The Legacy of Sacco & Vanzetti

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Vanzetti was thirty-two when he was arrested. He had left his home in the northern Piedmont of Italy when his mother, whom he had cared for over a long illness, died. Despite his father's relative prosperity, Vanzetti had spent a difficult childhood as an apprentice to a baker. He was a voracious reader, self-taught, and by the time he left for America, he was something of a political philosopher.

Like Sacco, Vanzetti's first years in America were as a laborer. He worked as a kitchenhand, in a brickyard, as a cook, as an iron mill factory hand. He too fled to Mexico, again, like Sacco, on principle. He returned after the Armistice and acquired a handcart from which he sold fish, clams, and eels.

Vanzetti is, in some ways, the more impressive of the two. He was a constant reader of important literature, and, by the time of his execution, had become quite proficient in writing English, although at the time of his arrest his English was, at best, weak. In one of his later letters from prison, he wrote:

Oftentimes my mind is ravishing; oftentimes, it is blank. More often I cannot express my thoughts ... The crux of this inner drama is not only about expression it is that I doubt my own thoughts, my opinions, my feeling, my sentiments, beliefs and ideals. I am sure of nothing, I know nothing.

Although he never married, he was a close friend of several families, serving as a surrogate father for a number of young people. He was described as gentle, generous, and caring. He lived simply, renting a room with the Brini family. He did not drink, and his only indulgences seemed to be books and his pipe.

He was also described as having a temper, and passionate in his political beliefs. He responded to one of his supporters while in prison with the following:

Authority, Power, and Privilege would not last a day upon the face of the earth, were it not because those who possess them, and those who prostitute their arms to their defence to suppress, repress, mercilessly and inescapable every efforts of liberations of each and all the rebels.

The Relationship Between Sacco and Vanzetti

There is speculation that Vanzetti could have been spared if he had incriminated Sacco, that Vanzetti was innocent and that Sacco had been the only one actually involved in the South Braintree crime. When Fred Moore suggested that Sacco plead guilty and Vanzetti not guilty, Vanzetti rejected the proposal. "Save Nick," he said. "He have the wife and child."

It is clear that from their meeting as fellow sympathetic strikers in 1917, Sacco and Vanzetti worked together industriously for Galleani's anarchist cause. Both raised money, distributed literature, followed Galleani's direction.

The most interesting insight into their relationship, however, comes from a note that Vanzetti gave to friends the day after his eloquent extemporaneous speech to Judge Thayer after their being sentenced to death, quoted in part in the introduction to this article. Vanzetti, worrying that he had not mentioned Sacco, who had been silent during his words to Judge Thayer, wrote the following (quoted with its original spelling):

I have talked a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature, and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of Liberty and to his love for mankind; money, rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life ... Oh yes, I may be more witfull, as some have put it, I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism I felt small at the presence of his greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him this man called thief and assasin and doomed. But Sacco's name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katmann's and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name, his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a deem rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.

Whatever their guilt or innocence, they were not common men. Their letters, as well as the testimony of those who knew them, confirm that they were quite remarkable.