The Legacy of Sacco & Vanzetti

Introduction

It was a bold and outrageous pair of murders. Three o'clock in the afternoon — in broad daylight — two armed men shot and killed a paymaster and his guard. Seven shots in all were fired. The killers picked up the two boxes containing almost $16,000, leaped into a car containing several other men, a car that had pulled up with precise timing, and sped away. The whole audacious enterprise had taken less than a minute.

"This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low or misfortunate creature of the earth — I would not wish to any of them 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.

I have finished. Thank you."

—Bartolomeo Vanzetti, to Judge Thayer, upon being sentenced to death, April 9, 1927

Vanzetti (middle) and Sacco (right) Were they executed for murder, or their political views?

The trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for the Braintree, Massachusetts payroll robbery and murders is the most politically charged murder case in the history of American jurisprudence. Even more than the conviction of atom bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg — for whose guilt a considerable amount of evidence exists — Sacco and Vanzetti were believed to be victims of their political beliefs.

What's all this fuss they're making about them guys?
Darned if some people ain't kickin' because they got
What was comin' to 'em;
Sayin', be Jesus,
It's cause they're reds.
That's bad enough,
But that ain't all —
Not by a damn sight.
Why, man alive,
They're only a couple o' God damn dagoes!...
Now me: I'm an American, I am ...
Send 'em up, say I,
Show 'em that our courts is American.
We don't get our law from Italy.
We don't care whether they done it or not.
To hell with 'em!
They're dagoes.

—Jim Seymour, 1921

Sacco and Vanzetti print by Ben Shahn

Whatever the truth of their guilt or innocence, no other crime story of our century has spawned so many poems, plays, novels, and passionate works of history. No other convicted robbers and murderers have received favorable accounts in the Dictionary of American Biography. No other case has defined an era of American history — its culture, causes, politics, paranoia, divided loyalties, fervent patriotism — than the trial and fate of these two immigrant Italians.

While memories of the details of this particular case are fading, the Sacco-Vanzetti case remains in its broad outline the prime example of defendants tried not for what they did, but for whom they were: poor, passionate radicals, in an era in which the United States lived in a state of fear. It was the era of "The Red Scare."