The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti

The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti by Howard Zinn

The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti is a transcript of a speech by Howard Zinn, delivered at Northeastern University on October 9, 1997. Zinn opens by asking his audience what they know of the case, then situates it among the "alternate list" of events that shaped political consciousness, alongside the Haymarket Affair of 1886, which radicalized Emma Goldman, and later cases such as the Rosenbergs and Mumia Abu-Jamal. He recalls that on the fiftieth anniversary of the executions, Governor Dukakis convened a commission that found the 1927 trial unfair, though Dukakis declined to issue a pardon, deeming it too late. This provoked backlash, notably from Peter Fuller, son of the executing Governor Fuller and a Boston Cadillac dealer, who wrote to the Boston Globe defending his father's record. Zinn then narrates the case itself. In spring 1920, a robbery and double murder occurred at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, killing a paymaster and a guard. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, picked up on a streetcar from Bridgewater to Brockton carrying revolvers, were arrested. Both were Italian anarchists, associates of Luigi Galleani and his publication Cronaca Sovversiva, with no criminal record but known political activity. Zinn places the arrest within the postwar antiradical hysteria: the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, the bombing of Attorney General Palmer's home, mass raids and deportations of foreign-born radicals including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and the death of the anarchist Salsedo after weeks of interrogation on the fourteenth floor of a Manhattan building. He details the trial before Judge Webster Thayer, emphasizing its patriotic, anti-immigrant atmosphere: Thayer's charge invoking "our soldier boys," prosecutor Katzmann's cross-examination pressing Sacco on his patriotism and his flight to Mexico to avoid the draft, dismissed Italian eyewitnesses placing the men elsewhere, and Thayer's own private remark bragging about "those anarchist bastards" at a Dartmouth football game. Zinn notes the inconclusive ballistics evidence and argues the men could not have received a fair trial given who they were. He recounts repeated denied appeals, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's refusal to review facts, and the failure to get Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to stay the execution. Governor Fuller's advisory committee, comprising the presidents of Harvard and MIT and a retired judge, upheld the conviction, drawing journalist Heywood Broun's sardonic comment about being executed "at the hands of men in dinner jackets or academic gowns." Zinn describes worldwide protests in Buenos Aires, Paris, and London, and support from figures like Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Dos Passos, and Albert Einstein, alongside labor movement demonstrations. Sacco believed legal argument was futile given who they were; Vanzetti held that only mass protest could save them. The protests fell short, and on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed at Charlestown Prison amid guarded crowds and clashes with police. Zinn closes by reading a leaflet found in Vanzetti's pocket at his arrest, advertising a speech he never delivered, questioning workers' rewards for war and labor. He concludes that beneath legal procedure lie enduring issues of class, race, gender, and social conflict, linking Sacco and Vanzetti's fate to the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal and to the broader character of the justice system.

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Historical Non-Fiction, True Crime, Legal History · 5,004 words

First lines

Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, October 9, 1997.

Zinn returned in many speeches and articles to the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. As he wrote in The Progressive, "What comes to us today from the case of the Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti is not just tragedy, but inspiration. Their English was not perfect, but when they spoke it was a kind of poetry."

Genres

Tags

anarchism · criminal justice · 1920s America · miscarriage of justice · Italian-American · Massachusetts history · immigration · prejudice · capital punishment · wrongful conviction · civil rights · labor movement

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