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Sacco, Vanzetti, and Rosie
| Article
# : |
14837 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
1,975 Words |
| Author
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George Szamuely
George Szamuely writes for Commentary and The Wall Street
Journal. He is a former editor of the Times Literary
Supplement. |
The trail and conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1920 has taken its place in political folklore as a grotesque--though most certainly not the most grotesque--instance of American national mendacity. Here were two young men, whose almost every attribute could not fail to endear them to the Left. They belonged to anarchist groups, they were draft evaders, they were Italian immigrants. And now here they were being put to death by Warren Harding's money-grubbing, scandal-ridden America. It did not matter that the two men had been convicted of robbing and murdering a postmaster. It did not matter that the governor of Massachusetts had appointed a blue-ribbon committee, headed by the president of Harvard, to look into the question of whether the trial had been fair or not. It did not matter that the jury had concluded that the defendants were guilty as charged, even if the conduct of the trial left something to be desired. Throughout the world, the left--enjoying a surge of self-confidence following the Russian Revolution of 1917 (the dismal failure of August 1914 now all but forgotten) was up in arms. There were riots in London, Paris, and Rome. There was a general strike in Montevideo. A bomb went off in the house of the American ambassador in Paris; and another bomb, also in Paris, killed twenty people during a demonstration in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. On August 23, 1927, the two young men were executed.
Grave Miscarriage
In the ensuing years, though the details of the case were not widely known, most right-thinking, well-meaning people did not hesitate to express their conviction that a grave miscarriage of justice had occurred and that America now had its own Dreyfus affair to live down. True,
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