Note 25 — CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE PUBLIC AND THE LOWELL COMMITTEE

An English writer, Edward Shanks, thought that these paragraphs compared with the Gettysburg Address but doubted that Vanzetti had ever uttered them. Stong defended himself by saying that he could not write that well, that he had supplied only the exclamation marks, and that these would have been better left out. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the internal evidence of that interview is sufficient to convince any honorably disposed person of its authenticity. The change of number in the pronoun was beautifully characteristic of Vanzetti. ‘I’ unmarked, unknown, a failure—but ‘Our’ career, triumph, work for tolerance and justice.” This version that Stong gave in the New York World of May 13, 1927, differs, nevertheless, in several places from the one he printed in 1949 in his essay on the case in The Aspirin Age.