More About July 14th, 1921: Sacco and Vanzetti

by Pa Rock

Master Typist

I posted yesterday's blog, a special effort dedicated to my mother, before leaving Kansas City for the long drive home.  It was July 14th, the day that would have been her one hundredth birthday, so I featured her in the "Ancestor Archives," which ran a couple of days early in order to capture the anniversary of Mom's birth.

The play that I wrote, "Crimes in Desolation," which was presented at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina this past April, has a scene in which the town sheriff is telling the son of the town's recently murdered banker about bank robbery that occurred in the town a decade earlier.  In his recouunting of the crime, the sheriff gets specific, telling the young man that the robbery, in which the sheriff's father had been killed, occurred on July 14th, 1921, a Thursday.  No one asked the playwright if there was any significance to that date - but now you know there was.  It was the day his mother was born!

And for you students of American history, July 14th, 1921, was also the day that Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murdering a guard and paymaster at a shoe company in Braintree, Massachusetts.  The pair of known anarchists were executed for those murders more that six years later in August of 1927.  The Sacco and Vanzetti case became a cause celebre in the United States and around the world as feelings began to emerge that the two had been wrongfully tried and convicted without convincing evidence because they were immigrants, Italians, and known anarchists.  The controversy over their trial and subsequent executions has grown and intensified over the years.  In 1977, on the 50th anniversary of their executions, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation saying that Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried and convicted, and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names."

And now, a full century after Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murder, murders they steadfastly denied and likely did not commit, we are still a nation that rushes to condemn immigrants.  Hatred, especially hatred that is based on race and ethnicity, is a virus that is almost impossible to eradicate, and its unchecked spread ultimately weakens and destroys society in much the same manner as a rampaging disease.

As an example GOP Senator Ted Cruz from Texas this week conflated the topics of illegal immigration and disease.  In what was a blatant racist lie, Cruz said:  "In South Texas, we're seeing COVID positivity rates rising and it's a direct result of illegal aliens being released into communities."  That was not true, as are many things that Senator Cruz says, but what is true is that positivity rates of COVID are rising across the nation due to Senator Cruz's political party downplaying the importance of getting vaccinated.   That, of course, does not play as well on Fox News as blaming immigrants.

In some respects, not much has changed over the past century.