One Summer: America, 1927

showing American films, American hotels, stores that sold American goods. According to the London Times correspondent, the rioters particularly targeted American shoe stores for some reason. To the disgust of many, the mobs also desecrated the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In trying to restore order, some two hundred policemen were injured. Some were stabbed.
    Time magazine took the opportunity to indulge in a little anthropological bigotry. ‘In South America,’ it noted, ‘the volatile – and indolent – inhabitants of Paraguay and Argentina were easily persuaded to stop all work … Swiss radicals were comically violent; Britons vaguely, Germans stupidly; Frenchmen hysterically violent.’
    On the day of the execution, the Coolidges travelled by train west to Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park, where they spent several days enjoying the scenery, watching geysers and being entertained by bears, which in those days were encouraged to beg at the roadside. The president managed to fit in a little fishing, too. He issued no opinions about the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, or anything else.
     
    Were Sacco and Vanzetti innocent? Across such a distance of time, it is impossible to say anything with certainty, but there are grounds for suspecting that they were not perhaps as innocent as they made themselves out to be. There was for a start their close friendship with Carlo Valdinoci, the most notorious of bombers. They were also self-declared disciples of Luigi Galleani, the most militant and implacable of anti-American radicals. Galleani was a swashbuckling figure. He had been jailed in Italy for radical activities but escaped – reportedly after seducing the warden’s wife – and settled inAmerica, where he immediately began calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Galleani published a radical journal called Cronaca Sovversiva ( Chronicle of Subversion ), which had a small but devoted readership of about four or five thousand. A regular contributor was Bart Vanzetti. Galleanists are thought to have been behind most or all of the notable bombings in this period. Vanzetti was widely rumoured to be a maker of bombs, if not necessarily a deliverer of them. The historian Paul Avrich states that Vanzetti was ‘probably involved’ in the bombing at Youngstown, Ohio, that killed ten policemen, and was certainly part of the small cell responsible for it.
    Many people closely involved in the case, then and later, concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were certainly guilty of some thing. The novelist Upton Sinclair, who was wholly sympathetic to both men, came to believe that they had been involved in bomb-making at the very least. Katherine Anne Porter was forced to a similar conclusion after long discussions with people inside the anarchist movement. According to several accounts, Sacco and Vanzetti’s own lawyer, Fred Moore, believed that Sacco was guilty of the Braintree killings and Vanzetti probably so. That view was shared by their fellow anarchist Carlo Tresca, who knew both men well. Francis Russell, who wrote two books on the case, long believed in their innocence (‘these men were not the stuff of criminals, either in their natures or their habits’), but eventually he concluded that they were guilty. The private papers of Harvard’s president and head of the review commission, A. Lawrence Lowell, opened in 1977, showed that he, too, had hoped to find the men innocent but had been persuaded of their guilt by the evidence. A dispassionate examination of the records indicates that the jurors in both trials were not obviously bigoted and that Justice Thayer, whatever his beliefs outside the court, conducted a fair trial.
    No one spent more time investigating Sacco and Vanzetti and the sinister world in which they operated than the late Paul Avrich, a professor at City University of New York. In his 1991 work, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background , Avrich asked rhetorically whether Vanzetti could have been involved in the Braintree holdup, and wrote: ‘Though the evidence is far from satisfactory, the answer almost certainly is yes. The same holds true for Sacco.’ Even if innocent of that crime, Avrich believed, they were almost certainly guilty of other murderous acts, including the bombings that led to the Palmer raids of 1919. That, he said, was ‘a virtual certainty’.
    Ballistics tests in the 1920s were basic and fairly easy to disbelieve, but more scrupulous tests in the modern