On this day in 1927, in the early hours, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were put to death at Charlestown State Prison in Massachusetts. Seven years earlier, in April 1920, Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter had been shot and killed during a robbery in Braintree; the two men were convicted of those killings, and the seven years between were spent in appeals. Celestino Medeiros, who had confessed to the Braintree crime, was executed the same night. Most historians who have gone back over the record consider the convictions unsafe, and prejudice against immigrants and radicals part of the reason.

What I know best is the paper they left. Both men wrote a great deal from their cells. Vanzetti had come from Italy as a young man with very little English and taught himself most of what he had in prison, with dictionaries and borrowed books, and the letters show it: the grammar of a man building a second language out of reading. A selection was published the year after their deaths, edited by Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson, and the editors chose to set the letters as the men had written them rather than tidy the spelling. That was the right decision. I will not quote from memory here; the words are too particular to risk getting nearly right.

The front page below is the Evening Star of Washington the next day, 24 August 1927, its lead column on what was to be done with Vanzetti's ashes, and the columns beside it on the crowds in Paris. Two men killed in Braintree, three men killed at Charlestown, and a great deal of ink.