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Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Moshik Temkin's The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (Yale University Press, 2009)

[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Assistant Professor of History, University of Tulsa.]

In 1927, two revolutionary anarchists of Italian ancestry, Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed outside of Boston, Massachusetts six years after their conviction on murder charges in one of the most controversial criminal cases in American history. Critics have long claimed that Sacco and Vanzetti were framed because of their radical political convictions. It has been widely acknowledged that they did not receive a fair trial because of widespread prejudice, fueled in part by the jingoistic and anti-immigrant climate of the first Red Scare. Moshik Temkin’s book, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial provides new insights on the socio-political resonance of the case and its broader historical implications. He argues that the heated passions that were invoked dispel the myth promoted by many historians that the 1920s were apolitical and the decision to go through with the execution further exemplified the provincialism of many political elites of the era, who rejected a broad international consensus supporting the right of Sacco and Vanzetti to a fair trial.

An Assistant Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Temkin devotes the first few chapters to exploring how the case became a political cause celèbre. He chronicles the dissent of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and labor activists who viewed the case as a reflection of class warfare and structural inequalities in American society. He also analyzes how liberal intellectuals who had predominantly defended the Palmer raids came to support Sacco and Vanzetti’s right to a fair trial, which he sees as a turning point in the growth of the popular front, or alliance between liberals and radicals during the 1930s. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a particularly influential piece in the Atlantic Monthly pointing to legal inconsistencies and the bias of Judge Webster Thayer. Internationally, the Sacco and Vanzetti case emerged as a symbol of the shortcomings of the American criminal justice system. Across Latin America and Europe, people sympathized with the defendants either in solidarity with their political beliefs or out of moral outrage. In France, the case was viewed as equivalent to the Dreyfuss Affair and fostered the growth of an incipient anti-Americanism. Intellectuals who had welcomed America aid during World War I came to see the U.S. in a hypocritical light.

Because of increasing popular protest and pressure, the Coolidge administration appointed a commission headed by Harvard University President Abbott Lawrence Lowell to reevaluate the evidence. After a short inquiry, Lowell upheld the original decision, which was especially disappointing to Sacco and Vanzetti’s supporters because Lowell had previously defended the right to free speech of several socialist professors at Harvard whom alumni had demanded be fired. Temkin paints Lowell’s decision as the product of his conservative political orientation and his stubborn disregard for domestic and international opinion, which is a dangerous tendency among American leaders. As with the population on the whole, elites were generally divided over the case on political and philosophical grounds as well as in their attitude towards America’s place in the world. Many pushed for the U.S. to adopt a flexible and pragmatic position accepting of diversity and the need to consider a wide variety of perspectives. Those who wielded ultimate power, however, clung to a more parochial and narrow-minded vision, with tragic consequences.

On the whole, Temkin has written an engaging book on the political impact and debates spawned by the Sacco and Vanzetti-affair. In a novel way, he uses them to illuminate the deep socio-political and cultural fissures in American life, which have remained enduring over time. The battle for the nation’s soul continues, as exemplified by the election in 2008, Temkin notes, of a “multicultural, intellectually curious man whose extraordinary popularity overseas was matched only by the global unpopularity of his parochial, proudly incurious predecessor.” A predecessor who had much in common with Abbott Lowell, Judge Thayer and the others responsible for Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution; one of the graver injustices of the 1920s.

Posted on Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | Return

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