Sacco and Vanzetti
In an era of seemingly endless social turmoil fomented by the radical Left — the wave of unrestrained immigration and resultant violent crime surge, coupled with constant violent street agitation and terroristic attacks perpetrated by the likes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter — it’s easy to believe that America is plumbing new depths of depravity and revolutionary unrest. But a century ago, things were little different. While most of us are aware of the titanic convulsions of World War I and the Communist Revolution in Russia, most Americans are blissfully unaware that America in the teens and ’20s of the last century was beset by violent unrest, including a years-long pageant of terrorist bombings and assassinations.
Then, as now, the perpetrators took few pains to disguise their hatred of the United States and their desire for its violent overthrow. Then, as now, ordinary Americans were horrified by the epidemic of violence and hate. And just like today, America’s urban elites — writers, journalists, politicians, and, above all, prominent lawyers and judges — openly sympathized with violent radicals and terrorists, exuding sympathy for even the most violent offenders, while ignoring the sensibilities of their victims. The same topsy-turvy elitist solicitude for victimizers over victims that has inflamed the American public in the age of Donald Trump and “Baltimore father” Kilmar Abrego Garcia was brought to bear for another media manufactured cause célèbre, the most polarizing news story of the Roaring Twenties: the trial and execution of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, known ever after simply as Sacco and Vanzetti.
By any measure, 1920 was a troubled year. With most of the world still recovering from the twin scourges of world war and the Spanish flu pandemic, the United States was comparatively well-off. Whereas Russia had fallen to the Bolsheviks, Germany’s economy had collapsed into hyperinflation on a scale the world had never before witnessed, and communist and anarchist revolutionaries were fomenting violence across Central and Eastern Europe, America’s economy and society were on a relatively sound footing. But all was not entirely well; for several years, spiraling terrorist attacks, mostly in the form of bombings, roiled America’s cities. The perpetrators were what we would now call elements of the radical Left, especially anarchists and communists bent on sowing turmoil as prelude to violent revolution. All the way back in 1901, one of their number, American-born anarchist Leon Czolgosz, a friend and devotee of leading radical agitator Emma Goldman, succeeded in assassinating the president of the United States, William McKinley. Although Czolgosz himself did not escape swift justice (he was executed only seven months after his crime), neither anarchism nor Goldman suffered any lasting legal taint, and the program of unremitting violence continued over the next couple of decades.
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