My Crazy Day

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate October 2001

download word file, 6 pages 5.0

Downloaded 10 times

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were perfect examples of victims of the Red Scare. The Red Scare was a nationwide fear that was present in the United States following World War One. This fear of communists, socialists, and anarchists spread quickley across nation, feading on the easily persuaded minds of the American people. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested and put to death for two robberies and murders. There was obvious evidence that showed the men were not guilty, but this evidence was ignored because they were poor immigrant anarchists. There was world wide protests to save them. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial and conviction was so famous that it was still making the news seventy years later.

        In 1908 Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti arrived separately in America. They both settled in Massachusetts.

Sacco was a shoe maker that had one child and Vanzetti was a fish peddler in Plymouth, Massachusetts. They were both Italian Immigrants. As time went by, both Sacco and Vanzetti fell into anarchist circles within the Italian-American community.

During World War I in 1917 they both ran to Mexico in order to avoid the draft. They eventually returned to Massachusetts.

        During April 1920, at the height of the Red Scare, a crime took place in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Two men shot and killed factory paymaster, Frederick Parmenter and his guard. They took the sixteen thousand dollar payroll and made their getaway in a car. Witnesses to the crime said that the shooters looked Italian. This crime was similar to a robbery that took place four months earlier in the nearby town of Bridgewater. Bridgewater police chief, Michael Stewart, who had been investigating Italian anarchists, noticed a link between the two crimes and planned to set a trap. While all of this was happening, Andrea Sculsedo, an Italian anarchist, fell to his death in New York on May 3, 1920. This sent the anarchist community into turmoil. Two days later on May 5, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested by...