Difference between revisions of "Sacco and Vanzetti"

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[[Image:Sacvan.jpg|right|thumb|Venzetti(left) and Sacco(right)]]
 
[[Image:Sacvan.jpg|right|thumb|Venzetti(left) and Sacco(right)]]
'''Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti''' were two [[revolution]]ary [[terrorist]]s who were [[conviction|convicted]] and [[execution|executed]] in 1927 for a 1920 double [[murder]] carried out during a robbery. The duo became a [[Communist]]<ref>Stephen Koch, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=YIoFAQAAIAAJ&pgis=1 Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals]'' (New York: Enigma Books, rev. ed. 2004) ISBN 1929631200, pp. 31-37</ref> ''cause célèbre''.<ref>John F. Neville, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=PXn7LbZRK2IC Twentieth-Century Cause Celebre: Sacco, Vanzetti, and the Press, 1920-1927]'' (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004) ISBN 0275977838 p. 101</ref> For decades, [[liberal]]s argued that they had been wrongly convicted, their [http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/oj/frankff.htm leading champion] [[Harvard Law School]] Professor [[Felix Frankfurter]],<ref>Felix Frankfurter, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=GiV9cR6277UC The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen]'' (Buffalo: Wm. S. Hein & Co., 2003) ISBN 157588805X</ref> a future [[United States Supreme Court|Supreme Court]] Justice. One of Frankfurter's students, future [[State Department]] official [[Noel Field]], would later write, "The shock of the Sacco-Vanzetti executions drove me leftward": he would become a [[USSR|Soviet]] intelligence source;<ref>[http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=8544389&CATLN=6&accessmethod=5&j=1 Noel Haviland Field], Records of the Security Service, The National Archives (United Kingdom)</ref> another of Frankfurter's students, [[Alger Hiss]], would later [http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2278 emulate] Sacco and Vanzetti.
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'''Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti''' were two [[revolution]]ary [[terrorist]]s who were [[conviction|convicted]] and [[execution|executed]] in 1927 for a 1920 double [[murder]] carried out during a robbery. The duo became a [[Communist]]<ref>Stephen Koch, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=YIoFAQAAIAAJ&pgis=1 Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals]'' (New York: Enigma Books, rev. ed. 2004) ISBN 1929631200, pp. 31-37</ref> ''cause célèbre''.<ref>John F. Neville, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=PXn7LbZRK2IC Twentieth-Century Cause Celebre: Sacco, Vanzetti, and the Press, 1920-1927]'' (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004) ISBN 0275977838 p. 101</ref> For decades, [[liberal]]s argued that they had been wrongly convicted, their [http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/oj/frankff.htm leading champion] [[Harvard Law School]] Professor [[Felix Frankfurter]],<ref>Felix Frankfurter, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=GiV9cR6277UC The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen]'' (Buffalo: Wm. S. Hein & Co., 2003) ISBN 157588805X</ref> a future [[United States Supreme Court|Supreme Court]] Justice. One of Frankfurter's students, future [[State Department]] official [[Noel Field]], would later write, "The shock of the Sacco-Vanzetti executions drove me leftward": he would become a [[USSR|Soviet]] intelligence source;<ref>[http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=8544389&CATLN=6&accessmethod=5&j=1 Noel Haviland Field], Records of the Security Service, The National Archives (United Kingdom)</ref> another of Frankfurter's students, [[Alger Hiss]], would later [http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2278 emulate] Sacco and Vanzetti, to whom would reportedly [https://web.archive.org/web/20120507180857/http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1996/11/24/an-american-melodrama.html compare himself].
  
The case became fodder for polemical works: [[Socialist]]<ref>"To John M. Gillette," September 15, 1912, in Maxwell Anderson (Laurence G. Avery, Ed.), ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=iINNqp6FxU0C Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958]'' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) ISBN 0807849405, p. 3</ref> playwright [[Maxwell Anderson]] had his greatest success with the 1935 play ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=6P8jBxOKYacC Winterset]'', a tragedy in verse loosely based on the case, which won him the Critics’ Circle Award. In the play, the accused is innocent, and the judge is described as "crazy as a bedbug." Socialist novelist [[Upton Sinclair]] likewise wrote a novel, ''Boston'', based upon the case, in which he suggested that the convicted terrorists had been railroaded.<ref>E.g.: "[O]f the five identification witnesses upon whom the case against Sacco rested, one was a many times arrested crook, one a hysterical prostitute, one a halfwit, one a disoriented fantasist, and one a feeble victim of police pressure." Upton Sinclair, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=YL2wAAAAIAAJ Boston: A Novel]'' (A. & C. Boni, 1928), p. 411</ref> But in 2005, a 1929 letter from Sinclair surfaced, in which he confided that the [http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sacvan.html well-known socialist] Fred Moore, radical attorney for [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9502E2DB1439E13ABC4D53DFBF668383609EDE&legacy=true the terrorist]<ref>Moments after the sentencing of 95 Wobbies (including Haywood) at the Chicago Federal Building in 1918, a bomb ripped through the building, killing four. Charles Howard McCormick, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=Vcvhrdr6drgC Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers]'' (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005) ISBN 0761831320, pp. 31-31</ref> [[International Workers of the World]]<ref>[http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/243/ Moore, Fred H., 1882-1933], The Emma Goldman Papers, University of California Berkeley</ref> who represented Sacco and Vanzetti, told Sinclair that “the men were guilty," and confessed "in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."<ref>Jean O. Pasco, "[http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/24/local/me-sinclair24 Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Expose]," ''Los Angeles Times'', December 24, 2005. Cf. "[http://web.archive.org/web/20090226152309/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/01/28/uptonsinclair-boston.html Novelist's Book about Murder Trial Called into Question]," Canadian Broadcasting Company, January 28, 2006 (Archive); cf. Doug Linder (2001), [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/s&vaccount.html The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti], Famous Trials (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law); Richard Newby, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=jxPC7B6jkRQC Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti]'' (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 634</ref> As he revealed in another letter, from 1927, Sinclair feared for his life if he told the truth: "My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book."<ref>Richard Newby, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=jxPC7B6jkRQC Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti]'' (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 481</ref> In the end, Sinclair decided that there was more money in lying than telling the truth: "It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public."<ref>Jonah Goldberg, [http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200601061019.asp The Clay Feet of Liberal Saints], ''National Review'', January 06, 2006. Cf. Ann Coulter, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=k_3EeVj2_IUC Godless: The Church of Liberalism]'' (Random House Digital, Inc., 2007), ISBN 1400054214, p. 52</ref> Even the Communist<ref>"I am for socialism," wrote Baldwin. "Communism is the goal." (Affidavit of Roger N. Baldwin, December 31, 1938, [https://archive.org/download/investigationofu193804unit/investigationofu193804unit.pdf Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States]. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 75th-78th Congress, pp. 3081-3082. Cf. "Baldwin, 'From the Harvard Classbook,'" [June 1935, vol. 763], reprinted in ''Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union'' [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000], p. 259; Peggy Lamson, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=iC6FAAAAMAAJ Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union: a portrait]'' [Houghton Mifflin, 1976], p. 192)</ref> [[Roger Baldwin]], founder of the [[American Civil Liberties Union]] (ACLU) (which [https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-Civil-Liberties-Union provided counsel] for the two men),<ref>Baldwin wrote: "The Civil Liberties Union has been connected with the Sacco and Vanzetti matter, but has hidden its participation under various false fronts. We are at present instigating a nation-wide movement," etc. William A. Donohue, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=kMnGnFOG6rcC The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union]'' (Transaction Publishers, 1985), ISBN 1412838444, p. 130</ref> admitted "there was no possible doubt of the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti."<ref>Richard Newby, [http://books.google.com/books?id=jxPC7B6jkRQC Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti]'' (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 635</ref>
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The case became fodder for polemical works: [[Socialist]]<ref>"To John M. Gillette," September 15, 1912, in Maxwell Anderson (Laurence G. Avery, Ed.), ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=iINNqp6FxU0C Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958]'' (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) ISBN 0807849405, p. 3</ref> playwright [[Maxwell Anderson]] had his greatest success with the 1935 play ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=6P8jBxOKYacC Winterset]'', a tragedy in verse loosely based on the case, which won him the Critics’ Circle Award. In the play, the accused is innocent, and the judge is described as "crazy as a bedbug." Socialist novelist [[Upton Sinclair]] likewise wrote a novel, ''Boston'', based upon the case, in which he suggested that the convicted terrorists had been railroaded.<ref>E.g.: "[O]f the five identification witnesses upon whom the case against Sacco rested, one was a many times arrested crook, one a hysterical prostitute, one a halfwit, one a disoriented fantasist, and one a feeble victim of police pressure." Upton Sinclair, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=YL2wAAAAIAAJ Boston: A Novel]'' (A. & C. Boni, 1928), p. 411</ref> But in 2005, a 1929 letter from Sinclair surfaced, in which he confided that the [http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sacvan.html well-known socialist] Fred Moore, radical attorney for [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9502E2DB1439E13ABC4D53DFBF668383609EDE&legacy=true the terrorist]<ref>Moments after the sentencing of 95 Wobbies (including Haywood) at the Chicago Federal Building in 1918, a bomb ripped through the building, killing four. Charles Howard McCormick, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=Vcvhrdr6drgC Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers]'' (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005) ISBN 0761831320, pp. 31-31</ref> [[International Workers of the World]]<ref>[http://editorsnotes.org/projects/emma/topics/243/ Moore, Fred H., 1882-1933], The Emma Goldman Papers, University of California Berkeley</ref> who represented Sacco and Vanzetti, told Sinclair that “the men were guilty," and confessed "in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."<ref>Jean O. Pasco, "[http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/24/local/me-sinclair24 Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Expose]," ''Los Angeles Times'', December 24, 2005. Cf. "[http://web.archive.org/web/20090226152309/http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/01/28/uptonsinclair-boston.html Novelist's Book about Murder Trial Called into Question]," Canadian Broadcasting Company, January 28, 2006 (Archive); cf. Doug Linder (2001), [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/s&vaccount.html The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti], Famous Trials (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law); Richard Newby, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=jxPC7B6jkRQC Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti]'' (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 634</ref> As he revealed in another letter, from 1927, Sinclair feared for his life if he told the truth: "My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book."<ref>Richard Newby, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=jxPC7B6jkRQC Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti]'' (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 481</ref> In the end, Sinclair decided that there was more money in lying than telling the truth: "It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public."<ref>Jonah Goldberg, [http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200601061019.asp The Clay Feet of Liberal Saints], ''National Review'', January 06, 2006. Cf. Ann Coulter, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=k_3EeVj2_IUC Godless: The Church of Liberalism]'' (Random House Digital, Inc., 2007), ISBN 1400054214, p. 52</ref> Even the Communist<ref>"I am for socialism," wrote Baldwin. "Communism is the goal." (Affidavit of Roger N. Baldwin, December 31, 1938, [https://archive.org/download/investigationofu193804unit/investigationofu193804unit.pdf Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States]. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 75th-78th Congress, pp. 3081-3082. Cf. "Baldwin, 'From the Harvard Classbook,'" [June 1935, vol. 763], reprinted in ''Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union'' [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000], p. 259; Peggy Lamson, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=iC6FAAAAMAAJ Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union: a portrait]'' [Houghton Mifflin, 1976], p. 192)</ref> [[Roger Baldwin]], founder of the [[American Civil Liberties Union]] (ACLU) ("The Civil Liberties Union has been connected with the Sacco and Vanzetti matter, but has hidden its participation under various false fronts," boasted Baldwin. "We are at present instigating a nation-wide movement," etc.)<ref>William A. Donohue, ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=kMnGnFOG6rcC The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union]'' (Transaction Publishers, 1985), ISBN 1412838444, p. 130</ref> admitted that "there was no possible doubt of the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti."<ref>Richard Newby, [http://books.google.com/books?id=jxPC7B6jkRQC Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti]'' (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 635</ref>
  
Seven eyewitnesses placed Sacco at the scene of the murders, and some identified him as the trigger man. The case was finally closed in 1983 when ballistics tests performed (by the renowned forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee, Director and Chief Criminalist of the Connecticut State Forensic Laboratory; Anthony L. Paul, Police Firearms Unit Laboratory Manager and Senior Firearms Examiner, Philadelphia Police Department; and Marshall K. Robinson, Senior Firearms Examiner for the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Police Department) under the auspices of the Select Committee on Sacco and Vanzetti, demonstrated conclusively that six cartridges taken from Sacco when he was arrested "were made on the same machine that made the two ... fired cartridge cases that were recovered from the crime scene.<ref>James E. Starrs, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3711839 Once More Unto the Breech: The Firearms Evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti Case Revisited]," ''AFTE Journal'', Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July 1985), p. 28. Cf. Richard Newby, [http://hnn.us/articles/4527.html Sacco & Vanzetti: Were They Really Innocent?], History News Network (George Mason University), April 19, 2004</ref>
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At the trial, seven eyewitnesses placed Sacco at the scene of the crime. Four decades later, a 1961 ballistics test by the Massachusetts Police Lab, employing new technology not available at the time of the trial, provided strong evidence that Sacco did indeed fire the fatal bullet that day.<ref>Douglas Linder, "[http://www.jurist.org/j20/famoustrials/the-trial-of-sacco-and-vanzetti.php The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti]. Jurist.org, May 2001</ref> Nevertheless, in 1977, Massachusetts Democratic governor [[Michael Dukakis]] signed a resolution pardoning Sacco and Vanzetti, apologizing to them and establishing a day in honor of them.
  
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The case was finally closed in 1983 when still more advanced ballistics tests by the renowned forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee, Director and Chief Criminalist of the Connecticut State Forensic Laboratory; Anthony L. Paul, Police Firearms Unit Laboratory Manager and Senior Firearms Examiner, Philadelphia Police Department; and Marshall K. Robinson, Senior Firearms Examiner for the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Police Department (under the auspices of the Select Committee on Sacco and Vanzetti), demonstrated conclusively that six cartridges taken from Sacco when he was arrested were made on the same machine that made the two fired cartridge cases recovered from the crime scene.<ref>James E. Starrs, "[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3711839 Once More Unto the Breech: The Firearms Evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti Case Revisited]," ''AFTE Journal'', Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July 1985), p. 28. Cf. Richard Newby, [http://hnn.us/articles/4527.html Sacco & Vanzetti: Were They Really Innocent?], History News Network (George Mason University), April 19, 2004</ref>
  
 
[[Image:Wallstreetbmb.jpg|thumb|300px|left|Wall Street bombing, 1920, attributed to [http://www.crimemagazine.com/06/wallstreetbomb,0115-6.htm Galleanists]. ''World-Telegram photo. Source: [http://www.fbi.gov/page2/sept07/wallstreet091307.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation]'']]The pair were members of a [http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/17/nyregion/after-1920-blast-opposite-never-forget-no-memorials-wall-st-for-attack-that.html?pagewanted=all terrorist]<ref>According to Charles Poggi, Frank Maffi said the 1920 Wall Street bombing that killed more than 30 people was the work of his uncle, a Galleanist named Mario Buda. Paul Avrich, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=8z8mdUYp-6gC Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America]'' (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2005), ISBN 1904859275, p. 133</ref> group known as the [http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3100/the_lessons_of_sacco_and_vanzetti/ Galleanists],<ref>Paul Avrich, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=lm0SCspDOjQC Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background]'' (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 0691026041, pp. 59-60</ref> which was responsible for the [http://www.slate.com/id/3135/ May Day 1919 attempted bombing] of [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9406E3D61238EE32A25752C0A9639C946896D6CF a number] of [http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=438 public figures].<ref>Paul Avrich, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=lm0SCspDOjQC Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background]'' (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 0691026041, p. 146</ref> They had dodged the draft for [[World War I]].
 
[[Image:Wallstreetbmb.jpg|thumb|300px|left|Wall Street bombing, 1920, attributed to [http://www.crimemagazine.com/06/wallstreetbomb,0115-6.htm Galleanists]. ''World-Telegram photo. Source: [http://www.fbi.gov/page2/sept07/wallstreet091307.htm Federal Bureau of Investigation]'']]The pair were members of a [http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/17/nyregion/after-1920-blast-opposite-never-forget-no-memorials-wall-st-for-attack-that.html?pagewanted=all terrorist]<ref>According to Charles Poggi, Frank Maffi said the 1920 Wall Street bombing that killed more than 30 people was the work of his uncle, a Galleanist named Mario Buda. Paul Avrich, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=8z8mdUYp-6gC Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America]'' (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2005), ISBN 1904859275, p. 133</ref> group known as the [http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3100/the_lessons_of_sacco_and_vanzetti/ Galleanists],<ref>Paul Avrich, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=lm0SCspDOjQC Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background]'' (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 0691026041, pp. 59-60</ref> which was responsible for the [http://www.slate.com/id/3135/ May Day 1919 attempted bombing] of [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9406E3D61238EE32A25752C0A9639C946896D6CF a number] of [http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=438 public figures].<ref>Paul Avrich, ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=lm0SCspDOjQC Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background]'' (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 0691026041, p. 146</ref> They had dodged the draft for [[World War I]].
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On the left, sympathy has continued for Sacco and Vanzetti ever since. Much is made of a confession by another death row inmate to having perpetrated the crime. But the judge found that unreliable.  
 
On the left, sympathy has continued for Sacco and Vanzetti ever since. Much is made of a confession by another death row inmate to having perpetrated the crime. But the judge found that unreliable.  
  
Fifty years after the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, in 1977, Massachusetts Democratic governor [[Michael Dukakis]] signed a resolution pardoning them, apologizing to them and establishing a day in honor of them. However, most scholars are convinced of their guilt.
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Most scholars are convinced of the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti.
  
 
==Notes==
 
==Notes==

Revision as of 02:29, March 6, 2017

Venzetti(left) and Sacco(right)

Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were two revolutionary terrorists who were convicted and executed in 1927 for a 1920 double murder carried out during a robbery. The duo became a Communist[1] cause célèbre.[2] For decades, liberals argued that they had been wrongly convicted, their leading champion Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter,[3] a future Supreme Court Justice. One of Frankfurter's students, future State Department official Noel Field, would later write, "The shock of the Sacco-Vanzetti executions drove me leftward": he would become a Soviet intelligence source;[4] another of Frankfurter's students, Alger Hiss, would later emulate Sacco and Vanzetti, to whom would reportedly compare himself.

The case became fodder for polemical works: Socialist[5] playwright Maxwell Anderson had his greatest success with the 1935 play Winterset, a tragedy in verse loosely based on the case, which won him the Critics’ Circle Award. In the play, the accused is innocent, and the judge is described as "crazy as a bedbug." Socialist novelist Upton Sinclair likewise wrote a novel, Boston, based upon the case, in which he suggested that the convicted terrorists had been railroaded.[6] But in 2005, a 1929 letter from Sinclair surfaced, in which he confided that the well-known socialist Fred Moore, radical attorney for the terrorist[7] International Workers of the World[8] who represented Sacco and Vanzetti, told Sinclair that “the men were guilty," and confessed "in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."[9] As he revealed in another letter, from 1927, Sinclair feared for his life if he told the truth: "My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book."[10] In the end, Sinclair decided that there was more money in lying than telling the truth: "It is much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public."[11] Even the Communist[12] Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ("The Civil Liberties Union has been connected with the Sacco and Vanzetti matter, but has hidden its participation under various false fronts," boasted Baldwin. "We are at present instigating a nation-wide movement," etc.)[13] admitted that "there was no possible doubt of the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti."[14]

At the trial, seven eyewitnesses placed Sacco at the scene of the crime. Four decades later, a 1961 ballistics test by the Massachusetts Police Lab, employing new technology not available at the time of the trial, provided strong evidence that Sacco did indeed fire the fatal bullet that day.[15] Nevertheless, in 1977, Massachusetts Democratic governor Michael Dukakis signed a resolution pardoning Sacco and Vanzetti, apologizing to them and establishing a day in honor of them.

The case was finally closed in 1983 when still more advanced ballistics tests by the renowned forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee, Director and Chief Criminalist of the Connecticut State Forensic Laboratory; Anthony L. Paul, Police Firearms Unit Laboratory Manager and Senior Firearms Examiner, Philadelphia Police Department; and Marshall K. Robinson, Senior Firearms Examiner for the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Police Department (under the auspices of the Select Committee on Sacco and Vanzetti), demonstrated conclusively that six cartridges taken from Sacco when he was arrested were made on the same machine that made the two fired cartridge cases recovered from the crime scene.[16]

Wall Street bombing, 1920, attributed to Galleanists. World-Telegram photo. Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation
The pair were members of a terrorist[17] group known as the Galleanists,[18] which was responsible for the May Day 1919 attempted bombing of a number of public figures.[19] They had dodged the draft for World War I.

Liberals alleged that they had been tried for their beliefs rather than their actions, and questions about the fairness of such a trial in Boston were raised from the beginning. They had skilled defense counsel in a famous labor attorney, but no Italians were included in the jury (none may have been in the jury pool). The defense counsel eliminated every businessman from the jury. Witnesses for the prosecution were weak, with one testifying that the murderer spoke good English (the defendants did not). The prosecution identified only one bullet as being from Sacco's gun, with no explanation as to the source of the other three bullets found at the scene. The stolen money was never found.

The defendants took the witness stand in their defense, but were subjected to relentless questioning about their political beliefs. Defense counsel repeatedly objected to such questions, but the judge overruled the objections and allowed them. There is widespread agreement that the judge never should have permitted so much questioning about political beliefs at the trial.

The jury returned a guilty verdict after more than a day of deliberations. (At an earlier trial, a different jury had convicted them of a similar crime.) Faced with international protests against the prosecution, the Massachusetts governor appointed a commission to examine the trial and evidence. Throughout the 1920s the case was a flashpoint for protests. Finally, after the commission announced it agreed with the verdict, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927.

Vanzetti, who sported a distinctive handlebar mustache, maintained his innocence to the end. His final words to the judge before execution were these: "I would not wish to [a dog or snake] 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 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."

On the left, sympathy has continued for Sacco and Vanzetti ever since. Much is made of a confession by another death row inmate to having perpetrated the crime. But the judge found that unreliable.

Most scholars are convinced of the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Notes

  1. Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (New York: Enigma Books, rev. ed. 2004) ISBN 1929631200, pp. 31-37
  2. John F. Neville, Twentieth-Century Cause Celebre: Sacco, Vanzetti, and the Press, 1920-1927 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004) ISBN 0275977838 p. 101
  3. Felix Frankfurter, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen (Buffalo: Wm. S. Hein & Co., 2003) ISBN 157588805X
  4. Noel Haviland Field, Records of the Security Service, The National Archives (United Kingdom)
  5. "To John M. Gillette," September 15, 1912, in Maxwell Anderson (Laurence G. Avery, Ed.), Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) ISBN 0807849405, p. 3
  6. E.g.: "[O]f the five identification witnesses upon whom the case against Sacco rested, one was a many times arrested crook, one a hysterical prostitute, one a halfwit, one a disoriented fantasist, and one a feeble victim of police pressure." Upton Sinclair, Boston: A Novel (A. & C. Boni, 1928), p. 411
  7. Moments after the sentencing of 95 Wobbies (including Haywood) at the Chicago Federal Building in 1918, a bomb ripped through the building, killing four. Charles Howard McCormick, Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2005) ISBN 0761831320, pp. 31-31
  8. Moore, Fred H., 1882-1933, The Emma Goldman Papers, University of California Berkeley
  9. Jean O. Pasco, "Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Expose," Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2005. Cf. "Novelist's Book about Murder Trial Called into Question," Canadian Broadcasting Company, January 28, 2006 (Archive); cf. Doug Linder (2001), The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, Famous Trials (University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law); Richard Newby, Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 634
  10. Richard Newby, Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 481
  11. Jonah Goldberg, The Clay Feet of Liberal Saints, National Review, January 06, 2006. Cf. Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Random House Digital, Inc., 2007), ISBN 1400054214, p. 52
  12. "I am for socialism," wrote Baldwin. "Communism is the goal." (Affidavit of Roger N. Baldwin, December 31, 1938, Investigation of un-American propaganda activities in the United States. Hearings before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 75th-78th Congress, pp. 3081-3082. Cf. "Baldwin, 'From the Harvard Classbook,'" [June 1935, vol. 763], reprinted in Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union [New York: Columbia University Press, 2000], p. 259; Peggy Lamson, Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union: a portrait [Houghton Mifflin, 1976], p. 192)
  13. William A. Donohue, The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (Transaction Publishers, 1985), ISBN 1412838444, p. 130
  14. Richard Newby, Kill now, talk forever: debating Sacco and Vanzetti (AuthorHouse, 2006) ISBN 1420843931, p. 635
  15. Douglas Linder, "The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. Jurist.org, May 2001
  16. James E. Starrs, "Once More Unto the Breech: The Firearms Evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti Case Revisited," AFTE Journal, Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners, Vol. 17, No. 3 (July 1985), p. 28. Cf. Richard Newby, Sacco & Vanzetti: Were They Really Innocent?, History News Network (George Mason University), April 19, 2004
  17. According to Charles Poggi, Frank Maffi said the 1920 Wall Street bombing that killed more than 30 people was the work of his uncle, a Galleanist named Mario Buda. Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2005), ISBN 1904859275, p. 133
  18. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 0691026041, pp. 59-60
  19. Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1996), ISBN 0691026041, p. 146