I myself do not have any memory of the trial, being then in the sixth grade of the Boston public schools, but I do remember from my eighteenth year the agitation and excitement of those summer weeks in 1927 preceding the two men’s execution. The day they were to die I spent the better part of the afternoon walking over Beacon Hill and across the Common in the muted August sunshine. Police were everywhere, hard-faced and angry, some of them carrying rifles—a thing I had never seen before. Pickets with placards marched up and down before the Bulfinch façade of the State House. Periodically the police carted groups of them away in a patrol wagon to the Joy Street Station. Almost at once their places were filled by others. Buses kept arriving from New York hung with signs proclaiming SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST NOT DIE! and trailing red paper streamers. As the buses pulled into Park Square those inside began to sing “The Red Flag.” They looked like foreigners, most of them. I did not like their looks. I sensed in myself the hostility of the bourgeois world toward those two men. In spite of any pickets and red-streamered buses from New York, I knew that they were going to die that night. As I walked under the lindens on the Tremont Street side of the Frog Pond I felt a sense of oneness with the community that was asserting itself. I was glad Sacco and Vanzetti were going to die. It never occurred to me that they might be innocent. In the shabby-genteel private school I went to in Roxbury none of the masters would have dreamt of such a thing. We took our opinions from them and from our parents. The father of one of my classmates was Reporter of Decisions of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. He published in 1927 a much-approved pamphlet on the trial in which he demonstrated the quasi-divine status of Massachusetts justice, a status that made even the appointment of the Lowell Committee to investigate the case a reflection on the Commonwealth’s judicial system. According to the reporter, that system, sanctified by the past, could not err. Such a conservative position was common enough in Massachusetts then. Nor did it change. Thirty years later the reporter still listed his pamphlet in _Who’s Who_ as his single literary accomplishment. By and large one’s view of the case depended on one’s status in the community. If one was middle-class and Republican and read the _Herald_ mornings and the _Transcript_ nights, one thought Sacco and Vanzetti guilty. Any latent doubts subsided after President Lowell of Harvard issued his report. But if one was a university liberal, one tended to think the trial unfair, and if one read the _Nation_ or _New Republic_ one was sure they were innocent.