America Out Loud by Alan Axelrod

Author:Alan Axelrod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Library of Congress

“No one in the world, so far as I know . has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

H. L. Mencken

Chicago Tribune, September 19, 1926

The sardonic and iconoclastic journalist is typically misquoted as having said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

“I would not wish to a dog or to a snake what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.”

Bartolomeo Vanzetti

1927

On April 15, 1920, Frank Parmenter and Alexander Berardelli, paymaster and guard at a South Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe factory, were killed in an armed robbery. Three weeks later, Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco—both immigrant working men and self-proclaimed anarchists—were arrested for the crime. Although much exculpatory evidence was presented, both men were convicted and sentenced to death. With appeals, the case dragged on for seven years, becoming the decade’s great cause célèbre, drawing the pleas of renowned authors, jurists, political leaders (including Woodrow Wilson), and religious leaders (including the Pope), who protested that the pair were being scapegoated for their political convictions and foreign birth. Sacco and Vanzetti were nevertheless executed on August 23, 1927. This 1921 postcard (above) depicts a demonstration in London, England, to “Save Sacco & Vanzetti.”

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