American muckraker Sinclair's integrity challenged (Sacco and Vanzetti confession cover-up?)

Reuters on Yahoo ^ | 1/27/06 | Arthur Spiegelman

[NormsRevenge]

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - He was a man for whom the term muckraker was coined, a crusading journalist and novelist who never hesitated to expose scandal at the highest levels of government and business.

But now the integrity of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Upton Sinclair is being questioned 38 years after his death because of the discovery of a letter he wrote in 1929.

Quotes from the letter in recent news reports make it seem that the man who exposed the horrors of the meat-packing industry in the 1906 book "The Jungle" covered up a confession from a defense lawyer that famous anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were guilty of the murders for which they were executed. Many people thought the two were innocent and prosecuted for political reasons.

But Sinclair's defenders say key quotes from the letter exonerating him from that charge were ignored and that instead of covering up his doubts about the case, he devoted a whole novel to them, "Boston." They say he is being smeared 38 years after his death.

The letter was found by Long Beach attorney and rare book collector Paul Hegness at the bottom of a box of letters he bought at auction about a decade ago. He forgot about it for years but remembered it while doing an interview on another subject with a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

The result was a newspaper story and a mystery percolating through the Internet as the previously unknown letter seemed to throw new light on the long-argued Sacco and Vanzetti case and paint Sinclair, a liberal hero, as a man with feet of clay.

Sacco and Vanzetti were radical Italian immigrants who were convicted of murdering two Massachusetts men in a 1920 robbery, They were ordered executed after a trial in which much of the evidence was later discredited. Refused a pardon, they died in 1927 and became international symbols of the miscarriage of justice.

In his three-page letter, Sinclair tells a Long Beach lawyer friend, John Beardsley, that he had gone to Boston to research the case and discovered he was "completely naive about the case, having accepted the defense propaganda completely."

DOUBTS AND PANIC

Soon he said he began to have doubts especially after a defense witness told him that his testimony had been framed. Sinclair then met defense attorney Fred Moore who told him the men were guilty and he had "framed a set of alibis for them."

"This naturally set me into a panic," Sinclair wrote. He went on to publish "Boston," whose heroine begins by thinking the men innocent and ends not knowing what to believe.

Sinclair never publicly disowned Sacco and Vanzetti nor discussed the information their lawyer told him. A book he wrote in 1953 called "Reds I Have Known" detailed his thoughts on the case but it never found a publisher.

In the month since the Los Angeles Times article and other articles on the letter appeared, conservatives have seized on the letter as proof of liberal perfidy. Columnist Jonah Goldberg called Sinclair a liar and said telling the truth would have cost him too many readers.

He linked Sinclair's support for Sacco and Vanzetti to later discredited causes of the Cold War like the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases.

But Goldberg might have been better served if he had read the entire letter instead of the excerpts printed in the Times or if he had access to a soon-to-be published biography by Anthony Arthur called "Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair."

In a copy of the full letter made available to Reuters, Sinclair says that soon after he talked to Moore he began to have doubts about him. "I realized certain facts about Fred Moore. I had heard that he was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels. ... Moore admitted to me that the men themselves, had never admitted their guilt to him; and I began to wonder whether his present attitude and conclusions might not be the result of his brooding on his wrongs."

Sinclair questioned Moore's former wife who worked with the lawyer on the case, and she "expressed the greatest surprise" saying he had not expressed thoughts that the men were guilty before.

In the letter, he also vowed "Boston" would tell all sides and "I would take my stand on the point that the men had not been proved guilty and that their trial had not been fair."

Arthur, who provided advance excerpts of the biography to Reuters, says that in other letters Sinclair quotes Moore as not even being sure both men were guilty.

"Moore said neither man ever admitted it to him, but he was certain of Sacco's guilt and fairly sure of Vanzetti's knowledge of the crime if not his complicity in it," Arthur wrote in the biography which will be published in June by Random House.

He added, "His knowledge had not prevented Moore from doing whatever he could to save the two men, perhaps including illegal activities. The entire legal system, was corrupt, Moore insisted, assuring Sinclair that, 'There is no criminal lawyer who has attained to fame in America except by inventing alibis and hiring witnesses. There is no other way to be a great criminal lawyer in America."'

The author said Sinclair's decision to end "Boston" on a note of ambiguity concerning Sacco and Vanzetti's guilt subjected him to "a torrent of abuse from the left."

Now he is being hit from the right.

[ikka]

Wasn't it always obvious that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty?

[muawiyah]

Their relatives certainly thought so. Still do.

[bill1952]

Always struck me as odd the "The Jungle" was required reading in high school, but when I asked the teachers about the last page, they shrugged it off.

Sinclair was more than a liberal, he was an advocate for worldwide Socialism, period, and he was blunt about that in his writings.

I think that if his rantings are required reading, then so should be "The Weapon Shops of Isher."

Doesn't seem to be the case though.

[razorback-bert]

For Fred to feel safe telling this to Upton, he must have known Upton was a fellow traveler.

[laconic]

And the simpleton Michael Dukakis declared a "Sacco and Vanzetti" day in Mass. a few years ago, shrieking about their (non)innocence.

[gleeaikin]

Why was a lawyer betraying his clients' confidences? Time for some good lawyer jokes.