Aida's US History: Sacco & Vanzetti

“The Case That Will Not Die”

At 3:00 in the afternoon, shoe factory paymaster, Frederick Parmenter and his payroll guard Alessandro Berardelli were shot and robbed of $15,776 on April 15th, 1920. There were two men spotted to have committed the crime. Immediately afterwards they hopped into a car and drove off. This frequent occurrence was committed in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian men, were accused of this felony. And because this was such a regular thing, you would expect this to be a normal robbery case, but it was not even in the slightest! This case changed the views of many Americans and immigrants.

Sacco was born in Torremaggiore, Italy. He was only one of the seventeen peasants in his home. In 1908, merely seventeen years old, Sacco immigrated to America and began to work at a shoe factory in Milford, Massachusetts. He eventually got married as well. Vanzetti was born in Villafalletto, Italy. He went to school for only seven years in Italy then moved to America in 1908 to work as a dishwasher in New York City. He worked in a stone quarry, a brick furnace; he dug ditches, and was once a fish peddler. Both of these men were intrigued by the relish of anarchism. Sacco and his wife would usually perform street theatre to raise money for anarchists. Separately, the men would be a part of strikes pro-anarchism and resisting war. The two men met May of 1917 in Boston at the meeting of Galleanist Anarchists. A week later the two of them and a group of friends went to Mexico to hide out from the law in case of being drafted or deported for anti-war activities.

The night of the robbery, a man known as the “shotgun bandit” was suspected to be Vanzetti. Sacco was accused for being an accomplice. On May 5^th, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were stuck in a sticky situation when they were armed during their arrest and also did not say the truth about their whereabouts and other details about the night of the robbery. The two were arrested and Vanzetti was later tried in the summer of 1920. He had fifteen witnesses claiming they saw him the night of the robbery and that he was nowhere near the crime scene. Unfortunately his witnesses were all Italian and none of them spoke enough English to convince the judge of his innocence. The fact that he was blacklisted for strike at the Plymouth Cordage Factory in 1916 did not really help his case. Vanzetti was found guilty. Sacco claimed to be in Boston trying to receive a passport on the day of the crime. Seven people had witnessed him. Sacco relied on a clerk at the shoe factory to back up his story, but he could not remember if he had seen him or not. This was understandable since he saw hundreds of faces a day. Sacco lied about his whereabouts, and his reasoning for obtaining a gun was improbable. Nevertheless, Sacco was almost certainly not guilty, but the judge was biased because the immigrant was "an enemy of our existing institutions." So he too was arrested for the robbery and murder. The ironic thing was that Sacco and Vanzetti were planning on moving back to Italy not too long before this whole fiasco.

This local buzz began to get pretty heated and eventually the nation was stirring! "Millions around would have fought to save them." The unfortunate situation of their case was that it occurred during the Red Scare. This time period was a slightly darker era in our country's history. The people who were against the current actions of the government such as the communists, socialists, and anarchists were all afraid of what would become of them during that time. The whole country was in an odd place and was very unforgiving and un-"American." As Edmund Wilson stated, "It revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its classes, professions and points of views and all their relations, and it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social statement." This statement really stood out to me because I found it very interesting that people were not allowed to properly use their freedom of speech without being punished immensely. One wrong turn and you could be out! "Innocent people were jailed for expressing their views, civil liberties were ignored, and many Americans feared that a Bolshevik-style revolution was at hand." Sacco and Vanzetti were just evidence of the injustice in a system that would frame two innocent men and execute them all because of their different view points on government behavior.
In 1927 the two men were executed. They were each able to write letters to their loved ones before they were killed. Vanzetti wrote:
"August 4, 1927
From the Death house of the Massachusetts State Prison
To the Defense Committee:
'Now ignoring and denial all the proofs of our innocence and insult us and murder us. We are innocent. This is as war of plutocracy against liberty, against the peeople. We die for Anarchy. Long life anarchy.
-Vanzetti'"
(Some words were spelled incorrectly because of his poor english, but I corrected them above just so there would be no confusion.)
This letter was a final cry of rebellion. It summed up all the feelings Sacco and Vanzetti had into a short and simple letter. They did not deserved to die the way they did. The two immigrants were mistreated and unfairly judged. It is so completely wrong that it ended the way it did, but hopefully people learned from this case and no repeats will occur, (no matter how unrealistic that seems).