The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial
More than 80 years after Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were electrocuted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Sacco-Vanzetti case continues to confound, fascinate, and even outrage. As evidenced by the considerable ink that has been spilled passionately debating the defendants’ guilt or innocence and the adequacy of their trial, few court cases in U.S. history have proven as culturally divisive. Kennedy School professor Temkin examines how the case quickly “transcended the persecution of anarchists or working-class Italians and became a story about the way the United States, the world’s first modern superpower, related to the rest of the world.” Put differently, this book answers how the Sacco-Vanzetti case turned into the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. Drawing on contemporary European commentary as well as the papers of Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, who headed the commission that inquired into—and ultimately approved—the trial’s outcome, Temkin dissects why the international community became involved in the case and how political pressures generated by its involvement may have sealed Sacco and Vanzetti’s fate. This is a fresh look at an enduring controversy and a reminder that modern ambivalence about American power has deep roots. --Brendan Driscoll