Homeschool Unit Study: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case

How impartial is the U.S. justice system really? A deep dive into this notorious 20th century court case gives historical context for that big question.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case, which began in April 1920, remains one of the most controversial and debated cases in U.S. history. Did Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti commit the murder for which they were executed? The answer to that question remains less important than the other questions about immigrants, political opinions, and justice that it continues to raise. This is just one case, but digging into with your high schooler reveals a lot about the United States in the 1920s, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the Red Scare.

The Case:

On April 15, 1920, robbers killed a paymaster and a guard at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts before escaping. Suspicion fell on two naturalized Italian immigrants: Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler. Sacco and Vanzetti were ideal villains — as atheists, draft avoiders, and anarchists, they represented a triple-threat to American ideas about the importance of religion, country, and property. 

The problem was that they might not actually have been villains. Caught up in a maelstrom of prejudice and fear, their case moved rapidly to court and execution, in the end resembling a slow-moving lynch mob as much as an organized pursuit of justice. Neither man had a criminal record, and there was no evidence against them. Another known criminal actually confessed to the crime while the trial was happening. Despite numerous appeals and evidence of the innocence, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed August 23, 1927.

• Listen to this: The Past Present: History For Public Radio’s episode on Sacco and Vanzetti includes historical audio of the defendants and other people involved in the case, Woody Guthrie ballads, Italian anarchist songs, and readings from the letters Sacco and Vanzetti wrote from prison. (Scroll to the bottom to download the full program.)

• Talking point: Why were anarchists targets for suspicion in the 1920s United States?

• Read this: How did people feel about the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti? The New York Times gave them the day’s main headline, and for the first time in modern history, the city of Boston shut down Boston Common in fear that activists would congregate there. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of many artists who tried to have the verdict overturned, wrote, “[the] men were castaways upon our shore, and we, an ignorant savage tribe, have put them to death because their speech and their manners were different from our own, and because to the untutored mind that which is strange is in its infancy ludicrous, but in its prime evil, dangerous, and to be done away with.’ And the Atlantic Monthly published a long essay by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter highlighting some of the major problems with the case.

• Talking point: How did anti-immigrant sentiment contribute to the sentence in this case? (You may want to look up the immigration quotas of 1924, which passed while Sacco and Vanzetti were in prison.)

• Explore this: You can visit the virtual exhibit Sacco & Vanzetti: Justice on Trial from Boston’s John Adams Courthouse online and explore the history and after math of the trial, including court transcripts like this cross-examination of Sacco: 

QUESTION: Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?

SACCO: That is pretty hard for me to say in one word, Mr. Katzmann

QUESTION: There are two words you can use, Mr. Sacco, yes or no. Which one is it? 

SACCO: Yes.

• Talking point: Would it have been possible for Sacco and Vanzetti to get a fair trial somewhere else?

• Watch this: Tony Shaloub and John Turturro lend their voices to Peter Miller’s 2006 documentary Sacco and Vanzetti, which recreates the trial and incorporates modern forensic evidence. 

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