Patrick Street were an acclaimed Irish folk band formed in 1986, often hailed as a “supergroup” thanks to a line-up of distinguished and highly respected traditional musicians. The core members comprised Andy Irvine (vocals, mandolin, bouzouki, harmonica), Kevin Burke (fiddle), Jackie Daly (accordion) and Arty McGlynn (guitar), who’d all been in various esteemed Irish bands including Planxty, The Bothy Band, and De Dannan to name just a few.
In 1988, they released the Andy Irvine-penned song ‘Facing the Chair’, a powerful and prescient piece of social commentary on the 1920’s trial and executions of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti which took place in the USA. Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of committing a robbery and double homicide at the Slater and Morrill shoe factory in South Braintree. On the afternoon of 15th April 1920, payroll clerk Frederick Parmenter and security guard Alessandro Berardelli were fatally shot and robbed of more than US$15,000 in cash. Witnesses reported seeing two assailants carry out the attack before fleeing in a vehicle occupied by two or three additional individuals. Sacco and Vanzetti were apprehended several weeks later.
The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti was presided over by Judge Webster Thayer of the Massachusetts Superior Court. Thayer had a history of bias against anarchists. In April 1920, he notably questioned a jury’s not guilty verdict in the case of Segris Zakoff, who had been charged with advocating anarchism. In addition, Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial was set against at what the time came to be known as the “Red Scare”, which was marked by numerous strikes, widespread fear of radicals, and a series of bomb attacks against government officials, among them the United States Attorney. Judge Webster Thayer allowed the prosecution to introduce substantial evidence regarding the defendants’ anarchist beliefs, immigrant origins, and their refusal to comply with the military draft during World War I.
On 14th July 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were found guilty by a jury and sentenced to death. Despite a confession made in November 1925 by Celestino Madeiros, who was already serving a sentence for murder, that he had participated in the South Braintree robbery and murder alongside the Joe Morelli gang, the verdict remained unchanged. Madeiros submitted a written statement declaring, “I hear by [sic] confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime”. Nevertheless, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declined to grant a retrial. At the time, the authority to reopen a case rested solely with the trial judge, Webster Thayer, who refused to do so. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair at Charlestown State Prison on 23rd August 1927.
In 1928, the American writer and critic Edmund Wilson observed that “The Sacco-Vanzetti case revealed the whole anatomy of American life, with all its classes, professions, and points of view, and all their relations, and it raised almost every fundamental question of our political and social system. It did this, furthermore, in an unexpectedly dramatic fashion”. Nearly five decades later, in 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation acknowledging that both Sacco and Vanzetti had been unfairly tried.
‘Facing the Chair’, in just over five minutes, brilliantly sums up the whole sorry episode, highlighting issues such as immigration, xenophobia, judicial and racial injustice, as well as the suppression of political dissent; matters which unfortunately continue to plague American society and many other countries. Although Patrick Street are no more, the 83 year old Andy Irvine is still going strong and regularly plays this poignant song live. It’s a song which is right up there with other masterpieces which contemplate other miscarriages of justice such as Bob Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’.
