Tracking the Elusive Truth

...They were tried and executed for the sort of criminal activity—a brutal holdup for money—they would seem to have been incapable of...

...But were they guilty of the crime they were executed for...

...Conspirators rarely keep records...

...Here we begin to penetrate the judicial murder—as it appears to have been —of Sacco and Vanzetti...

...It was, though, only time and circumstances that prevented their being involved as key figures in the terrorist acts the Galleani circle perpetrated...

...Both were certainly involved—to a degree that remains obscure—with groups that carried out bombings and other terrorist acts in the U.S...

...Paul Avrich, who did the definitive study of the Chicago incident, The Haymarket Tragedy, has also written a number of other illuminating works about lesser anarchists of various backgrounds...

...during the War and afterward...

...Such facts are not easy to establish...

...Sacco and Vanzetti were part of these militants, having joined them while in Mexican exile because life became too difficult in the United States for resisters of the Great War...

...Without making a direct argument for their innocence, Avrich suggests that the appearance of guilt was due to their not only carrying arms but also the burden of knowledge (never revealed) about terrorist conspiracies in which their comrades and perhaps they were involved...

...The most dynamicoftheanarchist-Communists, the followers of Luigi Galleani, combined Kropotkin's benevolent teachings of mutual aid with an ardent advocacy of the "propaganda of the deed," an anarchist concept that originated in Italy and was then carried into western Europe and the United States by immigrant workers...

...indeed, survivors are frequently reluctant 70 years later to talk about anything they or their comrades did...

...What he produces is a fascinating record of interlocking groups of conspiratorial militants almost mystically obsessed with the idea of retributive violence, among whom the typically Italian word of vendetta was common parlance...

...Avrich's account shows them to have been men of great devotion to their ideals, yet men who loved nature and lived exemplary personal lives, who were gentle and generous in their normal relations with other people...

...Moreover, even after many years the rule of silence tends to be observed...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two anarchists executed in 1927 for a holdup murder they denied to the end, has still not been laid to rest...

...All of his books have been distinguished by a remarkable sensitivity to the atmosphere that prevailed when his subjects pursued their radical agenda, and the same is true of Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background...

...Quietly, by presenting their characters and their lives, Paul Avrich has convinced me that by their very natures the two men were so unlikely to have committed the South Braintree murders that in this instance their innocence must be accepted...

...They were, after all, terrorists by conviction, and simultaneously men of humane and even saintly instincts in everyday life—a combination of opposites often encountered...

...Most people on the Left would say that there was a gross miscarriage of justice, that the two men were electrocuted on the flimsiest presumption of guilt because of the heat of public feeling against radicals of all kinds during one of America's "Red scare" periods...

...Avrich has delved deeper into the history—oral as well as written—of this radical anarchist immigration than any previous scholar...

...Others called themselves anarchist-Communists, preaching the doctrines of Peter Kropotkin...

...Nevertheless, Avrich has patiently put together an intricate and convincing picture of the world of self-confessed subversives that Sacco and Vanzetti lived in—a world where truth was expected between comrades and lies were enough for the enemy...

...Instead, he creates an extraordinary picture of the two men within their setting: a community of small-town rural Italians who had emigrated to the United States and had either brought along with them or subsequently acquired a strong conviction concerning the evil of the state and its whole structure of exploitation...

...Avrich does not set out to prove guilt or innocence...

...I used to maintain the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti as a matter of radical faith...

...Some, particularly the followers of Carlo Tresca, became anarcho-syndicalists, putting their faith in the development of free trade unions...

...But attempts to demonstrate that they were indeed guilty continue, so that one must regard the matter as open in a way the case of the four Chicago anarchists who were wrongly executed almost 40 years before Sacco and Vanzetti is not anymore...

...Almost surely they were guilty of criminal intentions as the law stood...

...The idea of a political party being anathema to good anarchists, these selfchosen militants gathered into affinity groups for direct action...

...communications are verbal, and not always remembered accurately...

...When they were arrested they acted evasively, however, and it was the impression they thus created of presumed guilt that more than anything else resulted in their condemnation...

...Loyalty, in its own way, killed them...