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The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History
Lisa McGirr
| On May 1, 1927, in the port city of Tampico, Mexico, a thousand workers gathered at the American consulate. Blocking the street in front of the building, they listened as local union officials and radicals took turns stepping onto a tin garbage can to shout fiery speeches. Their denunciations of American imperialism, the power of Wall Street, and the injustices of capital drew cheers from the gathered crowd. But it was their remarks about the fate of two Italian anarchists in the United States, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, that aroused the "greatest enthusiasm," in the words of an American consular official who observed the event. The speakers called Sacco and Vanzetti their "compatriots" and "their brothers." They urged American officials to heed the voice of "labor the world over" and release the men from their death sentences.1 |
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Between 1921 and 1927, as Sacco and Vanzetti's trial and appeals progressed, scenes like the one in Tampico were replayed again and again throughout Latin America and Europe. Over those six years, the Sacco and Vanzetti case developed from a local robbery and murder trial into a global event. Building on earlier networks, solidarities, and identities and impelled forward by a short-lived but powerful sense of transnational worker solidarity, the movement in the men's favor crystallized in a unique moment of international collective mobilization. Although the world would never again witness an international, worker-led protest of comparable scope, the movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti highlighted the ever-denser transnational networks that continued to shape social movements throughout the twentieth century.2 |
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The "travesty of justice" protested by Mexican, French, Argentine, Australian, and German workers, among others, originated in events that took place just outside Boston in 1920. On April 15, the payroll of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, was stolen and the paymaster and a guard murdered. Acting on a hunch that the crime was the work of local anarchists, a veteran police officer, Michael Stewart, arrested two obscure radicals and charged them with robbery and murder. The arrest of the two—Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—coming at a time of heightened political repression in the United States, attracted the attention of leftist sympathizers. When a Dedham, Massachusetts, jury declared the two men guilty of murder on July 14, 1921, anarchists and radicals in the United States and abroad moved into action. The trial, in their eyes, had been a mockery of justice: No money was found linking the two convicted men to the crime. There was no physical evidence against Vanzetti. Both men provided alibis, and scores of witnesses testified on their behalf. Prosecution witnesses made contradictory and weak statements. From the district attorney's opening remarks calling on the "good men and true" of Norfolk County to "stand together" to the presiding judge's closing instructions to the jury saluting "patriotism" and "supreme American loyalty," the court had seemed to attach as much significance to the defendants' status as immigrants and their views as radicals as to their culpability.3 The apparent unfairness of the trial and its negative outcome galvanized Sacco and Vanzetti's supporters to call for a retrial. In Boston, New York, and Chicago, and, more suprisingly, in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Marseilles, Casablanca, and Caracas, workers organized vigils and rallies to express their solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti. In Venezuela, according to the American minister there, "practically all the lower classes regarded them as martyrs." One old servant of a well-to-do family, he recounted, had even "arranged a newspaper picture of Sacco and Vanzetti surrounded by burning candles and was praying for them before it." The storms of protest that raged in Europe and Latin America led the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro to ask direly, "to what kind of folly is the world witness?" The editor of the New York–based Nation magazine declared shortly before their execution, "Talk about the solidarity of the human race! When has there been a more striking example of the solidarity of great masses of people than this?"4 |
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