Sacco and Vanzetti
An Interview with Richard Polenberg

Richard Polenberg is the Goldwin Smith Professor of American History at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1966. Polenberg is the author of several books, including Fighting Faiths: The Abrams Case, the Supreme Court, and Free Speech (1987). An expert on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, he contributed the introduction to the latest edition of The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case aroused enormous indignation from intellectuals in the 1920's. I think that the case has to do with what America is as a nation and how we define ourselves as a nation and who's included and who's excluded. I think it also raises issues about law in American society and the way in which the law operates, who can expect fair treatment and who can't expect fair treatment. And those are enduring issues.

And so there's the issue of immigration and ethnicity and the case arises in the 1920's with a period of great xenophobia and a strong anti-immigration feeling. It's a period when laws are passed to restrict immigration, and the laws that are passed chiefly restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Italy, of course, being where Sacco and Vanzetti came from.

If not for the Red Scare, if not for the anti-radical sentiment and the activities of radicals in that period, this case probably would not have arisen. These men would not have been arrested, because when they were arrested, there was no evidence linking them to any of the crimes. They were arrested because they seemed to be suspicious characters, and suspicious because they were Italian radicals, Italian anarchists.

Sacco could be described as a loving husband and father, a good family man, a hard worker, a skilled worker, and making a good living working in shoe factories. He seemed to be interested in his son Dante, interested in his friends, interested in his garden, considered to be a good and reliable worker. To all outward appearances, Sacco had actually done very well in America. He had a good income, a steady job, a well established family, and lots of friends. There's no doubt that Sacco was a militant anarchist, that he believed in overturning the existing order and that he would be willing to use violence to do it, because all the people in his anarchist group were willing to do that.

Vanzetti outwardly was quite different. He was not married; he used to say that "anarchism is my beloved." If he had a passion, it was for the movement and for the theory and the philosophy. He did not have the kind of steady job that Sacco had. He didn't have the kind of steady income that Sacco had. He was a fish peddler at the time of the arrest.

He had none of the family stability, family centeredness that Sacco had. He was much more interested in philosophical matters and in reading and thinking about broad philosophical issues. He read more history and more literature than Sacco, so I think he was always more of an idealogue even before the arrest and before the imprisonment. Certainly, once he was in jail, he learned to read English and to write English quite well and spent much of his time doing that.

It's usually thought that anarchism is synonymous with chaos or disorder. And quite the reverse is true; the people who believe in anarchism believed in an orderly society, and they thought that in a society in which there was no government, and there were no laws, and there were no police, and there were no judges, and there was nothing forcing anybody to do the right thing, that people would -- on their own -- do the right thing, because people deep down could be trusted. What was corrupting were economic institutions that exploited people. What went along with this, though, was the notion that the way you create the society is through violent revolution. No existing order -- certainly no capitalism in America -- is going to accept that kind of a change. And so it was up to workers, even a small number of workers in the anarchist movement to arouse the masses. And violence might be one means of doing it.

Mitchell Palmer was the attorney general under Woodrow Wilson. He was attorney general at a time when there was a great deal of radical activity in America in 1919 following the Armistice at the end of the war. The end of the war brought with it enormous social turmoil. There were not only race riots in places like Chicago, but there were very destructive race riots. There were also strikes, and strikes frightened a great many Americans. Partly Americans were frightened because the strikes seemed to be under the leadership of radicals. At the same time, of course, the Russian Revolution and the stated aim of the Russian government to export revolution made Americans fear that they were likely targets. A number of bombs went off on May 1st, on May Day in 1919. And they went off simultaneously in a number of cities, indicating that there was some conspiracy or some plot behind all of this. A bomb exploded outside Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home, doing a great deal of damage, although the Palmer family was not injured. So the combination of a fear of revolution, the turmoil associated with strikes, the actual bombings produced an enormous amount of fear. And the result of this were the Palmer Raids in the winter of 1919, 1920, in which the government swooped down on and seized foreign-born radicals. So, the Palmer Raids stands as an example of a wholesale violation of individuals rights, but one that was a violation that was widely supported by the public at the time.

There had been hold-ups in Bridgewater and in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and so the police were looking for people who had committed those robberies and in fact committed the murders and they were looking for people who fit the description of Italian immigrants.

Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up because the police were looking for people who were involved in radical activities. When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on the streetcar that they were riding that night, and taken to police headquarters and questioned, they did not know they were being questioned in connection with a robbery or a murder. That was never stated to them. They assumed that they were being interrogated because of their involvement with the anarchist movement. And they had been involved with the anarchist movement.

And the background to this is that a good friend of theirs, Andrea Salsedo, had been taken into custody by the federal agents in New York City and was being held in detention there while he was being questioned. And after being held for a number of weeks, he apparently jumped from a fourteenth floor window and was killed.

Vanzetti and the others feared that before his death, Salsedo had told the federal agents about the activities of people like Vanzetti and friends of his. So, Sacco and Vanzetti were both out on an errand, which they later said, at a certain point they said, was to collect anarchist literature. "Anarchist literature" was a well-known euphemism for dynamite. And the two them might very well been trying to hide evidence that might implicate them in some of the bomb scares or actual bomb plots when they were picked up. So naturally when they were arrested, they were not forthcoming. They didn't tell the police the truth about who they were, what their beliefs were, what their purpose had been when they were out that night.

And it always seemed to me that one of the best arguments for their innocence is that, is not that these were men who would not contemplate violence. I think that both of them would contemplate violence, but they would contemplate violence for revolutionary purposes -- violence that had a point, violence that would usher in, in their minds, a new order. These were not people who committed burglaries and who committed hold-ups. That was not the kind of violence that anarchists ever justified.

When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, they were both carrying guns -- different kinds of pistols or revolvers and shells and bullets. And these were hidden under their coats. The controversy concerns whether or not when they were apprehended they made some move to get those guns, that is, did they resist arrest? Later, at the trial, at least one, perhaps more of the police officers, argued that they had either reached for their guns or seemed to put their hand in a way that could have gotten the gun. Vanzetti jumped up at the trial when the policeman said this and accused him of being a liar. Because the issue of whether they resisted arrest would have a lot to do with what they were doing, who they were, whether they were guilty or not.

But the issue of their behavior concerns the so-called "consciousness of guilt" -- it's unlikely they would have been convicted. That is, if someone is innocent and has not done anything wrong, then when you're apprehended by a policeman, you have an open countenance, you ask what the problem is, officer, how can I be of help? If you're guilty, if you have a "consciousness of guilt," then you act in a sullen way or in a devious way, or you don't meet the person's eyes, you try to get away with something and you lie. Well, of course Sacco and Vanzetti lied when they were arrested. They were radicals, they were militants, they had been involved perhaps in plots to overthrow the government, and so they didn't tell the truth. And that came back to haunt them.

The interesting thing, I think, about the trial is that there was sufficient evidence produced for a fair-minded jury to conclude that they were guilty. That is, one doesn't have to assume that the jury was biased or that the jury was prejudiced against Italians or against immigrants or against radicals. One doesn't even have to assume that the judge was prejudiced, although we know that Judge Thayer was. That prejudice didn't have to enter into the courtroom. Enough evidence was there for reasonable people to have found them guilty beyond reasonable doubt. The problem is that the evidence was tainted evidence, and the jury had no way of knowing that.

One of the peculiar characteristics of the Massachusetts system of justice in the 1920s was that the same judge who had presided at the trial would also have the right to hear appeals from the decision, and to decide whether or not a new trial ought to be granted. And so, the Sacco-Vanzetti defense team was obliged to submit its request for a new trial, on the grounds that new evidence had been discovered or something wrong had happened. They had to present this material to Judge Webster Thayer, the same judge who had presided at the first trial. And not surprisingly, Judge Thayer turned down all efforts to have a new trial. Now, today it would appear that there might be a conflict of interest in this. But after turning down one set of appeals, Judge Thayer was walking across the Dartmouth Campus (he was an alumnus of Dartmouth) and had caught up to a professor of constitutional law and political science who was walking across the campus also. It was after a Saturday football game, evidently. And Judge Thayer made the infamous comment, "Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards the other day? That ought to hold them for awhile." The professor later stated publicly that the judge had said this to him, because he thought that Sacco and Vanzetti hadn't received a fair trial.

Inevitably, their supporters idealized them and made them into figures that represented what their supporters wanted them to be. And they did this for a few reasons. They turned them into saint-like figures, or Christ-like figures, crucified by an unfeeling and heartless society, men who love peace and who love justice, and who were good and hard working and were fundamentally peaceful -- peacefully inclined, peace-loving. This was how their supporters wanted to see them. America was becoming more xenophobic and anti-immigrant, and here were immigrants who represented hard-working people.

I think people made them into something that they weren't. Now they were writing to their supporters, they were writing to their family, they talked about memories of what it had been like when they were free, Sacco talked about his children, Vanzetti talked about his work. And so, of course, both were, I think, clever enough to play into what their supporters wanted to hear. They knew what people wanted to make of them and they were perfectly willing to play that role -- why not?

The letters of Sacco and Vanzetti are important because they're the clearest indication we have of what they were really thinking. And the only reason we have those letters is because of what happened to them. The letters were edited about a year after they were electrocuted. And the letters are important because they show the growth that the men underwent, our window into their soul, show their feelings, show their emotions, show their beliefs, and showed them in all their complexity. The letters, unlike the view that people had of them at the time, the letters show all sides of them. The letters are important also because -- especially Vanzetti's use of English, a use of English that's really quite profound and quite moving -- and this was someone who learned English while he was in prison, and yet expressed himself in ways that would make any professor of English quite proud.

There was not a great outcry about the case until 1927 -- until a few months before they were electrocuted. And I think that the reason for that had to do with the efforts of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee. Gardner Jackson, who was a skilled newspaper man, he had been a newspaper man, he was a skilled publicist. He took over the work of that defense committee. And with Mary Donovan and with Aldino Feliconi and others, began to rally public opinion and then artisan intellectuals began to become concerned with the case.

If you ask about Sacco and Vanzetti, these were two men, who in many respects were indistinguishable from anybody else, from any other workers, from any other immigrants, from any other radicals. They were just people who came to the United States and became involved in a certain kind of movement.

If this hasn't gone away, it's because other issues are involved, issues of attitudes toward outsiders in America, who those outsiders are, how the society will treat them, whether it will treat them fairly or not, how prominent Americans react when people are mistreated.