In high school we were taught about the so-called Red Scare in the US between 1918 and 1921. It was a time of great upheaval and social change: a just completed world war, a flu epidemic that killed 20-40 million, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, socialist and communist movements in the US, labor strikes, coming alcohol prohibition, female suffrage, and suppression of civil liberties (for real, not the whining we hear today).

The US had absorbed millions of immigrants in recent decades, some of whom were anarchists. Two of them were Sacco and Vanzetti. When the Italian immigrants were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts, many on the left claimed their conviction was an act of political supression.

It was presented to us in high school as a stain upon our history.

On the 50th anniversary of their execution, then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed, “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”

Dukakis was joining a distinguised list of Sacco Vanzetti defenders: Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, Katherine Ann Porter, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger wrotes verses about them. Of late, the band Rage Against the Machine featured them in a video.

Upton Sinclair, whose muckraking book The Jungle lead to the creation of the FDA, wrote a novel about Sacco and Vanzetti called Boston that claimed they were railroaded. Now, we learn that Sinclair had been told by the mens’ lawyers that the two were indeed guilty.

Yes, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. From a story in the December 24 LA Times:

Ordinarily, Paul Hegness wouldn’t have looked twice at Lot 217 as he strolled through an Irvine auction warehouse, preferring first-edition books and artwork to the box stuffed with old papers and holiday cards.

But then, he wouldn’t have stumbled upon 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.”

“I stood there for 15 minutes reading it over and over again,” Hegness said of the letter by the author of “The Jungle,” the groundbreaking 1906 book that exposed unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses.

The last paragraph got the Newport Beach attorney’s attention. “This letter is for yourself alone,” it read. “Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story.”

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.”

So what did Sinclair — the crusader for truth — do with this knowledge? He suppressed it.

“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.”

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.

Sinclair perpetuated a lie that continues to be believed to this day.

Which brings to mind another supposed case of injustice, cop-killer Abu-Jamal Mumia. As noted in FrontPageMag:

N THE SPRING OF 1994, I was strolling down Philadelphia’s legendary South Street. I noticed a poster in a storefront window, reminiscent of those seen in Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi that informed passersby the latest news.

“Free Mumia,” read the headline. The sign concerned efforts by the Uhuru Democratic Party, the local successor to the Black Panthers, to release the convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner from death row. Abu-Jamal killed Faulkner back in 1981, and a jury found him guilty only one year later. In the intervening seventeen years, however, left-wing supporters have waged a tireless campaign to exonerate their man. In April, thousands marched in Philadelphia to demand his freedom. Speakers at the rally included Ramsey Clark and Ossie Davis.

They are but two of the many celebrities on the Mumia bandwagon. Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Asner, Peter Coyote, Mike Farrell, punk-rock band Rage Against the Machine, and many others are also on board. The group is so eclectic that it’s difficult to see what it is that unites them around this particular murderer.

Read it all. History surely does repeat itself.