Sacco and Vanzetti at 100: The Quincy Connections – Introduction

The Sacco and Vanzetti case turned 100 years old this month. The case lasted 7 years, and its aftermath and reverberations have lasted until the present. But its origin was a daylight holdup and double murder in South Braintree on April 15, 1920. Three weeks later, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and dedicated anarchists, were arrested and came to be charged with the crimes. Tried and convicted, they were condemned and, after a long series of legal actions, executed on August 23, 1927.

For nearly all of the 100 years since 1920, the case and its two principal figures have been objects of world-wide fame and controversy, the stuff of legend and fierce emotions. They have spawned demonstrations, polemics, analysis, counter-analysis, investigation, art, poetry, fiction, drama, and song. Today, there are still committees dedicated to vindicating Sacco and Vanzetti’s innocence and others who bristle that two murderers have been sanctified as martyrs.

Yet, for all its international attention and accumulated symbolic significance, the Sacco-Vanzetti case is in many respects a deeply local story. The Historical Society will be looking at some of those local aspects—especially those with ties to Quincy—over the coming weeks.

Today it’s possible to walk the scene of the originating crime, a couple of blocks of Pearl Street between South Braintree Square and Ivory Street. In 1920 two shoe factories occupied much of this space on the south side of Pearl street. The Rice & Hutchins factory stood closer to South Braintree Square, in the area now taken up by the Pearl Plaza shopping center, with its Shaw’s and Marshalls. The Slater & Morrill Factory stood to further east, roughly where Burger King and Tennessee BBQ are now. Slater & Morrill had a second building, that included its business offices, on Railroad Avenue, now French Avenue, running north from Pearl between Rice & Hutchins and the Square.

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Thursday April 15 was payday and as was common practice at the time, pay was in cash. The payroll arrived by train in the morning at the South Braintree depot, also on what is now French Avenue. Intermittently throughout the day, various locals noticed two unfamiliar men hanging around the Square, and an unfamiliar car doing likewise.

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At 3:00 paymaster Frederick Parmenter and guard Alessandro Berardelli began to walk the Slater & Morrill payroll, nearly $16,000, from the business office to the main factory. They turned onto Pearl Street. In front of the Rice & Hutchins factory two men were loitering. As Parmenter and Berardelli reached them, the two loiterers attacked. Parmenter was shot twice. Berardelli was shot four times. A car, with three more men in it, that had been stationary beyond the Slater & Morrill main factory came up Pearl Street, and the two attackers, with the payboxes, jumped in. The car continued up Pearl, with shots being fired from it, perhaps to hit, certainly to frighten and confuse potential witnesses. At the Square, the car turned left, southward, on what is now Hancock Street.

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When Braintree police chief Gallivan gave pursuit a few minutes later, he took a course due south along Hancock Street. But in fact the criminals’ car had made a hairpin turn at the V intersection of Hancock and Franklin Streets, gone north on Franklin to Pond Street, turned west to Granite, down to Oak Street in Randolph and across to Stoughton. The car may have been spotted 45 minutes later in West Bridgewater.

Berardelli died within minutes of being shot. Parmenter was taken to Quincy Hospital and passed away at 5:00 the following morning. The stolen money was never found.

The crime prompted an Extra edition of the Patriot Ledger late on Thursday and was at the top of the front page of Friday’s Boston Globe. The story, though, was local. It would have become a terrible and tragic, but minor part of local history.

Then, on Saturday, the 17th, horseback riders came across the abandoned crime car in Manley Woods in West Bridgewater near Brockton. This discovery led West Bridgewater police chief Michael Stewart to form a theory that linked the car to a nearby alleged squatters’ shack for anarchists and to an attempted holdup months earlier. Stewart set a trap that resulted in the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. With their arrest, the local dimensions of the case were in tension with national and global ones.

– Ed Fitzgerald