With Malice Aforethought: The Execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti

Contents

Author’s Note on the Text

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

APPENDIX D

SOURCES

NOTES

Author’s Note on the Text

When I quote Sacco and Vanzetti, I prefer to use their words, unedited and without use of the [sic] designation, even when their words are odd or their statements are ungrammatical. I do this to avoid interrupting the flow of what they said and how they said it.

Preface

Ninety years ago, two Italian immigrant workers, members of a local anarchist group, were arrested for the robbery and murder of a paymaster and his guard in a Boston suburb. Their subsequent trial during the Red Scare challenged Massachusetts and the nation to meet the Constitution’s promise of equal justice under the law for all people in America.

I have studied the Sacco-Vanzetti case and written this book to show how that challenge was met. My motive stems from a belief in the Constitution’s promise, respect for the law, and my devotion to its practice for over fifty years.

There is also a personal reason for my intense interest in this case. When I was ten years old, I asked my father about Sacco and Vanzetti. I had heard their names, probably on the radio, in connection with the tenth anniversary of their executions. I still remember the look on my father’s face as he explained that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been sentenced to death for robbery and murder, but many believed they were innocent. My father spoke emotionally of the beautiful letters Sacco wrote to his children just before he was executed and of Vanzetti’s kind nature and brilliant mind. I believe that my father, an Italian immigrant shoemaker, identified with Sacco, an Italian immigrant shoe trimmer. My father’s expression and tone denoted sadness marked with a fear I could not then understand. I later learned he felt threatened by the ill will many Americans displayed toward Italians as a result of that case.

Over the years, I learned bits and pieces about the trial until I felt compelled to learn all that I could about the case. I recently discovered a questionable removal of court papers from the Sacco-Vanzetti case file. These papers consisted of an essentially ignored interim decision by Judge Webster Thayer and related appeal papers regarding his so-called investigation into who switched the barrel of Sacco’s gun while it was in an evidence locker. This convinced me of the need for an in-depth analysis of the gun barrel incident. I devote part of the book, especially chapter 16, The Rosetta Stone, to that endeavor.

Vanzetti’s last words to William Thompson, his devoted appellate lawyer, still echo in my mind, Clear my name. I have used my legal background to explore the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, and I provide my analyses, opinions, and conclusions along the way.

The Sacco-Vanzetti affair has relevance in today’s world. It brings into focus the proper role of the public prosecutor and of the judge in criminal proceedings. The case is a reminder that imperfections in human nature, such as blind ambition, can infect a prosecutor and ethnic prejudice can affect the impartiality of a judge. Some recent examples make the point.

Who can forget the injustice visited upon three members of the Duke University lacrosse team in 2006 by a corrupt prosecuting attorney? He fabricated evidence, suborned perjury, and suppressed exculpatory information in order to charge the three students with the rape of a black woman to gain favor with black voters in a close primary election.

An even greater injustice came to light in 2007, when a $102 million civil judgment was entered in the Boston federal court against the United States of America, resulting from the FBI frame-up of Joseph Salvati, Peter Lamone, Henry Tameleo, and Louis Greco for the murder of small-time hoodlum Teddy Deegan. Although the four were exonerated in 2001 for the 1965 murder, they were not vindicated until after Tameleo and Greco died in prison and Salvati and Lamone had each spent over thirty years behind bars.

FBI agents and prosecutors, in their overzealous efforts to fight organized crime, built a case against the four on perjured testimony and false evidence, while concealing information that would have exonerated them. Representative Dan Burton (R-IN), chairman of a congressional committee investigating FBI abuses in 2001, apologized to Salvati and his wife: I want to express to both of you how deeply sorry we are for everything that was taken away from you and everything you’ve had to go through the last 30 years.

Since 1990, as a result of improved DNA testing and the efforts of organizations like the Innocence Project, over two hundred prisoners have been found wrongfully convicted of crimes ranging from robbery to rape and murder.

Ambitious prosecutors must be held to the standard demanded by the law. Their role is not to seek convictions at any cost but to seek justice at all costs. And judges must be free of prejudice in order to protect the rights of even those who profess alien ideals.

In today’s America, the lessons learned from the case of Sacco and Vanzetti stand as sentinels of our liberty.

Theodore W. Grippo

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book, I have received assistance from a number of people whom I want to thank.

Greg Jones, my friend and former law partner of many years, read several early drafts of the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. His background as a former first assistant United States attorney in Chicago was valuable regarding various aspects of the Plymouth and Dedham trials.

Bill Dal Cerro, my friend and president of the Italic Institute of America, reviewed and gave me valuable comments regarding the manuscript.

Peggy Fox, librarian and researcher, reviewed an early version of the entire manuscript and provided many helpful editorial comments.

I am grateful to my son-in-law, Dave Nichols, who provided invaluable assistance in formatting the manuscript for the publisher. He also originated the design for the cover of this book. My thanks also go to my stepdaughter, Pam Nichols, who reviewed the manuscript and provided valuable editorial comments.

The members of the Barrington Writers’ Workshop, Barrington, Illinois, were extremely helpful with their comments regarding the manuscript. Similarly helpful in reviewing early versions of several chapters were members of the writers’ group at the Union League Club of Chicago.

Ms. Elizabeth Bouvier, head of archives, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, was extremely helpful in searching for and finding Judge Webster Thayer’s decision of March 25, 1924, regarding the switching of gun barrels, and several important appeal documents relating to that decision that appeared to be lost.

I’m grateful to Bruce Watson, author of the recent book Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind, for sharing with me certain documents relating to Judge Thayer’s March 25, 1924, decision.

I want to thank the employees of the following Massachusetts offices, who upon my request searched their files for the fingerprints on the Buick getaway car, and for the Brockton Police Report of May 5, 1920 regarding the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, as applicable, even though both searches were unsuccessful: The Norfolk County District Attorney, the Brockton Police Department, the City of Brockton Law Department, the Department of Public Safety, the Massachusetts State Police, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, and the Clerk of the Superior Court of Norfolk County. I’m equally grateful to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a search of their files for the lost fingerprints, which were not found.

I’m further grateful to the following organizations for permissions I received to use excerpts from published works: The Penguin Group (U.S.A.) for the use of certain letters of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti; Bentley Publishers for the use of an excerpt from Upton Sinclair’s novel Boston; The Kate Sharpley Library for the use of excerpts from The Story of a Proletarian Life by Bartolomeo Vanzetti; the Boston Herald for the use of an excerpt from F. Lauriston Bullard’s editorial We Submit; and Random House for the use of an excerpt from Vincent Teresa and Thomas C. Renner’s book, My Life in the Mafia.

For all other excerpts in the book, I have relied on the doctrine of fair use, with recognition of the source, and I extend my appreciation to the authors and publishers of those excerpts.

I wish to thank the trustees of the Boston Public Library/Rare Books for their permission to use the photographs so identified, including the photograph on the cover of the book. I also thank Commonwealth Editions for its approval to use the scene of the crime map appearing in its Sacco-Vanzetti publication. All other photographs were, to my knowledge pre-1923 publications, or otherwise in the public domain.

All source information, notes, a list of principal characters, and a chronology of major events appear in appendices at the end of the book.

CHAPTER 1

AN OVERVIEW

On April 15, 1920, a brutal crime was committed in South Braintree, a suburb of Boston. Five bandits gunned down and killed a paymaster and his guard while they were delivering a $15,700 payroll. The gang fled with the money. Three weeks later, on the night of May 5, the police arrested Nicola Sacco and his friend Bartolomeo Vanzetti as suspicious persons while they were passengers on a streetcar on the way to Sacco’s home. The police quickly identified the two as local immigrant workers associated with a detested anarchist group operating in the Boston area. Thus began the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Soon after Vanzetti’s arrest, the Commonwealth tried and convicted him for another crime—an attempted armed robbery in nearby Bridgewater some four months earlier. Thereafter, the Commonwealth tried and convicted both Sacco and Vanzetti for the South Braintree murders and six years later executed them for those crimes.

Following Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s arrest, a reporter sent to cover the story reported back, [T]here’s no story … just a couple of wops in a jam.¹ After their conviction of the murders on July 14, 1921, the New York Times gave the story seven inches on an inside page. However, after their execution on August 23, 1927, the New York Times ran a front-page headline and five pages about them, amid outrage and massive protests by millions of workers and supporters throughout America and the rest of the world. They claimed Sacco and Vanzetti were framed and executed for their political beliefs.

The trial became a cause célèbre of American legal history. Edmund Wilson, a noted American writer and critic, observed that the Sacco and Vanzetti case revealed the whole anatomy of American life with all its classes, professions, and points of view … and it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social system.²

Historians, scholars, lawyers, and writers continue in a search for evidence to determine their innocence or guilt and whether they got a fair trial. The execution of these two obscure and uneducated Italian immigrants, who were without influence, wealth, or power, inspired many celebrated authors—including Maxwell Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Felix Frankfurter, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay—to write about this case.

The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti spawned a legion of books. The titles of many convey the intense feelings the case has generated: The Case That Will Not Die, Tragedy in Dedham, Justice Crucified, and The Never-Ending Wrong. Writers, poets, and artists have authored operas, plays, songs, poems, scores of articles in leading journals, television and film productions, public debates, and thousands of news stories about the Sacco and Vanzetti affair.

Most ironic, on August 23, 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts declaring that day Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day.³ The proclamation stated that any stigma and disgrace should be removed from the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and from their families and descendants. The proclamation, however, was not without controversy. Apologists in support of the conviction and execution of the two Italians bitterly opposed the proclamation, rejecting its propriety in deference to the honor and memory of the judges, members of the jury, the prosecutors, the governor, and members of his advisory committee who were involved in the case.

The Sacco and Vanzetti affair transcends their deaths and the vicious murders of the two payroll guards. It is an American epic with villains and heroes, agony and triumph.⁴ It is a drama that touches on the battle of the American labor movement, the clash of capitalism and socialism, the exploitation of immigrant labor by the remnants of a moribund Puritan elite, and the personal struggle of immigrants seeking acceptance and equality in a country hostile to them.

Frederick Katzmann’s successful prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti and Judge Webster Thayer’s death sentences brought a defiant response from Vanzetti: Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katzmann’s and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name[s] … are but a deem rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man …⁵

The Sacco and Vanzetti story embraces not only their murder trial in the Dedham courthouse but also Vanzetti’s earlier trial in Plymouth for an attempted armed robbery in Bridgewater and the trial of court interpreter Angelina DeFalco, relating to her shakedown attempt of the two defendants. The public’s attention was magnified by six years of unsuccessful motions and appeals and the court’s rejection of the confession of Celestino Medeiros, an admitted participant in the South Braintree murders, who tried to exonerate the two Italians with sworn testimony that they were not involved.

A fruitless plea for clemency to the politically ambitious Governor Alvan T. Fuller and a questionable review of the case by his advisory committee exacerbated the affair. Added to the mix were the actions of Frederick Katzmann and Judge Webster Thayer. The establishment saw Katzmann as a fearless prosecutor protecting society from two murdering anarchists. Others saw him as a zealot rather than the people’s attorney, whose duty it was to seek justice rather than to convict. Most Americans saw Judge Thayer as the guardian of their venerable institutions. Others viewed him as a prejudiced judge who, in his black robe, was more like a cobra poised to strike Sacco and Vanzetti dead than the guarantor of their right to a fair trial.⁶

The times were rife with prejudice against immigrant workers like Sacco and Vanzetti. Following the Great War, a wave of unemployment, labor unrest, and crime swept across the country, centering especially in large urban areas like Boston. The authorities blamed immigrant workers for these conditions. The establishment labeled efforts to achieve reforms for workers the actions of radicals attempting to overthrow the government. The Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik takeover of Russia by revolutionaries known as the Reds, had fallen upon America, resulting in fear and enmity toward the two Italians.

This story demonstrates how a people caught in a wave of xenophobia reacted in a time of crisis. It reveals that America was not the melting pot once envisioned but a nation of many races and ethnicities—an America that had not yet achieved its ideal of e pluribus unum.

CHAPTER 2

BOSTON IN THE 1920S

Americans who survived the flu pandemic of 1918 saw glimmerings of good times ahead. The Great War had ended, and the country emerged from the recession that had followed. Americans turned inward, away from the problems of Europe. Prosperity ensued. The bulls were on the run, and the stock market soared. The radio, the automobile, and a flood of consumer products reached the masses through easy credit. Prohibition wasn’t so bad; it brought speakeasies with flirting flappers and the joy of jazz. Women obtained the right to vote, and they joined the workforce. The country loved Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh was America’s hero. Everybody went to the movies, and the talkies made them even better. However, the 1920s were only a glitzy veneer covering hard times for many Americans.

After the Great War, the world changed. Germany, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Czarist Russia were forever altered or destroyed. A new world order was emerging. The forces of socialism, fascism, anarchism, and democracy were on the march, and they fought to fill the void.

Foreigners, some of whom were immigrant workers from Italy like Sacco and Vanzetti, threatened American democracy on its own soil by promoting opposing ideologies. Boston’s withering aristocracy, having come to terms with a hated Irish Catholic peasantry, was confronted with a flood of unschooled Italians and other immigrants they found socially undesirable. New England Yankees, whose roots ran deep into their Puritan past, found these foreigners and their beliefs offensive.¹

The Puritans and Their Progeny²

The hostility of twentieth-century New Englanders toward immigrants had its origin in the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the city of Boston three hundred years earlier. Puritans left England primarily to establish a theocracy that excluded nonbelievers. The Puritans were dissatisfied with the failure of Elizabeth I to purify the Anglican Church of all remnants of Catholicism after her father, Henry VIII, broke with Rome.

Puritan theology, with its Calvinistic concept of predestination, held that only Puritans who achieved saving grace could gain heaven; everyone else was destined to hell. The elders of each congregation determined who achieved saving grace. They were the visible saints of their church. The elders controlled each congregation, and the congregations controlled the colony. The colony outlawed other religions and controlled the spiritual and social life of its members. A sinner, depending on the offense, was punished with time in the stocks, forced to wear the scarlet letter, have an ear removed, a tongue bored with a hole, or worse.

During the next 150 years, the laws of the colonies became the laws of most New England states. Government-sanctioned bigotry was the result. Roger Williams, a dissident minister, was banished in 1635 from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of his objection to its alliance of church and state. Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated and banished in 1637 from the colony because she challenged the right of elders to determine who had saving grace. In 1660, the authorities hanged Mary Dyer, a Quaker follower of Anne Hutchinson, for her beliefs.

As the elders began to lose control of their congregations at the end of the seventeenth century, they sought to divert attention from their own shortcomings. They found a favorite scapegoat of the times, an accursed group—the witches. The witch hunts started in Salem in 1692. Before they were over, the elders accused hundreds and hanged nineteen women. In Justice Crucified, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht pointed to what Puritan bigotry begot:

Calling it God’s will, the Puritans planted in the strong soil of New England the seeds of intolerance, injustice, and inequality. The concept of the visible saints would be stretched to embrace wealth and intellect, but the myth that an elect should determine man’s fate would endure, as would the belief that this elect was entitled to choose who might inhabit their earth. ³

The exclusion of foreigners remained a tradition in New England for the better part of three centuries. Nineteenth-century Bostonians, successors to the Puritans, visited their intolerance first on Irish Catholic immigrants and then on Italian Catholic newcomers. As Puritan control waned and democracy took hold, new waves of immigrants streamed into New England and the rest of America. Although the old barriers began to crumble, hatred of foreigners (other than those of Anglo-Saxon origin) by New Englanders did not disappear. Instead, their intolerance found more subtle ways of expression against these new immigrants: segregated neighborhoods, limited employment and social opportunities, and quotas for college entrance.

An elite group known as the Brahmins, the visible saints of the times, achieved the highest social status in Boston.⁴ They were the gentlemen and gentlewomen of four or five generations of Anglo-Saxon breeding, blessed with the divine favor of wealth and education, the progeny of the Puritans, endowed with saving grace.⁵ The Abbotts, Cabots, Lodges, Lawrences, and Lowells were among the elect. They found little room for the immigrant newcomers. After the Great War, restricting entry into America of southern and eastern Europeans, along with arresting and deporting troublesome immigrants, became the goal of most Bostonians and other Americans.

Puritan beliefs significantly influenced American culture.⁶ This was evidenced by the continued vitality during the early decades of the twentieth century of political, social, and religious movements that drew their strength from Puritan ideals. Chief among these were the Know-Nothings, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Prohibitionists.

The Know-Nothings, a virulent anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, semisecret political party, gathered strength in the years preceding the Civil War, often under the banner of the American Party. By the 1850s, the Know-Nothings gained governorships in a number of states and a large voting bloc in the Congress. Its members divided over the slavery issue, just as the North and the South did, and the party dissolved following the Civil War. Former party members, with their prejudices, merged with Democrats of the South and Republicans of the North, and Know-Nothing ideals persisted in those groups during the 1920s.

Followers of a revived and growing Ku Klux Klan supported the nativists’ exclusionary attitude in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Klan, a conceptual ally of the Know-Nothings, emerged as a new force of prejudice and bigotry during this period. Much of the Klan’s activities were against blacks, Catholics, and other minorities.

The Prohibitionists, essentially a faith-based group with Puritan values, demonstrated their power by promoting the Eighteenth Amendment, which outlawed the sale of alcoholic beverages. Adoption of the amendment required approval of two-thirds of the Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, and the Prohibitionists’ success in accomplishing such a difficult task was a reflection of the vitality of Puritan ideals in 1920s America.

It was among the descendants of the Anglo-Saxon founders of New England, steeped in Puritan ideals, that a mixture of southern and eastern European immigrant workers settled in America.

The Immigrant Workers⁷

The immigrants were not completely unwanted. New England elites had mixed feelings; their greed became the seeds of their decline. Decades of cheap immigrant labor that made huge profits for them spawned poverty and disease-ridden ghettos of unskilled workers. The workers were a suffering lot. The mills and factories paid only a dollar or two a day for their labor. Whole families, including unschooled and undernourished children, were put to work. They were barely able to provide scraps of food and inhabited wretched living quarters.

Safety and health standards were nonexistent. The premature death rate in Massachusetts mill and shoe towns had reached epidemic proportions. In 1909, in Lawrence, 17 percent of children died before they were a year old; in the town of Lowell, the annual death rate was 20 percent. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, and woolsorters’ disease (anthrax) were rampant; most workers died by the time they were thirty-nine. Driven by these conditions and inflamed by the exploitation of their masters, workers began to organize. Strikes soon spread throughout New England.

Boston and the nation would not forget the 1912 strike at the giant American Woolen Mills in Lawrence, a city of 86,000 mostly immigrant workers, speaking thirty different languages.⁸ The workers were crowded into a slum of seven square miles, while the middle and upper classes lived in comfort, and even opulence, in the surrounding areas. The strike took place during one of the coldest and hardest winters in New England’s history.

The mill owners contrived a dynamite plot to appear to be the work of the strikers in order to discredit them. Thousands of workers picketed daily. Injuries, and even death, were inflicted on them. Driven by the mill owners’ indifference to their suffering, the strikers destroyed looms, machinery, and other property. The government imposed a military siege upon the strikers, during which a soldier bayoneted Dominic Raprada, the young son of Italian immigrant workers, to near death.

The strikers and their families endured severe hunger and bitter cold. Hundreds of parents found it necessary to evacuate their children to caring families in New York and other cities for the duration of the strike because they did not have food and warm clothing for them.

When America and the world learned that Lawrence could not care for its own children, the city became the subject of national and worldwide criticism. City and state leaders were enraged. They ordered the police to stop the further evacuation of children. City officials threatened parents with arrest on grounds of child abuse if they attempted to send their children to the care of others outside the city.

On February 24, when parents and chaperones arrived at the Lawrence train station to send off a wave of forty-six children, the city followed through with its threats. Although many reporters were present, they did not release any photographs to the public showing what happened that morning. However, there were verbal and written accounts. Police grabbed children out of the arms of their mothers, who fought back, reaching for their screaming and crying children, some as young as two or three. To stop the evacuation, police even clubbed some mothers who were pregnant. In seven minutes it was over. The train pulled out of the station without a child on it. The police arrested many of the battered mothers. Strikers vowed revenge. Lawrence was a city seething with rage. It was a cauldron of boiling class hatred.

Despite a congressional investigation, the mill owners were unrelenting. The strike continued until the middle of March. The owners and the workers eventually settled the strike with small benefits for labor but not before inflicting a heavy toll on workers throughout New England. The establishment blamed the radicals for the dispute. Labor activists Joseph Ettor and poet Arturo Giovannitti, leaders of the strike, were arrested and jailed. The police charged them with the murder of Anna Lo Pizzo, a young Italian immigrant worker. She was killed during a gun battle between the police and the strikers. Ettor and Giovannitti were a mile away from where Anna was shot by a stray police bullet. The authorities, nevertheless, charged the two as instigators of the strike. After a dramatic trial, the jury returned not-guilty verdicts, and the court released them.

The Lawrence strike, along with more labor unrest, hardened the New England establishment into a deep hatred of labor leaders, anarchists, socialists, and other radicals. New Englanders believed they were attempting to take over the country. Unions and organized workers continued to clash with owners of businesses. The government sided with the owners, and unions became the scourge of the establishment. As labor became more organized, the owners began moving their mills to the South in order to escape organization of their workers. New England aristocrats saw their fortunes and profits decline. Boston, once the center of American culture, the fountainhead of the Republic, the seat of wisdom, law, and learning, the origin of the abolition movement, was now in decline.⁹ Factories were shuttered, and the city’s environs were turning into industrial dumps. The elites blamed the radicals and foreign agitators for Boston’s fall from grace. Many believed if it were not for those damned dagoes, Boston would still be on top.

The Italians¹⁰

Italian immigrants had a hard time from the start in America. Businesses shamelessly exploited them for their cheap labor. The workers they displaced hated them, and the more established Americans despised them for their ethnicity, traditions, and religion. As mafia criminals began replacing Irish and Jewish gangs, Italians became the object of disdain by the nativists. Politicians and the media seized on anti-immigrant bias and the criminal activities of a few to blame Italian immigrants for the urban problems of a fast-growing America. They became like the Salem witches, a favorite scapegoat of the times—an accursed group of twentieth-century America.

The Italians did not enter the country illegally or uninvited. Virtually all came through Ellis Island. Most were young men, induced to come here by false promises of employers looking for cheap labor. Businesses brought many Italians to America as strikebreakers, earning them a reputation as scabs. Unions denied them membership for that reason and because of their willingness to work for low wages. Even though they shared a common religion, Irish Catholics relegated Italians to segregated religious services in the basements of their churches and barred them from their neighborhoods.

These young Italian workers were often controlled by padroni, Italian agents who arranged their passage to America, obtained jobs and housing for them, and helped them send money back to Italy. Frequently, padroni received and managed their wages, sometimes victimizing their own countrymen for personal gain. Corrupt employers working with corrupt padroni often induced illiterate recruits to enter into unconscionable contracts, making them no better than vassals working for a feudal lord. Many were taken to camps and forced to work under armed guards until advances made under their contracts were repaid through wages withheld by their padroni.

Italian immigrants were often subjected to mob violence because they replaced higher paid workers and because of the low regard the nativists had for Italians. In excess of fifty lynchings and many additional acts of violence were committed throughout the country against Italians and their families during the thirty-year period immediately before the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. During this time, except for blacks, more Italians were lynched in America than persons of any other ethnic group. This deep-seated ill will toward Italians was prevalent among many New Englanders from whom jurors were selected for the murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The most bloodthirsty violence against Italians occurred in New Orleans in 1892, following the unsolved murder of Chief of Police

D. C. Hennessey.¹¹ This event contributed to a long-lasting negative attitude of many Americans toward Italians. The police rounded up hundreds of Italians as suspects, and nineteen were arrested. Nine of those arrested were tried for the murder; six were exonerated, the jury did not reach a verdict for three, and the rest of the nineteen were never tried. All nineteen were held in jail after the trial on a claim that additional charges would be filed, but it was a setup for the lynchings that followed.

The day after the jury verdicts, the following advertisement appeared in the local papers:

Mass Meeting

All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting on Saturday, March 14, at 10 o’clock A.M. at Clay Statue, to take steps to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessey case.

Come prepared for action.¹²

By ten o’clock Saturday morning, a crowd of eight thousand gathered at the statue of Henry Clay. William S. Parkerson and two assistants, all leading citizens of New Orleans, took charge of the crowd.

Parkerson denounced the jury that freed the Italians and then asked the crowd, Will every man here follow me, and see the murder of D. C. Hennessey vindicated?¹³

The crowd responded with a resounding, Yes, yes, hang the dagoes!¹⁴

Parkerson led the crowd to the parish prison. On the way, a prearranged death squad of one hundred men armed with rifles and shotguns joined the crowd.

The throng had grown to a frenzied mob of twenty thousand as they approached the front gate of the prison. Unable to break through the steel doors, they moved to a side entrance, broke that door down, and rammed their way into the prison.

When the warden heard the mob breaking through the side entrance, he locked all prisoners in their cells, except the nineteen Italians. He freed them, but only within the prison, and told them to hide as best they could. He refused to let them have guns to defend themselves.

After the mob broke into the prison, those who were armed pushed the warden and his guards aside and began hunting down the Italians. The leaders organized those who were armed into death squads of twenty-five or thirty. Each went in a different direction hunting for its prey.

Six Italians were in the corridor of the women’s section of the prison when they heard an approaching death squad. They ran downstairs into the prison yard. The gates were locked; they were trapped. A death squad caught up with them and fired over a hundred shots into the six Italians. Their bodies were torn to shreds. Another squad in a gallery area trapped and shot three Italians. Two died instantly; the third lived for nine hours before he died.

The roving squads found two others, Emmanuele Polizzi, who had been tried but with no verdict reached, and Antonio Bagnetto, who was tried and found not guilty. Both men were shot but not fatally. While still alive, they were taken out of the prison and turned over to the mob. The mob beat them, threw them about, and then hanged them—Polizzi from a lamppost and Bagnetto from a tree. While the two men were still alive and dangling from the ropes, the armed members of the crowd riddled their bodies with dozens of bullets.

The mob was furious when they were unable to find the other eight prisoners. They had successfully hidden under the floorboards of the women’s section of the prison. The mob’s attention was diverted when Parkerson emerged from the prison. Cheers and blessings were heard among the crowd at the sight of him. They carried him on their shoulders throughout the city. He was their hero.

No one was ever charged or prosecuted for the lynchings, although the authorities and the media were aware of the leaders of these terrible crimes. Quite the contrary—the press was openly antagonistic, scapegoating Italian immigrants, blaming them for the social and economic ills of the nation. John R. Fellows, former district attorney of New York City, endorsed the mob action in New Orleans.¹⁵ Theodore Roosevelt approved the mass lynchings;¹⁶ he called them a rather good thing and boasted that he said so at a party in the presence of various dago diplomats.¹⁷

A