Sacco and Vanzetti, then and now

Much of this editorial is taken from an editorial in the Aug. 26, 1977, issue of Workers World newspaper.

On Aug. 23, 1927 — 99 years ago — Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were murdered by the government of Massachusetts. They were killed, because they opposed the imperialist carnage of World War I, because they fought racial and national bigotry and oppression, and because they championed the cause of the working class.

This is an incontestable fact. Even [1977] Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis admitted the truth, proclaiming Aug. 23, “Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day.” “The atmosphere of their trial and appeals was permeated by prejudice,” the governor declared, noting that because of anti-Italian fanaticism and red-baiting, two guiltless people were sent to their deaths by the state. (saccoandvanzetti.org)

How true! Sacco and Vanzetti were framed by the Boston police and the FBI, because big business interests, driven into a paroxysm of rage and fear by the 1917 Russian Revolution, demanded their blood. The capitalist press, which tried and convicted the two before they even appeared in court, indulged in an orgy of chauvinist and anti-radical hysteria.

The New York Times, for instance, declared on Oct. 27, 1921, that “Federal agents have unearthed in Boston plans of an organized gang of radicals to spread a reign of terror across the whole United States. … The plot, according to the investigators, is international in its organization and was to have been carried out by radicals to aid the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti.”

Nothing but lies. And they all admit it.

What about now?

How ironic that, nearly 50 years after admitting that Sacco and Vanzetti were executed based on trumped-up charges, the state continues to impose outrageous sentences on activists such as the Prairieland defendants. Radical activists are facing McCarthy-like subpoenas. Thugs working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are terrorizing and killing migrants and their supporters.

Racist police terror and murder continue against Black, Brown and Indigenous people. Over a dozen Black people, mainly youth, have been found dead hanging from trees over the past two years in Mississippi and North Carolina, with no arrests. The U.S. prison-industrial complex incarcerates the largest number of people, per capita, of any country in the world.

From his cell in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Vanzetti wrote, “I learned that class consciousness was not a phrase invented by propagandists, but was a real, vital force and that those who felt its significance were no longer beasts of burden but human beings.”

The world is vastly different almost 100 years since these two working-class heroes were murdered by the state. World imperialism is on the decline. The best tribute we can pay to Sacco and Vanzetti today is to mobilize all the harder against xenophobia, racism and bigotry of all kinds and against the MAGA regime’s current, vicious promotion of anti-communism and white supremacist repression.