Walking up State Street a third of a century after the executions, on another August afternoon, I wondered again about the enigma of the case. The whole drama had been played out within twenty miles of here: in South Braintree, in Bridgewater, in sedate Dedham, in the gilt-domed State House beyond the Common, and finally just across Prison Point Bridge in the granite fortress of the now-demolished state prison. Would it ever become as clear-cut as the Dreyfus affair, where everyone was at last satisfied of the grossness of the injustice done? That still seemed unlikely. In 1950 the seven surviving jury members were interviewed as to their later opinions. The decades had only confirmed their belief in the rightness of their verdict. In 1959 a judiciary committee of the Massachusetts legislature had refused to consider granting Sacco and Vanzetti a posthumous pardon. Where the past is reduced to shelves of documents in a library it becomes manageable enough for the scholar or historian to make his evaluation. But where it is still an actual present in the contradictory minds of living men, what yardstick can one use except that of preconceptions? Was the chief of police who arrested Sacco and Vanzetti a forger of evidence? Did their first lawyers betray them? Was the district attorney a barrator with his hand out under the table? Was the judge mad? Was President Lowell of Harvard a Yankee bigot? Many upright men had maintained these things. Were Sacco and Vanzetti quietistic anarchists, or did they believe in the politics of the deed? Boston seemed downcast, heatstruck. The Old State House at the head of State Street had, I noticed, been steam-cleaned, and the clock over the balcony had been replaced by a more authentic sundial. As I reached the subway entrance under the ancient foundations, an eddy of heat snapped in my face like a dirty towel. At that moment a herd of tourists following the Freedom Trail had paused at Point 9 to get Freedom Stamps from the slot machine for their souvenir albums. A shiny-faced man in a Hawaiian sport shirt was maneuvering against the sun to get a photograph of the lion-and-unicorn supports on the Old State House facade, no doubt thinking they went back to 1776 instead of merely to a twentieth-century Armenian tinsmith’s shop. Watching the tourists, I felt I ought to have some sort of souvenir book myself to paste with self-congratulatory stamps for interviewing people on an afternoon like this. My first call was on a corporation lawyer who had spent years writing a book to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. His firm, occupying the sixth floor of a large old-fashioned building on Federal Street, was ostentatiously shabby with a well-preserved Edwardian décor. A horseshoe-shaped receptionist’s desk dominated an outer office.