Justice crucified

Description

South Braintree, Massachusetts, 1920. Two men accost a paymaster and his bodyguard on the lot of a shoe factory. They speak to them, rob and shoot them, then disappear. A local official feels sure it was the work of anarchists. His search turns up two--Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They also happen to be poor and Italian immigrants. That the evidence to prove them guilty was scanty, corrupt, or missing entirely is an appalling story in itself. The trial and appeals went on for seven years. The case became a cause, a landmark in American legal history. But the significance of the Sacco-Vanzetti case resonated far beyond the courtroom. With relentless logic, author Feuerlicht pursues the social forces surrounding their arrest and trial back to the first Puritan settlers of New England, whose determination to set a righteous example for the new nation bred suspicion and intolerance for every immigrant that followed them. On August 22, 1927, when Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted, immigrants of every race and nationality wept at the newsstands. "None of my enemies will be mourned as I am," Vanzetti said in his last letter to his family, and he was right. Feuerlicht's exhaustive research for this book uncovered new information about some of the lingering mysteries of the case and about the two men's personalities. In Italy she interviewed Vanzetti's sister and acquired more than 100 letters from Vanzetti to his family that have never been published in English. Her tight, dramatic narrative is punctuated with interviews with other surviving principals of the case, among them Nicola Sacco's grandson. "l believe," Feuerlicht writes in the foreword, "that the invidious ideas, emotions and attitudes that killed Sacco and Vanzetti were neither born with the case nor died with it but are with us still, and that for this reason Sacco and Vanzetti should never be forgotten."--From dust jacket.

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