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The jury system appeals with peculiar force to the great masses of common people. Through their service on the jury, the shoulder of every citizen, whatever the accident of his birth or station, tingles with that matchless precept of the law that all men are born free, equal and independent.
-Charles Coleman, "Origin and Development of Trial by Jury" (1919)
Circumstances sometimes force men into situations so dramatic, thrust their puny frames so far into the burning bright searchlights of history that they or their shadows on men's minds become enormous symbols.
-John Dos Passos, Facing the Chair (1927)
Nine years had passed since Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed. The Great Depression, the New Deal, the rise to prominence of the US Communist Party, and the growing threat of fascism all had transformed the tenor of American radicalism. In 1936' s new context, John Dos Passos revived Vanzetti's last words: "Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as how we do by an accident."1 In 1927 Vanzetti lamented not his death but the inefficacy of lived political commitment-his death could have meaning in a way that his life did not. Dos Passos, however, invoked the condemned man's roseate embrace of martyrdom only to insist "we stand defeated America."2 A space emerged between Vanzetti's preexecution optimism and Dos Passos's defeatism, a fissure explained by Vanzetti's understanding of his " accident" and U.S.A.' s self-conscious effort to construct " the speech of the people" on the anarchist's memory.3 The arrest, trial, and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, two vocally antigovernment activists, offer a magnified view of how US criminal law subdued anarchism and the parallel erasure of anarchism by progressive and radical literature.
As the radical cause célèbre of this period, Sacco and Vanzetti function as a condensed symbol of radical politics and government overreaction before World War II. Here were two anarchists, arrested, convicted, and executed despite a dearth of concrete evidence and an outpouring of public support. To this day, historians debate their guilt, rehashing the legal system's failures to show that the Left's outrage was warranted: innocent men were killed. Sacco and Vanzetti's legacy, however, rests less on...