In 1921 Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, and Nicola Sacco, a shoe factory worker, were both convicted of the murder of a Massachusetts paymaster and his guard.
Prejudice, anti-redism, anti-foreignism, and judicial lynching prevailed during the trial because the defendants were Italians, atheists, anarchists, and draft dodgers.
Even though in 1925 Celestino Madeiros, an ex-convict a
waiting for a murder trial, confessed to perpetrating the Braintree crimes, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927.
John Llewellyn Lewis (1880 – 1969) was president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960, and an advocate for the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which instituted the United Steel Workers of America and organized millions of different industrial workers in the 1930s.
In the 1950s, Lewis obtained periodic wage and benefit increases for miners and started the campaign for the first Federal Mine Safety Act in 1952, which granted annual safety examinations of mines operating wit over 14 workers.
