Anarchists Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, shackled together, on their way to their retrial for robbery and murder in 1927
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IN THE MID-1910S, AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT NAMED BARTOLOMEO Vanzetti was living in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and working for the local cordage company which dominated the town. I Factory conditions across the United States were harsh—twelve- or fourteen-hour days, six- or seven-day weeks, heavy, dangerous labor, desperately poor pay, fetid, filthy conditions—and Plymouth was no exception. To add insult to injury, foreign factory workers were often paid as much as a third less than their American-born colleagues, reflecting the popular assumption that, being of different “racial stock,” they were less intelligent and less capable.
When in 1916 the cordage workers decided to strike for better conditions, Vanzetti (who was no longer working for the factory) led the protest. He had lived in America for eight years, doing one wretched job after another. Over the years he had absorbed the radical ideas of men like Giuseppe Mazzini and Karl Marx who spoke of a time when all men would have decent jobs, roofs over their heads and food on their tables. As Vanzetti would later write, “I sought my liberty in the liberty of all; my happiness in the happiness of all. I realized that the equity of deeds, of rights and of duties, is the only moral basis upon which could be erected a just human society.” When he stood on a soapbox and told his fellow workers that they deserved better, they believed him. The company grudgingly raised their wages by a dollar. Afterwards Vanzetti was the only person who was explicitly barred from ever working for the factory again.
From this point onwards, Vanzetti worked for himself, selling fish from a hand-pulled cart and, when money was tighter than usual, building roads, cutting ice or shoveling snow for the Board of Public Works—earning his bread in the open air and, as he put it, “by the honest sweat of my brow.” His interest in radical politics and activism continued. Knowing he could not pursue his intellectual and social interests in a conventional job, he preferred to work for himself. Later he would say that he disdained business because it was a form of speculation using human lives.
During the cordage strike, Vanzetti had met one of his communist-anarchist heroes, Luigi Galleani, a passionate advocate of violent revolution, who came to Plymouth to encourage the protesters. For several years Vanzetti had been a subscriber and contributor to Galleani’s Italian-language journal, the Subversive Chronicle, which plotted the overthrow of the capitalist regime and argued in favor of terrorism and political assassination. The Chronicle had also published the Italian translation of Leopold Kampf’s On the Eve, a play examining the lives of Russian revolutionaries who were radicalized during the years following 1905, and a widely distributed bomb-making manual with the innocent title Health Is Within You.
Americans had feared radicals before the war, and distrusted foreigners—people from Southern and Eastern Europe, Russians and Italians, as well as Germans—during it, but the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 aggravated existing fears and prejudices. Floods of new immigrants, many from Russia, many with established communist sympathies and inspired by events at home, began to dominate the American communist movement in the late 1910s. Labor unions began to ally themselves with international radical groups; their militancy scared employers. Although the total number of active communists in the United States was probably well under 40,000, they were a vocal minority and the threat of a communist revolution on American shores began to seem a very real one. “If I had my way, I’d fill the jails so full of them [Bolsheviks] that their feet would stick out of the windows,” declared the evangelist Billy Sunday.
Because radicals, whether they were communists, anarchists, socialists or “Wobblies” (members of a group called the Industrial Workers of the World), were usually pacifists who had opposed the war, and because so many of them were new to American shores, they were labeled unpatriotic—potential traitors who ought not to be allowed to remain in the United States. Respectable politicians started saying things like, “My motto for the Reds is S.O.S.—ship or shoot. I believe we should place them all on a ship of stone, with sails of lead, and that their first stopping place should be hell.” (In March 1920 the New Republic attributed this quotation to General Leonard Wood, who stood against Warren Harding for the Republican presidential nomination that year; Wood publicly denied saying it.)
Intolerance, as the historian Frederick Allen observed ten years later, “became an American virtue.” Any individual or activity that cast into question “America” or “American values” was deemed suspicious. In popular parlance a Bolshevik was anybody “from the dynamiter to the man who wears a straw hat in September” while the name “radical” covered all those whose shades of opinion ranged “from a mild wonderment over ‘what the world is coming to’ to the extremists of the left wing.’”
This anxiety about outsiders, especially non-Northern European foreigners, was given pseudo-scientific credence by a series of books and studies claiming to prove that certain “races” were physically and mentally inferior to others. Writing in the popular Saturday Evening Post, published from Philadelphia, Kenneth Roberts called Polish Jews “human parasites” and denounced free immigration on the grounds that it would produce “a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and South-Eastern Europe.”
In the spring of 1919 post-war inflation hit hard. Workers had less to live on; they needed higher wages just to keep up with rising prices. But the companies they worked for were making less and had little inclination to pay them more. A wave of hard-fought strikes, like the one Vanzetti had helped coordinate in Plymouth three years earlier, swept the United States. It is estimated that four million people—ship-builders in Seattle, construction workers in New York, policemen in Boston, steel workers and coal miners all over the country—went on strike over the course of 1919. These strikes took place against a background of anarchist violence and rioting which allowed local leaders to crush walk-outs by exaggerating the Red menace and discrediting the striking workers as radicals.
Sixteen bombs were found in a New York post office that April by a worker who had read about a brown-paper package exploding in the hands of Senator Hardwick’s maid in Atlanta and remembered that he had set aside identical packages at his sorting office because of insufficient postage. On his information, eighteen more were intercepted at post offices across the country.
On the evening of 2 June bombs were set off in eight cities at carefully planned destinations. The most significant was the one aimed at the front door of the Washington house of the new Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer. The bomber, who apparently stumbled as he went up the steps to Palmer’s house, was killed by his own blast. He was an Italian activist, an adherent of Galleani and an associate of Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Galleani and eight of his closest followers were deported three weeks later, but although the authorities were desperate to root out more of his associates it was almost impossible to penetrate their tight-knit circles and find evidence that would incriminate them.
After this incident Palmer, known before his appointment to the Attorney-General’s office in March 1919 as a Wilsonian progressive who had supported women’s suffrage and laws to protect child workers, lost no time in mounting a campaign against “enemy aliens”: the “blaze of revolution,” he said, was sweeping across America “like a prairie fire.” He requested and received extra funds of $500,000 to set up Edgar Hoover (no relation to Herbert) in an anti-radical division of the Department of Justice. Twenty-four-year-old Hoover, a former librarian, quickly built up a meticulously cross-referenced card catalogue of 250,000 suspects. As a subscriber to Galleani’s Subversive Chronicle, Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s name was on Hoover’s list.
Using a Labor Department law set up to allow the Government to deport radicals during wartime, Palmer started rounding up suspected anarchists and revolutionaries in November. Despite the appropriation of the Wartime Sedition Act, his tactics were savage and unlawful. Scant attention was paid to individual warrants. Crowded tenement houses were virtually demolished during the raids, staircases ripped out, men beaten and physically torn away from their wives and children. Even the Assistant Secretary of Labor admitted that the attacks were “intended to be terrifying” and noted that “the whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with ‘labor’ spy interests”—that is to say agents hired by big companies to generate and intensify industrial tensions.
In Detroit, where eight hundred men were held for ten days in unheated stone cells, sharing a single toilet and water fountain, the Justice Department’s agent gleefully announced to reporters that, “We didn’t leave them a scrap of paper to do their business.” Between November and January over five thousand people were arrested in Palmer’s raids, of whom five hundred were deported and another third prosecuted.
The Government and the Establishment were united in their support of Palmer’s extreme measures. “There is no time to waste on hair-splitting over infringements of liberty . . .” said the Washington Post. Warren Harding, at the start of his campaign for the presidency, delivered a tub-thumping speech to the Ohio Society. “Call it the selfishness of nationality if you will, I think it is an inspiration to patriotic devotion—To safeguard America first. To stabilize America first. To prosper America first. To exalt America first. To live for and revere America first . . . Let the internationalist dream and Bolshevist destroy . . . We proclaim Americanism and acclaim America.”
The Palmer raids were conducted particularly vigorously around Boston. A large community of immigrants, especially Italians, lived in the Bay area, their presence greatly resented by longer-established residents. About eight hundred people were arrested on 2 January 1920 and half were taken in chains to the immigrant station on Deer Island in Boston Harbor where they too were held in unsanitary, freezing conditions. Two of the prisoners died of pneumonia; another went mad; a third plunged to his death out of a fifth-story window. Later it emerged that a group of thirty-nine bakers arrested in Lynn, Massachusetts, had been gathered together not to ferment revolution, but simply to establish a cooperative bakery.
It was at this time, and in this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, that two crimes in particular were committed near Boston. In Bridgewater on Christmas Eve, 1919, four men had unsuccessfully attempted to hold up a payroll truck, and fired at the truck as it fled. Four months later, in April, a gang murdered a paymaster and his guard at a South Braintree shoe factory, escaping the scene with $15,000. Suspicion rested firmly on the immigrant community, and the police were under enormous pressure to find and convict the murderers.
The following month, the body of Andrea Salsedo, an Italian anarchist printer, was found smashed on the ground beneath the windows of the Department of Justice’s New York office. He and an associate had been held without warrants and probably tortured since their arrests eight weeks earlier. It was unclear whether Salsedo had jumped or was pushed. During his captivity, Bartolomeo Vanzetti had traveled to New York as a delegate from his local Italian society, hoping to stand bail for Salsedo and his friend.
Back in Boston two days after Salsedo’s death, Vanzetti and a fellow anarchist, Nicola Sacco, went to get an associate’s car out of the garage so that they could drive to the homes of various anarchists, warn them of Salsedo’s fate and tell them to hide away any incriminating political pamphlets—probably including the bomb-making manual, Health Is Within You. They had heard that the area was going to be raided again. Finding that the car did not have a current license plate, they left the garage and boarded a trolley-bus heading home. The garage owner, acting on official instructions to inform on any Italians who owned cars, called the police as soon as they had left. The police apprehended Sacco and Vanzetti on the trolley-bus and took them into custody.
Visibly nervous, aware that the authorities probably knew of their anarchist connections, the two men lied about the fact that they were carrying weapons and who their friends were. The officers who arrested them interpreted this as “consciousness of guilt”—although John Dos Passos, who later wrote an impassioned appeal for their release, suggested that it might have been “consciousness of the dead body of their comrade Salsedo lying smashed in the spring dawn two days before.”
The Department of Justice quickly realized that by convicting Sacco and Vanzetti for the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes they would be getting rid of two central members of the Galleanist group they had long hoped to smash. Even before they were arrested, Sacco and Vanzetti had been the focus of Justice Department interest. Once they were in prison awaiting trial the Department stepped up its efforts to incriminate them. As many as a dozen spies were placed near them and their friends and families—in neighboring cells in prison; boarding with Sacco’s wife, Rosa; one even sat on the committee formed for their defense (and pocketed funds from it for himself). A letter to one of the spies later showed that he was offered $8 a day for his work—two or three dollars more than Vanzetti had earned per week as a dishwasher when he first arrived in New York. But the agents’ efforts went unrewarded.
Maybe no one knew anything; certainly they weren’t telling. As Sacco, who worked for a shoe factory, had a stamped time-card for Christmas Eve 1919, Vanzetti alone was tried for being part of the attempted robbery in South Braintree. The court case was staged in Plymouth, where he was a known anarchist. Despite the eighteen mostly Italian witnesses Vanzetti produced to testify to his whereabouts selling fish on 24 December (eels are an Italian Christmas delicacy), nine of whom had actually spoken to him, Vanzetti was convicted on evidence such as that of a fourteen-year-old boy who admitted he had not seen the face of the fleeing man purported to be Vanzetti, but swore he “could tell he was a foreigner by the way he ran.” One witness was asked whether he had ever heard any of Vanzetti’s entirely unrelated political speeches to the striking cordage workers, four years earlier. Judge Webster Thayer—who asked for and received permission to preside over the South Braintree case as well—told the jury in his summing-up that the crime was “cognate” with Vanzetti’s radical ideas.
After Vanzetti was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years for attempted robbery at Bridgewater, he and Sacco were tried for their part in the South Braintree murders in a courtroom heavily and dramatically fortified against a potential bomb attack. Twenty-two of the thirty-five eyewitnesses to the crime were certain that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been there; seven were unable to make any kind of identification; of the four who identified Sacco, two were discredited and the other two changed their first accounts to incriminate him; only one, who had elsewhere contradicted the evidence he gave in court, positively identified Vanzetti. Both men had alibis for that day, but these were disregarded by the jury. Although many of the Justice Department agents apparently thought that the theft and murders had been committed by professional highway robbers, one of the detectives working on the case was later quoted as saying, “They were bad actors anyway and got what was coming to them.” Off the record, Judge Thayer was said to have said that he wanted to see the bastards hanged.
The two men were convicted and sentenced to death by Thayer in July 1921. “There was not a vibration of sympathy in his tone when he did so,” said Vanzetti later. “I wondered as I listened to him, why he hated me so. Is not a Judge supposed to be impartial? But now I think I know—I must have looked like a strange animal to him, being a plain worker, an alien, and a radical to boot. And why was it that all my witnesses, simple people who were anxious to tell the simple truth, were laughed at and disregarded? No credence was given to their words because they, too, were merely aliens.”
Over the next few years, while Sacco and Vanzetti waited for a retrial, the Red Scare fueled by Palmer’s brutal raids abated. The threat of a widespread Bolshevik rising seemed less and less likely as stability returned to Europe. Despite Palmer’s dire warnings of imminent revolution on American soil, the chaos he had predicted did not come to pass. Americans wanted to forget the recent turmoil and concentrate on the future. When Warren Harding came to office seeking “a return to normalcy” he declared, “Too much has been said about Bolshevism in America.”
But immigrants continued to flood into America. Between June 1920 and June 1921, the year of Sacco and Vanzetti’s first trial, 800,000 people, 65 percent of them from South-Eastern Europe, landed in Ellis Island. Incoming ships had to be diverted to Boston because the facilities for dealing with new arrivals were overwhelmed. Almost unanimously, Congress passed an emergency act to stall the incursion. “America must be kept American,” declared the Vice President, Calvin Coolidge. Supported by the trade unions, the National Origins Act of 1924 was unabashedly discriminatory, limiting immigrants from South-Eastern Europe to pre-1890 levels and prohibiting Asian immigration. On hearing the news Japan declared a day of mourning.
Prejudice, ignorance and intolerance were gradually being institutionalized. One senator declared that the bill would mean “that the America of our grandchildren will be a vastly better place to live in. It will mean a more homogeneous nation, more self-reliant, more independent, and more closely knit by common purpose and common ideas.”
Only a few lone voices, like that of the Baltimore Evening Sun, dared express disapproval of the bill, pointing out that the United States had finally abandoned “that old and admirable tradition that this land was to serve as a refuge for the oppressed of all nations. No longer is the foreigner, to American eyes, a welcome fugitive from the political, economic and religious oppression of the Old World.”
From the start, liberal intellectuals and political progressives recognized Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause as their own. In late 1921 Anatole France wrote an open letter to the people of the United States, describing Sacco and Vanzetti’s crime as one of “opinion” and their sentence as “iniquitous.” “It is horrible to think that human beings should pay with their lives for the exercise of that most sacred right which, no matter what party we belong to, we must all defend,” the French writer wrote, urging Americans to save the two men “for your honor, for the honor of your children, and for the generations yet unborn.”
The following year, in an article in Harper’s, the writer Katharine Gerould declared that America was no longer a free country. “No thinking citizen, I venture to say, can express in freedom more than a part of his honest convictions,” she wrote. “I do not of course refer to convictions that are frankly criminal. I do mean that everywhere, on every hand, free speech is choked off in one direction or another.” Her piece provoked hundreds of responses, as many denouncing her as a dangerous radical as rejoicing that someone had at last dared tell the truth.
For the six years following their conviction, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were held in different prisons, Vanzetti serving hard labor in Charleston and Sacco in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in Dedham, Iowa. Both were affected profoundly by their incarceration. At one point Sacco went on hunger strike, refusing food for thirty days; Vanzetti became so depressed and paranoid that he spent four months in a prison asylum.
When they were well, the two men wrote to each other from their cells with fraternal affection. They had known one another since 1917, when they had spent six months in Mexico avoiding the draft. Neither had supported what they saw as a war to defend capitalist interests. From that point on, bolstered by their shared ideals and commitment to Galleanist principles, their friendship had flourished.
Burly Nicola Sacco, at thirty years old in 1921 three years Vanzetti’s junior, had arrived in America in 1908, within months of Vanzetti, but he had gone straight to Boston. His family were prosperous peasant farmers from the foothills of the Apennines in southern Italy. Unlike Vanzetti, Sacco was married with two young children and had a steady and relatively well-paid job; like his friend, though, he had been a socialist and anarchist since 1913. On the day he was said to have committed the South Braintree robbery and murders, Sacco claimed he had been at the Italian consulate in Boston, getting passports for himself and his family to return to Italy for good. He had saved almost $1,500, enough to start a new life at home.
Vanzetti had no plans to return to Italy, although like Sacco he had been frustrated, humiliated and demoralized by the discrimination and hostility he had encountered in the United States. After a seven-day crossing in steerage, he had sighted New York from the ship, looming “on the horizon in all its grandness and illusion of happiness.” But from his first steps on land he was shocked to find that he and his fellow arrivals were treated like animals. In his characteristically idiosyncratic prose, Vanzetti remembered seeing terrified children weeping as they went through immigration procedures. “Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, [were given] to lighten the burden of tears that rests heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores. Hope, which lured these immigrants to the new land, wither [sic] under the touch of harsh officials.”
Friendless, empty-handed and unable to speak or understand English, twenty-year-old Vanzetti was typical of many Southern and Eastern European immigrants to the United States. Al Capone’s family, which had arrived fourteen years earlier, had at least had each other. “Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated [railroad] rattled by and did not answer,” remembered Vanzetti, his words unwittingly echoing Charlie Chaplin’s first frightened response to New York. “The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me.”
The single contact Vanzetti had in New York could not find him space to sleep in his crowded, rat-filled tenement, so Vanzetti slept in the park. He did help him get work as a dishwasher, for which Vanzetti was paid $5 or $6—as much as a worker on Ford’s plant would earn in a day, a few years later—for an eighty-eight hour week. Although he hated baking, Vanzetti eventually managed to find work as a pastry-chef (the trade he had been trained in as a boy), but time and again he was sacked for no reason after a few months in the job. It turned out that the head chefs were paid by the employment agencies every time they hired a new worker, so they never kept anyone for long. Over the next few years, as he made his way slowly eastwards towards Boston, Vanzetti preferred to find manual labor under the open sky in furnaces, quarries and rail yards.
Vanzetti never married; his life was spent alone. What sustained him through these hard years was his inner life, his almost spiritual understanding of social justice. He read everything he could get his hands on (in Italian), from the Divine Comedy to Charles Darwin to Maxim Gorky to the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. Vanzetti started to see himself as a champion of “the weak, the poor, the simple and the persecuted”: the character of the man who would inspire the Plymouth cordage workers and then a generation of discontented intellectuals began to take shape.
“I understood that man cannot trample with impunity upon the unwritten laws that govern his life, he cannot violate the ties that bind him to the universe,” he wrote while he was in prison. “I grasped the concept of fraternity, of universal love. I maintained that whosoever benefits or hurts a man, benefits or hurts the whole species . . . I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect . . . I maintain that liberty of conscience is as inalienable as life . . . I am and will be until the last instant (unless I should discover that I am in error) an anarchist communist, because I believe that communism is the most humane form of social contract, because I know that only with liberty can man rise, become noble, and complete.”
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had spoken, read or written English with any fluency when they were arrested. Sacco did not read or write much until 1922, but Vanzetti began to study from the moment he was imprisoned. Visitors commented on his “keen interest in world affairs, and his thirst for knowledge.”
Smiling benevolently beneath his substantial walrus moustache, in prison Vanzetti became an icon of the left. In letters to friends and supporters, he embraced his role as a political symbol, developing and expanding his philosophy and almost mystical sense of mission. “I cannot share your confidence in ‘better government, ’ because I do not believe in the government, any of them, since to me they can only differ in names from one another,” he wrote to one new friend in the spring of 1925. “Mutual aid and cooperation and cooperatives shall be the very base of a completely new social system, or else nothing is accomplished.”
To another, later that year, he made it sound almost as if arrest and imprisonment had allowed him to serve his principles: “We did not come to [be] vanquished but to win, to destroy a world of crimes and miseries and to re-build with its freed atoms a new world. I am disappointed, but not crushed. I have not become a rat or a renegade. And I can carry my burden to the last, and only that counts.” He refused to recant his beliefs and continued to call for vengeance, which he hoped would be realized as freedom for all. “But till then, the struggle goes on . . . till then, to fight is our duty, our right, our necessity.”
The Department of Justice would have seen these words in the context of Vanzetti’s links to the violent anarchist movement—and so they were meant; documents signed by Vanzetti and Sacco while they were in prison contain pointed references to Health Is Within You. But they also inspired their liberal supporters with a vision of Vanzetti, in particular, as a “philosophical” anarchist, a harmless dreamer, a would-be intellectual. Instead of a ferocious activist, they saw a poet and an idealist behind the large moustache.
Vanzetti contemplated his end with serenity and dignity. “Were I to recommence the ‘journey of life,’ I should tread the same road, seeking, however, to lessen the sum of my sins and errors and to multiply that of my good deeds.” With all the lyricism of the incarcerated, he wrote of his lost hopes of living “free among the green and in the sunshine under an open sky.”
He thanked well-wishers who had sent him flowers for his cell: “My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing colors and beauties forms: A giranium plant, a tulip and plant both from Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches buds and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a bouquet of May flowers from Mrs. Winslow.” How could Mrs. Evans or Mrs. Winslow see this gentle, nature-loving man as a murderer?
Sacco and Vanzetti’s adherents focused on the “noble” characters of the accused men, swearing that no one who knew them could believe either man capable of committing the crimes with which they were charged. Visitors and correspondents described them as warm, poetic, simple-hearted and sincere; every contact they had with them, they claimed, made the conviction of their innocence stronger. Judge Thayer, however, thought differently.
After six appeals their case was reopened in 1927. One of Sacco’s fellow prisoners in Dedham, Celestino Madeiros, had confessed to being part of the South Braintree gang and specified that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been there. He named his fellow conspirators as the Morelli brothers—one of whom bore a striking similarity to Nicola Sacco. Madeiros was able to demonstrate that he had received a large sum of money, his fifth-part share of the robbery. No money had ever been associated with either Sacco or Vanzetti, the alleged thieves.
Madeiros’s evidence corroborated the generally held opinion of the Boston Department of Justice agents that the South Braintree crimes had been committed by a professional gang of highway-men, but Judge Thayer (again presiding) dismissed it. The Department of Justice refused to open their files to disprove evidence gathered against them of spying and manipulating evidence and witnesses. A Justice Department agent who had placed a spy in prison with Sacco insisted that his “only motive in trying to clear up the mystery was to aid justice.”
Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyer protested: “A government that has come to honor its own secrets more than the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny whether you call it a republic or a monarchy or anything else,” but there was nothing he could do to change Thayer’s mind. As the journalist Heyward Broun would later point out, Thayer was acting out of a genuine commitment to what he saw as the public interest. His belief in Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt was that of a “solid and substantial” citizen, and it chimed “with all our national ideals and aspirations.” Whether as ungrateful, un-American immigrants, common criminals, dangerous radicals or godless anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti could not be allowed to triumph. A woman in the courtroom cried out, “It is death condemning life!”
“There could not have been another Judge on the face of this earth more prejudiced and more cruel than you have been against us,” said Vanzetti later. “We know, and you know in your heart, that you have been against us from the very beginning, before you see us. Before you see us you already know that we were radicals, that we were underdogs, that we were the enemy . . .”
Vanzetti spoke proudly in court after Thayer had passed sentence. “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 am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved country 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.” Sacco echoed him, but with a more overtly political tone. “I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will always be collision between one and the other . . . That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed class.”
After sentencing, the two men were moved into the same prison for the first time. Between April and July they were held in Dedham, and for the final six weeks before their execution they were moved to Charleston. Still both refused to renounce the political ideals they had held so dear and for which they believed they were being punished. “Both Nick and I are anarchists—he radical of the radical—the black cats, the terrors of many, of all the bigots, exploiters, charlatans, fakers and oppressors,” said Vanzetti in May. “Consequently we are also the more slandered, misrepresented, misunderstood and persecuted of all.”
He proudly rejected a suggestion that they recant in order to sue for pardon. “We cannot make it [a refutation of their ideals], because it is a thing against our understanding and conscience…I cannot explain you why . . . But we too have a faith, a dignity, a sincerity. Our faith is cursed, as all the old ones were at their beginning. But we stick to it as long as we honestly believe we are right . . . We have renounced voluntarily to almost all of even the most honest joys of life when we were at our twenties. Lately we have sacrificed all to our faith. And now that we are old, sick, crushed, near death: . . . should we now quack, recant, renegate, be vile for the love of our pitiable carcasses? Never, never, never . . . We are ready to suffer as much as we have suffered, to die, but be men to the last.”
Interviewed by the New York World at about the same time, Vanzetti expressed the strange sense of vindication that accompanied their final defeat. The newspaper chose to emphasize his foreign accent and imperfect English. “If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s onderstanding of man as now we do by accident.”
Despite the efforts of their Defense Committee and a vocal international group of prominent supporters including Eugene Debs, H. G. Wells, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, Sacco and Vanzetti’s death sentences were confirmed. The journalist William Allen White was among those who wrote to Massachusetts governor Alvan Fuller pleading for clemency, but to no avail. “I now know why the witches were persecuted and hanged by upright and godless people . . . This is a tremendously important case for America. It seems to me that our courts would be vastly more discredited before the world if we executed innocent men than they would be if we refrained to execute innocent men when there was even a shadow of doubt as to their guilt.”
On 21 August Sacco and Vanzetti formally thanked the Defense Committee that had supported them since their arrest. “That we have lost and have to die does not diminish our appreciation and gratitude for your great solidarity with us and our families. Friends and Comrades, now that the tragedy of this trial is at an end, be all as of one heart. Only two of us will die. Our ideal, you our comrades, will live by millions; we have won, but not vanquished. Just treasure our suffering, our sorrow, our mistakes, our defeats, our passion for future battles and for the great emancipation.”
That same day, Vanzetti wrote to Nicola’s thirteen-year-old son, Dante, of how his father had “sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for his fate.” He hoped, he said, that Dante would understand that they had died for their principles, honor their memories, and perhaps one day take his father’s place “in the struggle between tyranny and liberty.”
Last-minute appeals went unheeded. An editorial in the New York World summed up the views of those who still hoped that eleventh-hour pardons might be issued. “The Sacco-Vanzetti case is clouded and obscure. It is full of doubt. The fairness of the trial raises doubt. The evidence raises doubt. The inadequate review of the evidence raises doubt. The Governor’s inquiry has not appeased these doubts. The report of his Advisory Committee has not settled these doubts. Everywhere there is doubt so deep, so pervasive, so unsettling, that it cannot be denied and it cannot be ignored. No man, we submit, should be put to death where so much doubt exists.”
At three minutes after midnight on the morning of Tuesday 23 August, Celestino Madeiros entered the execution room in Charleston prison. Nine minutes later he was dead. Nicola Sacco came in at 12.11, having refused the ministrations of a priest, and was strapped to the electric chair shouting, “Long Live Anarchy!” in Italian. He was pronounced dead eight minutes later.
Finally Bartolomeo Vanzetti was brought into the room, having also refused the last rites. He declared his innocence one final time, expressed his forgiveness for those who had brought him to this point, and shook his warden, William Hendry, warmly by the hand, thanking him for all his kindness. For most of the past seven years this prison had been his home. Hendry was so overcome that he was barely able to confirm that Vanzetti was dead at twenty-six minutes past twelve. The three executions had taken less than half an hour.
As they had hoped, Sacco and Vanzetti’s demise set off a series of retaliatory demonstrations, riots and bombs targeting United States embassies in Paris, Rome and Lisbon as well as all across America. Five hundred Italian immigrants protested against the executions in Boston’s North End. Writers John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker and Edna St. Vincent Millay were among many arrested for picketing the Boston State House the day before Sacco and Vanzetti died.
Millay was not alone in crediting their deaths with awakening her social conscience. “It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man,” she wrote afterwards, contrasting her own disillusionment with Sacco and Vanzetti’s unflinching idealism. “The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.”
People involved in their conviction—the brother of the garage owner who had informed on them, Governor Fuller who had refused them clemency, one of their jurors, the executioner, Judge Thayer himself—were the focus of specific violent attacks. Thayer’s home was destroyed by a bomb and he spent the rest of his life living under permanent guard at his club in Boston.
It is still unclear whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti did commit the crimes for which they were killed. Upton Sinclair, whose novel Boston was an attempt to place the events surrounding their purported crime and trial in a believable fictional context, was convinced that both were innocent—until his interview with their first lawyer, Fred Moore, who told him that although he had never heard them confess to it, he thought they were guilty. Sinclair considered Moore unreliable (he was sacked from the defense team because he was a cocaine addict) but his faith in his heroes was shaken.
It seems unlikely that Vanzetti was involved either with the murders and robbery at South Braintree or with the attempted robbery at Bridgewater. Ballistics experts over the years have linked Sacco’s gun to the bullets fired at South Braintree, although others claim that the gun or the bullet-casings found in his pockets were tampered with at the time or afterwards. In the 1980s, the son of an anarchist associate of the two men said everyone in their inner circle knew that Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was not.
What they were clearly and proudly guilty of was political radicalism, but this was not the offense for which they were tried. Their trial was a shameful attempt by the Government to rid itself by the only means it knew how of two men who symbolized forces that it feared and would not try to understand. But much of America would have agreed with Judge Thayer’s unofficial verdict that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were “bastards” who deserved to die, regardless of the means used to achieve that end. It was these people who rushed in their millions to join the revived Ku Klux Klan.