The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History

Abstract

On May 1, 1927, in the port city of Tampico, Mexico, a thousand workers gathered at the American consulate. Blocking the street in front of the building, they listened as local union officials and radicals took turns stepping onto a tin garbage can to shout fiery speeches. Their denunciations of American imperialism, the power of Wall Street, and the injustices of capital drew cheers from the gathered crowd. But it was their remarks about the fate of two Italian anarchists in the United States, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, that aroused the “greatest enthusiasm,” in the words of an American consular officials who observed the event. The speakers called Sacco and Vanzetti their “compatriots” and “their brothers.” They urged American officials to heed the voice of “labor the world over” and release the men from their death sentences.1 Between 1921 and 1927, as Sacco and Vanzetti's trial and appeals progressed, scenes like the one in Tampico were replayed again and again throughout Latin America and Europe. Over those six years, the Sacco and Vanzetti case developed from a local robbery and murder trial into a global event. Building on earlier networks, solidarities, and identities and impelled forward by a short-lived but powerful sense of transnational worker solidarity, the movement in the men's favor crystallized in a unique moment of international collective mobilization. Although the world would never again witness an international, worker-led protest of comparable…