I love this letter. It was cc’d to me:

To The Editor:
RE: “The Clay Feet of Liberal Saints,” January 5. Right-wing polemicist
Jonah Goldberg has decided that not only were leftist martyrs Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti guilty after all, but that progressive journalist
Upton Sinclair knew of their guilt and lied about it for propagandistic
purposes.
On what evidence? Because someone found a letter, supposedly written by
Sinclair in 1929, in which the author describes meeting with Fred Moore, the
lawyer for the accused. Moore told him that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty
and that Moore had helped them concoct their alibis.
The case stirred violent passions at the time and since, and a
politically-motivated forgery is a reasonable explanation of the “Sinclair”
letter–much more reasonable than the preposterous claim that a defense
lawyer confessed his clients’ guilt to a journalist. Never mind that Sacco
and Vanzetti’s alibis were solid, supported by many witnesses in sworn
testimony; or that another man, Celestino Madeiros, confessed to the crime.
Goldberg is not the first right-wing writer to choose the ideological slur
over the inconvenient fact.
Sincerely,
[Name withheld]

He then adds this P.S. to me:

Beyond my letter to the LA Times, I must include for you this wonderful
quote from Vanzetti, which I find far more inspiring than all the mountains
of words written by high-functioning sociopath William F. Buckley, in his
fifty years of crusading for the proposition that “Freedom” is the freedom
of the rich to crush and humiliate the poor. Vanzetti wrote this when his
execution was very near:
“‘Equality is the condition sine qua non of justice.’ The justice and the
injustice have a common source; the man’s respect of himself and of the
dignity of the human person. If from these two loves and respects innate in
man, follow plans and deeds of equalities in production and distribution,
consideration and rights, that is justice. If we, because of these loves
and respects are led to establish privileges for us and those whom we love
more at the expense of other, that is injustice.
The destiny of man on earth, is poverty. To live little, to work hard, to
always learn; the passion for the justice and the philosophy, to sustain and
abstain, such is our destiny. We have war because we are not sufficiently
heroic for a life which does not need war.
-From a letter to Alice Stone Blackwell, 1927

Me: I see no reason to debate this, because this email speaks so well for itself. But I should note that the possibility of a forgery was overlooked by the LA Times which reported the story in the first place. Also, among the books which demonstrate Sacco & Vanzetti’s guilt, I’d recommend Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved by Francis Russell. Another would be Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth, by Robert H. Montgomery. I doubt either are still in print, since the issue is so well-settled now.