[NYTr] "Remember Labor's Martyrs" - Sacco & Vanzetti 80 Years Later

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Today is the 80th anniversary of the state murder of Sacco and
Vanzetti.  First a NYC event tonight, then a sample of how they are seen
today. -NY Transfer]


Infoshop News - Aug 23, 2007 01:37 PM PDT

NYC: 80th Anniversary of America's Most Famous Judicial Murder

Anarchist EventsAUG. 17, 2002 – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
Italian immigrants and anarchists, were executed for a crime they did
not commit on Aug. 23, 1927. Millions around the world protested this
injustice and mourned their deaths. New Yorkers will gather Thurs.,
Aug. 23, 2007, at 6 p.m. in Union Square to commemorate the 80th
anniversary of their deaths and rededicate themselves to the struggle
for a society without war and racist oppression, without the state,
without the church, without capitalism.

SACCO-VANZETTI COMMEMORATION COMMITTEE
339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012 (Room 202)

Press Contact: Eric Laursen, (917) 806-6452

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SACCO AND VANZETTI: IN THE AGE OF BUSH,
THEIR STRUGGLE CONTINUES

80TH ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICA'S MOST FAMOUS JUDICIAL MURDER 
TO BE COMMEMORATED IN NYC, THURS., AUG. 23

AUG. 17, 2002 – Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian
immigrants and anarchists, were executed for a crime they did not
commit on Aug. 23, 1927. Millions around the world protested this
injustice and mourned their deaths. New Yorkers will gather Thurs.,
Aug. 23, 2007, at 6 p.m. in Union Square to commemorate the 80th
anniversary of their deaths and rededicate themselves to the struggle
for a society without war and racist oppression, without the state,
without the church, without capitalism.

The commemoration will include a performance by the Living Theater of a
scene from its landmark play, Paradise Now. Other musical and
spoken-word performers will be announced early next week.

The previous evening, Wed., Aug. 22, at St. Joseph's Church, 371 Sixth
Avenue in Greenwich Village (northwest corner of Washington Place), the
Sacco-Vanzetti Commemoration Committee will hold a teach-in. The
program will include a screening of Peter Miller's acclaimed
documentary, Sacco and Vanzetti, plus a facilitated discussion of the
case's continuing importance. Also included will be a staged reading of
Events & Victims, by Daniel Lang/Levitsky. Additional speakers to be
announced.

“Sacco and Vanzetti's case couldn't be more relevant to our current
political struggles,” says Bob Erler, a member of the Memorial
Committee. “Today, once again, immigrant communities are under attack,
civil liberties are being curtailed, countless prisoners of the
so-called 'War on Terror' are being held without charges, and the term
'terrorist' is being applied to everyone from Quaker meetings to animal
rights activists. More than ever, we've got to understand and learn
from our history.”

“Everything should be done to keep alive the tragic affair of
Sacco and Vanzetti in the conscience of mankind.” –ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1947

Related at Infoshop: http://www.infoshop.org/page/Sacco-Vanzetti

                              ***

The Phoenix - Aug 22, 2007 issue
http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid46042.aspx


Replaying injustice

Sacco and Venzetti, 80 years later

By: MIKE MILIARD

They stare from faded photographs like ghosts: faces ashen, eyes
doleful and accusatory. Like those photographs, the legacy of Sacco and
Vanzetti is fading fast.

“American history is vanishing before our eyes,” says Bruce Watson,
author of the new "Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the
Judgment of Mankind" (Viking). “I did a survey of history books — about
16 of them, high-school and college level. At the most, they have a
paragraph or two on this case. A couple didn’t have it at all.”

This Thursday, August 23, marks 80 years since the Italian-born
anarchists, after a joint trial marred by anti-immigrant and
anti-radical bias, were electrocuted in Charlestown Prison for a double
murder committed in the course of a robbery.

The anniversary will be marked this week by the Sacco and Vanzetti
Commemoration Society with a march from Copley Square to the North End
on Thursday at 3 pm; a night of music, poetry, and theater at the
Community Church of Boston on Friday at 7 pm; and the screening of two
documentary films — Peter Miller’s 2006 Sacco and Vanzetti and David
Rothauser’s 2004 The Diary of Sacco and Vanzetti — at Encuentro5, at 33
Harrison Avenue, on Saturday at 7 pm.

If few people think about Sacco and Vanzetti these days, it’s worth
remembering that, “by the time of their execution, they were the most
famous men in the world,” says Watson. Such was the global outrage at
their deaths.

Watson’s book is especially valuable for its evocation of the men’s
characters. Vanzetti was “very eloquent,” someone “any academic bookish
person would fall in love with,” he says. Sacco “seemed much more
innocent and naive than Vanzetti, but at the same time he . . . had a
temper, and was every bit as radical, politically.”

And make no mistake, both men were ardent anarchists. Watson concludes
that “they had probably been involved [with], or at least knew the
guys” who devised a nationwide 1919 mail-bomb campaign. And “that, of
course, opens the question of would they have done the robbery.”

Says Watson, “I think the preponderance of evidence certainly points
toward innocence. There certainly was a reasonable doubt, but the jury
ignored that.”

Still, there are “nagging doubts” that the two defendants may indeed
have killed shoe-factory paymaster Frederick A. Parmenter and security
guard Alessandro Berardelli, Watson allows. “But you’d have to convince
me a lot more. The character of the men is such that it just doesn’t
fit the crime.” (Some historians have posited that Sacco was guilty,
but Vanzetti was innocent.)

Whatever their culpability, it’s inarguable that the pair did not
receive a fair trial. Beyond being tainted by virulent anti-Italian
bias and a revulsion of the defendants’ radical politics, the 1921
conviction took place in a country preoccupied by the xenophobic
aftermath of World War I, the devastating tragedy of the 1918 flu
epidemic, and the Red Scare — a state of itchy unease only exacerbated
by Prohibition.

Compare that with the post-9/11 mood: the paranoia and seething
partisan rage, the governmental furtiveness and trumped-up trials, the
rabid anti-immigrant sentiment.

Ours is a country where a citizen, Jose Padilla, can be imprisoned for
three-and-a-half years without being charged or provided legal counsel,
just by being labeled an “enemy combatant”; a country where Newt
Gingrich rails that “young Americans in our cities are [being]
massacred” by illegal immigrants.

In times of crisis, Watson says, there’s a presumption of guilt rather
than of innocence, a tendency toward surreptitious power plays. “These
things are human traits, I’m afraid, especially in an era after a huge
attack, as we had after 1919, and after 9/11.” The fear of anarchists
and Italians, then, has simply been transposed eight decades later to
Muslims and Mexicans.

And reading the words of one of Sacco and Vanzetti’s attorneys, William
Thompson, it’s hard not to think of the current regime: “A government
which has come to value its own secrets more than it does the lives of
its citizens has become a tyranny, whether you call it a republic, a
monarchy, or anything else.”

If the legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti is fading fast, that aspect of
their story, at least, is not vanishing fast enough.

Copyright © 2007 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group 

                             ***

The Nation - Aug 27, 2007 issue
http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20070827&s=temkin

Sacco & Vanzetti Today

Moshik Temkin

On the night of August 23, 1927, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
two Italian immigrants and revolutionary anarchists, the former a
heel-trimmer and the latter an unskilled laborer, were executed in
Massachusetts. It was an awful end to an unprecedented seven-year legal
and political battle that put American justice on trial and involved
political leaders, social activists, public intellectuals, religious
figures, artists, workers and countless ordinary people, Americans and
non-Americans.

The case against Sacco and Vanzetti--who pleaded their innocence and
were tried while seated in a barred metal cage--was flimsy at best and
tainted by the open prejudice of judge and jury. Accused of being part
of a gang of bandits that carried out the April 15, 1920, robbery and
murder of a factory paymaster and his guard in South Braintree, an
industrial suburb of Boston, they were convicted in July 1921. The
verdict and subsequent death sentence were upheld by the Massachusetts
Supreme Court, approved by a special advisory commission to Governor
Alvan Fuller led by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell and, at the
moment of truth, tacitly sanctioned by laissez-faire President Calvin
Coolidge and progressive Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Louis Brandeis and Harlan Stone.

[...] full article available by subscription only.

                                    ***

History News Network - Aug 20, 2007
http://hnn.us/articles/41987.html

The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti: Eighty Years After

By Ron Briley

T. S. Elliott once described April as the cruelest month. Perhaps he
should have considered August. Recent weeks have witnessed observations
marking the sixty-second anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Yet, the eightieth anniversary of the executions of Sacco and
Vanzetti on August 23, 1927 is drawing less attention. Of course, we
are talking about the lives of two men as opposed to thousands. But
just as with the atomic bomb, the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti force us
to confront challenging questions about the American past and future.

On April 15, 1920, the robbery of a shoe factory payroll in South
Braintree, Massachusetts resulted in the murders of a paymaster and
security guard. Massachusetts authorities charged Italian immigrants
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti with the crime. In addition, to
their status as immigrants, Sacco and Vanzetti were followers of the
Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, who was suspected by the American
government of involvement in the bombing of Attorney General A.
Mitchell Palmer’s home. Galleani was deported in June 1919, while
Galleanist Andrea Salcedo died in May 1920 while in FBI custody. Thus,
the Sacco and Vanzetti case must be understood within the context of
the post World War I Red Scare.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution, there was widespread fear that
revolutionary unrest would sweep across Europe and threaten the United
States. This climate of fear was also an opportune time for the
government to undermine leftist organizations such as the Socialist
Party and Industrial Workers of the World, who enjoyed considerable
support before the First World War. Citing threats to stability, the
Justice Department instituted deportations and arrests of so-called
radicals.

Allied with these fears of disorder and revolution were concerns
regarding the rising tide of immigration from Southern and Eastern
Europe. Critics of the new immigration maintained that those entering
the United States from nations such as Italy lacked an appreciation for
Nordic democratic traditions and would drive wages down with their low
standard of living. Typical of this attitude was a 1922 piece for the
Saturday Evening Post by novelist Kenneth Roberts, complaining that it
is demoralizing “when great numbers of men, accustomed all their lives
to living on starvation rations, come to American and take jobs at low
wages and then, in their determination to save money, crowd into
wretched quarters and live in squalor and filth and darkness on the
fraction of the money which an American workingmen must spend in order
to live decently. Such a proceeding lowers the standard of living in
America.”

This is the milieu in which Sacco and Vanzetti were tried for murder.
Although the two immigrants proclaimed their innocence, much of the
case focused upon the anarchist and antiwar beliefs of the two
defendants captured by presiding Judge Webster Thayer’s reported
comment that he was going “to fry those anarchist bastards.” The
evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti was flimsy at best, and many
observers of the trial perceived the convictions as evidence of
prejudice against anarchism and the new immigration. Appeals from
intellectuals in the United States and around the world, as well as
global protests by workers, failed to halt the executions.

On the fiftieth anniversary of their deaths, Massachusetts Governor
Michael Dukakis, citing the prejudicial atmosphere in which the trial
was conducted, signed legislation exonerating Sacco and Vanzetti. In
the conclusion of his proclamation, Dukakis called upon the citizens of
Massachusetts to “pause in their daily endeavors to reflect upon these
tragic events, and draw from their historic lessons the resolve to
prevent the forces of intolerance, fear, and hatred from ever again
uniting to overcome the rationality, wisdom, and fairness to which our
legal system aspires.”

This proclamation, unfortunately, resonates all too well with the
climate of intolerance in contemporary America as concerns about
security are employed to justify opposition to immigration from Mexico.
Fear of the immigrant other may now be cloaked under the guise of
national security. We must protect our border in order to prevent
another 9/11 terrorist attack. Immigration reform is now perceived as
being soft on terrorism, even though there is no evidence of a
terrorist attack emanating from Mexico. In fact, terrorist plots aimed
at the United States have been uncovered in Canada, not Mexico. Yet, it
is the Mexican, not the Canadian, who draws the ire of those supporting
greater immigration restrictions. Anti-immigrant attitudes coupled with
anti-radicalism promote an environment of xenophobia which cost Sacco
and Vanzetti their lives and endanger our civil liberties today.

Folksinger Woody Guthrie recognized this connection, and in 1947 during
the Second Red Scare he compiled a collection of eleven songs entitled
Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti. Recognizing that with his rural origins
in Oklahoma and Texas, some might find Guthrie an odd choice to write
the story of two Italian anarchists residing on the East Coast, Guthrie
sought to build a union bridge between Oklahoma and Italy. Guthrie
wrote a journal entry dedicated to Sacco and Vanzetti in which he
stated, “You are Italian and I am from Oklahoma, but I have left out
from Oklahoma to do some bigger jobs, just like you left your native
house and home back in Italy.” Guthrie perceived his migrants from
Oklahoma as similar to the immigrants from Italy who were forced to
leave their homes and seek a new promised land. Guthrie concluded, “I
saw the same vision that you did and all of us dust bowl families saw
your same vision. It is the one big union we all saw. It shines just as
bright over your Italy as over the prairies and the flatlands of my
dust bowl.” As Peter La Chapelle suggests in his account of the “Okie”
migration to Southern California, Guthrie’s genius was to use the
concept of refugee to “form a symbolic alliance” between migrants from
the Southern Plains and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

While Guthrie found the legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti relevant to the
1930s Dust Bowl migration as well as the post World War II Red Scare,
filmmaker Peter Cooper’s 2007 documentary Sacco and Vanzetti makes the
argument for the case’s contemporary relevance. The director maintains,
“The case clearly has urgent lessons to offer American nearly eighty
years after its tragic conclusion. As in the ‘red scare’ of Sacco and
Vanzetti’s time, present-day Americans have allowed fear and jingoism
to erode our civil liberties, scapegoat immigrants, and compromise our
judicial system.” Thus, the filmmaker perceives disturbing parallels
between the fates of Sacco and Vanzetti and contemporary issues
regarding immigration restriction and limitations placed upon civil
liberties in the wake the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In a recent piece for the Journal of American History, Lisa McGirr
concludes that the story of Sacco and Vanzetti will continue to
resonate with a global community frustrated by the gap between the
rhetoric of the United States as a beacon for liberty and the reality
of inequality and injustice in the land of the free and home of the
brave. Eighty years ago Sacco and Vanzetti provided human faces for the
persecution endured by so many faceless immigrants over the course of
American history. To honor the legacy and sacrifice of Sacco and
Vanzetti, let us rededicate ourselves to the promise of American life
as a home for immigrants and as a model for freedom of expression.
Perhaps August does not have to be the cruelest month.

[Mr. Briley is Assistant Headmaster, Sandia Preparatory School.]