Rendering judgment on an infamous trial in ‘Sacco & Vanzetti’

'Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind'

by Bruce Watson

Viking, 448 pp., $25.95

Few criminal trials in American history have left such a record of recrimination and finger-pointing as the infamous trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants, were charged with the murder of two payroll clerks on April 15, 1920, in Braintree, Mass. The brazen daylight murder took place only steps away from busy factories filled with hundreds of potential witnesses. The gunmen shot the clerks, collected the payroll cash, and then roared away in a large black sedan with white window drapes fluttering amid the billowing dust. Less than three weeks later, Sacco, an edge trimmer in a shoe factory, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, were charged with the murders.

Both were carrying fully loaded pistols when arrested and neither provided fully plausible explanations for what they were doing that evening. They were, admittedly, anarchists who supported a shadowy movement intent on destabilizing the United States. But the evidence against them was weak and the trial an embarrassment.

Curiously, the trial occurred at a time with compelling similarities to the modern day. Then, as now, there was widespread fear of terrorism - and with good reason. Anarchists (we would call them "terrorists" today) regularly bombed public squares and subway stations.

Similarly, like today, conservative hostility toward immigration was rising, leading Congress in 1924, with the support of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion, to slash immigration quotas. Although it seems nearly unimaginable now, the tide of anti-Italian fever was running high in America in the 1920s, with fears of Italian gangsters and uncontrolled violence convulsing the country.

It is difficult to imagine a context less suited for a dispassionate, fair trial. And few would describe the resulting trial as either "dispassionate" or "fair."

In "Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind," Bruce Watson does a terrific job of reviewing the historical record of the trial, drawing compelling portraits of the principals, their families, and partisans on both sides of the bitter controversy. Drawing on untapped legal archives, this is the first full-length study of the case in over 30 years. It was worth the wait.

Judge Webster Thayer, a stern New England reactionary, presided over the trial with barely concealed hostility. Sacco and Vanzetti were defended by Fred Moore, a flamboyant California lawyer oblivious to his irritating effect on the judge.

The defendants were convicted on July 14, 1921, but the case lingered for more than six years while appeals and pleas for clemency ran their course. As Justice William O. Douglas commented decades later, anyone reading the trial transcript would "have difficulty believing that the trial with which it deals took place in the United States."

After Thayer denied the defendants' motion for a new trial, he commented to a friend at a Dartmouth football game, "Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?"

Tanks and Marines defended American embassies abroad as hundreds of thousands marched in protest in every major world capital. As Watson notes, the trial was freighted with much larger implications: "In the judgment of the world, one American city would stand for America itself, one court case for the universal dream of fairness, two men for all men staring into the naked face of power."

Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on Aug. 23, 1927. Over 100,000 people streamed through the funeral home after the execution to pay their respects.

For 80 years, the acrimonious table-pounding debate has continued over the case. Watson's careful study is unlikely to definitively settle that dispute, but does provide a welcome clear-eyed overview of one of the most disappointing chapters in American judicial history.

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