May 24, 2024: Criminal Duos: Sacco & Vanzetti

[100 years ago this week, the criminal duo who came to be known as Leopold & Loeb set their murderous plan in motion. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy L&L and four other criminal duos, leading up to a repeat Guest Post on the genre of true crime!]

On three contexts for the controversial trial and execution of a pair of Italian American radicals (who were almost certainly not guilty, so “criminal duo” in this case is particularly fraught of course).

1)      Anti-Anarchism: As I highlighted in this post on the Haymarket trial, for nearly a half-century prior to the 1920s the threat of anarchism had been sufficient to accuse (and often convict) Americans of a variety of offenses, including ones unrelated to political activism of any kind. But that trend had been greatly accelerated in the 1910s by President Woodrow Wilson’s arguments for the need for the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and by the extreme and ongoing effects of those federal laws including the Palmer Raids, ideological deportations, and more. All of that was the political, social, and legal climate for the 1920 arrest and 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a pair of Italian immigrant laborers in Massachusetts who had long espoused radical political positions (leading them for example to temporarily flee to Mexico to avoid the draft during WWI).

2)      Xenophobia: Just about everything I wrote in that prior paragraph was likewise connected to overarching anti-immigrant narratives, including the prosecutor’s attacks on the Haymarket defendants as “like a lot of rats and vermin” and President Wilson’s description of immigrants as “pour[ing] the poison of disloyalty into the arteries of national life.” Italian immigrants and Italian Americans had also been a specific target of xenophobic hate and violence for decades, including most prominently the March 1891 mass lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans. And 1921 was the year when such anti-immigrant sentiments became fully codified in national law, with the passage of the Emergency Quota Act that greatly limited arrivals from Italy along with countless other nations. For too many turn-of-the-century Americans, “Italian” was a term that did roughly the same psychological work as “anarchist,” and the combination of those two likely made a fair trial for Sacco & Vanzetti impossible.

3)      Literary Advocates: Efforts to highlight those prejudices and make the case for the two men came from a variety of 1920s voices, including future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in an Atlantic Monthly article that he revised into a groundbreaking book The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis of Lawyers and Laymen (1927). But for this English Professor, perhaps the most compelling came from two literary figures: the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was arrested while picketing the Massachusetts State House and then wrote a poetic yet political plea to Governor Alvan Fuller for clemency; and the journalist and novelist John Dos Passos, who published about the pair in both the contemporary pamphlet Facing the Chair (1927) and then in multiple sections of his experimental historical novel U.S.A. (1937). Although they did not succeed in stopping the execution, these advocates importantly foreshadowed (and perhaps helped create) the 1930s rise of political and protest literature.

Guest Post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other duos you’d highlight?