“What is history,” scoffed Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon?”, and anyone who has noticed how a country newspaper can garble the account of a strawberry festival knows what he meant. If such commonplace events are regularly distorted in print, what chance do we have to discover the inward truth of those rare situations which, by virtue of some antecedent build-up of intolerable pressures, become the fulcrum of truly seismic forces? A French Army major is charged with espionage; a United States Senator makes a speech in West Virginia—and suddenly a whole nation is riven to its core, and huge masses of opinion wheel on the tiny pivot like armies in the field. And when it is over, the poor bedraggled facts are found to have been transmuted, by the pressure and the heat, into something quite unrecognizable.
One such event is ably analyzed in Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth, by Robert H. Montgomery (Devin-Adair, $5.00).
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