#title The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti
#subtitle A Global History
#author Lisa McGirr
#LISTtitle Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti
#SORTauthors Lisa McGirr
#SORTtopics Italian Immigrants, Italian anarchism, history, biography
#date March 2007
#source *Journal of American History*, Volume 93, Issue 4, March 2007, Pages 1085–1115, [[https://doi.org/10.2307/25094597][doi.org/10.2307/25094597]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-02-09T05:09:17
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]
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 everdenser transnational
networks that continued to shape social movements throughout the
twentieth century.[2]
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]
No one has charted the global nature of the mobilization in support of
Sacco and Vanzetti or has adequately explained their international
prominence. Instead, shelves of books have focused on the legal aspects
of their trial, delineated its domestic ramifications, and rehashed the
question of guilt and innocence. That focus has been predominant in the
literature in no small part because the question of guilt or innocence
has proved so difficult to resolve. The biased trial proceedings and the
use of faulty evidence make assertions of either man’s guilt difficult
to sustain, but neither has their innocence been firmly established.
Ballistics evidence points to Sacco’s gun as the murder weapon, and
statements made by Sacco’s lawyer Fred Moore after he left the case and
the anarchist Carlo Tresca shortly before his death point to Sacco’s
guilt. Some argue that the ballistics evidence was the result of a
“frame-up” and that bitterness and anger led Tresca and Moore to
reformulate their opinions years after the trial. Even those who argue
for Sacco’s guilt assert that Vanzetti was probably innocent. There is
continued room for more than a “reasonable doubt.”[5]
The focus on the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti has caused us
to neglect the vast international movement in their support. Other
miscarriages of justice and other efforts to repress radical movements
failed to attract such outcry. So why Sacco and Vanzetti? A closer look
at this moment of international mobilization not only reveals a
fascinating and important story but also brings a fresh perspective on
the global connections of the United States. As important, the
distinctive angle of vision necessary to tell this story promises to
reveal dimensions of history in the 1920s that transcend individual
nation-states.
In recent years, scholars have called for U.S. historians to embed
American history in a global context. Historians have revealed
identities, networks, and processes that extend beyond the nation-state.
Such studies, focusing on economic ideas, policy makers, social elites,
and institutions, have neglected transnational social movements. By
revisiting the history of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, this essay
reveals an important moment of transnational movement building. Although
it was preceded by earlier transnational mobilizations in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries—from abolitionism to woman suffrage—the
“passion” of Sacco and Vanzetti brought the popular masses for the first
time to the forefront of international protest. Never before had global
radical institutions and global mass communications played such a
central role in collective popular mobilization. The
international social movement around Sacco and Vanzetti also highlights
transformations in the dynamics of global radicalism and of class. Only
by moving beyond individual nations can we understand what dynamics were
not “French,” “American,” or “Argentine,” but part of broader trends
with repercussions in many countries. It is such trends that
the history of the social movement in support of Sacco and Vanzetti
reveals.[6]
This essay looks at the international history of the 1920s from a
distinctive angle. The first of its three parts traces the setting of
global radicalism, in particular, the ethnic dimensions of the
international mobilization and the culture of the Left necessary to make
the men household words in far-flung places. The essay argues that the
case resonated so widely and deeply because of the new visibility and
vocality of the masses after World War I.[7] Second, the essay
explores how a mobilization around a single case grew into a broad
popular front movement. Here I emphasize the role of intellectuals and
their transnational connections. I contend that the location of the
trial in the United States at a time of heightened concerns with rising
American power is fundamental to understanding its resonance. Third, the
essay examines memorialization of the case in the wake of the men’s
execution, which determined the meanings of “Sacco and Vanzetti” in the
1920s and beyond.
; ;
The notoriety of the Sacco and Vanzetti case must be situated in the
history of labor internationalism. Since the founding of the First
International in 1864, radical worker politics had been internationalist
in theory and practice. Anarchists, Communists, and socialists, while
hostile to one another, shared a vision of worker solidarity that sought
to transcend national allegiances in order to support comrades in
faraway lands. Sacco and Vanzetti’s global presence points to a moment
when radical labor movements in Europe, Latin America, and North America
had built on the massive European migrations of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries to forge transnational communities, networks,
and identities.[8]
The position of the United States as the quintessential capitalist
nation, moreover, encouraged radicals around the globe to take an
interest in the American labor movement. As Friedrich Engels wrote in
1886 regarding the rise and fall of the Knights of Labor, “Nowhere in
the whole world do [capitalists] come out so shamelessly and
tyrannically as over there.” The radical international labor movement
had mobilized in solidarity to aid victims of “class warfare” in the
United States—from the Haymarket affair in 1886 to the effort to win
clemency for Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, two radicals tried and
sentenced for murder after a bomb was thrown during a preparedness day
parade in San Francisco in 1916.[9]
Proletarian internationalism, like nationalism, was defined by an
imagined community, with the universal working class as its starting
point. The global labor movement spoke
an emotional language; such terms as “brother” and “brotherhood”
encouraged members to think of their ties as akin to consanguinity. In a
time of massive migration when universal suffrage had only recently been
won in many countries, appeals to that alternative sense of community
resonated among many workers.[10]
Sacco and Vanzetti identified wholeheartedly with
that community, as part of a network of anarchists stretching from
Switzerland, France, and Italy to Uruguay and Argentina. While the
growing strength of syndicalism and socialism and the founding of the
Third International in 1919 signified the declining influence of
anarchism, some radicals continued to subscribe to the antistatist and
individualist doctrines set out by such theorists as Mikhail Bakunin and
Peter Kropotkin. Sacco and Vanzetti were among them. After migrating to
the United States in 1908 from Italy, the two young men had become
committed to the ideals of “direct action.” They belonged to the
secretive, ultramilitant circle of Italian anarchists around Luigi
Galleani, whom Vanzetti once acknowledged as their “master,” a
charismatic man who romanticized violence as a legitimate response to
injustice.[11]
While the Galleanistas’ emphasis on the “propaganda of the deed” placed
them on the extreme end of the left-wing political spectrum, their
strong identification with global proletarian solidarity was at the core
of radical worker politics. Anarchists, syndicalists, socialists, and
Communists shared it. The movement to rescue Sacco and Vanzetti could
mushroom because of those dense international connections. Galleani,
whom Sacco and Vanzetti had met when he lived in the United States from
1901 to 1919, had lived in Italy, France, Switzerland, England, Egypt,
the United States, and Canada. Although both Sacco and
Vanzetti had resided in the United States for most of their adult lives,
they had spent a year in Mexico with a group of Galleanista militants in
1917. They returned to the United States, but some of their companions
moved to Italy and others to South America; they thus had personal
connections with anarchist militants beyond the borders of the United
States. Throughout their long years of imprisonment, they deepened these
contacts, writing to anarchist compatriots in places such as France and
Argentina, requesting aid, receiving news of the worldwide activities on
their behalf, and pressing for further mobilization. Sacco and
Vanzetti’s political and mental world was framed as much by the
far-flung international community of anarchists and radical “masses” as
by the local communities in which they lived and the Gruppo Autonomo,
the Italian anarchist organization in Boston of which they were
part.[12]
The international contacts of this close-knit circle of Galleanistas
spread the first news of their arrest and conviction, but the
Galleanistas’ emphasis on the propaganda of the deed and their distrust
of institutions, including labor unions, made their brand of
internationalism far too antiorganizational to support a broad social
movement. A broader group of radicals who took up the men’s cause had
the institutional connections to do that. In the United States Carlo
Tresca, an iconoclastic radical, quickly contacted his leftist allies
asking for their help. Tresca brought in Fred Moore, a radical lawyer
who, with the local Boston attorneys Jeremiah and Thomas McAnarney, was
initially in charge of the men’s defense. Fred Moore earlier had been
one of the legal team that won acquittal for the syndicalists Arturo
Giovannitti and Joseph Ettor, who were tried for murder in connection
with the 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Moore
devoted his energies not only to pursuing courtroom strategies but also
to building a movement of labor solidarity.[13] He corresponded
with union leaders, socialists, and Communists in the United States and
abroad, tapping the connections he had developed through his years in
labor circles. His experiences during the trial of Giovannitti and Ettor
had made him keenly aware of the possibilities of international
solidarity.[14]
To build a movement, Moore first worked to link the cause of Sacco and
Vanzetti with that of organized labor, viewing the case as “the pivot
around which class struggle in America is to swing.” Given Sacco and
Vanzetti’s marginal involvement with unions, Moore knew his attempts
were tenuous, and, in letters to close allies, he worried about
convincing labor leaders. He hoped to use the international labor
movement to overcome the “standpatism” of the American Federation of
Labor and prod it to take a stand on the case. He wrote to his friends
in Italian labor circles, asking them to persuade the Italian
“Federation of Labor” (that is, the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro)
to issue a statement supporting the two men. One friend, a new member of
the Italian parliament, replied, “My Dear Comrade Moore, ... I am
willing to work with the best of my forces.” Moore also sent
the young journalist Eugene Lyons of the New York–based Workers Defense
League to Europe to spread word about the case. Moore and
Sacco and Vanzetti’s supporters more broadly had far greater success
with central organizations of labor outside the United States than
domestically. The American Federation of Labor passed resolutions in
1922 and in 1924 in favor of the two men but provided little other
tangible support. Local and state federations of labor more
often gave support, and rank-and-file workers at times expressed their
solidarity generously: A meeting of unemployed silk workers in New York
City in 1922, for example, raised over seventy dollars. Such support,
however, came largely from the ranks of the immigrant and unskilled; the
mass of skilled native-born workers remained indifferent.[15]
Moore and close allies such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn also appealed to
radical organizations. They met a receptive audience in the tiny
Communist organizations just forming in the United States. In 1921 the
Communist Workers Party of America called for a campaign of solidarity.
The recently founded Executive Committee of the Communist International
in Moscow picked up on this call and appealed for a worldwide campaign
of solidarity in the fall of 1921. The Russian Revolution had
just unleashed radical political imaginations in countries throughout
the world. Now supporters of the newly emerged “worker state,” through
newborn Communist parties, took up the banner of Sacco and Vanzetti as
victims of “bourgeois class warfare” whose plight might also bolster
support for the parties.[16]
The Sacco and Vanzetti case, then, gained visibility in part because it
took place at a transitional moment in radical politics. In the 1920s
anarchism, a significant current of radical politics in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was declining and its
supporters were seeking a new lease on their political life. The
Communist parties had just been founded. Both groups vied to strengthen
their causes by championing Sacco and Vanzetti. In the first weeks of
October 1921, demonstrations took place in London, Rome, and Paris. In
Le Havre, France, on October 10, 1921, brilliant red posters throughout
the city declared the verdict unjust. In the following weeks the
American consulate in Marseilles received police protection because of
the “quite formidable” demonstrations in front of it, according to an
American consular official. By the end of the month, three thousand
organized workers marched in the streets of Santiago, Chile, condemning
the “capitalist governments of the world and demanding the liberation of
the Italians Sacco and Vanzetti,” and in Basel, Switzerland, according
to the consular official there, protesters outside the U.S. consulate
“made speeches and threatened him with death.” In the Netherlands, early
in November, the Hague Trade Committee, the Communist party and the
Revolutionary Socialist Women’s League met to protest the death
sentence, which they linked to the “life and death of revolutionary
workers of all countries.”[17]
Protests sometimes led to violence. In Paris on October 20, 1921, the
American ambassador, Myron Herrick, was sent a mail bomb. Shortly
thereafter, during a meeting at the Salle Wagram in Paris, some
protesters threw a bomb at the police. Over the following weeks,
numerous American government targets were bombed. On October 31, 1921,
in Portugal, a bomb ripped through the U.S. embassy in Lisbon. An
explosion damaged the American embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the
next day. In Switzerland the front of the American Consulate in Zurich
was blown out, and on November 8 a bomb damaged the American consulate
at Marseilles. While the bombings hardened a segment of public opinion
against the two men, they also brought the Sacco and Vanzetti case
prominently onto the international stage. One radical wrote to defense lawyer
Fred Moore about the dual consequences of the bombings, “I can
appreciate the difficult position you were placed in by the Paris
happening. However, a byproduct of that event is far greater
international interest than before.”[18]
While international interest spread from Chile to New Zealand, in a
number of countries—Italy, France, Argentina, and Mexico
particularly—political mobilization deepened. Those countries had
powerful radical movements strongly influenced by anarchism and
anarcho-syndicalism. All of them had just witnessed the birth of rapidly
growing Communist parties, often founded with the support of former
anarchists, that became the leading champions of the men’s cause.
Italy’s militant antistatist currents, deep class rifts, and strong
localism had generated a vibrant anarchist movement, which since the
late nineteenth century had been rocked by periodic bursts of
insurrection and violence. A wave of labor unrest in the early postwar
years culminated in September 1920 when workers seized industrial plants
in Turin and Milan. While Italy’s biennio rosso (two red years)
ended in late 1920, violent clashes between the radical Left and Benito
Mussolini’s shock troops took their place, ending with Mussolini’s
ascent to power in 1922. Italy was not only home to powerful
militant left currents—from socialist to anarchist—but also Sacco and
Vanzetti’s native land, amplifying the case’s resonance there. Errico
Malatesta, Italy’s preeminent anarchist, and his newspaper, *Umanità
Nova,* propelled Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause forward. Radicals from the
United States also spread the word of the men’s situation throughout
Italy. Eugene Lyons, carrying a letter of introduction from Fred Moore,
placed articles about the case in leftist newspapers and helped set up
an Italian organization to coordinate efforts with the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee in Boston. “I have little doubt,” Lyons reported to
Moore, “but that a nationwide agitation for the two boys is in the
making.” In the year following Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial and
conviction, meetings in support of the two were held “all over Italy,”
according to the American consulate in Florence. Meetings
emphasized that the men were condemned because they were labor agitators
and Italian immigrants. In 1925 the U.S. embassy in Rome received
petitions with thousands of signatures protesting the verdict. By 1927
the American ambassador in Rome reported to the State Department “that
public opinion here was almost universally against their
execution.” The Fascists’ rise to power in 1922 kept
demonstrations and protests rare; those that took place were swiftly
crushed. While Mussolini allowed some public expression of support for
the two men in newspaper articles and eventually worked behind the
scenes for clemency, American government officials in Italy were
grateful to the Fascist police and government for containing protest. As
H. P. Starrett of the American consulate in Genoa put it, the “lack of
incidents in Genoa is due not to indifference but to the strictness of
the discipline enforced by the fascist government. If it had not been
for the very careful measures taken by the authorities no one doubts but
that the public here would have expressed its mind in no uncertain
manner. It is to be hoped that this discipline will continue until the
people have forgotten the case.”[19]
In France, where the government was not willing to resort to such
repressive measures, protest flourished. As in Italy, anarchism had deep
roots in France. Since the late nineteenth century, violence had
periodically flared up. As anarchists competed with syndicalists,
socialists, and Communists, the leading anarchist newspaper in the
1920s, Le Libértaire, kept up a drumbeat of news concerning the
case. Indeed, Sacco and Vanzetti were a major preoccupation of the
French anarchists in the 1920s. The organized labor movement, deeply
influenced by anarcho-syndicalist currents, aided the anarchists in
their efforts. The Conféderation Générale du Travail (cgt), born of
these tendencies, served as one institutional force for solidarity with
Sacco and Vanzetti. The birth of the Communist party in 1920 provided
yet another champion. Even though these organizations often clashed on
strategy, they formed an impressive base from which to mobilize. The
French Communist party took the lead in mobilizing in solidarity with
the two men. The case served as one of the only issues around which the
Communists were able to build a successful popular front during the
decade.[20]
While Sacco and Vanzetti’s conviction caught the attention of French and
Italian workers, workers elsewhere in Europe remained on the margins of
the developing international protest. Germany, for example, boasted a
powerful organized labor movement, but in the first years of the case,
Social Democrats there held themselves aloof from the men’s cause. They
were wary of naming two militant anarchists working-class heroes and
preoccupied with their own factional struggles against militant
Communists and anarchists. By the mid-1920s, however, when the case
gained increased attention, even moderate socialists throughout Europe
joined in the outcry. The Swiss Socialist newspaper *Le Droit du Peuple*
introduced its readers to the case in 1925 in an ambivalent tone: “A
painful and curious affair is beginning ... to agitate public opinion
in Europe ....We must save the innocents no matter who they are.... If we could become impassioned by a permanent army captain” (referring
to the unjust conviction of the French officer Alfred Dreyfus for
espionage and the campaign that ultimately vindicated him), “we must
[be] even more so when it comes to two militant workers, no matter what
their tendency or their affiliations.” After the Massachusetts Supreme
Court refused to grant the men a retrial in April 1926, even
the German Social Democrats became part of the popular front around the
case, labeling the men’s death sentence “judicial murder.”[21]
[[l-m-lisa-mcgirr-the-passion-of-sacco-and-vanzetti-1.png f][The Mexican General Confederation of Workers was an important
institutional force in the transnational effort to rescue Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. This oversized poster called for “justice” and
“liberty” and referred to the “strength of the world proletariat united
across borders to stop the horrendous crime.” Printed in bold red and
blue, it advertised a July 5, 1927, demonstration to protest the
impending execution scheduled for July 10. (The execution was
postponed.) *Courtesy Boston Public Library.*]]
As in Europe, Communists and anarchists took the lead in championing the
men’s cause in Argentina and Mexico. In Mexico anarchism had formed a
dominant current of left politics. Indeed, Mexican anarchism had
provided a hospitable temporary home for Sacco, Vanzetti, and their
Galleanista companions, who had gathered in Monterey a few years
earlier. With the founding of the Mexican Communist party in 1920,
anarchists suddenly found a strong competitor for the allegiance of
radical workers. While the Mexican Communist party struggled to
dominate, and differentiate itself from, the largely anarcho-syndicalist
radical milieu from which it sprang, the Sacco-Vanzetti issue provided
one point of unity with the country’s anarchists. The Mexican Communist
party boasted a membership of only a few hundred in the early 1920s; by
the end of the decade it had become the most successful of the Latin
American Communist parties. Embracing agrarianism clearly played a major
role in its success, but championing Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause helped
the party appeal to some anarchists. In addition, Mexican working-class
resentment against the country’s Yankee neighbor ran high, particularly
in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. The sympathetic left-leaning
revolutionary government, plus a highly organized syndicalist labor
movement, helped build protest against the treatment of Sacco and
Vanzetti. News about the case spread quickly, aided by North American
radicals who had published detailed accounts by 1921 and by the
Spanish-language paper of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww),
*Solidaridad.* Mexican radicals mobilized early and
powerfully in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. By 1921 the U.S. consulates
in Veracruz, Tampico, Mérida, and Guaymas were already confronting
demonstrations and protest. The Syndicate of Truck Drivers of the Port
of Veracruz raged with a virulence rarely matched elsewhere: “Free Sacco
and Vanzetti or the proletarian world will rip out your guts. We do not
ask pity.... If you are implacable we also will be implacable. An eye
for an eye! ... The law of retaliation will be served if our brothers
are not freed.”[22]
Radicals in Argentina also took up Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause
wholeheartedly, but there anarchists—not the Communist party—took the
lead. As a result, anarchism revived there, at least temporarily. In the
South American nation, much to the consternation of the ruling elite,
anarchism had proved attractive to the immigrant workers who constituted
most of the country’s working class in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The organized labor movement led by the Federación
Obrera Regional Argentina (fora) was deeply influenced by
anarcho-syndicalist currents. By 1921, however, its power was waning.
State repression that reached its height in 1919 contributed, but the
labor movement was also turning away from confrontational tactics
because of the increasing integration of workers into Argentine society,
as populist politicians fostered cross-class appeals. By the 1920s
anarchist calls for direct action by workers to overthrow capitalism and
anarchist belief in irreconcilable class conflict were losing their hold
on the loyalties of workers.[23] Anarchist newspapers railed
against the working class as a “Republica de serviles,” “a meek beast of
burden [that] has lost even the simplest notion of dignity.” The
Sacco-Vanzetti case infused fresh life into the movement; discouraged
anarchists had found a new mission. For well over a year, the sole
preoccupation of Argentine radicals was the liberation of Sacco and
Vanzetti. Anarchists may have seen the cause as capable of mobilizing
their social base, but its broad resonance among Argentina’s masses
expressed less a revived faith in anarchism than an attachment to
working-class and ethnic identity at a shifting moment in worker
politics. While calls for general strikes during the early 1920s
inspired only tepid responses, by 1927 masses of workers did march,
strike, and riot to express their solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti,
who had become working-class heroes. One American businessman described
“conditions” in the country at the time as “intolerable.”[24]
From France to Argentina, the mobilization around Sacco and Vanzetti can
be seen as the tail end of a militant form of class conflict that had
been significant in workers’ political action in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The men’s executions marked the death of such
radicalism. Worker action and organized left politics had led to growing
concessions to workers either through social democratic movements or, as
in Italy, corporatist politics. The case also served as a lightning rod
for a new cross-class ideology, crystallizing in countries such as
France, Germany, Argentina, and the United States, that emphasized the
social integration of workers and their enfranchisement as
citizens.[25]
The case spoke to both those currents and linked them in one
mobilization. The global movement aroused by the Sacco and Vanzetti case
both demonstrated a new visibility of the popular masses on the
international stage and suggested workers’ increasing integration within
nation-states. The case also precipitated a growing concern about the
rise of American power after World War I. In Buenos Aires, Argentina,
Paris, London, and Milan, workers rallied to Sacco and Vanzetti in the
wake of the popular insurrections and explosive worker uprisings of
1917–1919, unleashing their fury at “Yankee injustice.” In so doing,
they forged a cross-class mobilization with elites and intellectuals.
If the currents of global radicalism, newly vocal
masses, and a shared international working-class identity explain the
resonance of the case in its early years, a deepening Italian
nationalism was also crucial. Sacco and Vanzetti’s identity as Italian
immigrants and their experience of being outsiders and targets of
prejudice resonated within the large and far-flung Italian diaspora of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not surprisingly,
support for the two men was strong in their home country, where
supporters appealed to the men’s status as “fellow countrymen” and
argued that their conviction was due to widespread prejudice against
Italians in the United States. In parliament, for example,
Leonardo Mucci, a Socialist delegate, linked the case to Americans’ poor
treatment of Italian immigrants, expressed most recently in the campaign
for immigration restriction. He called on Italians to “show your teeth
to America.” Before the Fascist takeover, the Italian foreign
minister ordered Rolando Ricci, the Italian ambassador to the United
States, to “take every possible step toward the [American] government to
secure a pardon for our nationals Sacco and Vanzetti.” Even
the preeminent Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta appealed to
nationalism, remarking that in addition “to being anarchists, [Sacco and
Vanzetti] are also Italians: They belong to a rejected and despised
people who can be murdered without concern. Will the patriots of Italy
allow that?” Mussolini declared he would not. At a meeting in Milan in
1921, he called on the minister of foreign affairs to “take action to
prevent these ... innocent men from being condemned ... merely
because they belong to the Italian race and the Italian nation.”
After the Fascists took power in 1922, crushing the socialist,
Communist, and anarchist opposition, Mussolini spoke more cautiously,
fearful both of alienating American officials and of letting the case
become a powerful rallying symbol for the anarchists. Still, he worked
privately through the Italian ambassador to the United States, who told
an Italian newspaper in 1926 that he sought Sacco and Vanzetti’s release
“because they were Italians and because they were innocent.” In 1927
Mussolini told American officials that he feared execution of the two
men “would provide the pretext for a vast and continuous subversive
agitation throughout the world,” and he pleaded with the officials for
clemency.[26]
Not just in Italy, but throughout the Italian diaspora, ethnic
solidarity contributed to support for the two men. In the early
twentieth century, Italians were the preeminent workers of the world. As
Donna Gabaccia has revealed, “overall, no other people migrated in so
many directions and in such impressive numbers—relatively and
absolutely—as from Italy.” Italians flocked to France, the United
States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, connecting the old country to
their new worlds. For such Italian workers, transnationalism was a way
of life. The Sacco and Vanzetti case linked their Italian ethnic
identities to their broader status as workers of the world. One pamphlet
in France noted that “before they were internationalists, Vanzetti like
Sacco were Italians. They intensely love their brothers thrown into the
new world.” In France it was also argued that widespread American
hostility marked people of their nationality for poor
treatment.[27]
In such places as France and Argentina, ethnic identity and traditions
of workingclass radicalism were often inextricably linked. Since the
1890s Italian emigrants had been heading to France in great numbers, and
they had shaped the labor movement in France’s Italian colonies, such as
Marseilles. In the 1920s, with doors to the United States closed, France
became the number one destination for Italian emigrants. Many radical
workers, threatened with violence and repression in Mussolini’s Italy,
moved across the border. There were nearly 1 million Italian immigrants
in France by 1927. And Italians were, according to police reports, the
most political and the most receptive to labor and left politics of all
immigrant groups. Organizations such as the syndicalist cgt and the
Communist-led Conféderation Générale du Travail Unitaire (cgtu)
attracted many Italian members for whom ethnic and class identities
often meshed: By 1930 in Paris alone there were 6,000 Italian members of
the cgt. Nationwide the cgtu had 12,000 Italian members, and the French
Communist Party (pcf) between 5,000 and 10,000. According to one
scholar, “Italian immigrants represented in certain regions the
proletarian base of the party.” The Communist party newspaper,
*L’Humanité,* at times printed notices for
meetings in support of Sacco and Vanzetti in Italian and often announced
that “Italian speakers” would be at the podium.[28]
[[l-m-lisa-mcgirr-the-passion-of-sacco-and-vanzetti-2.png f][This large poster called for workers in Jujuy, Argentina, to join in a
general strike planned for June 15, 1927, to protest the planned
execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It highlights the
reach of the rescue effort beyond large cities and into the Argentine
provinces. Organized by a local affliliate of the Argentine Regional
Workers Federation (Federación Obrera Regional Argentina, or fora), the
poster made its appeal to liberate the two men in personal terms. The
image on the left presents portraits of the two men, with a skull and an
electric chair. The image on the right shows Sacco with his wife, Rosa,
and his son Dante. The poster highlights the contribution of
intellectuals to the global movement by including a plea on behalf of
Sacco and Vanzetti from the French author Anatole France. *Courtesy
Boston Public Library.*]]
The fusion of working-class and ethnic identities also undergirded the
powerful currents of protest in Argentina. By 1914 nearly one-third of
Argentina’s population of 8 million was foreign-born, and many were from
Italy. In Buenos Aires, about 20 percent of the population was
Italian-born. And in the city of Rosario, as late as 1926, foreign-born
immigrants, Italians foremost, accounted for 45 percent of the
population. Italians were also influential in shaping the anarchist
currents that had dominated the Argentine labor movement since the late
nineteenth century. Even in the 1920s, *La Protesta,* a widely
circulated anarchist daily, experimented with Italian-language sections
and printed notices for meetings in solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti
in Italian. In announcing meetings for Sacco and Vanzetti, other
anarchist papers sometimes stated that Italian speakers would be
present. Moreover, Italian immigration to Argentina in the
1920s, just as in France, took on an increasingly politicized cast, as
dissidents escaping Mussolini’s Italy made their way across the south
Atlantic Ocean. One of Sacco and Vanzetti’s greatest
champions was the immigrant Severino Di Giovanni, who landed in
Argentina in 1923. He opened a workers’ library, founded the newspaper
*El Culmine,* and eventually turned to a campaign of violence to rescue
Sacco and Vanzetti and to inspire revolutionary insurrection. Di
Giovanni was most likely responsible for bombing the American embassy, a
statue of George Washington, a Ford Motor Company office, and two U.S.
banks operating in Buenos Aires.[29]
While urban terrorists such as Di Giovanni and the larger Italian
anarchist community were the most steadfast champions of Sacco and
Vanzetti, other Italians rallied behind the men for other reasons.
Italian nationalism in the 1920s brought together seemingly unlikely
bedfellows. Conservative Italians in the diaspora sought to make the
case one about nationalism, not radicalism. Indeed, Italians—whether
anarchists or Fascists—were united on one point: Sacco and Vanzetti’s
plight was due, in no small part, to their status as Italian immigrants.
As a result, many Italian immigrants, from Buenos Aires to New York,
could rally behind Sacco and Vanzetti while simultaneously exalting
Mussolini.[30]
In the United States the Order Sons of Italy in America—urged on by
conservative Italian American *prominenti,* including Fascists, who had
formed the Comitato Pro SaccoVanzetti—swung behind the defense. Luigi
Barzini, the editor of an Italian daily in New York and a Mussolini
supporter, threw his newspaper behind the men, noting that “whatever
ideas Sacco and Vanzetti have are unimportant.” He urged the creation of
an Italian American “united front” in favor of the two. The
committee he organized arranged a benefit opera performed by singers
from the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York and attended by
prominent Italians as well as labor leaders.[31]
While the rise of nativism in the United States in the 1920s and
widespread hostility to migrants from southern Europe contributed to
this effort to forge an Italian united
front, even in Buenos Aires, where ideological lines were far more
starkly drawn and Italians more integrated, Italians from across the
political spectrum supported the two men. In 1927, when the American
Chamber of Commerce sought to place paid advertisements in both
*L’Italia del Popolo* and *La Patria degli Italiani* (as it did in many
other Argentine newspapers) detailing the history of the case to counter
“erroneous understandings” and “deep misperceptions” about “American
procedure in criminal cases,” they were refused. Chamber members were
not surprised that the socialist *L’Italia del Popolo* would turn them
down, but they were much astonished that La Patria degli
Italiani, “a very serious paper,” should do so. And, on the eve of
the execution, the General Federation of the Italian Societies of the
Argentine Republic cabled Massachusetts governor Alvan Fuller, imploring
him to save Sacco and Vanzetti from death. The Italian nationalist
sentiment supporting the two men was diverse. For left-leaning Italian
anarchists, it was an ethnic affinity that firmly rejected loyalty to
the Italian state. Indeed, the case offered a means for antifascist
Italians to build an alternative nationalism.[32]
If nationalism helped build support for Sacco and Vanzetti across class
and political lines, so did a broad quasi-racial and cultural identity.
In terms picked up from popular 1920s pseudoscientific discourse, Sacco
and Vanzetti were identified as “Latin” in contrast to their “Yankee
persecutors.” The French grouped themselves with the Italians,
identifying both as part of “la grande famille Latine.” One French
defender of Sacco and Vanzetti wrote that “the revolt of these two men
against the mechanical monster was born first of all of a sentimental
Latinism.” In Argentina, even anarchist papers such as *La Protesta,*
not given to ethnic or geographic characterizations of peoples, remarked
on Yankee plutocracy as a distinctive “Northern” characteristic that
contrasted with the habits of “the people of the South.”[33]
In some countries the combination of ethnic and class identities fueled
a potent movement and accounted for its incredible resonance. Where
strong anarcho-syndicalist currents, traditions of left radicalism, and
large Italian diaspora communities intersected, the cause unleashed a
tremendous reaction, which then echoed in other countries. Protest begot
more protest. By 1924 officials at American consulates in countries as
diverse as China, Paraguay, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and England wrote
to their superiors reporting demonstrations protesting the convictions
of the two men. Yet the extent of interest the case sparked varied in
different regions of the world. While the agitation led embassy
officials elsewhere to refer to the “Sacco and Vanzetti crisis,” the
American consul in Java requested to be taken off the list of embassies
and consulates receiving cablegrams about the case, since there was “no
interest in that case whatever, either one way or the other, in this
country.”[34]
The movement spread as widely across the globe as it did as a result of
another great development of the age: mass communications.
Turn-of-the-century revolutions in print and communications technology
enabled far-flung communities to follow the twists and turns of the
case. International telegraphic communication had enabled elites to stay
abreast of global developments in the last third of the nineteenth
century, but now the communications revolution had filtered down to the
working classes. Labor and radical movements in much of the world had
established their own newspapers and were publishing their own books and
pamphlets. The democratization of access to knowledge facilitated
transnational collective mobilization. Hundreds of thousands of workers
followed the case closely, in the final months daily. In France they
read Le Libértaire; in Germany, *Rote Fahne* and *Vorwärts;* in
Argentina, *La Protesta.* Jose Marinero, a member of the Sacco and
Vanzetti Defense Committee, reported for the Argentine audience direct
from Boston. For years *La Protesta* devoted several of its
weekly and biweekly supplements exclusively to the case.
Dozens of smaller Argentine newspapers, from Bahía Blanca’s *Brazo
y Cerebro* to the Buenos Aires–based *La Antorcha* and *El Libertario,*
also gave much attention to the case.[35]
Sacco and Vanzetti entered the pages of those newspapers as workers in
the West were becoming increasingly literate, thanks to the spread of
mass education and labor unions’ successful struggle for more leisure
time. Working-class culture in the 1920s in countries such as Argentina,
France, Germany, the United States, and England was increasingly a
reading culture. In Argentina a vibrant popular culture centered on
libraries and books flourished. Some libraries served as institutional
spaces for organizing in favor of Sacco and Vanzetti. Similar popular
libraries sprouted in France and Germany. New publishers catering to
working-class audiences sprang up. Workers developed an intimate
knowledge of the case not only from newspapers but also from pamphlets
and cheap pocket books.[36] For working-class audiences, the
ordeal of the two Italian immigrants since their arrest, the details of
their lives, their hopes and dreams, and their pleas for aid became the
drama of two working-class heroes. The anarchist press, especially,
revealed the men as flesh and blood militants. Workers read reprinted
versions of Sacco and Vanzetti’s letters and cards to family and
friends. When the protagonists called for more mobilization to save
their lives, it was a direct appeal.[37]
Not surprisingly, Sacco and Vanzetti’s story varied depending on who was
communicating it, how, and why. Radicals and conservatives sometimes
circulated completely different tales about Sacco and Vanzetti and their
politics. *Le Figaro* in France and *El Excélsior* in Mexico, both
conservative newspapers, cast the two men as “Communists” for whom the
Communists would perforce agitate. The international Communist parties
portrayed them as respected and well-known revolutionaries. As one
poster plastered throughout the city of Le Havre in October 1921
explained, Sacco and Vanzetti “were militant revolutionaries ...
carrying on an active and successful propaganda in America in favor of
their beloved ideals of social renovation. Gifted with exceptional
intelligence ... they soon attracted to their generous doctrines
thousands of admirers.... Unfortunately, as is always the case in
such circumstances, they drew upon themselves numerous and serious
troubles.”[38]
Not only were the men mythologized in a misleading way, but the facts of
the case were sometimes distorted. Communists in different parts of the
world developed their own “truths” about the case. Words attributed to
Webster Thayer, the presiding judge in the case, for example, were
translated in a similarly distorted manner in several countries. Thayer
was quoted in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and very likely
elsewhere, as having said that even if the two men “did not participate
materially in the crime with which they are charged, they are morally
guilty ... because they are enemies of existing institutions, because
they are anarchists ... and that is a crime in itself.” While those
words may have crystallized Judge Thayer’s sentiments, there is no
written record that he ever uttered them. Their origins are difficult to
trace, but they seem to lie in Communist party
literature.[39] Yet they soon became a part of the lore of
the case still remembered today. As that example suggests, stories told
about the case at times strayed far from the facts and responded to
local circumstances and the audience they were intended for. In China
and Sweden, for example, radicals emphasized issues of police and
government corruption. Speakers at meetings about the case in both
places claimed that Sacco and Vanzetti had “certain documents” that
might compromise police authorities, which explained their
“persecution.” Many stories suggested that the judge or the jury had
been bribed and that the government had offered a reward for the arrest
of those involved in the holdup. Although untrue, those tales heightened
the case for outrage. No doubt the details resonated because audiences
found them plausible.[40]
While Communist party literature tended to turn the two men into
revolutionary leaders, alternate representations, equally sympathetic to
their cause and equally false, portrayed Sacco and Vanzetti as simple
workingmen caught in the wheels of an unjust legal system. In the United
States, for example, as Fred Moore sought to link the two men to
organized labor, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, an American radical closely
involved with the cause, objected. As she wrote to Moore, “being
unknown, they had no labor enemies.... The simple cry ‘Save Sacco and
Vanzetti,’ has power ... it is a dynamic slogan. For heaven’s sake,
don’t lose it in a mass of other issues. Europe ... respond[ed] to the
human appeal and simple pathos of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their very
obscurity and helplessness made them powerful.”[41] Gurley
Flynn’s words, written in 1921, proved prescient. As the two men became
malleable symbols for different groups drawn to the case, the plight of
the simple “fish peddler” and “shoemaker” became the dominant rallying
point for the civil libertarians, intellectuals, writers, and artists
who eventually became Sacco and Vanzetti’s leading champions. The
discourse increasingly emphasized the “simple pathos” of Sacco and
Vanzetti. By 1926, after the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts
upheld their conviction, the mobilization had transcended its original
social base. The global drama concerning Sacco and Vanzetti moved into
its second act.
; ;
Between 1926 and 1927 middle-class citizens and intellectuals in Europe
and Latin America joined what had become a popular front mobilization.
The prejudiced climate in which the trial took place, the deep animosity
toward anarchists and foreigners expressed by the judge and the foreman
of the jury, and the shaky and contradictory prosecution evidence—all
created strong doubts that the men had received a fair trial. With
request after request for a retrial falling on deaf ears, prominent
intellectuals and political figures such as Felix Frankfurter began to
condemn the verdict as a judicial outrage. By early 1927 an increasingly
broad swath of “respectable opinion” around the world had become deeply
critical of the American system of justice and the “deafness” of U.S.
government officials to international opinion. For such women and men,
not Sacco and Vanzetti, but American justice was on trial. The case was
called the “American Dreyfus” affair, referring to the infamous trial of
Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer accused and convicted of treason
in late nineteenth-century France in a blatant case of anti-Semitism
that drew international attention. As one Danish newspaper, the
*Nationaltidende,* put it, “Exactly like the trial against the since
pardoned French artillery Captain ... the Sacco and Vanzetti trial has
in the course of a similar period developed slowly from an American
affair into an international affair.” Some argued that Sacco and
Vanzetti’s plight presented an even more obvious injustice than that of
Alfred Dreyfus. Another Copenhagen newspaper remarked, “Just because
Dreyfus was innocent, Sacco and Vanzetti need not be so.... But there
are far more positive, tangible and strong reasons to believe in a
judicial fallacy ... now than there was for a long time during the
Dreyfus case.” Such parallels were drawn again and again and
became a shorthand way of saying the case was another great miscarriage
of justice. With historical hindsight, the differences between the two
cases, particularly the dynamic role of the labor movement in the
mobilization to save Sacco and Vanzetti, are at least as great as their
similarities.
But the parallels were not without foundation. Both trials drew enormous
international attention. While the question of guilt or innocence was
more easily resolved in favor of Dreyfus than of Sacco and Vanzetti,
both trials were marked by prejudice and unfair treatment of the
defendants. Most of all, intellectuals helped make both cases *causes
célèbres.*[42]
From the beginning, defense lawyer Fred Moore had hoped to mobilize
liberal elite supporters. In 1921 Moore urged Gurley Flynn to contact
American Civil Liberties Union leader Roger Baldwin, saying he himself
would contact Frankfurter. He also urged the journalist Upton Sinclair
to visit Vanzetti in prison. Deeply moved, Sinclair published an account
that painted Vanzetti with a halo of innocence around him, declaring him
“simple and genuine, open minded as a child.” As liberals and
intellectuals came to their defense, the men’s militant politics were
defanged, and they were recast as “philosophical” anarchists. Sinclair
offered, as he put it, his “testimony” in the court of public opinion:
“this humble working man is precisely what he pretends to be, an
idealist and apostle of a new social order. I should consider him just
about as likely a person to be guilty of highway robbery and murder as I
myself should be.” Making Vanzetti a palatable protagonist
for middle-class audiences, Sinclair noted that Vanzetti “possess[ed]
that innate refinement which makes good manners without need of
teaching. He has devoted his life to the service of his fellow
wageworkers.” Sinclair’s views were shared by intellectuals in other
countries, some of whom had already begun speaking out in favor of the
two men.[43]
Moore and those close to him expressed continual disappointment with the
tepid support they mustered from liberals in the first years of the
case. Moore’s close associate Selma Maximon, working to drum up support
in Chicago, lamented that “no one is going to the public platform for
these two boys except a handful of ultra radicals.... We need every
ounce of energy of the liberals.”[44] Only after William G.
Thompson, a prominent Boston lawyer, replaced Moore on the defense team
in 1924 did liberals and intellectuals come increasingly to the fore. As
appeal after appeal failed and the possibility of execution seemed ever
more real, the case took on the dimensions of high moral drama. Just as
the Dreyfus case had influenced a generation of intellectuals in France
in the late nineteenth century, the Sacco and Vanzetti case contributed
to a budding social conscience among a generation of artists and writers
in the United States whose experiences of war had turned them toward
pessimism and disillusion. These American elites were affected by the
transnational currents that swirled around the case and themselves
influenced its global visibility. And like radicals and labor activists,
American intellectuals of the 1920s were embedded in transnational
networks.[45]
Writers and artists during the 1920s embraced cosmopolitan identities
with a vengeance, renouncing the nativist, puritanical impulses in
American culture at that time. American writers and artists frustrated
with the United States, including Malcolm Cowley, Katherine Anne Porter,
Ben Shahn, John Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway, left for long sojourns
in such places as Spain, Mexico, and France. Expatriation was considered
“a method of liberation from the Philistinism of the
1920s.”[46] Some moved to Europe; others to Latin America.
Abroad, such American artists and writers interacted with political
radicals of all stripes, from anarchists to Communists. Their
experiences made them see the world and at times the case through
different eyes. When they returned from abroad, the case deepened their
new social commitments and magnified their concerns about the deep rifts
in American life and their hopes to rectify them.
Porter, a writer who became deeply involved in their campaign, wrote
years later that her attention was first drawn to the case during the
years she spent in Mexico in the early 1920s: “On each return to New
York, I would follow again the strange history of the Italian emigrants
Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” Shahn, who studied in Europe in
the 1920s and whose art was profoundly shaped by the case, recalled
years later the demonstrations he witnessed in support of the two men in
Paris. At the time Dos Passos was the best-known of the writers involved
with the case. He had lived in both Spain and Mexico, where he
encountered anarchism and developed his sympathy for it. He saw the men
as anarchists and believed that was the basis for their persecution. The
case, as the critic Alfred Kazin remarked, transformed “his persistently
romantic obsession with the poet’s struggle against the world into a use
of the class struggle as his base in art.” Malcolm Cowley, who lived in
France in the 1920s, wrote that the case taught his generation of
intellectuals the need for “united political action ... the
intellectuals had learned that they were powerless by themselves and
that they could not accomplish anything unless they made an alliance
with the working class.”[47]
The involvement of intellectuals and writers such as Sinclair, Dos
Passos, and Frankfurter in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti brought the
movement a respectability and visibility previously unobtainable.
Transnational connections were thus a two-way street: American
intellectuals were influenced by currents of radical politics abroad,
and they introduced new foreign audiences to the case. Newspapers across
the world, for example, discussed Frankfurter’s criticisms of the case,
and his book on it provided the facts and analysis for innumerable
pamphlets and histories published around the world. Pleas for the two
men written by Frankfurter, Dos Passos, Sinclair, Anatole France, and
Hans Ryner were reprinted throughout Latin America and Europe. Extremely
prominent individuals joined the chorus: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie,
Thomas Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, H. G. Wells, George
Bernard Shaw, and Diego Rivera. Some spoke out against the death
sentence; others actively organized protests.[48]
The case contributed to an increasing turn toward social action among
American intellectuals, a commitment that deepened in the depression
years.[49] Yet, the response to the case suggests that many
intellectuals were conflicted about this newfound social activism.
European and American intellectuals of their generation were deeply
influenced by the disillusionment that resulted from World War I. That
disillusionment expressed itself in the literary themes of passionate
individualism and fierce independence, a yearning to escape the safety
and tedium of bourgeois society, and a heroization of living outside the
law. In France, in particular, anarchist thought was in vogue in
intellectual and literary circles. In Sacco and Vanzetti, writers and
artists already dismayed with a world they saw as bent on destroying
individuality found two strident individualists who faced execution
because of their militancy and rejection of bourgeois norms. The two
men, then, became symbols of the struggle for the survival of
individualism in a period of anxiety and frustration over its possible
loss. Here, perhaps, social commitment might serve to rescue
individualism.[50]
Discourse about the case expressed anxiety not only over the survival of
individualism in the modern world but also over the heightened power of
the United States in the wake of World War I. That the trial took place
in the United States, the new world center of business and capital, is
critical to understanding its international influence. Hundreds of
injustices of equal weight had occurred in other parts of the world, but
Latin America’s long-standing resentment of the power and influence of
the United States and Europe’s growing concerns about the increasing
power of Uncle Sam meant that this injustice stood out. Through
critiques of the mens’ plight, intellectuals hoped that the “de-Godding
of
America,” as one German journal put it, would begin.[51]
In Latin America, both elites and the lower classes complained of the
arrogance of Yankee power, and hostility to the United States reached a
new high point when the United States reoccupied Nicaragua in 1926. The
case of Sacco and Vanzetti heightened those
sentiments; according to American capitalists in Brazil, Uruguay, and
Argentina, it was “inflaming public opinion ... to the great detriment
of American business interests and ... endangering innocent
lives.”[52] In Europe, the United States’ postwar replacement
of Great Britain as the world’s major economic power heightened scrutiny
of American claims to be bringing freedom and democracy to the world.
The Sacco and Vanzetti case raised concerns about American intolerance,
prejudice, and disregard for civil liberties, not to mention calling
attention to the faults and inefficiences of its justice system. By 1927
the American legal system had become the target of European critics
representing both ends of the political spectrum: Conservatives
questioned why it took so long to carry out a sentence imposed by a
court of law. Many others condemned the death sentence per se. By the
eve of the execution, there was virtually unanimous accord in many
countries that the Massachusetts authorities should grant clemency to
the two men, given the doubts about their guilt.[53] Yet the
framing of such criticisms of the United States was more complex than
the reductionist term “anti-Americanism” might imply. As one newspaper
in Denmark, the *Politiken,* put it in August 1927, “If it were only in
Russia or some other barbaric country that such a judicial murder were
committed for political reasons. But America, the United States of
America! If such a thing happens there, the wholesome sense of justice
of mankind will feel deeply wounded.” And as another Danish newspaper,
the *Ekstrabladet,* proclaimed, “America, which formerly was the country
of liberty, has begun a new role: that of reaction ... which is
preparing to assume world hegemony.”[54]
By 1927 not only radical publications, but the mainstream mass media
charted, and spread news of, the case. The U.S. embassies circulated
detailed reports on what newspapers around the world were saying about
the case, noting with disgust and concern the widespread criticisms of
the American legal system they were hearing. U.S. embassy officials in
Norway remarked that “the bourgeois press and a deploringly large number
of non-radical citizens express doubt as to [Sacco and Vanzetti’s]
guilt.” In Latin America the negative press attention led
representatives of American business interests there to write letters to
the United Press, Associated Press, and the International News Service
in the
United States, complaining that the dispatches published regarding the
Sacco-Vanzetti case “are almost entirely Anti-American.” In Copenhagen
embassy officials remarked that “all shades of political opinion, some
moderate, others in highly inflammatory language” rejected the sentence
of Sacco and Vanzetti. In Uruguay, according to a U.S. legation
official, the press followed the trial to “an almost unbelievable
extent,” with Communist and conservative newspapers agreeing that Sacco
and Vanzetti should not be executed.[55]
[[l-m-lisa-mcgirr-the-passion-of-sacco-and-vanzetti-3.png f][As the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti approached, the
movement to rescue the two men unleashed a tremendous reaction
worldwide. Protesting the planned execution, a crowd listens to a
speaker at the Plaza del Congresso in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in August
1927. *Courtesy the Associated Press.*]]
In August 1927, after Governor Fuller of Massachusetts refused to grant
clemency, a tidal wave of outrage and indignation swept Europe and Latin
America. In Germany that summer, demonstrations in Hamburg, Berlin, and
Leipzig turned violent and bloody. A wide spectrum of the press in
Berlin, the German capital, expressed doubt that justice had been done,
with Social Democrats declaring the sentence “Justizmord” (judicial
murder). Influential politicians such as Paul Löbe, president of the
Reichstag, joined the loud chorus of dissent. In France a massive
demonstration was held in the Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of
Paris on August 8, with between twenty-five and seventy-five thousand
participants waving banners and demanding clemency for the two men. In
neighboring Switzerland mobs attacked the American consulate. In Denmark
U.S. embassy officials escaped mob violence, according to the American
ambassador, only because the “forces of police” protected them. In Latin
America hostility toward the powerful neighbor to the North rose to
critical levels. On the eve of the execution, Sacco and
Vanzetti sympathizers mobilized from Mexico to Argentina, staging
general strikes in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Montevideo, Uruguay. Embassy
officials reported that in Guadalajara on August 10, “all stores were
closed, all means of transportation stopped, and no private automobiles
were allowed in the streets.” At the request of American
consular officials, Mexican troops patrolled the section of the city
where Americans lived. In Montevideo shops were closed, newspapers
suspended publication, and each streetcar carried an armed soldier. U.S.
embassy officials remarked on the “excited state of public feeling
against us in connection with this trial which has spread to all classes
in this country.” In Mexico City movie theaters interrupted their
showings for a half hour to protest the men’s fate. “Whether one likes
it or not,” wrote the Parisian Journal des Débats in August
1927, “the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti has assumed international
importance.” In Munich the cover of a weekly magazine depicted an
agitated crowd with a caption remarking on the “storms” of protest that
raged in Germany and throughout Europe.[56]
For the State Department, the agitation was deeply worrisome. The early
mobilization in Mexico led embassy officials to distribute a circular
letter “containing a true explanation of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.” And
as early as 1922, State Department officials in Washington, D.C.,
remarked that “in view of the many inaccurate reports which have
appeared in the foreign press regarding the cases of Messrs. Sacco and
Vanzetti, the Department has deemed it advisable to obtain from the
authorities of Massachusetts a brief statement of the facts of the cases
as brought out upon the trial of the two men.” They closely followed
decisions in the case, notifying embassies and consulates when decisions
might be handed down so their staffs could prepare for the expected
threats and acts of violence and protest. Finally, the department
reached the point where simple notification was not enough, and by 1926
officials there appealed to the Massachusetts authorities for advance
warning: “we should inform our various missions by telegraph not only
that the men have been sentenced because that news will go all around
the world promptly enough, but ... we should be able to inform them in
absolute confidence two or three days in advance in order that proper
precautions can be taken to protect them before it is too late.” The
efforts in the United States were mirrored by consulates abroad. In
Argentina embassy officials published an extensive updated history of
the case, which it released to newspapers with the request that they
reprint it to correct against “misperceptions.” American businessmen in
Buenos Aires, to ensure widespread dissemination of the embassy’s
summary, took out advertisements in newspapers reprinting it in
full.[57]
U.S. officials were deeply aware of, and concerned by, the agitation
about the case. Governor Fuller’s decision to postpone the execution
after his refusal to grant clemency was a response not only to
last-minute appeals by lawyers, but to the vast global reaction. But the
agitation seemed to have the unintended consequence of hardening
officials’ positions. William E. Borah, chairman of the U.S. Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations, expressed the view of many officials:
“It would be a national humiliation, a shameless, cowardly compromise of
national courage, to pay the slightest attention to foreign protest...
. The foreign interference is an impudent and willful challenge to our
sense of decency and dignity and ought to be dealt with accordingly.” A.
Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University and a member of the
advisory commission convened by Governor Fuller to review the case and
consider clemency, wrote to Fuller shortly after the execution,
commending him for his decision to carry it out. Fuller, he wrote, was
“absolutely right in refusing a commutation ... which would have kept
the agitation for a pardon open indefinitely.” Still, he called on the
governor to commission an extensive report, hoping it would be of “great
value ... for its influence upon foreigners who have gotten a wholly
distorted idea of the case.”[58]
; ;
The global history did not end with the execution of the two men. It
continued well into the 1930s, emerged again powerfully in the 1960s,
and is still with us today. The struggle over the legacy of Sacco and
Vanzetti began as soon as the two men met their fate in the electric
chair on August 23, 1927. With the sentence carried out, they were now
elevated to the status of martyrs. Immediate protests expressed outrage
and sought to memorialize the two men. In Mexico City the Mexican
Confederation of Labor called for a one-hour cessation of work on the
morning of August 24. Streetcars halted, buses were parked across the
principal streets of the city, and traffic was paralyzed. In Sydney,
Australia, ten thousand protesters demonstrated in the streets. In
London’s Hyde Park, similar crowds gathered. In Paris, despite a
downpour of rain, bands of demonstrators battled with police: Stones and
bricks were thrown, store windows broken, and cars along the route of
the march overturned. More than a hundred police were injured and some
two hundred demonstrators arrested. Then the protests and demonstrations
stopped, and the case assumed a new life as the subject of films,
novels, plays, and poetry throughout the world.
The curtain rose on the third act of this global history.[59]
[[l-m-lisa-mcgirr-the-passion-of-sacco-and-vanzetti-4.png f][On August 23 and 24, 1927, French sympathizers smashed shop windows and
wrecked places of business to vent their rage after the executions of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In Paris many demonstrators were
injured in a clash with the police. This picture shows damage done by
rioters in Cherbourg, France. *Courtesy the Associated Press.*]]
Stories about the life and death of the two
working-class heroes fed the demands of the world’s burgeoning throng of
working-class moviegoers. Movies produced in Germany, Switzerland,
Austria, and Russia dramatized the case. One handbill in Argentina
advertised the film Sacco y Vanzetti as revealing “all the
struggles, the ideals, and the deep sufferings of seven years of slow
death, the most sensational, tragic, and heroic story witnessed in
centuries.” It noted that “women should see this film”; the sufferings
of Rosa Sacco “would bring tears to [the eyes of] all women of the
world.” In Copenhagen sensationalist advertisements billed a film on
Sacco and Vanzetti as a story of “a judicial murder ... A criminal
Film in Six Great Acts.” The movies were shown in such far-flung places
as Montevideo and Morocco, much to the consternation of American embassy
officials, who protested the showings as a “gratuitous and premeditated
effort to stir up hate against the United States.” Claiming that the
films represented a direct attack on the judicial procedure of a
friendly nation, embassy officials requested that they be withdrawn, at
times successfully.[60] Other forms of working-class culture
also provided ways to protest and remember the case. A tango—the dance created by the Argentine
working class in the 1920s—was entitled “Sacco y Vanzetti.” Composed by
J. M. LaCarte, it spoke of the “two Italians in a sad jail cell ...
crying their pain and affliction.” Entrepreneurs with radical sympathies
also used the two men’s fame to appeal to working-class consumers. In
Argentina a Sacco and Vanzetti brand cigarette was sold. The American
ambassador to Argentina was so concerned about their sale and that of
other “articles of commerce” that carried the names of “two convicted
criminals in the United States” that he protested to the Argentine
Ministry of Foreign Affairs requesting their prohibition.
Sympathizers of the two men in Argentina also sought,
unsuccessfully, to transform public spaces into sites of collective
remembrance. Proposals were made by city council members in Buenos Aires
to change the name of the street Estados Unidos to Nicolas Sacco and
that of Nueva York to Bartolomé Vanzetti.[61]
[[l-m-lisa-mcgirr-the-passion-of-sacco-and-vanzetti-5.png f][Worldwide protests, demonstrations, and memorial meetings continued
after the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. At a
September 1927 memorial meeting in Trafalgar Square, London, A. J. Cook,
secretary of the Miner’s Federation, addresses a crowd of 10,000 while a
spectator tears an American flag. Soon after Sacco and Vanzetti’s
deaths, however, demonstrations and meetings gave way to other modes of
memorialization through film, theater, and song. *Courtesy the
Associated Press.*]]
More commonly, the two men were remembered on the stage, in poems, in
songs, and in novels with their story retold in different ways for
different audiences at different times.
The first wave of such art burst onto the scene in the wake of the men’s
execution and continued into the 1930s. While much of this material was
produced in the United States, it was often translated and published
elsewhere—such as Eugene Lyons’s history of the case and the 1928 play
by Maxwell Anderson and Harold Hickerson, *Gods of the Lightning,* which
was produced in Berlin in 1930 and Madrid in 1931. Other plays were
written abroad, for example, Pierre Yrondy’s French production, Sept
ans d’agonie. Radical newspapers and journals that had kept up a
parade of information when the men were alive now memorialized them in
anniversary supplements and printed histories of the case. Even pulp
material intended for working-class audiences retold the story from
Madrid to Havana to Buenos Aires. The writings of Bartolomeo
Vanzetti, particularly his autobiography, were translated into several
languages. The writer Ba Jin, who had exchanged letters with
Vanzetti when the Italian was in prison, translated the autobiography
into Chinese. He was deeply touched by the case and referred to it in
his first novel, *Meiwang,* published in 1929. Ba Jin referred to
Vanzetti as his “mentor.” “I never met him, but I love him and he loves
me.” This first wave of cultural production, as Ba Jin’s words
attest—plays, novels, poetry, and art—heroized the two men and secured
their place for posterity as working-class martyrs whose deaths
symbolized injustice and sounded a call to social action.[62]
The second wave of cultural production arose in
the 1960s, a time of heightened social conflict in many places. For
those questioning their societies’ perceived failures to live up to
democratic ideals, the case highlighted that failure in the past and
linked a burgeoning social movement to a longer history of struggle. The
men’s story stood in for a broader history of social injustice and
called for a renewal of “international solidarity.” The social movements
of the 1960s—from the student movement to feminism and the New Left—were
international. Ideas, people, and organizations spilled across national
borders to redress social injustice in their home countries and
globally. Participants in those mobilizations looked to moments of such
solidarity in the past for inspiration. Publishers not only reissued
accounts of the case by, for example, Upton Sinclair and Eugene Lyons,
but Italian, French, and German playwrights retold the story. Plays
produced in one country were often translated and performed in another.
In a play by Armand Gatti, produced in France in the early 1960s, the
international presence of the case was taken as the central theme: The
trial of the two men was reconstructed through the eyes of women and men
in five urban settings—Boston, Lyons, Hamburg, Turin, and New
Orleans. Sacco and Vanzetti came alive again not only in
plays but also through music. Joan Baez’s “Ballad of Sacco and
Vanzetti,” written by Ennio Morricone, shared the title of Woody
Guthrie’s earlier homage to the two men. It linked their martyrdom to
“racial hatred” “and the simple fact” of being “poor.” It
became known to an international audience through the release of
Giuliano Montaldo’s film *Sacco e Vanzetti* in 1971. Songwriters abroad
joined the chorus. One of France’s best-known singers, Georges Moustaki,
translated Baez’s homage and released it as “La marche de Sacco et
Vanzetti.” In Germany the political songwriter Franz Josef
Degenhardt introduced a new generation to the two men with powerful
lyrics in three languages that sought to inspire left mobilization by
commemorating Sacco and Vanzetti’s legacy and martyrdom.[63]
Even today, Sacco and Vanzetti have not been forgotten. Their names
label streets in towns and cities in France, Italy, and the former
Soviet Union. Since 1988, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt has had
a Sacco and Vanzetti “reading room,” created by the Iranian-born artist
Siah Armajani as a tribute to the men’s “dedication to the rights of
working people and to the goal of universal education.” In Argentina in
1991, *Sacco y Vanzetti,* a play by Mauricio Kartun, premiered in the
Metropolitan Theater in Buenos Aires. Versions of the play have since
been performed in the Argentine interior, in Montevideo, and in
Rome. New plays, from Louis Lippa’s Sacco and Vanzetti: A
Vaudeville to Anton Coppola’s opera *Sacco and Vanzetti,* which
premiered at the St. Petersburg, Florida, opera house in March 2001,
retell the story. In these dramatizations, the details of the case have
been lost as it has been transformed into a grand symbol of the struggle
of the weak, the poor, and the working class for social and economic
justice and of political minorities for tolerance.[64]
; ;
Given that in eighty years historians have failed to come to a consensus
on the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, it might seem odd that
they have achieved global status as working-class martyrs. After all,
the twentieth century has witnessed its share of innocent women and men
persecuted and executed by repressive states because they held unpopular
political opinions. Yet, in the context of the historical moment and
contingencies that brought the two Italians to prominence, their staying
power makes sense. The Sacco and Vanzetti case coincided with the birth
of the new era of mass communications that transformed the world into an
ever more connected place. That made the two anarchists household names
in many parts of the world. Moreover, the confrontation took place as
the dynamics of global radicalism were being reworked, allowing the case
to serve as a cause for different groups in their efforts to revive or
build new radical movements. It also took place at a time when class
relations were being altered in Europe and Latin America. As a result,
it became a unifying cause that brought together workers and
middle-class citizens who shared a concern over issues of political
tolerance, discrimination, and social justice—in effect building an
early version of the Popular Front. These factors contributed to
unleashing the global passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.
But it was the location of the trial in the United States and the
position of the United States as a world power that above all explain
the case’s resonance. The United States government since World War I had
declared itself a beacon light of freedom and democracy, a positive
force for a better world. From the perspective of those outside the
United States—both for those who embraced that promise and for those who
found it barren—flagrant violation of justice in the United States was
rightly an international concern. It was, as they saw it, not only their
right but their duty as citizens in a world of deepening United States
influence to be concerned with the corruption of American justice. While
Sen. William Borah in 1927 indignantly declared foreign intervention
“impudent,” such intervention was read differently by many in the United
States and by the vast majority of those looking from the outside in.
Despite the deaf ears of United States officials to the international
outcry, its legitimacy was obvious to millions of citizens of the world:
A country claiming global influence—partly based on universal values of
democracy and freedom—is the rightful subject of international criticism
when free institutions and democratic values appear to fail. In a world
ever more shaped by the United States, that holds true as much today as
it did in the 1920s.
[1] “Demonstration of Radical Elements,” American Consulate, Mexico, to
Secretary of State, memo, May 2, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 446,
Records of the Department of State, rg 59 (National Archives,
College Park, Md.); “Speeches delivered before Consulate by radical
groups,” memo, May 2, 1927, *ibid.*
[2] I use the words “global” and “international” interchangeably. I use
“transnational” for connections between people and movements of
ideas across national boundaries. For the theoretical premises of a
concept of “transnationalism,” see Linda G. Basch, Nina Glick
Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, *Nations Unbound:
Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and
Deterritorialized Nation-States* (Amsterdam, 1994), 21−49, 225−66.
[3] *The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the
Record of the Trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the
Courts of Massachusetts and Subsequent Proceedings, 1920*−1927
(Mamaroneck, 1969). See also Paul Avrich, *Sacco and Vanzetti:
The Anarchist Background* (Princeton, 1991); Louis Joughin and
Edmund M. Morgan, *The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti* (New York,
1948); Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, *Justice Crucified: The Story of
Sacco and Vanzetti* (New York, 1977); Francis Russell, *Tragedy in
Dedham: The Story of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case* (New York, 1962); and
Michael M.
Topp, *The Sacco and Vanzetti Case: A Brief History with Documents*
(Boston, 2005).
[4] Willis C. Cook to Secretary of State, Sept.
28, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 929, State
Department Records; *Le Figaro* (Paris), Aug. 11, 1927, p. 1; Oswald
Garrison Villard, “Justice Underfoot,” Aug. 17, 1927, *Nation,* in
*Sacco and Vanzetti Case,* by Topp, 172.
[5] For examples of the minimal treatment of international
aspects of the case, see David Felix, *Protest: Sacco and Vanzetti and
the Intellectuals* (Bloomington, 1965), 170, 207−39; and Robert H.
Montgomery, *Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth* (New York, 1960).
See also Avrich, *Sacco and Vanzetti,* 9; and Topp, *Sacco and Vanzetti
Case,* 46. For diverging views on the guilt of Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, see Francis Russell, Sacco and Vanzetti: The
Case Resolved (New York, 1986); Russell, *Tragedy in Dedham;* and
William Young and David E. Kaiser, *Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case
of Sacco and Vanzetti* (Amherst, 1985). See also Topp, *Sacco and
Vanzetti Case,* 4, 21−50, 190−94; and Nunzio Pernicone, “Carlo Tresca
and the Sacco-Vanzetti Case,” *Journal of American History,* 66 (Dec.
1979), 535−47. A few close to the anarchist scene did raise doubts, and
their actions deeply concerned Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She wrote to the
lawyer Fred Moore, “How many Italians, especially the close comrades of
the Boston group, who say they are innocent with their tongues in their
cheeks and don’t believe it themselves. This must be stopped.” Elizabeth
Gurley Flynn to Fred Moore, Jan. 22, 1922, Fred Moore Correspondence,
Aldino Felicani Collection (Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass.). An
anarchist involved in the campaign of solidarity, Hugo Rolland, waited
until after his death to make available to researchers his version of
events. Although he offered no new evidence and although his account
suggests the influence of Francis Russell’s arguments about Sacco’s
guilt and is probably tainted by factional schisms, he was one of the
few anarchists who broke the code of silence to get to the truth of the
case. He came to believe that Sacco was involved in the holdup along
with Mario Budo and Riccardo Orciano, and that Vanzetti was not. Hugo
Rolland, “Il caso Sacco e Vanzetti: Nella storia e nella legenda” (The
Sacco and Vanzetti case: In history and in legend), I and II, 1971 and
1974, Hugo Rolland Papers (International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam, Netherlands).
[6] On the need to place United States history in
a transnational context, see Thomas Bender, *Rethinking American
History in a Global Age* (Berkeley, 2002). For recent examples of
transnational history, see Daniel T. Rodgers, *Atlantic Crossings:
Social Politics in a Progressive Age* (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Sven
Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web
of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,”
*American Historical Review,* 109 (Dec. 2004), 1405–38; Kristin
Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream,
1865−1920,” *ibid.*, 107 (Feb. 2002), 55–83; and Akira Iriye,
*Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the
Making of the Contemporary World* (Berkeley, 2002). On transnational
social movements, see Bonnie S. Anderson, *Joyous Greetings: The
First International Women’s Movement, 1830*−*1860* (New York, 2000);
Penny M. Von Eschen, *Race against Empire: Black Americans and
Anticolonialism, 1937*−*1957* (Ithaca, 1997); Winston James, *Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia:
Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America* (London, 1998);
James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada
Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys,
1931−1934,” *American Historical Review,* 106 (April 2001), 387−430; and
Jeremi Suri, *Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of
Detente* (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). On global cultural movements, see
Michael Denning, *Culture in the Age of Three Worlds* (London, 2004). On
the need to globalize the study of labor history, see Marcel van der
Linden, *Transnational Labour History: Explorations* (Burlington, 2003),
1−10, 143−53.
[7] For this same point with reference to the United States, see Eric
Foner, comment, in *Sacco-Vanzetti: Developments and
Reconsiderations**1979,* *Conference Proceedings* (Boston, 1982),
94.
[8] See van der Linden, *Transnational Labour History,* 1−21. On
transnational identities among one group of workers, see Donna R.
Gabaccia, *Italy’s Many Diasporas* (Seattle, 2000), 106–28; and
Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., *Italian Workers of
the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States*
(Urbana, 2001). See also Frits van Holthoon and Marcel van der
Linden, eds., *Internationalism in the Labour Movement, 1830*−*1940*
(Leiden, 1988).
[9] Friedrich Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Nov. 29, 1886, in *Marx
and Engels on the United States,* comp. and trans. Nelly Rumyantseva
(Moscow, 1979), 312; Richard H. Frost, *The Mooney Case* (Stanford,
1969).
[10] This argument draws on van der Linden,
*Transnational Labour History,* 20n6.
[11] George Woodcock, *Anarchism: A History of
Libertarian Ideas and Movements* (Cleveland, 1962); Avrich, *Sacco
and Vanzetti,* 59−136; Nunzio Pernicone, “Luigi Galleani and Italian
Anarchist Terrorism in the United States,” *Studi Emigrazione/Etudes
Migration* (Rome), 30 (Sept. 1993), 469−89; Augusta Molinari, “Luigi
Galleani: Un anarchico italiano negli Stati Uniti” (Luigi Galleani:
An Italian anarchist in the United States), Miscellanea Storica
Ligure (Genoa), 6 (1974), 261−86.
[12] On proletarian internationalism, see van der
Linden, *Transnational Labour History;* Geoff Eley, *Forging
Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000* (New York,
2002), 86−108; and Avrich, *Sacco and Vanzetti,* 160. On Sacco and
Vanzetti’s international contacts, see, for example, Bartolomeo
Vanzetti to Luigi Bertoni, Oct. 10, 1926, April 3, 6, 7, 1927, Luigi
Bertoni Papers (International Institute of Social History). See also
“Un saludo de Vanzetti al pueblo de la Argentina” (A greeting from
Vanzetti to the Argentine people), *Brazo y Cerebro* (Bahía Blanca),
July 31, 1927; “Una nueva carta de Sacco” (A new letter from Sacco),
*La Antorcha* (Buenos Aires), Aug. 27, 1926; *Agitación: Publicación
del Comité de Agitación Pro Libertad de Sacco y Vanzetti* (Buenos
Aires), 3 (Aug. 1926) (International Institute of Social History).
On Italian American workers’ transnationalism, see Michael M. Topp,
*Those* *without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian
American Syndicalists* (Minneapolis, 2001). On their radicalism more
broadly, see Rudolph J. Vecoli, ed., *Italian-American Radicalism:
Old World Origins and New World Developments* (Staten Island, 1971).
See also Elisabetta Vezzosi, *Il socialismo
indifferente: Immigranti italiani e Socialist Party negli Stati Uniti del primo novecento* (Indifferent
socialism: Italian immigrants and the socialist party in the United
States since 1900) (Rome, 1991).
[13] See, for example, Moore to Flynn, Aug. 26, 1920, Dec. 15, 1921,
Moore Correspondence, Felicani Collection; Moore to Selma Maximon,
May 24, 1922, *ibid.*
[14] See, for example, Moore to Ben Legere, Sept. 4, 1920, Moore
Correspondence, Felicani Collection; Moore to F. S. Merlino, Oct.
26, 1920, *ibid.*; Moore to Morris Gebelow (Eugene Lyons), Oct. 26,
1920, *ibid.* On the campaign of solidarity for Joseph Ettor and
Arturo Giovannitti, see Daniel Aaron, *Writers on the Left:
Episodes in American Literary Communism* (1961; New York, 1992),
171; and Michael M. Topp, “The Lawrence Strike: The Possibilities
and Limitations of Italian American Syndicalist Transnationalism,”
in *Italian Workers of the World,* ed. Gabaccia and Ottanelli,
139−62.
[15] Moore to Flynn, Dec. 15, 1921, Moore Correspondence, Felicani
Collection; Flynn to Moore, Dec. 14, 1921, *ibid.*; Moore to
Leonardo Mucci, Jan. 16, 1922, ibid. Moore asked Mucci to
win the support of the “Italian Federation of Labor.” Since there
was no such organization, he was surely referring, in poor English
translation, to the Confederazione Generale del Lavore, the leading
Italian labor organization. Moore to Morris Gebelow (Eugene Lyons), Oct. 26, 1920, *ibid.*; Joughin and Morgan, *Legacy of Sacco and
Vanzetti,* 228−29; Maximon to Moore [1922], Moore
Correspondence, Felicani Collection.
[16] On the call for a campaign of solidarity, see Johannes Zelt,
Proletarischer *Internationalismus in Kampf um Sacco und
Vanzetti* (Proletarian internationalism in the struggle to save
Sacco and Vanzetti) (Berlin, 1958), 57−61.
[17] On the history of anarchism, see Woodcock, Anarchism;
Giampietro D. Berti, *Errico Malatesta e il movimento
anarchico italiano e internazionale, 1872*−*1932* (Errico Malatesta
and the Italian and international anarchist movement, 1872−1932)
(Milan, 2003); and Eley, Forging Democracy, 85−123. See
also Benedict Anderson, *Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the
Anti-Colonial Imagination* (London, 2005). On demonstrations, see
*Le Figaro* (Paris), Oct. 21, 1921, p. 3; *ibid.*, Oct. 24, 1921,
pp. 1–2; *L’Humanité* (Paris), Aug. 7, 1921, pp. 1–3; *ibid.*, Oct.
6, 1921, p. 2; American Consulate, Marseilles, France, memo, Nov.
8, 1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 85, State Department Records;
American Consulate, Santiago, Chile, to Secretary of State, memo,
Nov. 10, 1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 110, *ibid*.; American
Consulate, Basel, Switzerland, to Secretary of State, memo, Nov. 8,
1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 85, *ibid*.; American Consulate, the
Hague, Netherlands, to Secretary of State, memo, Nov. 18, 1921,
file number 311.6521 Sa1 105, *ibid.*
[18] Journal des Débats (Paris),
Oct. 21, 22, 23, 1921; Le Figaro (Paris), Oct. 24,
1921. On the bombings, see W. R. Castle Jr. to John H. Wigmore,
Northwestern University School of Law, Aug. 4, 1927, file number
311.6521 Sa1 518, State Department Records. W. Stanley Hollis to
Secretary of State, memo, Nov. 1, 1921, dispatch 338, file number
125.1, *ibid.*; Arthur Shields to Moore, Nov. 8, 1921, Moore
Correspondence, Felicani Collection.
[19] The key characteristic of worker politics in
Italy was “its preference for anarchism and insurrection as well as
its hostility to the state and electoral politics,” according to
Gabaccia, *Italy’s Many Diasporas,* 108−9. See also
Nunzio Pernicone, *Italian Anarchism* (Princeton, 1993). Berti, *Errico
Malatesta e il movimento anarchico;* Emilio Gentile, “Fascism in Power:
The Totalitarian Experiment,” in *Liberal and Fascist Italy:
1900*−*1945,* ed. Adrian Lyttelton (New York, 2002), 139−73, esp.
148−49. See also Adrian Lyttelton, *The Seizure of Power: Fascism in
Italy, 1919*−*1929* (London, 1987). Philip Cannistraro, “Mussolini,
Sacco-Vanzetti, and the Anarchists: The Transatlantic Context,” *Journal
of Modern History,* 68 (March 1996), 31–62, esp. 40; Eugene Lyons
(Morris Gebelow) to Moore, Dec. 10, 1920, Moore Correspondence, Felicani
Collection; H. Roderick Dorsey, American Consulate, Florence, to
Secretary of State, memo, Oct. 22, 1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 57,
State Department Records; Henry Fletcher, Embassy of the United States,
Rome, to Secretary of State, June 26, 1926, file number 311.6521 Sa1
270, *ibid.*;
American Consulate, Genoa, Italy, to Secretary of State, memo, Aug.
1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 893, *ibid.*; H. P. Starrett,
American Consul, Genoa, to Secretary of State, Aug. 1927, file number
311.6521 Sa1 893, *ibid.* The American consul in Naples commented on the
“almost perfect protection provided by the Italian authorities.” See
Homer Byington to Secretary of State, n.d., file number 311.6521 Sa1
895, *ibid.*
[20] David Barry, *A History of the French Anarchist Movement,
1817*−*1945* (Westport, 2002); Eley, *Forging Democracy,* 95−98. See
also Anne Rebayal and Jean-Paul Roux, “L’affaire Sacco et
Vanzetti vue par *L’Humanité* et *Le Libertaire*” (The Sacco and
Vanzetti case seen by *L’Humanité* and *Le Libertaire*) (University of
Paris, mémoire de maîtrise, 1971); Louis LeCoin, *Le cours d’une vie* (A
life’s course) (Paris, 1965), 103−20; and Sylvain Garel, *Volonté
anarchiste: Louis Lecoin et le mouvement anarchiste* (*Anarchist will:
Louis Lecoin and the anarchist movement*) (Paris, 1982). *L’Humanité*
(Paris), Aug. 7, 1927, pp. 1–3; Edward Mortimer, *The Rise of the French
Communist Party, 1920*−*1947* (London, 1984), 19−98; Annie Kriegal and
Robert Wohl, *French Communism in the Making, 1914*−*1924* (Stanford,
1966). See *L’Humanité,* which in early October 1921 dedicated a column
“Pour Sacco et Vanzetti” (For Sacco and Vanzetti), tracing events in the
case, and publicized demonstrations and meetings. *L’Humanité* (Paris),
Oct. 6, 1921; *ibid.*, Aug. 7, 1927, p. 3.
[21] *Le Droit du Peuple* (Lausanne), April 7,
1925; *Vorwärts: Zentralorgan der Sozialdemokratischen Partei
Deutschlands* (Berlin), July 12, Aug. 4, 1927.
[22] On Sacco and Vanzetti in Mexico, see Avrich,
*Sacco and Vanzetti,* 58−92. John M. Hart, *Anarchism and the
Mexican Working Class, 1860*−1931 (Austin, 1978), 14;
Barry Carr, “Marxism and Anarchism in the Formation of the Mexican
Communist Party, 1910−1919,” *Hispanic American Historical Review,*
63 (May 1983), 277−305. See also Barry Carr, *Marxism and Communism
in Twentieth Century Mexico* (Lincoln, 1992), 1−46. Max Nettlau,
“Anarchisten in Lateinamerika” (Anarchists in Latin America), n.d.,
p. 443 (International Institute of Social History). On
Solidaridad, see, for example, Shields to Moore, Nov. 8,
1921, Moore Correspondence, Felicani Collection. On Mexican
protests, see American Consul, Progreso, Mexico, memos to Secretary
of State, Nov. 14, 17, 1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 94, State
Department Records; statement of Syndicate of Truck Drivers of the
Port of Veracruz, translated enclosure in American Consul,
Veracruz, to Secretary of State, memo, Nov. 15, 1921, file number
311.6521 Sa1 78, *ibid.* See also “Torch of Liberty Guard,”
translated enclosure in American Consul, Vera Cruz, to Secretary of
State, memo, Nov. 9, 1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 99, *ibid.*
[23] Jeremy Adelman, “The Political Economy of
Labour in Argentina, 1870−1930,” in *Essays in Argentine Labour
History, 1870*−*1930,* ed. Jeremy Adelman (Basingstoke, Eng.,
1992); Ronaldo Munck, *Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism:
Workers, Unions, and Politics, 1855*−*1985* (London, 1987), 12−59,
103. On workers’ shift to crossclass politics, see *ibid.*,
153; Matthew B. Karush, *Workers or Citizens: Democracy and
Identity in Rosario, Argentina, 1912*−*1930* (Albuquerque, 2002),
43−58; and Leandro H. Gutierrez and Luis Alberto Romero, *Sectores*
*populares, cultura y política: Buenos Aires en la entreguerra*
(Popular sectors, culture and politics: Buenos Aires in the
interwar period) (Buenos Aires, 1995).
[24] Karush, Workers or Citizens, 157;
Osvaldo Bayer, *Severino D. Giovanni in Argentina, 1923*−*1931*
(London, 1985), 51; J. M. Barker, First National Bank of Boston, to
Philander L. Cable, Chargé d’Affaires, American Embassy, Buenos
Aires, Aug. 13, 1927, enclosure in American Embassy, Buenos Aires,
to Secretary of State, memo, Aug. 23, 1927, file number 311.6521
Sa1 375, State Department Records.
[25] On the growing integration of workers, see
Eley, *Forging Democracy*, 123−277; Charles S. Maier, *Recasting
Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in
the Decade after World War I* (Princeton, 1975), 579−86; van der
Linden, *Transnational Labour History,* 23–47; and Dan S. White,
“Reconsidering European Socialism in the 1920s,” *Journal of
Contemporary History,* 16 (April 1981), 251−72.
[26] On the Italian diaspora, see Gabaccia,
*Italy’s Many Diasporas;* and Gabaccia and Ottanelli, eds.,
*Italian Workers of the World.* On the link between the men’s
Italian citizenship and support in their home country, see Dorsey
to Secretary of State, Oct. 22, 1921, file number 311 6521 Sa1 57,
State Department Records. Leonardo Mucci quoted in *Atti
Parlamentari,* Legislatura XXVI Sessione, Discussione, March 11,
12, 1922. The Italian foreign minister is quoted in Cannistraro,
“Mussolini, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the Anarchists,” 43−44; Errico
Malatesta, in *Umanità Nova,* Oct. 6, 1921, quoted *ibid.*, 46;
Embassy of the United States, Rome, to Secretary of State,
telegram, July 24, 1927, forwarding plea from Mussolini, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 556, State Department Records.
[27] Gabaccia, *Italy’s Many Diasporas*, 58−105,
esp. 60; Victor Bonnans and Pierre Humbourg, *La vie tragique de
Sacco et Vanzetti* (The tragic life of Sacco and Vanzetti) (Paris,
1927), 35; Henri Alfred Guernut, Une affaire Dreyfus aux
États-Unis: L’affaire Sacco et Vanzetti (An American Dreyfus
case: The Sacco and Vanzetti case) (Paris, 1927), 37, 68.
[28] Pierre Milza, “L’intégration des italiens
dans le mouvement ouvrier français à la fin du XIXème et au début
du XXème siècle: Le cas de la région marseillaise” (The integration
of Italians into the French labor movement in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries: The case of the Marseilles region), *Affari
Sociali Internazionali* (Milan), 3−4 (1977), 171−207; Pierre Milza,
“L’immigration italienne en France d’une guerre à l’autre:
Interrogations, directions de recherche et premier bilan” (Italian
immigration in France in the interwar period: Questions, research
directions, and first reports), in *Les* *italiens en France de
1914 à 1940* (Italians in France, from 1914 to 1940), ed. Pierre
Milza (Rome, 1986), 18−31; Pierre George, “L’immigration italienne
en France de 1920–1939: Aspects démographiques et sociaux” (Italian
immigration in France, 1920−1939: Social and demographic aspects),
*ibid.*, 45−67; Ralph
Schor, “L’image de l’Italien dans la France de l’entre-deux-guerres”
(The image of the Italian in France in the interwar period), *ibid.*,
101−3; Pierre Guillen, “Le rôle politique de l’immigration italienne en
France dans l’entre-deuxguerres” (The political role of Italian
immigrants in France in the interwar period), *ibid.*, 323−41. On
Italians as “the proletarian base” of the Communist party, see Loris
Castellani, “Un aspect de l’émigration communiste italienne en France:
Les groupes de langue italienne au sein du pcf (1921–1928)” (An aspect
of Italian Communist emigration in France: The Italian-language groups
in the French Communist Party, 1921–1928), *ibid.*, 212–19. For notices
in Italian, see, for example, *L’Humanité* (Paris), Aug. 7, 1927.
[29] Samuel L. Baily, *Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in
Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914* (Ithaca, 1999), 73−75.
On Italians in the Argentine labor movement, see, for example,
Osvaldo Bayer, “L’Influenza dell’immigrazione italiana nel
movimento anarchicio Argentino” (The influence of Italian
immigrants in the Argentine anarchist movement), in *Gli italiani
fuori d’Italia: Gli emigranti italiani nei movimenti operai dei
paesi d’adozione 1880*−*1940* (Italians in the diaspora: Italian
emigrants in the labor movement in their new homelands), ed.
Osvaldo Bayer and Bruno Bezza (Milan, 1983), 531−48; and Samuel L.
Baily, “The Italian and the Development of Organized Labor in
Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, 1880−1914,” *Journal of
Social History,* 3 (Winter, 1969), 123−34. On meetings appealing
specifically to Italian immigrants, see La Protesta
(Buenos Aires), Oct. 28, 29, 30, 1925; *Brazo y Cerebro*
(Bahía Blanca), Dec. 19, 1926; *La Antorcha* (Buenos Aires), Feb.
16, 1926; “Sezione Italiana,” *La Protesta* (Buenos Aires), Oct.
16, 1925; and *Ordino Nuevo* (Buenos Aires), March 31, 1926. On
Severino Di Giovanni, see Bayer, “L’Influenza dell’immigrazione
italiana,” 546; and Osvaldo Bayer, *Anarchism* and Violence:
*Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina, 1923*−*1931* (Cantania, Italy,
1985), 50−71, 76−77.
[30] Cannistraro, “Mussolini, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the Anarchists,” 50.
[31] *Ibid.*, 50−51; Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee News Service
bulletin, Jan. 4, 1924 (International Institute of Social History).
[32] Chamber of Commerce of the United States of
America in the Argentine Republic to Cable, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires,
Embassy of the United States, Aug. 22, 1927, file number 311.6521
Sa1 873, State Department Records; General Federation of the
Italian Societies of the Argentine Republic to Gov. Alvan T.
Fuller, cable, Aug. 9, 1927, file number 311. 6521 Sa1 621, *ibid.*
[33] Bonnans and Humbourg, *Vie tragique,* 20;
“Plutoyanquia,” *La Protesta* (Buenos Aires), Nov. 13, 1922.
[34] Charles L. Hoover, American Consul, Java, to
Secretary of State, memo, March 7, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1
395, State Department Records.
[35] On the mass communications revolution, see Stephen Kern,
*The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918* (Cambridge, Mass., 1983),
240. For detailed reporting of the case, see, for example, *La Protesta*
(Buenos Aires), Feb. 9, 1923, May 6, 26, 1921; “Supplemento Semenal,”
*ibid.*, Aug. 20, Nov. 8, 1926, June 20, 1927; *Agitación: Publicación
del Comité de Agitación Pro Libertad de Sacco y Vanzetti* (Buenos
Aires), 3 (May 1926); and “Notas de agitación para salvar a Sacco y
Vanzetti” (Notes on the effort to save Sacco and Vanzetti), *Humanidad*
(Buenos Aires), 3 (July 1927). Biblioteca Popular Jose Inginieros
(Buenos Aires) has an extensive collection of these materials.
[36] On popular libraries as spaces for
organizing, see notice for a Sacco and Vanzetti meeting held at the
library “El Porvenir,” Santa Fe, *La Protesta* (Buenos Aires), Nov.
7, 1926. On working-class popular libraries in Argentina, see
Guttierez and Romero, *Sectores populares, cultura y política)*
45–104. For pamphlets and cheap pocket books, see, for example,
Bonnans and Humbourg, *Vie tragique;* Sebastien Faure, *Deux
martyrs: Sacco & Vanzetti* (Two martyrs: Sacco and Vanzetti)
(Paris, 1927); Guernut, *Une affaire Dreyfus aux Etats-Unis;*
R. Schiavina, *Sacco e Vanzetti: Cause e fini di un delitto di
stato* (Sacco and Vanzetti: Causes and consequences of a state
crime) (Paris, 1927); Georg Branting, *Sacco-Vanzetti
dramat* (The drama of Sacco and Vanzetti) (Stockholm, 1927);
Augustin Souchy, *Sacco und Vanzetti: Zwei Opfer Amerikanischer
Dollarjustiz* (Sacco and Vanzetti: Two victims of American dollar
justice) (Berlin, 1927); Arthur Mueller Lehning , *De feiten en de
beteekenis van de zaak Sacco en Vanzetti* (The facts and
significance of the Sacco and Vanzetti case) (Utrecht, n.d.);
Federacion O. Local Bonaerense, *El caso Sacco y Vanzetti* (The
Sacco and Vanzetti case) (Buenos Aires, 1927); “Salviamo Sacco y
Vanzetti” (Save Sacco and Vanzetti), *Piensero & Volunta* (Buenos
Aires), Feb. 16, 1925; “Una vida proletaria” (A proletarian life),
supplement to *La Antorcha* (Buenos Aires), July 3, 1927; *Brazo y
Cerebro* (Bahía Blanca), Aug. 9, 1927. See the Biblioteca Popular
Jose Inginierios and the International Institute of Social History
for extensive printed material on the case.
[37] For personal appeals from Sacco and Vanzetti,
see, for example, “Lettre de Vanzetti; lettre de Sacco, un peu de
leur pensées” (Letter of Vanzetti; letter of Sacco, some of their
thoughts), *Le Libértaire* (Paris), May 6, 1927; “Un saludo de
Vanzetti al pueblo de la Argentina”; “Una nueva carta de Sacco”;
“Carta de Vanzetti a la Argentina” (Letter from Vanzetti to
Argentina), *Humanidad* (Buenos Aires), 3 (July 1927); and letter
from Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, *Agitación: Publicación
del Comité de Agitación Pro Libertad de Sacco y Vanzetti* (Buenos
Aires), 3 (Aug. 1926); *El* *Obrero Granitero* (Sierra
Cica, Argentina), March 1927 (International Institute of Social
History). Some of these letters highlight the militancy of Sacco
and Vanzetti’s anarchism.
[38] *Le Figaro* (Paris), Oct. 22, 23, 1921; *El
Excélsior* (Mexico City), Aug. 9, 1927; “Impartial Havrais” and
“Protest of Chambre Syndicale des Ouvriers,” enclosures in American
Consulate, Le Havre, to Secretary of State, memo, Oct. 27, 1921,
file number 311.6521 Sa1 44, State Department Records.
[39] American Consulate, the Hague, to Secretary
of State, memo, Nov. 18, 1921, file number 311.6521 Sa1 105, State
Department Records; “Internationale Presse-Korrespondenz,” 13
(1921), 112, quoted in Zelt, *Proletarischer Internationalismus,*
43. See also *L’Humanité* (Paris), Oct. 19, 1921; “Impartial
Havrais,” and “Protest of Chambre Syndicale des Ouvriers.” The
rumored words of Webster Thayer that circulated internationally
probably originated in a different phrase attributed to Thayer
domestically. Supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti claimed Thayer
identified anarchism with criminality at Vanzetti’s Bridgewater
trial, remarking that “the defendant’s ideals are cognate with the
crime.” Since the record of part of the judge’s charge to the jury
is oddly missing, it is not possible to verify the claim. The quote
does echo statements Thayer made outside of court. See Joughin and
Morgan, *Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti,* 220.
[40] American Consulate, Harbin, China, to
Secretary of State, memo, Dec. 18, 1924, file number 331.6521 Sa1
195, State Department Records; “American Foreign Service Report,”
American Legation, Stockholm, memo, Feb. 13, 1925, file number
311.6521 Sa1 20, *ibid*.; *Le Droit du Peuple* (Lausanne), April 6,
1925, enclosure in Hugh Gibson, Berne, Switzerland, to Secretary of
State, memo, April 16, 1925, file number 311.6521 Sa1 213, *ibid.*
[41] Flynn to Moore, Dec. 14, 1921, Moore
Correspondence, Felicani Collection.
[42] *Nationaltidende* (Copenhagen), Aug. 4, 1927,
translations in American Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of
State, memo, Aug. 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 774, State
Department Records; *Politiken* (Copenhagen), Aug. 6, 1927, *ibid.*
For representative references to Alfred Dreyfus, see also Guernut,
*Une affaire Dreyfus aux États-Unis;* and “An American Dreyfus
Case,” *London Daily News,* Aug. 5, 1927.
[43] On early attempts to muster liberal support,
see Moore to Flynn, Aug. 26, 1920, Moore Correspondence, Felicani
Collection. See also Moore to Maximon, May 24, 1922, *ibid.*; Upton
Sinclair, open letter, May 22, 1922, sent to Fred Moore, *ibid.*,
and later reprinted in Upton Sinclair, “Vanzetti: A Tribute and an
Appeal,” *Appeal to Reason,* June 17, 1922, p. 1. See also Upton
Sinclair, *Boston* (1928; Boston, 1978), xx; and Leon Harris,
Upton Sinclair:
*American Rebel* (New York, 1975).
[44] Moore to Maximon, May 24, 1922, Moore
Correspondence, Felicani Collection.
[45] I draw for this insight on Jesus Velasco,
“Reading Mexico, Understanding the United States: American
Transnational Intellectuals in the 1920s and 1990s,” *Journal of
American History,* 86 (Sept. 1999), 641–67. On the transnational
identities and connections of American intellectuals, see also
Brooke Blower, “The Paris of the Americans:
Transnational Politics and Culture between the World Wars” (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 2005). For concepts of transnationalism applied in
case studies, see Basch, Schiller, and Blanc, *Nations Unbound.*
[46] Velasco, “Reading Mexico, Understanding the United States,” 642.
[47] Katherine Anne Porter, *The Never-Ending Wrong* (Boston, 1977), 3;
Howard Greenfeld, *Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life* (New York, 1998),
72–73. On the influence of Spanish anarchism on John Dos Passos,
see David Sanders, “The ‘Anarchism’ of John Dos Passos,” in *Dos
Passos, the Critics, and the Writer’s Intention,* ed. Allen Belkind
(Carbondale, 1971), 122–35. See Townsend Ludington, ed., *The
Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos*
(Boston, 1973), 341–42. See also John Dos Passos, *The Best Times*
(New York, 1966). Alfred Kazin, “Dos Passos and the ‘Lost
Generation,’” in *Dos Passos, the Critics, and the Writer’s
Intention,* ed. Belkind, 12; Malcolm Cowley, “Echoes of a Crime,”
*New Republic,* Aug. 28, 1935, p. 79, quoted in Aaron, Writers
on the Left, 173. See also Malcolm Cowley, *Exile’s Return: A
Literary Odyssey of the 1920s* (New York, 1984).
[48] Felix Frankfurter’s analysis of the case was extensively
translated. See, for example, Felix Frankfurter, *El caso Sacco y
Vanzetti* (The Sacco and Vanzetti case), reprinted in *La Protesta*
(Buenos Aires), Supplemental Quincenal, Sept. 5, 1927; remarks by
Frankfurter in *Giornale D’Italia* (Buenos Aires), July 15, 1927;
comments on Frankfurter in *Leeds Mercury,* April 26, 1927, in
“Editorial comments on the Sacco-Vanzetti case,” American Consulate,
Leeds, England, to Secretary of State, memo, April 26, 1927, file number
331.6521 Sa1 440, State Department Records; *Frankfurter Zeitung*
(Frankfurt), July 3, 1927; Zelt, *Proletarischer Internationalismus,*
26, 169; Lehning, *Feiten en de beteekenis van de zaak Sacco en
Vanzetti,* 1; and *Nationaltidende* (Copenhagen), Aug. 4, 1927,
translated enclosure in American Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of
State, memo, Aug. 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 774, State Department
Records. On other writers and intellectuals, see, for example, remarks
by Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Anatole France, and Hans Ryner, in
*Agitación: Publicación del Comité de Agitación Pro Libertad de Sacco y
Vanzetti* (Buenos Aires), 3 (Aug. 1926); “Una Carta de Hans Ryner” (A
letter from Hans Ryner), La Protesta (Buenos Aires), Aug. 13,
1926; remarks on Upton Sinclair, Die Weltbühne (Berlin), 23
(Sept. 1927), 365; and remarks by John Dos Passos, “Besuch bei Vanzetti”
(A visit with Vanzetti), *Das Tagebuch* (Berlin), April 30, 1927, pp.
718–19. On Diego Rivera’s organization of protests, see *El Excelsior*
(Mexico City), Aug. 9, 1927. On German intellectuals, see, for example,
an appeal signed by prominent writers including Thomas Mann: “Rettet
Sacco und Vanzetti: Ein Aufruf!” (A call to rescue Sacco and Vanzetti),
*Das Tagebuch* (Berlin), Aug. 7, 1926, pp. 1175–76. Albert Einstein,
Henri Barbusse, and Romain Rolland to Calvin Coolidge, cable, April 12,
1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 387, State Department Records. An appeal
by prominent French personalities to American intellectuals is mentioned
in Einstein, Barbusse, and Rolland to Coolidge, cable, Aug. 6, 1927,
file number 311.6521 Sa1 624, *ibid.*
[49] For this argument, see Aaron, *Writers on the
Left,* 172–73.
[50] David Nasaw, “From Inquietude to Revolution,”
*Journal of Contemporary History,* 11 (July 1976), 149–72. See
Warren Susman, *Culture as History: The Transformation of American
Society in the Twentieth Century* (New York, 1984); and Kazin, “Dos
Passos and the ‘Lost Generation,’” 12–14.
[51] *Die Weltbühne* (Berlin), Sept. 6, 1927, p.
367.
[52] On U.S. relations with Latin America, see, for example,
Warren Cohen, *Empire without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations,
1921*–*1933* (Philadelphia, 1987); Margot Louria, *Triumph and Downfall:
America’s Pursuit of Peace and Prosperity, 1921*–*1933* (Westport,
2001); and Walter LaFeber, *The* *American Age: United States Foreign
Policy at Home and Abroad* (New York, 1984). R. E. Varner, Vice
President, American Association of Uruguay, to Arthur J. Miguel,
Manager, Chamber of Commerce of the United States in the Argentine
Republic, Aug. 18, 1927, enclosure in U. Grant Smith to Secretary of
State, memo, Sept. 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 914, State Department
Records.
[53] One American legation official’s remark on a
Copenhagen newspaper’s unusual support for the execution is
telling. “Alone among all Danish papers—perhaps alone among the
press of the civilized world—The *Berlingske Tidende* comes forth
with a creaky judicial defense for the execution.” See American
Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of State, memo, Aug. 1927, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 774, State Department Records. See also
American Legation, Montevideo, memo, Aug. 1927, file number
311.6521 Sa1 877, *ibid.* *Journal des Débats* (Paris), Aug. 25,
1927; *Frankfurter Zeitung,* July 23, 1927; Albrecht Graf
Montgelas, “Sacco and Vanzetti” (Sacco and Vanzetti), *Das
Tagebuch* (Berlin), Aug. 13, 1927, pp. 1298–1307; *Manchester
Guardian,* Aug. 5, 1927, clipping in Embassy of the United States,
London, to State Department, memo, Aug. 9, 1927, file number
311.652 Sa1 779, State Department Records; *London Daily Herald,*
Aug. 5, 1927, *ibid.*; *London Times,* Aug. 5, 1927, *ibid.*; and
*London Daily Express,* Aug. 5, 1927, *ibid.*
[54] *Politiken* (Copenhagen), Aug. 5, 1927;
*Ekstrabaldet* (Copenhagen), translated enclosure in American
Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of State, memo, Aug. 1927, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 774, State Department Records. Secretary of
State Frank B. Kellogg wrote to President Calvin Coolidge that
summer that “the Sacco-Vanzetti case has aroused ill feeling
against America in foreign countries to a critical point.” See
Frank B. Kellogg to Coolidge, Aug. 20, 1927, file number 311.6521
Sa1 766, *ibid.*
[55] Laurtis S. Swenson, American Legation, Oslo,
to Secretary of State, Aug. 13, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 843,
State Department Records; A. F. Hiltz, American Chamber of
Commerce, Brazil, to American Association of Uruguay, cable, Aug.
13, 1927, enclosed in American Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary
of State, Aug. 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 875, *ibid.*; H.
Percival Dodge, American Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of
State, telegram, Aug. 8, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 610,
*ibid.*; Smith, American Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of
State, Aug. 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 812, *ibid.*
[56] *Vorwärts* (Berlin), Aug. 4, 1927. It is
difficult to determine the numbers involved in the Paris protest.
*Le Figaro* placed the number at 25,000; L’Humanité
offered the highest estimate of around 100,000. Even *Le
Figaro,* however, reported a veritable “sea of human beings”; see
*Le Figaro* (Paris), Aug. 8, 1927. *Ibid.*, Aug. 9, 1927. On the
potential for violence, see Dodge, American Legation, Copenhagen,
to Secretary of State, memo, Dec. 1927, 311.6521 Sa1 960, State
Department Records. On conditions in Uruguay, see Smith, American
Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of State, memo, Aug. 1927, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 812, *ibid.* Joseph C. Satterthwaite, American
Vice-Consul, Guadalajara, to Secretary of State, Aug. 12, 1927,
file number 311.6521 Sa1 710, *ibid.*; see also Satterthwaite to
Secretary of State, Aug. 11, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 708,
*ibid.* On public feeling in Montevideo, see Smith, American
Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of State, Aug. 8, 1927, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 598, *ibid.*; see also Smith, American
Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of State, Aug. 10, 1927, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 633, *ibid.* On Mexican movie theaters, see H.
F. Schoenfeld , Embassy of the United States, Mexico, to Secretary
of State, Aug. 26, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 813, *ibid.*
*Journal des Débats* (Paris), Aug. 24, 1927; *Simplicissimus*
(Stuttgart), Sept. 5, 1927.
[57] On the circular letter, see American Consul,
Sonora, to Secretary of State, memo, Nov. 30, 1921, file number
311.6521 Sa1 116, State Department Records. On the “brief statement
of facts,” see Fletcher, Department of State, to Diplomatic
Officers of the United States of America, Jan. 27, 1922, file
number 311.6521 Sa1 86, ibid. W. R. Castle Jr. to Robert
O. Dalton, Adjutant General’s Office, State House Boston, July 1,
1926, file number 311.6521 Sa1 272, *ibid.*; Cable, Chargé
d’Affaires, Embassy of the United States, Buenos Aires, to
Secretary of State, Aug. 13, 14, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1
873, *ibid.*
[58] William E. Borah to Jane Addams, telegram,
Aug. 18, 1927, in *The Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace
Collection,* ed. Mary Lynn McCree (microfilm, University Microfilms
International, 1985), series 1, reel 19; “Borah Amazes Sacco
Vanzetti Forces,” newspaper clipping, Aug. 18, 1927, *ibid.*; “Jane
Addams Plea,” *Washington Post,* n.d., newspaper clipping,
*ibid.*; A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard University,
to Fuller, Sept. 9, 1927, A. Lawrence Lowell Papers (Harvard
University Archives, Cambridge, Mass.).
[59] Schoenfeld, Embassy of the United States,
Mexico, to Secretary of State, Aug. 26, 1927, file number 311.6521
Sa1 813, State Department Records; *Journal des Débats* (Paris),
Aug. 25, 1927.
[60] Teatro Artigas, handbill, enclosure in Smith,
American Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of State, Dec. 29,
1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 959, State Department Records;
Dodge, American Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of State,
enclosure in memo, Dec. 29, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 959,
*ibid.*; Dodge, American Legation, Copenhagen, to Secretary of
State, Sept. 1, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 868, *ibid.* On film
showings, see, for example, Robert Woods Bliss, Embassy of the
United States, Buenos Aires, to Secretary of State, Dec. 28, 1927,
file number 311.6521 Sa1 957, *ibid.* On the films’ “stirring up
hate,” see Smith, American Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of
State, Dec. 29, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 959, *ibid.* On
censorship due to American objections, see J. C. W., Embassy of the United States, Berlin, to Secretary
of State, Dec. 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 955, *ibid.* On left
cinema for working-class audiences, see Vance Kepley Jr., “Workers’
International Relief and the Cinema of the Left, 1921–1935,” *Cinema
Journal,* 23 (Autumn 1983), 7–23.
[61] J. M. LaCarte, “Tango Cancion,” music sheet, enclosure in
Smith, American Legation, Montevideo, to Secretary of State, memo, Dec.
29, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 959, State Department Records; Bliss,
Embassy of the United States, Buenos Aires, to Secretary of State, Nov.
28, 1927, file number 311.6521 Sa1 954, *ibid. Concejo deliberante de la
ciudad de Buenos Aires, correspondiente a las sesiones de convocatoria y
ordinarias del 2. periodo* (City council of the City of Buenos Aires:
Corresponding to the regular and special sessions of the second period)
(Buenos Aires, 1927), 1406–7 (Biblioteca Esteban Echeverria, Buenos
Aires).
[62] Eugene Lyons, *The Life and Death of Sacco
and Vanzetti* (New York, 1927); Maxwell Anderson and Harold
Hickerson, *Gods of the Lightning* (London, 1928); Pierre
Yrondy, *Sept ans d’agonie: Le martyre de Sacco et Vanzetti* (Seven
years of agony: The martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti) (Paris, 1927).
*Novelas y Cuentos* (Madrid), July 10, 1932, cited in Joughin and
Morgan, *Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti,* 359. On this first wave of
plays, prose, poetry, and art (emphasizing the United States), see
*ibid.*, 375–454. The cover of Ba Jin’s 1938 translation is
included in Bartolomeo Vanzetti, *Une vie de prolétaire* (A
proletarian life) (Paris, n.d.). For his statement, see Ba Jin,
*Meiwang* (1929; Beijing, 1989), 3–4. Translation provided by Di
Yin Lu, Harvard University.
[63] For plays, see, for example, Armand Gatti,
*Chant public: Devant deux chaises électriques, théâtre* (Public
song: Faced with two electric chairs) (Paris, 1964); Mino Roli and
Luciano Vencenzoni, *Sacco e Vanzetti: Tre atti* (Sacco and
Vanzetti: Three acts) in *Teatro Nuovo* (Milan) (May 1961)
(International Institute of Social History). This play was also
translated and performed in Germany. See S. Roli, *Sacco und
Vanzetti: Drei Akte* (Zurich, 1960). See also Fernando Quesada,
“Sacco y Vanzetti: Dos nombres para la protesta” (Sacco and
Vanzetti: Two names for a protest), *Todo es historia* (Buenos
Aires), Suplemento 25 (April 1970) (Biblioteca Jose Inginieros).
The Sacco and Vanzetti case has influenced writers, according to
references in their memoirs and works. See, for example, André
Breton, *Nadja* (Paris, 1964), 180. Woody Guthrie, Ballads of
Sacco and Vanzetti (1960; compact disc; Smithsonian Folkways
40060; 1996). This album was released with a new song by Pete
Seeger linking the new and older Lefts. Ennio Morricone, “The
Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti: Part 2” (1971), performed by Joan
Baez, *Sacco and Vanzetti* (compact disc; Omega Classics 3015;
1993); *Sacco e Vanzetti* (Sacco and Vanzetti), dir. Giuliano
Montaldo (Italonegglio Cinematografico, 1971). Carolyn West Pace,
*Sacco and Vanzetti in American Art and Music* (Syracuse, 1997);
Georges Moustaki, “La marche de Sacco et Vanzetti” (The journey of
Sacco and Vanzetti), performed by Georges Moustaki, *Georges
Moustaki* (lp record, Polydor 2393 019; 1971); and Franz Josef
Degenhardt, “Sacco und Vanzetti” (Sacco and Vanzetti), performed by
Franz Josef Degenhardt, *Mutter Mathilde* (Mother Mathilda)
(compact disc; Universal; 1999).
[64] Siah Armajani, Sacco und Vanzetti-Leseraum,
room, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 1988; Mauricio
Kartun, *Sacco y Vanzetti: Dramaturgia sobre el caso* (Sacco and
Vanzetti: A play about the case) (Buenos Aires, 2001); Louis Lippa,
*Sacco and Vanzetti: A Vaudeville* (Washington Depot, 1999). On
Anton Coppola’s opera, see Lawrence A. Johnson, “In Review,” *Opera
News,* 66 (July 2001), 59.
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Lisa McGirr is Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History in the
Department of History at Harvard University.
All translations, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.
I would like to thank Thomas Bender, Stefano Luconi, Nelson
Lichtenstein, Michael Topp, and the anonymous referees for the *Journal
of American History* for their careful reading of the manuscript and
valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank Gabriel Ferro for
excellent research assistance and Di Yin Lu for Chinese-language
translation.