On May 5, 1920, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on a streetcar outside Boston, carrying loaded pistols and lying to police about where they'd been. Three weeks earlier, two men had been shot dead in a payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Sacco and Vanzetti had nothing to do with it. They were anarchists trying to protect their community, two days after a friend held in secret federal custody fell to his death from a fourteenth-floor window.
That's not a footnote. It's the reason the case became what it became: a shoemaker and a fish peddler convicted less on evidence than on their politics, their nationality, and their fear, then executed seven years later, after a confession from the actual robber was thrown out and a governor's own advisory panel found the rigged trial fair.
This episode is about the two men underneath the trial everyone half-remembers. Where they came from. What they believed. The militant anarchist movement around them, which included real bombings alongside real innocence. And what got said, in the last weeks of their lives, in the letters they wrote to each other and to the people trying to save them.
It also sits with the harder question: what do you do with a case where the men on trial were framed, but the movement they belonged to wasn't uniformly peaceful? Honesty doesn't land cleanly on either side of that story.
Further reading: Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (Pantheon, 2007) Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton University Press, 1991) The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, ed. Marion Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson (Viking Press, 1928) Massachusetts state archive on the case — mass.gov/info-details/sacco-vanzetti-who-were-sacco-vanzetti
Tags: Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchism, Red Scare, Palmer Raids, Luigi Galleani, Andrea Salsedo, wrongful conviction, labor history, Italian immigration, 1920s America, Judge Webster Thayer, capital punishment, Haymarket, Governor Michael Dukakis, direct action, state violence, anarchist history
Show notes:
The shoemaker, the fish peddler, and the car nobody got to drive A Thousand Small Fires
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for a robbery and murder they didn't commit, on a night they were actually trying to protect their friends from the Palmer Raids. This episode traces the two men's lives before the arrest, the trial that convicted them anyway, and the seven years of appeals that ended in execution.
In this episode: