Sacco and Vanzetti and the Immigrant Threat

Abstract

The anti-immigrant sentiment in America in the 1920s, exemplified by the case against Sacco and Vanzetti, provides a pertinent reminder of the power of nativism as an establishment faces threatening social changes.

Lethal bombs exploding on American soil, suspicions about immigrant groups harboring terrorists, a drive to close the borders to unassimilable foreigners—this isn’t just today, it’s also the 1920s, a similar period of turmoil around immigration and the ethno-racial divisions that arise from it.

One case and two names symbolized the contradictions of the era for Americans in the ‘20s: Sacco and Vanzetti. Before two anarchist Italian immigrants were executed for their alleged involvement in a robbery and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston), their case became a cause célèbre among Americans, divided by their views of the men’s guilt or innocence.

Nine decades on, we can look back at this case to recognize how easily justice is perverted by the intensifying perception of immigrants as “enemies” of American institutions. These perceptions are vulnerable to exploitation in uncertain times like the immediate post-World War I period. Then, as now, some immigrant groups were widely believed to be inferior to ordinary white Americans and unsuitable for assimilation into the mainstream.

Nativism

By World War I, decades of mass immigration to the U.S.—the zenith was the first decade of the century—had produced a huge population of foreign origin. The twentieth-century high-water mark for immigrants in the population, 15 percent, was reached in 1910. In the largest American cities outside the South, immigrants and the second generation (those who’d grown up in immigrant homes) made up the majority of residents.

World War I triggered profound anxieties about the foreign born. Americans worried that immigrant communities from countries that were now enemy powers could shelter conspiratorial groups that would bring the war to the homeland through sabotage and propaganda. Just as is true today, native-born Americans thought language marked distance from the mainstream; a number of states passed laws to ban the teaching of foreign languages, particularly German.

The war ushered in a period of superpatriotism, when “100 percent Americanism” became the slogan of the day and the federal government passed laws to suppress and punish dissent. After the war ended, anxieties focused, during the Red Scare of 1919-20, on political radicals and labor organizers. Again, immigrant communities appeared in the crosshairs, and the Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, ordered raids on foreign-born radicals for the purpose of deportation. Anarchist groups, often anchored among Italian communities, responded with bombing campaigns, one of which reached the front steps of Palmer’s Washington, D.C. residence.

From the Boston Daily Globe, October 2, 1923.

Such events lent momentum to the long-term drive to limit immigration, especially for groups viewed as undesirable according to their race, religion, or national origin. Scientific racism, then widely accepted by even educated Americans, provided the theories and evidence (collected, in part, with the newly developed IQ test) to regard most of the recently immigrated groups as inherently inferior.

Asians had already been mostly eliminated from the immigrant stream (starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), but now the targets became the heavily Catholic and Jewish immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The Ku Klux Klan revived in the early 1920s, this time in northern cities, as Protestant whites mobilized against the interlopers. In 1921 and 1924, Congress passed immigration laws that, “at long last” in the eyes of many native-born Americans, shut the golden door to the U.S. These laws stipulated nationality quotas that discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans. The Italians, the most numerous of the immigrant groups, saw their annual limit for entrants set at less than 6,000, about 3 percent of the 200,000 newcomers they’d averaged in the early years of the century.

Enter Sacco and Vanzetti

In April 1920, a gang pulled off a brazen robbery outside a South Braintree shoe factory. Two bandits gunned down the payroll master and his guard as they walked down the street, shooting the guard repeatedly from close range in an apparent execution. A car with three other men raced in to pick up the gunmen and their loot (almost $16,000) and sped away. The crime played out in full view of numerous witnesses.

A few weeks later, two different plotlines intersected when police in a nearby town arrested Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both carrying loaded revolvers on a streetcar. The men were part of a small contingent of Italian-born anarchists who were out that evening in an unsuccessful attempt to pick up and hide materials belonging to their group. Leaflets? Dynamite? No one knows for sure, but they were acting out of fear that the group had been fingered by two New York anarchists who’d been detained and interrogated for weeks by the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI). The police for their part had set a trap for anarchists they suspected of the South Braintree crime and of a failed Christmas Eve robbery in nearby Bridgewater.

Sacco and Vanzetti were exhibited to numerous witnesses of the crimes, most of whom failed to recognize them. Still believing they’d been arrested for their anarchism and wanting to protect their comrades, the men gave false and evasive answers to police questions. Later, this behavior was viewed in court as betraying “consciousness of guilt” and weighed heavily against them. In the event, the local police chief, Michael Stewart, a key player in the drama to come, was certain that he had his men and convinced the district attorney, Frederick Katzmann, to prosecute. Sacco and Vanzetti were trapped in a vise that would tighten relentlessly until they were dead.

Vanzetti went on trial first, for the Bridgewater robbery. (Sacco could not be tried for this crime because he could prove that he was at work when it occurred.) The trial foretold what was to come. Eyewitness testimony placing Vanzetti at the scene was thin, and his defense presented numerous Italian witnesses who said that he was elsewhere that day, selling eels, a customary Christmas Eve food in Italian families. But the alibi testimony, often requiring translation into English, counted for little, as the district attorney deployed courtroom tricks, asking the Italian witnesses to recall their experiences on randomly chosen dates to undermine their reliability. Vanzetti was convicted, and Judge Webster Thayer, who’d preside at the next trial as well, sentenced him to an exceptionally long period in prison—12 to 15 years—for the failed robbery.

The Sacco and Vanzetti case suggests how easily justice is perverted by the perception of immigrants as “enemies.”

The next trial, for the South Braintree robbery and murders, would make world history. Against Sacco, district attorney Katzmann presented a series of eyewitnesses who identified him as a gunman (the jury was not told about the more numerous witnesses who’d not recognized Sacco as one of the bandits). The courtroom testimony often deviated from what the witnesses had told investigators shortly after the crimes, and the defense tried its best to highlight the contradictions. Sacco’s alibi, that he’d been in Boston attempting to secure an Italian passport to return home, was supported by defense witnesses and the affidavit of an Italian consular official. But his fate was sealed by ballistics tests that purported to show that a bullet from his gun had killed the guard.

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was only one luminary arrested in Boston protests in the summer of 1927.

Against Vanzetti, the evidence was much weaker. No witnesses placed him at the crime scene, though a few claimed to have seen him subsequently in the getaway car. The prosecution presented the theory that the gun in his possession when he was arrested had been taken from the dying guard. His alibi was that he was on the streets hawking fish that day, but the claim was hard to prove.

Though the evidence on which the trial turned has been analyzed and disputed ever since, the jury took just three hours to convict the two men of a capital crime. The verdict did not end the drama; it merely brought down the curtain on the first act. Between the close of the trial in July 1921 and the execution of the two men in August 1927 lay six long years of appeals, controversy over their guilt and the fairness of the trial, and national and international mobilization on their behalf.

In those years, the defense filed multiple motions for new trials, which were heard and rejected by Judge Thayer and higher courts as well. In 1926, Herbert Ehrmann, a defense lawyer who would devote his life to the case, assembled evidence that a known Providence, RI criminal gang, the Morellis, had carried out the crime. The possibility of a new trial was rejected again.

Appeals exhausted, Judge Thayer finally imposed the mandatory sentence of death in the spring of 1927. All hope was not yet extinguished, though: the governor could grant clemency. But, wary of acting on such a controversial case, he asked a three-man committee of luminaries, including the presidents of Harvard and MIT, to review it. Though they listened to extensive presentations from the defense, even evidence about the alternative theory of the crime, their report found the trial fair and the original verdict correct, thus paving the way for the executions.

Closing Ranks

The Sacco and Vanzetti case shows how an ethnically unified establishment can close ranks against outsiders, especially against those who are viewed as social and moral inferiors. In the process, those with power can pervert justice, acting in ways that they would probably condemn in others, but viewing their own actions as morally justified. One of the defenses frequently offered on behalf of those who sent Sacco and Vanzetti to their deaths is that they were “honorable” men, incapable of the perversions of justice that are apparent in retrospect (such as the subornation of perjury by the prosecution). Honorable they may have been, but when facing what they view as a crisis, those in power will generally do what they deem necessary to protect an established order in which they occupy positions of privilege.

None of the establishment actors from Sacco and Vanzetti’s case escapes with honor intact. Not only did the prosecution put eyewitnesses on the stand who gave trial testimony that deviated considerably from what they’d previously told investigators, but some were explicitly coached to tailor their testimony to the prosecution’s case. For instance, a shipping clerk appeared as a prosecution witness to tell about his observation of the getaway car loitering on a nearby street hours before the robbery, but he was urged to omit mention of a second car, whose driver appeared to be in communication with the other. Two cars might have suggested a more professional operation than immigrant anarchists were capable of mounting.

One of the most devastating misrepresentations involved Vanzetti. The theory presented to the jurors that the pistol in his possession had been taken from the dying guard was known by prosecutors to be false by the time of the trial. When the police records of the case were unsealed a half century later, the files of Michael Stewart, the police chief, revealed that his men had uncovered the original sales record for the guard’s gun, which proved it wasn’t the gun found on Vanzetti.

Prosecutor Katzmann’s final remark had addressed the jurors as native-born Americans: “Stand together you men of Norfolk.” And stand together they did. Interviewed many years later, they were unwavering in their views of the case and refused to consider the possibility that prejudice of any sort played a role in their deliberations. Yet they took remarkably little time to convict two men of a capital crime, even though the evidence was contradictory and against Vanzetti, meager. (And sometimes ludicrous, as when one witness who claimed to have seen Vanzetti in the getaway car also stated that Vanzetti had yelled a warning in idiomatic, unaccented English. Vanzetti, like Sacco, spoke a stilted English with a strong accent.)

Between the close of the trial and the execution lay six long years of appeals, controversy, and international mobilization.

The role of Judge Thayer was controversial even at the time. Some observers recalled an icy courtroom atmosphere, where the hostility toward immigrants was almost palpable. The judge’s contempt for the defense’s lead lawyer, Fred Moore, was undisguised. Thayer had asked to preside at the South Braintree case, and he heard and rejected all of the appeals. His hostile attitudes burst through in private comments that were made public. At one of his clubs, he opined, “These two men are anarchists; they are guilty… They are not getting a fair trial but I am working it so their counsel will think they are.”

Then there’s the governor’s committee of advisors, who lent their prestige to a dubious verdict. Its three members, including Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, knew their review was the final step before execution, and seemed to take their responsibility seriously (they rebuked Judge Thayer for breaching the neutrality of his role with prejudiced outbursts, for instance). In the end, though they may have had reservations about the case, they stood with the establishment. Their hesitant conclusion about Vanzetti expresses the awkwardness of their position: “On the whole, we are of the opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond reasonable doubt.”

These indictments of establishment actors don’t mean that Sacco and Vanzetti lacked for influential supporters. The case became a cause célèbre, both in the U.S. and abroad. Prominent among the supporters were radicals like Moore, who, as the lead defense lawyer during the trial, helped to raise the profile of the case to the international plane. Also flocking to their cause were intellectuals such as the novelist Upton Sinclair and the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. In addition, members of minority groups, such as the Jewish future Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard professor, made common cause with the two Italian immigrants. Upper-class Boston women, perhaps conscious of their recent suffrage struggle, supported the men with jail visits and English lessons.

Others saw the case as a test of the American system. After Moore left the case due to a dispute with Sacco, the two men were represented by the Brahmin lawyer William Thompson, who was convinced of the men’s innocence. Harvard’s president Lowell was harassed by alumni for linking the university’s name to what they perceived as a miscarriage of justice. Many ordinary Americans were skeptical of the trial and the verdicts; on the night of the executions, men and women kept vigil throughout the world.

Were They Guilty Anyway?

One hindsight defense of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial is that, though the judicial process may have been highly imperfect, it got the right men: Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, or, in another version, only Sacco was. Some present-day conservatives, such as commentator Ann Coulter, deride the notion of Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence as yet another liberal delusion.

Without question, Sacco and Vanzetti were militant anarchists. They belonged to a group that preached violence against capitalism and the state, but the two men did not come to the U.S. as anarchists. Like thousands of other Italian immigrants at the time, they were radicalized by the harsh conditions under which they labored and lived and the discriminatory treatment they received at the hands of many native-born white Americans. They knew men who planted bombs, sometimes with lethal consequences. One of their friends, perhaps stumbling as he carried his bomb to Attorney General Palmer’s house, blew himself up in front of it. Yet there is no indication that Sacco and Vanzetti participated in bombings.

Nativism’s powers are contingent, vulnerable to shifts in the social landscape.

The weight of the evidence speaks against the guilt of either man when it comes to the crimes for which they were convicted and executed. This evidence is negative in part, consisting of questions that, implausibly, have no answer. For one thing, no trace of the stolen money was ever found, though police went to great lengths, even asking Italian authorities to search the trunks of an immigrant anarchist who left the U.S. shortly after the robbery. Nor did the anarchist groups connected to Sacco and Vanzetti, which had been infiltrated by the authorities, show any sudden cash infusions. The failure to find the money strongly suggests the police were looking in the wrong place.

The accomplices in the robbery were never identified either. The anarchists in Sacco and Vanzetti’s circle were investigated by the police, who initially believed they’d stumbled on a criminal band. However, no one else was ever tried for the South Braintree crime (and historians sifting the evidence have subsequently ruled out most of these men as potential participants). Moreover, the group involved in the crime was likely larger than the five bandits observed fleeing the scene (a second car was almost certainly involved in the getaway). This level of organization suggests a gang of professionals (as the Bureau of Investigation believed at the time), not an opportunistic handful of radicals.

There can be little doubt about Vanzetti’s innocence. The evidence against him is so paltry that there’s simply no reason to connect him to the South Braintree crime. Sacco remains the hard case, and his guilt or innocence can probably never be established in a way that will convince everyone. The ballistic evidence presented at trial has withstood the newer technologies that have been applied to it. That is, the bullet that was alleged to have mortally wounded the guard was fired, we can now be certain, by Sacco’s gun.

However, the problems with the conclusion that he was guilty lie with everything else. Sacco was a family man with young children; by the time of the South Braintree robberies, he was a skilled worker earning good pay and with a considerable sum of money in the bank. He lived next door to his Irish-American employer, whose trust in him was not ended by the criminal charges. He had a credible alibi for the time of the crime, supported by an Italian consular official. Why would such a man engage in this sort of crime? Why would his anarchist comrades, some of whom were unmarried and had less to lose, bring him into the risky enterprise and give him the role of gunman?

If Sacco was innocent, then someone tampered with the ballistic evidence. There’s a plausible case to be made here. A scrupulous analysis of the trial evidence by historians William Young and David Kaiser (in their book, Postmortem) found the bullets presented by the prosecution conflicted with eyewitness testimony—supposedly only one bullet came from Sacco’s gun, though every witness reported the gunman firing several shots at the guard from close range. Even Young and Kaiser, though, can’t explain convincingly how a bullet substitution could have been carried out.

Past to Present

Among other things, the Sacco and Vanzetti case illustrates the power of nativism in the hands of an establishment facing threatening social changes. One strategy its members pursue to protect position and privilege involves brightening the boundary between the mainstream and ethno-racial outsiders, highlighting that “they” are not “us.” This is most effective when the boundary is already visible and legitimate to the broad majority population. The boundary that in the early 20^th century kept southern and eastern Europeans from easy access to the mainstream entailed social distinctions, including religious ones, with deep roots in American history and identity.

Sacco and Vanzetti, handcuffed together outside the courthouse after learning that they’d been sentenced to death by electrocution.

The nativism of today exhibits similar features. As was true a century ago, immigration is bringing about social changes that seem threatening to many majority Americans. The analogy is especially strong in terms of demographic shift: a hundred years ago, the changes threatened the position of Protestants of northern and western European ancestry; today, it’s the position of a broader group of white Americans that is challenged. The tropes of criminality and threat to American institutions are as vital to nativism today as in the past. They’re most potent when invoked in relation to already salient social distinctions, such as that between immigrant Latinos and native Anglos in the Southwest. The response of many majority Americans has been to support measures that place large portions of the immigrant population under suspicion and state surveillance, exemplified in the extreme by Arizona’s 2010 law empowering local police to detain those they suspect are unauthorized immigrants.

Yet, in the midst of a period of intense nativism, it’s easy to exaggerate the power of an establishment, and of the majority group more generally, and impose an enduring, inferior status on minorities. That view can lead to a mistaken emphasis on social reproduction at the expense of opportunities for change. In the case of the Italians, within three decades of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, they were well on their way to mass entry into the mainstream. That a minority group deemed inferior in the first half of a century could become part of the majority during the second half demonstrates that the exclusionary power of an establishment is not unlimited.

A repetition of mid-20th century mass assimilation is not in the cards, at least for the foreseeable future, but the determinative power of today’s nativism may also turn out to be limited. The most critical factor will be the demographically-driven transition to a more diverse society that is already underway. It will likely offer opportunities to alter the balance of power in American society: that is, because of the shrinking number of white Americans in young age groups, the U.S. of the near future will almost certainly depend on young people from immigrant backgrounds to assume positions of leadership in the labor force and elsewhere. How this transition plays out, on the ground in everyday relationships as well as in the economy and the polity, will do much to determine the exclusionary—or inclusive—force of 21^st century ethno-racial boundaries.

The ultimate significance of the Sacco and Vanzetti case remains as paradoxical as some of the events themselves. While the men’s fate demonstrates that nativism can even assume life-and-death powers, the subsequent integration of Italians reminds us that its powers are contingent, vulnerable to shifts in the social landscape and to the resistance of anti-nativists. This gives a new twist to the eloquent epitaph spoken by Vanzetti to a journalist a few months before the executions: “If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out of my life talking at 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 can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as now we do by our dying.”