Sacco And Vanzetti

The case continues to excite controversy today on two fronts:
Culpability: the question of the innocence or guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti;
Conformance: the question of whether the trials were fair to Sacco and Vanzetti.

Overview



Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the murders of Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard during a robbery of US$15,776.51 from the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company, on Pearl Street in South Braintree, Massachusetts during the afternoon of April 15, 1920. The two men were arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 5, 1920, after appearing at a garage to pick up a car that police believed was used in the robberies.

Both had pistols on them, along with anarchist literature, and Vanzetti was carrying shotgun shells.
Vanzetti was initially tried and convicted of an armed robbery in nearby Bridgewater, Massachusetts that occurred the previous year. Both men were then tried for the murders and convicted. After several failed appeals, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in the electric chair on August 23, 1927, along with a third man, Celestine Madeiros, who had confessed to the murder.
Many aspects of both trials were challenged at the time (and since) for being highly prejudicial against the two men. In particular, the presiding judge in both cases (and several appeals) was seen by some as forcing the trial towards conviction and execution.

Sacco and Vanzetti both claimed to be victims of social and political prejudice and both claimed to be unjustly convicted of the crime for which they were accused. However, they did not attempt to distance themselves from their fellow anarchists nor their belief in violence as a legitimate weapon against the government.
Their controversial trial attracted enormous international attention, with critics accusing the prosecution and Judge Webster Thayer of improper conduct, and of allowing anti-Italian, anti-immigrant, and anti-anarchist sentiment to prejudice the jury. Prominent Americans such as Felix Frankfurter and Upton Sinclair publicly sided with citizen-led Sacco and Vanzetti Committees in an ultimately unsuccessful opposition to the verdict.

The executions elicited mass protests in New York, London, Amsterdam and Tokyo, worker walk-outs across South America, and riots in Paris, Geneva, Germany and Johannesburg. The American Embassy in Paris was besieged by protesters and the facade of the Moulin Rouge was wrecked.
On August 23, 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis signed a proclamation declaring, "Any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti." Dukakis said, "We are not here to say whether these men are guilty or innocent.

We are here to say that the high standards of justice, which we in Massachusetts take such pride in, failed Sacco and Vanzetti."
Background
Sacco was a shoe-maker born in Torremaggiore, Foggia who emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. Vanzetti was a fishmonger born in Villafalletto, Cuneo who arrived in the United States at age twenty. Both men arrived in the US in 1908, although they did not meet until mid-1917. As with other anarchists, the two opposed U.S. participation in the war in Europe, and moved (to Mexico) to avoid the draft.

Sacco and Vanzetti

The men were followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who advocated revolutionary violence, including bombing and assassination.

Galleani published both Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle), a periodical that advocated violent revolution, and an explicit bomb-making manual (La Salute è in voi!). At the time, Italian anarchists ranked at the top of the government's list of dangerous enemies, and had been identified as suspects in several violent bombings and assassination attempts (even an attempted mass poisoning), going back to 1914.

Cronaca Sovversiva was suppressed in July 1918, and Galleani along with eight of his closest associates were deported on 24 June 1919. Most of the remaining Galleanists sought to avoid arrest by becoming inactive or going underground.

However, some sixty militants considered themselves still engaged in a class war that required retaliation. For three years, they waged an intermittent campaign of terrorism directed at politicians, judges, and other federal and local officials, especially those who had supported deportation of alien radicals.

Chief among the dozen or more terrorist acts the Galleanists committed or are suspected of committing was the bombing of Attorney General A. In that incident, one Galleanist, Carlo Valdinoci (a former editor of Cronaca Sovversiva and an associate of Sacco and Vanzetti), was killed when the bomb intended for Attorney General Palmer exploded in his hands as he was placing it.

Incendiary pamphlets found at the scene of this and several other midnight bombings on the same evening were signed "The Anarchist Fighters."
Several Galleanist associates had been suspected and/or interrogated about their roles in the bombing incidents. Two days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, a Galleanist named Andrea Salsedo jumped to his death from the Bureau of Investigation offices on Park Row in New York.There was dark speculation that Salsedo may have been pushed out the window or possibly dropped as he was held out the window by his ankles, a well known "third-degree" technique, as he was interrogated.
Roberto Elia, another Galleanist under arrest, was later deposed in the inquiry and testified that Salsedo was distraught over his capture and killed himself to avoid betraying the others. He had interviewed many of the participants in the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, but the truth about Salsedo, whose death may have spurred his comrades to further violent action, may never be known.

The Galleanists knew that Salsedo had been held, and reportedly beaten, for several weeks which lead to rumors that Salsedo and his comrade Roberto Elia had made important disclosures concerning the bomb plot of 2 June 1919. The rumors about the confessions were later confirmed by Attorney General Palmer.
The Galleanist plotters realized that they would have to go underground and dispose of any incriminating evidence.

Stewart was called by the Federal Immigration Service about Galleanist anarchist Ferruccio Coacci, whom he had arrested for them two years earlier. For advocating violent overthrow of the government, Coacci was going to be deported.

Coacci kept managing to postpone this however, until April 15, 1920, the day of the fateful holdup in Braintree. Failing to appear, he called the FIS with the excuse that his wife had fallen ill.

Coacci insisted on this, and being cleared due to an alibi-—his timecard showed he worked on April 15--he was deported on April 18. Stopped on arrival in Italy, his bags were searched, but nothing was found by the police.

Stewart became suspicious, and on April 20 visited the Coacci residence, finding a "Mike Boda"--an alias of Mario Buda, the chief bombmaker of the Galleanists--who rented the house. Claiming not to like the deported Coacci, he volunteered that the man's wife has left in a hurry as well.
Buda freely admitted to owning a .32 caliber Spanish automatic when asked if either man owned a gun, having the diagram of a Savage automatic too, like the one used in the robbery-murder.

The empty garage elicited interest, as two cars had been there, a deduction from tire tracks. Stewart had no jurisdiction or probable cause to arrest Buda, and so left.

Discovering later that Coacci had worked for both plants that were robbed, he came back in consort with the Bridgewater police--only to find that Buda had disappeared with his possessions and furniture.
The police told the owners of the Johnson garage where the cars were to call them when people came to collect the 1914 Oakland. "Mike Boda" arrived with men later identified as Sacco and Vanzetti along with another man later to be named as Riccardo Orciani.

(He resurfaced in Italy in 1928, claiming that he escaped the US.) Sacco and Vanzetti were tracked onto a streetcar and swiftly arrested.
Vanzetti claimed to carry the revolver for protection; the prosecution claimed it had been taken from the murdered guard. In apparent attempts to avoid deportation as anarchists, they told lies to the police, lies which would come back to weigh heavily on their case.

Vanzetti was tried for the South Bridgewater robbery, though not Sacco, who was able to prove by a time-card that he had been at work all day. The presiding judge was Webster Thayer, who had criticized the jury for acquitting an anarchist named Sergei Zabraff in a trial he presided at just two months before.Jurors were swayed by several witnesses who identified Vanzetti as being at the scene of the attempted robbery and by shotgun shells found on Vanzetti when he was arrested five months after the Bridgewater crime. Vanzetti was furious with his lawyer who, he claimed, “sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ.” Vanzetti also claimed his lawyer convinced him not to testify in his own behalf lest his anarchist politics sway the jury.

Vanzetti's absence on the witness stand is thought to have convinced the jury of his guilt. Found guilty for a crime that almost no historians think he committed, Vanzetti was soon sentenced by Judge Thayer to 12-15 years' imprisonment, the maximum sentence allowable.
Sacco and Vanzetti had been involved at some level in the Galleanist bombing campaign, although their precise roles have not been determined. In particular, the Galleanist's chief bombmaker, Mario Buda, informed a friend in 1955, "Sacco c'era" (Sacco was there). This fact could account for their suspicious activities and behavior on the night of their arrest, 5 May 1920.
The judge in the case, Webster Thayer, allegedly stated to the jury "This man, (Vanzetti) although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions."There is no record of this statement in the full trial transcript.
Second trial
Later Sacco and Vanzetti both stood trial for murder in Dedham, Massachusetts for the South Braintree killings, with Webster Thayer again presiding.

Each day during the trial, Sacco and Vanzetti were escorted in and out of the courtroom under a heavy armed guard.
Vanzetti again claimed that he had been selling fish at the time of the Braintree robbery. Sacco claimed that he had been in Boston in order to gain a passport from the Italian consulate.

He had claimed to have had lunch in Boston's North end with several friends, each of whom testified on his behalf. The clerk said he remembered Sacco because of the unsually large passport photo he presented.

Moore's friend tried to get the clerk to return to America to testify but the clerk, in ill health, refused. Prosecutor Frederick Katzmann, after initially promising he would not try to link any fatal bullet with Sacco's gun, changed his mind after the defense arranged test firings of the gun.

The prosecution then matched bullets fired through the gun to those taken from one of the slain guards. Since all of the bullets found at the scene were .32 caliber and Vanzetti's gun was .38 caliber, there was no direct evidence tying Vanzetti's gun to the crime scene. The prosecution claimed it had originally belonged to the slain guard and that it had been stolen during the robbery.

The prosecution traced the gun to a Boston repair shop where the guard had dropped it off a few weeks before the murder. The defense, however, was able to raise doubts, noting that the repair shop had no record of the gun ever being picked up and that the guard's widow had told a friend that he might not have been killed had he claimed his gun.

Sacco tried the cap on in court and, according to two newspaper sketch artists who ran cartoons the next day, it was too small, sitting high on his head. But Katzmann insisted the cap fitted Sacco and continued to refer to it as his.
Further controversy clouded the prosecution witnesses who identified Sacco at the scene of the crime.

One, a bookkeeper named Mary Splaine, precisely described Sacco as the man she saw firing from the getaway car. While a few others singled out Sacco or Vanzetti as the men they had seen at the scene of the crime, far more witnesses, both prosecution and defense, refused to identify them.
After deliberating for only three hours, then breaking for dinner, the jury returned with a guilty verdict.

Captain William Proctor claimed that he never meant to imply the connection and that he had repeatedly told DA Katzmann there was no such connection but that the prosecution had crafted its trial questioning to hide this opinion.
Adding to the growing conviction that Sacco and Vanzetti deserved a new trial was the conduct of trial judge Webster Thayer. During the trial, many had noted how Thayer seemed to loathe defense attorney Fred Moore."I guess that will hold them for a while! Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!” The outburst remained a secret until 1927 when its release heightened the suspicion that Sacco and Vanzetti had not received a fair trial.
Jurors in the trial, however, were almost unanimous in praising Thayer for the way he conducted proceedings. When interviewed, they also stated that they were unaware that he had also been the judge in the earlier trial.

But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. Prior to April 1920, gang leader Joe Morelli and his men had been robbing shoes from factories in Massachusetts, including the two in Braintree where the murders occurred.

However, the appeal for a new trial based on the Madeiros confession was denied by Judge Thayer. Further appeals to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court were also denied.
On 8 April, 1927, their appeals exhausted, Sacco and Vanzetti were finally sentenced to death in the electric chair.

Fuller finally agreed to postpone the executions and set up a committee to reconsider the case. By this time, firearms examination had improved considerably, and it was now known that an automatic pistol could be traced by several different methods if both bullet and casing were recovered from the scene (as in Sacco’s case).

Automatic pistols could now be traced by unique markings of the rifling on the bullet, by firing pin indentations on the fired primer, or by unique ejector and extractor marks on the casing. Many modern critics charging that Sacco, at least, was guilty, cite Goddard's examination.

However, this would not have protected any of them, because it still would have been felony-murder if they were involved in the robbery previously. Others insisting on innocence note the doubts Thompson raised.
Execution and aftermath


Protest for Sacco and Vanzetti in London, 1921

On December 24, 1927, the headquarters of the Citibank and of the Bank of Boston in Buenos Aires were blown up by the Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, in apparent protest of the execution..

Giovanni, one of the most vocal supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti in Argentina, had already bombed the US embassy in Buenos Aires a few hours after Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned. Later, Giovanni and his comrades would unsuccessfully attempt to bomb the train in which president Herbert Hoover travelled during his stay in Argentina, in December 1928.
A few days after the executions, Giovanni received a letter from Sacco's widow thanking him for his actions and informing him that the director of the tobacco firm Combinados had proposed her a contract to produce a cigarette brand named "Sacco & Vanzetti". On 26 November, 1927, Giovanni and his comrades duly bombed a Combinados tobacco shop.
Both Sacco and Vanzetti famously refused a priest but both men went peacefully and proudly to their deaths. Sacco's final words were "Viva l'anarchia!" and "Farewell, mia madre." Vanzetti, in his final moments, gently shook hands with guards and thanked them for their kind treatment, read a statement proclaiming his innocence, and finally said, “I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”
Fellow Galleanists did not take news of the executions with equanimity.

In 1921, a booby trap bomb mailed to the American ambassador in Paris exploded, wounding his valet. Other bombs sent to American embassies were defused. In 1926, Samuel Johnson, the brother of the man who had called police the night of Sacco and Vanzetti's arrest (Simon Johnson), had his house destroyed by a bomb.
Following the sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, a package bomb addressed to Governor Fuller was intercepted in the Boston post office.

The idea to go to Mexico arose in the minds of several comrades who were alarmed by the idea that, remaining in the United States, they would be forcibly restrained from leaving for Europe, where the revolution that had burst out in Russia that February promised to spread all over the continent.
Some critics felt that the authorities and jurors were influenced by strong anti-Italian prejudice and prejudice against immigrants widely held at the time, especially in New England. Against charges of racism and racial prejudice, others pointed out that both men were known anarchist members of a militant organization, members of which had been conducting a violent campaign of bombing and attempted assassinations, acts condemned by the Italian-American community and Americans of all backgrounds.

Though in general anarchist groups did not finance their militant activities through bank robberies, a fact noted by the investigators of the Bureau of Investigation, this was not true of the Galleanist group, as Mario Buda readily admitted to an interviewer: "Andavamo a prenderli dove c'erano" ("We used to go and get it where it was") - meaning factories and banks.
Others believe that the government was really prosecuting Sacco and Vanzetti for the robbery-murders as a convenient excuse to put a stop to their militant activities as Galleanists, whose bombing campaign at the time posed a lethal threat, both to the government and to many Americans. Faced with a secretive underground group whose members resisted interrogation and believed in their cause, Federal and local officials using conventional law enforcement tactics had been repeatedly stymied in their efforts to identify all members of the group or to collect enough evidence for a prosecution.
Today, their case is seen as one of the earliest examples of using widespread protests and mass movements to try to win the release of convicted persons.The Sacco-Vanzetti case also exposed the inadequacies of both the legal and law enforcement system in investigating and prosecuting members and alleged members of secret societies and terrorist groups, and contributed to calls for the organization of national data collection and counterintelligence services.
Later investigations
One piece of evidence supporting the possibility of Sacco's guilt arose in 1941 when anarchist leader Carlo Tresca, a member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, told Max Eastman, "Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent." Eastman published an article recounting his conversation with Tresca in National Review in 1961. At the time, Whipple was unfamiliar with the specific facts of the case, and it is not known if Seibolt was actually recalling Albert Hamilton's testimony and behavior on the stand when Hamilton apparently switched Sacco's gun barrel with that of another Colt automatic.
Sacco's 0.32 Colt pistol is also claimed to have passed in and out of police custody, and to have been dismantled several times, both in 1924 prior to the gun barrel switch, and again between 1927 and 1961.

In addition to tampering with the pistol, the gun switcher/dismantler would have had also to access police evidence lockers and exchange the bullet from Berardelli's body and all spent casings retrieved by police, or else locate the actual murder weapon, then switch barrel, firing pin, ejector, and extractor, all before Goddard's examination in 1927 when the first match was made to Sacco's gun. "These two greaseballs Sacco and Vanzetti took it on the chin.“
Yet there are others who revealed different opinions, further muddling the case.

In his letter to Russell, Gambera claimed, "everyone knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing."
Russell had originally written about the case, arguing that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but further research led him to write a 1975 book, asserting that Sacco was, in fact, guilty. District Court in Massachusetts, wrote to Russell stating "I myself am persuaded by your writings that Sacco was guilty." The judge's assessment was significant, because he was one of Felix Frankfurter's "Hot Dogs," and Justice Frankfurter had advocated his appointment to the federal bench.
On August 23, 1977, exactly fifty years after their execution, Governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation stating that Sacco and Vanzetti had been treated unjustly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." Controversy arose, as a result of his action, and Dukakis later expressed regret, not for the proclamation itself, but for not also reaching out to the families of the victims of the crime.

"It was a terrible gap in my judgment; we didn't seem to focus on that," said the former Governor, in a 2005 newspaper article.
On August 23, 1997, on the 70th anniversary of their execution, Thomas Menino, the first Italian-American mayor of Boston, presided over an official ceremony at the Boston Public Library to formally "accept" a bas-relief memorializing Sacco and Vanzetti, designed by the same sculptor who created Mount Rushmore. "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.

In contrast to Moore's equivocal stance, William Thompson, the corporate lawyer who defended Sacco and Vanzetti from 1924 until their deaths, never expressed any doubt in their innocence.
Sacco and Vanzetti in popular culture


Sacco & Vanzetti mosaic by Ben Shahn at Syracuse University.



Close up of mosaic.

Sacco and Vanzetti, an award-winning documentary film featuring interviews with Howard Zinn, Anton Coppola, and Studs Terkel, and the voices of Tony Shalhoub and John Turturro, was shown in theaters across the U.S. O'Connor award for best historical film by the American Historical Association.
Anton Coppola, uncle of Francis Ford Coppola, premiered his opera Sacco and Vanzetti in 2001; Maestro Coppola recently conducted and directed his opera on February 17, 2007, at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center
Joan Baez's "Here's To You" is written for the two, referencing them as "Nicola" and "Bart".
In 1927, editorial cartoonist Fred Ellis published The case of Sacco and Vanzetti in cartoons from the Daily Worker which collected radical cartoonists' work relating to the case that had been published in the American Communist periodical Daily Worker
In Clifford Odets's 1935 play Awake and Sing!, stage directions indicate that Jacob (the grandfather) has a picture of Sacco and Vanzetti on his bedroom wall.
The Sacco and Vanzetti Century was an American anarchist military unit in the Durruti Column that fought in Spain.
In 1960, Folkways Records released an LP titled The Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti.

The soundtrack was written by composer Ennio Morricone and sung by folk singer Joan Baez. It is a re-recording by Harry Gregson-Williams with vocals by Lisbeth Scott.
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.
William Carlos Williams wrote a poem entitled "Impromptu: The Suckers" in response to the Sacco and Vanzetti trial.
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. ISBN 0837155843
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti is mentioned in an episode of 'The Practice' Mr Shore Goes to Town in which it is described as Dedham's great legal mistake.
Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned in Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain.
Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned in the song "Marathon" by composer Jacques Brel.
Edna St.

Vincent Millay wrote an essay entitled "Fear."
On the Family Guy Stewie Griffin movie, as Phineaus & Barnaby, the two vaudeville weightlifters, are being hauled in a police truck whilst being arrested for suspicions of an illegal steroid usage (which brings us back to the radical & prejudice situation), Barnaby says to one of the officers, "Stop pushing! Save your roughneck tactics for Sacco and Vanzetti."
Folk Singer David Rovics wrote a song "Sacco and Vanzetti" in 1998 telling their stories.
Author Mark Binelli presented the two as a Laurel-and-Hardy-like comedy team in the 2006 novel Sacco And Vanzetti Must Die!
On the first season of The Partridge Family after Keith and Danny inadvertantly write a song together, Danny suggests that he and Keith could be the next, "Lennon-McCartney, Rogers and Hammerstein, or Sacco and Vanzetti!"
Folk artist Joel Rafael's song "Two Good Men" portrays Sacco and Vanzetti's story.
Vanzetti's jailhouse letter is a major plot point and dramatic high point in the comedy The Male Animal by James Thurber and Elliot Nugent (1940) and later filmed with Henry Fonda reading the letter.
In 1963 a fictionalized play about the case, The Advocate, was televised on national television at the same time it premiered on Broadway. Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth, New York: Devin-Adair, 1960.
Grossman, James, The Sacco-Vanzetti Case Reconsidered: Commentary, January 1962.
Russell, Francis, Tragedy in Dedham: 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.