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Sacco and Vanzetti, Mary Donovan and transatlantic radicalism in the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2020

Niall Whelehan
Niall Whelehan*
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyde
*
*School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, [email protected]
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Abstract

In 1927 the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston following a murder trial that was widely denounced for its anti-labour and anti-immigrant bias. From 1921 the campaign to save the two men powerfully mobilised labour internationalism and triggered waves of protests across the world. This article examines the important contributions made by Irish and Irish-American radicals to the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign. Mary Donovan was a leading member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and a second-generation Irish union organiser and member of Boston's James Connolly Club. In the 1920s she travelled to Ireland twice and appealed to Irish and Irish American labour to support the campaign. At the same time, Donovan and many of the activists considered here held ambiguous personal and political relationships with Ireland. Transnational Irish radicalism in the early-twentieth century is most commonly considered in nationalist terms. Taking a distinctly non-Irish cause – the Sacco-Vanzetti case of 1920–7 – allows us to look from a different perspective at the global Irish Revolution and reveals how radical labour currents reached into Irish and Irish-American circles during the revolutionary era, though the response to the campaign also indicates a receding internationalism in the immediate aftermath of Irish independence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 165 , May 2020 , pp. 131 - 146
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Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 2020

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References

1 Boston Globe, 29 Aug. 1927.

2 Mary Donovan, ‘No tears for my youth’, unpublished draft autobiography (Lilly Library, Indiana University, Mary Donovan Hapgood papers). The manuscript contains several versions of chapters with no page numbers; the citations here reflect this. My thanks to the Lilly Library staff for their help during my research. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions received at the Global Irish Revolution workshop at the University of Edinburgh, and at the Irish Centre for Histories of Labour and Class, N.U.I. Galway, where an early draft of this article was presented.

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13 Information drawn from the United States Federal Census, 1880, 1900, accessed via www.ancestry.com (2 Jan. 2020).

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35 For her part, Flynn made no mention of Donovan in her own recollections.

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40 In 1908 The Pilot was bought out by the Catholic church and became its official organ.

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42 Donovan, ‘No tears’. Donovan dates the trip to 1926 in her papers, but her letters to Vanzetti state that it took place in 1925 (Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, p. 155).

43 Lyons to Sheehy Skeffington, 26 Oct. 1921 (N.L.I., Sheehy Skeffington papers, MS 33,606 (8)).

44 Amleto Fabbri to James Larkin, 4 Feb. 1926 (B.P.L., Aldino Felicani Sacco-Vanzetti papers, S2/B7/F19/I2).

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48 Irish Worker (Dublin), 7 Feb. 1925. National newspapers did not report on this demonstration.

49 Irish Worker, 21 Mar. 1925.

50 Jack Carney to Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, 18, 19 July 1927 (B.P.L., Aldino Felicani Sacco-Vanzetti papers, S2/B9/F5/I1, 6); Carney to the SV New Trial League, 13 May 1924 (ibid., S4/B37/F5/I1).

51 Larkin to Donovan, 19 July 1927 (ibid., S2/B9/F5/I7).

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75 Ibid.; Boston Globe, 26 Aug.1927.

76 Boston Globe, 29 Aug. 1927; Donovan, ‘No tears’.

77 Bussel, From Harvard, p. 103.

78 Kurt Vonnegut said he voted for Donovan; see the prologue to Vonnegut's Jailbird (London, 1992), pp xi-xii.

79 Mary Donovan, ‘Why do intelligent women marry’ (Lilly Library, Indiana University, Mary Donovan Hapgood papers); Bussel, From Harvard, pp 150, 228.

80 Boston Globe, 23 Aug. 1967; Berkshire Eagle, 6 Feb. 1959.

81 Palmer, James P. Cannon, p. 113.

82 Donovan, ‘No tears’.

83 Bussel, From Harvard, p. 102.

84 Murray, Irish nationalists in Boston, p. 120.

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87 Donovan, ‘No tears’; Boston Globe, 28 Jan. 1928.

88 Donovan to Felicani, 22 Jan. 1928 (B.P.L., Aldino Felicani Sacco-Vanzetti papers, S6/B49/F74/I3).

89 Irish World, 27 Aug. 1927.