Sacco and Vanzetti

Sacco and Vanzetti

 

In the August 14^th, 2006 issue of the Nation Magazine, there’s a review of recent books on Upton Sinclair by Brenda Wineapple that contains the following observation on the muckraking novelist’s involvement with one of the landmark political trials of the 20^th century:

“On the whole, Bachelder’s perspective on Sinclair’s unsinkability seems right. Just last December, Sinclair was resurrected and assassinated all over again when the Los Angeles Times ran a story, bruited in the conservative press, about the recent purchase of a Sinclair letter in which he admitted that one of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s defense attorneys had told him that the two Italian anarchists were guilty as charged, and yet he published the novel Boston anyway, to peddle sympathy for them. Neither Mattson nor Arthur would be surprised by the revelatory letter. Each of them amply demonstrates that Sinclair doubted the innocence of at least one, if not both, of the defendants.”

Although Wineapple is understandably focused on Sinclair’s reputation, it is too bad that she allows the reader to assume that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. This charge has been made mostly by rightwingers like Jonah Goldberg of the National Review, but you find concessions to it from other leftists besides Wineapple, which mostly takes the form of failing to take the charges head-on. In an interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Anthony Arthur, an Upton Sinclair biographer included in Wineapple’s article, skirts around the subject of their guilt and allows the typically liberal NPR listener to assume the worst about Sacco and Vanzetti.

It should be noted that the lawyer who badmouthed Sacco and Vanzetti to Upton Sinclair was one Fred Moore, who was replaced by his clients in favor of a more competent defender. The documentary reveals Moore as a classic ultraleftist lawyer whose strategy revolved around “putting the system on trial”. According to some reports, he was also a cocaine addict.

While the excellent new documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti by Peter Miller does not specifically rebut the charges flowing out of the Upton Sinclair incident, it certainly does establish their likely innocence. If there is still lingering doubts about such a matter, the film does prove beyond a shadow of a doubt and to a moral certainty that their trial was little more than an orchestrated persecution of the sort that delivered the Rosenbergs to the electric chair. In cases such as this, when rightwingers are so eager to prove the guilt of a class struggle martyr, they never bother to examine the circumstances of the trial. In such cases, it is the judge and the district attorney whose guilt is proven over and over again.

Drawing upon archival footage and interviews with relatives of Sacco and Vanzetti, leftist American historians such as Howard Zinn and Mary Anne Trasciatti, co-author of “Representing Sacco and Vanzetti,” we get a clearer understanding of the background and beliefs of the two Italian-American immigrants but the importance of their case. Along with the Rosenbergs and Mumia, the two anarchists are prototypical victims of capitalist “justice.” In ever single one of these epochal trials, the indicted parties had to face judges who made no pretense of impartiality.

Judge Webster Thayer allegedly described the two as “anarchist bastards.” In 1920 he rebuked a jury for acquitting anarchist Sergie Zuboff of violating a criminal anarchy statute. While turning down their appeals, he often referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as “Dagos” and “sons of bitches” in the confines of his golf club.

Despite the absence of any physical evidence and contradictory testimony of eyewitnesses linking Sacco and Vanzetti to the payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts on April 15, 1920 that left paymaster Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli dead, the jury found the two men guilty. Even when a prisoner named Celestino Madeiros confessed to the robbery/murder, the courts refused to schedule a new trial.

The 1920s left rallied around Sacco and Vanzetti in the same manner that it would rally around the Rosenbergs and Mumia. Demonstrations were organized around the world not only demanding justice for the two Italian-American anarchists but for all immigrants who were being hounded by the federal government as part of the post-WWI xenophobic hysteria whipped up Attorney General Palmer, the Alberto Gonzalez of his day.

Under pressure from a powerful mass movement, the state of Massachusetts finally appointed a blue ribbon panel called the “Lowell Committee” (named after A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University, its most prominent member) to review the case. Lowell epitomized the polite, patrician racism that has been attached to Harvard up until the present day with people like Lawrence Summers in charge. The committee found nothing wrong about the trial and advised against clemency. The two men died in the electric chair on August 23, 1927. In May of that year, when they learned of their impending execution, the two men had this to say:

Sacco: “I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize them and kill them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been of the oppressed class. Well, you are the oppressor.”

Vanzetti: ” Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in my life–though some sins but not crimes–not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the moral law condemns, but also the crime that the moral law and the official law sanction and sanctify,–the exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes can doom me, it is this reason and none else.”