The Legacy of Sacco & Vanzetti

About the same time, the noted journalist and critic H.L. Mencken noted in his diary:

"Sedgwick (the editor of the Atlantic Monthly) told me that the Atlantic Monthly article on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, written by Felix Frankfurter, was really inspired by the Lord Chancellor of England. Sedgwick was at a dinner in London, and happened to be put beside the Lord Chancellor. As a good Bostonian, he had always assumed that Sacco and Vanzetti were clearly guilty, but the Lord Chancellor told him that he had doubts about it, and so when Sedgwick got back to Boston he began looking into the matter. He was informed that Frankfurter knew more about the case than anyone else, and so put him to work on the article ... He told me that the celebrated Lowell report was really the work of Stratton. Stratton pretends to be a ballistics expert, and he believes that he has evidence that Sacco actually fired the shot which killed the paymaster. His conviction communicated itself to Lowell and Grant, and so they were prejudiced from the beginning of the investigation ... At the time the Frankfurter article came out ... Harvard was carrying on a campaign to raise money for the Law School, in which Frankfurter is a professor. The rich Babbits immediately served notice that they would give nothing, and poor Lowell was in a quandary."

Diary of H.L. Mencken, February 19, 1932.

Books, poems, plays, paintings followed. Heywood Broun lost his job with the New York World as a result of his vicious attacks on Lowell and Harvard. Sacco and Vanzetti supporters persisted in their grief.

Sacco's wife, Rosina, remarried in 1943, and was still living in 1991. Dante died in 1972. Rosina would not attend her son's religious funeral, or her daughter's church wedding, adhering to her husband's opposition to religion. Spencer Sacco (Nicola's grandson), a music teacher at a Catholic college, delivered Governor Dukakis's proclamation (below) to Rosina, and to Luigia, Vanzetti's sister. Only a niece of Vanzetti's still lives.

On August 23, 1977, fifty years to the day of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, Michael S. Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts, issued a proclamation that concluded with the words:

Therefore, I, Michael S. Dukakis, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ... hereby proclaim Tuesday, August 23, 1977, "NICOLA SACCO AND BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI MEMORIAL DAY"; and declare, further, that any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, from the names of their families and descendants, and so ... call upon all the people of Massachusetts to pause in their daily endeavors to reflect upon these tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our legal system aspires.

They weren't pardoned. That would have been a declaration that they had been guilty. They were in a manner of speaking apologized to.