Letters from Felix Frankfurter, 1927

This series consists of research done by Judge Clarence Cheney Smith concerning the Sacco-Vanzetti case. On April 15, 1920, a paymaster and guard were murdered during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. On May 5, 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested and later found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The trial garnered national attention, and many prominent lawyers and professors took a public position that the pair had received an unfair trial amid Communist hysteria. Smith seemingly became interested in the trial following the publication of Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter's article "The Portentous Case of Sacco and Vanzetti" in the March 1927 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The series includes Smith's correspondence to Frankfurter and other prominent legal thinkers, such as Charles Austin Beard, who maintained that Sacco and Vanzetti had received an unfair trial, asking them to justify their position and asserting his opinion that the trial had been fair. It also includes clippings regarding the various appeals to the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the governor.