Anarchism

Anarchafeminism

Anarchist University

Still Controversial - Sacco & Vanzetti

Commentary by Dave Coull (D.Y.COULL@dundee.ac.uk)

I first heard about Sacco and Vanzetti from my father. As a very young lad he had attended a meeting in Glasgow in solidarity with them. They are part of working class history. But history is not dead. We are all a part of it, and it will continue after us.

The "Guardian" newspaper of Saturday 23rd August carried an article under the headline :

BOSTON  BELATEDLY  ADJUSTS  THE  SCALES 
FOR  ANARCHISTS  SACCO  AND  VANZETTI

The London (and Manchester) based paper reported that

>Seventy years to the day after their execution for a murder
>they may not have committed, the Italian-born anarchists
>Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will be honoured today
>in Boston when the mayor, Thomas Menino, formally accepts
>and dedicates a memorial sculpture which the city has rejected
>three times in the past.

The sculpture, a 7-foot bas-relief showing Sacco and Vanzetti facing a tilted scales of justice, and quoting from Vanzetti's final statement, is the work of Gutzun Borglum, the sculptor whose most famous work is Mount Rushmore. (Well, to tell the truth, Borglum was no Slartibartfast; the mountain wasn't actually all his own work. He just disfigured it with huge faces of USA presidents, designed to make mere mortals feel dwarfed by such gods. One of these "gods" is George Washington, notorious slave-owner, property speculator, turncoat, and imperialist warmonger. Maybe Borglum was trying to make amends for that piece of idolatry.)

Borglum decided to carve the Sacco and Vanzetti sculpture in 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge refused a stay of their execution on the very day that he dedicated the Mount Rushmore monument. The bas-relief was offered to the city of Boston at ten year intervals in 1937, 1947, and 1957.

Now a new Italian-American mayor of Boston has finally accepted the monument. However, during the seven years that passed between the initial arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti and their execution, opinion was divided, not on ethnic lines, but on class and ideology. That patriotic Italian-American , that staunch believer in The American Way, Al Capone, boss of organised crime in Chicago, declared at the time "bolshevism is knocking at our gates...we must keep the workers away from red literature and red ruses".

Sacco and Vanzetti described themselves as "philosophical" anarchists. However, in their case, being "philosophical" certainly didn't mean they were not active. They were not members of the IWW (though it's uncertain whether they had any ideological differences with it) but they were most certainly class struggle anarchists. When the IWW agitators Ettor and Giovannitti were framed by the state for their part in the Lawrence strike of 1912, Sacco contributed to their defence. In 1916 he was arrested for taking part in a demonstration in solidarity with the IWW strikers at Mesabi Range in Minnesota. Also in 1916 he took part in a strike at the coradage factory in Plymouth, Massachusetts. This was when he met Vanzetti. Bartolomeo Vanzetti was regarded as the "ringleader" of that strike, and was blacklisted from employment after it. That is why he took to scraping a living as a fish pedlar.

Like most anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti opposed World War One. (Unfortunately, the most famous anarchist of all at that time, Peter Kropotkin, sided with the allies. He wasn't an anarchist "leader", but non-anarchists thought he was.)

In 1920, Andrea Salsedo, a friend of Vanzetti's, was arrested in New York, held illegally for 8 weeks in the Department of Justice building in that city, then "fell" from the 14th floor of that building. Sacco and Vanzetti began organising a public meeting to protest about that suspicious death. The meeting was to be on May 9th. It never took place. On May 5th, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for "dangerous" radical activities. When arrested they had leaflets advertising the May 9th meeting on them. They also had guns - although opposed to imperialist war, they never pretended to be pacifists in the class war. It was only some time after their arrest on political grounds that the police decided to charge them with a payroll robbery in which 2 security guards had been killed. Vanzetti was also charged with another payroll robbery.

When the cases came to trial, Judge Webster Thayer said of Vanzetti "This man, although he may not have actually committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because he is the enemy of our existing institutions". This was the same judge who would later sentence both men to death, the same judge who would ask Professor James P. Richardson of Dartmouth College "Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day ? I guess that will hold them for a while...."

What's more, the foreman of the jury for the case was a retired chief of police ! When a friend of his said he thought the two men were innocent, his response was "Damn them. They ought to hang anyway."

The state's case against Sacco and Vanzetti was full of holes. Twelve of Vanzetti's customers testified that he was delivering fish at the time of the crime. An official of the Italian Consulate in Boston testified that Sacco had been seeing him about a passport around then. Furthermore, somebody else confessed to the crime of which they were accused, and said they had nothing to do with it. Yet, because they were held "morally culpable", because they were "the enemy of our existing institutions", they were found guilty and sentenced to death. This was, as the "Guardian" says, widely seen as a class war verdict .

The verdict was so blatantly unjust that the case of Sacco and Vanzetti became the most famous cause in the world. Demonstrations of solidarity with them were held in China, India, France, England, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Uruguay, Norway, Poland, Paraguay, Belgium, Portugal, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Spain, and many other countries. Here are a few of the headlines about the case from just one issue of the "New York Times" (10/8/27) : 'Fifty Thousand Swedes Parade'; "Argentine Strike Goes On" ; "Dutch Demonstration Broken Up" ; "Warsaw Mob Kept From Legation" . There were particularly massive demonstrations in Bombay , Barcelona , and Buenos Aires.

On the eve of the executions

>>There were strikes in which hundreds of thousands
>>participated in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado,
>>Illinois, New Jersey. Police arrested demonstrators
>>in Philadelphia and Chicago, and clashed with
>>50,000 gathered in New York's Union Square.

("Labor's Untold Story", page 235)

Nicola Sacco was survived by his wife, Rosina, his son, Dante , and his little daughter , Inez .

Bartolomeo Vanzetti wrote shortly before his execution :