Sacco and Vanzetti in History...

Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and tried in a period that was shaken by prejudice and distrust. The United States had entered a period of post-war isolationism, and the "Red Raids" ordered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1920 were only the most obvious manifestation of a generally paranoid political climate.

The direct comparisons between then and now are inescapable. The Palmer raids, in which thousands of aliens were rounded up in major American cities and deported en masse to Europe, have been compared to the McCarthy purges of the 1950's or the mass, indiscriminate arrests during the Washington Mayday demonstrations in 1971. Many would contend that the system of justice that convicted Sacco and Vanzetti lives on in the trials of the Rosenbergs, the Chicago Eight and Angela Davis.

On May 5, 1920, Nicola Sacco, a shoe-worker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish-peddler, were arrested on Brockton street car. They were both Italian immigrants and admitted anarchists. They were soon charged with a double murder and payroll robbery committed three weeks earlier in South Braintree, Mass.

Seven years later, in August of 1927, they were electrocuted for this crime. Yet both before and after their execution, the world would stormily debate two important issues: Were they in fact guilty, and did they have a fair trial?

As the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti progressed, it became apparent that the Commonwealth's case rested largely on uncertain eyewitness accounts and ambiguous ballistics evidence. The idea of a government conspiracy against two innocent but radical foreigners began to grow in the minds of liberals, intellectuals, socialists newspapermen and plain old New England folk.

If the evidence presented at the trial was somewhat nebulous, the personalities involved certainly were not. The presiding judge, Webster Thayer, was a traditional Yankee with little sympathy for radicals. The Prosecutor, District Attorney Frederick G. Katzmann '96, was a cold, sharp, thin-lipped man of German descent who sought convictions with merciless persistence. And the original defense counsel, Fred Moore, was a leftist labor lawyer who sported long hair and often wore sandals to Court. Moore's appearance coupled with his constant objections to Katzmann's tactics, only strengthened Thayer's bias against the defendants.

For those who are familiar with the case and believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent and victims of an unfair trial, there are many tantalizing possibilities which may well have changed the verdict:

* What if William G. Thompson '88, a renowned and established Boston attorney, had taken charge of the case in the beginning instead of coming in after the guilty verdict to conduct the long series of appeals?

* What if Thayer's unusual request that he be appointed to preside at the trial had been denied, especially since he had also been the presiding judge at the Plymouth trial at which Vanzetti was convicted of an earlier robbery?

* What if the actual intent of the damaging testimony given by Captain William Proctor, a state ballistics expert, had been determined by competent cross-examination instead of in an affidavit filled after the trial by the Defense?

* What if Sacco and Vanzetti had been given separate trials?

* What if the witnesses from South Braintree that the Prosecution knew would positively identify Sacco and Vanzetti as the wrong men had independently stepped forward?

* What if the Lowell Committee had been composed of respected legal minds instead of two prestigious and aristocratic university Presidents and a retired judge turned novelist?

But none of these events occurred, and the result may have been unsought and undeserved martyrdom for a shoe-worker and a fish-peddler who happened to be Italian immigrants with radical sympathies. The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti was undoubtedly the most significant of this century. Its world-wide repercussions rivaled those of the Dreyfus case in France. for the larger part of a decade it commanded the interest and emotion of millions of people both here in America and throughout Europe.

In his Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard, Lowes Dickinson inquired "Is immortality desirable?" Ferris Greenslet, a biographer of the Lowells, has stated that he almost thought it was, if only to get at the truth of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

"Well, I have already say that I not only am not guilty of these two crimes, but I never commit a crime in my life, I have never steal and I have never kill and I have never spilt blood, and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the Church legitimate and sanctify.

"This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and 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 reborn 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, April 9 1927 Conclusion of his speech before sentencing in Dedham, Mass.