Nunzio Pernicone Nunzio Pernicone is a historian of anarchism and expert on the Sacco & Vanzetti case. He explains the motives of the American anarchist movement and the movement's ideological strains. "The state had to be eliminated before humanity could become free," he says. "And the kind of society that they envisioned after the revolution would be one in which private property did not exist."

Sacco came from the peasant class in Southern Italy in Pullia, which is the heel of Italy. His family was fairly prosperous, his father owned a vineyard and an olive oil business. So his desire to come to the United States was not motivated by desperate poverty. This was the case for so many other Italian immigrants. He had a very large family, about 17 children altogether. His motivation was, as he put it at one point, to come to a free country, a spirit of adventure. He came in 1908; his experience, I would say, was much more fortunate than most immigrants. He became an inch trimmer in a shoe factory, which was rather a skilled job, and he was a very hard worker. By the wage standards of the day, he earned a substantial amount of money for a worker.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, like Sacco, came from peasant stock, from the Northwest of Italy, the region known as Piedmont. He had a fairly happy childhood until age 12, 13 thereabouts, when his father apprenticed him in a bakery in a nearby town, and this began six years of dreadful exploitation. He would be working as many as 18 hours a day and really was totally demoralized by this. His only solace then, and later on his life, was reading books. He was very closely attached to his mother; when she died of cancer in 1907, he was totally despondent and decided that he had to leave his town, and decided to embark on his journey to the United States.

Sacco within a few years found a highly skilled profession to pursue and did very well for himself. Vanzetti drifted from New York to Massachusetts in all kinds of minimal jobs. He was a dishwasher, he worked in a stone quarry, as a factory worker, as a pick axman on a railroad gang. He never really found a niche and led a very lonely life. He had no family and very few friends. This situation improves by 1913 when he finds the Brini family in Plymouth, Massachusetts. He boards with these people, and they become his family thereafter. Again, his solace was in books; he became a voracious reader and became really the archetype of the self-taught anarchist.

Anarchism literally means "without government." There are many kinds of anarchists, many kinds of anarchism, but all anarchists believe that government is the root of all evil and therefore must be eliminated, by whatever means.

It's a common misconception that radicals like Sacco and Vanzetti had been politicized in the old country and brought their subversive ideas with them. That's not the case at all, they were converted to these idealogies because of the terrible labor conditions to which they were exposed personally and were men who were moved in their souls to the plight of the poor and what they considered the oppressed. In this case, certainly Vanzetti had a tougher go than Sacco, but I would say [they were influenced] by the conditions they saw.

The anarchists really were the dominant political elements in New England. Luigi Galliani was this charismatic writer who had an almost hypnotic spell on his immigrant followers. In New England, Galliani was the most important Italian radical. He was a man of great charisma and magnetic power and a very ornate flowery writer. Hearing him speak and participating indirectly in some of the strikes of the day, both of these men became radicalized.

Galliani was an anarchist communist. That has nothing to do with communism Bolshevik style of the Soviet Union. Anarchist communists believed basically that the root of all evil was government and authority. Therefore, they were anti-statists: the state had to be eliminated before humanity could become free, and the kind of society that they envisioned after the revolution would be one in which private property did not exist, and a kind of harmonious mutual aide would predominate in a communistic society.

Galliani and his disciples believed, as most anarchists did, that the government was not going to abolish itself. Therefore it needed some help; help would come in the form of violence. They believed that since the state had a monopoly on violence and utilized it as suppression of workers and peasants, inevitably the oppressed had the right to retaliate in kind. And this meant insurrection, assassination, bombings, whatever was necessary to overthrow the state.

We have a misconception that should be clarified. For decades, supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti always portrayed them as either avowed pacifists or "philosophical anarchists." One writer described philosophical anarchists as anarchists who shave daily, have good manners and who are guaranteed not to act upon their principles. Sacco and Vanzetti were not anarchists of this breed.

As disciples of Luigi Galliani, they believed that any means was legitimate in the fight against the state, and by any means, they meant terrorism, bombings, assassination. Since these were the tools which the state used to oppress the workers, these were tools that workers could legitimately use against their adversaries.

I should emphasize that anarchists like Galliani and his disciples never engaged in indiscriminate forms of violence. These were not the kind of people who would plant a bomb in cafes simply because it would be loaded with people from the middle class. This was always retaliatory violence against what they perceived and experienced as persecution from the state. Galliani took the view that there's no sense [in] just talking about fighting the state. If you ask the oppressed to engage in rebellion against the state, you must provide them with the means to do so. Therefore, he (Galliani) made available a bomb manual starting in 1905, and this bomb manual played a very significant role in the [Sacco and Vanzetti] case.

From the first days of the war [World War I] in 1914 in Europe, Galliani and his disciples took a position that this was a capitalist war, which in no way could benefit the working class and therefore had to be opposed. In 1917, after the United States enters the war, the issue of draft registration became very important for alien radicals. And after a law was passed to require aliens to register, Galliani essentially told them, "Don't do it." Even though you may not be legally eligible for the draft because you're not citizens, you might be used for labor battalions, or conscripted later on for some reason. And once word went that they had to avoid registration, that meant, in some instances, that they had to get out of the country altogether. And this explains one of the reasons why they (Sacco and Vanzetti) went to Mexico.

It's often believed they did so just to avoid the draft. That's not the case. Indeed, they did wish to avoid the draft, but on the other hand, they were thinking in much more global terms with respect to revolution.

It's important to realize that the targets of these bombs were not just any common citizens, but rather political figures, judges, politicians, the police, those who had participated in the repression of Italian anarchists with the deportation of Galliani. At the top of the list was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and the attempt to bomb Palmer really sets the Sacco and Vanzetti case in motion. One of their comrades tripped while attempting to blow up Palmer's house and got blasted to smithereens, leaving behind fragments of a leaflet called "Plain Words," which the federal authorities were able to eventually trace back to a printing establishment in Brooklyn. This was operated by the Gallianisti, this in turn led to the arrest of Roberto Alyra and Andres Salsedo.

Salsedo and Alyra are kept incommunicado at the Department of Justice building on Park Row in Manhattan. Salsedo is beaten daily for a period of several weeks until finally he cracks, reveals what he knows about the movement and the origins of the bombings. Feeling terribly guilty for what he feels is the betrayal of his comrades, he jumps out of the window, and his death serves as a signal to the other Gallianisti that they really must go underground at this point.

Once they [Sacco and Vanzetti] found out that Salsedo had killed himself or -- in their belief -- was thrown out the window, they put two and two together and assumed that he must have talked, which meant that sooner or later the anarchists in New England were going to become targets for arrest and deportation. Therefore, they had to hide whatever incriminating evidence there might be. On the night of their arrest, it's more than likely that the literature they say they were hiding was not just run-of-the-mill literature but included the bomb manual that Galliani had published back in 1905. Also, you cannot exclude the possibility that they might have been hiding dynamite as well.

It was commonly assumed by authorities in the conservative class, in the United States and Europe, that an anarchist was by definition, a criminal and a terrorist. They were frequently the first people suspected in any crime that was committed. After investigating an attempted payroll heist that failed, a police chief in the small town of South Braintree concluded that the deed must have been committed by a gang of Italian anarchists, which included Sacco, Vanzetti, and several of their comrades.

The question of their behavior at the time of their arrest becomes of critical importance during the trial. The term is "consciousness of guilt"; indeed they were conscious of a guilty act, but not the one for which they were arrested and ultimately condemned. They knew that they were anarchists who were wanted by the Justice Department. They knew that they were at risk of being deported. Consequently, when they spotted a policeman on the trolley car and were apprehended, their assumption was that they had been arrested because they are anarchists. Indeed, during their initial interrogation, no mention was made of any crime; they were interrogated because they were radicals, and these were the questions to which they had to respond. Their fear of being caught up in the political repression of the day just got them deeper and deeper into trouble because they lied and attempted to disguise what they were doing, particularly if they were hiding a bomb manual or dynamite. They had good reason to fear apprehension.

[In the Dedham trial] politics are absolutely crucial. Katzmann's objective is not merely to make a good case on the basis of evidence, but rather to interject their political beliefs, their actions (the fact that they fled to Mexico), that they have dodged the draft and don't love the United States. He tore Sacco apart on the stand over this.

Their supporters, I believe, had an accurate view of these men as immigrants who were being persecuted for their beliefs. They were mistaken in their notion that Sacco and Vanzetti were just pacifists and philosophical anarchists, thereby failing to understand they were genuine revolutionaries. I would say that most of their liberal supporters, who really knew very little about the anarchist movement and the Italian anarchists were always mistaken in their belief that Sacco and Vanzetti were just benign pacifists and philosophical anarchists.

In my opinion, Vanzetti was almost certainly innocent, and Sacco most likely was, although I'm not 100 percent convinced of that. There is some anecdotal evidence which, in my view, at least creates the possibility of a discussion on that issue. With respect to the trial and subsequent legal proceedings, I find it inconceivable how anybody could believe they were fairly treated.

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