The stirring words of the great American folksinger and songwriter, Woody Guthrie, remind us that yesterday it was 75 years since Sacco and Vanzetti went to the electric chair. Their trial and execution became a causé célebre of American justice or, perhaps more correctly, injustice, writes Brian Maye
Two good men a long time gone/ Sacco and Vanzetti are gone
In April, 1920, a payroll robbery in South Braintree, a small industrial town south of Boston, resulted in the deaths of a paymaster and his guard. Three weeks later, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fell into a police trap that had been set for a suspect in the crime.
Although originally not under suspicion, both men were armed at the time of their arrest and lied to the police when questioned. This led to their being held and indicted for the Braintree crimes.
Vanzetti was also charged with an earlier attempted robbery in the nearby town of Bridgewater. Contrary to the usual Massachusetts's court procedure, he was first tried on the lesser of the two charges.
Despite a strong alibi supported by many witnesses, he was found guilty. Most of his witnesses were Italians who spoke English poorly and their testimony, given mostly in translation, failed to convince the American jury.
For a first criminal offence in which no one was hurt, Vanzetti was given a much harsher than usual sentence by Judge Webster Thayer - 10 to 15 years. This signalled to the two men and their supporters a hostile bias on the part of the authorities that was political in nature.
The arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti coincided with the period of the most intense political repression in American history, the so-called "Red Scare" of 1919-20. The police trap they had fallen into had been set for a comrade of theirs, who was suspected mainly because he was a foreign-born radical.
Anarchist militants
While neither of them had any previous criminal record, they were long recognised by the authorities as anarchist militants who had been widely involved in labour strikes, political agitation and anti-war propaganda and who had had many serious clashes with the law. They were also known to be strong supporters of Luigi Galleani's Italian-language journal Cronaca Sovversiva, the most influential anarchist organ in America, feared by the authorities for its militancy and acceptance of revolutionary violence.
When initial police questioning focused on their radical activities and not on the specifics of the Braintree crime, Sacco and Vanzetti lied in response. This created a "consciousness of guilt" in the minds of the authorities but the implications of the phrase soon became a central issue in their case.
Did the two men's lies mean criminal involvement in the Braintree murders, as the authorities claimed, or did they signify an understandable attempt to hide their radicalism and protect their friends during a time of national hysteria about foreign-born radicals, as their supporters were to claim?
Left Italy in 1908
But who were Sacco and Vanzetti? Both had left Italy in 1908, seeking opportunity in the "land of the free". They did not come from peasant families but from modestly prosperous farming backgrounds, Sacco from the south of Italy and Vanzetti from the north. While they were concerned with earning a living, neither seems to have been overly preoccupied with becoming rich. All they wanted, according to Vanzetti, was "a little land to grow, a roof, some books".
At the time of his arrest, Sacco was 29, having been in America since he was 17. He was married to Rosina, also Italian, and they had a son called Dante. He was a hard worker and good family man. Before his arrest he had been averaging the reasonably good sum of $50 a week and had saved $1,500.
His employer, Michael Kelly, the owner of the 3K Shoe Factory in Stoughton, Massachusetts, thought highly of him. "A man who is in his garden at four o'clock in the morning, and at the factory at seven, and in his garden again after supper until nine and ten at night, carrying water and raising vegetables beyond his own needs which he would bring to me to give to the poor, that man is not a 'holdup man'."
At the outbreak of the first World War, both Sacco and Vanzetti moved to Mexico, along with about 60 other Italians. They did so not so much to evade the draft, but to support Galleani's argument that the war was a capitalist, not a proletarian one.
But after a few months Sacco became homesick for his family and returned home and to his old job.
Vanzetti was 32 when arrested. He had left Italy when his mother, whom he had looked after through a long illness, died. He was similar to James Connolly in that he was a voracious reader, self-taught and a political philosopher. He had worked at various jobs before the war.
After the armistice, he returned from Mexico and bought a handcart from which he sold fish. Although he never married, he was a close friend to several families and was a surrogate father to a number of young people. He lived simply, did not drink and his only indulgences were his books and his pipe.
The evidence that convicted the two men was extremely dubious.
'Draft dodging'
Their anarchistic beliefs were introduced into their trial in order to incriminate them. With Judge Thayer's assistance, the jury was prejudiced in this way. The prosecution played on the jury's patriotism by questioning the two's "draft dodging".
A number of appeals followed during the six years between their original sentencing and execution. Amazingly, Massachusetts's law of the time permitted Thayer to act upon the appeals, which got nowhere as a result.
On August 23rd, 1977, 50 years to the day of their execution, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts issued a proclamation completely upholding Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence. They weren't pardoned for that would have been a declaration that they were guilty. It was more in the nature of an apology.