Legislative Hearing on Sacco-Vanzetti
LEVITAS, MITCHEL
NATIONAL REPORTS Legislative Hearing On Sacco-Vanzetti By Mitchel Levitas BOSTON THE LATEST of many attempts to establish the innocence of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti failed on April 8....
...To this question, there are two answers...
...Allied with these legalists were those who invoked the constitutional separation of powers between the Governor and the Legislature as reason for legislative paralysis...
...It may well be that no legislative act is necessary where history has already marked them as martyrs to popular frenzy...
...The resolution had been sponsored by 29-year-old State Representative Alexander J. Cella...
...This, at least, was the position taken by attorney Herbert B. Ehrmann, who helped defend Sacco and Vanzetti in the later stages of the case but who declined MITCHEL LEVITAS...
...But in 1927...
...In these views he was joined by two veterans of the original effort to win freedom for the two radicals, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr...
...The reasons are not hard to discover...
...What is most important is that people' young and old will remember this day...
...At one extreme of the spectrum of opinion was the bitterly-held view that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty...
...No one really expected that the measure had a chance of approval...
...But in a l31/2-hour hearing that stretched from morning until almost midnight, this sentiment failed to move the Judiciary Committee...
...NATIONAL REPORTS Legislative Hearing On Sacco-Vanzetti By Mitchel Levitas BOSTON THE LATEST of many attempts to establish the innocence of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti failed on April 8. when the Massachusetts legislature's Joint Committee on the Judiciary turned down a resolution asking the Governor to grant them a posthumous pardon...
...together, they link the past, the present and the future...
...A less hostile, but equally immovable group of legislators opposed the resolution on the ground that approval would mean a posthumous slap at those august members of the judiciary and police who arrested, tried and convicted the immigrant shoemaker and fishpeddler...
...speakers in favor of the pardon included Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., Brandeis University political scientist John P. Roche, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael A. Musmanno, attorney Morris Ernst...
...the last plea for executive clemency was rejected, and their sentence of death in the electric chair was carried out...
...Then there were the Committee members who may well have harbored sympathy for Sacco and Vanzetti, but who would have submerged such feelings by expressing the fear that a pardon would open the door to countless similar pleas, and so would tend to undermine the foundations of the law...
...and Al-dino Felicani...
...Indeed, this legislator was restrained compared with one unregenerate Boston newspaper which recalled the original defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti simply as "sob sisters, bleeding hearts and so-called liberals," or the executive of another paper who labeled their current defenders "nitwits and exhibitionists...
...Moreover, he deeply believed that through the Committee hearing a new generation—his own—would be educated to the significance of America's Dreyfus Case...
...A free society cannot long retain its moral integrity by stubbornly refusing to rectify its injustice...
...In addition to Cella...
...The two anarchists were tried and convicted in 1921 for a payroll robbery in a Boston suburb, in which the paymaster and his armed guard were shot to death...
...But at least the government authorities that Sacco and Vanzetti opposed so fiercely in their lifetime were made to hear this last plea for clemency—32 years after their death...
...Their trial touched off vociferous protests by liberal and radical groups throughout the world, and was followed by a six-year effort to save them...
...Honor, decency and respect," said Cella, "in government as among men, demand that errors be freely acknowledged and openly corrected...
...the chairman of the Defense Committee back in the 1920s...
...Probably even the members of Massachusetts Joint Judiciary Committee will find it hard to forget...
...To Cella, however, the issue was not the inarticulate judgment of history, but the capacity of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to concede its past error by giving that judgment a voice...
...To me," said Felicani, 68 and still a proud anarchist, "I doubt that anything will happen now to clear the names of Sacco and Vanzetti...
...For Cella was convinced that his fellow-lawmakers ought to underwrite history's judgment that the radicals did not get a fair trial...
...The chief Committee spokesman for this position argued that the evidence was conclusive and that subsequent juridical and public reviews of the case were more than ample to erase the shadow of judicial blindness...
...to take part in the recent attempt to clear their names...
...staff correspondent for the New York Post, is now at Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship...
...If the move to exonerate Sacco and Vanzetti concededly faced such bleak prospects—only 12 years ago a request to erect a plaque to them on the Boston Common was coldly refused by the Governor—why was the effort made in the first place...
Vol. 42 • April 1959 • No. 16
