Sacco Vanzetti Term paper

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Sacco-Vanzetti Trial: 1921

This is the story of two men, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo "Bart the Beard" Vanzetti, and how the State of Massachusetts indicted them with murder one and executed them only for being Anarchist Italian immigrants.

To understand why these men were discriminated against and made the scapegoats for a murder you must first understand what was going on in the North Eastern United States at the time. Italian people were immigrating to the United States in increasing numbers in the 1860s and70s to escape the frightful conditions in Southern Italy due to the fact that all of the Italian territories and kingdoms had united. Instead of being more prosperous as one large kingdom the conditions grew increasingly worse after the combining of the kingdoms. Northern Italy gained most of the political control of the new kingdom and rarely did this benefit the South. In Southern Italy the average income went down, but the cost of living nearly doubled which inspired many of the moves to America. The immigrants stereotypically had little money, were illiterate and easy targets for people to take advantage of. Since they often had no family in America they stayed in Italian neighborhoods (ghettos) in the East. They usually ended up staying in the East because of financial shortcomings and the fact that so few of them even spoke English, and without their Italian communities support would have died in the streets or been deported. Many of these Italian immigrants had family back in Italy who they saved up their meager wages to have brought over. Even after their families were reunited life was still appalling. The Italian families faced many grievances like not having enough food, not having adequate shelter, and being to poor to take proper care of life's other necessities (doctors, education, clothing, etc.). Assimilation was a leisurely event for the Italian ghetto dwellers. For these people life had changed very little from that of life in Southern Italy. Poor Italian workers would often take any low-paying job they could find, and because of this were often used as strikebreakers by factories. For these reasons many Americans despised the Italian workers and did everything in their power to make life for them even worse than it already was by refusing to do business with them, denying them equal housing and employment opportunities, and blaming them for things they had little or no control over. (The People's Almanac #2 121-122; Wallechinsky and Wallace 1978)

The ball was set into motion on April 15, 1920 in South Braintree where Federick Parmenter was robbed and killed for the $15,777 payroll he was transporting. His guard, Alessandro was also murdered by the men who sped off in "a car" and were later described by witnesses as being "Italian", though that was all any two of the over fifty witnesses could agree upon. There was another attempt to hold up a different shoe company store for the payroll on December 24 and the police chief suspected a man by the name of Mike Boda. Mike Boda's car was awaiting repairs at a garage. On May 5 Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in connection with the robberies. It seems they were on their way to visit their friend Vittorio "Poppy" Papa in the same neighborhood that Mike Boda's car garage was in and the police suspected they were coming to pick it up for him. (By Bullet, Bomb and Dagger; Richard Suskind: 1971 p. 138-140; Great American Trials; Knappman: 1994 p.289-290)

When arrested the two men had in their possession a .32-caliber pistol fully loaded with nine bullets, an additional 23 .32-caliber bullets, a fully loaded .38-caliber, four 12-gauge shotgun shells, and a flyer for an anarchist meeting where Vanzetti was going to speak. At the attempted robbery on December 24 a 12-gauge shotgun had been fired and the fact that the two men had shotgun shells was suspicious. The police took them to the station and locked them up for the night, waiting until morning to interrogate them. In the morning, June 22, 1920, the trial began and the district attorney for Norfolk county, named Gunn Knatzmann, questioned Sacco and Vazetti and learned that both men had fairly solid alibis. Nicola Sacco had a very solid alibi, since he was at work in the shoe factory when the attempted robbery was going on. Sacco was not, however, at work on the day of the murders at the first robbery and was charged with those murders. Vanzetti's alibi was questionable, but believable. He was a fish peddler, and since it is an old Italian Christmas Eve tradition to eat eels that night he was out selling his fish. At the trial there were countless witnesses, who through interpreters, testified that they had purchased eels from Vanzetti on December 24. Also at the trial three witnesses identified Vanzetti as the man who had fired the shotgun and he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison without even taking the stand to deny the charges. He did not take the stand because he had the right not to, and although the jury was...

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