Sacco and Vanzetti Arrested in Red Scare Climate of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria

Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts, on streetcar robbery charges that will be escalated to murder charges in connection with a payroll robbery in South Braintree that left two men dead. The arrests occur at the height of the Palmer Raids and Red Scare, when the Department of Justice is actively surveilling and deporting immigrant radicals. Both men are carrying firearms at the time of arrest, and both have evaded the draft during World War I. However, they maintain their innocence of the robbery-murder, and significant evidence suggests they were targeted for their anarchist beliefs and immigrant status rather than actual culpability.

District Attorney Frederick Katzmann and presiding Judge Webster Thayer display overt prejudice throughout the subsequent prosecution. Thayer privately refers to the defendants as “those anarchist bastards” and uses the trial to lecture about Americanism and the dangers of radical ideology. Katzmann emphasizes the defendants’ lack of patriotism and political beliefs rather than physical evidence linking them to the crime. The prosecution’s ballistics evidence is later contested, and several witnesses recant their identifications. Despite numerous appeals based on newly discovered evidence, judicial bias, and prosecution misconduct, Massachusetts courts refuse to grant a new trial.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case becomes an international cause celebre, with protests in cities worldwide and prominent figures including Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter calling for their release. The case exposes how the American legal system could be weaponized against immigrants and political dissidents during periods of anti-radical hysteria. Governor Alvin Fuller’s advisory committee, led by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, upholds the convictions despite substantial doubt, demonstrating how elite institutions closed ranks to defend the judiciary’s legitimacy. The case will culminate in Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution on August 23, 1927, exactly seven years after their arrest.