August 23, 1927: Sacco & Vanzetti Are Executed

August 23, 1927: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison in Boston. They were convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts, south of Boston, on April 15, 1920. Sacco (on the left in this photo), a shoemaker, was 36 years old. Vanzetti, a fishmonger, was 39.

They were almost certainly innocent. As their appeals ran out in 1927, demonstrations opposed to their impending execution were held around the world, including on Boston Common. But they were foreigners, Catholics, and known anarchists, and it was the Roaring Twenties, so they never had a chance at a fair judicial process. Bigotry prevailed over justice.

Governor Alvan T. Fuller refused to pardon them, although he did convene a committee to re-examine the evidence. For all the good that did: The committee concluded that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. President Calvin Coolidge, himself a former Governor of Massachusetts, refused to listen to protests.

Vanzetti left a letter:

If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph.

Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident.

Our words, our lives, our pains: nothing! The taking of our lives, lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler -- all! That last moment belongs to us, that agony is our triumph!

The prison was closed in 1955. The Bunker Hill Mall was built on the site. In 1977, Governor Michael Dukakis, who became the Democratic nominee for President in 1988, issued a proclamation stating that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names." He did not issue a pardon, because that would have presumed guilt.

There was only 1 score on this historic day, a Tuesday, and it was in baseball: The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 13-3 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia.