Nicola Sacco & Bartolomeo Vanzetti Part IV

 Massachusetts judicial reform

Following the SJC's assertion that it could not order a new trial even if there was new evidence that "would justify a different verdict"; a movement for "drastic reform" quickly took shape in Boston's legal community. In December 1927, four months after the executions, the Massachusetts Judicial Council cited the Sacco and Vanzetti case as evidence of "serious defects in our methods of administering justice." It proposed a series of changes designed to appeal to both sides of the political divide, including restrictions on the number and timing of appeals. Its principal proposal addressed the SJC's right to review. It argued that a judge would benefit from a full review of a trial, and that no one man should bear the burden in a capital case. A review could defend a judge whose decisions were challenged and make it less likely that a governor would be drawn into a case. It asked for the SJC to have right to order a new trial "upon any ground if the interests of justice appear to inquire it." Governor Fuller endorsed the proposal in his January 1928 annual message.

The Judicial Council repeated its recommendations in 1937 and 1938. Finally, in 1939, the language it had proposed was adopted. Since that time, the SJC has been required to review all death penalty cases, to consider the entire case record, and to affirm or overturn the verdict on the law and on the evidence or "for any other reason that justice may require" (Mass. General Laws, 1939 ch. 341)

Historical viewpoints

Many historians, especially legal historians, have concluded the Sacco and Vanzetti prosecution, trial, and aftermath constituted a blatant disregard for political civil liberties, and especially criticizes Thayer's decision to deny a retrial.

John W. Johnson has said that the authorities and jurors were influenced by strong anti-Italian prejudice and the prejudice against immigrants widely held at the time, especially in New England. Against charges of racism and racial prejudice, Paul Avrich and Brenda and James Lutz point out that both men were known anarchist members of a militant organization, members of which had been conducting a violent campaign of bombing and attempted assassinations, acts condemned by most Americans of all backgrounds. Though in general anarchist groups did not finance their militant activities through bank robberies, a fact noted by the investigators of the Bureau of Investigation, this was not true of the Galleanist group. Mario Buda readily told an interviewer: "Andavamo a prenderli dove c'erano" ("We used to go and get it [money] where it was")—meaning factories and banks. The guard Berardelli was also Italian.

Johnson and Avrich suggest that the government prosecuted Sacco and Vanzetti for the robbery-murders as a convenient means to put a stop to their militant activities as Galleanists, whose bombing campaign at the time posed a lethal threat, both to the government and too many Americans. Faced with a secretive underground group whose members resisted interrogation and believed in their cause, Federal and local officials using conventional law enforcement tactics had been repeatedly stymied in their efforts to identify all members of the group or to collect enough evidence for a prosecution.

Most historians believe that Sacco and Vanzetti were involved at some level in the Galleanist bombing campaign, although their precise roles have not been determined. In 1955, Charles Poggi, a longtime anarchist and American citizen, traveled to Savignano in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy to visit old comrades, including the Galleanists' principal bombmaker, Mario "Mike" Buda. While discussing the Braintree robbery, Buda told Poggi, "Sacco c'era" (Sacco was there). Poggi added that he "had a strong feeling that Buda himself was one of the robbers, though I didn't ask him and he didn't say." Whether Buda and Ferruccio Coacci, whose shared rental house contained the manufacturer's diagram of a .32 Savage automatic pistol (matching the .32 Savage pistol believed to have been used to shoot both Berardelli and Parmenter), had also participated in the Braintree robbery and murders would remain a matter of speculation.

Later evidence and investigations

In 1941, anarchist leader Carlo Tresca, a member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee, told Max Eastman, "Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent", although it is clear from his statement that Tresca equated guilt only with the act of pulling the trigger, i.e., Vanzetti was not the principal triggerman in Tresca's view, but was an accomplice to Sacco. This conception of innocence is in sharp contrast to the legal one. Both The Nation and The New Republic refused to publish Tresca's revelation, which Eastman said occurred after he pressed Tresca for the truth about the two men's involvement in the shooting. The story finally appeared in National Review in October 1961. Others who had known Tresca confirmed that he had made similar statements to them, but Tresca's daughter insisted her father never hinted at Sacco's guilt. Others attributed Tresca's revelations to his disagreements with the Galleanists.

Labor organizer Anthony Ramuglia, an anarchist in the 1920s, said in 1952 that a Boston anarchist group had asked him to be a false alibi witness for Sacco. After agreeing, he had remembered that he had been in jail on the day in question, so he could not testify.

Both Sacco and Vanzetti had previously fled to Mexico, changing their names in order to evade draft registration, a fact the prosecutor in their murder trial used to demonstrate their lack of patriotism and which they were not allowed to rebut. Sacco and Vanzetti's supporters would later argue that the men fled the country to avoid persecution and conscription; their critics said they left to escape detection and arrest for militant and seditious activities in the United States. However, a 1953 Italian history of anarchism written by anonymous colleagues revealed a different motivation:

Several dozen Italian anarchists left the United States for Mexico. Some have suggested they did so because of cowardice. Nothing could be more false. The idea to go to Mexico arose in the minds of several comrades who were alarmed by the idea that, remaining in the United States, they would be forcibly restrained from leaving for Europe, where the revolution that had burst out in Russia that February promised to spread all over the continent.

In October 1961, ballistic tests were run with improved technology on Sacco's Colt semi-automatic pistol. The results confirmed that the bullet that killed Berardelli in 1920 was fired from Sacco's pistol. The Thayer court's habit of mistakenly referring to Sacco's .32 Colt pistol as well as any other automatic pistol as a "revolver" (a common custom of the day) has sometimes mystified later-generation researchers attempting to follow the forensic evidence trail.

In 1987, Charlie Whipple, a former Boston Globe editorial page editor, revealed a conversation that he had with Sergeant Edward J. Seibolt in 1937. According to Whipple, Seibolt said that "we switched the murder weapon in that case", but indicated that he would deny this if Whipple ever printed it. However, at the time of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, Seibolt was only a patrolman, and did not work in the Boston Police ballistics department; Seibolt died in 1961 without corroborating Whipple's story. In 1935, Captain Charles Van Amburgh, a key ballistics witness for the prosecution, wrote a six-part article on the case for a pulp detective magazine. Van Amburgh described a scene in which Thayer caught defense ballistics expert Hamilton trying to leave the courtroom with Sacco's gun. However, Thayer said nothing about such a move during the hearing on the gun barrel switch and refused to blame either side. Following the private hearing on the gun barrel switch, Van Amburgh kept Sacco's gun in his house, where it remained until the Boston Globe did an exposé in 1960.

In 1973, a former mobster published a confession by Frank "Butsy" Morelli, Joe's brother. "We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery", Butsy Morelli told Vincent Teresa. "These two greaseballs Sacco and Vanzetti took it on the chin."

Before his death in June 1982, Giovanni Gambera, a member of the four-person team of anarchist leaders who met shortly after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti to plan their defense, told his son that "everyone [in the anarchist inner circle] knew that Sacco was guilty and that Vanzetti was innocent as far as the actual participation in killing."

Months before he died, the distinguished jurist Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr., who had presided for 45 years on the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, wrote to Russell stating, "I myself am persuaded by your writings that Sacco was guilty." The judge's assessment was significant, because he was one of Felix Frankfurter's "Hot Dogs", and Justice Frankfurter had advocated his appointment to the federal bench.

The Los Angeles Times published an article on December 24, 2005, "Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Exposé", which references a newly discovered letter from Upton Sinclair to attorney John Beardsley in which Sinclair, a socialist writer famous for his muckraking novels, revealed a conversation with Fred Moore, attorney for Sacco and Vanzetti. In that conversation, in response to Sinclair's request for the truth, Moore stated that both Sacco and Vanzetti were in fact guilty, and that Moore had fabricated their alibis in an attempt to avoid a guilty verdict. The Los Angeles Times interprets subsequent letters as indicating that, to avoid loss of sales to his radical readership, particularly abroad, and due to fears for his own safety, Sinclair didn't change the premise of his novel in that respect. However, Sinclair also expressed in those letters doubts as to whether Moore deserved to be trusted in the first place, and he did not actually assert the innocence of the two in the novel, focusing instead on the argument that the trial they got was not fair.

Dukakis proclamation

In 1977, as the 50th anniversary of the executions approached, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis asked the Office of the Governor's Legal Counsel to report on "whether there are substantial grounds for believing—at least in the light of the legal standards of today—that Sacco and Vanzetti were unfairly convicted and executed" and recommend an appropriate action. The resulting "Report to the Governor in the Matter of Sacco and Vanzetti" detailed grounds for doubting that the trial was conducted fairly in the first instance, and argued as well that such doubts were only reinforced by "later-discovered or later-disclosed evidence". The report questioned prejudicial cross-examination that the trial judge allowed, the judge's hostility, the fragmentary nature of the evidence, and eyewitness testimony that came to light after the trial. It found the judge's charge to the jury troubling for the way it emphasized the defendants' behavior at the time of their arrest and highlighted certain physical evidence that was later called into question. The report also dismissed the argument that the trial had been subject to judicial review, noting that "the system for reviewing murder cases at the time ... failed to provide the safeguards now present."

Based on recommendations which were made by the Office of Legal Counsel, Dukakis declared that August 23, 1977, the 50th anniversary of their execution was Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. His proclamation, issued in English and Italian, stated that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." He did not pardon them, because that would imply they were guilty. Neither did he assert their innocence. A resolution to censure Dukakis failed in the Massachusetts Senate by a vote of 23 to 12. Dukakis later expressed regret only for not reaching out to the families of the victims of the crime.

Later tributes

A memorial committee tried to present a plaster cast which was constructed in 1937 by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, to Massachusetts governors and Boston mayors in 1937, 1947, and 1957 without success. On August 23, 1997, on the 70th anniversary of the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, Boston's first Italian-American Mayor, Thomas Menino, and the Italian-American Governor of Massachusetts, Paul Cellucci, unveiled the work at the Boston Public Library, where it remains on display:

"The city's acceptance of this piece of artwork is not intended to reopen debate about the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti," Menino said. "It is intended to remind us of the dangers of miscarried justice, and the right we all have to a fair trial."

The event occasioned a renewed debate about the fairness of the trial in the editorial pages of the Boston Herald.

A mosaic mural portraying the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti is installed on the main campus of Syracuse University. In Braintree, Massachusetts on the corner of French Avenue and Pearl Street, a memorial marks the site of the murders. The memorial has two exhibits. The first is a weatherproof poster that discusses the crime and the subsequent trial. The second exhibit is a metal plaque that memorializes the victims of the crime.

The "Sacco and Vanzetti Centuria" was an American anarchist military unit in the Durruti Column that fought in the Spanish Civil War.

Many sites in the former USSR are named after "Sacco and Vanzetti": for example, a beer production facility in Moscow, a kolkhoz in Donetsk region, Ukraine; and a street and an apartment complex in Yekaterinburg. 'Sacco and Vanzetti' was also a popular brand of Russian pencil from 1930 to 2007. Numerous towns in Italy have streets named after Sacco and Vanzetti, including Via Sacco-Vanzetti in Torremaggiore, Sacco's home town; and Villafalletto, Vanzetti's.

In Bakhmut Raion in Eastern Ukraine, there is Sakko i Vantsetti, a small village which is named after them and it was occupied by Russian forces from Feb to mid-May 2023 during the Battle of Bakhmut.

In 2017, as part of an Eagle Scout project, a plaque was placed outside of Norfolk Superior Court commemorating the trial. The Justinian Law Society of Massachusetts owns the bound transcripts of the trial with a verbatim transcription of testimony, objections, and statements by the attorneys and judge in the case. In 2024, they loaned the books to the Dedham Museum and Archive for curation.

References in popular culture

Plays

James Thurber and Elliot Nugent's 1940 play The Male Animal turns on a college professor's insistence on reading Vanzetti's statement at sentencing to his English composition class. It was adapted as a film the next year, starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland.

In 1992, Argentinian playwright Mauricio Kartun [es] premiered Sacco y Vanzetti: dramaturgia sumario de documentos sobre el caso, under the direction of Jaime Kogan

In 2000, the play Voices on the Wind by Eric Paul Erickson centers around the final hours of the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis recorded an audio clip of his public statement on the 50th anniversary of their execution for the production.

In 2001, Anton Coppola premiered his opera Sacco and Vanzetti.

In 2014, Joseph Silovsky wrote and performed in an Off-Broadway play about Sacco and Vanzetti, Send for the Million Men.

Films and television

Sacco-Vanzetti Story was presented on television in 1960. The two-part drama starred Martin Balsam as Sacco and Steven Hill as Vanzetti.

In 1965, the BBC produced The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler, a TV movie about the case.

Sacco & Vanzetti, a 1971 film by Italian director Giuliano Montaldo covers the case, and it stars Riccardo Cucciolla and Gian Maria Volonté as Sacco and Vanzetti. Joan Baez performed the song "Here's To You" (music by Ennio Morricone, lyrics by Baez) for the film. This same song was later used in the 2009 video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots as well as in its 2015 successor Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes.

In the 1972 comedy film Avanti! An American in Italy played by Jack Lemmon frustratedly asks, "Is this Italian justice?" and gets the response, "What about Sacco and Vanzetti?"

The 2006 documentary Sacco and Vanzetti was directed by Peter Miller. Produced by Peter Miller and Editor Amy Linton, the film presents interviews with researchers and historians of the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and it also presents interviews with historians and researchers of their trial. It also presents forensic evidence that refutes the forensic evidence which was used by the prosecution during the trial. Prison letters which were written by the defendants are read by voice actors with Tony Shalhoub as Sacco and John Turturro as Vanzetti. Interviewees include Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel, and Arlo Guthrie.

Sacco and Vanzetti are briefly mentioned in season 1 episode 8 of The Sopranos, with Tony Soprano's son, Anthony Jr., mistaking them for the Antichrist until being corrected that the word he was thinking of was "anarchist".

Sacco and Vanzetti were briefly mentioned in season 4 episode 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, when Asher mentions to Abe "they had great lawyers too and must've been a great comfort to them as they sat in their electric chairs listening to their brains melts".

Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned in season 8, episode 15 of the TV series, The Practice.

Music

In 1927, six Italian- and Neapolitan-language 78 rpm recordings on the topic of Sacco and Vanzetti were recorded by Italian immigrant artists on U.S. record labels: “A morte e Sacco e Vanzetti” (The death of Sacco and Vanzetti) sung by Giuseppe Milano; “I martiri d’un ideale” (Martyrs for an ideal), a spoken-word piece performed by F. De Renzis; “Lacreme ‘e cundannate (ovvero Sacco e Vanzetti)” (Tears for the condemned [or Sacco and Vanzetti]) and “Lettera a Sacco (P’o figlio suoio) (Letter to Sacco [For his son])” sung by Alfredo Bascetta; “Protesta per Sacco e Vanzetti (Protest on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti), performed by the Compagnia Columbia; and “Sacco e Vanzetti” sung by Raoul Romito. The latter two recordings were listed on the Library of Congress’s 2019 National Recording Registry.

In 1932, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger wrote the song "Sacco, Vanzetti" on commission from the Society of Contemporary Music in Philadelphia.

American folk singer Woody Guthrie recorded a series of songs in 1946–1947 known as the Ballads of Sacco & Vanzetti, eventually released in 1960.

In 1963, Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Roger Reynolds set selections of Vanzetti's letters to music in the chamber work Portrait of Vanzetti for narrator, mixed ensemble, and electronics.

American composer Marc Blitzstein started an opera about Sacco and Vanzetti, which was unfinished at the time of his death in 1964; Leonard Lehrman completed the work, Sacco and Vanzetti, which premiered in 2001.

The 1971 song "Here's to You" by Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone is a tribute to them and became a symbol for the human rights movement of the 1970s. Georges Moustaki adapted the song under the new title of "Marche de Sacco et Vanzetti" for his 1971 album Il y avait un jardin (There was a garden).

In 1976, the German folk group Manderley included the song "Sacco's Brief" (Sacco's Letter) on their album Fliegt, Gedanken, fliegt.

American folk singer Charles King wrote the song "Two Good Arms" about Sacco and Vanzetti in 1977 on the 50th anniversary of their death. The song has been performed by Holly Near and Ronnie Gilbert.

The song "Facing the Chair" about Sacco & Vanzetti, composed by Andy Irvine, was recorded by Patrick Street for their 1988 album, No. 2 Patrick Street. Bruce Molsky recorded the song on his 2022 CD, Everywhere You Go.

Written works, paintings

Mosaic "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" by Ben Shahn at Syracuse University (1967)

Mosaic detail of Sacco and Vanzetti lying dead in their coffins, by Ben Shahn

Upton Sinclair's 1928 book Boston is a fictional interpretation of the affair.

H. G. Wells's 1928 book Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island refers to the case and the main character's reaction to it.

In the early 1930s, Ben Shahn produced a series of works related to the case, notably The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. A similar 60-by-12-foot mural by Shahn, executed in marble and enamel, is installed on the east wall of Huntington Beard Crouse Hall at Syracuse University.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story, "Six of One..." (1932), one of the characters is said to have been "arrested in the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations".

The chapter 'Holding the Fort: The Night Sacco and Vanzetti Died' of Frank Moorhouse's 1993 novel Grand Days depicts the violent demonstrations in Geneva following the execution.

In 1935, Maxwell Anderson's award-winning drama Winterset presented the story of a man who attempts to clear the name of his Italian immigrant father who has been executed for robbery and murder. It was adapted as a feature film a year later.

In 1936, the third novel in John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, The Big Money, Mary French works on the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee and is arrested protesting their imminent executions.

James T. Farrell's 1946 novel Bernard Clare uses the anti-Italian sentiment provoked by coverage of the case and the crowd scene in New York City's Union Square awaiting news of the executions as critical plot elements.

Mark Binelli presented the two as a Laurel-and-Hardy-like comedy team in the 2006 novel Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!

The trial is discussed in detail in Kurt Vonnegut's 1979 novel Jailbird, in which Vonnegut suggests that the case—especially Medeiros' confession—is a modern day parallel to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Rick Geary wrote a 2011 graphic novel titled The Lives of Sacco & Vanzetti as part of his Treasury of XXth Century Murder series.

In the novel Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, (Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko) the Institute for Special Technologies is on Sacco and Vanzetti Street.

In the novel Paradies Amerika by Egon Erwin Kisch, Sacco and Vanzetti are mentioned as victims of a "barbaric judicial murder".

Margo Laurie's 2022 novella The Anarchist's Wife is a fictionalized depiction of the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

Poetry

John Dos Passos wrote the poem "They Are Dead Now", about the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.

In his poem "America", Allen Ginsberg presents a catalog of slogans that includes the line: "Sacco and Vanzetti must not die".

Carl Sandburg described the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem "Legal Midnight Hour".

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem after the executions titled "Justice Denied in Massachusetts".

William Carlos Williams wrote a poem entitled "Impromptu: The Suckers" in response to the trial.

The Welsh poet Alun Lewis, who died in World War II, wrote a poem in the form of a dramatic monologue titled "Sacco Writes to his Son".