90 Years Later: Bartolomeo Vanzetti's Letters Reconsidered

Abstract

90 years after Sacco and Vanzetti’s infamous executions, it is time for a fresh look at their letters and a new edition of them. Although the most recent edition of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s English letters, The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti edited by Gardner Jackson and Marion Frankfurter, is riddled with errors and omissions, it has had an indelible impact on the mythos and historical understanding of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. In part because of that edition, Sacco and Vanzetti have been presented as mirror characters whose lives were necessarily intertwined together instead of as individuals whose fates were only linked by the actions of the State. Both Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s narratives are worthy of study apart from considerations of culpability or fairness of their trial, but this has not often been done. The first step in reconsidering the men and their case is a new, complete and unedited edition of Vanzetti’s letters, apart from Sacco’s.