By Jack Cashill

A letter from literary great Upton Sinclair found by a southern California collector sheds some startling new light on the granddaddy of all left wing murder trials, that of the Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

This story of this discovery was broken recently by Los Angeles Times writer Jean O. Pasco, but it deserves far greater attention than that offered by the Orange County section of the paper.

Much depends on the guilt or innocence of these archetypal “innocents”-- --the first in a long line of allegedly framed leftists from Alger Hiss to the Rosenbergs to Leonard Peltier to Mumia Abu Jamal--including the very credibility of the American cultural establishment.

In the way of background, local police apprehended Sacco and Vanzetti in May 1920, following the murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts. When arrested, Sacco had in his pocket six obsolete bullets, which matched the bullet found in the body of Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard killed in the robbery. Stuffed in Sacco’s waistband was the gun through which the fatal bullet had been fired. As to Vanzetti, he carried Berardelli’s revolver.

In September 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were both indicted for the murder. At first, Sacco and Vanzetti held little appeal for anyone. A socialist newsman sent up to review the case quickly lost interest. “There’s no story in it,” he reported back to his editor, “Just a couple of wops in a jam.”

A local Italian anarchist cell did come to the pair’s aid before the murder trial and formed a Defense Committee. The committee enlisted the help of the fledgling ACLU among other sponsors and the aid of maverick western attorney Fred Moore, an eccentric leftist in the Clarence Darrow tradition.

The trial and subsequent appeals gained real traction when

the Communist International came to Sacco and Vanzetti, glass slipper in hand. Stalin was looking for a way to discredit the American experience, and this trial, when amplified by a friendly media, offered a great opportunity for Soviet agitprop.

Almost immediately, “spontaneous” protests sprung up throughout the world. Europe’s great squares filled with sobbing, shouting protestors, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their persecutors. This trial and subsequent sideshow would serve as the prototype for anti-American hysterics in the years to come.

Just like today, the casting call for the Sacco and Vanzetti protests attracted a who’s who of “useful idiots.” Leading literary lights like Upton Sinclair, Katherine Ann Porter, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay not only protested the seeming injustice but also created literary works around it.

Scores more picketed, protested, or signed petitions. The Crime Library lists a total of twenty-five books written about the case, a dozen of which are still in print. The tone of most are best reflected in titles like Justice Crucified by Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht in 1977 and The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti by Howard Fast. This latter book was published in 1953, the same year, coincidentally, that Fast, an American Communist, was awarded the oxymoronic Stalin Peace Prize.

Upton Sinclair, the prestigious socialist author of The Jungle, expressed his outrage in a two volume, 750-page novel called Boston. What the newly discovered letter reveals, however, is that Sinclair knew that the pair were guilty even before he published his novel.

As reported in the LA Times, Newport Beach attorney Paul Hegness stumbled upon the letters at an Irvine auction warehouse ten years ago and only recently dusted them off. A critical letter was from Sinclair to his attorney, John Beardsley.

The letter revealed that Sinclair had met with Fred Moore, the anarchists’ attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter.

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair added. " … 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."

As Sinclair made clear in this and other letters, he proceeded to write his book about the pair as though they were innocent. "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 confided to a friend in 1927.

As I reveal in my book Hoodwinked, the left’s attraction to the obviously false is nothing new. For well nigh a century, in fact, America’s intellectual elite has been crafting and enabling fraud on a wide range of critical subjects, among them history, anthropology, political science, science, sexology, health, and, of course, criminal justice.

Control of the cultural establishment is just one reason why fraud plagues the political left. The less obvious but more fundamental reason is that progressive authors and their cultural support groups live in a world where God, if not fully dead, is irrelevant.

“If there is no God,” concluded Jean Paul Sartre in his famous paraphrase of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, “everything is permitted.”

That “everything” includes dishonesty, deception, and downright fraud. That fraud has helped paralyze the culture with self-hatred as was most painfully evident in Michael Dukakis’s proclamation on the fiftieth anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution, August 23, 1977, which he preposterously dubbed "Nicola Sacco and Bartomolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day” in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

[I] declare, further, that any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, from the names of their families and descendants, and so ... call upon all the people of Massachusetts to pause in their daily endeavors to reflect upon these tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our legal system aspires.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Can the Stanley “Tookie” Williams Memorial Day be far behind?