Bartolomeo Vanzetti

The backstory

The Bridgewater attempt

On Dec. 24, 1919, there was an attempted holdup at Bridgewater, Massachusetts.⁴ In the historian Francis Russell’s account, four men in a touring car tried to rob the paymaster of the L. Q. White shoe factory.³³ Bridgewater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, came to suspect local political radicals of the crime.¹¹

The South Braintree robbery and murders

At about 3 p.m. on Apr. 15, 1920, Frederick A. Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, his guard, were carrying the payroll along Pearl Street in South Braintree, near the Rice and Hutchins factory.¹ In the words of the Supreme Judicial Court, they “were attacked by two or more armed men who shot them down inflicting wounds from which death ensued.”¹ The robbers took $15,776.51 “contained in two boxes” and escaped in an automobile.¹ The payroll belonged to the Slater and Morrill shoe company.²³¹⁷

The arrest

Chief Stewart learned that a car belonging to an anarchist he suspected was being repaired at a Bridgewater garage, and asked the owner to call police when someone came for it.¹¹ On the evening of May 5, 1920, four Italian men came for the car; the garage owner’s wife called police.¹¹ That night Sacco and Vanzetti “were arrested on an electric car while returning from West Bridgewater to Brockton,” the court wrote.¹ Sacco carried a loaded .32 Colt automatic pistol, and Vanzetti “a loaded .38 Harrington and Richardson revolver.”¹¹ Shotgun shells loaded with buckshot were also found on Vanzetti.¹

Both men lied under questioning, which centered on their guns and their political beliefs.¹¹ Among other things, they denied knowing the anarchist whose car they had come for and denied having been at the garage.¹³ They later said they lied to hide their political activities, and that they believed they were being held because they were aliens and anarchists.¹¹ The anarchist Andrea Salsedo had died in federal custody on May 3, 1920, and the two men learned of his death on May 4.¹¹ According to the court’s own exhibit, they and their companions meant to use the car to dispose of material tying them to anarchist activity.¹¹

The Plymouth trial

A Plymouth County grand jury indicted Vanzetti for the Bridgewater attempt, and his trial began on June 22, 1920, before Judge Webster Thayer.¹² Russell’s chronology gives the indictment date as June 11 and the trial’s end as July 1, 1920.³³ Governor Fuller later wrote that “practically everyone who witnessed the attempted holdup and who could have identified the bandits identified Vanzetti.”⁴ The defense presented an alibi: a 13-year-old boy testified that he had been delivering eels with Vanzetti in Plymouth that morning, the day before Christmas.³³ Vanzetti did not testify. Fuller wrote that he “waived the privilege of telling his own story to the jury.”⁴ The jury convicted him, and Thayer sentenced him to prison on Aug. 16, 1920.¹²³³ The Supreme Judicial Court’s exhibit calls it “a harsh sentence.” Felix Frankfurter later wrote that “[t]he evidence of identification of Vanzetti in the Bridgewater case bordered on the frivolous.”¹²

The Dedham trial

On Sept. 11, 1920, a Norfolk County grand jury indicted Sacco and Vanzetti for the South Braintree murders.¹² The trial opened at a special sitting of the Superior Court in Dedham on May 31, 1921, again before Judge Thayer; the jury was sworn on June 4.¹¹² District Attorney Frederick G. Katzmann prosecuted, and Fred H. Moore was lead counsel for the defense.¹² The Commonwealth called 59 witnesses and the defense 99, and the eyewitness testimony was extensively contradictory.¹³ Thayer told the jury that the Italian defendants were entitled to the same rights and consideration “as though their ancestors came over in the Mayflower.”¹⁵ Katzmann closed by urging, “Gentlemen of the jury, do your duty. Do it like men.”¹² On July 14, 1921, the jury found both men guilty of murder in the first degree.¹¹⁵

The evidence against Vanzetti

The prosecution’s case on the fatal shots was against Sacco: it argued that the bullet that killed Berardelli, Bullet No. III, was fired from Sacco’s Colt, not from Vanzetti’s revolver.¹³ The Supreme Judicial Court summarized the case against Vanzetti this way: “Although no witness identified Vanzetti as one of the persons who actually fired the fatal shots, or as being at the immediate scene of the homicide, there was evidence that he was in South Braintree on the morning of April 15,” in an automobile in the town square, and that this was the car “in which the murderers made their escape.”¹

Identifications. A railroad gate tender testified that Vanzetti was driving the car, but the district attorney conceded that he was not, and the court held that these admissions “bound the Commonwealth.”¹ The Lowell Committee later counted four witnesses who placed Vanzetti at or near the scene, and considered one of them, who thought he saw Vanzetti at the wheel, mistaken.⁵ Thayer himself later wrote that “these verdicts did not rest, in my judgment, upon the testimony of the eyewitnesses.”¹³

The revolver. The court recorded evidence that Berardelli “owned a .38-calibre Harrington and Richardson revolver,” that a revolver of that make belonging to him had been taken in for repairs in March 1920, and that a revolver of that kind “was found fully loaded in the possession of Vanzetti after his arrest.”¹ The prosecution argued that it had been taken from the dying Berardelli at the scene; the court’s exhibit calls that evidence inconclusive.¹³ Vanzetti testified that he had bought the gun from a friend a few months before his arrest because of recent holdups, according to Russell’s account of the testimony.²⁵ All the bullets fired at South Braintree were .32 caliber, Russell wrote, so the .38 was “obviously not used at South Braintree.”²⁵

Consciousness of guilt. The Commonwealth argued that the men’s lies after their arrest showed “consciousness of guilt.”¹³ A police officer testified that Vanzetti put his hand toward his hip pocket on the streetcar, and Thayer put that question to the jury in his charge: “Is the testimony of Officer Connolly true, in that Vanzetti put his hand in his hip pocket?”¹ On appeal, the court held that the jury “were to pass on the question whether the general conduct of the defendants, in connection with other evidence introduced later, showed consciousness of guilt.”¹ On redirect, Vanzetti testified that neither Chief Stewart nor Katzmann told him he was suspected of robbery and murder, and that he believed he was held for a political matter because he was asked whether he was a Socialist, an I.W.W. member, a Communist or a Radical.¹³

The alibi. Vanzetti testified that he was peddling fish in Plymouth on Apr. 15, 1920, and several witnesses corroborated him.¹³ On cross-examination, Katzmann asked whether he had left Plymouth in May 1917 “to dodge the draft,” and Vanzetti answered, “Yes, sir.”¹⁴

Motions for a new trial

From 1921 through 1926 the defense filed a series of motions for a new trial, and Thayer denied them all.¹⁶ In 1923 Sacco dismissed Moore, and William G. Thompson and Herbert B. Ehrmann took over the defense of both men.¹⁶ In an affidavit dated October 1923, State Police Captain William H. Proctor, who had testified that Bullet No. III was “consistent with being fired” from Sacco’s pistol, said that he did not believe it had been, and that he had told Katzmann so before testifying.¹³¹⁶

On Nov. 18, 1925, Celestino Madeiros, held in the same prison as Sacco, sent him a note: “I hear by [sic] confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”¹⁷ Madeiros had been convicted of first-degree murder in another case.² Defense lawyers found that his description matched the Morelli gang, known to police in Providence and New Bedford, and filed a motion for a new trial on May 26, 1926.¹⁷² Thayer denied it.¹⁷

The appeals

On May 12, 1926, the Supreme Judicial Court, in an opinion by Justice Braley, overruled the exceptions from the trial.¹ It held that whether Vanzetti “could be found to have been present at the scene of the murder” was a question for the jury, upheld most of the evidentiary rulings as within the judge’s discretion, and found no abuse of discretion in the refusal of a new trial.¹⁷ Its review was confined to errors of law and abuse of discretion; Frankfurter criticized the limited power of Massachusetts courts at the time to review convictions.²²⁰

On Apr. 5, 1927, in an opinion by Justice Wait, the court upheld the denial of the Madeiros motion.² It framed the question as “Could the judge conscientiously, intelligently and honestly have reached the result he has reached?” and said that “it is not for us to determine what is to be believed.”² It held that Madeiros’s confession standing alone would not be admissible at a trial of the defendants, and that the supporting facts, if true, “go no further than to furnish basis for a contention that he and some members of the Morelli gang of criminals took part in the murder at South Braintree.”² “There is no error of law or abuse of discretion in the denial of the motion,” the court concluded.²

The sentence

On Apr. 9, 1927, Thayer sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death by electrocution, and set the executions for the week of July 10.⁷ Asked whether he had anything to say, Vanzetti began: “Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime.”²² He told the court, “I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.”²² He said he would not wish on “a dog or to a snake” what he had suffered “for things that I am not guilty of,” and closed: “I would live again to do what I have done already. I have finished. Thank you.”²²

The clemency review

On May 3, 1927, Vanzetti wrote to Gov. Alvan T. Fuller asking him to “investigate all the facts of our cases and set us free of that sentence”; Sacco refused to sign the appeal.⁷ Fuller delayed the executions and appointed an advisory committee: Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, MIT president Samuel W. Stratton and retired probate judge Robert A. Grant.⁷¹⁸

The committee’s report, dated July 27, 1927, found that Thayer “endeavored, and endeavored successfully, to secure for the defendants a fair trial,” though his talking about the case off the bench was “a grave breach of official decorum.”⁵ On Vanzetti, it wrote that “the evidence against Vanzetti is somewhat different” from that against Sacco, called his alibi “decidedly weak,” and found it “significant” that no cartridges for the revolver were found on him except those in it.⁵ It called the Madeiros confession “worthless.”⁵ “On the whole, we are of opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond reasonable doubt,” the committee concluded.⁵

On Aug. 3, 1927, Fuller denied clemency: “I believe with the jury, that these men, Sacco and Vanzetti, were guilty, and that they had a fair trial.”⁴ On Aug. 8, Thayer denied a motion to revoke the sentences.¹⁸ Later that month the Supreme Judicial Court held that the trial court had no jurisdiction to hear a new motion once the defendants had been committed in execution of their sentences, and it rejected petitions for writs of error.³

The execution

Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted at Charlestown State Prison on Aug. 23, 1927.⁸ Madeiros was executed the same night for the murder of a bank cashier, a crime unrelated to South Braintree.⁸ On Aug. 28, a funeral procession for the two men passed through Boston; the Trial Court Law Libraries put the number of mourners at about 200,000.⁸²¹

Later views of his guilt

The question of guilt has never been settled. Frankfurter wrote in 1927 that “every reasonable probability points away from Sacco and Vanzetti; every reasonable probability points toward the Morelli gang.”¹⁷ Russell, who began his research believing both men innocent, concluded in 1962, largely because of the 1961 ballistics tests, that Sacco was guilty, while still holding that Vanzetti was innocent.²⁵ He reported that Carlo Tresca had told the writer Max Eastman, shortly before Tresca’s death, “Sacco was guilty, but Vanzetti was not.”²⁵ By 1981, Russell wrote that Vanzetti “at most possessed guilty knowledge.”²⁷ Judge Michael A. Musmanno disputed the 1961 tests.²⁶ The Lowell Committee and Governor Fuller concluded that Vanzetti was guilty.⁵⁴ WBUR reported in 2007 that the men’s guilt or innocence and the fairness of their trial were still debated.²⁴

Personal backstory

Early life in Italy

By his own account, Vanzetti was born on June 11, 1888, in Villafalletto, in the province of Cuneo in Piedmont, which he described as “primarily an agricultural community.”³² He wrote that he attended school from age 6 to 13 and “loved study,” but that his father decided he should learn a trade.³² At about 13 he was apprenticed in a pastry shop in Cuneo, where by his account he worked “from seven o’clock each morning until ten at night, every day,” and he later spent three years at a bakery in Cavour.³² He wrote that he fell seriously ill while working in Turin in February 1907 and that his father brought him home to recover.³² Afterward his mother died in his arms after a three-month illness; “The void left has never been filled,” he wrote.³²

Emigration and work

Vanzetti left Italy on June 9, 1908, and sailed to New York.³²¹⁰ He held a series of manual jobs in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.¹⁰ In his autobiography he lists work as a dishwasher in New York restaurants, as a farmhand in Connecticut, in brick furnaces near Springfield, in stone pits in Meriden, Connecticut, and on railroad and factory jobs.³² He settled in Plymouth, where by his account he lived for about seven years before his arrest, did stone work, worked at the cordage plant for about 18 months, and worked on public construction.³² He wrote that he took part in a strike at the cordage works and was afterward blacklisted by some factories.³² About eight months before his arrest he bought a cart and began peddling fish, and in the winter of 1919 he cut ice, shoveled coal, dug ditches and cleared snow.³² At the time of his arrest he was a fish peddler in Plymouth.¹⁰

Politics

Vanzetti wrote that he came to his politics through co-workers in Turin, his own working life in America and wide reading, including Kropotkin, Marx, Malatesta, Mazzini, Darwin and Tolstoy.³² “I am and shall be until the last instant… an anarchist-communist,” he wrote in 1923.³² He and Sacco were committed anarchists in the circle of Luigi Galleani, who published the newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva, advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and was deported in 1919; Vanzetti subscribed to the paper, raised money for it and wrote for it.¹⁰ He met Sacco in the spring of 1917, and that summer both went to Mexico with other Galleanists after Galleani urged his followers not to register for the draft; they returned in September 1917.¹⁰ The Trial Court Law Libraries note that the press later called the two men a “good shoemaker” and “poor fish peddler,” while in fact they were committed anarchists.²¹

In custody

Vanzetti was in custody from his arrest on May 5, 1920, until his execution more than seven years later.¹¹⁸ The Supreme Judicial Court recorded that in January 1925 he was found insane and transferred from the State Prison to the Bridgewater State Hospital, and that he was returned to prison later that year after the hospital’s medical director believed him “normal mentally”; the court held that “the presumption of his sanity is controlling” in deciding that he could instruct his lawyers.¹ In 1923 the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee published his autobiography, The Story of a Proletarian Life, in which he wrote that he had “not a drop of blood on my hands.”³² He was held in the Dedham jail in the spring of 1927, where the journalist Philip Stong interviewed him.²⁹

In his own words

His prison letters were published in The New York Times on Aug. 5, 1927.¹⁸ Lines from one, “What I wish more than all in this last hour of agony,” and the hope that the case would “serve as a tremendous lesson to the forces of freedom,” are inscribed on a Gutzon Borglum sculpture at the Boston Public Library.²³ The sources reviewed do not record his last words in the execution chamber.