Public
television in Boston (WGBH) broadcast "The Italian Americans"
this week (first screened a year ago), a historical account beginning with the arrival of some 4 million immigrants in the early
decades of the 20th century and carrying through to the place and prominence of Italian Americans in America today. When I
tuned in Thursday night, actor Stanley Tucci was narrating the film's account
of the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
In this
segment (Episode two) of the documentary, historians and other sources make
very clear how the case was seen, and was long remembered, through Italian
American eyes: as an attack on them.
"Up until the 1960s," one of the episode's authorities
tells us, "every Italian family heard the story at the dinner table... If
you stepped out line, this is what they would do to you."
What
American justice in the state of Massachusetts did to Sacco and Vanzetti was an
"appalling" miscarriage of justice overseen by a bigoted judge
before a prejudiced jury, the show tells us. Historian Bruce Watson paraphrases
the words of one of the jurymen (in fact the foreman) who said "they
should all be hanged," whether or not they were guilty of the crime they
were accused of -- simply because of who "they" were: political radicals,
foreigners, Italians.
The trial
was framed in a way that made the defendants appear like dangerous criminals.
They were shackled together and walked from a local lockup to the courthouse in
Dedham each day surrounded by a phalanx of armed plain clothes police. Once inside
the courtroom, they were made to sit inside a metal cage.
Judge Webster
Thayer made clear (in rulings inside, and statements outside, the courthouse) his vicious hatred
for the political movement Sacco and Vanzetti represented -- the radical pro-labor,
anti-capitalist attack on his America's Guilded Age status quo, a time of
domination by the very rich over an oppressed mass of underpaid industrial
laborers and farmers; a time of ever-increasing gap between the very rich and
the working poor. (Sound familiar?)
The trial
wasn't about the crime Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of (the robbery of a
shoe factory payroll and murder of two guards), the show's experts tell us, it
was about anarchism. Once the information came out in court that both men were
professed anarchists, "it was all about anarchism."
The political
background for this scapegoating of two self-proclaimed radicals in order to
put the Italian anarchist movement on trial was a string of attempted bombings
(including a few bombs that actually went off) for which historian believe anarchists
were almost certainly responsible. Those bombs were acts of violent revenge
against the American political, economic and judicial system that had targeted
the movement's leaders during World war I, shut down its publications, and
deported high-profile spokesmen such as Emma Goldman and Luigi Galleani.
Much as acts
of terrorism do today, the bombings scared Americans, a fear whipped up by newspapers and politicians into an all-pervading threat that
justified the targeting of ethnic minorities perceived to be "others"
and hostile to the political status quo.
But Sacco
and Vanzetti were not being tried for bombings. No one was ever put on trial
for the bombings that so terrified Americans during the Red Scare of
1918-19. They were arrested without any
evidence to connect them to the Braintree robbery-murder; but simply because a local police chief believed the crime must be the work of the political radicals he hated. Once it became known
in the Dedham courtroom where they were being tried in 1921 that they were anarchists,
nothing else really mattered.
"The
trial was about anarchists," said author Bruce Watson (his book "Sacco
and Vanzetti: The men, the murders, and the judgment of mankind" was
published in 2007). "And Italian anarchists made it all the better."
Watson also
describes how Vanzetti, the more "cerebral" of the defendants, put
this case in his address to the court before sentencing. While denying any
guilt for the crime for which he was tried, Vanzetti stated, "...my
conviction is I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering
because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am
an Italian and indeed I am an Italian...[yet] if you could execute me two times, and
if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done
already."
"The
Italian Americans" makes a final connection between the anti-immigrant
(and anti-Italian) racism that condemned Sacco and Vanzetti by pointing out
that in 1924 Calvin Coolidge signed a law setting a
quota specifically for Italian immigrants.
At
the signing Coolidge said, "It is clear that certain groups of people will
not mix or blend."
As
the whole of "The Italian Americans" demonstrates, it is hard to
imagine a more erroneous, short-sighted (and bigoted) prediction.
Yet
it seems to me that similar things are being said about other groups today.
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