Mussolini, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the Anarchists: The ... - Libcom

Mussolini, Sacco-Vanzetti, and the Anarchists:
The Transatlantic Context
Philip V. Cannistraro
Queens College, City University of New York
In The Big Money (1936), John Dos Passos reminds us that for left-wing
militants the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on August
23, 1927, defined the political discourse of the age by polarizing society into
"two nations": I on one side of the great divide stood the popular, progressive
social elements that had fought to save the two anarchists from the electric
chair; on the other side were arrayed the reactionary forces that sustained the
capitalist order, from American nativism to Italian Fascism. Vanzetti, who
anxiously followed the rise of Benito Mussolini's Fascist movement from his
prison cell, had arrived at the same conclusion, believing that the judge who
condemned him and Sacco wore the American face of the conservative
interests propped up by the Italian dictator. The choice, Vanzetti believed, was
"either fascismo, or revolution."2
Mussolini did not see Sacco and Vanzetti in these stark ideological terms.
As the duce of Fascism and as dictator of Italy, reasons of state shaped his
policies toward the case. Moreover, even as the leader of a radical right
movement engaged in a bloody war against the left, he admired the anarchists,
whom he believed were morally and politically superior to socialists and
communists. As late as 1934, he continued to speak of Sacco and Vanzetti in
a way that suggests personal sympathies for them and for anarchism, attitudes
unrecognized by historians who emphasize his unremitting crusade against the
left. The two Italian anarchists had been innocent, he protested indignantly to
' John Dos Passos, The Big Money, vol. 3 of the trilogy U.S.A., as quoted in John
P. Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York and London, 1992),
p. 143. On Dos Passos's involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti case see John D. Baker,
"Italian Anarchism and the American Dream-the View of John Dos Passos," in
Italian American Radicalism: Old World Origins and New World Developments, ed.
Rudolf J. Vecoli (Staten Island, N.Y, 1972), pp. 30-39; and Louis Joughin and
Edmund M. Morgan, The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York, 1948), pp. 438-
44. In 1927 Dos Passos wrote Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two
Foreignborn Workmen for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee.
2 Vanzetti to Alice Stone Blackwell, September 15, 1924, in Marion Denman
Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, eds., The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (New York,
1930), p. 128.
[The Journal of Modern History 68 (March 1996): 31-62]
(D 1996 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/96/6801-0002$01.00
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