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Notorious Lives

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Nicola Sacco

by Pietro Lorenzini

Italian anarchist

Major offenses: Robbery and murder

Active: April 15, 1920

Locale: South Braintree, Massachusetts

Sentence: Death by electrocution; posthumously pardoned

Early Life

Nicola Sacco (NEE-coh-lah SAH-coh) was born in Torremaggiore, Italy, in 1891. Though his father was a merchant, Sacco received only the basic formal education common in the Italy of his day. At age sixteen Sacco emigrated to the United States with a brother and settled in Massachusetts. Because Sacco had little formal education and no marketable skills, only menial jobs were open to him. He began work at an Italian American-owned company and was soon promoted to laborer. As was common in the construction industry, employees were laid off in winter. Thus forced to seek other employment, Sacco began doing textile work.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco.

ph_0111226749-Sacco_Vanzetti.jpg

After his brother returned to Italy, Sacco learned the shoemaking trade. He went to work at a shoe manufacturing company. In 1912, as a skilled and employed tradesman, he married Rosina Zambelli. One year later their son, Dante, was born. Their daughter, Ines, was born in 1920.

Anarchic Career

In 1912, Sacco began to associate with anarchists because he sympathized with their demands for equality for all. Convinced of the need for a radical solution to the perceived inherent injustice of capitalist society, Sacco regularly attended anarchist meetings and also began writing for a well-known anarchist newspaper.

After the United States entered World War I on the side of Italy, Sacco could not support a conflict he considered unjust. He and his new friend Bartolomeo Vanzetti went to Mexico until they could return to Massachusetts unthreatened by conscription. Little did they know that after the war had ended, a different form of injustice would take their lives.

Defendants in the most celebrated political trial in history, Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of the April 15, 1920, South Braintree murders of F. A. Parmenter, a paymaster of a shoe factory, and Alessandro Berardelli, the company’s payroll guard.

Legal Action and Outcome

On the evening of May 5, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. By the end of the month they found themselves in the Massachusetts Superior Court standing trial before Judge Webster Thayer. On July 14, both defendants were found guilty of murder. Later, they would be sentenced to death. Because of such factors as openly displayed bias against the defendants by Judge Thayer, a jury that seemed chosen expressly to convict, false eyewitness testimony, and a strong cultural bias against the defendants’ radical political beliefs and ethnicity, the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti was protested throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Newspaper editorials throughout the world denounced the unfairness of the trial, and government authorities received thousands of protest letters.

In 1925, another man, a local gang member, confessed his guilt and admitted that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been involved in the murders. After the Massachusetts courts refused to reopen the case, Governor Alvan T. Fuller responded to the tremendous mass protests and newspaper criticisms by creating an investigatory committee chaired by the president of Harvard University, A. Lawrence Lowell. When the governor’s refusal to grant clemency was supported by the committee, renewed demonstrations and mass protests broke out across the United States, and from Mexico City to Paris. Although evidence pointed to the guilt of a local gang and to the unfairness of the trial, Sacco and Vanzetti, maintaining their innocence to the end, were executed on August 23, 1927. Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis formally cleared the two men in 1977.

Impact

The criminal case against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti is a historical milestone. This case underscored the last days of a significant American anarchist movement. Though the two defendants underwent a criminal prosecution, at trial were two anarchists who had American antiradicalism and xenophobia working against them. Thus, the trial marked the impact of the antianarchist, anticommunist, xenophobic hysteria of the early twentieth century. The conviction and execution of the two Italian immigrants moved many to question openly the fairness of an American political and judicial system that would allow a political crucifixion of two foreign-born anarchists.

Many American intellectuals, such as John Dos Passos, attacked the trial as an assault on American freedoms and proof of a dual system of justice based on class distinctions and ethnicity. Protests from judicial community leaders, such as Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, assailed the unfairness of the trial, the bias of the judge and jury, the weakness of the evidence, the unprofessional conduct of police, and the near-perjury of prosecution witnesses.

The Sacco and Vanzetti trial is still hotly debated. Most accounts declare the men’s innocence and point to xenophobic, anti-Italian and antiradical prejudice. While some studies hold that the guilty verdict may have been valid, no works have definitively determined the culpability of either defendant. The only certainty is that both Sacco and Vanzetti suffered for their ethnicity and political beliefs. The sole definitive conclusion is that the anarchist cause to which both were so impassionedly dedicated suffered a death much more silent than theirs.

Further Reading

1 

Avrich, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Through research of anarchist sources, Avrich gives a definitive assessment of the case and of the anarchist movement.

2 

Binelli, Mark. Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006. Presents an intriguing review of the controversy surrounding the case.

3 

Frankfurter, Felix. The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Critical Analysis for Lawyers and Laymen. Boston: Little, Brown, 1927. In a still indispensable work, Frankfurter does much to reveal the trial’s unfairness.

4 

Topp, Michael. The Sacco and Vanzetti Case: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Macmillan, 2005. Offers a summary of the varied views and documents concerning the Sacco and Vanzetti case.

5 

Vanzetti, Bartolomeo. Background to the Plymouth Trial. Chelsea, Mass.: Road to Freedom Press, 1927. This important monograph presents an intriguing and personal review of the case and the cause.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Lorenzini, Pietro. "Nicola Sacco." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1518.
APA 7th
Lorenzini, P. (2007). Nicola Sacco. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Lorenzini, Pietro. "Nicola Sacco." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.