From Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!
Biographical Notes
They emigrated from Italy the same year (1908), both eventually settling in Massachusetts.
A third accomplice, according to witnesses, hiding behind a pile of bricks.
Part of a wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration (1890-1915), and then eventually to Massachusetts-the cradle of the New World! Vanzetti at one point actually living in Plymouth, where he worked at a cordage factory, loading up rope-making machines with enormous bales of hemp. He and Sacco met much later.
The trial stretched over seven years, becoming one of the most notorious of the day, the flimsiness of the prosecution's evidence and a clear judicial bias seen as expressions of anti-radical and anti-immigrant hysteria.
Nicola Sacco (b. April 22, 1891) was the third of seventeen children. He grew up in Torremaggiore, a coastal town in Puglia, in the south of Italy, where he worked on his father's vineyard.
Seven shots. Three PM. (Broad daylight!) Two dead, and just under $16,000 in payroll stolen. The money was never recovered. Two weeks later, Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up while riding a streetcar in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The arresting officer described the pair as "suspicious characters."
Rope-making machines?
Bartolomeo Vanzetti (b. June 11, 1888) held his mother in his arms while she succumbed to cancer, his father unable to bring himself to enter the sick room. This was in the hilly Piedmont region in the north of Italy, in a town called Villafalletto. The main crop of the region was hay. After his mother's death, Vanzetti wandered the woods bordering the nearby Maira River and contemplated suicide. He departed for America two days before his twentieth birthday.
Sacco's nickname for his wife: Rosina. They met at a benefit dance for a paralyzed accordion player.
Their execution (by electrocution, Vanzetti a few minutes after Sacco) took place shortly after midnight on August 23, 1927, all appeals having been exhausted—Sacco and Vanzetti, at this point, having long been embraced as heroes of the left. Over one hundred poems were written about the case in the days just prior and post execution. Often, the poets made note of the time of their poems' composition.
e.g., "execution day," "midnight," "after midnight."
Vanzetti: a lifelong bachelor.
Sacco "had a trade," as they say. (Said?) A cobbler, more specifically a shoe edger, which—shoes!—this biographical sketch is covered with their muddy prints, Sacco and Vanzetti's alleged crime being the robbery and murder of a paymaster (Frederick Parmenter) and guard (Alessandro Beradelli) at a South Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe factory, and then later the written prison confession (ignored by the court, adding to the view, held by many sympathizers, of the trial as a corrupt and inherently prejudicial) of Celestino F. Medeiros ("I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime"), who, before being picked up for the murder of a bank cashier, had been a member in good standing of the notorious Morelli Gang of Providence, Rhode Island, a gang notorious for stealing shoes from freight cars. Also, one witness (a newsboy hiding behind a telegraph pole) testified that he could tell the fleeing gunman was a foreigner by the way he ran.
Vanzetti went from job to job. At the time of his arrest, he was working as an eel monger. He also dug ditches, washed dishes, sold ice cream, poured molten metal in a foundry, installed telephones, broke rocks in a stone quarry, cut wood, sold fruit, worked in a brick factory, gardened, sold candy, and hauled rocks at a reservoir. The historian Paul Avrich describes him as "one of the numerous itinerants of the period . . . who would not or could not adhere to the discipline of the new industrial order."
They were arrested while picking up a friend's car from the garage, police later alleging said car was to be used to dispose of "radical literature"—an anarchist euphemism for explosives. (Though often portrayed as holy innocents caught up in events beyond their control, Sacco and Vanzetti were, in fact, members of an Italian anarchist group devoted to the violent overthrow of all government.)
A brick factory?
They met much later, in 1917, when, on the United States' entry into the war, a group of the anarchist Luigi Galleani's followers fled to Mexico to avoid the draft, and also to await the wave of revolutionary activity that would, inevitably, sweep across Europe from Russia.
The Bridgewater chief of police was not able to question one of the suspects personally because he was rehearsing for a play. The name of the play is not known, though a popular nineteenth-century farce still performed during this period was titled Too Much Johnson.
Vanzetti occasionally used the pen name "Il Picconiere" when writing for Cronaca Sovversiva, Galleani's Italian-language anarchist newspaper. The pen name roughly translates as "the Pick-Axe Man."
La salute è in voi!, Galleani's forty-six-page bomb manual-translation: Health is in you!—sold for twenty-five cents. It was advertised as "an indispensable pamphlet for all comrades who love self-instruction."
The theory being that an accomplice had-to quote Bridgewater police chief Stewart—"skipped with the swag."
Vanzetti never married, or even dated-Avrich quoting him as having no interest in "Epicurean joys"—but he loved to read: Zola, Darwin, Malatesta, Dante, Hugo, Marx, Tolstoy, Carducci. His two favorite books were The Divine Comedy (much of which he'd memorized) and Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus.
Again, Avrich: "Like many Italian immigrants of the day, they came as single young men, looking for adventure."
The following is not their story.