Sacco and Vanzetti

Not innocent after all, says Upton Sinclair (by way of the LAT):

The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.

Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.

Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.

"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. ". . . He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."

America's first muckraker: still at it! But he held his tongue in Boston, citing among other worries a concern about the precedent the S&V case would set and the many legitimately unfair aspects of the trial—but also fear of retribution from his readership:

Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.

"My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.

"Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."

He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.

Can't help but think of the Hitch, who revels in thorny ethical grey areas like a pig in mud, to the point at which his love for the counterintuitive stake clouds his judgment. But he really has risked his readership, and while I think history will judge him harshly for going down with the U.S.S. Ahmed Chalabi, it's better to be wrong than to be low.

Posted by Kriston at December 28, 2005 10:54 AM