Sewell Chan

Throughout the 1920s, huge workers’ rallies were held in Union Square to demand the release of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italian-American anarchists who had been arrested for murder in 1920. As night fell on Aug. 23, 1927 — 80 years ago today — a rally gathered in the square. Around midnight, a sign went up: “Sacco Murdered.” A short while later, another sign: “Vanzetti Murdered.”

“People wept, tore their clothes, sat in stunned silence,” Bruce Watson, the author of a new book, “Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders and the Judgment of Mankind,” said today.

New York City actually figured prominently in Vanzetti’s life, and indirectly in Sacco’s, Mr. Watson, a writer and author in Leverett, Mass., told us in a phone interview. Vanzetti landed on Ellis Island in 1908 at age 20 and settled in Manhattan, which he would later describe as “the immense hell pit of the poor and the paradise of the rich.” He worked as a dishwasher at Moquin’s, an upscale restaurant, and the experience exacerbated “his seething class resentment,” Mr. Watson said.

After about a year, Vanzetti left with another Italian immigrant for New England, working in Springfield, Mass., for a while loading bricks. He came back to Manhattan to work briefly as an assistant pastry chef, then left again.

New York would figure again in the two men’s lives. In the spring of 1919, anarchists — most likely from the circle in which Sacco and Vanzetti were involved — tried to send mail bombs to J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Sr. and other figures in business and government. In April, a bomb sent to a senator in Georgia wounded a maid, and a postal worker discovered bombs at a Midtown post office; the packages had not been delivered because of insufficient postage. Other bombs were recovered before reaching their targets.

But in June, anarchists detonated hand-delivered bombs at the homes of judges, politicians and law enforcement officials. In Manhattan, a 71-year-old security guard was killed by a bomb planted at the brownstone of a judge at 151 East 61st Street.

The bombing campaign was a major cause of the Red Scare. Mr. Watson said he did not believe Sacco and Vanzetti were directly involved. “My feeling is they were radical dreamers,” he said. “They didn’t strike me as the type who would plant a bomb that would kill someone, but they would not have discouraged other people from doing that because they believe it would hasten the revolution, in some strange way.”

The bombings indirectly led to the apprehension of Sacco and Vanzetti. Federal agents, led by J. Edgar Hoover, mobilized around the country in response to the bombings and attempted bombings. An informant led the authorities to an anarchist print shop in Brooklyn. Vanzetti came back to Manhattan to find out how to help — he also hoped to visit the Statue of Liberty, which he had missed when he arrived at Ellis Island because of fog. Expecting a raid by federal agents and the police in New England, he quickly returned to Boston to help his fellow anarchists hide radical pamphlets. Days later, on May 5, 1920, he and Sacco were arrested in Bridgewater, Mass., accused of killing two payroll guards during an ambush robbery in Braintree, Mass., on April 15.

Sympathizers — including generations of American leftists — have long maintained that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent victims of a criminal justice system determined to crack down on anarchists, socialists and Communists. (Andrea Camilleri examines Italians’ views of the case in an op-ed essay in today’s Times.)

But Mr. Watson, in his new book, urges readers to draw their own conclusions. “There is far more evidence of innocence than of guilt, but unfortunately, especially with Sacco, guilt can’t be ruled out,” he said. “Their characters don’t fit the crime. There is so much doubt surrounding their trial. The one thing I say definitively is that they deserved a second trial.”

Eric Laursen, who calls himself an anarchist and an “enemy of the state,” helped to revive the Sacco-Vanzetti Commemoration Committee, an informal coalition of activists who held a commemoration of the executions five years ago, for the 75th anniversary. Mr. Laursen said that more than 500 people turned out for that event, and he is hoping for similar attendance at the commemoration today, which is to begin at 6 p.m. on the south plaza of Union Square.

However, Mr. Laursen acknowledged that activists had a lot of demands these days. “The Iraq war has just consumed people’s activist attention to such an extent that it’s been hard to organize this sort of thing,” he said.

via Sacco and Vanzetti, 80 Years Later – NYTimes.com.