Labour's martyrs: the story of Sacco and Vanzetti: Workers' Liberty 3/53

Who can save Sacco and Vanzetti?

By James P Cannon, Labor Defender January 1927

The Sacco-Vanzetti case is at a turning point. Legally speaking, it now rests on another appeal to the Massachusetts State Supreme Court from the latest decision of Judge Thayer refusing a new trial. But speaking from a more fundamental standpoint, that is, from the standpoint of the class struggle, the issue really hangs on developments taking place within the Sacco-Vanzetti movement which embraces many workers of various views.

Within this movement lately a certain indecision and hesitation has been noticeable.

The working-class victims of bourgeois repression and deliberate murder are legion. The murder of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were burned alive in the electric chair in Massachusetts, on August 23, 1927, was a cold-blooded crime committed by the American capitalist class in the full sharp glare of world wide attention and protest. Mass demonstrations were organised in every city in the world where Communist and Socialist movements existed. Protests and demands for clemency were made by many well known writers and politicians. These included British working-class leader George

This is the famous last speech of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the class-war prisoner who, alongside Nicola Sacco, both of them anarchists, died in the electric chair in August 1927, framed by the US authorities. This speech, despite its broken English, is so beautiful and moving that it falls naturally into verse form. No-one has ever expressed more splendidly and with such stirring, simple language the aspirations and hopes of all those who fight for a better world. Once read, these words form part of every socialist’s heritage. This typographical arrangement of Vanzetti’s speech first appeared in L

1920
MAY 5—Nicola Sacco and Bartolmeo Vanzetti
are arrested on a streetcar while going from West Bridgewater to
Brockton, Massachusetts,
AUGUST 16—Vanzetti is charged
with attempting to rob a cashier in
Bridgewater on December 24, 1919,
and is sentenced to prison for from 12
to 15 years by Judge Thayer in Plymouth.
SEPTEMBER 11—Sacco and Vanzetti
are accused of being the chief
participants in the murder that occurred
in South Braintree on April 15, 1920,
where, near the shoe factory of Slater
Morrill Company, Ferdinand Parcenter
and his guard, Alexander Beradelli, were killed.
The $15,000

THE United States government is on its trial for murder. The indictment is that in order to conceal the secret murder by its police of an Italian worker, Andrea Salsedo, it is now judicially murdering two other Italian workers, Nicola Sacco and Hartolomeo Vanzetti.

First of all, the facts. In the spring of 1920 war passion and panic that had been worked up to even a higher pitch in America than elsewhere, and had not there worked itself off in war exhaustion, was diverted by the German collapse and the Russian revolution from the "Boche" to the "Bolshie." And the cruel hounding of pacifists or

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The Palmer Raids
The death of Andrea Salsedo
Who were Sacco and Vanzetti?
Vanzetti's first trial
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti
Sacco is also identified
The hnourable and virtuous prosecution witnesses
"Consciousness of guilt"
The working class organizes its protest
Court motions and mass movements
The case gets a "new complexion"
The Department of Justice is caught redhanded
The Madeiros confession
The militants demand a protest movement
Thayer replies to the protests
Governor Fuller takes a hand
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