In late August, Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston placed an expiatory statue of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti -- the two professed anarchists electrocuted for their part in a 1920 robbery-murder in southeastern Massachusetts -- in front of its public library. The sculpture is by Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore. It's the second step in an ugly episode of Bay State revisionism: In 1977, on the 50th anniversary of the execution, Massachusetts's new governor, Michael Dukakis, issued an official apology. (An apology that was promptly condemned in a vote of the state senate.)
The trial was not American justice at its best. The negative publicity surrounding the two anarchists did owe much to the Red Scare climate opportunistically created by U.S. attorney general Mitchell Palmer. Judge Webster Thayer was publicly skeptical about their innocence, describing them as "anarchistic bastards." But Vanzetti was almost certainly guilty, and Sacco was guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, as the work of historian Francis Russell makes clear. No evidence has arisen since their deaths to diminish that certainty.
A governor's commission of inquiry upheld the verdict. Many of those who offered alibis for the two were subsequently shown to have been anarchist comrades who falsified and coordinated their stories. A 1962 re-running of forensic tests from the trial showed that the physical evidence against the pair was even stronger than previously suspected.
Even if Menino's intent is to glorify a couple of murderers, they're not the proper subjects of the sculpture. The real "honors" should go to those Communist historians whose misrepresentation of the Sacco/Vanzetti affair over the decades has made this travesty possible.