1. Sacco and Vanzetti
Martyrs or criminals?

2. If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life talking on street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words-our lives- our pains, nothing! The taking of our lives-lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish- peddler-all! That last moment belongs to us-that agony is our triumph.
What strikes you first about this?
What is significant about the spelling/grammar/diction? What can you infer about the speaker?
How do you feel the men are being portrayed?
What words or phrases give you insight into what this image is trying to convey?
What do you think happened to these guys?

3. Context: 1920s Red Scare
Red Scare=the intense fear of communism and its potential spread throughout the United States against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution and labor unrest at home
Americans felt that communists were behind labor strikes, and largely associated immigrants with radicalism and subversive behavior
Americans wanted a “return to normalcy” at this time. Recall the Palmer Raids

4. The Crime
On April 15, 1920, a factory paymaster and his guard were robbed and murdered in South Braintree, Massachusetts
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were apprehended shortly thereafter
Both men were working-class Italian immigrants
Both men were known anarchists, proclaiming themselves to be against war, violence, and oppressive governments
What strikes you first about this?
What is significant about word choice/spelling/grammar? What can you infer about the speaker?
How do you feel the men are being portrayed?
What words or phrases give you insight as to what this image is trying to convey?

5. The Trial
The pair went on trial and were found guilty of first-degree murder on July 14, 1921
A series of appeals were denied by the Massachusetts Supreme Court
By 1925, the case was receiving international attention, with protests being held in every major city in Europe and North America
Appeals were requested based on recanted testimony, conflicting ballistics evidence, a prejudicial pre-trial statement by the jury foreman, and a confession of an alleged participant in the robbery

6. The Execution
“As the guards were finishing their work Sacco cried out in Italian: "Long live anarchy."
In English he shouted: "Farewell, my wife and child, and all my friends!"
He has two children, Dante, 14, and Inez, 6, but his difficulty in speaking English and the excitement of the occasion were responsible for the slip.
"Good evening, gentlemen," he said, jerkily. Then came his last words: "Farewell, mother."
Warden Hendry waited until Sacco apparently was satisfied that there was no more to say. Then he gave the signal. Sacco was pronounced dead at 12:19:02.”
-From The New York Times, August 23, 1927
Does this portray Sacco in a positive or a negative light?

7. Relevance
The trial and subsequent execution of Sacco and Vanzetti brought up many pervasive issues of the 1920s:
The battle of the American labor movement
The inherent ideological clash between capitalism and socialism
The exploitation of immigrants seeking acceptance and equality in 1920s America
The imperfections of the criminal justice system

8. Sympathy In Popular Culture: Woody Guthrie
All you people ought to be like me, And work like Sacco and Vanzetti; And every day find some ways to fight On the union side for workers' rights. I've got no time to tell this tale, The dicks and bulls are on my trail; But I'll remember these two good men That died to show me how to live.
Musical social commentator of the early 20th century-unionist with socialist leanings
“This machine kills fascists”

9. The Investigation of Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair, American author and muckraker (a journalist working to expose social failings and corruption) set out to expose the innocence of the two men in his work, Boston (1929)
Later evidence reveals that Sinclair thought the men were guilty:
“I face the most difficult ethical problem of my life…I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case….But it's much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, because this is what readers expect.”
Also responsible for The Jungle (1906)
Sinclair himself was a socialist, basically admitted it was more convenient for him to come to the conclusion that the men were innocent

10. A Larger Truth?
Upton Sinclair, Woody Guthrie, and other famous defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti (Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay) had socialist sympathies or leaned extremely politically to the left – bias?
Sinclair’s biographer on Boston: “There was repression in America and that was his subject… and that innocent people sometimes were found guilty.”
Even if the men were guilty, to many, they came to represent the bigger picture
Poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts”
Parker was arrested at a protest for the men

11. “He'd been concerned through most of his life, which, he was born in 1878, so he grew up in a period of enormous turmoil, and he was concerned that there was going to be a war, a literal war, not a figurative one, between labor and capital. So even if the men were guilty, I think he felt that the climate of opinion and the representation of their foreignness, they were Italian, and their political beliefs, which were anarchism, had almost condemned them out of hand before they had a chance at a fair trial.”

12. The Evidence
What do YOU think? Did they have a fair trial? Was popular culture of the period justified in defending Sacco and Vanzetti, considering the evidence?