George Washington to New Hampshire, 29 December 1777 (Detail, GLC03706) America Between the Wars: The Sacco and Vanzetti Trial by Rebecca Shapiro The Urban School of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA Famous Trials Website by Doug Linder http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ SaccoV/courtspeech.html Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both Italian immigrants and active Anarchists, were arrested in 1920 as suspects in a shooting and robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts. Found guilty of murder in the first degree at their trial in 1921, both men were sentenced to death by electrocution. Numerous motions were filed to appeal for the new trial, mostly calling attention to false testimony, questionable identifications by witnesses, and misleading statements. The last motion for a retrial came in 1926 when Celestino Madeiros, a convicted murder, allegedly confessed that he had been involved in the Braintree crime. Judge Webster Thayer, who had presided over the original trial, denied all the motions. Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted on August 23, 1927. The case became famous mainly because of the many people drawn to the cause of these two men. Felix Frankfurter, who would later sit on the bench as a Supreme Court Justice, analyzed the weak points of the trial and accused the prosecution of playing on current fears of immigrants and communism. The following excerpt comes from the final sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. CLERK WORTHINGTON: Bartolomeo Vanzetti, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon you? BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI: Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stolen and I have never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stolen, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth. Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not need to go into the streets and kill a man or try to take money. I can live by my two hands and live well. But besides that, I can live even without work with my hands for other people. I have had plenty of chance to live independently and to live what the world conceives to be a higher life than to gain our bread with the sweat of our brow. My father in Italy is in a good condition. I could have come back in Italy and he would have welcomed me every time with open arms. Even if I come back there with not a cent in my pocket, my father could have give me a position, not to work but to make busi-ness, or to oversee upon the land that he owns. He has wrote me many letters in that sense, and as another well-to-do relative has wrote me letters in that sense that I can produce. Well, it may be said to be a boast. My father and my aunt can boast themselves and say things that people may not be compelled to believe. People may say they may be poor when I say that they are in good condition to give me a position any time that I want to settle down and form a family and start a settled life. Well, but there are people maybe in this same court that could testify to what I have said and that what my father and my aunt have said to me is not a lie, that really they have the means to give me a position any time that I want. Well, I want to reach a little point farther, and it is this that not only have I not been trying to steal in Bridgewater, not only have I not been in Braintree to steal and kill and have never stolen or killed or spilt blood in all my life, not only have I struggled hard against crimes, but I have refused myself of what are considered the commodity and glories of life, the prides of a life of a good position, because in my consideration it is not right to exploit man. I have refused to go in business because I understand that business is a speculation on profit upon certain people that must depend upon the business man, and I do not consider that that is right and therefore I refuse to do that. Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in my life--though some sins but not crimes--not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the moral law condemns, but also the crime that the moral law and the official law sanction and sanctify,--the exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes can doom me, it is this reason and none else. 1. Why does Vanzetti discuss his family background? 2. What are Vanzetti's reasons for not going into business? 3. In saying that he has eschewed "what are considered the commodity and the glories of life" Vanzetti suggests that he disagrees with these values. What might he have identified as the "glories of life?" Explain. 4. How is Vanzetti's immigrant background significant in this text? 5. If you were one of the jurors in the original trial and were present to hear Vanzetti deliver this statement at his sentencing in 1927, how would you respond?