Lowell Committee. Sacco and Vanzetti Report.

The committee, appointed by Gov. Alvan Fuller, was made up of Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Samuel Stratton, Judge Robert Grant, and Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell. (According to Richard Norton Smith, Lowell was named chairman because, on the day of its first meeting, he raced up the steps to the governor’s office while the others waited for the elevator.) The report concludes that, while while trial Judge Webster Thayer may have been indiscreet, the defendants received a fair trial. John Dos Passos later writes, “The suspicion grows paragraph by paragraph that its aim was not to review but to make respectable the proceedings.”