By Nick Deiuliis
The summer of 1921 was a memorable time in America: Babe Ruth was having one of the greatest seasons in baseball history as he worked toward a new single-season home run record, America’s jazz age was getting ready for takeoff, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey would defeat light heavyweight champion Georges Carpentier in a “battle of the century” before upwards of 90,000 in Jersey City, and striking West Virginia coal miners battled the US Army at Blair Mountain.
The summer of 1921 also brought one of the saddest and most lamentable chapters in American jurisprudence. A show trial that delivered tragic consequences and that stamped a reputational black eye on the United States.
Too few Americans today are aware of the event, yet in 1921 just about every American, along with millions across the globe, intensely followed the event’s proceedings.1
It was the trial, which led to the eventual wrongful execution, of two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Events Leading to Trial
During the spring of 1920, there was a robbery of the payroll cash for the employees of a shoe company just outside of Boston. Two individuals transporting the payroll cash were summarily executed by the bandits.
Violent robberies were not uncommon in the United States during the early 1920s. But this robbery and the homicides led to a gross miscarriage of justice.
Weeks after the killings, police were tipped off that two potential suspects were on a streetcar. Officers ran down and boarded the streetcar and detained two nervous-looking Italians: Sacco and Vanzetti. They were carrying loaded handguns and anarchist literature.
The anarchist literature instantly drew scrutiny. During the late 1910s and the 1920s, America was subjected to numerous bombings and terrorist acts by anarchists. Many a politician, judge, or businessperson were targeted with, and in some instances killed by, street or mail bombings.
Yet Sacco and Vanzetti had no prior arrests and no history of violence. Amazingly, there was no physical evidence, fingerprints or other, that placed either accused at the scene of the crime.
Sacco had a good job and was a dedicated family man. Vanzetti struggled when he first came to America, but after years of toiling he successfully built a fish cart business that became quite profitable.
The two suspects knew each other but weren’t particularly close friends. Sacco came across as apolitical and anything but an anarchist, while Vanzetti was more of a political thinker and clearly held anti-state views.
Law enforcement made a mockery of due process once Sacco and Vanzetti were taken in for questioning. When witnesses to the crime viewed lineups of potential suspects for identification, both Sacco and Vanzetti were presented alone and individually, without the benefit of a lineup. Unbelievably, the police informed witnesses that the two men were prime suspects before asking the witness whether they saw either at the scene of the crime.
Despite the absence of probable cause linking Sacco and Vanzetti to the murders and the lack of due process, both were charged with murder. Public opinion demanded it, as the nation and law enforcement were in near panic over the widespread bombing campaign by anarchists. The mood of the country steamrolled due process and the individual rights of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Now they were in a fight for their lives.
Kangaroo Court2
The bungling of due process before trial paled in comparison to the miscarriage of justice that was about to unfold in the courtroom that summer in 1921. The trial lasted nearly two months and produced thousands of pages of testimony.
It is noteworthy that neither defendant was fluent in English, having only a rudimentary ability to converse in it. But during police questioning and during trial, questions were proffered in English, and responses were delivered in broken English by Sacco and Vanzetti. The defendants struggled to understand the questions and the jury likely lost much in translation and misconstrued the defendants’ testimony.3
Bias was evident with both the judge and jury during the trial. Early in the proceedings, the jury foreman commented, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.” No action was taken by the court.
Judge Thayer presided over the trial and was a procedural nightmare. Toward the end of the proceedings, he lectured the jury on the concept of ‘consciousness of guilt’, which is the theory that innocent people do not need to fabricate answers or be evasive when answering questions from law enforcement or at trial. Which was a marginally indirect way of telling the jury that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.
The jury went into deliberation and after a few hours returned guilty verdicts for both men. The sentence would be death by electrocution.
Years of Systemic Moral Cowardice
The extensive appeal process dragged on for several years. Request for retrials were submitted, drawing on the numerous procedural transgressions and flaws, from arrest through sentencing. And all the requests were denied, despite a growing cadre of influential Sacco and Vanzetti supporters.
Petitions in support of the condemned were signed by Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells.
Felix Frankfurter, the future legendary Supreme Court justice, was then a law professor at Harvard and publicly campaigned to denounce the stacked and biased legal system that Sacco and Vanzetti were subjected to.
Frankfurter stated, “I assert with deep regret, without the slightest fear of disproof, but certainly in modern times Judge Thayer’s opinion stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys. His 25,000 word document cannot accurately be described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations. The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterance permeates the whole.”
The governor of Massachusetts, Alvin Fuller, who could grant a stay of execution, was an especially interesting situation. He took a genuine interest in the case after the trial by reading transcripts, talking to jurors, and interviewing witnesses. And the governor invested significant time getting to know Sacco and Vanzetti when they sat in jail. He came to like both, especially Vanzetti.
But the governor begrudgingly refused to grant a stay of execution. He did, however, create a slight delay of a week or two to allow the US Supreme Court to grant a retrial or hear new evidence. But the Supreme Court did not intervene.
It was as if everyone who had the power to do something was hoping that someone else would do something. And no one did anything.
Thus, on the evening of August 22nd, 1927, the system was preparing to execute the two men, about six years after their trial.
Sacco was executed first. Vanzetti followed and he had last words to offer, putting to work his better mastery of English that he developed by studying in prison while on death row. Vanzetti’s final words were, “I wish to tell you that I am innocent, and that I never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all. I am an innocent man. I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.” Vanzetti was electrocuted to death.
By 12:30 in the morning of August 23rd, the sad journey of Sacco and Vanzetti came to a tragic end.
The coffins of Sacco and Vanzetti are carried out from the Langone Funeral Home in Boston’s North End on August 28, 1927.
Aftermath
Between 1921, when Sacco and Vanzetti were first put on trial, through 1927 at their execution, scores of protests, bombings, and attacks occurred in the United States and abroad. The world took an objective look at America’s supposed and self-described system of fair justice and didn’t like at all what it saw.
Once Sacco and Vanzetti were dead, tensions escalated further. Protests broke out in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Sydney, and Tokyo. In Cuba, the US embassy was bombed.
Europe expressed extreme anti-American sentiment after the executions. Many European demonstrations were violent. Hyde Park in London saw brawls between protesters and police, with dozens injured, some seriously. In Geneva, the League of Nations was attacked. In Paris, residents roamed the streets looking for Americans to assault. American hotels and theaters that played American films were attacked across the continent. The mayor of New York, on a goodwill tour of Germany when the executions occurred, was threatened with physical violence in Berlin.
In the summer of 1927, just after the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, it wasn’t safe to be an American beyond the borders of the United States.
The Hard Truth
Officially, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for the murders tied to the payroll robbery outside of Boston.
But the real reason that Sacco and Vanzetti were killed was that they were guilty of being Italian at a time in America when that’s all it took to be falsely accused and convicted of a crime. And to die for it.
The system, along with many Americans, during that era didn’t consider immigrants, particularly Italians, as deserving of the same individual rights that native-born citizens enjoyed. Most Italians in the 1910s in 1920s would be excluded from employment consideration and educational opportunities. Neighborhoods would put up restrictive covenants to keep Italians from living there. In the South, it wasn’t atypical where Italians would have the option of attending Black schools or no school at all.
For decades before the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, mainstream media in America openly expressed hostile racism toward Italians. The New York Times said in 1875 that it is “perhaps hopeless to think of civilizing the [Italians] or keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law.” Popular Science published in 1890 the article What Shall We Do With the “Dago”?
The unwillingness of America to integrate immigrants into society made it incredibly difficult for non-English-speaking immigrants to develop language fluency. It created a negative feedback loop, where the broken English was viewed by mainstream society either as an unwillingness to assimilate or as a sign of someone (or some race) not being intelligent.
Indeed, the Sacco and Vanzetti drama was one of the saddest moments in American history.
And it wasn’t because Sacco and Vanzetti were saints. Or that they were not anarchists; because there is sufficient evidence where a reasonable person could assume that they were indeed anarchists. And that they may have been guilty of not just sin, but perhaps crime.
A reasonable person could even conclude that the men played a role in the holdup murders, indirectly or directly. More than one expert in criminal law studying the case came to such a conclusion decades after the trial.
The critical failing of America was how the system went about treating Sacco and Vanzetti.
Neither accused received fair and equal treatment under the law. In fact, the system went out of its way to prejudice both men. The cumulative evidence presented during trial did not come close to approaching the standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ The state prosecution failed miserably to present a compelling case for conviction and the judge was far from unbiased.
The system went to painfully disturbing ends to justify a desired outcome. Any non-immigrant white American at the time would have had the case against them dismissed and thrown out of court.
But these defendants were immigrants, and the worst kind at the time, Italians. Bombings by anarchists were occurring all over the eastern United States and in major cities. Guilt by association. A different set of standards, rights, and protections than what the Constitution prescribed. All of it shamefully imposed and sanctioned by the system itself.
1921 America Informs 2024 America
The Sacco and Vanzetti debacle should guide Americans pondering present immigration and criminal justice policies and norms. There is no doubt that a civil society needs consistency and a sound rules-based system; open borders and refusing to prosecute (or selectively prosecuting) crime invite chaos and societal breakdown.
But Sacco and Vanzetti serve as a warning of the dangers of allowing knee-jerk public opinion to sway policy and process from the consistent and rational to the erratic and emotional.
Consider how the Sacco and Vanzetti debacle highlights the lurking dangers of the death penalty.
Even the best-designed legal systems can be corrupted or subjected to bias at times (or often). A civil society that respects the sanctity of the individual and where the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt cannot afford to make wrongful decision of guilt with a capital punishment case.
And the system can wrongly assign guilt in capital punishment cases three ways.
- The first way is via the Sacco and Vanzetti route, where the system simply fails and chooses not to function in a consistent and fair manner. The system goal-seeks for a conviction and goes through the motions only to justify what it already predetermined to deliver.
- The second way is where the guilt beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard still leaves a level of subjective judgment to jurors. If one thousand juries convict one thousand defendants of first-degree murder and the state executes all the convicted, what if the juries’ accuracy rate on actual guilt is as good as, say, 95%? That would mean society killed fifty innocent people.
- The third way is making life-and-death decisions based on limited information. Consider how many of today’s wrongly accused would have been summarily put to death back in the day without the benefit of modern technology that exonerates (GPS, forensics, DNA, etc.) But if the system already executed the wrongly accused, then what?
The more rational route is life imprisonment without parole upon conviction for first-degree murder. Unless the accused confesses to the murder, in which case society can proceed with execution with a clear conscience. It’s not perfect and it would preserve the life of a criminal who indeed committed a heinous act. But it will protect the wrongly convicted from being murdered for a murder they didn’t commit.
On the 50th anniversary of the executions, Massachusetts Governor Dukakis issued a proclamation that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”
If America learned anything over the century since the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, let it be to think rationally instead of acting rashly.
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