Novel: Boston

Overview
Upton Sinclair’s Boston (1928) is a sweeping political novel centered on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, using fiction interlaced with documentary material to indict the social order of post–World War I New England. Set in Boston and its surrounding mill and factory towns, the book traces how two Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, are arrested for a payroll robbery and murder in South Braintree, tried amid the Red Scare, and ultimately executed. Sinclair transforms the legal saga into a panorama of class, ethnicity, and ideology, examining the machinery of power wielded by the Boston Brahmin elite, the press, the judiciary, and business interests.

Plot and structure
The narrative follows an aging Beacon Hill aristocrat whose moral awakening provides a lens on the case. From a life of philanthropy and club dinners, she is drawn into the defense effort, visits meetings and prisons, and witnesses how privilege and prejudice operate behind Boston’s polished façade. Through her eyes, Sinclair charts the 1920 arrests, the 1921 trial before Judge Webster Thayer, and the long sequence of motions and appeals. The judge’s overt hostility toward the defendants, the reliance on dubious ballistics and eyewitness testimony, and the climate of anti-immigrant hysteria form the legal backbone of the story.

As months become years, the private journey of conscience runs alongside public mobilization: radical and liberal committees raise funds, scientists and writers publish documents, and mass demonstrations spring up across the world. Sinclair dramatizes the final review of the case by Governor Alvan Fuller and his advisory panel drawn from Boston’s most esteemed institutions. The panel’s report upholding the verdict and the governor’s refusal to commute the sentences lead to the night of August 23, 1927, when the executions proceed despite global protest. The novel ends not with catharsis but with a reckoning, an accounting of what Boston, as symbol of American rectitude, has done in the name of order.

Social canvas
Boston is as much a city-portrait as a courtroom drama. Sinclair moves from Beacon Hill parlors and university boards to North End tenements, shoe shops, and textile mills, mapping the interlocking networks of capital, philanthropy, and influence. He depicts the reach of the press in shaping fear of “Reds,” the roles of police spies and informants in labor struggles, and the ways courts and clubs reinforce each other’s judgments. The immigrant communities are shown with sympathy and specificity: their mutual aid societies, political debates, and the fierce dignity of workers trying to claim a place in a hostile nation.

Themes
The novel argues that the case cannot be separated from the era’s nativism and class anxiety. Justice is portrayed not as neutral procedure but as a field contested by wealth, status, and ideology. Sinclair returns to questions of evidence and truth, how “facts” are curated by power, how expert testimony can be bent, and how a judge’s bias can tip an entire proceeding. He contrasts institutional piety with individual conscience, showing how one patrician’s journey from complacency to solidarity mirrors the broader moral choice confronting the city. The book also reflects on the uses of fear in democratic society, as the Red Scare narrows the space for dissent and legitimizes repression.

Style and significance
Sinclair blends melodrama with reportage, inserting excerpts of affidavits, letters, and news stories to blur the line between novel and casebook. The result is a sustained polemic that reads as civic anatomy: a dissection of Boston’s power structure and a lament for the promise of American justice. By anchoring the Sacco and Vanzetti narrative in a rich social world, the novel keeps its focus not only on two men but on the city and class system that judged them, turning a famous trial into an allegory of a nation’s conscience.