August 19, 2007

Broadcast Date: 
Aug 19 2007

A documentary on the Sacco and Vanzetti case highlights the links to anti-immigrant sentiment today, plus Gerald Horne's new biographies of scriptwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, and African-American fascist Lawrence Dennis.

Episode segments
  • Sacco and Vanzetti
    Film, Arts & Culture
    Peter Miller is the director and coproducer of Sacco and Vanzetti. His previous documentaries include Frank Lloyd Wright, The Internationale, and The Uprising of ‘34. 
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    A discussion of a fascinating new documentary about the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a shoemaker and a fishmonger, who were accused of robbery and murder in 1920; during the course of the case they were demonized as anarchists and immigrants, a story with close parallels to the present day.

  • Historian Gerald Horne
    Arts & Culture, Literature
    Gerald Horne, a professor of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author, most recently, of The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten and The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing and the Rise of Right-Wind Extremism in the U.S.
    Esther Kaplan and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark

    A discussion of new biographies of one left-wing radical, Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, and one right-wing radical, Lawrence Dennis, a leading American advocate of fascism who was born African-American but passed as white throughout his adult life