The executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1927

On 23rd August 1927 two men were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts. They were Nicola Sacco (born 1891) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (born 1888), two Italian immigrants, who had been convicted in 1921 of the murder of two men during a factory robbery in 1920.

However, serious doubts were raised at the time about the safety of the convictions, which have not been eased in the intervening years, with the real possibility that the men were condemned more for their political beliefs and social status than their actual guilt or otherwise based on real evidence.

The United States was, at the time, in the grip of one of its periodic “red scares”, this one based on fears that Communist plotters sought to copy the Russian Revolution of 1917 on the western side of the Atlantic. The problem for Sacco and Vanzetti was that they were admitted anarchists. Their politics, plus the strong anti-immigrant feelings current at the time, ensured that it would be extremely difficult for them to get a fair trial.

As it was, the jury did not take long to reach guilty verdicts and all appeals against the death sentence were subsequently rejected.

There was contrary evidence pointing to the men’s innocence, including ballistics evidence and a confession by another man, but none of this made any difference.

The storm aroused by the convictions and executions was such that the case became a noted “cause celebre” in the United States, as well as the inspiration (in whole or in part) for several literary works.

These included:

• “Boston”, a novel by Upton Sinclair
• “Winterset”, a play by Maxwell Anderson
• “U.S.A.” trilogy by John Dos Passos

The poet Edna St Vincent Millay joined a protest on the day before the executions and held a placard that read “If these men are executed, justice is dead in Massachusetts”, and was arrested for doing so.

The case was not forgotten for many years, becoming seen as an archtype of the prejudice of the American judicial system against the Left and ordinary working people. It would certainly appear to have been a clear case of a miscarriage of justice, and it might have been hoped that it would have led to such instances becoming a thing of the past. However, there have been plenty of other cases that suggest that Sacco and Vanzetti were by no means the last Americans to suffer from a deeply flawed legal system.

© John Welford