From The Vault
January 27, 2021: Saco & Vanzetti
This week on From the Vault we gain historical perspective on the uneasy relationship between politicians and organized labor in America, turning back the clock almost a hundred years to the 1920’s.
At a time when the forty-hour work week was only a dream, the immigrant workforce was feared, and the Courts generally sided with corporate barons, two Italian immigrants named Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for their alleged murder of two men in a robbery of a shoe company in Massachusetts.
Many believed that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, and overwhelming evidence suggested the same. The fact that these men held radical political beliefs (they were anarchists) was cited as a reason they were so easily tried, convicted, and put to death.
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti garnered international attention, including an 1927 essay by H.G. Wells, the 1928 Upton Sinclair book Boston, as well as personal appeals from Albert Einstein and George Bernard Shaw.