National Affairs 1927; Radicals In Charlestown

In Charlestown

After seven years of premeditation, blood was shed beside a so-called cradle of American liberty, Boston.

Guilty or not, justly or not, Nicola Sacco, clean-shaven factory worker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, mustachioed fish-peddler, were informed last Monday evening that they must die that midnight for the murders—which to the end they denied committing—of a paymaster and guard at South Braintree, Mass., in 1920.

Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti refused last rites from the prison priest. They would die as they had lived, they said. Faith in a communistic order of mankind was enough for them.

Five guards took their posts in the death house, two to adjust electrodes, one at the blue lethal door, two to call at the cells. One newsgatherer, W. E. Playfair of the Associated Press, was included among the seven official witnesses of man killing man.

Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti died in the order that their names had long been coupled, seven minutes apart.