. Some of their productions were highly innovative. Among those who got their start here were Orson Welles, John Houseman, John Huston and Norman Lloyd.

The Art Project's artists produced nearly a million works of visual art which were exhibited and used by schools, courthouses, hospitals, libraries, post offices and other public buildings. And each month 60,000 people came to the free art classes offered by the Art Project. Some of the artists and photographers who emerged from this program included Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, BenShahn, Hugo Gellert, Miguel Coverrubias, Al Hirschfield, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Much of the art produced under the aegis of the Art Project provided a vivid record, otherwise unobtainable, of life during the Depression.

The Writers' Project employed workers of literary competence and included many teachers who could not find teaching jobs. Some of these writers trekked the countryside, discovering untapped fountains of folklore and history, wrote about them and provided invaluable data for later researchers of Americana. Writers who came out of this program included Conrad Aiken, Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever and Malcolm Cowley.

The Federal Arts Projects collectively became one of the most culturally productive and creative periods in American history. Nevertheless, it faced considerable opposition in Congress almost from the first days of its creation. The opposition had two roots: the idea that work relief was not something the government should be involved in and the accusation that the WPA projects constituted a network for militant trade unionists and communists. The House Investigative Committee in 1939 began a campaign of intimidation by questioning Federal Arts Project employees regarding their union and political activities, hoping to rouse support for eliminating the programs. The Senate joined in the harassment. As a result, in 1939 the WPA appropriations were cut and the Federal Arts Project died. The WPA itself went out of business officially in 1943.

The New Deal was, in almost every aspect, revolutionary in scope and it was fought bitterly by America's right wing. (What remains of it today is still under attack: witness the recent drive to scuttle Social Security - as well as Medicare passed in the Johnson era.)

Abe was married and the father of two young children. He was devoted to his family, but always seemed more preoccupied with his work; spending his days and most evenings at the office, or in the company of professional colleagues. Even on weekends or holidays one could invariably find him bent over his drawing board. I was hired in October 1944 to handle his office work, and was immediately aware that his professional absorption to the exclusion of a normal family life was a defining mode for him.

Abe was usually out of the office during the day, calling on accounts or at client meetings, and he would return just as I would be packing up for the day. I began to adjust my hours to accommodate his routine. We often worked late, went to dinner together, and I found charming his endless stories of his childhood in an extended family. I was dazzled also by his erudition in science and mathematics, by the reach of his mind in history, and his canny perceptions of the events of the day. He was the liveliest conversationalist and the most indefatigable I had ever known. When he also turned out to be musically gifted-he had studied voice and could impressively render Schubert or Puccini or Cole Porter - it seemed a superabundance of gifts had been lodged in this person and I was awed. He was amusing, too; his irreverent quick humor skewered the shams of modern life, and I learned to laugh with him at the contradictions we had to cope with.

Before Abe, I had worked for the government as a clerk, first for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, then for the Social Security Board, and finally for the War Manpower Commission. My life centered around my job and the union I belonged to, a CIO affiliate, the United Federal Workers of America. On Wednesday evenings at the union hall we had folk or square dancing; on Saturday evenings we ran social events, even a theater party now and then; summer Sundays were for beach parties; and in between we worked on grievance strategies, held business meetings, or ground out leaflets on the mimeograph machine in support of a union action. The young men in my life, most of whom I had met either at New York City College, where I was an Evening Session student, or through union activities, were now in uniform preparing to fight World War II. When they came home on leave I dragged them to the union hall for whatever was going on there, or we went to the movies and later, over coffee, I listened to their accounts of army life. They were unenthusiastic soldiers, perhaps, but always brave and I ached for them, so innocent and unknowing about what awaited them overseas.

And while I was veering leftward in my political perceptions I was also dipping into interests that were not remotely concerned with causes or social problems. One of the young men would take me to Nick's Bar in the Village on Tenth Street and Seventh Avenue on Friday evenings or to Jimmy Ryan's boozerie on West 52 Street on Sunday afternoons, where for the price of a beer at Nick's, or a fifty-cent admission at Ryan's, we would listen with total rapture to Eddie Condon and Pee Wee Russell and Sidney Bechet and Max Kaminsky and other giants of jazz whose names I no longer remember. They gave us haunting, heart-stopping bluesy improvisations; their interactive exchanges finding harmonies that could have been Debussy's or Ravel's, while a clarinet quivered and a velvety trumpet reached achingly for a resolution. All the while the percussive tempos, now driving, now mellow, combined to offer mood and music that was the new aesthetic joy of the 1940s jazz, totally unlike anything we had heard before, leaving us sometimes shaken to such emotional depths as we had never known.

In 1944 I became restless in my government job, left it, and found one with Abe Brothman. Suddenly my good old friends all seemed like sandbox playmates; Abe and his universe were closing them out. Over several months our relationship took a more personal turn. I was twenty-eight, he was thirty-one; it was an uncharted course and neither of us recognized the dangers.

I was also not paying attention to the clouds mottling my horizon: the growing intensity of an anti-communist fever claiming national front and center-stage attention. I read disbelievingly the escalating accusations of communists corrupting the corridors of government.

Miriam Moskowitz, a retired math teacher who lives in Washington Township, New Jersey, has just published her first book, at the age of ninety-four. “Phantom Spies, Phantom Justice” - its comprehensive subtitle is “Elizabeth T. Bentley, Harry Gold, Roy M. Cohn, Irving H. Saypol, Judge Irving R. Kaufman, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Rehearsal for the Rosenberg Trial, or How I Survived McCarthyism” - is a memoir of the events of sixty years ago, when Moskowitz and her then boss, Abe Brothman, a chemical engineer, were found guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Roy Cohn described the trial in his autobiography as a dry run of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; they faced the same judge, were prosecuted by the same lawyers, and were testified against by the same witnesses. “I wanted to set the record straight,” Moskowitz, who is acute and right, said the other day. “I just felt that this was a part of history.”

Among the things Moskowitz sets straight is one of the reasons that she and Brothman did not testify on their own behalf: they did not wish to expose the fact that they were having an affair. (Time Magazine reported that they “sat mute and unblinking as dummies in a waxworks.”) “He was married,” she said the other day. “I had no right to do that. And I was overcome, I guess, with humiliation that I had ever let myself get into that.” Moskowitz, who grew up in Bayonne, and attended City College, says that she was bowled over by Brothman. “I was very flattered,” she said. “When he talked, he made such sense. He interpreted the universe... It was like getting a secondhand education without cracking the books open.” Had it not been for her affair with Brothman, Moskowitz says, she might have testified on his behalf. The question of his testifying on her behalf never came up. “I never thought of that - sixty years later, and I never thought of that,” she said. “The lawyers never mentioned it. I didn’t count.” Her admiration for Brothman rapidly diminished after she was reunited with him, upon her release, in 1952, from Alderson federal prison, in West Virginia, having served two years. Brothman served a similar sentence. “He came to see me at my house,” she said. “We embraced, and as he embraced me he said, ‘I have had such a terrible time.’ And then everything got clear.” (Their relationship ended soon thereafter; Brothman died in 1980.)

Moskowitz’s discretion came at considerable cost. After her sentencing, she spent several months in the Women’s House of Detention, in Greenwich Village, where she sometimes had coffee in the afternoon with Ethel Rosenberg, chatting about music or Rosenberg’s children. “We floated free then for those few moments in a more benevolent world - until a guard would yell across to us as we finished the last of our coffee, ‘Hey, you two! You’re not in the Waldorf, ya know!’ ” In Moskowitz’s account, Rosenberg was a generous inmate. Photographs that showed her smiling as she was being transferred to Sing Sing, which were viewed as evidence of her coldhearted culpability, were in fact proof of her affection for the women among whom she had been living at the House of Detention - and who, Moskowitz writes, were chanting her name from the barred windows as she was driven away. “Ethel had heard the anguish in our voices and wanted us to buck up,” she writes. “Ethel was smiling for us.”

At Alderson, Moskowitz kept up with the news by reading the newspapers that came wrapped around supplies sent to the storehouse. With the encouragement of a kindly officer, she played the violin at church services. In the years after her incarceration, Moskowitz, who never married, worked in public relations. In the sixties, she became a teacher. She would have liked to teach history, but being herself a footnote to history rendered that unwise.

In 1992, Moskowitz stood outside the funeral of Irving Kaufman, the judge who presided over her trial. In the book’s concluding scene, she describes herself issuing a lengthy silent curse over his casket as it is rolled outside: “I damn you for having lusted for prestige and for having fed your obscene ambitions at my expense.” She says now, “I was sorry I never met him again, I really was. I wanted to say, "Mr. Kaufman, look me in the eye and tell me that you did right." Moskowitz is working on a short story, about the life of another inmate at Alderson: Iva D’Aquino, better known as Tokyo Rose.

On a sleepy summer afternoon in July, 1950, in a sleepy coastal New Jersey town, the FBI, in its best imitation of ’50s popular TV shows, swooped down on me and Abraham Brothman, arrested us and threw us in jail.

I was Brothman’s secretary and friend. The charge against us was “conspiracy to obstruct justice.” I had no idea what that meant or what the government thought I had done but I knew it portended trouble for the charge had overtones of Soviet espionage and in the McCarthyite political atmosphere such hints of wrongdoing, true or not, would be disastrous.

In its details, the government accused Brothman, my co-defendant, of having influenced a key witness to lie to the grand jury which was then investigating Soviet espionage, and, it said, I had known of it. That key witness was a chemist from Philadelphia who had shaken up the world only months earlier with a startling confession that he had been America’s No. 1 spy although he made no accusations that we had participated in his wrongdoing… His name was Harry Gold.

From then on my life seemed to be on a roller coaster going downhill. We were tried in November, 1950. Gold, who had not yet been sentenced and faced a death penalty, was the prosecution’s most compliant witness in detailing how Brothman and I were complicit in the charges the government leveled against us. In an atmosphere of unprecedented political hysteria and grossly misleading testimony we were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.

The forgotten defendant at the trial was Miss Moskowitz. The formal charge against her, conspiring to obstruct justice, provided no details - she was not named in any of the overt acts of the indictment. The single witness against her, Harry Gold, mentioned her only infrequently and in such oblique terms that it was impossible to judge whether she had been a conscious participant in the alleged conspiracy. Gold testified that Miss Moskowitz had been present at some of the dinner and other meetings at which he and Brothman discussed their FBI interviews and grand jury appearances and indicated that she had given them her approval and encouragement, but he told almost nothing about what she had said.

In the summer of 1950 in New York City Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were arrested and charged with having conspired to commit espionage in behalf of the Soviet Union.

They were in their early thirties and the parents of two young sons; she was a homemaker and he was an engineer who ran his own small machine shop. Neither was able to make bail; the judge had imposed $100,000 bail for each and for this family of modest means it was an impossible sum to raise. They were jailed to await their trial.

In that same summer in New York City the government had indicted Abraham Brothman and me for conspiring to obstruct justice in a case which had the same overtones of Soviet espionage. The two witnesses against us, Elizabeth Bentley and Harry Gold, would also testify later against the Rosenbergs. We were tried and convicted in November 1950 and remained in jail while we awaited a decision on our appeals.

Ethel and I were both incarcerated in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City but were kept separated, she on the ninth floor and I on the fifth, and we had never known each other before. The police van became our unplanned social outpost; we traveled together in it when we went to court, I to attend my trial and she to meet with her lawyer and with Julius to plan their court defense.

The section of the van behind the driver was paneled off and a row of benches stretched along each side. A grate across the middle separated the men from the women, all of whom would be transported together. The men would be picked up first at the federal Detention Center on West Street. They were loaded into the front section and secured by the grate. Then the van rolled across town and picked up the women; they sat in the rear on the other side of the grate.

The day the jury brought in a guilty verdict, Ethel was moved to my floor and assigned a cell at the end of the corridor nearest the guards, which permitted them to keep her within sight at all times. Presumably someone in the Department of Justice wanted to be sure Ethel Rosenberg would not do away with herself. (She commented to me later that it was ironic that they could never understand that this would be the least likely thing she could ever do.)
Her corridor was now diagonally opposite mine. I watched her settling in from behind the bars of my corridor and when the gates were opened at recreation time I walked over to say hello. She greeted me warmly and she, who faced such a monumentally more severe punishment than I did, she was concerned for me. Was I bearing up well?

She was the same with other inmates and quickly they warmed to her. She was never judgmental about whatever brought them to this hellhole; she would share anecdotes with them about her children and listen sympathetically to their sorry stories. Hers was a gentle presence - there was a dignity about her and as she became known to those women, their routine cursing and descriptively angry language became muted when she was near.

Many of the women were young and barely out of their teens. When melancholy seized them she became a surrogate big sister and comforted them. The outside world usually thinks of a jail population as the most outcast, most immoral and most destructive part of society; nevertheless, the women saw themselves as loyal and patriotic Americans, and they separated their legal misdeeds from their love of country. One accused of treason or espionage, as Ethel was, would have been regarded with contempt and overt hostility by those women, yet they did not believe the government's accusations about her. They liked her, they accepted her, and they gave her their endorsement.
I also found her cheering to be with. At Commissary time in the middle of the afternoon we would buy a cup of coffee and sit in the mess hall dawdling over it while we talked. Our conversation was trusting, inconsequential chatter: the roots that identified us as second-generation American Jews and as women, the pleasures of New York City life, our common interest in music and always, always her children. We floated free then for those few moment in a more benevolent world-until a guard would yell across to us as we finished the last of our coffee: "Hey, you two! You're not in the Waldorf, ya know! Time's up for Commissary!"

We had, tacitly, set limits on our conversation so we never discussed our legal cases; but sometimes Ethel would remark bitterly about her brother's scabby behavior towards her. She remembered David as a child, cute and cuddly and as the one who was their mother's special joy, who much indulged him. Trying to comprehend the freakish turn of his behavior, Ethel recalled that he was always overconfident and reckless, and life had tripped him up many times. Now, she reasoned, he had walked into the FBI's arena underestimating how they could forge steel traps out of airy spiderwebs; at the same time he was sublimely, foolishly cocksure about his ability to combat their efforts. Ethel knew first-hand the awesome pressure they could exert and she visualized that when they threatened to arrest his wife and to anchor him to the death penalty, he quickly collapsed and followed where they led him. She was sure that ultimately he would be unable to live with what he had done to her.

That done, I headed for home as though I were just another commuter. When I opened the door to our house I could hardly breathe for the rush of excitement that flooded through me. My mother had prepared one of her remarkable dinners; my father could not take his eyes off me and followed me around as I wandered from room to room. I marveled how wonderful it was to be here.

The next day I ran to see my sister; she had just given birth. My brothers, out-of-towners, telephoned as did other relatives. My mother spoke to the relatives in Hungarian, her native language, thinking to foil possible eavesdroppers.

A sick feeling swept over me that my mother could be made to fear the FBI for nothing she had done, but merely because she was my mother.

A dear friend dropped by. We had been friends since high school and she remained loyal and supportive during the worst times. No one else-none of my former friends called.

In succeeding days I found a job as a public relations manager and for the moment it was a triumph. I began also to thread my way through a social routine, gingerly picking up the shards of my old life and blending them discreetly with my evolving one. I could not afford my own living place, but thought that would come soon.

Abe was freed soon after me, but we had difficulty reconnecting. We realized there would be no healing and no moving back into the flow of normal life if we spent our time together rehashing events and weeping for what we had lost. The adjustments we needed to wrestle with could only be done alone; mea culpas would destroy us.

Complicating all this was that I now had a newly generated need to be my own person. We parted with wrenching resolve, with pain and with ineffable sadness.

With much delayed clairvoyance I saw that this was a jerry-built attachment, and it was no longer working. Out of my mind with the wretchedness this new vision was handing me, even then, I was uncertain I could find my way without him. In the end I knew that if I had any chance to rebuild my life I had just one option. With lacerating pain and a superhuman will, I cut my ties to Abe, betrayed my longing and endured his absence minute by lonely minute.

It took a long time for me to move ahead and while I worked it out there were some who became unintended victims with me. There was that pleasant, totally guileless young man who appeared on my social horizon and seemed to complete my life again. A week before we were to wed I cancelled out. He was hurt and bewildered and I could not explain my panic. There were others towards whom I warmed initially, but for whom I could feel no juncture of either trust or desire. Inevitably, each took his leave.

Through it all, no one in my new life had known me in the old, and it needed a delicate balancing act to keep my old identity submerged. I was always fearful that ultimately I would be discovered. Many in my old life, whom I thought were friends, were too uneasy to welcome my presence now. The Cold War had intensified; the increasingly strident Senator Joseph McCarthy was ransacking the nation's equilibrium, as the country succumbed to political paranoia. A convicted felon, especially one so publicly condemned, was hardly a social asset. I watched my whilom friends skitter off like jittery chickens, tumbling over the refuse of their discarded morality.

In the meantime, the FBI was not done with me. In May 1953, eight months after my release from prison, they appeared at my door and asked to talk to me. In 1956, they accosted me on the street. Rather than let them into the house and alarm my parents I sat with them in their car and listened to their questions. Did I remember anything now that I cared to share with them which I had withheld before? No, there was nothing I could tell them and yes, if I thought of anything I would let them know. I was excruciatingly polite.

Less than eight months after the Rosenberg execution their attorney, Manny Bloch, died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 52 years old. I was among the overflow crowd who attended his funeral on February 2, 1954. The FBI, in characteristic, mindless snoopery (assisted in this case by the New York Police Department), duly noted my signature in the condolence book.

On November 28, 1950, at the height of the Red Scare, Miriam Moskowitz was found guilty of conspiracy to lie to a grand jury in the run-up to the atomic spying case that would end in the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Now, at 98, Moskowitz is trying to clear her name in court. Reuters reports an initial federal court hearing convened Monday in New York to determine how to proceed with her case.

“I just want to end my life with a clear name,” Moskowitz told the New York Post earlier this month.

The New Jersey woman was sentenced to two years in prison following her charge, several months of which she spent with Ethel Rosenberg in the Women’s House of Detention, a prison which once stood in the middle of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, where a garden sits now. Moskowitz told the New Yorker that she spent those days chatting with Rosenberg about music or Rosenberg’s children.

“We floated free then for those few moments in a more benevolent world - until a guard would yell across to us as we finished the last of our coffee, ‘Hey, you two! You’re not in the Waldorf, ya know!’” Rosenberg was later executed along with her husband Julius. While Soviet cables later appeared to suggest that Julius Rosenberg may indeed have been a spy, Ethel Rosenberg's involvement remains unclear.

Now, over 60 years later, Moskowitz says she has evidence of her own innocence. Documents released in 2008 show that Harry Gold, the government witness against her, told the FBI repeatedly that Moskowitz was unaware of the plans of others to lie to the grand jury, but that he changed his tune once he was threatened him with the death penalty, according to Moskowitz’s lawyer.

Moskowitz published a memoir in 2010, detailing her conviction and life afterwards. A New Yorker item on the memoir notes the book’s concluding scene: In 1992, Moskowitz stood outside the funeral of Irving Kaufman, the judge who presided over her trial. As his casket is rolled outside, Moskowitz silently curses him. “I damn you for having lusted for prestige and for having fed your obscene ambitions at my expense.”