Sacco & Vanzetti: Agony and triumph

Ocean Press, 2004

119 pages, $18 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/31506

It was just another payroll robbery with murder in the US in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, and the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company paymaster, and armed guard, lay dead. Three weeks later, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested and a chapter in the long and disgraceful history of capitalist political trials began.

Sacco and Vanzetti, the latest in Ocean Press' "Rebel Lives" series includes letters, documents and articles from the time onwards that capture the most important legal, political and human issues of the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

In the wake of the orgy of patriotism unleashed by imperialist war, repression of the left had intensified. A socialist revolution in Russia was manipulated by the US government and capitalist press to fuel an hysterical Red Scare campaign. The 1919 raids organised by attorney-general Mitchell Palmer, laid into the socialist and labour movements with billy clubs, blackjacks, arrests and deportations.

Immigrants' were targeted, those "hyphenated Americans" with their "poison of disloyalty", as President Woodrow Wilson called Italian-Americans and others of "alien" ancestry. Palmer fed the ethnic hatred by criminalising immigrants — "from their lopsided faces, sloping brows and mis-shapen features may be recognised the unmistakable criminal type". To racism was added political prejudice — what could be more scary than the stereotype of "crazed, bomb-throwing anarchists"? Southern Italian anarchists, like Sacco and Vanzetti, could be demonised as both aliens and terrorists.

Menacing fates lurked for their kind. An anarchist typesetter in New York was kidnapped, detained and beaten for eight weeks by the FBI, then found dead (deemed suicide) on the pavement 14 floors below his torture cell. So when Sacco and Vanzetti, who were on the Justice Department list of "radicals to be watched", were arrested and questioned by the police about their politics — "Are you a citizen ... a communist ... an anarchist ...?", "Do you love this country and believe in this government of ours?" — they lied about their movements, to hide their politics. Being truthful would have signed their deportation orders or worse.

Sacco and Vanzetti were also carrying guns at the time of their arrest. Although citizens bearing guns is not exactly rare in the US (Vanzetti carried a gun to protect his takings on his fish route, Sacco was at the time an armed guard at a shoe factory), their guns, too, were used by the prosecution to insinuate guilt.

The government's determination to convict was evident at all times. The police identification procedure was designed to prejudice witnesses — Sacco and Vanzetti were paraded singly and forced to simulate the robbery action.

In court, wrote H. G. Wells, they were "not so much tried as baited" by Judge Webster Thayer. Thayer was not impartial — Sacco and Vanzetti were "anarchistic bastards", he said to a colleague. He constantly reinforced the political nature of the trial, directing the jury to be "loyal to the government" and to do their "patriotic duty" by showing the courage of "the American soldier as he fought and gave up his life on the battlefields of France" (Sacco and Vanzetti had resisted the draft by escaping to Mexico in 1916).

Thayer allowed the prosecutor, district attorney Frederick Katzmann, to cross-examine on a political basis, to withhold evidence and, in the end, to get away with murder. Thayer instructed the jury (hand-picked by Sheriff's deputies) that Sacco and Vanzetti's lying to the police and gun-carrying was "consciousness of guilt as murderers or as slackers and radicals". Ninety-nine defence witnesses backed Sacco's or Vanzetti's alibi, however, a jury and judge inflamed with anti-'alien' hysteria dismissed this as tainted evidence coming from "non-white" witnesses protecting their own.

Vanzetti truly knew his judge — a tyrant ready to kill us, he wrote, because "he deadly hates the subversive". Sacco's terse conclusion: "They got us. They will kill us."

If the legal system under capitalism is really about a dispassionate search for facts, then Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence would have been allowed to emerge from the hothouse of improper police procedures, irrelevant speculation and inflammatory racial and political bias. This didn't happen, because, as Howard Zinn wrote, the trial was not a "contest among equals based on an objective search for truth" but a "struggle between the classes".

"I struggle all my life to eliminate crimes ... of exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man", said Vanzetti in his statement to the court,"that is why I am here as a guilty man". As anarchist Emma Goldman added, Sacco and Vanzetti "believed and preached human brotherhood and freedom. As such, they could expect neither justice nor humanity".

This trial was a clash of civilisations. Working-class values were pitted against ruling-class values. Public campaigning forced Massachusetts Governor Alvin Fuller, a wealthy auto dealer, to set up a special commission to review the trial. Its wealthy commissioners found the trial to have been "fair" thus ruling out a re-opening of the case.

Despite massive protests around the globe, and the rallying of leading intellectuals (Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Bertrand Russell, Charlie Chaplin) to the cause, the will of the capitalist class and it political executors was not broken. On August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were killed.

Two opponents of war and exploitation were persecuted for their belief in "human brotherhood" whilst their killers went free to wage war for wealth and power and to pollute the air with their lies. The script is familiar. As this book hits the shelves, union leaders and peace activists are still hauled before the courts, whilst racism greases the wheels of persecution and scaremongering about terrorism.

After the execution, two long-time Justice Department agents testified in an affidavit that the federal Justice Department and the Massachusetts District Attorney colluded to convict the two anarchists, with federal agents providing "evidence" to the district attorney on the criminal charges in return for the DA getting information from the defendants to help the Justice Department deport their political associates.

It took 50 years, however, for Sacco and Vanzetti to be officially cleared. In 1977, the governor of Massachusetts, Democrat Michael Dukakis, announced that Sacco and Vanzetti had not received a fair trial and granted them a posthumous pardon.

Death was not the end for Sacco and Vanzetti. Who now remembers the names of their executioners? Plenty, however, remember Sacco and Vanzetti, their names angry reminders of class oppression and injustice. As a defiant Vanzetti declared in one of his last letters, "the taking of our lives — Lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — That last moment belongs to us — That agony, out triumph!".