(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone.

I'm Steve Adubato.

Way more importantly, we're honored to be joined by Bruce Watson, the author of a compelling, important book, "Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind."

Bruce, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- Let me put this out there right away.

I just said this to you before we got on the air that I've been wanting to have you.

This book has been in our home for a long time, and my dad, God rest his soul, I remember getting this book and making an almost mandatory reading for everyone in our family.

Why do I say that?

Growing up in an Italian-American neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, Sacco and Vanzetti were two names that I heard as far back as I can remember.

The basic facts of this case, going back to August 23rd, 1923, what happened then, and what happened in 1927 that is so significant about Sacco and Vanzetti?

First of all, who were these two gentlemen?

- Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian immigrants among the millions who came to America between 1890 and the early 1920s and might have been unknown, but they got into a jam, as some people called it, two different jams.

One was the fact that they were devout anarchists.

They truly believed in anarchism, and some anarchists were lofty, poetic dreamers, and others were fierce militants, and they were fairly fierce militants.

And they were involved, we now know, in some bombing plots against America, but they were arrested for something else.

They were arrested for basically a street crime, a payroll robbery, a gunman driving down the street, shooting down these payroll guards, taking the cash and running, and that was what they were accused of, and that was what they were convicted of.

And the two different sides of them are still at war, and there's plenty of evidence that they were innocent, and their execution was followed around the world in every capital of the world on August 23rd, 1927.

But there was also some evidence that they might have done it.

And so the case remains endlessly complex, endlessly fascinating, and I just thoroughly threw myself into it.

- Why did you become so interested in this case?

- It was sort of a sequel to a book I had written a couple years earlier, the previous book I had written.

It was called "Bread and Roses."

It was about the Bread and Roses strike in 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a highly dramatic textile strike with 30,000 workers from all over and including many anarchists and many Italians.

And this was sort of a sequel.

In fact, I found out later that Sacco was at that strike.

He wasn't a textile worker, but he attended some of the rallies.

Some of the same characters appeared in both of these, some of the same policemen.

And so I was very much involved in looking into that time, and Sacco and Vanzetti seemed like the next logical step.

And I, like you, I had heard about it all my life, not quite in the same context, but I'd heard about it all my life.

And always one of those names hang in the air in American history.

They haunt American history.

And I began to look into them and found out why.

- Bruce, why do you think the name, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the case of Sacco and Vanzetti and the narrative, at least in my own community growing up, was they were railroaded, they got us, they got two of our own and the justice system worked against them because they were poor immigrants?

That was the narrative in my neighborhood.

Again, the facts, you're the one who researched it in the way you did.

Why do you think it was and continues to be for many such a powerful story in the Italian-American community?

- Oh, because I think that that is true.

There are some who say and many historians look at their anarchist background and the fact that they testified during their trial, and the judge didn't want them to bring out the anarchism.

He warned them against it.

He said, "If you go into this, you're not being tried for anarchists."

So he hated anarchists.

We'll get into that later.

But, "You're not being tried for that.

You should not bring that out."

- I'm sorry, Bruce.

I don't know that I've allowed you to explain what an anarchist was, is.

- Oh yes, I should do that.

- Go ahead, please.

- Anarchists were the terrorists of their time.

Think of the way we talk now about terrorists in various types.

Anarchism in the late 19th century and early 20th century had taken a huge toll.

It was a rising philosophy particularly among disgruntled workers.

It basically, it was not what we think of as anarchism today where total chaos.

The idea was, and it came from Russian and Italian thinkers, was that without laws, without a church, without police, people would behave themselves.

Often, it was compared to a lifeboat.

People behave on lifeboats.

They behave.

They care for each other without any laws, without any imposition.

This was the anarchists' dream, and they believe that if someday, not soon, but someday, if there was no government, no police, no church, people would behave, they would be free.

Well, I find that terribly naive, sweet but naive.

And there was another side anarchism though, and that was some anarchists believed in what they called the propaganda of the deed, which meant violence.

It meant assassination.

And anarchists had assassinated the king of Italy.

An Italian immigrant went from New Jersey back to Italy to kill the king.

An anarchist killed our president, William McKinley.

Anarchists had killed other people.

There had been bombings and other things.

So there were both sides to anarchism.

And in Sacco and Vanzetti, the question is always which side were they on?

They were kind of on both.

- But here's the thing.

But they're tried, they're charged, and they're convicted, and then they're executed, not for being anarchists, but for this specific killing of, was it two guards?

- Two guards, two payroll guards who were carrying $15,000 in cash through the street.

- But as I was reading...

Sorry for interrupting, Bruce.

In reading the book, the descriptions that were given in the trial of these two men did not match what they looked like, or how many dark-skinned, swarthy, if you will, the word often used for Italian Americans, who one of 'em had a mustache.

Was it Sacco or Vanzetti had a mustache?

- [Bruce] Vanzetti had a beautiful waterfall, flowing mustache.

- [Steve] And that was countless Italians.

- Yes, and you're right.

The descriptions did not necessarily fit, but you have to put the Italian context and the anarchist context into it.

As I said, they testified about their anarchism.

They decided it was the only way to explain why when they were arrested, they were armed.

They were armed to the teeth on a dark night on a streetcar.

Why?

They said they were going out to fetch anarchist literature they thought would be rounded up soon and lead to deportations.

That was their alibi.

So they did bring it out, and they testified very badly, very awkwardly about their beliefs in anarchism and the future, et cetera.

So that was there.

But much stronger was, as you said, the Italian context, and you have to put that in the Boston Massachusetts context of 1920.

There were numerous Italian immigrants in Boston.

They were in the North End.

They were elsewhere.

They were not well-liked.

They were totally discriminated against, totally suspect.

And there was at that time, already rising the mafia stereotype of Italian gangsters.

And because of the anarchy, the anarchism threat, the courtroom in Dedham, Massachusetts was locked down.

And Sacco and Vanzetti were marched by armed guards every day through the streets from their jail down through the streets, people watching, surrounded by armed guards, marched into the courtroom and sat in a cage, which was normal in a capital crime in Massachusetts at that time.

It was an open cage with bars all around them, cops all around.

They looked guilty.

They looked like dangerous men.

And it didn't help when Vanzetti stood and shouted at one witness who he thought was telling a lie.

And so it did not take a lot of...

There was a plenty of doubt, but there was also plenty of momentum by this time.

This was a horrible crime, and someone had to pay, and these were the men.

They fit the character in a certain way.

- Did you come to the conclusion, Bruce, in all your research, all your work, that Sacco and Vanzetti were railroaded in this case and convicted and executed for a crime that they did not commit?

- I try to be coy in the book and let the reader come to- - I noticed.

- His own conclusion, but I will reveal that yes, I believe they were innocent.

I think there is a slim chance of this so-called split guilt theory that emerges in the '60s.

Maybe Sacco was guilty and Vanzetti was innocent.

Vanzetti was a much more gentle type.

Sacco was a little bit fierce, and his alibi was a little weaker.

But overall, the one conclusion I definitely come to and state is they deserved a second trial.

There's no way that with all of the doubts and suborning perjury and prejudice on behalf of the judge, no way that they didn't deserve a second trial.

But yes, I do believe they were innocent of that crime.

But as we may get into soon, there was an anarchist bombing that took place a year before all this, and they were involved in that.

We know now it was their group who pulled it off.

- But they were not charged for that.

- They were not charged for that because no one, there was a deep suspicion among the budding Bureau of Justice, which would become the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover, who was just starting his career, that the anarchists were involved, but they could never pin anything on them.

And so there's always a question of whether or not, maybe they knew they were guilty of this and so they're just gonna get 'em for the other, but nobody's- - Listen, I don't wanna be overly sensitive.

Growing up Italian-American, my grandparents came from Italy in the late 19-teens, early 1920s.

And again, this Sacco and Vanzetti thing, obviously, I became obsessed about in some ways.

But you mentioned Hoover and the FBI.

J. Edgar Hoover in particular, no fan of the Italian-American community, or is that an unfair assessment?

- Well, I think he was no fan of many non-WASP communities.

- Non-WASP.

(laughs) - I think it's fair, but I think Hoover was more involved in the anarchist aspect.

When the bombings went off, and perhaps now's the time to go into that, on June, 1919, on one night, there were bombs that went off in eight different cities in America at midnight.

They even blew up, one bomber carrying his bomb tripped and fell on the steps and blew up in front of the attorney general's house right across the street from where FDR was living at that time.

And so this bombing just shocked America and threw us into what was the worst red scare in our history.

It was not quite the same as McCarthyism, but it was more intense.

- Red scare, meaning fear of communism.

- Right, and so they rounded up hundreds of radicals, what were called the Palmer Raids, named after the attorney general, shipped 'em overseas, shipped 'em away, and just gone without any trial, without any detention.

And Sacco and Vanzetti were worried that this was gonna happen again and that they would get caught in it.

But that was what Hoover was involved in.

He was involved in masterminding those raids He was just a Bureau of Justice official then rising in the ranks, and he pulled that off, and he stayed with that fierce anti-communism, anti-anarchism his whole life.

- So, folks, you don't have to be Italian-American to appreciate the story that Bruce has written, "Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind."

It has an awful lot to do with immigration as well.

And remember, again, it's hard in 2023 to think back into the 1920s, but Italians then, coming from a foreign land, there's a history there, and there are a lotta lessons to be learned, and people can decide for themselves.

Bruce, I wanna thank you so much, and we appreciate you taking the time to join us.

- Oh, thank you.

Thank you very much.

- Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

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