One Summer: America, 1927

could be an anarchist and yet claim to love America:
     
When I came to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before, but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there just as well. Work in the same condition but not so hard, about seven or eight hours a day, better food. I mean genuine. Of course over here is good food, because it is bigger country, to any of those who got money to spend, not for the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh, and I came in this country.
     
    Poor command of English was widely regarded as proof that Italians were lazy and irremediably backward. Many Americans were sincerely bewildered and affronted (not altogether without reason, it must be said) to think that the nation had flung open its doors to the tired and poor of Europe only to have that generosity repaid with strikes, the planting of bombs and the fomenting ofrebellions. Sacco and Vanzetti became the living symbols of that ingratitude. A common view among Americans at the time was that even if they were innocent of the Braintree crimes, they still deserved to be punished. As the foreman of the jury in their case reportedly remarked early in the trial, ‘Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.’
     
    Five days after indictments were handed down against Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts, a horse-drawn wagon pulled up outside the head offices of J. P. Morgan & Co. at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in Manhattan. The driver, it is supposed, tethered the horse and departed sharply, for a few moments later the cart exploded with a force that rocked the district and blew out windows on the thirty-second floor of a building more than a block away. The bomb was a particularly vicious one: packed with shrapnel, it was designed to maim and was detonated when the street was packed with lunchtime office workers. Thirty people were killed instantly and several hundred injured. The heat of the blast was so intense that many of the victims suffered severe burns on top of any other injuries. A clerk at J. P. Morgan was decapitated at his desk by a sheet of flying glass, but no senior members of the firm – the presumed principal targets – were among the victims. J. P. Morgan himself was out of the country. The other Morgan partners – including Charles Lindbergh’s future father-in-law, Dwight Morrow – were meeting in a room that had no windows on the blast side of the building, so were securely shielded. At the end of the day, the casualty totals were 38 dead and 143 gravely injured. Among the luckiest people outside was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president, who was close enough to be blown off his feet but far enough away not to be seriously hurt.
    Morgan as a point of pride opened for business the next day. Rewards of $100,000 were offered for information leading to a conviction, but no one came forward who could describe the bomber or offer any other useful leads. Detectives and federal officialsinterviewed every blacksmith east of Chicago and visited more than four thousand stables in the hope of identifying the horse, cart or horseshoes involved in the bomb. The shrapnel had been made from sash weights, so they contacted every sash-weight dealer and manufacturer in America to try to find where the slugs came from. For three years detectives worked on the case. Not a single helpful fact emerged. No one was ever charged.
    In 1991, the historian Paul Avrich, in Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background , probably the most exhaustive book ever written on the case, declared that he had it on good (but unspecified) evidence that the bomber was Mario Buda, the man who had been with Sacco and Vanzetti on the evening of their arrest. At the time, however, Buda was not known to the police in New York and was not suspected or interviewed. Whether part of the bombing or not, he returned to Naples in a curious hurry soon after the bomb went off.
    It later also emerged that Nicola Sacco had been close friends with Carlo Valdinoci, and that Valdinoci’s sister had come to live in Sacco’s house after her brother died in the Palmer house-bombing in Washington. Sacco and Vanzetti, it seems, may not have been quite so innocent as history has wished to make them.
     
    The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti for the murders and payroll robbery at South Braintree began on 31 May