Sacco & Vanzetti
Sacco & Vanzetti (Directed by Peter Miller, 2006) This is the poignant and powerful story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who came to America for a better life. As Italian newcomers in the Boston area, they encountered injustice that led them to support the tenets of anarchism. They both seemed peaceful persons.
Their lives changed irreversibly on May 5, 1920, when they were arrested. Though not originally charged, the police believed that they were perpetrators of the killing two payroll custodians during a robbery in South Braintree the previous April 15th.
Much of the documentary focuses on the personal lives of Sacco and Vanzetti and on the anti-foreign phobia that often seizes Americans. Interviews with former neighbors of the two, as well as film clips from the Italian, award-winning Sacco e Vanzetti (1971), provide sensitive insights into the lives and personalities of two ordinary individuals who were to be catapulted on to the national and international scene.
This was the time of the “Red Scare,’ during which Attorney General Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, his youthful assistant, launched a campaign resulting in arresting and, often, deporting thousands of immigrants who where purported to be ‘radicals.’
Sacco and Vanzetti, known to be associates of anarchist Luigi Galleani, were considered guilty by association.
The judicial proceedings violated the most basic legal practices. Judge Thayer, who was to preside over two trials, five appeals, and the sentencing, later said to a fellow Dartmouth alumnus: “Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards?” Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s legal case was not helped by their left-wing lawyer, who chose to use the courtroom as a forum for his anti-capitalism political views.
There was little firm evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti. The so-called eye witnesses who identified the two as the gun men and driver could never have withstood a rigorous cross examination. The testimony by over a dozen Italians that they had observed Vanzetti selling eels from his fish cart throughout the day of the robbery was dismissed as ‘unreliable.’
As one documentary commentator expressed it: in the 1920s “an Italian accused of murder in Boston was as likely to be acquitted as a black accused of rape in the South.” The jury took less than an hour to return a murder conviction against Sacco and Vanzetti.
Six years passed between verdict and execution. Various appeals were denied by Judge Thayer. These included the detailed confession by Celestino Madeiros, a Portuguese convict, that he and his gang had committed the South Braintree robbery.
The Sacco and Vanzetti case became a cause celebre nationally and internationally. Some of this was self-serving to other political causes. As one cynical Communist described his participation in a rally: “Sacco and Vanzetti are more use to us dead than alive.” There also was a growing reaction among prominent Anglos that Sacco and Vanzetti were being railroaded. William Thompson, a respectable Brahmin lawyer, came to adopt the case as a personal cause.
In 1927, after Judge Thayer pronounced a death sentence, Massachusetts Governor Fuller, faced with a groundswell of opposition to the legal process that condemned Sacco and Vanzetti, appointed a ‘blue-ribbon committee’ to present him recommendations. The presidents of Harvard and MIT, as well as a retired federal judge, drafted their report upholding the verdict prior to hearing defense testimony. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927.
There case has triggered an outpouring of art, poems, books, and films. One of the first poems was Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Justice Died in Massachusetts. The judicial process that convicted Sacco and Vanzetti was mortally flawed. Evidence produced at the time and subsequently does suggest that Sacco might have been a participant in the South Baintree robbery and murder.
The purist aspect of this sordid affair was the extraordinary dignity exhibited by Sacco and Vanzetti during the six years between arrest and execution. Vanzetti’s letters from prison are a beautiful testimonial of a sensitive, passionate period whose wishes for America differ little from those expressed by President Frank Roosevelt in his New Deal and by President Lyndon Johnson in his Great Society.
The lasting message from the Sacco-Vanzetti ordeal is that has happened before and is likely to happen again. The closing moments of the documentary quoted then-Attorney General Ashcroft, in the aftermath of 9/11, saying “Who you are and what you believe is really important.” Also see True Story of Sacco and Vanzetti (1998) and Paul Avrich’s Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (1991).
