Sacco and Vanzetti
An Interview with Arthur Schlesinger

Author of over twenty books, Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger has become one of the most eminent historians of the 20th century. He served as a special assistant to President Kennedy and has won numerous awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award. He also served as a special assistant to Averell Harriman and worked in both of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns. His father, also a Harvard historian, was close to a number of people involved in the case and the fight to save Sacco & Vanzetti.


I think it's controversial partly because there's an argument about guilt or innocence and it won't go away because it had great impact in the 1920's. Of course, that was some 70 years ago, but impact is embodied in writings and literature. Many writers and intellectuals were much involved in it. And both the mystery of the case and the apparent injustice of the trial are things that linger in people's mind.

Clearly, the procedure in Massachusetts at that point permitted only one trial and the whole thing was a travesty on proper judicial procedure.

It must be remembered that Sacco and Vanzetti were immigrants, they were poor, they were atheists, they were draft dodgers, they were anarchists. They were exactly the kind of person who 100% Americans felt might be guilty of anything. And they were anarchists who believed in, as many anarchists did, in violence as a way of remedying what they regarded as the injustices of society. This was very much out of sync with the predominant American mood in the 1920's. Calvin Coolidge said, "The business of America is business." And then there is a general atmosphere of contentment or, indeed, of complacency over the country, which led Sinclair Lewis to write his satiric novels and so on. So there was kind of a gap between the official mood and the revolt against the so-called lost generation. And for people who felt alienated from the complacency of American life, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was something which attracted their attention and concern.

The war was a popular war and because it was popular, those who opposed it were very unpopular, so it was quite natural, naturally there was legislation against critics of the war. The Espionage Act, for example, was passed in 1917. Some states passed strict laws. There was a Volusk Law in New York State, for example, which was used as an excuse to punish teachers and socialists and the like. War creates a mood of national anxiety and anxiety often leads to repressive legislation.

My father, who was a historian ... joined the Harvard history department in the middle 20's. And at Harvard, he became a very good friend of Felix Frankfurter, professor in the law school, later justice of the Supreme Court. And Felix Frankfurter was very much concerned about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the propriety of the judicial procedures and so. He and a man named Gardner Jackson--Pat Jackson--who was a rumpled, crusading newspaper man who later became the secretary of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee. Pat Jackson and Felix Frankfurter got my father much involved in the case. The atmosphere grew very intense in the summer of 1927.

All appeals had been denied, the execution was set, and it was a sweltering August in Boston, Massachusetts. One day the writer John Dos Passos, the famous novelist, burst into my father's office at Widener Library, and had the great idea that he should rent a colonial costume, get on a horse,and ride through the countryside like Paul Revere saying, "Save Sacco and Vanzetti" -- an adventure from which my father, with difficulty, dissuaded him.

Irate intellectuals were much agitated by the case because it seemed to them a case of rank injustice and it seemed to them a case where the people they disliked, the merchants and the businessmen, the people who...stood, in their view, for censorship and repression--this was the logical culmination of an attitude in America which they thought was hateful.

Dos Passos himself has a sequence in one of his novels, which after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, someone says, "After all, we are two nations." They meant two nations, not in the current sense of white and black, they meant two nations in the sense of censors on the one hand and people who believed in freedom on the other.

I was off at camp in New Hampshire that summer and I used to read the paper--primarily read the baseball scores. I was 9 years old in the summer of 1927 and I remember...an inexpressible shock when I came in and picked up a copy of the Boston newspaper to find the baseball scores and there's a big headline saying, "Sacco and Vanzetti Executed." Then I overheard one counselor say to another, "Thank God they got those bastards finally." I found that very shocking, having heard so much about the unfairness of the trial. That's my chief personal memory of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

There was great concern about immigrants.

Today, there are about 10 percent [of U.S. residents] are foreign-born and there's already concern about immigration. So, if 50 percent more were foreign-born, as was the case just before the first World War, it's understandable that there would be this kind of excessive concern about it. After all, we are a nation of immigrants, and we're bound to continue to be a nation of immigrants.

It was a very conservative time in the 1920s. We had three extremely conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. We had a conservative Congress and they passed the Immigration Act in 1924, which was cut back on immigration. They tried to freeze the ethnic composition of the country as it was then.

There was always a prejudice against the latest newcomers. I mean, when the Germans first came, there was prejudice against them. Then when the Irish came, there was prejudice against them, in which the Germans joined. Then when they, when each new wave of immigration, when the Italians came, the Germans and the Irish were prejudiced against them. When the Eastern Europeans, the Poles, the Hungarians, and Russians came, everyone was prejudiced against them. And now, we're having the same thing with the Latinos. But this is part of the process of absorption.

Governor [Alvan] Fuller of Massachusetts, in view of the protest against the case, appointed a commission headed by A. Lawrence Lowell, who was president of Harvard.

They rendered a report which enabled the execution to go forward.

It was a puzzle to people, why men of the distinction -- Judge Grant and President Lowell -- should have reached this conclusion. But I think people felt -- I think my father felt -- that they were old Yankees and they couldn't believe that the judicial process operated by other old Yankees could be unfair.

Why does the case still matter today? Well, I suppose your great trials express -- bear the soul -- of a nation in a way and Sacco-Vanzetti was a great case in that respect. People compared it to the Dreyfus case in France. It was one of those half dozen cases which a historian of the United States covering the 20th century could fix upon as a way of getting in, penetrating some of the deep conflicts in American life.