Memorializing Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston

‘WHO WERE THOSE PEOPLE?’ historian Howard Zinn asked a member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society in November 2008. Zinn had just delivered a lecture for the benefit of the Society on ‘The Meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti’ to a crowd of at least 250 people overflowing the Dante Alighieri Italian Cultural Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was taken aback that interest in the case was still alive. ‘I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, how many people are still interested in Sacco and Vanzetti? Maybe seven? Ten? Fifteen? I can’t even—but this place is full!’i Accustomed to smaller crowds composed of all the same familiar radical characters of Greater Boston, I, myself, was surprised at the size of the diverse and intergenerational crowd.

I recognized less than half of the faces I saw; those who I did recognize belonged to friends and acquaintances involved with a broad array of social and ecological justice struggles. I was not immediately able to account for everyone else’s presence, which became a subject of discussion at the Society’s next meeting. Where did these people come from? Were the young ones Zinn’s students? Were the older ones the Dante’s regular crowd, interested in all things Italian? Were the middle-aged ones the archetypical Zinn-loving Cambridge liberals? Did they read about the event on Zinn’s website, or in the Globe or the Times? Did they come for an opportunity to hear the legendary, aging historian speak or did they come because of a prior interest in Sacco and Vanzetti? Whoever they were, they had packed the Dante for the first time in years on account of two dead anarchists and a legal case over eighty years old.

In May 1920, police arrested Italian immigrant workers and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, questioning them about their citizenship and their radicalism. The two were charged, held, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. They were accused of the murders of a paymaster and his security guard during a payroll robbery that many believe they did not commit. Public opinion on the case was polarized. Even before Celestino Madeiros, a known criminal and member of a gang specializing in armed robbery, confessed to his participation in the crime and the absence of Sacco and Vanzetti from it, the evidence against the defendants was shaky. Both had multiple alibis, but the witnesses accounting for their whereabouts during the crime, workers who were not native speakers of English, were mocked and dismissed as liars by the court. The anti-immigrant, anti-anarchist prejudice of the judge, jury and prosecution alike was profound. Judge Webster Thayer, who not only tried the two, but presided over and gleefully denied all motions for a new trial, was quoted as calling the two ‘anarchistic bastards.’ii One of the jurors, in conversation with a friend who believed the pair to be innocent, snapped, ‘Damn them, they ought to hang anyway!’iii The prosecution regularly dwelled on the citizenship and radicalism of the defendants, factors that had little to do with a well-orchestrated payroll robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts.

The cause of Sacco and Vanzetti became known around the world, setting off protests, strikes and riots from Chicago to Buenos Aires to New York to Johannesburg to Paris to Tokyo, pressuring the governor of Massachusetts to call off the execution. Nevertheless, shortly after midnight on August 23, 1927 in Charlestown State Prison, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts put Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to death in the electric chair, ending their seven-year imprisonment. Their trial, riddled as it was with prejudice, is widely considered to be one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history. The two condemned anarchists are often invoked as a symbol of protest against the inequity of American society and its criminal justice system, inspiring works of drama, art, and music from the time of their execution to the present. One such work, a bas-relief by the famous sculptor Gutzon Borglum, was presented for permanent, public display on the Boston Common to the governments of the City of Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the 10^th, 20^th and 30^th anniversaries of the execution. Each time, the work and its subjects were denied the use of public space in Boston. Then, on the 50^th anniversary in 1977, Governor Dukakis issued a proclamation that the two had not received a fair trial and that ‘any stigma and disgrace should be forever removed from their names.’ On the 70^th anniversary of the execution in 1997, Mayor Menino of Boston and acting Governor Cellucci of Massachusetts met in the Boston Public library and, repeating the assertion that Sacco and Vanzetti had not received a fair trial due to the bias against them, formally ‘accepted’ Borglum’s bas-relief, announcing the intent of the city to cast the artwork in bronze and place it outdoors in a more public place by the year 2000.iv As of this writing, the bas-relief remains indoors.

‘THERE’S NO STORY IN IT … Just a couple of wops in a jam.’

– city editor of the New York Call.v

Garnering publicity for the cause of the condemned workers began as an uphill battle, a battle fought by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee. The group, made up of the co-defendants’ friends and comrades, had formed shortly after the Italian immigrants were arrested in May 1920. Well-organized and highly efficient, the Committee’s work intensified so that by 1925, they had moved to a 2^nd floor office at 256 Hanover Street in Boston’s North End, then the epicenter of working class Italian life. With a broad and ever rotating cast of characters, the Defense Committee served as a clearinghouse for information and agitation, international outreach, a massive legal defense fund, and correspondence with individuals and institutions alike. The driving force of the Committee was always its treasurer, anarchist Aldino Felicani. ‘Friendly, open, and guileless,’vi Aldino Felicani ‘talked to everybody, listened to everybody, learned from everybody.’vii An immigrant himself and a printer by trade, Felicani was a close personal friend of Sacco and Vanzetti. Socialist labor organizer Mary Donovan acted as secretary, while anarchist shoe worker Joe Moro also performed secretarial duties for the Committee. Though it was, from its beginnings, an organization made up of working class radicals, its composition altered as the case gained publicity. Most notably, journalist Gardner Jackson, a liberal sympathetic to labor and radical causes, quit his job at the Boston Globe to work full time for the Committee. ‘Jackson brought in a respectable, social, liberal element,’ Felicani recalled. ‘We were now able to reach people we never could have dreamed [of] reaching before.’viii Harvard law school professor, later Supreme Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter was so incensed by the Sacco and Vanzetti matter that he risked his career and reputation by not only being an outspoken public figure and writer on the case, but by significantly funding and advising the Committee’s work. Despite all their efforts, the Defense Committee ultimately did not prevent the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Notwithstanding this crushing defeat, their work on behalf of the anarchist workers was not over in 1927.

I do not remember when or where I first heard of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, but I know that it was after I became an anarchist myself. The more I learned about the case, the more infuriated, disappointed and unsurprised I was that an episode so central to 20^th century world history could be obscured and forgotten, left out of textbooks, kept out of classrooms and out of the public memory of my generation, especially when its lessons are just as relevant now as they were 80 years ago. Immigrant workers are still scapegoated for the nation’s social and economic ills, discriminated against, rounded up, detained and deported in the name of national security. The state is still acutely interested in pre-emptive repression of dissent, recently seen in the case of the RNC 8 in the Twin Cities, who, for the crime of organizing food, housing and other logistics for protestors, were each charged with four conspiratorial felony counts, two of which with terrorism enhancements.ix The overwhelming majority of developed nations have abolished the death penalty; its retention in the U.S. keeps the United States in alarmingly poor company with other countries notorious for human rights abuses. And so it came to pass in spring 2007 that Boston’s young, historically minded anarchists joined forces with a broader, intergenerational coalition of community, labor and immigrant rights organizers, anarchist historians, archivists and activists to create the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society. Ever since then, we have been organizing annual marches and events in memory of our two martyred comrades. In December 2007 we replaced a plaque at 256 Hanover Street to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee that had been put up in 1976 and removed by unknown hands in the 1980s. We have also been working with the city to make the long-promised public memorial to Sacco and Vanzetti a reality. Through working with historians who have dedicated years of their lives to the study of the Sacco and Vanzetti case, I came to learn that the Society was not first in demanding official recognition and reparation for the wrongs committed against the two immigrants; the struggle to memorialize the two workers began shortly after the electric chair took their lives.

The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee met August 31, 1927, a week and a day after the execution of their comrades, to outline their future work. The meeting’s minutes outline a five-point plan, the last of which is ‘Memorial to Sacco and Vanzetti.’x Yet when the Defense Committee’s September 1927 bulletin was printed, the fifth point was changed to ‘Generally proclaiming the vindication of Sacco and Vanzetti.’xi Similarly, the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti, a group of affluent liberals operating in New York City, outlined their post-execution plan in six points, the sixth being ‘To create a memorial for Sacco and Vanzetti.’xii The Defense Committee, receiving word of these plans, found the first five points objectionable enough to send two of its members, Mary Donovan and labor organizer Powers Hapgood, to the November 7, 1927 meeting of the Citizens National Committee. Explaining the objections of the Defense Committee, Boston’s broader radical community, and the families of the condemned workers, the result of this meeting was an entirely different five-point plan for the group, which also changed its name to the Sacco-Vanzetti National League. Though it was not a point to which the Defense Committee objected, the new five-point plan omitted mention of a memorial.xiii

Meanwhile, Boston’s wealthier supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti, Gardner Jackson and Felix Frankfurter, were concocting their own memorial to the dead. They envisioned a House of Free Speech or Freedom House in memory of Sacco and Vanzetti for liberal organizing, meeting and lecturing. It was to be established on Beacon Hill behind the Massachusetts State House and opened on the 1-year anniversary of the execution. Desiring a large piece of artwork to go over the front entrance, they sought out sculptor Gutzon Borglum, creator of Mt. Rushmore, and longtime friend of Frankfurter. Frankfurter was dubious as to how willing Borglum would be to memorialize two immigrant radicals, given the sculptor’s extreme patriotism and his former association with the Ku Klux Klan.xiv After meeting with Jackson, Frankfurter and Felicani,xv however, Borglum became convinced of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, writing to Jackson,

If two innocent men have been electrocuted under order of the American courts, much as I love my country and always shall, above any and all things … I will do anything I can to make the martyrdom of these men a burning, living protest against the injustice practiced in the name of modern jurisprudence!xvi

Refusing pay for his labor, Borglum met the deadline and sent a plaster draft of his work to Boston for the Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Committee’s 1-year commemorative event. The Memorial Committee was a prestigious assemblage of swells plus Aldino Felicani. Together they arranged for a distinguished line-up of speakers and attracted 2,000 people to the ‘orderly’xvii meeting on August 23, 1928. Elizabeth Glendower Evans unveiled Borglum’s 3.5’ x 7’ bas-relief at the conclusion of the event in Boston, held at the Scenic Auditorium on 12 Berkeley Street. Afterwards, the plaster work was placed in storage. 

August 22, 1928. Associated Press Photo

As for what became of the Freedom House, it is like so many mysteries surrounding the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The minutes of the executive committee of New York City’s Sacco Vanzetti National League from October 3, 1928 relay that Gardner Jackson had acquired the title to the building on Beacon Hill for $16,000 and that the cost of remodeling would amount to an additional $15-20,000. The minutes go on to relay that ‘the Boston group have $12,000 on hand, and plan to cover the balance of $4,000 with mortgages.’xviii On December 18, 1929, the secretary of the National League wrote to Gardner Jackson, thanking him for ‘the full report on the house,’ describing it as ‘corking’ and assuring Jackson that ‘we will surely be able to do something about it.’xix The April 4, 1930 minutes of the League’s executive committee note that, ‘while the committee agreed that it was desirable that the plans for the house should proceed and that it should be owned by the League, no definite action was taken.’xx In 1947, describing the plans, the Boston Herald remarked that it had ‘failed to materialize.’xxi Borglum’s biographer states that the city refused to issue the necessary permits.xxii Still other sources claim the project fell through due to lack of funds. I was not able to determine when, why or by whom the plans for the Freedom House were halted, though I am inclined to believe that the city denied the permits, as there was no shortage of interest or money for the project.