The Sacco-Vanzetti Case

The “roaring 20s” on the surface was extravagant, a time of the jazz age, new hollywood cinema, economic prosperity, new consumerism, and a revolution to the old rigid traditions of the 19th century. Politically, the red scare has swept across america, as conservatism becomes very popular to combat “the others”, of radical communism playing off the recent WW1. However within america, the opposite of roaring promise was the case for many americans. Foner reports the reality of the average population, “At the beginning of 1929, the share of national income of the wealthiest 5 percent of American families exceeded that of the bottom 60 percent. A majority of families had no savings, and an estimated 40 percent of the population remained in poverty, …show more content…
This lead to the racist treatment of particularly foreign radicals in the United States, most recognizably in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The details of the case follow, “Neither fingerprints nor possession of stolen money linked either to the crime. In the atmosphere of anti-radical and anti-immigrant fervor, however, their conviction was a certainty. ‘I have suffered,’ Vanzetti wrote from prison, ‘for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian.’” These italian radical immigrants Sentenced to death despite little condemning evidence, international protests, and intellectual criticisms such as, “novelist John Dos Passos, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School and a future justice of the Supreme Court.” This symbolized how we saw continued to believe foreign radicals in our country were monsters here to take our lifestyle rather than the reality of the situation, in the case of sacco-vanzetti and communism at large. This treatment translated to everyday discrimination against “radicals” who don’t hold conservative beliefs. Ironically, we trust the corrupt government we do know over the only people thinking of …show more content…
This relates to today's society in many ways because mainly we are now seeing similar scandal accusations in both our political parties. Most recently famous is the clinton email scandal, where top secret emails were allegedly hacked off the Hillary Clinton’s home private server. This created heavy mistrust between her party and the American people, and as a result, just like FDR, the American people wanted something different and elected Donald Trump, overlooking scandals of his own. Additionally our societies are similar because of our willingness to overlook the wellbeing of our society for monetary gain. For example, our continued involvement in Afghanistan is likely due to the link between oil and opium profits incoming to our country, as we send our troops there in the name of the war on