Committee

Last week sympathizers with Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti thought they saw a rescue party starting out for an eleventh hour salvation of the two men who are scheduled to occupy the electric chair during the week of July 10.

Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller of Massachusetts, who last fornight had somewhat curtly replied to a request that he appoint a committee of investigation with the statement that the matter was his responsibility to be investigated as he saw fit, last week, suddenly, surprisingly, did appoint exactly the kind of committee which he had been asked to name.

Consisting of Judge Robert Grant (lawyer and novelist), President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University and President Samuel W. Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the committee will make an investigation independent of the Governor's own inquiry and report to him.

Although the new committee is advisory only and although it is in no sense pro-Sacco or pro-Vanzetti, friends of the condemned Italians welcomed its appointment. Felix Frankfurter's study of the Sacco-Vanzetti case* has become a sort of Sacco-Vanzetti Bible, extracts from which have been read from many a soap-box on many a public square.

And Mr. Frankfurter is a member of the Harvard Law School faculty. Furthermore, it is felt that the new committee takes the case entirely out of the realms of precedent and politics, and that the country as a whole will accept its findings on a case that has been more or less of a public disturbance for the past seven years.

The Committee. Most famed among the three committeemen is Abbott Lawrence Lowell, since 1909 President of Harvard University. Before entering the Harvard Faculty he had 17 years' experience in the practice of law, has made the science of government his specialty and has written two books on the character and potency of public opinion.

Samuel Wesley Stratton has been President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1923, has specialized in physics and was onetime (1901-23) Director of the National Bureau of Standards. In 1895, while teaching physics at the University of Chicago, he joined the Illinois Naval Militia and during the Spanish-American War was (May-Nov. 1898) Lieutenant Stratton, U. S. N.

Robert Grant, best known as a novelist, has also been lawyer and judge, having spent 30 years (1893-1923) as judge of the Probate Court and Court of Insolvency of Suffolk County. Born in Boston in 1852, he graduated from Harvard in 1873 (though at one stage of his undergraduate career he was publicly reprimanded for having absented himself from chapel on 22 occasions). He has written more than 20 volumes of novels and essays, his stories generally dealing with the "best people," no state occasion being required for his characters to appear in evening dress.

*THE CASE OF SACCO AND VANZETTI-- Felix Frankfurter--Little, Brown ($1.00).