Posted 10:59 AM by Gene

I wish I'd heard of this before: two of history's great martyrs were guilty after all. We can take Upton Sinclair's word because the author of The Jungle was nothing if not earnest. The needless deaths of the now largely forgotten Sacco and Vanzetti were at the center of a culture suspicious of Communists but more suspicious of being too suspicious; they were also at the center of a popular and defunct romantic comedy I played in (I mentioned this before), Thurber and Nugent's arthritic, arteriosclerotic and senile The Male Animal, whose sole usefulness was to have introduced Gene Tierney to the world; it makes great pretentious bales of hay about a professor reading Vanzetti's letter to a class. (That Sacco and Vanzetti wrote other letters to "comrades" doesn't seem to have occured to anybody.) We can see why so many were duped; they wanted to believe two poor immigrants were innocents, and not murderous deviants, just as they hoped Joe Stalin was a mere kindly fat uncle with a moustache. With such delusions come genocides.

And that the former PBS talk-show host Mike Dukakis all but pardoned him shows that tank commander as one of history's most useful idiots.

P. S.

Dukakis now acknowledges that his administration erred - not in its decision to clear Sacco and Vanzetti's names - but by not also reaching out to the families of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, the two men who were robbed, shot, and left to die on a Braintree street on April 15, 1920.

He said one reason for the oversight was that concerns about victims' rights were not as strong in the 1970s.

"It was a terrible gap in my judgment; we didn't seem to focus on that," said Dukakis, now a professor at Northeastern University. "I think so much of the focus has been on (Sacco and Vanzetti) and the possibility that other people did it that I'm not sure how much time and attention we paid to (Parmenter and Berardelli.)"

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURP.

(Via, alas, The Corner)