We told a few people that we were going to Syracuse this weekend and two of them asked, “Why?” Hey, Lou Reed went to school here. There is a show at the Everson Museum, a modern painting show from the Brooklyn Museum, that got a great review from our painting teacher so we hopped on the thruway. We stopped at Starbucks for a cappuccino and the next thing you know we were looking at a field of RVs with their doors open, an RV Liquidation Sale at the State Fairgrounds in Syracuse. It was early afternoon but hundreds of SU kids were stumbling around town with red plastic cups of beer in their hands, celebrating something called “May Fest” on April 26th.
We stumbled onto a Ben Shahn mural that was done in small tiles in 1967 and based on the the “good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler,” Sacco and Vanzetti trail. Long before the OJ trial in an earlier wave of domestic terrorism, the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, became the trial of the century. A plot had been exposed in which thirty bombs, disguised as free samples from the Gimbels department store, were sent to such pillars of American capitalism as J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller. The plot failed due to lack of sufficient postage and in the resulting atmosphere of shock, fear, and repression, two working-class Italian Americans with anarchist connections, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco became scapegoats in the reaction to the supposed threat of the combined forces of labor unrest, new waves of immigration, and the advance of the “red menace” that followed the end of World War I.
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