Long ago in Braintree, Mass. …The Crime that began the Sacco-Vanzetti case took place a Century ago
By Robert Knox
These are difficult days in American politics — perhaps difficult days in America, period. But times were tough a hundred years ago as well, especially for immigrants and for civil liberties — i.e. the Constitutional protections of free speech, freedom of the press, due process of law, and other basic rights.
A little more than a hundred years ago, on April 15, 1920, the crime took place that began the notorious Sacco and Vanzetti case — an American scandal of conspicuous injustice that became an international cause — in which two Italian immigrants who professed anarchist beliefs were accused without a shred of real evidence of committing a heinous crime, tried in a prejudiced courtroom, convicted by a nativist jury — that is to say, all male American citizens in a time when only men could vote — and eventually executed 7 years later. By that time their case had become an international cause de celebre. Their names were known worldwide, everybody knew about the case. Everybody worldwide (except in the Massachusetts legal system) believed they were victims of a singular injustice.)
Immigration, always an essential part of the American story, looked a lot different in the early 20th century from immigration today. Immigrants came from Europe — not from Mexico, Central America, Asia, the Caribbean, Africa or the Middle East. They came at first from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, mostly northern European countries. But from around 1880 and into the 1920’s, and in greater numbers than had ever been seen, they came from southern and eastern Europe. From Poland, Russia, the Balkans, Portugal, Turkey, and — the single greatest number — from Italy. For those who came from Italy, the cause was almost always purely economic. Disasters weakened the economic base of Southern Italy: drought, crop disease, the collapse of traditional fisheries and the lumber industry. At the same time advances in maritime transportation made it easier, and less expensive, to cross the ocean. Many Italian men crossed it to work in the US in seasonal industries and then return home with their earnings, year after year. But many others, including women and children –often whole families — chose to come and stay.
During those peak decades, 1880–1920, national prejudices grew as numbers of immigrants crowding cities and towns did. Some towns or employers made it clear when they were hiring more workers that they did not intend to hire Italians.
Two immigrants: Bartolomeo Vanzetti arrived in America in 1908 as a young man of 20 to “put an ocean between my mother’s death” and the rest of his life, he said… Unlike most, he did not come for economic reasons. His father was a wealthy farmer in northern Piemonte Italy (in the town of Villafilletto) who wanted Bartolomeo to learn to run his businesses. He sent his son to the city to learn to be a pastry chef and help the family business that way. Starting ‘at the bottom,’ Bartolomeo found pastry-making to be factory work, piece-work, a miserable business in conditions that nearly killed him. He became seriously ill with a breathing difficulty and was sent home, where his loving mother devoted herself to nursing him back to health. Then she developed cancer and died after months of terrible suffering. Her son devoted himself to her care, believing that her efforts to save him weakened her. Wishing to separate his future from a painful past — he had a deep relationship with his mother, but a poor one with his father, Bartolomeo decided to go to America, which he thought of as “the land of the free.” A country, that is, with no rigid divides between social classes; no oppressive national church.
Vanzetti was not an anarchist when he arrived. His life in the US led him to that philosophy. He later told reporter about the early years, “I was a Dago [a common pejorative] to be worked to death…. We lived in a shanty, where the Italians work and live like a beast…” Like other day laborers, he was forced to follow the availability of work, a trade he called “pick and shovel.” After five years mostly in New York, rumors of work brought him to Massachusetts, and eventually to Plymouth, where he boarded with the Brini family who came from his region in Italy, who lived in North Plymouth, the immigrant section of town. The boarder became close to the family’s children. Vanzetti later called Beltrando Brini his “spiritual son.” Recorded interviews later collected and published show Vanzetti to be kind, courteous to women, gentle and loving to children. He was a talker, a thinker, a dreamer, a reader. Among the books he owned was “the life of Jesus Christ” by Ernest Renan. Anarchism became his religion; its ideals gave meaning to his life… Among his jobs was working on repairs to Plymouth harbor.
Nicola Sacco was born in the town of Torremaggiore (in the Southeast of Italy) and emigrated to US in 1908 at age 17. He loved machinery. He emigrated with his brother Sabino, and when his brother returned to Italy in 1909 and he was left alone in the United States, he took lessons in shoe-making and became an excellent shoe trimmer. He was a skilled worker and made a good living. He married his wife, Rosa, when he was 21, she 17 (their ages typical of the times), and their first child was born in 1913.
Sacco found settled work in a shoe factory in Stoughton, Massachusetts; he developed a strong relationship with the owner, the son of an Irish immigrant. The craft of a shoe trimmer is piece work. Sacco could make a day’s pay in a few hours. He was also attracted to the cause of labor, and participated in strikes. He volunteered to help in the defense of Arturo Giovannitti, an Italian labor organizer — one of the principal organizers of the famous 1912 Lawrence textile strike — an Italian immigrant who had been arrested on a dubious murder charge. It was one of his first radical activities.
A definition: The word “anarchy” means ‘no authority.’ [From the Greek: ‘a’ means not; archon is a ruler] It doesn’t mean chaos. It means living with no governing state, no political or “established” religious institutions. No rich; no poor… V. called anarchy “the beautiful idea.” People, he believed, would live happily and survive materially by forming voluntary cooperatives. Sharing resources. Recognizing the needs of others as important as one’s own.
For anarchists like V and S and for many other social critics, the fundamental issue in this stage of western civilization was “rich versus poor”. …today we call that “the distribution of wealth.”
Believing that workers were oppressed by the capitalist system, by the owning of property, anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti — both became disciples of the anarchist theorist Luigi Galleani (Vanzetti called him my ‘master’) — supported and took part in strikes. Though he did not work there, Vanzetti took part in the 1916 strike against the Plymouth Cordage Company, a large ropemaking business. WWI created a great demand for American resources such as cordage, but war-driven inflation ate up workers’ earnings.
The Red Scare
OK, now comes the heavy political stuff. The stuff that should have been part of everybody’s high school American History courses, but probably wasn’t.
During a period of anti-radical and anti-foreigner hysteria known as “The Red Scare” of 1919–1920 (it was like McCarthyism, but worse), a time of a time of national paranoia, thousands of immigrants were detained without due process of law.
After the US entered World War I in 1917, Congress passed laws to suppress all criticism of the government’s decision to join the ongoing European slaughter or any means (such as a military draft) the government adopted to conduct the war. Anti-war critics were prosecuted, the non-citizens among them deported to their native countries. (For comparison, imagine that response to protests and anti-war criticism during the Vietnam War era.)
In his recent book “American Midnight,” historian Adam Hochschild detailed the US government’s outrageous violations of war critics’ Constitutional rights — and the rights of Americans in general. The new restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly led to a general crackdown on labor organization: Union meetings were broken up by local and government police, abetted by loosely ‘deputed’ thugs. Labor speakers, and meeting participants were beaten and dragged off to jail.
In addition to attacking union organizers and members, new oppressive laws were aimed at suppressing anti-war speech or behavior by immigrants. Thousands of immigrants were rounded up in mass raids, declared ‘disloyal’ without evidence or due process of law, and sentenced to deportation, before a single federal judge stepped in to overturn immigration orders made without due process of law.
When Galleani was deported to Italy, some of his followers ‘declared war’ on the government — arguing that the government had already been making war on them — and on the institutions that suppressed their publications, broke up rallies of war critics, and used the courts to suppress their First Amendment freedoms of expression. In response, these followers — some of them members of the same ‘gruppo’ that Sacco and Vanzetti belonged to — sent bombs through the mail and placed them at the homes of their ‘enemies’ in government and big business. These “Anarchist Fighters” were self-declared enemies of the state.
In the most extensive of these-style, on June 2, 1919, the Anarchist Fighters mailed, or delivered by hand, their handmade explosive devices to the homes of federal judges, police chiefs and prominent capitalists in what today would be called “terrorist” attacks. Bombs were sent to major cities, including Washington and Boston. Top of the page next day in every newspaper is the bomb that explodes on the front steps of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s house in DC, destroying most of the house but not harming his family. Almost no one was hurt in the exclusive neighborhood (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lived across the street), except the bomber, who was blown up when his bomb went off on the front porch. We know his name, Carlo Valdonocci, a Galleanisti. Sacco and Vanzetti probably knew him.
These bombings led to the Palmer raids. In late 1919 federal agents and vigilantes conduct major raids in big cities rounding up radicals and thousands of immigrants on no grounds other than national origins — a lot of Russians, since ‘communism’ is now perceived as major threat. Detainees were roughed up and kept in poor conditions. Congress passes a law making it illegal to be a member of an anarchist organization.
Fed agents can’t find who’s responsible, but in this fear-driven, highly politicized and wholly repressive atmosphere, police target union organizers and political radicals such as anarchists when something goes wrong.
The Crime
During the period of national hysteria that followed the bombings, a criminal gang executed a brazen and well-planned daylight robbery in Braintree, Mass. on April 15, 1920. The robbers stole a shoe factory payroll and shot and killed the paymaster and his guard at point-blank range. State police assigned to crack the case come under pressure to make an arrest.
Some days later, on a completely unrelated errand, members of Sacco and Vanzetti’s “Gruppo” decided that in view of the government’s sweeping attack on radicals and immigrants following the Anarchist Fighters’ bombings, they should hide evidence linking them to Galleani, such as copies of his journal “Cronaca Sovversiva.” …The Gruppo decides to send some of its members to collect anarchist lit from other members and hide it. Sacco and Vanzetti and two other group members decide to retrieve a comrade’s car left at the home of a mechanic in Bridgewater. Police have staked out the car, on the grounds that that Bridgewater is somewhat near Braintree (though not really) and since some anarchists have taken to planting bombs, maybe they also commit robberies — a notion that, a century later, makes no more sense now than it did at the time. Cops tell the mechanic to call them at once if anybody comes for the car.
Four Gruppo members, two riding a motorcycle, arrive at the Bridgewater mechanic’s home one evening to retrieve the car, which they plan to use to round up anarchist literature from other group members. The mechanic stalls, then tells the visitors that the car isn’t ready to drive yet. His visitors shrug, decide it’s now too late to make their rounds without a car. The two guys get back on the bike for the ride home. Sacco and Vanzetti take off on foot to the nearest streetcar stop. Meanwhile the mechanic’s wife has called the Bridgewater police to say four “foreign” guys came looking for the car.
State police put out the word to local cops to look for foreign-looking guys leaving Bridgewater. Streetcars are stopped, and two men with foreign accents are taken off a streetcar at gunpoint, hauled to a police station and interrogated. After the two men freely admit to being anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti are charged with robbery and murder, despite any evidence linking them to the crime. They were charged, police would later say, because they lied about what they were doing on the night of their arrest. They said they were visiting a friend. And because they were carrying weapons. Quick fact check: This is America! lots of people carry weapons — it’s legal. Vanzetti told the police they were carrying guns “because there were a lot of dangerous people around.” Clearly, though, they came under suspicion largely because they were friends of another anarchist who owned a car that had nothing to do with the robbery. It’s hard to find a clearer case of “guilt by association.”
Since police and prosecutors lacked any substantial evidence against the two radicals, both of whom had witnesses for their whereabouts on the date of the crime, they went about creating it. Among the many shoe factory workers who managed split-second glimpses of the crime from factory windows, the state found a few whom they could pressure, or threaten, into testifying that they recognized the defendants. In the best of circumstances eye-witness testimony to the brief, violent or otherwise criminal acts of strangers is highly unreliable. The overwhelming majority of factory workers interviewed either said the accused were not the robbers, or they could not make an identification based on what they had seen.
The Trial
When the case went to trial, ballistic experts disagreed over whether a bullet removed from one of the victim’s body could have been fired by Sacco’s gun. Recent re-examinations of both the ballistics and autopsy evidence suggest that the state fired a bullet from Sacco’s gun and subbed it for one of the bullets surgically removed from a victim’s body. Since the state failed to maintain a secure chain of evidence, the case’s physical evidence was contaminated.
The trial’s native-born, male jurors were themselves hardly unbiased. After the trial, the jury foreman said he didn’t care whether the defendants were guilty or not, saying “they should hang them all.” It was clear who was meant by this ‘them’ — foreigners with political beliefs that native-born citizens found threatening.
And trial judge Webster Thayer made his own bias clear in a widely reported comment to a college classmate, at an alumni reunion, after passing sentence: “Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards?”
The defendants’ attorney, a respected labor lawyer naturally appealed, beginning a legal process that lasted seven years. Appeal hearings were delayed, postponed, rescheduled for a host of reasons — so-called prosecution witnesses had left the state and needed to be tracked down. Expert witnesses were ill and could not attend until recovery. The judge was ill for a year. The appeals court judge was not always available, and then needed a vacation. When the state’s supreme judiciary court finally rejected the defense’s appeal, only then could Webster Thayer pronounce sentence: Death in the electric chair.
Protests of the trial’s unfairness had been taking place for years, both in this country and overseas, as the story of two “poor” immigrants being framed for a crime they did not commit made its way through the country and the world. Unions, socialists, anarchists, antiwar critics, and immigrants joined demonstrations and raised money to support the defendants’ legal costs.
Thayer’s death sentences brought widespread public protests, both in this country and abroad, to a boil. A typical newspaper headline from 1927 captured the universality of working class and progressive condemnation of the court’s decision: “Protests and demonstrations and strikes all over the United States, in Germany, England Australia, Switzerland, Paraguay, Mexico, on every continent except Antarctica.”
In Paris, a protest gathering drew a reported one million people. A who’s who of prominent figures from different walks of life expressed support for Sacco and Vanzetti either publicly or privately. Various others, from Albert Einstein to George Bernard Shaw to Marie Curie, signed petitions directed toward Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller or U.S. President Calvin Coolidge.
The defendants’ attorneys made a final appeal for clemency to the governor of the state. Unhappily, the overseas attention paid to the case may have worked against the defendants. Governor Alvan Fuller, a Republican, visited them in prison while weighing an appeal and was impressed by Vanzetti’s personality, remarking: “what an attractive man.” Vanzetti had used jail time to improve his English. He wrote letters to supporters, and a few memoirs. Fuller said he considered granting a pardon but, one associate explained, “He felt that worldwide interest in the case proved that there was a conspiracy against the United States.”
Their execution, after several stays of execution by Fuller kept the case on the front pages in the summer of 1927, drew international outrage, including violent demonstrations in France and in some other European countries. Thousands of people gathered the night of the execution, Aug. 23, 1927, many of them on the Boston Common, in a vigil…dispersing after midnight in sorrow after word passed that the men were dead.
Final Words
I will give the last words to the two principals in this story: At his trial Sacco said that life in the U.S. is good for people with money but it’s not good for the working and the laboring class And at his sentencing, he said, “I know this sentencing will be between two classes, the rich class and the working class, and there will always be collision between one and the other.”
Vanzetti said his deaths would be a worthy sacrifice. He said he might have spent his life “talking to sad men on street corners,” winning no change or improvements: a failure. But “Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we now do by dying. Our words, our lives, our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us — that agony is our triumph.”
