Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen

In 1920, two Italian immigrant workers were arrested for a murder they almost certainly did not commit. Nicola Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fishmonger, were radicals in a nation terrified of radicals. They were foreigners in a country that blamed its anxieties on foreigners. John Dos Passos, one of the era's most exacting chroniclers of American life, reconstructes their trial, their years in prison, and the international outcry that followed, mapping how prejudice masqueraded as law. Through affidavits, testimony, and the impassioned appeals of figures like Anatole France and Eugene V. Debs, the book exposes a court that never saw them as innocent or guilty, only as dangerous. The execution came in 1927, but the questions Dos Passos raises have never been answered: Who gets to be American? What happens when justice becomes a performance of power? This is not merely a historical document; it is a mirror held up to every era that chooses scapegoats over truth.