BOOKS: New Book Examines the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti

A new book by Bruce Watson examines the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants whose guilt remains in serious doubt eight decades after Massachusetts carried out their death sentences. The book, “Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind” (Viking, 2007), provides a factual account of the case surrounding the two men, who were convicted of stealing a shoe factory’s pay envelopes and killing four people in the crime. Watson’s investigation found that there were as many different accounts of the crime as there were people to testify about it, and that the state’s prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti was shaped by deep prejudice against Italian immigrants.

Police focused their attention on Sacco and Vanzetti after one eyewitness stated that two suspicious-looking men speaking Italian had been seen in the town where the crime was committed, and that one of the men “bore a striking resemblance to Nicola Sacco.” Watson’s review of historical documents revealed that Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial lacked basic due process. The two men were forced to sit in cages during their trial, during which prosecutors exploited the pairs well-known activism in anarchist circles. Even trial judge Webster Thayer called the two “anarchistic bastards” and told a friend that he “would get them good and proper.” After Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted, they struggled for six years to prove their innocence, but all attempts to vacate their convictions were denied.

Sacco and Vanzetti maintained their innocence throughout their trial and during their years on death row. Their case was among the first to generate widespread protest around the world and within the U.S. Thousands of supporters gathered in Boston and New York to protest the state’s prosecution of the two men and to call for a halt to their executions. An editorial about their execution appearing in The Nation stated, “We are shaken to the core… . (The executions were) a judicial murder (that) struck at the reputation of the whole nation (and) everywhere strengthened all those who believe that the world can be reformed only by bombs and bloodshed.”
(Washington Post Book World, August 19, 2007 and The Nation, August 23, 2007). See Books and Innocence.