The Sacco Vanzetti Affair

"What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the center of a global cause câeláebre that shook public opinion and transformed America's relationship with the world"--Publisher marketing.

What began as the obscure local case of two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of robbery and murder flared into an unprecedented political and legal scandal as the perception grew that their conviction was a judicial travesty and their execution a political murder. This book is the first to reveal the full national and international scope of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, uncovering how and why the two men became the center of a global cause celebre that shook public opinion and transformed America's relationship with the world. Drawing on extensive research on two continents, and written with verve, this book connects the Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the most polarizing political and social concerns of its era. Moshik Temkin contends that the worldwide attention to the case was generated not only by the conviction that innocent men had been condemned for their radical politics and ethnic origins but also as part of a reaction to U.S. global supremacy and isolationism after World War I. The author further argues that the international protest, which helped make Sacco and Vanzetti famous men, ultimately provoked their executions. The book concludes by investigating the affair's enduring repercussions and what they reveal about global political action, terrorism, jingoism, xenophobia, and the politics of our own time.

The Sacco and Vanzetti case is probably America’s most controversial court case. One of the most important studies of the case was made by Justice Felix Frankfurter when he was a professor of administrative law at Harvard. It created considerable stir when initially published in 1927. The book was praised and attacked; it was considered “thrilling,” “uncomfortable,” “lucid” and “judicious.” It was destined to become somewhat of a classic in American juridical literature. “The author... has gone through the record of the successive court proceedings, covering thousands of pages of printed matter, and on it has based this judicial résumé... he makes a survey of the case that is wonderfully compact, but complete enough to bring together all the essential developments and present them in a lucid, readable narrative.” — The New York Times “Mr. Frankfurter has very comprehensively analyzed the trial of these two condemned murderers, and a careful study compels the experienced lawyer to stand aghast at the result obtained under the absolute disregard for the rules of evidence and the conduct of a trial by a jurist who is supposed to be without prejudice or partiality.” — Edwin M. Abbott, Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology “[Felix Frankfurter’s] book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case is a real contribution to the cause of Free Speech; it is, moreover, a thriller... Every lawyer ought to read this slender but powerful volume.” — Morris L. Ernst, The Yale Law Journal “This small volume of barely more than a hundred pages should be read by lawyer and by layman. The reader will then know how the guaranties of justice and liberty may crumble under the destructive influence of class complacency.” — Charles Nagel, Harvard Law Review “Felix Frankfurter in his book mercilessly analyzes both the record of the trial and the affidavits summarizing the after-discovered evidence upon which a new trial was sought... None can read Frankfurter’s able brief without an inner conviction that the defendants are innocent.” — Charles I. Thompson, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register “This compelling account will remain an important document in the history of what has become one of the outstanding cases in the annals of criminal justice... [Professor Frankfurter] deserves credit for the courage with which he undertook a task which in the community in which he lives was thankless and unpopular.” — Ernst Freund, Social Service Review “The whole account is set forth in a manner likely not only to capture but to hold the interest of the reader. Besides having been demonstrated, by the attacks upon it, to be reliable, it is no exaggeration to say that the book is really thrilling.” — E. W. Puttkammer, American Journal of Sociology

The Sacco-Vanzetti affair is the most famous and controversial case in American legal history. It divided the nation in the 1920s, and it has continued to arouse deep emotions, giving rise to an enormous literature. Few writers, however, have consulted anarchist sources for the wealth of information available there about the movement of which the defendants were a part. Now Paul Avrich, the preeminent American scholar of anarchism, looks at the case from this new and valuable perspective. This book treats a dramatic and hitherto neglected aspect of the cause célèbre that raised, according to Edmund Wilson, "almost every fundamental question of our political and social system."

In this groundbreaking narrative of one of America?s most divisive trials and executions, award-winning journalist Bruce Watson mines deep archives and newly available sources to paint the most complete portrait available of the ?good shoemaker? and the ?poor fish peddler.? Opening with an explosion that rocks a quiet Washington, D.C., neighborhood and concluding with worldwide outrage as two men are executed despite widespread doubts about their guilt, Sacco & Vanzetti is the definitive history of an infamous case that still haunts the American imagination.

Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary politics of the United States. In this bold and original study, Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth. She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be American in the new century, even as they came up against conflicting interpretations of American power by others. Interwar Paris may have been a capital of the arts, notorious for its pleasures, but it was also smoldering with radical and reactionary plots, suffused with noise, filth, and chaos, teeming with immigrants and refugees, communist rioters, fascism admirers, overzealous police, and obnoxious tourists. Sketching Americans' place in this evocative landscape, Blower shows how arrivals were drawn into the capital's battles, both wittingly and unwittingly. Americans in Paris found themselves on the front lines of an emerging culture of political engagements-a transatlantic matrix of causes and connections, which encompassed debates about "Americanization" and "anti-American" protests during the Sacco-Vanzetti affair as well as a host of other international incidents. Blower carefully depicts how these controversies and a backdrop of polarized European politics honed Americans' political stances and sense of national distinctiveness. A model of urban, transnational history, Becoming Americans in Paris offers a nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape modern American political culture.

In the fall of 1931, Thalia Massie, the bored, aristocratic wife of a young naval officer stationed in Honolulu, accused six nonwhite islanders of gang rape. The ensuing trial let loose a storm of racial and sexual hysteria, but the case against the suspects was scant and the trial ended in a hung jury. Outraged, Thalia’s socialite mother arranged the kidnapping and murder of one of the suspects. In the spectacularly publicized trial that followed, Clarence Darrow came to Hawai’i to defend Thalia’s mother, a sorry epitaph to a noble career. It is one of the most sensational criminal cases in American history, Stannard has rendered more than a lurid tale. One hundred and fifty years of oppression came to a head in those sweltering courtrooms. In the face of overwhelming intimidation from a cabal of corrupt military leaders and businessmen, various people involved with the case—the judge, the defense team, the jurors, a newspaper editor, and the accused themselves—refused to be cowed. Their moral courage united the disparate elements of the non-white community and galvanized Hawai’i’s rapid transformation from an oppressive white-run oligarchy to the harmonic, multicultural American state it became. Honor Killing is a great true crime story worthy of Dominick Dunne—both a sensational read and an important work of social history

In Anarchist Voices, Avrich lets anarchists speak for themselves.