[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?
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