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By Root 1928 0

Law School) took up their cause, and leftists the world over lionized Sacco and Vanzetti. The case became the American equivalent of the Dreyfus case.daThe governor of Massachusetts appointed an advisory committee, headed by Abbott Lowell, president of Harvard, to review the evidence. The Lowell Committee endorsed the work of the trial court and proclaimed that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. The two men were put to death. That was, however, hardly the end of the affair. Their “linked names have continued to echo across the years,” as a kind of “symbol of man’s injustice to man.”48 But were Sacco and Vanzetti actually guilty? If not, then American justice was guilty—of prejudice, of political bias, and of executing two innocent men. The question has never been fully and totally resolved; it may be that at least one of them was guilty; perhaps we will never know.

Political Justice: World War II and Beyond

The hysteria level during the Second World War seemed to be considerably lower than during the first. There were no roundups of American Bolsheviks—the Bolsheviks, after all, were America’s allies. The worst blot on the country’s record was the shameful treatment of the Japanese on the West Coast. President Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the roundup of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans (most of them citizens) for internment in camps in the desert. The justification was, to say the least, flimsy. These citizens and residents never faced trial, never had hearings on charges of disloyalty, and were nonetheless severely punished without a shred of due process. A racist odor hung over the whole business: General John DeWitt, head of the West Defense Command and the main architect of the program, felt that “a Jap is a Jap”;he was not inclined to make fine distinctions between spies and loyal citizens.49 In Korematsu v. United Statues,50 a supine Supreme Court, citing (baseless) fears of “an invasion of our West Coast,” upheld the detention of the West Coast Japanese on grounds of military necessity, or, more accurately, the Court’s unwillingness to overrule or second-guess “the war-making branches of the Government.”

The war was also the excuse for declaring martial law in Hawaii. On December 7, 1941, the army suspended the regular courts and provided for a “military commission” to try cases of treason, sabotage, murder, and other major crimes. The commission tried only a few cases, but the “provost courts,” also dominated by army officers, enforced “the whole range of military regulations” as well as “trials for felonies and misdemeanors under territorial and federal laws, which were continued in effect by military orders.”51 There were no jury trials. The average trial took five minutes or less, and the verdict was guilty in 99 percent of the cases. Many of the sentences were, by legal standards, bizarre: compulsory purchase of war bonds in lieu of a fine, or mandatory donation of blood.52

During the war itself, there were relatively few trials for treason, espionage, or sabotage. Afterwards, there were a certain number of arrests and trials for treason and treasonlike behavior. The poet Ezra Pound was indicted, but found incompetent to stand trial. Iva d’Aquino was tried for treason in 1949; she was, supposedly, the legendary “Tokyo Rose,” who broadcast propaganda in English, from Radio Tokyo, to American troops in the Far East. The evidence against her was rather flimsy, but a jury convicted her of one count of treason, and she was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $10,000.53

At the end of the war, there was no red scare—at first. But the honeymoon did not last. The Cold War broke out only a few years after the hot war ended, and it ushered in an era of loyalty oaths, witch-hunting, and a general purge of radicals and rumored radicals. In the overheated atmosphere, charges and countercharges were flung about. Senator Joseph McCarthy made a career out of reckless, lying accusations of disloyalty and treason; McCarthyism poisoned the air in politics, in the universities, and in the arts