Sacco-Vanzetli Trial: 1921

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Sacco-Vanzetli Trial: 1921

Defendants: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti
Crime Charged: Murder
Chief Defense Lawyers: William J. Callahan, Herbert B. Ehrmann, James M. Graham, Arthur Dehon Hill, Jeremiah J. McAnarney, Thomas F. McAnarney, Fred H. Moore, Michael Angelo Musmanno, William G. Thompson, and John P. Vahey
Chief Prosecutors: Frederick Gunn Katzmann, Donald P. Ramsey, and Harold P. Williams
Judge: Webster Thayer
Place: Dedham, Massachusetts
Dates of Trial: May 31-July 14, 1921
Verdict: Guilty
Sentences: Death

SIGNIFICANCE: The Sacco-Vanzetti case began as a simple trial for murder. It ended as an international cause in which the world believed that Massachusetts had executed two innocent men because they held radical views. A study of the trial and its aftermath provides a superb lesson in how myths are made.

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, as a shoe manufacturer's paymaster, Frederick Parmenter, and his guard, Alessandro Berardelli, carried the $15,777 cash payroll in South Braintree, Massachusetts, they were killed by two men armed with pistols. Seizing the money, the men jumped into a car containing several other men and sped away. Eyewitnesses thought the murderers looked like Italians.

At the time, police were investigating an attempted holdup on the preceding Christmas Eve by a gang of Italians with a car in nearby Bridgewater. Police Chief Michael E. Stewart suspected one Mike Boda, whose car was now awaiting repairs in Simon Johnson's garage. Stewart told Johnson to call the police when anyone came to get Boda's car.

A Car to Move Red Literature

Stewart also was busy rounding up alien communists following raids by the U.S. Departments of Labor and Justice. Many were being deported. In May, a radical held on the 14th floor of the New York City offices of the Department of Justice was found dead on the sidewalk below. His friends, including Mike Boda, decided they had better hide a large quantity of Red literature. To move it, they needed Boda's car.

Boda and three others appeared at Johnson's garage. Mrs. Johnson called the police. Johnson refused to hand over the car because it had no up-to-date license plates. Boda and one man departed on a motorcycle. The other two boarded a street car. Arrested aboard the car minutes later were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Sacco carried a. 32-caliber pistol loaded with nine bullets, and 23 additional bullets in his pocket. Vanzetti had a fully loaded. 38-caliber revolver and four 12-gauge shotgun shells. Also found on Sacco was a notice, in Italian, of a forthcoming meeting at which Vanzetti was to speak on "the struggle for existence." The two men were active anarchists.

Grilled by District Attorney Frederick Gunn Katzmann, Sacco said he had bought the gun two years earlier for $16 or $17 and had bought a new box of cartridges. Vanzetti said his gun cost $18 or $19 four or five years earlier. Neither gun was licensed.

Vanzetti's shotgun shells put him under suspicion for the failed holdup on Christmas Eve, when a 12-gauge shotgun was fired. His alibi was that, as a fish peddler, he spent a busy Christmas Eve selling eels for traditional Italian dinners that night. At his trial, several witnesses identified him as the man with the shotgun. He did not take the stand to refute them and was convicted and sentenced to 12 to 15 years. Sacco, meantime, had a solid alibi: He had been on the job in a shoe factory when the attempted robbery occurred. But he was held for trial in the South Braintree murders, for on April 15 he had taken the day off.

Defense Committee Organized

Anarchist friends organized the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. For three months, it collected money. Then the committee hired Fred H. Moore, a long-haired radical labor lawyer from California. Moore, experienced in handling underdog cases for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, founder of the Workers' Defense Union, and for the International Workers of the World (The "I.W.W."), saw the Sacco-Vanzetti case as a cause. "In saving them," he said, "we strengthen our muscles, develop our forces preparatory to the day when we save ourselves."

Moore spent a busy year writing, traveling, and organizing volunteers. The United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the American Federation of Teamsters, and the American Civil Liberties Union were among the many organizations that responded. Pamphlets were printed in batches of 50,000. Publicity releases flooded the mail weekly to 500 newspapers. The murder charge was depicted as "a mere device to get them [Sacco and Vanzetti] out of the way."

Outdated Bullets and a Cap

Opening May 31, 1921, the trial revealed that Sacco had lied about his gun. It was several years old, and his box of "new" cartridges contained a mixture of old bullets that were all obsolete. The bullet that killed Berardelli was so outdated that the state's expert witness could locate none like it with which to test Sacco's gun—except the equally obsolete bullets from Sacco's pocket.

Vanzetti, too, had lied. Although he had said he paid $18 or $19 for it, the jury learned that his was a $5 gun, that Vanzetti had said he bought a new box of cartridges and threw it away when six remained and he put them in the revolver, but that it held only five and those in the gun were not all the same make. And it learned that Vanzetti's nickel-plated pistol was identical to that of the murdered guard, whose gun could not be found after the crime.

Then there was the cap found beside the dead guard. It was not his. Sacco's employer testified that it looked like a cap that Sacco regularly wore. When the prosecutor asked Sacco to put the cap on, the defendant, pulling it down over his ears in trying to prove it was too big, threw the courtroom into giggling hysterics—but the state also put into evidence a cap of exactly the same size, found in Sacco's home. "Some one of you who wears a seven and oneeighth," said Katzmann to the jury, "try them both on. If they are not identically the same size, then so find, so find, gentlemen."

Trial for Murder, Nothing Else

Before the trial opened, Judge Webster Thayer had told counsel on both sides that he saw no reason to bring up the issue of radicalism. It was not mentioned during the prosecution's entire presentation. But on the 29th day, Vanzetti himself, under direct examination by his attorney Jeremiah J. Mc-Anarney, was explaining why the four men sought Boda's car: "We were going to take the automobile for to carry books and newspapers," he said. Why hadn't he told the police that when he was arrested? "Because there was the deportation and the reaction was more vivid than now and more mad than now." In a word, his defense was that he lied out of fear of deportation as a radical.

Under Massachusetts law, since the defense had brought it up, the door was now open for prosecutor Katzmann to cross-examine Vanzetti about all his radical activities. But the jury heard no such questions. "Neither is Radicalism being tried here," the prosecutor told them. "This is a charge of murder and it is nothing else."

Next, Sacco explained that he, too, lied when he was arrested because he feared deportation on a radical charge. And he explained another lie. Upon arrest, he had said that he was at work all day April 15. But now his boss testified that Sacco had taken that day off to see the Italian consul in Boston about a passport for a trip to Italy. The consular clerk testified that Sacco was in his office at about 2:00 p.m. April 15, but the alibi was weak: Sacco had been turned down immediately because the passport photo he offered was too large. While the jury was being told that Sacco spent an entire day in Boston (several witnesses for the defense testified to having seen him there in the morning, at lunch, and in the afternoon), his business at the consulate had consumed only 10 minutes. Then Sacco noticed a spectator in the courtroom whom he had seen on the late afternoon train home. Sworn as a witness, the man could not remember seeing Sacco but was confident he had been on the train Sacco described.

As with Vanzetti, prosecutor Katzmann refrained from any line of questioning that might have led the jury to consider Sacco a dangerous radical.

Bullets Convince Jury

At three o'clock, July 14, the jury retired. It immediately voted 10-2 for conviction. "Then," said one juror afterward:

[W]e started discussing things, reviewed the very important evidence about the bullets, and everybody had a chance to speak his piece. There was never any argument, though. We just were convinced Sacco and Vanzetti had done what the prosecution had charged them with.

Asked later what evidence impressed him most, another juror said:

The bullets, of course. That testimony and evidence on it sticks in your mind. You can't depend on the witnesses. But the bullets, there was no getting around that evidence.

The guilty verdict brought violent reactions around the world. American consulates and embassies in Europe and South America were flooded with letters of protest. The Communist International urged all communists, socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists to join in rescuing Sacco and Vanzetti. Demonstrations were mounted in France, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia. It took 10,000 police and 18,000 troops to hold back the crowd besieging the American embassy in Paris. Bombs exploded in that embassy and around the world. One destroyed the home of one of the jurors. Judge Thayer's house was put under guard.

Vehement Appeals Follow

Over the next six years, the furor raged. Motion after motion for a new trial was denied. So-called experts examined the pistols, took them apart, wrongly reassembled them. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn raised $25,000 in two days to pay the advance legal fee of Harvard Law School lecturer and Massachusetts insider William G. Thompson, who replaced Moore, the radical outsider. Imprisoned criminals volunteered confessions.

By 1926, with "Sacco-Vanzetti" a worldwide battle cry, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest, rejected an appeal. The International Labor Defense (ILD) (later to defend the Scottsboro Boys, [See separate entry]), set up by the communists, received only some $6,000 of millions raised in the names of Sacco and Vanzetti. Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter (later to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court), in an Atlantic Monthly article, attacked the jury, witnesses, verdict, and judiciary. The state's supreme court, having already rejected Thompson's appeal, now upheld the judge: He had committed, it declared, no errors of law or abuses of discretion.

Lowell Committee Reviews Case

In June 1927, on Thompson's urging, Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, who was considering an appeal for clemency, appointed an Advisory Committee headed by Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell to review the entire case. After two months, and after himself interviewing 102 witnesses in addition to those from the trial, he agreed with the Lowell Committee's conclusion: Sacco and Vanzetti had a fair trial and were guilty.

Worldwide protests grew more violent. A London demonstration injured 40 people. Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, and countless other cities saw riots. Now picketers before the State House in Boston, including novelists John Dos Passos and Katherine Anne Porter, humorist Dorothy Parker, and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, were arrested. All Boston public buildings were garrisoned by the police, who for the first time in memory permitted no meetings on Boston Common. Columnist Heywood Broun found his column suspended by the New York World for his violent comments on Lowell.

By now, Judge Thayer had denied a half-dozen motions for a new trial, the state superior court had denied another, and the state supreme judicial court had turned down four appeals. Several petitions for a writ of habeas corpus, for extensions of time, and for stay of execution were denied by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit of the United States and by U.S. Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Harlan F. Stone.

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed August 23, 1927. In 1977, their names were "cleared" when Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis signed a special proclamation.

—Bernard Ryan, Jr.