"What's
blackened all of history
Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!"
THE RED PERIL
"Father,
yes, I am a prisoner
Fear not to relay my crime
The crime is loving the forsaken
Only silence is shame"
Fear not to relay my crime
The crime is loving the forsaken
Only silence is shame"
"What's
blackened all of history
Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!"
Against us is the law
With its immensity of strength and power
Against us is the law!"
1926, SACCO-VANZETTI
SACCO-VANZETTI CASE
Failed Justice. The Sacco - Vanzetti Case
MARCH 1927
The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti
In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both Italian-Americans, were convicted of robbery and murder. Although the arguments brought against them were mostly disproven in court, the fact that the two men were known radicals (and that their trial took place during the height of the Red Scare) prejudiced the judge and jury against them. On April 9, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti's final appeal was rejected, and the two were sentenced to death. Felix Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, was considered to be the most prominent and respectable critic of the trial. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939
1926 - AN APPEAL TO AMERICAN LABOR
On 15th April, 1920, Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, in South Braintree, were shot dead while carrying two boxes containing the payroll of a shoe factory. After the two robbers took the $15,000 they got into a car containing several other men and were driven away.
Several eyewitnesses claimed that the robbers looked Italian. A large number of Italian immigrants were questioned but eventually the authorities decided to charge Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco with the murders. Although the two men did not have criminal records, it was argued that they had committed the robbery to acquire funds for their anarchist political campaign.
There was little Italian emigration to the United States before 1870. However, Italy was now one of the most overcrowded countries in Europe and many began to consider the possibility of leaving Italy to escape low wages and high taxes. Most of these immigrants were from rural communities with very little education. From 1890 to 1900, 655,888 arrived in the United States, of whom two-thirds were men. A survey carried out that most planned to return once they had built up some capital. Most Italians found unskilled work in America's cities. There were large colonies in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore and Detroit. From 1900 to 1910 over 2,100,00 arrived. Of these, around 40 per cent eventually returned to Italy.
CARATTERISTICHE DELL’EMIGRAZIONE ITALIANA NEGLI STATI UNITI D’AMERICA
http://www.fedoa.unina.it/8639/1/Manfrellotti_Laura_24.pdf
RED SCARE!
1919 - THE "RED SUMMER"
Red scare («paura rossa») Nome di due campagne contro il radicalismo di sinistra negli Stati Uniti. La prima, accentuatasi tra il 1919 e il 1920, rappresentò lo sviluppo delle iniziative per soffocare il dissenso neutralista e pacifista durante la Prima guerra mondiale.
Court Statements Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927)
The
anticommunist crusade of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its
legendary director J. Edgar Hoover during the McCarthy era and the
Cold War
Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born in the Italian town of Villaffalletto on 11th June, 1888. The son of a farmer, Vanzetti emigrated to the United States when he was twenty years old. Vanzetti settled in Plymouth, where he worked as a fish peddler.
Vanzetti was shocked by the way working class immigrants were treated in America and became involved in left-wing politics. He went to anarchist meetings where he met Nicola Sacco, an Italian immigrant working in a shoe-factory inStoughton, Massachusetts. The two men became friends and often attended the same political meetings together.
Like many left-wing radicals, Vanzetti and Sacco were opposed to the First World War. They took part in protest meetings and in 1917, when the United States entered the war, they fled together to Mexico in order to avoid being conscripted into the United States Army. When the war was over the two men returned to the United States.
LE RIMESSE DEGLI EMIGRATI ITALIANI NEGLI STATI UNITI D’AMERICA
http://www.fedoa.unina.it/8639/1/Manfrellotti_Laura_24.pdf
Nicola Sacco was born in the Italian town of Torremaggiore on 22nd April, 1891. He emigrated to the United States when he was seventeen. Sacco found work in a shoe factory in Stoughton, Massachusetts. He got married and started a family. Sacco also became involved in left-wing politics and at one anarchist gathering met Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an Italian immigrant working as a fish peddler inPlymouth. The two men became friends and often attended the same political meetings together.
Anarchism is the political belief that society should have no government, laws, police, or other authority, but should be a free association of all its members. William Godwin, an important anarchist philosopher in Britain during the late 18th century, believed that the "euthanasia of government" would be achieved through "individual moral reformation".
Fred H. Moore was a lawyer who began his career working for railroad companies. He then established an office in Los Angeles. Moore became a socialist and in 1912 took the case of a friend, who was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and had been arrested while making a speech in San Diego.
Eugene Lyons was born in Uzlyany on 1st July, 1898. His parents were Jewish and as a child the family emigrated to the United States and they settled in New York City. He later wrote: "On the East Side of New York, where I grew up, we knew hardship and fear in their less romantic guises. Our streets teemed with crowded, chaotic life like the underside of a moss-grown, stone. Our tenements were odoriferous garbage heaps where the same over-abundant life proliferated. We knew coarseness, vermin, want, so intimately that they became routine commonplaces. The affluence, the ease, the glimpse of ordered beauty were distant and unreal, like stories in books. Only the ugliness and sweat and unrelenting tussle were close and terribly familiar... We were caught and tangled in a mass of people for the most part resigned to their fate, sodden with hopelessness, and in a stupor of physical exhaustion. For the average boy it was easier to burrow deeper into the heap, taking the aroma and the drabness of the East Side into his soul, than to attempt the Gargantuan job of escaping. The Americanism that he acquired and dragged into the writhing heap was the loud, vulgar, surface - the slang, the sporting page, the crude success ideals of the movies and yellow journals - and nothing of the grandeur at the core of America."
After
the First
World War Italians
developed a reputation for becoming criminals. This was mainly due to
high-profile criminals such as Al
Capone, Lucky
Luciano, Joe
Masseria, Albert
Anastasia, Salvadore
Marazano, Vito
Genovese and Frank
Costello.
However, a study in Massachusetts revealed that the Italian-born, who
comprised 8.0 per cent of the population of the state, made up only
4.2 per cent of those confined in penal institutions. The US
Department of Justice also estimates that less than .0025 percent of
Italian Americans have anything to do with organized crime.
L’esecuzione della sentenza ebbe luogo il 23 agosto 1927, dopo che uomini politici e intellettuali (tra i quali R. Rolland, A. France, A. Einstein), capi di Stato e decine di migliaia di cittadini avevano protestato contro quello che ritenevano un processo politico, svoltosi in un clima d’isteria antisovversiva e xenofoba
Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island near New York
Il 23 agosto 1927 gli anarchici Sacco e Vanzetti (in)giustiziati
in America. Negli scritti dal carcere il dramma giudiziario e le loro motivazioni ideali
in America. Negli scritti dal carcere il dramma giudiziario e le loro motivazioni ideali
The
1920s, famous as a time of wild parties and fads, was also a decade
of notable
intolerance. The special targets of law enforcement and popular
culture
were
radicals and immigrants. Two Italian radicals, Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, became symbols of the oppressive hand of the
state.
Sacco,
a shoemaker, and Vanzetti, a fishmonger, were accused of killing a
pay-master and his guard on April 15, 1920, during a robbery of a
South Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe factory. Their trial before
Judge Webster Thayer involved a great number of irregularities, not
the least of which were the close connection between the
state-appointed defense attorney and the prosecutor and the oft-
stated
conviction of the judge that the two defendants were guilty. The fate
of Sacco and Vanzetti became an international cause, with thousands
of liberals and radicals, from Felix Frankfurter to Eugene V. Debs,
joining in the effort to free the two men. In 1927 Judge Thayer
oversaw the hearing that reconsidered and confirmed his verdict in
the first trial. In broken English, Sacco and Vanzetti condemned the
court for its corruption of justice. The pair were executed in the
electric
chair on August 23, 1927.
John Dos Passos’s "They Are Dead Now"
appeared inthe New Masses, October 1927
Nativism is the policy of favoring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants
Last Statements (1927)
Emigrazione, identità etnica e consumi:
gli italiani d’America e la fisarmonica
http://www.storiamarche900.it/uploads/File/Moroni%20n.%2034.pdf
SACCO - VANZETTI "THE TRIAL" 1921
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/SaccoV.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQk5cUMhI8k
SACCO - VANZETTI "THE TRIAL" 1921
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/SaccoV.htm
The Sacco and Vanzetti: Justice on Trial exhibit on the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and its aftermath is now open at the John Adams Courthouse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQk5cUMhI8k
