Two years later Sinclair threw himself into a vindication of the characters and lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The cast of _Boston_ (1928) includes the fictitious Thornewell family, but they are all dwarfed by the two Italians whose careers ended in the electric chair. Sinclair presents the case as an effort by the city and state governments to dispose of two representatives of the anarchist movement which was thought to threaten society’s foundations. He maintains that the government was supported in its attempt by representatives of organized religion as well as the socially prominent and economically powerful classes. Although the author said that he had tried to be a historian, that he had not “written a brief for the Sacco-Vanzetti defense,” the novel is precisely that. It is also an indictment of most of the immediate society in which the events took place. He accuses the prosecution of carefully building an illegal, trumped-up case heard by the violently prejudiced Judge Thayer. He declares that the Commission which investigated the case, made up of Cardinal O’Connell, Bishop Lawrence, and President Lowell of Harvard, rendered an endorsement of the state’s actions which amounted to a whitewash. Running parallel to the story of the Italians is that of Jerry Walker, parvenu tycoon of the New England felt industry who is legally plundered by the old commercial and banking interests of Boston and New York. Mr. Sinclair’s intentions to be impartial may have been sincere, but like the exclamation points in his prose, they got away from him. =Growing Political Consciousness: 1930 to 1954= The great wave of political consciousness which struck America in the 1930s surged over into the novel. It took several forms. There was the novel which advocated liberal reforms in government, and the novel which, presenting the Communist point of view, necessarily went farther. The proletarian novel emerged. Sympathetically describing the privations of the so-called proletariat to stimulate betterment of its living conditions, these novels sometimes cleaved to the Communist Party line but were often the work of non-Communist authors writing from genuine concern for their subjects. The Communists regarded this art form as another weapon in the class struggle. Paul Drummond, a fanatical Communist writer in James T. Farrell’s _Yet Other Waters_ (1952), shouts that “now the time has come for Party literature.” Moses Kallisch, leader of a front organization starting a Left Wing Book Club, declares, “The day is not far off when we’ll overwhelm bourgeois culture in America!” Increasing consciousness of the political malignancy of Fascism and Nazism appeared in the novel. With the descriptions of these dangers came appeals for the strengthening and defense of the best in the American political system.