The latest entry in cartoonist/historian Rick Geary’s “Treasury of XXth Century Murder,” The Lives of Sacco and Vanzetti (NBM) tackles a still-disputed trial from the 1920’s. On April 15, 1920, two employees of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company, carrying $15,776.51 in payroll envelopes were robbed and murdered in the streets of the quiet industrial town of South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two Italian immigrants, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for the crime, tried and ultimately executed. The case itself became a world-wide cause celebre, which spurred riots and protests across the globe.
Though writer/artist Geary refuses to come down on either side re: Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence, he does establish several salient points, chief among these being the idea that the duo’s immigrant status and political beliefs (anarchist) were prime factors in their conviction. Judge Webster Thayer was well-known for his antipathy toward “parlor radicals” and made more than one unguarded statement away from the courthouse about getting “those bolsheviki bastards good and proper.” Anti-Italian sentiment also played a strong part in the case, and the prosecution was shameless in taking advantage of it.
When the only witnesses capable of establishing that the defendants weren’t near the scene of the crime proved to be fellow immigrants, for instance, D.A. Frederick Katzman either used their halting command of English to confuse and rattle them — or simply asserted that their veracity was questionable because they were either “Italian or anarchist or both.” To be sure, many of Sacco and Vanzetti’s political compatriots didn’t exactly help their cause. This was the era that gave birth to the stereotypical image of the bomb throwing anarchist, after all, and Geary duly depicts two bombing incidents that occurred in the aftermath of the twosome’s sentence, one at the house of a Dedham juror.
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