Sacco and Vanzetti: Maybe Murderers, Maybe Martyrs. Anyway, they had no chance

They may have stolen $15,000 and killed two people during an armed robbery. No one knew for sure. And he still doesn’t know. In the eyes of millions of people around the world, they stood before the court as two martyrs, heroes of the resistance against an unjust capitalist society.

Maybe they were both. Dangerous rebels and unjustly judged paupers. History tends to be like that. That we can’t be sure what they really are. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Italian immigrants, radicals, anarchists, proletarians. For many Americans at the time, it was a typical “shooting type”.

They were arrested on May 5, 1920, executed seven years later.

Nicola Sacco said in his closing argument in court that he was not a great speaker and that English was not his first language. But he wasn’t afraid. And he said what he thought was important. “We know that the judgment will express the relationship between the two classes. By the oppressed class and the rich. And there will always be a clash between them,” explained Nicola Sacco to the jurors. “We bring people together through literature. You persecute, bully and kill them. We try to educate people. You are trying to sow hatred between different nationalities. And that’s why I’m here in the dock now. Because I am a member of the oppressed class. And you are the oppressors!”

Sacco and Vanzetti arrived in America in 1908. That same year, The Melting Pot premiered in Washington. The author is Israel Zangwill, an intellectual and writer of Jewish origin. The play celebrated the ability of American society to absorb a huge influx of immigrants. You know it, that’s what all generations of English learners have learned and are learning – the United States as a “melting pot”. National and cultural differences merge into a new matter in which there is no place for past prejudices.

Even the then president Theodore Roosevelt praised the play’s author directly at the premiere. “That’s a great game, Mr. Zangwill. Great game,” he congratulated.

Hence the “melting pot”. It is understandable that it was and continues to be good for American politicians and ideologues. But it is far from reality. Well, first of all, it could not be any other way than for the continent that was previously inhabited by Indians to be occupied by immigrants. And the first Puritans who sailed across the Atlantic on the legendary ship Mayflower in 1620 were not enough to do it alone.

Second, we have the genocide of the Indians. Third, the millions of black slaves murdered. And fourth, the hatred of immigrants at a time when the people of the United States already felt that they could do it on their own. It was on this “fourth wave” that Sacco and Vanzetti rode.

After the North lost the war against the South, Southern farmers needed cheap labor as they gradually lost black slaves. The uneducated poor Italians fit the bill. And they didn’t fare much better than blacks. From the point of view of the southern elite, they were inferior Catholics. Somewhat worse than slaves.

In 1891, a mob lynched 11 Italian immigrants in New Orleans. Some of them were suspected of killing a local policeman. No one was convicted, most had nothing to do with the suspicion. The crowd didn’t discriminate. The future governor of Louisiana, John Parker, helped organize the lynching. He said that “Italians are a little worse than blacks, a little dirtier and more treacherous.”

Future President Theodore Roosevelt, yes, the one who later praised the “melting pot” game, said that such lynchings “are rather a good thing.” And The New York Times wrote of the lynching victims as “cowardly Sicilians, descendants of criminals and murderers.”

The “melting pot” did not give the Italians much of a chance for a fair trial.

Nicola Sacco (1891) was a shoemaker and helped in his father’s vineyards. He left for America at the age of seventeen. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, three years older, sold fish. They lived at opposite ends of Italy, they didn’t know each other. They met during the 1917 strike.

During the trial, the prosecution claimed to belong to Luigi Galleani’s anarchist group, which condones violence and prepares a coup. Yes, the Italians had a bad reputation. In the eyes of the Americans, they were Catholics, criminals and anarchists. Catholics were the majority. About as many criminals and anarchists as in other communities. But the “melting pot” didn’t distinguish it.

Sacco and Vanzetti became radical critics of capitalism within a few years of thrashing around in the “promised land”. How far they were willing to go is the question. They were accused of robbery and murder. The motive was to finance the anarchist movement.

The evidence was circumstantial, the testimony contradictory. To this day, historians speculate how it was. Most believe they were innocent. In any case, the problem is that the accused did not have a chance for a fair trial. In a way, they were lucky – the mob didn’t lynch them. But it wasn’t a big win: They spent seven years in prison and then they were executed.

Judge Webster Thyer publicly referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as “Bolsheviks”, “anarchist bastards”, adding that “they will get what they deserve… to hang”. According to the laws of the time, this judge also decided on the appeal of the convicted.

Mass protests against the imprisonment and conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti took place in many places in the United States, Europe, South America, but also in China or Morocco. Tens of thousands of people demonstrated in support of the imprisoned Italians.

Anarchists also organized several bombings. Famous personalities such as Albert Einstein or George Bernard Shaw and many other artists joined the protests.

Few knew the details of the case, and no one could be sure if Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. But the court was in many ways a symbol of the topics that divided society at the time.

To avoid conscription, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti fled to Mexico. No, there was no way they were going to fight a war for a regime they saw as illegitimate and worthy of overthrow. For some, they were traitors. For others, brave fighters against a senseless war.

After the end of the war, the Western world gradually forgot about the horrors of war, became rich and wanted to have fun. The first wave of “flamboyant consumerism” briefly swept through it. The Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, whose tomb was discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, became an icon. And above all, the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, whose bust was first exhibited in Berlin in 1923. It was a world of wealth, an unknown and mysterious world. And above all, a completely different world than the world of the recent war.

But the real world did not cease to exist. The first wave of the “Red Scare” was rising in the United States. Panic, a sense of threat that Bolsheviks, anarchists, communists, leftists of all kinds want to destroy Western society. They succeeded in Russia. And in many countries of Western Europe they had a strong position. They wanted a bigger change than consumerism. No wonder – the Great War was not exactly the best advertisement for the values ​​of the Western world.

And there was another thing – the United States took the position of the world’s greatest power after the war. And disgusted Europe watched closely what was happening in that great country.

During the seven-year trial, Sacco and Vanzetti were at the center of global debate.

And on August 23, 1927, they were executed in the electric chair.

“If these things hadn’t happened, I might have spent my life persuading contemptuous men on street corners. I would die unknown, unrecorded, it would be a failure. But now we are no longer a failure. This is our career, our triumph. Never in all our lives could we have hoped to do as much work for tolerance, justice and mutual understanding between people as we will do with our death. Our words, our lives, our pains were nothing. Our deaths—the killing of the good shoemaker and the good fishmonger—are everything. This last moment is ours, this agony is our triumph.”