Sacco and Vanzetti

Bartolomeo Vanzetti (left) and Nicola Sacco (right)

Nicola Sacco (April 22, 1891 – August 23, 1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (June 11, 1888 – August 23, 1927) were two Italian-born American anarchists, who were arrested, tried, and executed via electrocution in the American state of Massachusetts. There was some popular doubt at the time regarding their guilt, stirred in part by Upton Sinclair's 1928 novel Boston.

Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the killings of Frederick Parmenter, a shoe factory paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, and of robbery of $15,766.51 from the factory's payroll on April 15, 1920.

Both Sacco and Vanzetti had alibis, but they were the only people accused of the crime. As a result of what many historians feel was a blatant disregard for political civil liberties, and a strong anti-Italian prejudice, Sacco and Vanzetti were denied a retrial. Judge Webster Thayer, who heard the case, allegedly described the two as "anarchist bastards".

Today, their case known in some circles as one of the earliest examples of using widespread protests and mass movements to try to win the release of a murderer. [1]

Sacco was a shoe-maker born in Torremaggiore, Foggia. Vanzetti was a fish seller born in Villafalletto, Cuneo.

The Events

In South Braintree, Massachusetts, on the 15 April 1920, Frederick Parmenter, a shoe factory paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, were taking the workers' wages to the factory when they were attacked by five men. Parmenter and Berardelli were killed in the raid. The robbers escaped in a car along with an accomplice. The robbery netted $15,766.51.

The police suspected that the robbery was connected to an earlier one committed at South Bridgewater in December 1919 which had been unsuccessful and non-fatal. They kept watch on radical members of the Italian community and eventually arrested two immigrants who were also known to be anarchist believers: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Both men had owned hand guns at the time of their arrests. At first they panicked and lied about their guns and ammunition. Then Sacco, a shoemaker, who sometimes served as a night-watchman at the factory in which he worked, explained that that was why he was armed.

Vanzetti was tried for the South Bridgewater robbery (Sacco had been at work all day). The presiding judge was Webster Thayer. Although he produced witnesses to claim that he had been selling fish all day, Vanzetti was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.

Later Sacco and Vanzetti both stood trial for the South Braintree killings, with Thayer again presiding. Vanzetti again claimed that he had been selling fish at the time. Sacco for his part claimed that he was in Boston in order to gain a passport from the Italian consulate and have dinner with friends. The date of Sacco's visit to the consulate could not be established with certainty and it was argued that his dinner companions were friends and fellow anarchists.

DA Frederick Katzmann raised the political views of the two accused, and the fact that Sacco had fled to Mexico to avoid conscription during the Great War. Under cross-examination, Sacco did admit to lying to Katzmann during interviews in Brockton prison, and made a lengthy speech attacking the treatment of the working-class by the ruling class of America.

Sacco and Vanzetti were both found guilty of first degree murder. The three other robbers were never found.

Defence motions for a new trial went unheeded. Then in Dedham prison Sacco met a Portuguese convict called Celestino Madeiros who claimed to have committed the crime of which Sacco was accused. Governor Alvin T. Fuller finally agreed to postpone the executions and set up a committee to reconsider the case. The committee upheld the convictions.

In spite of major protests and strikes all over the world, Celestino Madeiros, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were all three executed on August 23, 1927.

Background and reactions

Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had any previous criminal record, nor were they communists, but they were known to the authorities as radical militants who had been widely involved in the anarchist movement, labor strikes, political agitation, and anti-war propaganda. Sacco and Vanzetti claimed to be victims of social and political prejudice, and as Vanzetti said in his last speech to Judge Webster Thayer:"I would not wish to a dog or a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth — I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian... If you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already". (Vanzetti spoke on 19 April, 1927, in Dedham, Massachusetts, where their case was heard in the Norfolk County courthouse.[1])

Many famous socialist intellectuals, including Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, campaigned for a retrial but were unsuccessful. Famed lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter also worked for a retrial for the two men. On August 23, 1927, after seven years of incarceration, the two men were sent to the electric chair. The execution sparked riots in London and Germany. The American Embassy in Paris was bombed by protestors.

Later investigations

One piece of evidence supporting the possibility of Sacco's guilt arose in 1941 when anarchist leader Carlo Tresca told Max Eastman, "Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent." Eastman published an article recounting his conversation with Tresca in National Review in 1961. Later, others would confirm being told the same information by Tresca.

In addition, in October 1961, ballistics tests were run using Sacco's Colt automatic. The results suggested that the bullet that killed Berardelli in 1920 came from Sacco's gun. The relevance of this evidence was cast in doubt in 1988, when Charlie Whipple, a former Globe editorial page editor, revealed a conversation he had with Sergeant Edward J. Seibolt when he worked as a reporter in 1937. According to Whipple, Seibolt admitted that the police ballistics experts had switched the murder weapon, but Seibolt indicated that he would deny this if Whipple ever printed it. The gun is also said to have gone in and out of police custody and been dismantled several times between 1927 and 1961.

Evidence against Sacco's involvement included testimony by Celestino Madeiros, who confessed to the crime and indicated that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti took part. Madeiros was also in possession of a large amount of money ($2800) immediately following the robbery, whereas no links to the stolen money were ever found with Sacco or Vanzetti. Judge Thayer rejected this testimony as a basis for a retrial, calling it "unreliable, untrustworthy, and untrue."

Further evidence on the Sacco and Vanzetti case came in November, 1982 in a letter from Ideale Gambera to Francis Russell. In it, Gambera revealed that his father, Giovanni Gambera, who had died in June 1982, was a member of the four-person team of anarchist leaders that met shortly after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti to plan for their defense. In his letter to Russell, Gambera claimed, "everyone [in the anarchist inner circle] knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing."

On August 23, 1977, exactly fifty years after their execution, Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been treated justly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names."

The involvement of Upton Sinclair

In 2005, a 1929 letter from Upton Sinclair to his attorney John Beardsley, Esq., was publicized (having been found in an auction warehouse ten years earlier) in which Sinclair revealed that he was told at the time he wrote his book Boston, that both men were guilty. During the trial Sinclair met with Sacco and Vanzetti's attorney Fred Moore.

Sinclair revealed that "Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth, ... He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them. ... I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point, I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case". A trove of additional papers in Sinclair's archives at Indiana University show the ethical quandary that confronted him (Pasco 2005).

In January 2006, more of the text of the Beardsley letter became public casting some doubt on the conclusion that Sinclair believed Moore's statement"I realized certain facts about Fred Moore. I had heard that he was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels. ... Moore admitted to me that the men themselves, had never admitted their guilt to him; and I began to wonder whether his present attitude and conclusions might not be the result of his brooding on his wrongs"CNN.

If Sinclair did not give any credibility to Moore's statement, it would not have been "the most difficult ethical problem of [his] life". On the other hand, Sinclair's public position was consistent in asserting the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. Both Moore's statement and Sinclair's skepticism of it were mentioned in a 1975 biography of Upton Sinclair, despite claims that the contents of the letter were a new or "original" development.

Sacco and Vanzetti in Arts

Sacco & Vanzetti mosaic by Ben Shahn at Syracuse University

Close up of mosaic

* Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned in the animated Family Guy film Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story when Phineas and Barnaby are arrested by the police.
* In 1960, Folkways Records released an LP titled The Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti. This record included eleven songs comprised and sung by folksinger Woody Guthrie in 1946-1947, and one song sung by folksinger Pete Seeger (words by Nicola Sacco).
* The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, by Ben Shahn, a famous painting depicting the funeral of the two men, is housed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. A similar three-panel marble and enamel mosaic is located on the east wall of Huntington Beard Crouse Hall, at Syracuse University.
* In 1977, folksinger Charlie King wrote a protest song called Two Good Arms that was based on Vanzetti's final speech.
* The novel Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut has their trial as a major part of it.
* Upton Sinclair's 1928 book, Boston , is a fictional interpretation of the affair.
* The 1969 book The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Venzetti , by Herbert B. Ehrmann, junior counsel for the defense, describes the author's experiences working on the case.
* Sacco e Vanzetti, a 1971 film by Italian director Giuliano Montaldo covers the case. The soundtrack was written by composer Ennio Morricone and sung by folk singer Joan Baez. The notable song Here's to You was a hit for Joan Baez.
* At the time of his murder in 1964, American composer Marc Blitzstein was working on an opera on Sacco and Vanzetti.
* In his poem America Allen Ginsberg includes the line, Sacco and Vanzetti must not die.
* Carl Sandburg described the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem Legal Midnight Hour.
* Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem after the executions entitled Justice Denied In Massachusetts.
* Two men with covered faces (labeled Sacco and Vanzetti) are shown in Rage Against the Machine's music video, No Shelter.
* The ska punk band Against All Authority wrote a song titled Sacco and Vanzetti, which appears on their album Nothing New for Trash Like You.
* The fictional scenario of Maxwell Anderson's 1935 play Winterset bears some resemblance to the case, by which it was inspired.
* Georges Moustaki, francophone singer and songwriter translated Joan Baez's "Here's To You" in French. The result is a song entitiled "Marche de Sacco et Vanzetti".

External links

* The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti, a Crime Library article about the case
* The Murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, an essay written by the Workers' Solidarity Movement
* Sacco-Vanzetti Case, an essay by Robert D'Attilio
* Sacco and Vanzetti Documentary; The site for the first major documentary film about the Sacco and Vanzetti case
* Sacco e Vanzetti; the IMDB page for the film
* The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti; a detailed analysis of the case by Douglas Linder

References

*Brian MacArthur (editor), The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches, second edition (1999), pp. 100-103.
* Kadane, Joseph B. and Schum, David A. A Probabilistic Analysis of the Sacco and Vanzetti Evidence (Wiley Series in Probability & Mathematical Statistics: Applied Probability & Statistics) , 1996.
*Montgomery, Robert H. Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth, New York: Devin-Adair, 1960.
*Grossman, James, The Sacco-Vanzetti Case Reconsidered: Commentary, January 1962.
*Russell, Francis, Sacco-Vanzetti: The Story of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962.
*Felix, David, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.
*Russell, Francis, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved, New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
*Starrs, James E., Once More Unto the Breech: The Firearms Evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti Case Revisited, in Journal of Forensic Sciences, April 1986, pp. 630-654; July 1986, pp. 1050-1078.
*Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
*Newby, Richard, Kill Now, Talk Forever: Debating Sacco and Vanzetti, AuthorHouse, Revised 2006.
*Feuerlicht, Roberta Strauss, Justice Crucified, The Story of Sacco and Vanzetti, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977.
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