Robert Hanson Robert Hanson is the local historian of Dedham, Massachusetts, the city where the Sacco and Vanzetti case was tried. Hanson believes Sacco and Vanzetti essentially received a fair trial and were manipulated for political ends: "Sacco and Vanzetti served many causes, however inadvertently. There is a very strong argument that in the end they were better as martyrs than they were as innocent defendants."

In 1921 Dedham was a town of approximately twelve thousand people, which had the benefit of sitting on a major railroad line which gave it access to other communities. It was somewhat an economically and socially divided community with large Irish and Italian populations as well as a sizeable Yankee contingency.

As far as the Sacco and Vanzetti trial goes, Dedham really was an accident of geography. The county seat was Dedham, the trial was just one in a series of trials which came and went with some regularity and perhaps with a little more notoriety attached to it.

The original activity of the trial attracted very little attention. My uncle, who was a newsreel photographer, was assigned at one point to cover the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, and he reported to me many years later that the crowd was a happenstance crowd. The crowd was silent and unmoving and there were the newspaper photographers and the photojournalists who tried to agitate the crowd to look angry and wave their arms or yell or something, anything [more] than just stand there.

Other than being all male, there really wasn't any restriction on the jury pool. No one involved in the case as a lawyer was from Dedham. Neither of the defendants was from Dedham. The judge was not from Dedham. So it really was not a trial which had an internal effect on the community. There were no Italians on the jury, per se. I'd say it was an accident of the way the numbers worked out. You also have to remember that a lot of the Italian population were not registered voters, and therefore in a sense excluded themselves from participation in the pool.

Dedham, despite its mixed population still had all the trappings of an old Yankee community with a Calvinist view of life and a sense of ingrained propriety. There is one school of thought which is that the defense effort went down the tubes on the day that Judge Thayer, coming back from lunch, found Fred Moore (Sacco and Vanzetti's defense attorney) lying on the side lawn of the courthouse taking a siesta -- which was bad enough in its own right -- but the fact that he had the temerity to do this in his shirtsleeves offended the judge and all of his hangers-on, who witnessed a similar scene.

My feeling, from my non-scholarly approach to the trial, is that the judge procedurally was scrupulously fair. There had been allegations about his facial expressions and his body language and so forth. I don't know, I wasn't there. As far as I am aware, from everything I have read about the judge, not just about the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, but also other trials, the judge conducted himself in what he thought was the dignity appropriate to the occasion and he was scrupulous about adhering to the law and the process.

One thing that can be concretely said about the trial was that Sacco and Vanzetti received as much, if not more, process as any other defendant in any other action in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and certainly the County of Norfolk. The trial itself dragged on because of the actions of the defendants exercising their rights. You can criticize aspects of the trial which today would not be tolerated. In the time frame in which the entire thing transpired, what was done was in large part by the book. And the process was given its fullest extent, at great expense to the Commonwealth.

I think the perception of the trial by the citizens of Dedham depended on which end of town you lived in. The upper Dedham crowd believed in the justice system and I think they recognized guilt not so much because they followed every jot and tiddle of the evidence but they had faith that the judicial system was working and was working well. On the other end of town down in the Italian section or amongst the Irish, I think probably you had a bigger question mark.

My feeling is that if Vanzetti had not been convicted in this earlier case, he probably never would have come to trial in the Dedham case. In the course of the activity involving the case, Vanzetti was given the option to separate his trial from Sacco's with the understanding that they could probably get him off based on what little evidence there was. Vanzetti refused. It was his choice to keep the two cases combined.

In that day and age the cage was a fixture in the courtroom. As you can see, it is a somewhat artistic piece of work. It's not exactly an animal cage of some description where the defendants were ostentatiously locked in and surrounded on four walls and ceiling and floor. The cage was a symbol of the prestige of the county. In modern days, it wouldn't be tolerated. It's a pre-judgment of sorts against any defendant to have to sit in something like that. In 1920, it wasn't such a big deal. That's where you sat if you were the defendant and no one thought any more or less about it because no one was really analyzing the civil rights aspect of the whole trial procedure.

Sacco and Vanzetti served many causes, however inadvertently. There is a very strong argument that in the end they were better as martyrs than they were as innocent defendants.

TOP OF PAGE

COURT TV HOMEPAGE | VERDICTS | FAMOUS CASES | TRIAL TRACKING | LEGAL DOCUMENTS | PROGRAM GUIDE | CTTV STORE | GAMES/CONTEST | LEGAL TERMS | SEARCH | INDEX | HOW TO GET CTTV | COMMENTS