Sacco‐Vanzetti case

Sacco‐Vanzetti case originated in the robbery (April 15, 1920) of a Massachusetts shoe company's payroll by two men who killed the paymaster and his guard. Nicola Sacco (1891–1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888–1927) were charged with the crime, when it was discovered that they carried firearms and laid claim to the car that police identified with the crime. In their trial at Dedham, Mass. (May–July 1921), both had witnesses to prove that they were not at the scene of the crime, but these statements were discredited by state witnesses. Much of the evidence against them was later refuted, but prejudice was strong in their disfavor because they had been draft dodgers, anarchists, and labor agitators. In 1927 Governor Fuller of Massachusetts appointed an advisory investigating committee, consisting of President Lowell of Harvard, President Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Judge Robert Grant. Although a condemned criminal, Madeiros, exonerated Sacco and Vanzetti, and admitted he had been a member of a gang of robbers responsible for the shoe‐company killings, death sentences were upheld by the committee, and in 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. G. Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan in The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (1948) find 144 poems treating the case, including works by Witter Bynner, Malcolm Cowley, Countee Cullen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Lola Ridge; six plays, including Winterset by Maxwell Anderson, Gods of the Lightning by Anderson and Harold Hickerson, and The Male Animal by Thurber and Elliott Nugent, which uses a letter by Vanzetti as an important issue; and eight novels, including Upton Sinclair's Boston, Nathan Asch's Pay Day, De Voto's We Accept with Pleasure, Ruth McKenney's Jake Home, and, less directly, Dos Passos's The Big Money and Farrell's Bernard Clare. A section of C.E.S. Wood's Heavenly Discourse deals with the case, as does Katherine Anne Porter's The Never‐Ending Wrong. The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti was published in 1928.