In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

[O]ur immigrants now largely represent . . . social discards. •Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race 2|“This Human Flotsam” Life was good for young Bartolomeo Vanzetti. To be the eldest son, to grow up with an adoring mother and a successful father in a land of beauty and bounty�a boy with blessings like these could be happy and carefree. Small wonder that Bartolo, looking back on his childhood, would sigh, “I love my valley.”1 Vanzetti was born on June 11, 1888, in Villafalletto, a small town ringed by farms in the Piemonte region of northern Italy.2 His father, Giovanni, “as sturdy and upright as the mountains that surround him,”3 was “an intelligent agriculturer”4 who worked his own land and planted the area’s first peach trees.5 His mother, Giovanna, already wed and widowed at an early age, married Giovanni, her second husband, when she was twenty-five. Bartolomeo arrived a year later, baby sister Luigia three years after that.6 Situated on the banks of the Magra River “in the shadows of a beautiful chain of hills,”7 Villafalletto seemed like paradise on earth to little Bartolo. In summer he swam in the river.8 Wildflowers bloomed, “the wonder of the garden ’s wonders.”9 “[U]nmatchable nightingales” and other songbirds filled the air with music.10 In winter snow-chased highlanders came down to the valley for shelter on the farms. Bartolo always remembered the “very clean and decent ” family of tenants who wintered in his father’s house.11 The land was fertile; the harvests, abundant. Vanzetti later recalled that so many varieties of fruit flourished there, so many “apples, pears, cherries, grapes, plums, figs, peaches, berries, etc. etc., [that the] nearby hills are all a fruit-garden, wine yards and woods of chestnut and of hazelnuts. Blackberries, strawberries and mushroom grow wonderfully up there.” Women raised silkworms , so “every field is planted of lines of mulberry trees.”12 Here in Bartolo’s childhood utopia, even going to school was a joy. He “loved study with a real passion,”13 he said later, and some of his earliest memories were “of prizes won in school examinations, including a second prize in the religious catechism.”14 His faithful Catholic father surely approved of that award. 10 | in search of sacco & vanzetti Religious though he may have been, Giovanni Vanzetti was also practical, and it was his practicality that brought Bartolo’s sunlit youth “in the bosom of my family” to a crashing halt. As Bartolo turned thirteen, he found to his dismay that his father was “undecided whether to let me [continue my] studies or to apprentice me to some artisan.”15 Here were the facts as Mr. Vanzetti no doubt saw them: he had opened a café in town, and could use his son’s help there, especially if the boy learned how to make pastry. On the other hand, what good would more schooling do? Hadn’t the newspaper just reported that in Turin an oversupply of lawyers was competing for a single low-paying job? The father’s choice seemed clear: no more useless schooling. Bartolo had no say in the matter. “[M]y father determined that I should learn a trade and become a shop-keeper. And so in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor Conino, who ran a pastry shop in the [provincial capital] city of Cuneo, and left me there to taste, for the first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor.”16 Life as he knew it changed then, abruptly and completely. For the next six years, his entire adolescence, Bartolo lived and worked on his own, far from his valley, far from his family, boarding in different cities and toiling long hours, often fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, with a few hours off every other Sunday. He worked nearly two years in the pastry shop, then three years in a bakery, and finally, after several months of unemployment, he did a stint as a caramel maker in Turin. He didn’t like the path he was on, he said, “but I stuck to it to please my father and because I did not know what else to choose.”17 The teenager was lonely and homesick. Christmas should be family time, he wrote his parents in December 1902, when he was fourteen, “and I would give so much to spend it among people as affectionate and sacred as you are...

Share