One Summer: America, 1927

editor: ‘There’s nothing in it – just a couple of wops in a jam.’ In Boston the big story in the spring of 1920 was how the Red Sox would do in their first season without Babe Ruth.
     
    Vanzetti, to his astonishment, was charged not just with the Braintree crime, but also with the earlier one, at the L. Q. White Shoe Company factory in Bridgewater on Christmas Eve 1919. Sacco was not charged because he was able to produce a time card showing he was at work that day. Vanzetti was not short of alibis himself. Thirty witnesses testified that they had seen, talked to or conducted business with him from his fish cart in Plymouth that day. Eels are a traditional Christmas dish for many Italians, so people remembered buying eels from him on the day before Christmas. Such evidence as was brought against Vanzetti was hardly the most persuasive. A witness, aged fourteen, when asked how he knew one of the robbers was a foreigner, replied: ‘I could tell by the way he ran.’
    The jury convicted him anyway, evidently discounting all the witness testimony on his behalf in the belief that ‘all the wops stick together’, as Vanzetti himself remarked bitterly afterwards. Had a Protestant minister or school principal testified in Vanzetti’s favour, he would probably have been cleared, but unfortunately such people didn’t buy eels on Christmas Eve.
    A quotation often attributed to Judge Webster Thayer at the Vanzetti trial was: ‘This man, although he may not actually have committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because [his] ideals are cognate with crime.’ It has been quoted many times, but in fact the statement is not in the trialtranscript and no evidence exists that Thayer ever said such a thing. It was clear, however, that he had little sympathy for anarchists. He sentenced Vanzetti to twelve to fifteen years in prison – an unusually stiff sentence for a man with no criminal record. To many observers this was clearly a travesty, and the second trial would make matters far worse.
     
    For Italian immigrants of the early twentieth century, America often came as a shock. As the historians Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers have observed, most ‘were unprepared for the coolness with which so many Americans received them’. Often they found themselves excluded from employment and educational opportunities because of their nationality. Restrictive covenants kept them from moving into certain neighbourhoods. Italians who settled in the Deep South were sometimes made to attend black schools. At first, it was by no means clear that they would be allowed to use white drinking fountains and lavatories.
    Other immigrant groups – Greeks, Turks, Poles, Slavs, Jews of every nation – encountered similar prejudice, of course, and for Asians and America’s own blacks prejudice and restrictions were even more imaginative and cruel, but the Italians were widely regarded as something of a special case – more voluble and temperamental and troublesome than other ethnic groups. Wherever problems arose, Italians seemed to be at the heart of things. The widespread perception of Italians was that if they weren’t fascists or bolsheviks, they were anarchists or communists, and if they weren’t those, they were involved in organized crime. fn1
    Even the New York Times declared in an editorial that it was ‘perhaps hopeless to think of civilizing [Italians] or keeping them inorder, except by the arm of the law’. University of Wisconsin sociologist E. A. Ross insisted that crime in Italy had fallen only ‘because all the criminals are here’. This was precisely the prejudice that Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray hoped to exploit when they created a pair of imaginary Italian anarchists as the supposed murderers of her husband.
    For working-class Italians, assimilation was often a forlorn hope. Millions lived within but quite separate from the rest of America. It is a telling point that after twelve years in the country Sacco and Vanzetti still barely spoke English. The transcript of their trial shows that both men often did not fully understand questions put to them or what was being said by others. Even when they grasped the gist of matters, they struggled to express themselves. As someone remarked, it was not so much that they spoke English with an Italian accent as that they spoke Italian using English words. Here is a short specimen of Sacco trying to explain from the witness stand how he