The Legacy of Sacco & Vanzetti

It is very difficult to be objective about this case. Were Sacco and Vanzetti innocent or guilty? Evidence for at least the guilt of Sacco were the eyewitness testimony, the similarity of one bullet taken from Beradelli that might have come from Sacco's gun, and the uncertainty of establishing his alibi. The evidence against Vanzetti is even less, consisting of inconclusive eyewitness accounts, and the prosecution's discounting the witnesses that would establish his alibi. (After the two were executed, an American Express receipt establishing that Vanzetti had indeed received a shipment of eels on December 24, 1919, was discovered.) Much was made by both the prosecution and the judge about their guilty behavior. In retrospect, the evidence against them seems slim, and certainly the question of reasonable doubt is raised.

Arguments supporting their innocence are indirect, but important. What happened to the $16,000? Who were the other three criminals? How can one explain the variety of bullets taken from the victims that do not match Sacco's gun? Why did the accused show no change in their behavior? Why were the members of the Morelli gang not questioned?

Almost all authors will admit that Judge Thayer was prejudiced against the defendants, and that the laws of Massachusetts at the time allowing the trial judge to rule on appeals were detrimental to the rights of the accused. Sacco and Vanzetti, at the least, should have been granted a new trial.

But the important point to be made in this author's note is my own bias, which I have tried unsuccessfully, I think to overcome in my study of this case. I am a first-generation Italian whose parents came to America in 1908 and 1912. It is entirely possible that my mother was on the same ship with Sacco (in April, 1908) or Vanzetti (in June, 1908). My father left Sicily four years later as a young man of seventeen (the same age as Sacco when he immigrated to America) because of his abhorrence of the stranglehold that the Mafia and the Roman Catholic Church had on the lives of peasants. He was throughout his life anticlerical (like Sacco and Vanzetti) and a Garibaldi Republican (like Sacco in his youth), finding the New Deal as the most likely political system for the working class. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he worked as a laborer and a farm hand, before establishing his own small, but successful, business. My maternal uncle, for whom I am named, was a closet socialist, ready to declare his utopian ideals within the family, but frightened to be open about his beliefs. The connections to my own family, at least emotionally, are difficult to ignore.

My regret is that I never spoke to them about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, for I am certain that they followed it and were drawn deeply into it. At the time of the case, my mother was in her late twenties, my father in his mid-thirties. Both died before I was aware that I had an important cultural source of information in my own family.