Sacco and Vanzetti Case

Sacco and Vanzetti Case (1920). In May 1920, Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were arrested for the murder of a paymaster and guard in a robbery at a South Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe factory.In a trial marked by flimsy evidence and flawed procedures, they were convicted and sentenced to death. Critical observers recognized at the time that the police, jurors, prosecutors, and judge were responding less to the evidence than to the fact that Sacco and Vanzetti were immigrant Italian anarchists who had evaded the draft in World War I. Their case was set against the backdrop of the Red Scare of 1919–1920, when Americans, fearful that the Bolshevik Revolution could spread to their country, and resentful of rising prices, a wave of labor strikes, and a growing immigrant presence, were catapulted into an antiradical, anti‐immigrant furor. As Vanzetti himself put it, “The jury were hating us” because it was “a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate against the foreigner, against slackers.”

The conviction sparked a wave of protest among reformers and radicals, as well as artists, such as Ben Shahn, and writers, including the novelist John Dos Passos and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. The future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a lengthy exposé for the Atlantic Monthly in 1927, in which he concluded that Judge Webster Thayer's handling of the case was characterized by “misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations.” A special commission appointed by the governor of Massachusetts, however, upheld the conduct of the trial and dismissed the evidence suggesting the pair's innocence. Both men were electrocuted in August 1927. Historians still debate the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti, but most concur that the two men did not receive a fair trial and the case stands as an example of the excesses of the post–World War I Red Scare.
See also Anarchism; Anti‐Communism; Nativist Movement; Radicalism; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Francis Russell , Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved, 1986.
William Young and and David E. Kaiser , Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1985.

Lynn Dumenil