Divided society

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The Russian Revolution of 1917, when the communists seized power in Russia, and the wave of strikes in 1919, such as the Seattle General Strike and the Boston police strike, which many Americans believed were the start of a revolution.

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The author of Interpretation A was a former Klansman from Indiana, so he has a strong reason to justify his own membership and to play down the violence. In Indiana the Klan was very large and many members were ordinary, church-going Protestants who joined for social and patriotic reasons, so he saw it from the inside as a respectable organisation. As a white Protestant, he was never one of its targets. Writing in 1965, when the Klan was notorious for bombings and murders of civil rights workers in the South, he may also want to show that the Klan he joined was different. The author of Interpretation B is an African American historian, from the community that was the Klan's main target, and is writing a history of the struggle for civil rights, so the focus is on the victims and what they suffered. A historian writing in 1994 can study evidence of floggings, lynchings and the Klan's political power, and knows the long history of Klan violence, so B sees its respectability as a cover for terror.

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Interpretation A is convincing in some ways. When they were arrested in May 1920, both Sacco and Vanzetti were armed and both lied to the police about their activities, which looked like evidence of guilt. Some witnesses identified them, and the prosecution presented ballistic evidence that a fatal bullet had come from a pistol like Sacco's; later tests in 1961 and 1983 suggested that Sacco's gun did fire it, and some historians believe Sacco may have been guilty. A is also right that the case was examined repeatedly, with appeals from 1921 to 1927 and a review by Governor Fuller's committee, led by the president of Harvard, which upheld the verdict.

However, Interpretation B is more convincing about whether the trial was fair. The robbery and trial took place during the Red Scare, soon after the Palmer Raids, and the two men's anarchism and the fact that they had gone to Mexico to avoid the draft in 1917 were used to make them look dangerous and unpatriotic. Judge Webster Thayer was reported to have made hostile remarks about them outside court. The eyewitness evidence was contradictory, while Italian witnesses who gave them alibis were not believed. Their lies can be explained by fear: days before their arrest a fellow anarchist, Andrea Salsedo, had died after falling from a Bureau of Investigation office in New York. When Celestino Madeiros confessed to the crime in 1925, a new trial was refused.

Overall, B is more convincing. A relies on the fact that the courts and the Governor's committee approved the verdict, but B shows that the legal process itself was shaped by prejudice against Italians and radicals. Whether or not the men were guilty, the evidence suggests they did not receive a fair trial, as the Governor of Massachusetts officially admitted in 1977.

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Competition for jobs and housing was an important cause of racial tension. During and after the First World War hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved north in the Great Migration to work in the factories of cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York. When soldiers returned home in 1919, jobs became scarcer, and many white workers resented Black workers, especially when employers used them to break the strikes of that year. Housing was also a flashpoint: Black families were crowded into ghettos such as Chicago's South Side and Harlem, and when they tried to move into white neighbourhoods their homes were attacked and even bombed. These pressures exploded in the 'Red Summer' of 1919, when riots broke out in more than 20 cities; in Chicago 38 people were killed.

Racist beliefs and attitudes were also important. In the South, Jim Crow laws, upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v Ferguson (1896), enforced segregation, and most African Americans could not vote. Lynching continued, and in 1922 Southern senators blocked a bill to make it a federal crime. The Ku Klux Klan, revived in 1915 and inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation, grew to millions of members, spreading the belief that white Protestants should dominate. Racist ideas about white superiority were widespread, so Black soldiers who returned from the war expecting better treatment were met with hostility. In 1921 white mobs in Tulsa destroyed the prosperous Black district of Greenwood, showing resentment even of Black success.

Overall, racist beliefs and attitudes were the more important cause. Competition for jobs and housing explains why tension exploded in Northern cities in 1919, but it does not explain why white workers blamed Black workers rather than employers, or why competition so often ended in mob violence. In the South, where there was less new competition, racism kept segregation, disenfranchisement and lynching in place throughout the decade. Racism turned economic rivalry into racial violence, so competition was the trigger, but racist attitudes were the underlying cause of racial tension across the whole country.