Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, died in the electric chair in Charlestown Prison, Boston Massachusetts, on 23 August 1927.
By John Tully
For a society founded by dissenters, the United States of America has shown scant tolerance for those who have dared to think differently. Nowhere has this been truer than in New England, whence the Pilgrim Fathers fled from persecution over three centuries ago. The names of two modern dissenters and immigrants to the region, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, have entered the language as bywords for the victims of tyranny. Sacco and Vanzetti landed in New England in 1908 and 'thought it the land of the free'. But as Andy Irvine's song1reminds us Vanzetti 'very soon saw that the rich had one law, and there was another for people like me.'
Centuries earlier, the Pilgrim Fathers' search for freedom had degenerated into the small-town bigotry and misogynism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and the infamous Salem witch trials. By the nineteenth century industrial capitalism had created a new category of 'witches' in a radical, largely immigrant, proletariat. Working conditions were appalling; Sacco testified at his trial that they were worse than those in Italy.
The burghers of the New England mill towns hated trade unions and socialism like sin. Their response to strikes and labour organisers was direct and brutal. In one case they planned to immure the 'agitators' in specially-built cellars into which water could be pumped to varying levels to cool the radicals' ardour. They fostered racism against immigrants and discouraged them from settling down in New England, preferring to take on fresh batches of 'hands' from the immigrant boats to avoid strong unions taking root in the mill town communities.
Yet as the years passed large numbers of immigrants did settle down, Sacco and Vanzetti among them. Sacco hailed from the southern Adriatic coast of Italy, where his father kept vineyards and olive groves. He married his Italian sweetheart Rosina in 1913 and obtained steady work as a skilled 'edger' in the Boston shoe trade. Originally a supporter of Guiseppe Garibaldi, he became an anarchist and by 1913 he was extremely active in the city's labour movement. He and Rosina put on amateur plays to raise funds for strikers' families and were proud of the time they put in on the picket line.
Vanzetti, the son of a Piedmontese farmer, left school to work as an apprentice pastrycook in Turin. He too, came to America in 1908 and worked at a number of jobs in the iron mills, as a brickie's labourer, quarryman and dishwasher. His father offered to set him up in business, but he gently declined, saying that it was against his principles. He too became a strong unionist and was blacklisted by the bosses for his part in the strike wave of 1916. Thereafter he earned his living by digging eels from the sands of Boston harbour and peddling fish from a handcart in the city's Italian quarter.
News of the 1917 Russian Revolution came to America like a thunderclap, galvanising the workers and bringing hope for the future. It also unleashed a hysterical reaction from the ruling class, which did not hesitate to use illegal means to suppress the tide of discontent. Lynch mobs also dealt out grisly retribution to 'Wobblies' and 'Communists', unrestrained by the law.
The 'blue-blooded' 'Boston Brahmins' were in the forefront of the incredible anti-Red witch-hunt which swept America after the Russian Revolution. The Boston Herald screamed that there was a 'Bolshevik Plan for [the] Conquest of America' and radicals were deported to Europe by the shipload (including Leon Trotsky from New York in 1917).
In 1920 the Federal Department of Justice began a nationwide round-up of the 'Reds', numbered at over 60,000 by Attorney-General Palmer. Upwards of 6000 were detained nationally and nowhere did the hysteria reach such a crescendo as in New England. Over 1500 'Reds' were detained in Massachusetts alone and detainees were marched in handcuffs through the streets of Boston. Squalid concentration camps were set up for those arrested and their families were left without news or bread. Bail was set at impossibly high levels and the constitutional rights of the 'Reds' were flouted; in many cases arrest warrants arrived in bundles of telegrams after the arrests.
Many of Sacco and Vanzetti's comrades were picked up in the 'dragnets'. One, Salsedo, was kept incommunicado in the Boston police headquarters before 'falling' to his death from a 14th storey window.
At the height of the witch-hunt, on 15 April 1920, two payroll clerks were shot dead and robbed of over $15,000 in the suburb of South Braintree. The murderers were said to be Italian-looking men and three weeks later Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested as they rode a tram. Vanzetti was also charged and found guilty of another, unrelated, robbery. (Prof. Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School said that the evidence for the latter conviction 'bordered on the frivolous.')
The murder trial began before Judge Webster Thayer on 31 May 1921. Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty on 14 July following a brief retirement by the jury. Once arrested, their doom was sealed. The evidence was flimsy, the witnesses shaky and the judge biased. When one member of the jury suggested that the defendents might be innocent, the foreman said 'damn them, they ought to hang them anyway.' Nor did fresh evidence count in their favour.
The defendents were aliens and 'Reds' in a country ruled by reactionary mob passions. As a newspaper reporter said at the time, 'There's no story in it - just a couple of wops in a jam.' Fifty years after their executions on 23 August 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were given posthumous partial pardons, and a decade later, they were exonerated, ending their families' long battle for justice.
A Defence Committee worked tirelessly to raise funds for an appeal, but their efforts were in vain. The international communist movement campaigned throughout the world for their release, mobilising workers in their tens of thousands. There were protests from Albert Einstein, the writers Thomas Mann and John Galsworthy and the musician Fritz Kreisler and hundreds of other celebrities. James Cannon, the director of International Labor Defence at the time, recalls this work as noble and non-partisan, as opposed to the later Stalinist sectarianism of the US Communist Party.2
At the end of every legal avenue stood the crabbed and bigoted figure of Judge Webster Thayer, bluest of the blue bloods and vindictive judicial guardian of his class. Among his own, Thayer often boasted about his role. 'Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?' he joked to a fellow clubman following an appeal in 1924. He dismissed the defence lawyer as 'a long-haired anarchist from California' and declared that 'We must stand together to protect ourselves against anarchists, reds.'
In a more plebeian circle, the racist demagogue Reverend Billy Sunday ranted from his Boston pulpit: 'Give 'em the juice. Burn them if they're guilty. That's the way to handle it. I'm tired of hearing these foreigners, these radicals, coming over here and telling us what we should do.'
Sacco and Vanzetti's last years were hard, but they bore them with fortitude. Both were confined for periods in the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Both went on extended hunger strikes which were ended with forced feeding. Vanzetti said that the hospital 'quacks' believed his ideas to be 'aberration and insanity' and they confiscated his books and his partly-finished translation of Proudhon3.
We should contrast the quiet dignity of their words with those of their tormentors. Rosina was pregnant when Sacco was arrested and he never saw his daughter, Ines, but he wrote some moving letters to them. On the eve of his death by electric chair he entreated his son Dante to 'help the weak ones that cry for help, help the persecuted, and the victims because [they] are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo [ie Vanzetti, JT] fought and fell yesterday of the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers.'
They died as they had lived: with dignity and courage. Sacco's last words were 'Viva l'anarchismo! Farewell my wife and child and all my friends.' Vanzetti said the 'Our words -- our lives -- our pains -- nothing. The taking of our lives -- lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish pedlar -- all. That last moment belongs to us -- that agony is our triumph.'
Such is the strength of their courage that we have never forgotten them. In contrast, who remembers the crude police and 'well-mannered thugs' who framed them?
1 Andy Irvine, 'Facing the Chair'.
2 Cannon was expelled from the Communist Party of the USA in 1928 and led the US Trotskyist movement for many years afterwards.
3 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French anarchist best remembered for his maxim 'Property is Theft'.