One Summer: America, 1927 (41 page)

For Italian immigrants of the early twentieth century, America often came as a shock. As the historians Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimer have noted, most “were unprepared for the coolness with which so many Americans received them.” Often they found themselves excluded from employment and educational opportunities because of their nationality. Restrictive covenants kept them from moving into certain neighborhoods. Italians who settled in the Deep South were sometimes made to attend black schools. At first, it was by no means clear that they would be allowed to use white drinking fountains and lavatories.

Other immigrant groups—Greeks, Turks, Poles, Slavs, Jews of every nation—encountered similar prejudice, of course, and for Asians and America’s own blacks prejudice and restrictions were even more imaginatively cruel, but the Italians were widely regarded as something of a special case—more voluble and temperamental and troublesome than other ethnic groups. Wherever problems arose, Italians seemed to be at the heart of things. The widespread perception of Italians was that if they weren’t Fascists or Bolsheviks, they were anarchists or Communists, and if they weren’t those, they were involved in organized crime.

Even the
New York Times
declared in an editorial that it was “perhaps hopeless to think of civilizing [Italians] or keeping them in order, except by the arm of the law.” University of Wisconsin sociologist E. A. Ross insisted that crime in Italy had fallen only “because all the criminals are here.”
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This was precisely the prejudice that Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray hoped to exploit when they created a pair of imaginary Italian anarchists as the supposed murderers of her husband.

For working-class Italians assimilation was often a forlorn hope. Millions lived within but quite separate from the rest of America. It is a telling point that after twelve years in the country Sacco and Vanzetti still barely spoke English. The transcript of their trial shows that both men often did not fully understand questions put to them or what was
being said by others. Even when they grasped the gist of matters, they struggled to express themselves. As someone remarked, it was not so much that they spoke English with an Italian accent as that they spoke Italian using English words. Here is a short specimen of Sacco trying to explain from the witness stand how he could be an anarchist and yet claim to love America:

When I came to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before, but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there just as well. Work in the same condition but not so hard, about seven or eight hours a day, better food. I mean genuine. Of course over here is good food, because it is bigger country, to any of those who got money to spend, not for the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh, and I came in this country.

This poor command of English was widely regarded as proof that Italians were lazy and irremediably backward. Many Americans were sincerely bewildered and affronted (not altogether without reason, it must be said) that the nation had flung open its doors to the tired and poor of Europe to give them the chance of a better life only to have that generosity repaid with the holding of strikes, the planting of bombs, and the fomenting of rebellions. Sacco and Vanzetti became the living symbols of that ingratitude. A common view among Americans at the time was that even if they were innocent of the South Braintree crimes, they still deserved to be punished. As the foreman of the jury in their case reportedly remarked early in the trial, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.”

Five days after indictments were handed down against Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, a horse-drawn wagon pulled up outside the head offices of J. P. Morgan & Co. at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in Manhattan. The driver, it is supposed, tethered the horse and departed
sharply, for a few moments later the cart exploded with a force that rocked the district and blew out windows on the thirty-second floor of a building more than a block away. The bomb was a particularly vicious one: packed with shrapnel, it was designed to maim and was detonated when the street was packed with lunchtime office workers. Thirty people were killed instantly, and several hundred injured. The heat of the blast was so intense that many of the victims suffered severe burns on top of any other injuries. A clerk at J. P. Morgan was decapitated at his desk by a sheet of flying glass, but no senior members of the firm—the presumed principal targets—were among the victims. J. P. Morgan himself was out of the country. The other Morgan partners—including Charles Lindbergh’s future father-in-law, Dwight Morrow—were meeting in a room that had no windows on the blast side of the building, so were securely shielded.

At the end of the day, the casualty totals were 38 dead and 143 gravely injured. Among the luckiest people outside was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president, who was close enough to be blown off his feet but far enough away not to be seriously hurt. Morgan as a point of pride opened for business the next day. Rewards of $100,000 were offered for information leading to a conviction, but no one came forward who could describe the bomber or offer any other useful leads. Detectives and federal officials interviewed every blacksmith east of Chicago and visited more than four thousand stables in the hope of identifying the horse, cart, or horseshoes involved in the bomb. The shrapnel had been made from sash weights, so they contacted every sash-weight dealer and manufacturer in America to try to find the origin of the slugs. For three years detectives worked on the case. Not a single helpful fact emerged. No one was ever charged.

The historian Paul Avrich, in his 1991 book,
Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background
, probably the most exhaustive book ever written on the case, declared that he had it on good (but unspecified) evidence that the bomber was Mario Buda, the man who had been with Sacco and Vanzetti on the evening of their arrest. At the time, however, Buda was not known to the police in New York and was not suspected or interviewed.
Whether part of the bombing or not, he returned to Naples in a curious hurry soon after the bomb went off.

It later also emerged that Nicola Sacco had been close friends with Carlo Valdinoci, and that Valdinoci’s sister had come to live in Sacco’s house after her brother died in the Palmer house bombing in Washington. Sacco and Vanzetti, it seems, may not have been quite so innocent as history has wished to make them.

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti for the payroll robbery and murders at South Braintree began on May 31, 1921, Judge Webster Thayer presiding once again. Thayer was a gaunt, pale figure in his sixties. He had a hawk nose, thin mouth, and white mustache. He was only five feet two, but had been a star athlete in his youth and had nearly become a professional baseball player. He went through life with a small chip on his shoulder because he was a butcher’s son in a state where pedigree counted for a lot.

The trial lasted almost seven weeks, heard from about 160 witnesses, and produced over two thousand pages of testimony. According to the state’s case, Sacco and another, unidentified man did the holdup and shooting. No attempt was made to track down or identify the other gunmen, or any of the other participants in the robbery. The state seemed oddly content to pin the whole thing on Sacco and Vanzetti. Vanzetti, even in the worst scenario, was merely a passenger in the getaway car, and only one witness confidently put him there. Forty-four others swore they saw him elsewhere that day—selling fish in Plymouth, for the most part—or declared him not to have been among the culprits. A group in Providence known as the Morelli gang actually had a history of robbing shoe factories, but the police did not investigate them. None of the robbery money was ever found or in any way connected to Sacco or Vanzetti. The prosecution offered no theories as to what had become of it. No attempt was made to find or identify the other three men involved in the robbery.

Much of the testimony against the accused was pretty dubious. Lewis Pelser, a factory worker, testified that he saw Sacco shoot Berardelli, but
he had originally told police that he had dived under a table when he heard gunfire and hadn’t seen anything. Three of his co-workers testified that he had never looked out the window.

Mary Splaine, a key witness, said she looked out a window just as the getaway car sped off. Her view lasted for no more than three seconds and was from a distance of between sixty and eighty feet, yet at the trial she was able to recount sixteen details about Sacco’s appearance, including the shade of his eyebrows and the length of his hair at the neck. She even stated with certainty Sacco’s height, even though she had only ever seen him seated in a moving automobile. Thirteen months earlier, she had failed to identify Sacco when viewing him in person from close range. Sacco had once briefly worked at the Rice and Hutchins factory, and several of its employees remembered him, but none except Mary Splaine said that Nicola Sacco was one of those present.

Just one witness placed Vanzetti at the scene at the time of the murder—as a passenger in the getaway car. None suggested that he fired a gun or was otherwise directly involved.

In his summing up to the jury, Judge Webster Thayer laid great stress on what the legal profession called “consciousness of guilt”—Sacco and Vanzetti’s suspiciously evasive behavior under questioning. Innocent people, Thayer stressed, did not need to fabricate answers. Ergo, they were guilty. The jury agreed. After five and a half hours of deliberation on July 14, 1921, it pronounced Sacco and Vanzetti guilty. The sentence was death by electrocution.

It cannot be said that the state rushed to execute them. Appeals went on for six years. Sacco and Vanzetti’s defense team submitted seven motions for retrial on the grounds that Judge Thayer was biased and the trial not fair, and lodged two further appeals with the Massachusetts Supreme Court. All were denied. In 1925, Celestino Madeiros, a native of the Azores who was on death row for another crime, issued a confession. “I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime,” he wrote. Under questioning, Madeiros proved vague about crucial details of the South Braintree
robbery—the time of day it took place, for instance—and Thayer dismissed the confession as untrustworthy, which in fact it was. Thayer also issued a detailed twenty-five-thousand-word statement explaining why he had dismissed all calls for a retrial.

The first signals of angry dissent arose not in America, but in France. On October 20, 1921, a bomb was sent to Ambassador Myron Herrick in a package disguised to look like a gift. By remarkable good fortune the package was inadvertently activated by one of the few people in Paris who could recognize it for what it was and had the forbearance to respond accordingly. Herrick’s English valet, Lawrence Blanchard, had worked with bombs in World War I and recognized the whirring sound within the package as a Mills hand grenade. He hurled the package into the ambassador’s bathroom an instant before it detonated. The explosion destroyed the bathroom and felled Blanchard with a piece of shrapnel to the leg, but he was otherwise unhurt. Had Herrick opened the package himself, another ambassador would have greeted Lindbergh in Paris in 1927.

A few days later, another bomb (possibly an accidental detonation), at a Sacco-Vanzetti rally killed twenty people. In the following two weeks bombs exploded at American embassies or consular offices in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Zurich, and Marseille.

In America, writers and intellectuals were the first to protest the convictions—notably the novelists Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos, the short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the critic Lewis Mumford, the newspaperman Heywood Broun, and several members of the Algonquin Round Table, including Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. Most of them were at one time or another arrested and charged with “loitering and sauntering”—an offense peculiar to Boston, it seems. Benchley additionally swore that he had overheard Thayer boasting in the golf club at Worcester, Massachusetts, that he would “get those bastards good and proper,” which agitated liberal opinion further.

Petitions appealing for a retrial poured in from abroad. One had almost 500,000 signatures, another more than 150,000. Streets and
cafés throughout the world were renamed for the two Italians. In Argentina, a brand of cigarettes was called Sacco y Vanzetti, as was a popular tango.

The involvement of intellectuals and foreigners stirred sharp resentment in some quarters. Workingmen, mostly Irish, held counterdemonstrations in Boston calling for the swift execution of the two Italians. According to the writer Francis Russell, who lived through the period as a boy in Boston, public opinion was mostly against Sacco and Vanzetti. In particular, middle-class Republicans believed in their guilt. Senator William Borah of Idaho, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, said “it would be a national humiliation, a shameless, cowardly compromise of national courage, to pay the slightest attention to foreign protests,” which he called “impudent and willful.”

The real turning point for many was when future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, then a law professor at Harvard, looked into the case and became convinced that Sacco and Vanzetti had been railroaded. Frankfurter detailed his objections in the March 1927 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
. “I assert with deep regret, but without the slightest fear of disproof, that certainly in modern times Judge Thayer’s opinion stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys,” he wrote. “His 25,000-word document cannot accurately be described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations.… The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterance permeates the whole.”

Frankfurter systematically and persuasively demolished the case against Sacco and Vanzetti, but his findings were not welcomed by the Boston establishment. Many Harvard alumni demanded that he be fired. Colleagues and old friends snubbed him. He found that when he walked into a room or restaurant some people would get up and leave. The article, it was said, cost Harvard $1 million in donations.