Compare And Contrast Sacco And Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Sacco & Vanzetti: Dividing a Nation

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born immigrants to the United States, affected the entire nation for years based on their actions from a single day. One simple trial sent ripples across the country as it pitted Americans against each other. The Sacco-Vanzetti court case provided a snapshot to Americans of two, Italian immigrant anarchists, their supposed heist and murders, and showed the divisive nature of a simple court case.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, were open about their political and social ideals. They were known by many people to be anarchists. This belief of anarchism was not unpopular during the 1920s, but it may have led to their eventual demise (Linder).

The trial pitted a radical defense lawyer against a prosecution that was known to be anti-anarchist. Fred Moore, Sacco and Vanzetti’s attorney, realized that the only hope to win the case was to create a large fanfare around the trial and to turn it into a political event (Linder). Moore appealed to many radical and immigrant communities claiming that there was a political effort made to frame the two men. The trial opened in May of 1921 under heavy guard and drug on until July. Both the prosecution and defense brought forth evidence and witnesses that gave untruthful and sometimes conflicting conclusions. In the end, the jury deliberated at announced that they had found the men guilty. The judge ordered the two men to be executed by the electric chair. However, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti was far from over. Protests began after the conviction across the US, France, Italy, and South America. To avoid the electric chair, Moore and the defense appealed to multiple different courts and sets of evidence for years after the conviction. Similar to the original trial, the evidence presented contradicted itself and showed no clear conclusion. Judge Thayer vowed to ensure that the two men would get what they deserve and refused a retrial (Hodak). The execution had been scheduled for August 23rd, 1927 (Sacco-Vanzetti Case”). The night before the execution, two last-ditch attempts were

People across the nation and in other countries took to the streets to express their displeasure with the rulings. Riots and protests occurred on six continents as thousands of people received the news. The American Embassy in Paris, France came under fire from protesters, and tanks had to be called in to ease the crowd. Nearly 5000 protesters destroyed anything related to the United States in Geneva and riots in Germany resulted in six deaths (Linder). In an article posted in The Atlantic Monthly, future justice Felix Frankfurter claimed that Judge Thayer and the DA had “exploited the postwar Red Scare and jurors' nativist impulses, thereby invoking a "riot of political passion and patriotic sentiment" that all but precluded a fair trial” (Hodak). Frankfurter’s statement represented the opinion of many people during this time. Most of the world believed that the courts were corrupt and had been biased against Sacco and Vanzetti. Following the protests, the saga of Sacco and Vanzetti came to a close and left the world to wonder the real