Commissioned for the Rosenberg Era Art Project (REAP), 1987. The arrest and trial of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg took place at the height of the Cold War. Early in the 1950s, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of conspiring to pass American military secrets to the Soviet Union: specifically, technical information relating to the atomic bomb, which since its unveiling in 1945 had been a technology monopolized by the United States. Around this time the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) became a stepping stone into national politics for Richard Nixon, and a shoehorn into the footnotes of history books for Whittaker Chambers, Roy Cohn, and the Pumpkin Papers. Many of those who were called to testify before HUAC lost their jobs or were blacklisted, including a number of Hollywood screenwriters. While some families were brought closer together, others were destroyed by the economic and psychological stress of paranoia masquerading as patriotism. Some couples divorced. Some individuals committed suicide. On June 19, 1953, in spite of national and international protests and appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, the Rosenbergs two young sons were orphaned by state mandate, when their parents were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison. Thirty years later, Rob Okun, as director of the Rosenberg Era Art Project, began to organize an exhibition of art made about the Rosenbergs and their era. Along with curator Nina Felshin, he located paintings, posters, prints and sculpture made by artists at that time and shortly afterward. He also included work made more recently by contemporary artists who had either explored the subject matter on their own or who were invited to do so by REAP.

From review of the Rosenberg exhibition in the Guardian, Oct 5, 1988, p. 11:

"...Sue Coe's Needs of the State depicts Truth in the electric chair surrounded by shadowy figures of the Rosenbergs, Einstein, Lillian Hellman, W.E.B. Du Bois, and other witchhunt targets, while rays from two gas chamber showerheads spray down on the chair. The dark space these figures inhabit, which resembles a torture chamber, is overlooked by people such as J. Edgar Hoover, Judge Kaufman, Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohn, and the chief inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition Torquemada, who hold electric lines leading to the chair."