By Jon Curley
With this week’s publication of Bartolomeo Vanzetti’s EVENTS AND VICTIMS, I wish to share more pics and history regarding our courageous, imaginative, and murdered author. Here are photographs taken yesterday afternoon in my hometown of Bridgewater, Massachusetts.
On December 19, 1919 a bank robbery occurred at the bank pictured below (purposely shrouded in shadows as such citadels of greed should be), now the Bridgewater Saving Bank. Bartolomeo Vanzetti was charged with the Bridgewater crime after he was charged by the Braintree robbery. He was identified at the corner of Hale Street and Broad Street (see below) by a local paperboy who thought that one of the fleeing robbers ran to the hold-up car “like an Italian.”
One of the great virtues of rampant and ongoing American xenophobia is its propensity for ceaseless inventiveness. The ascription of ethnically inflected mobility to Vanzetti? Brilliant in its insidiousness and falsity. Let me, as St. Patrick’s Day nears, hop wildly like an Irishman, like a leprechaun, on my fairy mound, situated here in our world where reality and literature explore the dire conditions of our times!
Buy your copy of EVENTS AND VICTIMS now!
