History 122 Research Brief
Sacco and Vanzetti: Martyrs for "the Idea"© 2000 David C. Hanson, Virginia Western Community College
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 1920"If it had not been for this, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we do such a work for tolerance, for justice, for men's understanding of man, as we now do by an accident, our words--our lives--our pains--nothing! The taking of our lives--lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler--all! The last moment belongs to us--that agony is our triumph!" --Bartolomeo Vanzetti
On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley was mortally wounded by an avowed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. While shaking hands at a reception in Buffalo, McKinley was shot in the abdomen at point-blank range. The bullet lodged in his pancreas and he died on September 14. Czolgosz was promptly convicted of murder and sentenced to death by electrocution. His last words were, "I killed the president because he was the enemy of the people--the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime."
The assassination of McKinley was a shocking crime of historical importance--not the least of which being the fact that it elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency--but Leon Czolgosz soon became merely an obscure footnote, forgotten by most Americans. Conversely, the most famous anarchists in American history--Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti--were convicted of a very unnoteworthy crime: killing two men during a robbery in 1920. So why are Sacco and Vanzetti more famous than Czolgosz, who murdered the president? Why, on the contrary, are they the subject of countless books and articles, with continuing interest in their case and new scholarship eighty years later?
The simple answer is implied by Vanzetti's comments after his sentencing [above]. At the time there was considerable doubt about their guilt, and the likelihood of their innocence has grown stronger in the years since their electrocution in 1927. The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti made them an international cause celebre; but again, there is the question, what made the case of Sacco and Vanzetti so famous? Just how remarkable were these two men--"a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler"--and how "innocent" were they?
Sacco and Vanzetti were among approximately 130,000 Italians who emigrated to the United States in 1908. Sacco was seventeen years old, Vanzetti was twenty. Sacco came from Torremaggiore, located in southern Italy [his real name was Ferdinando; in 1917 he assumed the name of his older brother Nicola]. Vanzetti came from Villafalletto, located in northern Italy. Sacco married, started a family, and became a highly skilled and well-paid worker in a shoe factory where he worked for seven years. Vanzetti was a more restless fellow. Though trained as a pastry chef in Italy, in America he moved around a lot, working various unskilled jobs--digging ditches, washing dishes, swinging a pick-axe on a railroad gang, laboring for a building contractor--and eventually working as a fish peddler at the time of his arrest in 1920. Vanzetti later wrote that he enjoyed "that vagabond freedom of working and living in the open." A gentle, modest man of simple needs with a passion for nature, he hardly seems like the violent revolutionary depicted by the prosecutor in his trial. But this ordinary laborer had an extraordinarily active mind. Exhibiting an insatiable hunger for knowledge, he read everything he could get his hands on--history, literature, philosophy, religion, science. Under other circumstances, with a formal education, he might have become a scholar rather than a fish peddler.
How did Sacco and Vanzetti become anarchists? Both men were serious, sensitive idealists who had come to America to pursue their dream of freedom and opportunity, only to become disillusioned by what they saw: poverty in the midst of plenty, children working in factories by day and sleeping in alleys at night, workers pushed to their limits by greedy industrialists, hired strikebreakers (and police) crushing labor unions, while the government turned a blind eye. Passionate in their sympathy for "the oppressed victims of capitalism," separately they joined the anarchist movement around the same time (Vanzetti in 1912, Sacco in 1913). By the time they met in 1917, Sacco had quit his job, changed his name, and gone "underground" to devote himself to the single-minded pursuit of his ideals. Simply put, government was the enemy of humanity--it had to be destroyed so that men could be free. "I have try to hit at the centres of this decrebid society," Sacco later wrote. Vanzetti, the "wise and gentle working-class philosopher," was every bit as militant and dangerous, as Upton Sinclair concluded. Gathering material for his book about the case after their execution [a "documentary novel," like his epic work, The Jungle], the famous socialist had been convinced they were harmless idealists. In the course of his research, however, he discovered that he had been mistaken. Both men were "well acquainted with dynamite."
Vanzetti & Sacco at Dedham courthouse
Much has been written about the injustice of the case against Sacco and Vanzetti--a textbook case of police, prosecutorial, and judicial misconduct. On April 15, 1920, the paymaster for a shoe manufacturer and his assistant were robbed and fatally shot on the streets of Braintree, Massachusetts. Acting on a hunch, police in nearby Bridgewater staked out a garage with a car belonging to a notorious anarchist named Mike Boda, believed to be the getaway car. Boda and three other men came by for the car but Boda and Riccardo Orciani (a comrade of Sacco since 1913), got away. Police followed the other two men, Sacco and Vanzetti, and arrested them a short time later. The two "suspicious characters" were taken into police custody for questioning.
Indeed, both men did act suspiciously, denying knowing Boda or having been at the garage. At this time, the Justice Department's new Bureau of Investigation, headed by J. Edgar Hoover, was vigorously pursuing alien radicals. One of Vanzetti's associates, Andrea Salsedo, who had been detained for questioning about bombs mailed to prominent authorities in 1919, committed suicide while in custody. (Broken by intense interrogation, and possibly torture, Salsedo betrayed his comrades and then jumped from a window to his death.) Fearing that the federal authorities' dragnet was closing on them, apparently Sacco and Vanzetti were trying to dispose of some incriminating evidence (dynamite and anarchist literature). They assumed this was why they were picked up by the authorities.
From the beginning, the case was stacked against them because of who they were, not what they had (or had not) done. They were questioned not about the crime but about their political beliefs (seeming to confirm their own fears); then they were made to stand alone in a room, posing as bandits, in front of eyewitnesses. As revealed in the trial, the eyewitness testimony was highly unreliable, neither man fit the description of the bandits, and both Sacco and Vanzetti had credible alibis. Although both men were armed when arrested, the ballistic evidence was inconclusive at best, and arguably exculpatory. To bolster his flimsy case, throughout the seven-week trial the prosecutor played to the patriotic and xenophobic prejudices of the jury, focusing on fact that the defendants were alien radicals. When questioned by a friend about the weakness of the evidence, the jury foreman (a former police chief) reportedly stated, "Damn them, they ought to hang anyway." The trial judge was no better. From statements made outside the courtroom, and from his actions clearly intended to influence the outcome of the trial, Judge Webster Thayer evidently shared the opinion of the jury foreman. Thus, for obvious reasons the trial attracted a great deal of attention, much of it sympathetic to the defendants. To their deaths, both men steadfastly maintained their innocence while openly professing their anarchist philosophy--"the Idea" of a classless society free from any form of government authority.
The amount of "reasonable doubt" about their involvement in the Braintree robbery should have been enough to acquit Sacco and Vanzetti, but not during the Red Scare. (To this day, the question of who committed the Braintree robbery remains a mystery.) Likewise, the fact that both men were not opposed to the use of dynamite in their commitment to "the Idea" has no legal relevance to the case, but does help keep things in perspective. They were hardworking, compassionate and considerate men, well-liked and highly-regarded by everyone who knew them personally. They were also dangerous terrorists, willing to use violent means--to risk their lives, and to take other men's lives--to achieve their ends. Their friend Carlo Valdinoci blew himself up in an effort to bomb Attorney-General Palmer's home. And Mike Boda (Mario Buda), who eluded the police when Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, drove a wagonload of dynamite to the front of J. P. Morgan's office in the heart of Wall Street, killing 33 people and wounding hundreds, before safely returning to Italy. All were devoted followers of Luigi Galleani, a charismatic anarchist deported to Italy for promoting violence.
The ultimate irony of the case, as suggested by Vanzetti's remarks, is that in its overzealous and unscrupulous efforts to crush the anarchist movement, the government elevated two obscure men to immortality by railroading them straight into the electric chair. The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler, did more for both men and "the Idea" than they possibly could have achieved on their own.
DCH 082000