Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants convicted in a controversial murder case and executed in 1927. Supporters of Sacco and Vanzetti argued that their conviction and subsequent execution was based largely on their nationality and political views, and the pair quickly became martyrs for those on the political Left. The actual murder and trial took place at the height of the Red Scare when labor militancy and political reaction were at their postwar peak.
Largely kept in check during World War I, labor militancy and political radicalism intensified following the Russian Revolution and the return of unemployment in 1919. Political and business leaders insisted that a Red Menace was spreading throughout the country. The backlash against labor militancy and radicalism culminated in the arrest and deportation of suspected socialists, communists, and anarchists in the Palmer Raids of January 1920. In the midst of this ferment, Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of killing two men and stealing $16,000. Despite substantial evidence of their innocence, the pair were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Supporters were convinced that their only crime had been that they were anarchists.
Amid intense repression, the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti became a rallying point for militant unionists and political radicals. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the Communist Party, and the Workers’ Party raised money and held mass demonstrations calling for the release of the two men. Supporters warned that unless workers, radicals, intellectuals, and others united they could expect the same fate.
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, however, was more than simply a rallying cry for the nation’s radicals. It outraged many in the political mainstream who concluded that the case was weak and motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment. Harvard Law School professor and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter noted that the case against
Sacco and Vanzetti was based largely on the “systematic exploitation of the defendants’ alien blood, their imperfect knowledge of English, their unpopular social views, and their opposition to the war.” As the date of their execution neared, massive demonstrations took place. On July 7, 1927,
20.000 took part in a New York demonstration. On August 10, the day Sacco and Vanzetti were to be executed, over
200.000 workers walked off their jobs. Other protests, demonstrations, and strikes took place throughout the country.
Despite international appeals for clemency, Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death on August 23, 1927. Debates about the innocence or guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti raged in the decades after their execution, but they seem to have been resolved by William Young and David E. Kaiser’s authoritative account, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1985). After careful reconstruction of the evidence, Young and Kaiser concluded that, without a doubt, Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Because of the circumstances of the case and the widely held belief that the pair were innocent, the case is still cited by many as evidence of the excesses of the Red Scare and the rampant hostility and suspicion of immigrants that characterized the 1920s.
Further reading: William Young and David E. Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985).
—Robert Gordon
Sanger, Margaret (1879-1966) birth control activist Born on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York, Margaret Louise Higgins (Sanger) became the foremost birth control advocate of the early 20th century. The sixth of 11 children of Anne Purcell and Michael Hennessey Higgins, her father was the owner and operator of a stone monument business. As the child of an Irish-American father,
Margaret Sanger (Library of Congress)
She was early introduced to the ideas of Robert Ingersoll and Henry George, the Single Tax advocate. Margaret went to Claverack College, a coed preparatory school in upstate New York. Originally, she took a teaching job but left it when she was called home to nurse her mother. After her mother’s death, she entered nursing school at the White Plains (New York) Hospital. In 1902, Margaret finished her degree and married William Sanger, an architect. The next few years, she recovered from ill health to give birth to her two sons, Stuart and Grant, and a daughter, also called Margaret. Sanger became discontented and she and her husband moved to the Lower East Side of New York, where they became active in the radical community. Active in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Sanger helped Elizabeth Gurley Flynn evacuate the children during the Lawrence Strike, an act that aroused national sympathy for the embattled textile strikers.
Sanger was a practicing nurse whose professional work brought her to understand the lack of control women had over their own bodies. She supported the idea that women needed the freedom to control their own life and body. From the first issue of her magazine, Wo-man Rebel, in
March 1914, to the financial and organizational support she gave to hormone research after World War II, she was dedicated to bringing effective birth control to women around the world. She became known in radical circles for her support of sexual reform and her advocacy of working-class women’s need for information on venereal disease, birth control, and sexual practice.
Sanger brought information to the public by remaining in the spotlight. The public relations strategy she used helped to create awareness and challenge regulations and laws that suppressed the free circulation of contraceptive information. She created a pamphlet, Family Li'mi-tation (1914), which gave advice to women about various birth control methods. She also included the names and addresses of places where women could write for further information or purchase necessary items. She even included a recipe for the home production of vaginal suppositories. This pamphlet had two important features. First its straightforward approach was notable because of her focus on the working class, whose hardships were increased by low wages combined with excessive fertility. Sanger also criticized the use of coitus interruptus as a contraceptive device, indicating that it deprived women of sexual satisfaction. She clearly communicated more than technical information in her pamphlet. Sanger advocated the right of women to sexual enjoyment as well as control over their own bodies. It was this pamphlet that led to her prosecution under the Comstock laws, during which she fled to Europe.
In 1916 Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. The clinic faced many obstacles, the most important of which was staunch opposition from the medical profession. New York State law specified in Section 1142 that no one could give information to prevent conception to anyone for any reason. Additionally, Section 1145 stated that only physicians could give advice to prevent conception for the cure or prevention of disease. That same year, Sanger and two of the clinic’s staff members were arrested for violating the state law. All the clinic’s records were confiscated. In 1919, Sanger changed her emphasis from women’s control of their own bodies to eugenic reasoning about the need for better babies. She joined in supporting the ideas of eugenicists who sought to improve the human race by selective breeding and sterilization of those thought unfit on the grounds of low intelligence or a propensity for crime and shiftlessness. For the most part, though, Sanger focused her efforts on educating the public and lobbying for the legalization of birth control. Continued opposition to birth control required political compromise with the medical establishment. Jealous of their own authority in the medical realm, doctors could support Sanger once she accepted that they should have the final authority in providing birth control. This shift in emphasis increased Sanger’s following and made birth control a respectable issue.
From the Great Depression to the 1960s, Sanger played a less vital and visible role in the birth control movement. In part, the ground had shifted, and birth control, once a feminist issue, was now seen largely in terms of family planning. Concern about the world population crisis, however, revived Sanger’s reputation, and she took part in the founding of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation. Throughout her life, she had been devoted to improving methods of contraception, and in the 1950s, she helped raise funds to support the development of the birth control pill, which was first made available in 1960. Sanger died at a nursing home in Tucson, Arizona, in 1966.
See also EUGENICS; SEXUALITY; WOMEN’S STATUS
AND RIGHTS.
Further reading: Ellen Chesler, Wo-man of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
—Marcia M. Farah
World History
