Sacco and Vanzetti

Nicola Sacco (died 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927), Italian-born anarchists, became the subject of one of America's most celebrated controversies and the focus for much of the liberal and radical protest of the 1920s in the United States.

The execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Boston in 1927 brought to an end a struggle of more than 6 years on the part of Americans and Europeans who had become convinced that they were innocent of the crimes of robbery and murder. For a sizable portion of the American intellectual community their case symbolized the fight for justice for ethnic minorities, the poor, and the politically unorthodox. The case had a catalytic influence on the subsequent development of leftist thought in America.

Sacco was born in Torremaggiore. When he was 17, he immigrated to the United States. He learned the trade of shoe edge-trimming and settled in Milford, Mass., working for a local shoe company. He married, fathered a son, and seemed to be building a stable and secure life.

Vanzetti, by contrast, was a bachelor and a wanderer. Born in Villafalletto, he went to the United States in early adulthood. He worked as a kitchen helper in New York, then at various menial jobs in the Boston area. There Vanzetti, already committed to anarchist principles, met Sacco. When the United States entered World War I, they fled to Mexico to escape military conscription. Within a few months Sacco returned to his family; Vanzetti traveled around the American Midwest for a year.

Returning to New England, Vanzetti worked at a succession of jobs and renewed his friendship with Sacco, who was employed at a shoe factory. Vanzetti spent much time reading and reflecting on prospects for the revolutionary transformation of industrial society. Sacco, though little interested in books and ideas, also accepted the anarchist vision of brotherhood, peace, and plenty without government. The two moved in a circle of anarchists and sometimes distributed revolutionary literature.

Arrest, Trial, Conviction

Such were the ostensible circumstances of the two men's lives in May of 1920, when they were arrested and charged with participating in the robbery of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Mass., on April 15 and murdering the plant's paymaster and payroll guard. They were arrested shortly after going to a garage to claim an automobile which had supposedly been seen near the South Braintree crime. Both were armed but protested they knew nothing of the crime and had planned to use the automobile to distribute anarchist literature.

Vanzetti, also charged with taking part in an attempted mail truck robbery the previous December, was speedily indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 12 to 15 years' imprisonment. It was almost a year before Vanzetti and Sacco went on trial in Dedham for the South Braintree robbery and murders. Their trial turned into an extraordinarily vigorous and complicated legal struggle between the prosecutor and Fred H. Moore, who managed the Sacco and Vanzetti defense. After more than 6 weeks of listening to witnesses, to the presentation of ballistics evidence which supposedly matched a bullet from one of the victims with bullets from Sacco's pistol, and to grueling cross-examinations and closing speeches, the jury returned verdicts of guilty for both.

Posttrial Strategy

The Dedham trial received almost no publicity outside Boston while in progress; the anarchist issue was apparently of minor importance. But over the next 6 years Moore, William G. Thompson (who became chief defense counsel after Moore left), and the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee (an array of anarchists, Boston free-thinkers from prestigious families, and middle-class liberals and radicals) reshaped the public image of the case into a political and ideological rather than a legal controversy. The thesis of the defense's campaign was that the trial had been conducted in an atmosphere of fear and repression and that the jury and especially Judge Webster Thayer had been prejudiced against the defendants. Therefore Sacco and Vanzetti stood convicted not because of the evidence but because of their radical political beliefs.

This strategy increasingly mobilized public sentiment as years passed and doubts multiplied regarding portions of the evidence. Some prosecution witnesses repudiated their identifications, then repudiated their repudiations. Another convicted murderer confessed that he had taken part in the South Braintree crime and that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been in the gang, but his story was sketchy and inconsistent. The defense lawyers repeatedly but unsuccessfully presented motions for a new trial. On April 9, 1927, after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the convictions, Judge Thayer sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to die in the electric chair.

Final Failure

The fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti's lives continued. Governor Alvan T. Fuller, harassed on all sides, appointed a three-man panel to review the documents accumulated since 1920. The committee concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti should die. Desperate efforts to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case failed. On Aug. 22, 1927, as hundreds of heavily armed police faced crowds of demonstrators outside Boston's old Charles-town Prison, and as tens of thousands protested in the streets of New York and in many cities abroad, Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case furnished a public cause around which American intellectuals of widely variant beliefs could unite. The case inspired a voluminous literary outpouring and seemed to dramatize the intolerance and injustice of American society. The movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti presaged the greater involvement of intellectuals with social issues that would mark the 1930s.

The Sacco and Vanzetti case remains a tragic chapter in United States history. The case has come to stand for the type of racial bigotry and breach of human rights the United States Constitution is to protect against. The legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti serves to protect others from racial and political prosecution.

Further Reading

Published material on the Sacco-Vanzetti case is voluminous. The classic brief for the defense is Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927). G. Louis Joughin and Edmund M. Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (1948), an almost exhaustive résumé and analysis of the evidence, strongly upholds their innocence. Robert H. Montgomery, Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth (1960), concludes they were guilty, while Francis Russell, Tragedy in Dedham (1962), accepts the state's ballistics evidence and the guilty verdict for Sacco but exonerates Vanzetti. David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (1965), is more concerned with describing the development of the Sacco-Vanzetti "myth" and its impact on American intellectuals in the 1920s. Much of the atmosphere of the Sacco-Vanzetti protest movement can be gleaned from Upton Sinclair's novel Boston (1928) and John Dos Passos' The Big Money (1936) and U.S.A. (1937). □

SACCO-VANZETTI CASE

SACCO-VANZETTI CASE. Nicola Sacco, a skilled shoeworker born in 1891, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler born in 1888, were arrested on 5 May 1920, for a payroll holdup and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts. A jury, sitting under Judge Webster Thayer, found the men guilty on 14 July 1921. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on 23 August 1927 after several appeals and the recommendation of a special advisory commission serving the Massachusetts governor. The execution sparked worldwide protests against repression of Italian Americans, immigrants, labor militancy, and radical political beliefs.

Numerous legal issues arose regarding the case's prosecution that sidelined the question of guilt or innocence, including prejudicial behavior of an unscrupulous district attorney, Frederick G. Katzmann, complemented by an often inept defense; and profane and violent prejudice by the judge against the defendants, expressed outside the courtroom and possibly implicit in his behavior on the bench. Other issues included alleged perjury by a state police captain; refusal to address circumstances pointing to a group of professional criminals; inexpert and potentially deceptive presentation of ballistics evidence; and failure of the evidence as a whole to remove "reasonable doubt." Throughout the trial, the men were disadvantaged by their avowed anarchism, their status as unassimilated alien workers, and the backdrop of the red scare following World War I. Scholarly legal opinion over-whelmingly holds that apart from the question of guilt or innocence, the case is an extremely serious instance of failure in the administration of justice.

Within the United States, Sacco and Vanzetti received from the start the help of compatriots, fellow anarchists, and scattered labor groups. By 1927 they had support in money, action, and words of concerned lawyers, numerous writers, prominent activists, organized labor, and the Communist Party leadership. Nevertheless, it is clear that the majority of persons in the United States who held an opinion, and they were in the millions, believed the verdict sound and approved of the death penalty.

The case has inspired writers and artists from the 1920s onward, including several novels, plays, television presentations, and over a hundred poems by such prominent writers as John Dos Passos, Countee Cullen, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Upton Sinclair's novel Boston (1928) and Maxwell Anderson's prize-winning play Winterset (1935) reached particular fame, and Ben Shahn produced a notable series of gouaches on the two men. The letters Sacco and Vanzetti wrote during their seven years in prison are still regarded by many as the most profoundly human and genuinely literary commentary on the case.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Russell, Francis. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved. New York:

Harper and Row, 1986. Sacco, Nicola, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. Edited by Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

LouisJoughin

Eric S.Yellin

See alsoAnarchists ; Italian Americans andvol. 9:Vanzetti's Last Statement .

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

Sacco–Vanzetti Case (USA) In 1921, Nicolà Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists, were found guilty of the murder of the paymaster and a guard of a shoe factory in Massachusetts, and sentenced to death. Frequent and irrelevant mention of their political beliefs and circumstantial evidence formed the basis of the state's case. The two were executed in August 1927. Widespread condemnation of, and protest at, the nature of the trial and the result (especially among writers and intellectuals) occurred inside and outside the USA. It led Massachusetts Governor Fuller to order a review of the trial, which declared that the verdict had been ‘fair’. The conclusion convinced few, and it was not until 1977 that Governor Dukakis signed a special posthumous ‘pardon’ which overturned the verdict.

Sacco-Vanzetti Case The controversial US legal case (1920–27) in which two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bertolomeo Vanzetti, were found guilty of murder. Many have alleged that their conviction resulted from prejudice against them as immigrants, ANARCHISTS, and evaders of military service. Following the trial there were anti-US demonstrations in Rome, Lisbon, and Montevideo, and one in Paris, where a bomb killed 20 people. For six years efforts were made to obtain a retrial without success, although the judge was officially criticized for his conduct; the two men were electrocuted in August 1927. The affair helped to mobilize opinion against the prevailing ISOLATIONISM and conservatism of the post-war USA. Later evidence pointed to the crime having been committed by members of a gang led by Joe Morrelli.

Sacco and Vanzetti the Italian-born political radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were accused and convicted of murder in the US in 1921 in a sensational, controversial trial. In 1927, both men were executed; fifty years later, their names were cleared of any crimes.