780 ★ CHAPTER 20 From Business Culture to Great DepressionDisputed tests on one of the six bullets
in the dead man’s body suggested that
it might have been fired from a gun
owned by Sacco. Neither fingerprints
nor possession of stolen money linked
either to the crime. In the atmosphere
of anti- radical and anti- immigrant fer-
vor, however, their conviction was a
certainty. “I have suffered,” Vanzetti
wrote from prison, “for things that I
am guilty of. 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.”
Although their 1921 trial had
aroused little public interest outside
the Italian- American community, the
case of Sacco and Vanzetti attracted international attention during the lengthy
appeals that followed. There were mass protests in Europe against their impend-
ing execution. In the United States, the movement to save their lives attracted
the support of an impressive array of intellectuals, including the novelist John
Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor
at Harvard Law School and a future justice of the Supreme Court. In response to
the mounting clamor, the governor of Massachusetts appointed a three- member
commission to review the case, headed by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the presi-
dent of Harvard University (and for many years an official of the Immigration
Restriction League). The commission upheld the verdict and death sentences,
and on August 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair. “It is not
every prisoner,” remarked the journalist Heywood Broun, “who has a president
of Harvard throw the switch for him.”
The Sacco- Vanzetti case laid bare some of the fault lines beneath the sur-
face of American society during the 1920s. The case, the writer Edmund Wil-
son commented, “revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its
classes, professions and points of view and... it raised almost every fundamen-
tal question of our political and social system.” It demonstrated how long the
Red Scare extended into the 1920s and how powerfully it undermined basic
American freedoms. It reflected the fierce cultural battles that raged in many
communities during the decade. To many native- born Americans, the two men
symbolized an alien threat to their way of life. To Italian- Americans, including
respectable middle- class organizations like the Sons of Italy that raised money
for the defense, the outcome symbolized the nativist prejudices and stereotypesA 1927 photograph shows Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti outside the courthouse in
Dedham, Massachusetts, surrounded by security
agents and onlookers. They are about to enter
the courthouse, where the judge will pronounce
their death sentences.