Although the case of Sacco and Vanzetti was quickly taken up as a political cause, the trial itself was not simply, or even primarily, the crucifixion of two radicals. Although the judge, Webster Thayer, was a hidebound reactionary who despised the defendants for their political views and presided with barely concealed bias, the malicious persecution of the two men was as much a matter of bad police work and seething ethnic prejudice as anything else. The jurors, to a man, denied ever considering anarchism as a factor in their decision, and the political views of the defendants were not touched on until late in the trial, and then only vaguely.
Instead, the prosecution paraded a motley lineup of shaky eyewitnesses, most of them pressured or threatened; befuddled the jury with ambiguous ballistics reports; browbeat the many Italian witnesses who vouched for the whereabouts of the defendants on the day of the murders; and, not least, relied on the astounding incompetence of Sacco and Vanzetti's idealistic but badly overmatched lawyer. William Douglas, the Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1969 that anyone reading the courtroom transcript "will have difficulty believing that the trial with which it deals took place in the US."
Once convicted, Sacco and Vanzetti, in a sense, became the property of their supporters and their vilifiers. They provided a noble cause for what the Boston Globe called "the sob sisters, pacifists and Reds." For ordinary Americans, terrified by waves of immigrants, political radicals and the rise of militant labor, they were evil incarnate.
The case, Watson argues, defined a new American fault line. "Opinions on their guilt or innocence soon separated sophisticate from 'rube,' liberal from conservative and those who feared authority from those who implicitly trusted cops, judges and juries."
Watson devotes some of his most compelling pages to the long, anguished and ultimately hopeless campaign to rally support for the condemned men, to unearth new evidence and to chip away at the smooth facade of injustice. Pleas, motions and appeals proved futile. The judicial system, forming a perfect circle, simply ratified its own errors. At one point, the state's Supreme Judicial Court decided that Thayer himself should rule on a legal writ accusing him of bias in the case. "Prejudice?" he declared from the bench. "There isn't any now and there never was at any time."
Outside Boston, as far away as Buenos Aires and Berlin, millions of eyes saw things differently. Watson sums it up eloquently. "In the judgment of the watching world," he writes, "one American city would stand for America itself, one court case for the universal dream of fairness, two men for all men staring into the naked face of power."
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