Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background

by Paul Avrich

Book Overview

The Sacco-Vanzetti affair is the most famous and controversial case in American legal history. It divided the nation in the 1920s, and it has continued to arouse deep emotions, giving rise to an enormous literature. Few writers, however, have consulted anarchist sources for the wealth of information available there about the movement of which the defendants were a part. Now Paul Avrich, the preeminent American scholar of anarchism, looks at the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691026041
• ISBN13: 9780691026046
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

fascinating

I read another book about Sacco and Vanzetti which is very good. This one, however, is great. It is well organized, and, while the other book spent a good portion of the book on the trial, in this one you got to understand better who these anarchists were. It is not biased either for or against their conviction. Extremely well written.

"one cannot deal with Sacco and Vanzetti without talking about anarchism"

When I was a young teenager, I first ran across the names Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in a footnote to "Two Sonnets in Memory" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. At that age, the story of an injustice is always interesting and I was introduced to the myth of Sacco and Vanzetti. I may be careless to use the word "myth" since it is still such a loaded subject. But by using that term I do not mean any statement about their guilt or innocence-- that truth can never be fully established either way. I mean only that for many many years Sacco and Vanzetti were nothing to me except two soulful and handsome young men who were apparently executed for nothing except their political views-- about which I had no notion at all. My notion of anarchism was colored by a vague notion of Dada art and Futurism. My understanding of the political history of Italian-American anarchism in the US was entirely non-existent. The sacrificial lambs may well be one valid way of looking at the case, but it isn't the entire picture and also does not do justice to the context of the time. I was interested in finding a book that covered what I did not already know. I knew quite about about the protests and the affect on literature and art. I had virtually no background as to what school of thought Sacco & Vanzetti belonged and I wanted to understand more about what it meant that they were anarchists-- in what context & to what ends. The Avrich book succeeds admirably in providing the information that I had hoped to find. From their childhoods in Italy to the history of Italian anarchism in the US, Avrich paints the context around Sacco and Vanzetti and how they finally came to the place where they were when executed. It is not a lengthy book, but is dense and well-documented. It draws heavily from the Italian language resources that appear to have been ignored by many others who have written about the case. Avrich is a dry writer-- unlikely to ever find himself a cross-over history best seller because of his sparkling prose. But the fact that the dryness bothered me surely says more about me as a lazy and erratic reader of history than it does about Avrich as a historian. If you are looking for a personal biography of Sacco & Vanzetti, there are surely more charming narrative sources. As it is a fairly narrow political biography, I am also not sure that I would recommend it if you also are not familiar with the broad strokes of the case. There are also many other books which use the Sacco & Vanzetti case to examine US law and political culture at the time of the executions. The Avrich book is not the place to go in order to look at the case's impact on the United States. However, if you are already familiar with the case and would like to know more, Avrich does present a perspective that many others neglect. It would also be a very interesting book if you were interested in the history of anarchism in the US. Recommended.

Just a very thorough book

Most people know nothing of why the United States has such prohibitive laws against the first amendment now. But long before 9/11, terrorism struck the USA. Another set of terrorist acts were passed at that time that led to many restrictions on speech and association. These laws were similar to, and in some cases more extreme than Bush's invasive and repressive laws in the first Patriot Act and the Democrat's invasive and repressive laws that followed in the second revision of the Patriot Act. You may even see parallels in how extreme shock led to extreme removal of constitutionally protected activities and led to absolute invasion of privacy, similar to how the modern 9/11 led to extreme laws such as the Talent-Feinstein inclusion in the Patriot Act that mandates warrantless law enforcement monitoring of those with rhinosinusitis. You will see many other parallels as you go through this book between how people in the United States responded to the shock of terrorism on American soil then, and how they respond now. Though the purpose of this book is merely to cover in detail what is known about the surroundings of the largest previous terrorist act in the United States, which also took place in NYC. It is a highly entertaining book from start to finish. You will get to know each of the terrorists, along with the controversial evidence for and against each of them. But the terrorism of that era wasn't the extreme Islamic terrorism of our era. The terrorists of this book were members of the extreme anarchist parties in Europe.

The Anarchist as a Human Being

Avrich's book is extraordinary as an account of the varied principle protagonists in the Italian Anarchist circles of 80 years ago, though it provides only a historical account of the characters without a perspective of history's judgment. The only reason I give the book 4 stars instead of 5 is that Sacco and Vanzetti are almost minor characters, popping up now and then amongst Galleani, Malatesta, Buda, Salsedo, et al, though their story and their fate is symbolic of the entire movement: All were relatively ordinary people who despised governments, and in turn were wiped off the face of America by ours. Avrich gives rich detail into the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti as well as all of the other mad bombers running around New York and Boston. The story of "Ella", the dynamite courier, with a side dish of Emma Goldman sharing her prison cell for a while, is superb. If you're an Anarchist fan, or maybe even a real Anarchist, Avrich is your man for history of the movement. As a side note, read this book on an airplane some time and see how many people sitting next to you ask you what it's about. As significant as S & V were in American 20th Century history, their names are lost now to anyone but an Anarchist or the occasional college student doing required reading.

Excellent book!

Paul Avrich has made a career out of anarchist history -- anarchistory, I suppose you'd call it. He's an excellent writer and this book is a welcome addition to his series. The title is a little misleading, as Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in the late 20's in one of the most controversial criminal cases of this century, aren't really dealt with too much.What is dealt with are the Galleanists, the followers of Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, who really framed American anti-radical policy (unintentionally) by way of a series of bombings that occurred in 1919 and 1920. These bombings offered the government the pretext for the unlawful series of police actions called the "Red Scare". These events are important even today because they framed American policy toward domestic leftist radicalism, much of which remains in force today.The book follows the lives (and deaths) of many Italian anarchists, including Galleani himself, and is a fascinating exploration of their lives and their anarchist subculture at a time when anarchism was on the wane everywhere except Spain.To the modern anarchist, the book offers as much of a sense of what anarchism shouldn't be as what it used to be. The Galleanist use of bombs did anarchism a considerable disservice as it gave the press something sensational to latch onto -- even today, some 70 years later, people still link anarchism with bombs. This is a direct offshoot of the Galleanists' activities, as explored in this book.Avrich has a very readable writing style, and the book is jam-packed with historical references and interesting stories. Like all of his anarchist books, this one is worth your time.