Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR DRAPER KUDOS I am writing to congratulate you most heartily on Theodore Draper's pamphlet, "Ordeal of the U.N." (NL, November 7). It is a brilliant analysis and exposition and I am...
...Walter Lippmann We can't thank you enough for sending that fabulous Draper booklet...
...Robert V. Daniels...
...Among these were Upton Sinclair, a Socialist, and Carlo Tresca, an anarchist, who died with his boots on fighting Communists and Fascists...
...He says, "Others who were convinced at the time of the trial that the defendants were innocent came later to believe that one or both were probably guilty...
...For the enclosed check, please have your office send us one hundred copies of the booklet...
...In the brief compass of the review neither my criticisms nor their object became sufficiently clear...
...I would like to emphasize again that the book is an outstanding synthesis of our knowledge of the field, and at the same time embodies a great deal of valuable new research...
...I should add that immediately upon my return to California I sought out Lola Moore, Fred's wife, from whom he was separated, and she expressed dismay at what he had told me...
...She had been with him all through the case as an active collaborator, and she assured me positively that Fred had had no such idea so long as he had been connected with the case...
...neither of the two men had given him the least hint that they might have been guilty or even might have known who was guilty...
...I have to correct James Rorty's statement concerning my own ideas on this case...
...I point out one significant detail...
...Washington, D.C...
...I had long talks with him twice, and I feel sure that he was the kind of man who would seal his lips...
...I may have put this story on record before, but I cannot recall having done so...
...I would have to alter the word probably to possibly, which is quite a different assertion...
...Harry Overstreet SACCO-VANZETTI I have read with great interest your discussion of the Sacco-Vanzetti case (NL, October 31...
...Fred had complied with this request although he did not like it, and he considered it somewhat of an imposition under the special circumstances...
...Will you do one more thing for us...
...If Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti was innocent it follows that Vanzetti went to his death rather than name one of his anarchist comrades...
...We want to Draperize our friends and all the doubting Thomases we know...
...In a hotel room in Denver I sat for a long evening with Fred Moore, who was the attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti until the last weeks of the long drawn out case...
...Fred had heard this opinion expressed many times by members of the group and had seen it in The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...Much of it has gone in the two final chapters we have been writing for our next book...
...But Fred's doubts had grown, and he had come to the belief that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti might possibly have been guilty, although it was much more difficult to hold this idea about him...
...Burlington, Vt...
...The reader should refer to my own recently published works for an explanation of my standpoint that it is misleading to regard Communism primarily as a tactical and organizational phenomenon throughout its history...
...He was careful to state that he had no definite knowledge whatever...
...and Fred had been requested to smuggle them out of New York in the car he was driving back to Boston...
...and they are immensely the better for it...
...That is all I have to report on the matter...
...Fred, whom I had known for a long time, and who had twice taken me to visit Vanzetti in prison, told me that he had come to be troubled in his mind concerning the case...
...So far as concerns my case I feel sure that I have never made this statement...
...She attributed his change of mind to the fact that in the last period of the long struggle Fred had been dismissed from the case in favor of Thompson, a better known and more highly respected lawer of Boston...
...Upton Sinclair CLARIFICATION I have received reactions to my review of Leonard Schapiro's The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (NL, July 18-25) which indicate that my positive appraisal of Schapiro's work was not fully understood...
...I fear that I was unfair to Schapiro in taking his work as the occasion for stating my criticisms of a whole school of political science...
...Monrovia, Calif...
...I did not meet Sacco, but I talked with his family and friends, and I felt there an atmosphere of secrecy and fear wholly different from what I found in the Brini family with whom Vanzetti had lived...
...It is a brilliant analysis and exposition and I am most grateful to you for it...
...While the Sacco-Vanzetti case was being fought over, Carlo Tresca, the accepted leader of the anarchists in New York and the active defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, had told Fred, the attorney and friend of the prisoners, that two members of the New York group were being sought by the police on the charge of robbery...
...Falls Churchy Va...
...One had to bear in mind that with anarchists of the "activist" variety a hold-up or robbery would be no crime provided that the money was used for the purpose of propaganda...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 46
