Sacco and Vanzetti

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I picked to do my project on Sacco and Vanzetti!!!!!!! I did not have a hard time finding information on these guys because I found out that, back in the day, they were a pretty big deal. I found out that they were both charged with the murder of a paymaster in Braintree, Massachusetts during the Red Scare from my text book. They also could not speak English so they could not argue their case.

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After reading The Progressive, I found out that no matter what rank officer someone was they all knew that the verdict was going to be that of guilt for both Sacco and Vanzetti. Reading this made me a little bit mad because I do not think that is very fair at all. I mean these guys couldn’t even speak English and they are being accused of killing someone when there was no real evidence against them at all! The government just needed someone to blame.

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I wanted to figure out how big of a deal these guys really were and the impact that they had on the people during that time period and how they are affecting our time period. To figure this out I went to an article called Remembering Sacco and Vanzetti. I learned that mass rallies took place in many different cities on the day of the execution. For decades after the tragedy people gathered to mark the date of the execution and recently in 2002 there was a rally for the 75^th anniversary.

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I found out that the reason that they specifically were accused of the murder was because they were selling Luigi Galleani's Cronaca Sovversiva, which was an anarchist newspaper that advocated the murder. That is completely insane. They did absolutely nothing wrong. All they did was sell a newspaper and because of it they got the death sentence.

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I did not know who this Luigi Galleani was so I did some research. I learned that Galleani was an influential Italian anarchist of the early 20^th century. He was an accomplished radical orator, strongly charismatic, and inspired countless followers among his Italian comrades. Obviously he inspired two people too many to sell his newspapers...

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I personally think that this was completely wrong and incredibly immoral. If this was to happen in modern times it would never work. This was completely made up just to find someone to take the blame when it needed to be passed out. I can not believe that this happened in America and it makes me sick just thinking about it.