Free Republic

Ten years ago this coming February, George Zimmermann shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on a rainy night in Sanford, Florida. Without intending, Zimmerman triggered a dark new phase in the history of progressive America. Beginning with the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s, the left lied to conceal the guilt of the guilty. Yes, Virginia, those two bad boys were guilty. Upton Sinclair, who “proved” their innocence in his epic novel Boston, knew they were guilty. "My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe,” Sinclair confided to a friend, “I will be called a...

Back in the 1920s, the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic were loudly protesting the execution of political radicals Sacco and Vanzetti, after what they claimed was an unfair trial. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to his young leftist friend Harold Laski, pointing out that there were "a thousand-fold worse cases" involving black defendants, "but the world does not worry over them." Holmes said: "I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black." To put it bluntly, it was a question of whose ox was gored. That is, what groups...

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...

Why is it that liberals, progressives, leftists, humanists and the like seeking a brave new world for the rest of us often resort to lying or cheating to turn their vision into reality? Upton Sinclair was the socialist author of The Jungle in 1906. He meant his book as an attack on what he and other socialists termed “wage-slavery” but the book’s main claim to fame was as an exposé of unsanitary practices in the meat processing industry. It was Sinclair’s sort of writing that President Theodore Roosevelt termed as “muckraking.” Sinclair also wrote The Profits of Religion, a non-fiction...

Well, folks, after defending Sacco and Vanzettir for EIGHT decades, historians are finally beginning to admit that they were, in fact, guilty. Moreover, if you take a look at the comments, you will see that historians have known for three decades (at least) that their stories regarding Sacco-Vanzetti story were false. While this trial is always pictured as one where a WASP judge simply bullied two Italian immigrants to the electric chair, Upton Sinclair actually was afraid to release the truth because: 1.) He was afraid he would be killed by the anarchists (not the WASPy Judge;) 2. He was...

"... an envelope ... caught his eye... The return address read, "Upton Sinclair..." "... I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story." "The story was "Boston," Sinclair's ... condemnation of the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory..." "... Sinclair met with ... the men's attorney..." "..."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...