Sacco and Vanzetti · Warhol · Exoneration 101

The crime
Bartolomeo Vanzetti (above left) and Nicola Sacco (above right) were accused and convicted of, then executed for, the murders of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter during an armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, MA. Various evidence, affidavits, and analyses that have come to light in the intervening century suggest that only Sacco participated in the crime — but it’s been apparent since before the verdicts even came in that the pair didn’t get a fair trial, and this is what’s considered the crime “in chief” today.

The story
Sacco and Vanzetti: it’s one of those cases whose details have gotten sanded off by time and symbology, by a transference of meaning. You know that old saw about how, prior to the Civil War, the United States functioned grammatically as a plural — i.e., “the United States were represented at the Such-and-So Summit” — but after 1865, the country became a group noun in the language, like “the people”? Same with Sacco and Vanzetti. Who they were, what they did or did not do, has shifted to a Sacco-and-Vanzetti singular that stands for the men, their case, that time, and the Anarchist movement, just for starters.

That shift, and a century’s distance, creates an ill-founded fog of quaintness around both the “them” and the “it” of Sacco and Vanzetti that makes them hard to see. Them, the deaths of Berardelli and Parmenter, just how many Galleanisti bombs were going off in major cities every few days, just how many people were killed by a single bomb that was detonated on Wall Street in protest of Vanzetti’s indictment for a different robbery, the struggle for the soul of the American justice system that was all around Sacco and Vanzetti, but somehow not entirely about them…we know the dim, dull shapes of these things, and from here, that seems like enough. Or, really, to learn anymore feels very much like homework.