Mood:
surprisedNow Playing: holy frijoles
Check out this story in the Los Angeles Times about a newly-disclosed letter written by Upton Sinclair in which the guilt of the famous anarchist-bank robbers Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was confirmed to him by their lawyer, Fred Moore.
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.That's amazing enough, but get a load of what Sinclair's reasons were for never publicly acknowledging what he knew. From another letter found in the same cache:
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 [Paul] 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."
"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."The movement"? What does Sinclair mean?
"It is much better copy as a naive 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.Man. What a remarkable thing to say. Socialist, anti-establishmentarian propaganda written for Eurowankers and intended to undermine American jurisprudence and national security. Why does that sound so fucking familiar?