Upton Sinclair Knew Sacco and Vanzetti Were Guilty

Wrote Book Claiming Their Innocence

See Los Angeles Times December 24, 2005 article Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Exposé by Jean O. Pasco:

“a confession from one of America's great authors. Inside the box, an envelope
postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to John Beardsley,
Esq., of Los Angeles. The return address read, ‘Upton Sinclair, Long
Beach’."

"Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future
the world may know the real truth about the matter."

" ‘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.”

" ‘Alone in a hotel room with [Sacco and Vanzetti attorney] Fred [Moore], 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’."

“Upton Beall Sinclair was a giant of the nation's Progressive Era, a crusading writer
and socialist who championed the downtrodden and persecuted.”

“On Aug. 23, 1927, the day they were executed, 25,000 protested in Boston.”

“The men have been viewed as martyrs by the American left ever since.”

“On the 50th anniversary of their execution, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis all but
pardoned the pair, urging that ‘any disgrace should be forever removed from
their names’.”

" ‘I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point,’ he wrote to his attorney. ‘I had come to Boston with the
announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case’."

" ‘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.”

“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.”

Commentary:
Liberals have used the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti as a cause célèbre using it as an argument against the death penalty claiming that innocent people have been executed.

Liberals honored icons such as Upton Sinclair feeling moral superiority. History has repeatedly proven them wrong [think Alger Hiss who was proven to be a communist spy after the declassification of the VENONA project.]

Upton Sinclair was dedicated to tell the truth, but for the socialist cause, he lies. His justifications cover quite a range:
- True believers might kill him
- His foreign book sales would suffer

It doesn’t sound like anything close to honorable.