Sacco-Vanzetti: The End of the Chapter

From its obscure origins the Sacco-Vanzetti case developed into the great American case of the twentieth century, as shattering in its repercussions as the Dreyfus case in France and far more durable. For the Dreyfus case, resolved, has receded into history while that of Sacco and Vanzetti almost half a century after their trial remains a living issue. What began as a casually brutal murder in a small Massachusetts mill town in the spring of 1920, ended seven years later as a world-shaking cause célèbre and in fact as a legend it has never ended. In 1921, some time before the trial took place in Dedham, a reporter from a New York socialist newspaper, who had been sent to Massachusetts, reported back to his editor that “there’s no story in it . . . just a couple of wops in a jam.” In 1927, Stalin, at the All-Union Congress of the Communist Party that banished Trotsky, called the case the most important event since the October Revolution.

The fate of Sacco and Vanzetti became one of those emotion-fraught issues that divide a society. “All right we are two nations,” John Dos Passos wrote after their execution from the depths of his anger in The Big Money. In the prolonged interval between their trial and their deaths, Sacco and Vanzetti grew into symbols of man’s injustice to man. Acquiring the habiliments of martyrdom in their years of imprisonment, they convinced themselves that they were dying for the working class of the world. Some of their adherents— and even the men themselves in their last months—came to see the two anarchist Italians as Christ-figures. “My first lawyer of the defense has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ,” Vanzetti told the court at the time of his sentencing in 1927. The artist Ben Shahn painted a series of pictures which he called The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Malcolm Cowley wrote :

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Francis Russell

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From its obscure origins the Sacco-Vanzetti case developed into the great American case of the twentieth century, as shattering in its repercussions as the Dreyfus case in France and far more durable. For the Dreyfus case, resolved, has receded into history while that of Sacco and Vanzetti almost half a century after their trial remains a living issue. What began as a casually brutal murder in a small Massachusetts mill town in the spring of 1920, ended seven years later as a world-shaking cause célèbre and in fact as a legend it has never ended. In 1921, some time before the trial took place in Dedham, a reporter from a New York socialist newspaper, who had been sent to Massachusetts, reported back to his editor that “there’s no story in it . . . just a couple of wops in a jam.” In 1927, Stalin, at the All-Union Congress of the Communist Party that banished Trotsky, called the case the most important event since the October Revolution.

The fate of Sacco and Vanzetti became one of those emotion-fraught issues that divide a society. “All right we are two nations,” John Dos Passos wrote after their execution from the depths of his anger in The Big Money. In the prolonged interval between their trial and their deaths, Sacco and Vanzetti grew into symbols of man’s injustice to man. Acquiring the habiliments of martyrdom in their years of imprisonment, they convinced themselves that they were dying for the working class of the world. Some of their adherents— and even the men themselves in their last months—came to see the two anarchist Italians as Christ-figures. “My first lawyer of the defense has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ,” Vanzetti told the court at the time of his sentencing in 1927. The artist Ben Shahn painted a series of pictures which he called The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Malcolm Cowley wrote :