[NYTr] Lessons of Sacco & Vanzetti for a Post-9/11 Age

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Huffington Post - Aug 23, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-miller/lessons-of-sacco-and-vanz_b_61560.html

Lessons of Sacco and Vanzetti

by Peter Miller

Just after midnight on August 23, 1927, two Italian immigrant radicals
were killed in the electric chair in Boston. The execution of Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti sent shock waves throughout the world,
and millions watched in horror as their seven-year legal nightmare came
to a close. As we mark the 80th anniversary of this landmark event, we
would do well to consider the lessons that the Sacco and Vanzetti case
-- and the sadly familiar era in which it took place -- offer us in
post-9/11 America.

Sacco and Vanzetti came to America looking for freedom, adventure, and
a chance to earn some money, much like tens of millions of other
immigrants around the turn of the last century. Sacco worked in a shoe
factory and Vanzetti was in itinerant fish peddler. Both had lived
quiet lives in Italian immigrant enclaves near Boston, but their
betrayal by their adopted country would make their names famous around
the world.

The prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti was the most visible outrage of
the so-called "red scare" that followed the First World War. A nation
caught up in the jingoistic spirit of war looked on approvingly as the
federal government ran roughshod over civil liberties in an effort to
apprehend and punish suspected enemies within our borders. An ambitious
attorney general rounded up, imprisoned, and deported thousands of
radicals, peace advocates, labor activists, and other undesirables,
often without charges or hearings. Special zeal was directed at
Italians, especially Italian anarchists, a small number of whom --
including Sacco and Vanzetti -- were committed to waging a
revolutionary struggle against the American capitalist state.

But Sacco and Vanzetti were not put on trial for their political
beliefs or for revolutionary activities. They were accused of a robbery
at a shoe factory in which two men delivering the payroll were
mercilessly gunned to death. The evidence against Vanzetti was
non-existent. The case against Sacco rested largely on perjured
eyewitness testimony and what now appears to have been manufactured
ballistics evidence.

The outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial had little to do the
evidence presented in court. When the jury foreman was asked by a
friend if he thought the two "guineas" might in fact be innocent, he
replied "damn them, they ought to hang them anyway." When Sacco took
the stand, the prosecutor focused on his radicalism and his opposition
to World War One. After the jury provided a speedy conviction, Judge
Webster Thayer threw out a series of subsequent appeals by defense
attorneys citing perjured testimony and judicial bias. Thayer, who
referred to the defendants as "anarchist bastards," even refused to
consider the confession of a small-time criminal who said he'd
participated in the robbery and insisted that Sacco and Vanzetti had
nothing to do with it.

We'll never know if Sacco and Vanzetti committed the shoe factory
murder, and the question of guilt or innocence remains politically
volatile even to this day. A recent flap based on a misreading of a
letter by the novelist Upton Sinclair is the most recent proof of the
ongoing radioactivity of this subject. But to focus on the issue of
innocence or guilt is missing the point. The more fundamental question
is whether they received a fair trial, and the answer is a resounding
no.

More important still is the question of what we can still learn from
their story. As our country remains fixated on the threat of domestic
terrorism today, we would do well to reflect on how we responded to
similar threats eighty years ago. Were we really more secure as a
country as a result of the unconstitutional attacks on radical
movements in the 1910s and '20s? Did the judicial murder of Sacco and
Vanzetti help protect us from crime and terror?

Muslims and Arabs have become the current targets of racial profiling
in the name of protecting our security. Looking at history will remind
us that such treatment used to be reserved for Italians, now a
fully-assimilated immigrant group whose members includes two justices
on the Supreme Court. Does a defendant's ethnicity or political creed
continue to shape the kind of justice that we offer in this country?
How often do we still think something along the lines of "damn them,
they ought to hang them anyway" when considering the fate of a
defendant from an unpopular ethnic group, or whose beliefs are
antithetical to our own?

Sacco and Vanzetti's fate also raises unsettling questions about
capital punishment. As hundreds of death penalty convictions are now
being overturned due to the introduction of new evidence, can the
electrocution of these two men 80 years ago remind us of the folly --
not to mention the brutality -- of killing a defendant before the truth
is settled?

Perhaps the greatest lesson we can take away from the Sacco and
Vanzetti case was its ability to inspire millions of people to stand up
on behalf of justice and reason. As the case played itself out over
seven years in the 1920s, the unfairness of Sacco and Vanzetti's
treatment in the courts fueled protests not just in the United States
but throughout the world. Protests erupted in Boston, New York, and
dozens of American cities, as well as is Paris and London, Tokyo and
Buenos Aires, numerous cities in Africa, and countless other places.
Books, poems, operas, and works of art further publicized the story of
the two men and their legal ordeal. Would such a movement happen today?

[Peter Miller's documentary SACCO AND VANZETTI has just been released on
DVD - check it out at www.willowpondfilms.com ]