On
15th April, 1920, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, in
South Braintree, were shot dead while carrying two boxes containing
the payroll of a shoe factory. After the two robbers took the $15,000
they got into a car containing several other men and were driven away.
Several eyewitnesses claimed that the robbers looked Italian. A large
number of Italian immigrants were questioned
but eventually the authorities decided to charge Bartolomeo
Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco with the
murders. Although the two men did not have criminal records, it was
argued that they had committed the robbery to acquire funds for their
anarchist political campaign.
The trial started on 21st May, 1921. The main evidence against the
men was that they were both carrying a gun when arrested. Some people
who saw the crime taking place identified Bartolomeo
Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco as the robbers.
Others disagreed and both men had good alibis. Vanzetti was selling
fish in Plymouth while Sacco was in Boston
with his wife having his photograph taken. The prosecution made a
great deal of the fact that all those called to provide evidence to
support these alibis were Italian immigrants.
Vanzetti and Sacco were disadvantaged by not having a full grasp of
the English language. It was clear from some of the answers they gave
in court that they had misunderstood the question. During the trial
the prosecution emphasized the men's radical political beliefs. Vanzetti
and Sacco were also accused of unpatriotic behaviour by fleeing to
Mexico during the First World War. The trial
lasted seven weeks and on 14th July, 1921, both men were found guilty
of first degree murder and sentenced to death.
Many observers believed that their conviction resulted from prejudice
against them as Italian immigrants and because they held radical political
beliefs. The case resulted in anti-US demonstrations in several European
countries and at one of these in Paris, a bomb exploded killing twenty
people.
In 1925 Celestino Madeiros, a Portuguese
immigrant, confessed to being a member of the gang that killed Frederick
Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli. He also named the four other
men, Joe, Fred, Pasquale and Mike Morelli, who had taken part in the
robbery. The Morelli brothers were well-known criminals who had carried
out similar robberies in area of Massachusetts. However, the authorities
refused to investigate the confession made by Madeiros.
Important figures in the United States and Europe became involved
in the campaign to overturn the conviction. John
Dos Passos, Alice Hamilton, Paul
Kellog, Jane Addams, Heywood
Broun, William Patterson, Upton
Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Ben
Shahn, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Felix
Frankfurter, John Howard Lawson,
Freda Kirchway, Floyd
Dell, Bertrand Russell, George
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells became involved
in a campaign to obtain a retrial. Although Webster Thayer, the original
judge, was officially criticised for his conduct at the trial, the
authorities refused to overrule the decision to execute the men.
By the summer of 1927 it became clear that Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti would
be executed. Vanzetti commented to a journalist: "If it had not
been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street
corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure.
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, justice,
for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. 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
belong to us - that agony is our triumph. On 23rd August 1927, the
day of execution, over 250,000 people took part in a silent demonstration
in Boston.
Fifty years later, on 23rd August, 1977, Michael
Dukakis, the Governor of Massachusetts, issued a proclamation,
effectively absolving the two men of the crime.
Bartolomeo
Vanzetti and Nicola
Sacco
(1)
Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday
(1931)
At the height of the Big Red Scare - in April, 1920 - there had
taken place at South Braintree, Massachusetts, a crime so unimportant
that it was not even mentioned in the New York Times of the
following day - or, for that matter, of the whole following year.
It was the sort of crime which was taking place constantly all over
the country. A paymaster and his guard, carrying two boxes containing
the pay-roll of a shoe factory, were killed by two men with pistols,
who thereupon leaped into an automobile which drew up at the kerb,
and drove away across the railroad tracks. Two weeks later a couple
of Italian radicals were arrested as the murders, and a year later
the Italians were tried before Judge Webster Thayer and a jury and
found guilty.
(2)
Eugene Debs, statement issued in October,
1926.
The supreme court of Massachusetts has spoken at last and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, two of the bravest and best scouts that
ever served the labor movement, must go to the electric chair. The
decision of this capitalist judicial tribunal is not surprising. It
accords perfectly with the tragical farce and the farcical tragedy
of the entire trial of these two absolutely innocent and shamefully
persecuted working men.
Now is the time for all labor to be aroused and to rally as one vast
host to vindicate its assailed honor, to assert its self-respect,
and to issue its demand that in spite of the capitalist-controlled
courts of Massachusetts honest and innocent working-men whose only
crime is their innocence of crime and their loyalty to labor, shall
not be murdered by the official hirelings of the corporate powers
that rule and tyrannize over the state.
(3)
John Dos Passos, Facing the Chair:
Sacco and Vanzetti (1927)
Why were these men held as murderers and highwaymen and not as
anarchists and advocates of the working people? Among a people that
does not recognize or rather does not admit the force and danger of
ideas it is impossible to prosecute the holder of unpopular ideas
directly. Also there is a smoldering tradition of freedom that makes
those who do it feel guilty. After all everyone learnt the Declaration
of Independence and "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" in
school, and however perfunctory the words have become they have left
a faint infantile impression on the minds of most of us. Hence the
characteristic American weapon of the frameup. If two Italians are
spreading anarchist propaganda, you hold them for murder.
(4)
Bertrand Russell led the campaign
in Britain against the conviction of Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
I am forced to conclude that they were condemned on account
of their political opinions and that men who ought to have known better
allowed themselves to express misleading views as to the evidence
because they held that men with such opinions have no right to live.
A view of this sort is one which is very dangerous, since it transfers
from the theological to the political sphere a form of persecution
which it was thought that civilized countries had outgrown.
(5)
Heywood
Broun, New
York World
(5th August, 1927)
When at last Judge Thayer in a tiny voice passed sentence upon Sacco
and Vanzetti, a woman in the courtroom said with terror: "It
is death condemning life!"
The men in Charlestown
Prison are shining spirits, and Vanzetti has spoken with an eloquence
not known elsewhere within our time. They are too bright, we shield
our eyes and kill them. We are the dead, and in us there is not feeling
nor imagination nor the terrible torment of lust for justice. And
in the city where we sleep, smug gardeners walk to keep the grass
above our little houses sleek and cut whatever blade thrusts up a
head above its fellows.
"The decision is
unbelievably brutal," said the Chairman of the Defense Committee,
and he was wrong. The thing is worthy to be believed. It has happened.
It will happen again, and the shame is wider than that which must
rest upon Massachusetts. I have never believed that the trial of Sacco
and Vanzetti was one set apart from many by reason of the passion
and prejudice which encrusted all the benches. Scratch through the
varnish of any judgment seat and what
will you strike but hate thick-clotted from centuries of angry verdicts?
Did any man ever find power within his hand except to use it as a
whip?
Governor Alvan T. Fuller
never had any intention in all his investigation but to put a new
and higher polish upon the proceedings. The justice of the business
was not his concern. He hoped to make it respectable. He called old
men from high places to stand behind his chair so that he might seem
to speak with all the authority of a high priest or a Pilate.
(6)
William
Patterson,
The Man Who Cried Genocide (1971)
Sacco and Vanzetti became friends during World War
I. Rather than go
to war to kill their fellow-workers, they had joined a group of anarchists
who went to live in Mexico for the duration of the war. Their friendship
continued when they returned to Massachusetts.
In the police files there
was quite a dossier under the designation "agitators" concerning
these two men. Vanzetti had led a strike at a cordage factory for
which he was blacklisted. Sacco had raised money to fight frame-ups,
he had walked picket lines, had been arrested for demonstrating. Both
were very active in the defense of the foreign-born, who were at that
time the targets of a sweeping witch hunt, under the guidance of U.S.
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover. The two friends
had organized protest meetings, raised defense money, distributed
handbills. They were often followed by spies hired by the federal
government.
A protest meeting that
Sacco and Vanzetti were organizing for May 9, 1920 never came off.
On May 5 they were arrested, charged with dangerous radical activities.
But even the authorities must have felt this an insufficient charge,
for they added another - they associated them with a payroll robbery
at South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920, in which two guards
had been killed.
At their trial. Judge
Webster Thayer, who presided, revealed at every turn his marked hatred
for the two Italians. Every effort was made by the press and the authorities
to whip up mass mob hysteria. The courtroom was surrounded with extra
guards, and everyone entering it was searched. Suborned witnesses
calmly lied on the stand, with the knowledge, undoubtedly, that even
if they were charged with having given perjured testimony they would
go free.
(7)
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, statement (9th
April, 1927)
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 was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered
more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so
convinced to be right that 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.
(8)
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, comment to a reporter
before his execution (1927)
If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life
talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked,
unknown, a failure. 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, justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by
accident. 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 belong to us - that agony is our triumph.
(9)
Freda
Kirchway
was in Germany during the last few weeks
before Bartolomeo
Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were
executed. She wrote about her reaction to the execution in The
Nation (28th August, 1927)
We've hardly talked about it—but every time we got within range
of a newspaper we've rushed to it hoping, without any real hope that
some miracle of mercy would have descended on the Governor or someone
else. It was hard to sleep through some of those nights. And everywhere
we went - from Paris and Berlin to Heiligenblut in the Austrian Tyrol
- people talked to us about it with horror and a complete inability
to understand. This was true of people without any political feeling
in the matter - casual companions in a railway compartment or in a
hotel office. And now they're dead. In spite of riots and bitter resentment,
I feel, in people and in myself a distinct relief that, if it had
to be, it is done. Anything is better than that strain of waiting.
(10)
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Justice Denied
in Massachusetts (1927)
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room.
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under the cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted
-
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited -
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued -
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does not overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
(11)
H. G. Wells became involved in the
campaign in Britain against the conviction of Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in
America. The New York Times refused
to publish his article, The Proposed Murder of Two Radicals.
It eventually appeared in his book of essays, The Way the World
is Going, in 1929.
The elementary education of the American citizen is cheap
and poor and does not fit him for his proper role in the world; next,
that the methods of democracy used by the States are crude and ineffective
and that they hamper the moral and intellectual development of what
is still the greatest, most promising of human communities; and, thirdly
and finally, that the American sense of justice is clumsy and confused.
(12)
Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts,
proclamation on the Sacco and Vanzetti case (23rd August, 1977)
Today is the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day.
The atmosphere of their trial and appeals were permeated by prejudice
against foreigners and hostility toward unorthodox political views.
The conduct of many of the officials involved in the case shed serious
doubt on their willingness and ability to conduct the prosecution
and trial fairly and impartially. Simple decency and compassion, as
well as respect for truth and an enduring commitment to our nation's
highest ideals, require that the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti be pondered
by all who cherish tolerance, justice and human understanding.
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