Long before they had expiated their crimes in the death chair, the names of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, perhaps the most talked of individuals in the world, had become scarcely more than symbols.
The personalities behind the famous names were lost amid the international clamor for their cause and today those inseparable words, "Sacco-Vanzetti," stand for a lost cause rather than for the identification of a humble shoemaker and his fish-peddler comrade, gone to their doom.
Strangely parallel were the careers of these two men, so utterly different in temperament.
Both were born in Italy. Both emigrated to America in their youth. And both arrived the same year 1908.
Their careers, however, did not converge until shortly before that fateful day, seven years ago, when both were arrested in connection with the crime for which both died last night.
Nicola Sacco was born April 23, 1891, in Torremagiore, a town m southern Italy. He was one of 17 children. His father was an oil and wine merchant and a trustee of the local church. One of Nicola's brothers once served as mayor of Torremaggiore.
CAME TO AMERICA
At the age of 17 Nicola sailed for America with a brother, Sabino. They came to Boston and Nicola obtained a job soon afterward as waterboy in a road gang near Milford, Mass.
Later, while employed at the Hopedale mills trimming slag off pig iron, he decided to learn a trade and hired a man to teach him to operate an edging machine.
Homesick, Sabino went back to his native land, but Nicola remained here, fascinated by America.
With his trade learned, Sacco worked for several years in shoe factories in Webster and Milford. Meanwhile he had met and married the woman who, as Mrs. Rosa Sacco, mother of his two children, has remained loyal and devoted throughout the long and harrowing years.
In May, 1917, Sacco went to Mexico to avoid the draft. On the train he met the man who was to be his inseparable companion to the end.
When he returned to Massachusetts a few months later he moved his family to Stoughton, where he had obtained employment in a shoe factory. His employer, who lived nearby, testified at the subsequent murder trial:
"Sacco was ambitious. After he would get through work at night he would go into his garden, a beautiful garden, with plenty of vegetables. He was right on the job all the time."
Labor and social problems long interested Sacco. He has read widely, and even in his death cell found pleasure in such books as "An American Bible."
VANZETTI'S HISTORY.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti was born on June 11, 1888, in Vulafalletto, an agricultural town in Piedmont, northern Italy. He was a natural student and won many scholastic prizes. The fact that he was obliged to leave school at 13 did not halt his studies. A love of books enabled him to attain a broad knowledge of philosophy and history, and a familiarity with numerous other departments of education.
For six years, as a youth, he worked in a pastry shop. Death of his mother, coupled with personal illness, turned Vanzetti toward a disquietude of mind which he sought to cure by coming to America.
After working as a dish-washer in a New York hotel, he came to New England in quest of outdoor employment. Subsequently he worked in a brick yard at Springfield. Mass., in the stone pits of Meriden, Conn., and later as a railroad laborer in Springfield and Worcester.
Finally he moved to Plymouth, where he was living at the time of arrest. Blacklisted by local factories for participation in a strike, he went into business for himself as a fishmonger.
Vanzetti's facile pen and oratorical ability won him recognition among those of his beliefs. His literary favorite was Ralph Waldo Emerson and he frequently quoted from the writing of Thomas Jefferson. He was familiar with the works of Karl Marx and other socialist writers.
