The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair - book

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, Moshik Temkin, Yale University Press, 2009.
There are many Ph.D. dissertations that do not deserve publication no matter how many revisions they attempt. This is not one of them. It is a truly fascinating account of the still often debated Sacco-Vanzetti electrocutions, a scholarly and well researched work that puts the “affair” in an international context rather than the more typical work on the subject that concentrates more often than not on whether Sacco and Vanzetti were actually guilty as charged, or sometimes on whether or not they received a fair trial. The fact that they were both electrocuted in 1927 does nothing, in and of itself, to answer these questions.

This book traces the arrest in 1920 of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants, who were also anarchists, for the robbery and murder of a factory paymaster and security guard in an industrial suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. To this day it has never been clearly established they were guilty, but they were found guilty in 1921 and finally electrocuted in 1927. What began as a rather routine criminal “case” in 1921, began to change into a national “affair,” and by 1926 had become an international affair of monumental significance. This book traces the history of this transformation and what it meant to the emergence of the U.S. as an international power after the first World War.

The Sacco-Vanzetti affair did not die subsequent to their electrocutions. Indeed, it is still alive and well as this book and others testify. At first Sacco and Vanzetti were supported only by anarchists and those who believed in overthrowing governments and throwing off the yokes of the capitalists, etc. But as the two languished in prison, waiting to be executed, others became interested in their case, including many of the most important liberals of the time who then tried to influence the Massachusetts courts to either free them or at least give them another trial. There were very good reasons why many influential people believed they had not had a fair trial, the trial judge had been shown to be terribly biased toward “wops” and other immigrants, for example. And the quirky Massachusetts laws at the time only allowed for appeals to go to the same judge that had sentenced them (who, of course, stood by his earlier decision). The affair became one in which laborers (the proletariat) were believed by many to be unfairly discriminated against by the (bourgeois) capitalists. Many others were simply outraged by what they believed were the unconscionable actions of the prosecutors and the trial judge. Still others were concerned because they did not belief Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty in the first place. This all took place during the “Red scare” that gripped the United States at that time. Stalin, and the communist party, who were in fact sworn enemies of the anarchists and were at that moment actually jailing them in Russia, seized upon the Sacco-Vanzetti case as an example of labor revolutionaries fighting for the rights of workers everywhere. Mussolini, who was coming into power in Italy, was torn between wanting to defend his fellow Italians and his obsequious desire for good relations with the U.S. In France the affair was seen as another example of their own infamous “Dreyfus affair.” England and other countries were outraged because they thought American laws were unfair and discriminatory against immigrants, especially Italians. Many thought that six years in prison, just waiting to be executed, was enough in itself to free them.
It is somewhat difficult to follow all the nuances of this affair now because, among other things, for all intents and purposes, there are no anarchists today. But there were then, they were organized, and were in opposition to communism as well as other forms of government. It is also difficult for us to understand the importance of the Red scare, but McCarthyism also played into this affair as is not too hard to imagine. Out of this incredible mix of various interests eventually emerged a pretty solid consensus that Sacco and Vanzetti were indeed sacrificed by a paranoid U.S. society, the question of their actual guilt or innocence became largely irrelevant to this wider political context. This view went largely unchallenged until the 1950’ and 60’s when the far right, enchanted by McCarthy, attempted to challenge it. Led by William Buckley and a few others they tried to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti were rabid revolutionaries and deserved to be put to death, etc. This controversy has not completely disappeared even now.

I have not done justice to this fine and compelling book. My opinion, having read it, is that there is no doubt whatsoever that Sacco and Vanzetti did not get a fair trial and should never have been executed. The behavior of the judge who sentenced them, as well as the decision by the review committee that was finally established, was outrageous almost beyond belief and could not happen now. In fact, the Massachusetts law that allowed appeals to go only to the sentencing judge were changed after this awful tragedy. Basically, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted and executed because they were Italians (“wops”), immigrants, poor, laboring class, and anarchists, critical of government. Their guilt with respect to the crime involved was not established beyond any doubt (nor was any attempt even made to consider their innocence). Nor is it clear that they ever seriously participated in trying to overthrow the government. This shameful episode in our history has much to do with the original creation of anti-Americanism around a world that expected much better from us.

The 1920's and 30's were a truly interesting period in the United States, as it was a time when we were emerging for the first time as a world power. This book makes much of this history much more understandable, and actually helps to understand our current situation as well.