Sacco & Vanzetti: Unraveling the Truth, Research Paper Example

For the historian, attempting to reconstruct an historical event often involves a series of what Daniel Little refers to as “intellectual tasks” which includes 1), locating “conceptualizations and factual descriptions of events and circumstances;” 2), asking pertinent questions like “Why did this event occur?” and “What were the conditions and forces that brought it about?” 3), answering the questions “How did the results of the event come to pass?” and “What were the processes through which the outcome occurred?” and 4), piecing together the “human meanings and intentions that underlie a given complex series of historical actions” in order to “make sense of the event in terms of the thoughts, motives, and states of mind” of the individuals that participated in the event (“Philosophy of History”). After completing these “intellectual tasks,” the historian must then compile and “make sense out of the archival information that exists” concerning the historical event; however, more often than not, the information and data related to the event (especially if it occurred thousands of years ago) is “incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, and confusing” which only increases the historian’s difficulties in reconstructing the truth about the given event (“Philosophy of History”).

In the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, “two Italian immigrants living on the fringe of American society” in the early 1920’s (Davidson & Lytle, 159), the problems associated with reconstructing the historical facts are few, due to having access to the full court records and transcripts of their trial in which Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of killing a paymaster and his guard and were sentenced to death via the electric chair. As Davidson and Lytle note, the all-white male jury took only five hours to

find Sacco and Vanzetti guilty which “provoked bitter national and international controversy” (159), due to the fact that many at the time believed that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent of the murder of the paymaster and his guard and were in effect railroaded by the American justice system and by rampant racism and bias.

However, one important problem associated with Sacco and Vanzetti and which most historians would find daunting to answer properly is whether these two Italian immigrants were indeed guilty of the crime of murder and armed robbery. Simply put, the historian is completely removed from the event via the passage of almost ninety years and cannot say (or perhaps determine) with accuracy the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. Also, the historian is a non-witness to the events that led up to the trial, meaning that the historian was not present at the time which makes it very difficult to relate the true facts. Therefore, determining the truth related to Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence is not possible. All we have to go on are surviving court records and transcripts, statements made by the witnesses, and the story itself which was widely covered by numerous American and foreign newspapers.

As mentioned above, the primary source which a historian could use in order to reliably reconstruct the events and details associated with Sacco and Vanzetti, such as the motivations of the alleged perpetrators and why the trial turned out as it did, are the court records and transcripts. For the prosecution, we have testimonies provided by numerous individuals who allegedly witnessed the crime itself, such as Shelley Neal who “picked up and distributed the payroll money” that Sacco and Vanzetti allegedly stole at gunpoint; Lewis Wade who testified that Sacco closely resembled the gunman; Lewis Pelser who testified that Sacco was the “dead on image of the murderer;” and George Kelley who stated that Sacco was wearing a cap that resembled one found at the scene of the crime (“The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti”). For the defense, we have James E. Burns, a ballistics expert who declared that one of the bullets found at the crime scene could not have come from Sacco’s Colt revolver; and Angelo Guidobone who testified that he bought some cod from Vanzetti on the day of the crime, thus making it feasible that Vanzetti was elsewhere when the crime was committed (“The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti”).

There is also the official court records of the summary of evidence in which seven eyewitnesses for the prosecution “placed Sacco in or near the city of Braintree (Massachusetts) around the time of the crime” and the testimony of another ballistics expert who “testified that “Bullet 3″ was consistent with being fired through Sacco’s pistol.” There is also the evidence related to the cap, the car in which Sacco and Vanzetti allegedly drove and used at the crime scene, and Sacco’s absence from his place of employment on the day of the crime (“The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti”). Therefore, these “facts” make it reasonably easy to reconstruct what happened; however, because of human subjectivity and the lack of truly solid evidence (with the above evidence as mostly circumstantial), the actual “facts” related to Sacco and Vanzetti will probably never be known.

In After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, Volume II, Davidson and Lytle devote some fifteen pages to discussing the “epic story” of Sacco and Vanzetti, “two obscure Italian aliens who became the focal point of one of the most controversial episodes in American history” and who on April 9, 1927 were sentenced after eight failed

appeals to die in the electric chair (162). Of course, Sacco and Vanzetti repeatedly declared that they were innocent of the charges brought against them, but because of racism and bigotry in the small town of Braintree and in the men chosen as a “jury of their peers,” Sacco and Vanzetti went to their deaths. They were also railroaded by the American justice system, perhaps due to their anti-capitalism ideals and principles and the fact that both Sacco and Vanzetti saw themselves as anarchists or non-conformists fighting a system which discriminated against foreigners and upheld all of the rules and tenets of good old-fashioned American Protestantism.

Thus, as noted by Davidson and Lytle, the actual “truth” related to the case of Sacco and Vanzetti may never be known, at least not “beyond a reasonable doubt” as to whether Sacco and Vanzetti were truly guilty of armed robbery and murder or were completely innocent. However, historians and scholars have recently “unearthed enough additional information to provide if not the certainties of fact at least a few ironies of probability” (176), such as whether Sacco and Vanzetti were on the verge of voluntarily leaving the U.S. out of a fear of going to prison for their radical views.

After conducting quite a bit of research on this infamous event of the 1920’s, it certainly appears that Sacco and Vanzetti were in the wrong place at the wrong time and that because of their radical political views were used as scapegoats by the American justice system. As Davidson and Lytle see things, “the historian must suspect that the citizens (as well as the court system) were not merely fighting over a matter of guilt or innocence, but over the meaning of those “clean words our Fathers spoke” (177), a reference to the long-cherished belief that all men are created equal and that in America,

a person is innocent until proven guilty. But for the historian, attempting to unravel the truth behind an historical event like the story of Sacco and Vanzetti is fraught with roadblocks and divergences, due in part to the fact that all of the participants are long deceased and that even eyewitness accounts can be dead wrong because of human subjectivity.

Works Cited

Davidson, James West, and Mark Hamilton Lytle. After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, Volume II. 6th ed. New York: McGraw Hill Humanities, 2010. Print.

Little, Daniel. Philosophy of History. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2007. Web. Mar. 24, 2013. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/history/#HisRep>.

The Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1921. Famous American Trials. 2013. Web. Mar. 24, 2013. <http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/saccov/saccov.htm>.