Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind |
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Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
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by Bruce Watson
Sales Rank: 131071
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List Price: $25.95
$17.13
At Amazon
on 9-16-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 448 pages
Published by: Viking Adult August 16, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0670063533
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0670063536
Book Dimensions:
8.8 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
Weighs: 1 pounds
Reader Reviews
The two names are linked forever, but have not been subjects of a book for thirty years; now _Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind_ (Viking) by Bruce Watson brings a historic case back. The book is timely, but Watson leaves it up to the reader to draw parallels between our time and the time of the murders and trial. Americans were scared of being victims of terrorist bombs then. The world then was full of anti-American feeling, with protests that the government was imprisoning and executing poor foreigners who had no chance of getting a fair trial. There were protests at US embassies all over the world. The trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti has every reason to be considered "the trial of the century", especially compared to other nominees for that category, like the O. J. Simpson trial. At the time of the trial, Watson says that the pair were the most famous men in the world, and Watson has done a fine job of going through the records once again to bring out the personalities involved in the crime, the investigation, and the trial, as well as the international but unsuccessful movement to get them a reprieve. Everyone knew the case in its time, although the passage of years has inevitably made it less immediate. Almost everyone who now knows of the case already has an opinion about the guilt or innocence of the two men, and Watson's book will not change anyone's opinion. It might, however, reinforce the idea that guilty or innocent, the men were given a grossly unfair trail without a deserved chance at a second one that might have been closer to the American ideal of justice. Whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti did the bank robbery and murder for which they were executed, they were not innocents; they were anarchists and true to their anarchist principles, and the anarchists were terrorizing America. A chief doubt about their guilt, though, comes from anarchist principles. An anarchist might have bombed a politician's office or a capitalist's home, but anarchists weren't big on other crimes. They killed for political effect, not for lucre, and the crime involved here was a simple payroll heist. They were certainly suspicious characters, but any suspicions were magnified by the worries about anarchism and the distrust of Italian immigrants. There were serious problems with the case against them. The judge was convinced that they were guilty long before the trial concluded, and had been heard telling a friend that he would "get them good and proper" and that "no Bolsheviki" could intimidate him. Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, and countless less famous protesters all over the world tried to get the decision changed, but the system merely agreed with itself on all levels, and no appeal worked. After they were electrocuted, 200,000 mourners were in their funeral procession. Watson, unlike many previous examiners of the case, does not exhibit a point of view on the guilt or innocence of the pair. Some of the physical evidence and some of their behavior clearly implicated them, but other evidence made their guilt unlikely, and it is clear that eyewitnesses were pressured and coached towards a guilty verdict and that ballistics reports were a mess that the jury could take any way it wanted to. And like the judge, and Boston in general, the jury wanted to find Sacco and Vanzetti guilty, and did so in just three hours, though it withheld announcing the verdict for a couple of hours more to avoid the appearance of unseemly haste. Justice of the Supreme Court William O. Douglas wrote in 1969 that anyone who studies the transcript "will have difficulty believing that the trial with which it deals took place in the United States." Just before the pair was executed, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was asked by his secretary whether justice had been done. "Don't be foolish, boy," came the answer, "we practice law, not `justice'." Watson may not provide certainty of guilt or innocence, but it is clear that the trial was unfair, and that the world-wide protests to promote a re-trial should have borne fruit. The law's toll, Vanzetti realized, would make him a historic figure: "If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure." Maybe, but the anarchist cause died out; our bomb-throwers these days have more powerful bombs, and are not motivated to destroy government but just certain governments. We can look back on the prejudices that powered the case against Sacco and Vanzetti; we can hope for a fuller expression of American justice in the legal proceedings that absorb us now.
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Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind
Available from Amazon
Price: $17.13
Updated on 9-16-2008.
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