FOOTNOTES:
[1] Several years later another investigator measured the shed and said that it would have been impossible to maneuver a car from the right-hand threshold to the area on the left.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NIGHT OF MAY 5
A week after Stewart’s visit, Simon Johnson received a long-distance telephone call at his garage from Boda asking if the Overland was ready. Johnson told him it was. Boda said he would pick it up next day. Next day he did not appear. Another week passed, and Johnson began to worry about his bill. He asked Stewart if he could sell the car for what was owing on it. Stewart told him to wait.
On the evening of May 5 Johnson had felt out of sorts and gone to bed early. At a little after nine o’clock his wife, Ruth, was sitting in the front bedroom of their one-story wooden house on North Elm Street, a quarter of a mile from the garage, when she heard a knock at the front door. Going to the vestibule, she asked who it was. A voice replied that it was Mike Boda and that he had come for his car. From the bedroom Johnson recognized the foreign voice. As his wife came back, he whispered to her to go next door and telephone. She nodded, then said loudly enough to be heard outside: “Mr. Boda is here for his car. While you’re getting up I’ll go over for the milk.”
As she opened the front door and stepped outside she found herself caught in a beam of light. At first she could make out nothing beyond the whiteness, then she saw Boda vaguely outlined against a telephone pole ten feet away. As her eyes grew more used to the glare, she noticed two strangers walking toward her from across the railroad bridge thirty feet south of the house. She could hear them talking—in Italian, she thought. The glare caught them. They looked foreign. One was wearing a derby and an overcoat. The other, who wore a felt hat, Ruth Johnson remembered afterward because of his drooping mustache. Boda called out something to them and then walked toward her.
“Mr. Johnson isn’t feeling good,” she told him, “but he’s getting out of bed to get your car for you.”
Boda nodded as she walked past him toward the Bartlett house next door. The light, she now saw, came from a motorcycle. A man in a checked mackinaw with a hat pulled over his eyes was sitting in the saddle with one hand resting on the empty sidecar. After she had passed into the darkness she had the uneasy feeling that the men were following her. But there were no steps behind her as she turned up the Bartletts’ driveway. To her relief, the lights in the house were still on downstairs.
One of the Bartlett children let her in. Over the hall telephone, in a voice barely under control, she told the operator to get through to the police. For the moment that was all she could think of to say. West Bridgewater then had no police force, only two part-time policemen. The operator connected her with the house of one of them, Warren Laughton, who was also fire chief and water commissioner. Laughton had just stepped out, his wife said, but she took the message that the Johnsons had agreed on with Stewart: “Boda has come for his car.”
Johnson dressed slowly. When he finally stepped out of his house the first thing he noticed was Boda walking toward him from the bridge. Farther off he saw the motorcycle with the indeterminate outlines of the driver and the two other men. The usually dapper Boda was wearing a crumpled brown suit and an old slouch hat. He said he wanted to take the Overland away at once. Johnson asked him if he had brought license plates. Boda said he had not. Johnson told him he could not drive without plates. “I will take the chance,” Boda said. Johnson said that when his wife got back, they would go down to the garage.
Boda, watching Mrs. Johnson return, said he guessed it was too late for the car now, that he would send someone with plates for it next day. He said good night and turned away. The man in the mackinaw kicked the motorcycle’s starter pedal and the other two men stepped back. Ruth Johnson, as she passed, sensed that they were watching her and she thought she caught the word telephone mixed in their foreign speech.
Boda stepped into the sidecar, squatted down, and the motorcycle spluttered off north toward Brockton. The taillight was out, but Johnson had already noted the license plate: 871. As the motor echoed away, the two strangers, the man in the derby and the man with the drooping mustache, started back over the railroad bridge. The Johnsons watched them hesitate, turn, and disappear in the direction the motorcycle had taken.
Along empty North Elm Street they trudged for a mile, following the Bridgewater-Brockton trolley line. Meeting a solitary woman, they asked her where the car stop was. She pointed just beyond them to a white-striped pole on the corner of Sunset Avenue. They thanked her. A few minutes later the electric car from Bridgewater hummed along the track. It was 9:40 when the two men stepped aboard it.
Until he had a closer look at him, Austin Cole, the twenty-three-year-old conductor, thought that the man in the derby and the walrus mustache was a Portuguese named Tony. Cole asked if they were going to Brockton and the other man, who was clean-shaven, said yes. At that hour the car was almost empty. The newcomers walked stiffly down the aisle and sat in the first cross-seat at the rear. Somehow they reminded Cole of a pair who had got on at the same place about the same time a few weeks back.
The car swayed and rattled through the darkness. Where North Elm Street crossed the Brockton line it became Copeland Street, and the houses—most of them with their lights out now—began to give way to small shops and an occasional church. Cole, counting transfers, eyed the strangers in the back seat. They were aliens. Anyone could see that. The high-cheek boned man with the drooping mustache was easy to spot, but beyond his obviousness there was a quality about them both—a stiffness of feature, a fixed look to the eyes, just the awkward way they wore their clothes—that set them apart. Americans were put together more loosely.
When Warren Laughton arrived home and received Ruth Johnson’s message, he had no idea what was back of it but called Chief Stewart at once. However, by the time Stewart arrived at the Johnson house the two strangers were already on the Brockton car.
How Stewart knew they were on that car is not wholly clear. One account has it that Johnson followed them and saw the car stop at Sunset Avenue. It may be that the unnamed woman at the corner of Sunset Avenue reported them. In any case, Stewart went to the Bartlett house and called the Brockton police headquarters.
A few minutes before 10 P.M. Michael Connolly, the officer on duty at Station 2, Campello, received a call from the Brockton central station telling him that two foreigners on the trolley from Bridgewater had just tried to steal an auto. The trolley was due in Brockton any minute. Connolly put down a sandwich, nodded to the sergeant at the desk, and hurried off to Main Street with Officer Earl Vaughn. Vaughn walked north, Connolly headed south. It was four minutes past ten. Connolly saw the trolley’s headlight as it turned into Main Street from Keith Avenue. A hulking, florid, pugnacious man who liked a good pinch, he hoped that the suspects had not got off. He signaled to the motorman and swung aboard while the trolley was still moving.
As Connolly steadied himself and glanced down the aisle he saw the foreigners in the rear seat. A year later at the Dedham trial he gave his version of the arrest:
I went down through the car and when I got opposite the seat I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said, “Bridgewater.” I said, “What was you doing in Bridgewater?” They said, “We went down to see a friend of mine.” I said, “Who is your friend?” He said, “A man by the—they call him Poppy.” “Well,” I said, “I want you, you are under arrest.” Vanzetti was sitting on the inside of the seat ... and he went, put his hand on his hip pocket and I says, “Keep your hands on your lap, or you will be sorry.”
They wanted to know what they were arrested for and I says, “Suspicious characters.” We went on—oh, it was maybe about three minutes’ ride where ... Officer Vaughn got on ... and I told Officer Vaughn to fish Vanzetti, and I just gave Sacco a slight going over, just felt him over, did not go into his pockets, and we led them out the front way of the car.
Vaughn found a loaded revolver in the hip pocket of the man with the mustache and gave it to Connolly, who kept it in his hand all the way to the Brockton central station. Officers Spear and Snow of the central station had driven down to meet the trolley.
I put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back of our light machine [Connolly continued], and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.... I told them when we started that the first false move I would put a bullet in them. On the way to the station Sacco reached his hand to under his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes and on his lap.... I says to him, “Have you got a gun there?” He says, “No.” He says, “I ain’t got no gun.” “Well,” I says, “keep your hands outside your clothes.” We went along a little further and he done the same thing. I gets up on my knees on the front seat and I reaches over and I puts my hand on his coat but I did not see any gun. “Now,” I says, “Mister, if you put your hand in there again you are going to get into trouble.” He says, “I don’t want no trouble.” We reached the station, brought them up to the office and searched them.
The revolver taken from the mustached man was a 38-caliber Harrington & Richardson, its five chambers loaded with two Remington and three U. S. cartridges. Taken from him at the Campello station were four shotgun shells, a pocket knife, a handkerchief, twenty dollars, and several pamphlets. The smooth-faced man was searched by Officer Spear, who found a 32-caliber Colt automatic tucked in his waistband. The Colt had eight cartridges in the clip and one in the chamber. In the man’s pocket were twenty-three loose cartridges. Though all 32-caliber, the cartridges were of assorted makes—sixteen Peters, seven U. S., six Winchesters, and three Remingtons. In addition the man had in his pocket a penciled announcement in Italian that read:
Proletarians, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the owners. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak. Hour____Day____Hall____Admission free. Freedom of discussion to all. Take the ladies with you.
Within a quarter of an hour Chief Stewart arrived at the station, heady with excitement at the springing of his trap. With him were his night patrolmen Frank LeBaron and Warren Laughton, and Simon Johnson. Johnson at once identified the prisoners as the men he had seen standing by the motorcycle. Stewart then questioned them individually. He talked to the mustached man first, taking care to repeat the cautionary formula that the latter did not have to answer questions but that anything he said might be held against him. The prisoner did not hesitate. He said his name was Bartolomeo Vanzetti, that he was an Italian, thirty-two years old and a fish peddler, and that he lived at 35 Cherry Street, Plymouth. For the last two days, he said, he had been visiting his friend, Nick Sacco, in South Stoughton. The two of them had gone to Bridgewater that evening to see Vanzetti’s friend Poppy, but it was so late by the time they arrived that they decided Poppy had probably gone to bed and they might as well go home. They were on their way back to South Stoughton when the police picked them up. As for Poppy, that was only the man’s nickname. Vanzetti did not know his real name or even his address in Bridgewater, but he was a big man who usually wore a blue shirt. They had worked together in the Plymouth Cordage plant.
Vanzetti denied knowing anyone named Boda or Coacci. He said he had never before been in West Bridgewater. He had walked some distance before he had taken the trolley, but he had seen no motorcycle all evening. Stewart suddenly asked Vanzetti if he was an anarchist, if he approved of the government. All Vanzetti would admit was that he was a little different and that he liked things different. As to why he was carrying a revolver, he said that he was in business and needed it for protection. He had no permit.
Stewart’s questioning of the second man followed the same line. The suspect said his name was Nicola Sacco, that he was married, lived in South Stoughton, and had been in America eleven years. For the last two years he had worked at the Three-K factory in Stoughton. He had once looked for a job in Bridgewater, but he had never been in West Bridgewater until tonight. He did not know any Boda or Coacci. He had not seen a motorcycle. He was not an anarchist or Communist. As for the automatic in his waistband, he carried it because there were a lot of bad men about. He had bought it a long time ago at some shop near Hanover Street in Boston. The cartridges were from a box he had bought and they just happened to be in his pocket. He had planned to shoot them off in the woods with his friends.
Stewart’s questioning of both men lasted about ten minutes. They were then locked up.
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been behind bars before. Now, in adjoining cells under the shadowless glare of the overhead light, with a wooden shelf to sleep on and a seatless toilet in the corner, they sensed the isolating fear of arbitrary impersonal force. To the policemen going on and off duty they were curiosities and as such subject to a certain amount of crude horseplay. When the two men requested blankets the reply was that they would find it warm enough when they were lined up in the hall for a little live target practice, and one patrolman showed Vanzetti a cartridge which he then slipped into the barrel of his revolver, cocking it and pointing between the bars. When Vanzetti did not move, the other spat on the floor contemptuously and turned away.
According to the Registry of Motor Vehicles records the motorcycle in which Boda had ridden off belonged to Ricardo Orciani. A molder in a Norwood foundry, Orciani boarded at 1532 Hyde Park Avenue with Angelo Ventola, whose brother, Joseph Ventola, lived across the street. Orciani was picked up in his room the night of May 6 and taken to Brockton. Still wearing the checked mackinaw of the night before, he was identified by Simon and Ruth Johnson as the driver of the motorcycle. A short, cocky Italian with an assured round face and clipped mustache, he was unperturbed by his arrest. He refused to answer questions. Where he went, he told the police, was his own business. The revolver found in his bureau was one he just happened to have.
On Thursday, May 6, the district attorney for Norfolk and Plymouth counties, Frederick Gunn Katzmann, appeared at the Brockton station to take over the questioning, bringing with him a stenographer and an interpreter.
Katzmann was then in his late forties, a plump, ambitious man whose presence seemed underlined by the smartness of his dress, his snap-brim hat, and his raglan Burberry coat. He had grown up on one of the poorer streets of Hyde Park, a gray semi-industrial adjunct of Boston, attending the Boston Latin School and then crossing the Charles River to enter Harvard with the class of 1896. As an unathletic poor boy from Hyde Park, his years at Harvard were obscure. He belonged to no clubs, took part in no sports or undergraduate activities. Nor, on the other hand, was he a scholar. At the end of his senior year his one distinction was an honorable mention in engineering. Returning to Hyde Park with his diploma, he worked for several years as a meter-reader for the local electric-light company. What he really wanted was to be a lawyer. If he had had the money he would have gone on to the Harvard Law School. Instead he attended night sessions at Boston University, receiving his bachelor of laws degree in 1902.
For the next year he served as an apprentice with one of the established firms of Boston’s Pemberton Square. But the staid legal world of Beacon Hill and State Street was a fenced-off Brahmin preserve. A Hyde Park boy with a B.U. law degree and a dubious name would not penetrate that circle.
Katzmann was sensitive about his name. His mother’s maiden name—his own middle one—was Gunn, and he tried to emphasize its Anglican propriety in his signature. After his year at Pemberton Square he returned to the familiar puddle of Hyde Park and set up his office on the second floor of a wooden building on River Street. There, in a small ocher room with a creaking floor smelling of oil, he hung his two diplomas and filled several sectional bookcases with secondhand volumes of Corpus Juris. He prospered. From 1907 to 1908 he represented Hyde Park in the Massachusetts legislature. The following year he was appointed assistant district attorney. From 1909 until Hyde Park was absorbed by Boston in 1912 he served on the school committee. In November, 1916, he ran for district attorney and was elected to a three-year term. In 1919 he was re-elected.
Katzmann’s personality, like his figure, expanded with success. He could plan to go back to his Harvard twenty-fifth reunion with pride, the chill of his undergraduate years forgotten. As an active, conforming Republican, the prospect of a judgeship in the superior court or even, with luck, the state attorney-generalship lay ahead of him. The drawback of his name scarcely bothered him now. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in a Victorian frame house on the Mattapan side of River Street, within walking distance of his office. He was a member of the Hyde Park Lodge of Masons, the Cebra Tennis Club, and the Wollaston Golf Club. He became Hyde Park counsel for the Family Welfare Society of Boston. As district attorney he was popular if undistinguished, a routine prosecutor addicted to the McKinley-baroque style of oratory. The district had re-elected him in spite of the war-fanned prejudice against German names. As with many criminal lawyers, the law was for him, like politics, a game where at times one might have to cut a few corners, but in the end the best man usually won, and the loser congratulated the winner. It was a game played with other men’s years and sometimes with their lives—but still a game. Such was the man, soon to become a symbol of chicanery and deceit for indifferently informed protestors all over the world, as he arrived at the Brockton police station for the routine questioning of two holdup suspects.
Especially in questioning foreigners the district attorney favored the disarming approach, bluff, fatherly, confidential—you deal straight with me and I’ll deal straight with you. It is particularly effective after a suspect has spent a night in a cell. Katzmann first questioned Sacco. For some time he put merely routine questions to him about his acquaintances, about the gun and the cartridges. Sacco said he had bought his gun two years before in the North End. He had not given his right name then because he was afraid. As to Orciani, yes, he knew him but Vanzetti did not. Boda he had never heard of. Boda did not sound like an Italian name. Suddenly Katzmann asked if he knew anyone named Berardelli. Sacco asked him who Berardelli was. In the course of the interrogation Sacco said that his mother had died recently and that he was planning to return to Italy. When Katzmann asked if he had heard about the South Braintree murders, he said he had read in the Post “there was bandits robbing money.” He had worked in various shoe factories, he admitted, but never in Braintree. He had taken a day off early in April to go to Boston for his passport, but thought he had been working in Stoughton on April 15, the day of the holdup. That was all—the opening gambit—but both men were now aware of the South Braintree crime in relation to each other.
When Vanzetti appeared, Katzmann asked him if he spoke English. He said that he spoke a little. When reminded that he was free not to answer questions, he said he was willing to answer any. He had known Sacco for a year and a half. He told of taking the trolley from Stoughton to Bridgewater with him to see a friend, and of changing cars at Brockton. During the wait he had gone into a fruit store to buy some cigars and to a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. At no time, the evening of May 5, had he seen a man on a motorcycle. The name Boda meant nothing to him. His revolver he had bought four or five years before for eighteen or nineteen dollars at a shop on Hanover Street. At the same time he had bought a box of cartridges. Some of these he had fired off on the Plymouth beach. The remaining six were in the revolver. Katzmann led him indirectly to the date of the South Braintree crime. Vanzetti remembered Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth of April, because it had fallen on a Monday. He had no particular recollection of what he had done the preceding Thursday.
Katzmann had already discovered, before questioning the men, that Sacco had been absent from his work on April 15. When he left the police station he was convinced that Sacco had been involved in the South Braintree murders. Of Vanzetti he was not so sure.
After their questioning, the two Italians, unshaven and bedraggled, were photographed. They were then taken to the Brockton police court and charged with carrying concealed weapons. A local lawyer, William Callahan, was engaged for them. They pleaded guilty. The judge, after consulting with the district attorney’s office, held them without bail under an unrepealed wartime act that empowered him to hold men suspected of major crimes.
Later in the day several dozen witnesses were brought from South Braintree and Bridgewater to see if they could identify the prisoners as participants in either of the holdups. In the small Brockton police station there was no attempt to have the two Italians mixed with other suspects in a lineup. They were merely led into the emergency room by themselves where they stood docilely until ordered to kneel, put on and take off their hats, raise their arms, and assume the crouching position of a man firing a pistol. The various witnesses walked around them slowly observing them from every angle.
Mary Splaine, Frances Devlin, Minnie Kennedy, Louise Hayes, Mark Carrigan, Albert Frantello, Frank Burke, Hans Behrsin, Louis DeBeradinis, Jimmy Bostock, Mike Levangie, and Lewis Wade were among those who came from South Braintree. Minnie, Louise, Carrigan, Burke, and Bostock could not identify either man. Frantello was certain that they were not the ones he had seen on April 15. Wade thought Sacco resembled the man he saw shooting Berardelli.
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine studied the two men separately several times. Sacco was again ordered to raise his arm as if holding a pistol. The two women finally decided that he might possibly have been the man they saw leaning out of the car and shooting, but they were certain they had never seen Vanzetti before. Of all the South Braintree witnesses only Levangie, the gate-tender, picked Vanzetti as the driver of the getaway car. Jenny Novelli, coming to the station with a later group of witnesses, said that Sacco resembled the man she had seen in the bandit car, but she could not be positive about him.
The shotgun bandit in the Bridgewater holdup had been described by Constable Bowles as having a close-cropped mustache, and Slip Harding had so described him to a detective the afternoon of the crime, adding “I did not get much of a look at his face, but I think he was a Pole.” Nevertheless, he no sooner caught sight of the droop-mustached Vanzetti in the Brockton station than he pointed to him with great positiveness as the man with the shotgun. Cox, on the other hand, was inclined to think Vanzetti was not the man. Bowles thought that he might have been.
While these identifications were being made, Chief Stewart and Assistant District Attorney William Kane took the handcuffed but still unperturbed Orciani on an identification marathon from Brockton to Needham to Braintree to Bridgewater. Faced with Sacco and Vanzetti, Orciani smilingly declared that he had never seen them before in his life. In Needham George Hassam said Orciani was not the man who had tried to borrow his dealer’s plates in December. When Orciani was displayed in the Braintree town hall, three witnesses identified him as one of the April 15 gunmen. In Bridgewater Harding was positive that Orciani had been one of the gunmen in the December 24 holdup.
Back in Brockton, Orciani was taken to court and charged with exceeding the speed limit on his motorcycle and not having a taillight, the only things the police could pin on him for the moment. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he was held without bail. Although state and local police combed their districts for Boda they could find no trace of him.
The headlines of the Boston Evening Globe of May 6 announced that Governor Calvin Coolidge had vetoed the 2.75 Beer Bill. Tucked away on page six were several short paragraphs about “Bert Vanzetti, 32, of Plymouth, and Mike Sacco, 34, of South Stoughton ... arraigned this morning in the Brockton Police Court charged with carrying concealed weapons.” The last paragraph mentioned that an unnamed witness was almost sure that one of the men under arrest had driven the getaway car the day of the South Braintree murders.
These few lines were the first notice in print of what would in the next seven years become the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MEN AND THE TIMES
An introspective man, the sensitivity of his features concealed by prominent cheekbones and the drooping thatch of his ferocious mustache, Vanzetti was well known in North Plymouth’s Italian settlement. Unmarried, he boarded with the Fortini family in a house halfway up Cherry Lane. Daily he sold fish to the Italian and Portuguese families, pushing his cart with its clanking brass scales and load of haddock, cod, halibut, and swordfish along Cherry Lane and Cherry Court and Standish Avenue. The fish for his regular customers he carefully wrapped in newspapers, marking the packages with the name and price.
Most of the Italians of North Plymouth worked at the Plymouth Cordage Company. Vanzetti had been employed there for eighteen months during 1914 and 1915 but had quit when they wanted him to shift from an outside to an inside job, preferring to work outdoors on the Plymouth breakwater. He had been on the strikers’ fund committee in the Cordage strike that broke out over a wage dispute in January 1916. At that time the men were receiving eight dollars a week, the women six. The strikers demanded twelve and eight dollars, but finally accepted the company’s offer of a general raise of a dollar. After that, Vanzetti never worked or attempted to work for the Cordage again. In the spring of 1919, in an effort to be independent of bosses and foremen, he bought his pushcart and scales and knives from a friend who was going back to Italy.
Each morning at the Fortinis’ he would come downstairs in his slippers, take his boots from the zinc platform under the coal stove, and put them on before having breakfast. Then he would push his cart either to the town pier or the railroad station, returning to the Fortinis’ with his load of fish, which he could clean in the cellar. When fish were scarce he would go clamming on the flats between the town pier and the Cordage plant. He liked being on the windy beach.
Everybody knew the fish peddler, Bart the Beard, along the narrow lanes of his route, even the Yankee policemen. Children loved him. At mealtimes he was welcome in the Italian kitchens along his route, where he would sit at the table with his elbows on the checkered cotton tablecloth drinking coffee (for some years he had drunk nothing stronger) while the others downed glasses of homemade red-eye. He liked to talk and he liked to read. Over the years he had read Darwin, Marx, Spencer, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Zola, in random persistent efforts to overcome his lack of formal education. And he had read the anarchist fathers, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Malatesta, long since convinced that only anarchism could strike off the chains that fettered human freedom. His best-thumbed books, however, were The Divine Comedy and Renan’s Life of Jesus. Anarchist that he was, in his personal relations he was not a doctrinaire. At one time he had enrolled in an evening course given by a liberal Protestant minister in Plymouth.
Sacco would never have set foot inside a church. Like his friend a member of the loose-knit Galleani group of New England anarchists, he was rigidly class-conscious. Yet in his private life he was much more the petty-bourgeois than Vanzetti. Domesticity, which meant little to Vanzetti, touched Sacco more deeply than anything else. He lived with his wife Rosina and his seven-year-old son Dante in a five-room bungalow rented from Michael Kelley, the owner of the Three-K Shoe Company, where he worked. His wife, who was expecting another child, was a delicately featured auburn-haired woman of the northern Italian type. As is often the case with Latin women, she left politics to the men and held to her inherited Catholic faith.
Sacco, as a skilled piece worker, often earned sixty or seventy dollars a week. A short, muscular man, he read little except the daily paper and repetitious anarchist tracts, preferring to spend his free time in his garden. Often he would be there at sunrise of a summer morning before going off to the factory, and after hours he would be working among his vegetables until dark. Sometimes he gave Michael Kelley beans and corn and tomatoes to distribute to poor families in the vicinity. Kelley thought well of Sacco. During the cold months he gave him the small extra job of tending the factory furnace. When Sacco stoked the fire in the evening he always checked the premises. Mornings he always made sure that the place was warm by the time the workers arrived. Whenever he went to the factory after hours he carried his 32-caliber Colt with him. Kelley warned him several times to get a permit from the chief of police if he wanted to carry a pistol.
Sacco had come to the United States in 1908, the same year as Vanzetti. In the dozen years since their arrival they had both kept close to the immigrant community. They spoke scarcely more than a pidgin English.
“Nameless, in the crowd of nameless ones,” Vanzetti described himself in his twenty-page autobiography, “The Story of a Proletarian Life,” that he wrote in the Charlestown prison.
He was born in June 1888 into a prosperous family of Villafalletto, Piedmont, a village on the Magra River. Life in northwest Italy had the harshness of most peasant life, but the landscape itself could have served to illustrate the Georgics. Villafalletto was a rich agricultural community raising corn, wheat, beets, silkworms, and three crops of hay yearly. In the surrounding Alpine hills were apples, pears, cherries, grapes, plums, figs, and peaches. Vanzetti’s earliest memories were of his father planting peaches, of blue flowers in the garden of his house, and of his mother giving him honey every morning from a beehive.
Vanzetti lived with his parents, a brother, and two sisters until his fourteenth year. At school, loving study “with a real passion,” he won examination prizes that included a second prize in religious catechism. Under other circumstances the eager introspective boy might have developed into a teacher or scholar. William Thompson, who became Vanzetti’s counsel in 1924, thought he was one of the most gifted men he had known and—applying a Boston yardstick—felt that with an education he might have been a Harvard professor.
Vanzetti’s father was a practical peasant-minded man. For some time he could not make up his mind whether to apprentice his son or to let him continue his studies. But when he read in the Gazzetta del Popolo that forty-two Turin lawyers had applied for a position paying thirty-five lire a month, he decided then and there that education was a waste of money.
And so [Vanzetti wrote] in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor Conino, who ran a pastry shop in the city of Cuneo, and left me there to taste for the first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor. I worked for about twenty months there—from seven o’clock each morning until ten at night, every day, except for a three-hour vacation twice a month. From Cuneo I went to Cavour and found myself installed in the bakery of Signor Goitre, a place that I kept for three years. Conditions were no better than in Cuneo, except that the fortnightly free period was of five hours’ duration.
Later he became a caramel-maker in Turin. Scarcely out of his childhood, drifting from city to city, reading whatever came to hand, he found nothing to replace the memory of Villafalletto. His companions, the casual workers of the urban proletariat, were blasphemously Marxist, and he, still loyal to his heritage, would occasionally defend his religion with his fists. Yet, as the hard years of his adolescence passed, he too was drawn to the socialist image of a better world. His Catholicism eroded to a vague deism.
Early in 1907, working again in Turin, he fell ill of pleurisy, and his father came from Villafalletto to take him home. In spite of his suffering, when he saw from the train the deep green of his native countryside Vanzetti felt renewed.
And so I returned after six years spent in the fetid atmosphere of bakeries and restaurant kitchens, with rarely a breath of God’s air or a glimpse of His glorious world. Six years that might have been beautiful to a boy avid of learning and thirsty for a refreshing draught of the simple country life of his native village. Years of the great miracle which transforms the child into the man. Ah, that I might have had the leisure to watch the wonderful unfoldment!
After two months in bed, nursed by his mother, he began to recover. He was now twenty years old. Later he was to describe the period of his convalescence as one of the happiest of his life, a time of gardening, of talking, and wandering through the woods bordering the Magra. The happiness was brief, for his mother developed cancer and after three agonizing months died. Vanzetti cared for her as she had cared for him. He remained at her bedside day and night. For the last two months of her life he did not even undress. She died in his arms.
In after years he recalled that death in all its immediacy:
It was I who laid her in her coffin, I who accompanied her to the final resting place, I who threw the first handful of earth over her bier. And it was right that I should do so, for I was burying part of myself ... the void left has never been filled.
It was in the days following her death that he decided to go to America, to that land across the ocean where the past might be erased. On June 9, 1908, he left Villafalleto, accompanied far down the road by his tearful relatives and neighbors. After traveling across France he embarked at Le Havre in the packed steerage of a giant liner.
New York, the impersonal sky-swept metropolis, seemed to him from the huddled deck both inviting and threatening. In his autobiography one can sense the bewilderment of the immigrant coming down the gangplank.
How well I remember standing at the Battery, in lower New York, upon my arrival, alone, with a few poor belongings in the way of clothes, and very little money. Until yesterday I was among folks who understood me. This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land where my language meant little more to the native than the pitiful noises of a dumb animal. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer. The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me.
That depression year of 1908 was a sorry time for a friendless stranger to arrive in the United States. Like all immigrants facing the unknown, Vanzetti sought out his fellow countrymen; one of them found him a job in a fashionable restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher and slept in a vermin-infested garret. Three months later he moved on to a similar job at Mouquin’s. As in so many such places the glittering dining room bore little relation to the squalid kitchen. The scullery where Vanzetti worked was windowless.
When the electric light for some reason was out, it was totally dark so that we couldn’t move without running into things. The vapor of the boiling water where the plates, pans and silver were washed formed great drops of water on the ceiling, took up all the dust and grime there, then fell slowly one by one upon my head, as I worked below. During working hours the heat was terrific. The table leavings amassed in barrels near the pantry gave out nauseating exhalations. The sinks had no direct sewerage connection. Instead, the water was permitted to overrun to the floor. In the center of the room there was a drain. Every night the pipe was clogged and the greasy water rose higher and higher and we trudged in the slime.
We worked twelve hours one day and fourteen the next, with five hours off every other Sunday. Damp food hardly fit for dogs and five or six dollars a week was the pay. After eight months I left the place for fear of contracting consumption.
Three months he tramped the streets of New York looking for work. Behind the bright towering façade of the world city he saw the human refuse that slept out of doors and rummaged in garbage barrels. There were two worlds—he could see them for himself—the world of those who sat at the tables of Mouquin’s, and the world of those like himself who worked in sculleries. And for him they were irreconcilable. At an employment agency he met a young Italian who had not eaten for two days. Vanzetti bought him a meal. They decided to strike out into the country where they thought there would be a better chance of finding work and where at least the air would be clean.
With Vanzetti’s last savings they bought tickets and took a steamboat up the Connecticut River to Hartford. They then set off, aimless and hopeful, knocking on doors and asking for work but rarely finding any. A farmer they encountered took pity on them, fed them, and let them stay two weeks on his farm although he had no real need of their labor. Vanzetti never forgot the man’s kindness.
Their wanderings took them from village to village. Penniless, often soaked by rain, they were glad to find a few slices of bread at the end of the day or an abandoned stable to sleep in. Finally they managed to get work in a brick factory near Springfield, Massachusetts. The other man soon quit, but Vanzetti stayed on, the hard labor at the furnaces compensated for after work by the gay spirits of a little colony of his countrymen, natives of Piedmont, Tuscany, and Venice. In the evenings, someone would strike up a tune on a violin or an accordion. Some would dance. Vanzetti like to watch them, keeping time to the music with his foot.
Later he went to Meriden, Connecticut, where he worked almost beyond his strength in the stone pits. His friends kept urging him to go back to his trade as a pastry cook, insisting that the unskilled worker was the lowest animal in the social system. After two years Vanzetti returned to New York and took a job as assistant pastry chef in the Savarin Restaurant on Broadway. Eight months later he was unexpectedly discharged. He found a new job in a Seventh Avenue hotel, only to be discharged again after five months. Finally he learned the reason. The employment agencies were splitting their fees with the chefs, who found hiring and firing more profitable than keeping regular help.
Again he was out of work, walking the streets, unable to find a job even as a dishwasher, buffeted by the weather, sometimes sleeping in doorways, his clothes lined with newspapers to keep out the cold. After five months he learned of an employment agency that was looking for pick-and-shovel workers.
It was necessary [he recalled] to present one’s self with unbuttoned shirts, because they wanted to see what one was like, they wanted to see the hair on the chest of the worker, and good for me that I am Latin with haired chest. They used to say: “You are too small—you are too old.”
He was sent to a barrack settlement near Springfield, Massachusetts, and put to work on the railroad. After he had swung a pick several months and saved enough to pay off his debts in New York—a little over a hundred dollars—he moved on to Worcester, first working on the Boston & Albany Railroad, then in various factories.
In 1914 he arrived in Plymouth where he was employed as a gardener, then with a loading gang in the Plymouth Cordage Company. Through all his working years he spent his scant free hours in reading. “Ah, how many nights I sat over some volume by a flickering gas jet,” he wrote, “far into the morning hours! Barely had I laid my head on my pillow when the whistle sounded and back I went to the factory or stone pits.” His reading was now mostly political: Gorki and Merlino, Reclus, Marx, Leon de Labriola, the Testament of Carlo Pisacani, Mazzini’s Duties of Man.
He boarded at first with Vincenzo Brini and his wife Alfonsina in Suosso’s Lane, one of the unpaved unnumbered streets, like Cherry Street and Cordage Lane, of North Plymouth’s Little Italy. The houses were either the barracklike structures of the Cordage Company or else square boxes with haphazard additions, always with a grape arbor in the rear. They clustered round the Cordage plant like houses round a medieval cathedral.
The Brini house was a wooden double tenement opposite the Amerigo Vespucci Club, the social center of the Italian colony. Vanzetti had been drawn to Brini by his anarchist beliefs. Brini was a forceful, outstanding man, respected in the community for an integrity strong enough to overcome the suspicion of his free-thinking. For, in the pattern of immigrant groups, the Italians of Plymouth were more devout than those of the old country, their religion reinforcing their nationality in a foreign land. The Brini house was a way station for every passing anarchist. Luigi Galleani had stopped there, and big, genial, bearded Carlo Tresca, and the poet Arturo Giovannitti, and Malatesta himself, the aristocrat turned radical, with his beautiful voice. Night after night they used to sit in the Brini kitchen, talking, talking, talking of the brave new world to come.
Vanzetti felt himself more a relative than a boarder in the four years he lived at the Brinis’. He was fond of the little girls, LeFavre and Zora, but their brother Beltrando came to seem almost a son to him. Vanzetti always had time for the children when the parents had none. He used to take Beltrando on walks, showing him the kinds of flowers, or in the early evening pointing out the constellations. On Saturdays Beltrando would sometimes help him with the pushcart. Vanzetti liked to listen when Beltrando practiced his violin. Though he could not read music, Vanzetti had a sharp ear for the wrong note. “Paganini” he called the boy.
Although the Cordage strike had left him blacklisted in the local factories, Vanzetti stayed on at the Brinis’ taking odd jobs: carting bricks, digging cellars, building breakwaters, cutting ice, or after a northeaster shoveling snow for the town or the railroad. He continued in this casual way until the spring of 1917.
Nicola Sacco had been baptized Ferdinando, a name he sometimes used in later life, but when his eldest brother, Nicola, died, he inherited the name by which he came to be generally known. The third of seventeen children, he was born in 1891 into a prosperous peasant family living on the outskirts of Torremaggiore, an Adriatic village in the foothills of the Appenines. His father, who owned olive groves and vineyards and who had married the daughter of an oil and wine merchant, was not made conservative by his prosperity. He belonged to a local republican club. Nicola’s older brother Sabino went one step further and became a socialist.
Recalled from his Dedham prison cell, those early years at Torremaggiore became a sun-drenched idyll that Sacco would sometimes describe in letters that were at the same time exercises in English:
About sixty step from our vineyard we have a large piece of lant full of any quatity of vegetables that my brothers and I we used to coltivate them. So every morning before the sun shining used comes up and at night after the sun gos out I used to put one quarts of water on every plant of flowers and vegetables and the small fruit of little trees. While I was finished my work the sun shining was just coming up and I used always jumping upon well wall and look at the beauty sun shining and I do not know a long I used remane there look at that enchanted scene of beautiful.
At fourteen he left school to work in the fields. He became the reliable son. Sometimes his father would send him off in a cart paying off workmen or buying supplies. When the grapes were ripe he used to sleep in a hayrick to guard the vineyards. Summers he tended the steam engine that threshed all the wheat of the region. He liked machines.
When Sabino was called up for his three years in the army, Nicola took over as the head of the family. A trustworthy boy, old for his age, he still did not want to settle down in Torremaggiore. Sabino had long been fascinated by the dream of going to America and his younger brother absorbed the idea from him. Their father had a friend who had some years before emigrated to Milford, Massachusetts, and when they wrote to him he replied enthusiastically, urging them to come over as soon as possible.
Sabino finished his army years in the spring of 1908. In April he and Nicola sailed from Naples on one of the White Star ships. They landed in East Boston just before Nicola’s seventeenth birthday, and went at once to Milford.
The realities of immigrant life were too much for Sabino. Within a year he returned to Italy. Nicola stayed on. For his first few months he worked in Milford as a water boy with a road gang. Sometimes the engineer would let him tend the steam roller. He liked to stand beside the clanking shining engine, stoking it with coal or squirting oil into it from the long-nozzled can. After three months, however, he was given a pick and shovel. Then for a year he worked in the foundry of the Draper Corporation in Hopedale, trimming slag off pig iron.
As an unskilled foreign laborer he was at the bottom of the heap and he knew it. He decided to learn a trade. In Milford, Michael Kelley, then superintendent of the Milford Shoe Company, ran a school where immigrants could learn edge-trimming, lasting, stitching, and the other processes of shoe manufacture. The course lasted three months and cost fifty dollars. More burdensome than the fee was the necessity of spending a quarter of a year without earning anything. But Sacco took the chance and the course. He became a skilled edger.
The benefits were immediate. Where before he had been earning $1.15 a day, he could now earn $40 or $50 or more a week. After a short period in another factory, Sacco went to work in the Milford Shoe Company, remaining there from 1910 until the spring of 1917.
Three evenings a week he attended English classes, then compulsory for foreigners working in factories. Most of the pupils showed up in their work clothes, sweaty and indifferent, but Sacco always arrived washed and shaved, in a decent suit of clothes. His teacher remembered his courtesy, his eager mind. She liked him, as did everyone else in the clanbound community, even though they all knew that he was a radical.[2] Sacco joined the Italian dramatic society and took part in most of the neighborhood social events. It was at a benefit dance he got up for a crippled accordion player that he met Rosina Zambelli. She was sixteen that year, 1912, and had arrived from a convent school in Italy only a few months before to live with her parents. Father Zambelli heard a lot about Sacco as soon as he began to court Rosina. A sovversivo, a free-thinker! When the sovversivo eloped with his daughter, Zambelli was furious. “That one will end on the gallows!” he shouted. Later he became somewhat reconciled with his son-in-law.
Sacco was happier in his married life than he had ever been before. But for this it is probable that in a few years he would have followed his brother back to Italy. He never identified himself with America. He kept to the society of Italians and gave up his efforts to learn English. Like many radical-minded Italian immigrants of the time, he found himself drawn to anarchism. Until coming to America he had been a republican. In Milford he read Il Proletario, a paper edited by the poet-anarchist Giovannitti, Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva, and other more fugitive sheets. Sometimes he and Rosina acted in fund-raising propaganda melodramas with titles like Senza Padrone and Tempeste Sociale.
In 1913 he joined a local anarchist club, the Circolo di Studi Sociali. He helped organize meetings in neighboring towns, distributed crudely printed apocalyptic pamphlets, raised small sums of money, and occasionally welcomed visiting leaders like Tresca or Galleani. In 1916 his club held a meeting in Milford to raise money to support a strike Tresca was running in Minnesota. The meeting did not have a police permit and the speakers were arrested, among them Sacco. He was convicted and paid a fine for disturbing the peace. It was the only time he was ever arrested until the May night when he was picked up on the Brockton streetcar.
For most Americans the belated entry of the United States into World War I was an exhilarating experience. The bloody reality of the Civil War had long since been embroidered by legend. After half a century of peace—the Spanish-American affair was, after all, little more than a maneuver—combat could again seem the grandest of human hazards. For Sacco and Vanzetti the complex tragedy of the war was simplified to the formula of predatory capitalism. Their attitude was summed up in the Anarchist-Communist Anti-Conscription Appeal, which demanded that the workers refuse to serve in the Army at any cost.
A month after Congress declared war, President Wilson signed the Selective Military Conscription Bill, requiring every male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, whether or not a citizen of the United States, to register on June 5, 1917. The official notice explained that registration did not mean liability to military service except for citizens or those who had taken out first papers. Sacco and Vanzetti were not liable, but so remote were they from ordinary American life that neither of them understood this. The passage of the act filled them with panic. A week before the registration date they left for Mexico. It was only a week before this that Sacco and Vanzetti had first met.
Some thirty New England anarchists formed a cooperative community in Monterrey. Those who could found jobs. Sacco worked in a bakery, sometimes taking his pay in bread and carrying a sack of it back to the others. But life in the adobe huts was difficult. From the United States letters came telling of high wages there and how easy it was to avoid the draft. Gradually the Monterrey anarchists slipped back across the border. Sacco, who had suffered much from the separation from his family, returned to Massachusetts late in August. Under his mother’s maiden name of Mosmacotelli he rejoined his wife in Cambridge and worked briefly for the New England Candy Company, going on to a succession of poorly paid jobs in East Boston and Haverhill, and a better one in Brockton. This he gave up rather than buy a Liberty Bond. For a short period in October 1917 he was employed by Rice & Hutchins in South Braintree, but quit when he found that he was making only thirteen dollars a week.
A few days before the Armistice, when it was obvious that war was ending, Sacco reappeared under his own name at the Three-K Shoe Factory in South Stoughton. It was a small plant of about 125 workers, owned by the same Michael Kelley who had run the apprentice school in Milford. Sacco walked into his office and said, “I am Nick.” At first Kelley could not place him. Then he remembered the deft young Italian he had taught six years before. He called his elder son and told him, “George, if you need an edge-trimmer, here’s a good man.” And Sacco was a good man: steady, arriving early and staying late, “a great fellow to clean up everything.”
Unlike Sacco, Vanzetti had no personal goal. Returning to the United States at about the same time as Sacco, he wandered for a year: first to St. Louis; then Youngstown, Ohio; Farrell, Pennsylvania; and finally, in the summer of 1918, back to Plymouth. For a few months he stayed again with the Brinis, then Vincenzo found him a room with the Fortinis in Cherry Lane. But though Vanzetti no longer lived at the Brinis’, the old intimacy remained.
For a year Vanzetti worked at various jobs. Then he bought his pushcart. He had no competitors in North Plymouth, and there were days when he would sell up to two hundred pounds of fish. The difficulty was the supply. Often the trawlers did not go out until April, and sometimes they came back with empty holds. During the slack summer of 1919 Vanzetti worked for the town, but in the autumn he again pushed his cart. Sometimes he had to go to the Boston docks for his fish. When he was in the city he would drop in to see his friend, the printer Aldino Felicani, in the press room of the Italian daily La Notizia, or else would take the one-cent ferry to East Boston to visit some of his anarchist comrades there. After the first of Attorney General Palmer’s Red raids in November, Vanzetti told Felicani they should plan to set up an underground press.
In 1917 the slogans that after the war came to seem as shabby as a last-season’s theater poster had rung taut and true. Beat the Hun! Stand by the President! Keep the World Safe for Democracy!
It had been a time of sauerkraut turned liberty cabbage, of Wagner turned John Philip Sousa, of the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Dr. Karl Muck, driven from the podium and dachshunds driven from the streets. Several states had even passed laws against speaking German. High schools dropped the language from their curricula. Upper-school boys of my school, Roxbury Latin, who were still allowed the choice between Greek and German, used to joke that it was better to choose Greek because you could study it on the streetcar.
Except for the scapegoat Germans, all American racial and religious groups were welded into the unity of the war years. Only a meager minority, a few hundred thousand at most, continued to stand aside. What opposition to the war still remained came from the foreign-born of the big cities with their inherited dread of conscription, from the dwindling Socialist Party, the still belligerently confident Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—and from the anarchists.
War unity, seeming at the time to be forged in steel, has a way shortly afterward of showing its puttylike consistency—as 1919 soon demonstrated. In a soothing-syrup speech that year Senator Warren G. Harding coined normalcy, a word that has endured because it somehow expressed the common yearning to return to the idealized prewar period.
Instead of normalcy, 1919 was a year of fragmentation that began with President Wilson triumphant on his European journey and ended with him in America broken and defeated. It was the year of the High Cost of Living (as inflation was then known), the year of the great steel strike, the Seattle general strike, the outlaw railway strikes, coal strikes, textile strikes, maritime strikes, telephone operators’ strikes, the Boston police strike, actors’ strikes, even strikes of rent-payers. At one point almost three million workers were out.
Above all it was a year of antitheses. The first year of peace, it saw the United States reject the peace treaty. In Versailles the League of Nations was born, while in Berlin the Spartacist revolt was bloodily suppressed. The AEF paraded under Madison Square’s plaster triumphal arch in New York, and just before Christmas the Spanish-American War transport Buford—nicknamed the Soviet Ark—left Ellis Island for Russia with a load of assorted radical deportees that included Emma Goldman. Within a few months of each other the American Legion and the American Communist Party were founded. “Hell will now be for rent,” Billy Sunday announced triumphantly as Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the prohibition amendment; at the same time a crime wave surged from coast to coast.
It was a year of violence. When President Wilson landed in Boston on February 23 after his return from the Paris Peace Conference, Secret Service men lined the roofs and all windows were ordered closed as he drove through the streets. The day before, two members of the Groupa Pro Prensa, a Spanish anarchist circle in Philadelphia, were arrested by Secret Service agents and accused of plotting the President’s assassination. On April 28 Mayor Ole Hansen of Seattle, who had been denouncing the Red Menace, received a bomb package in the mail. The following afternoon a maid at the Atlanta home of Senator Thomas Hardwick, former chairman of the Committee on Immigration, opened a package that blew off her hands. Subsequently, thirty-four bomb packages were put in the mails addressed to Attorney General Palmer, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of Labor, the Commissioner of Immigration, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge K. M. Landis (who had recently presided at an anarchist trial), Senator Lee Overman (chairman of a committee investigating Bolshevism), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and others.
May Day, the first since the Armistice and the second since the Bolshevik coup d’état in Russia, was anticipated by the police in all major American cities. Attorney General Palmer had announced that there was a plot afoot to kill high officials and force American recognition of Soviet Russia. But the bomb packages were followed by nothing so drastic. In New York a Tom Mooney protest meeting that overflowed Carnegie Hall was charged by ex-servicemen in uniform. The New York offices of the socialist Call were sacked by a mob of soldiers and sailors. There were demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Chicago, and in Cleveland a man was killed when paraders carrying a red flag were attacked. The worst street fighting took place in Boston when the Communist-dominated Lettish Workmen’s Society attempted to hold a parade after a mass meeting in the Dudley Street Opera House.
In mid-May Luigi Galleani, the leading anarchist figure in the United States, was taken to the East Boston Immigration Station for deportation. A man of leonine bearing and much charm, Galleani had edited the brilliantly inflammatory Cronaca Sovversiva in Paterson, New Jersey, in Barre, Vermont, and finally in Lynn, Massachusetts. “Our master,” Vanzetti called him.
Following his deportation, on the evening of June 2, bombs exploded in eight cities. The chief target was Attorney General Palmer, whose house at 2132 R Street, Washington, had its front blown in just as he was going to bed. Windows of neighboring houses were shattered, including those of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt directly across the street. Apparently the bomb had gone off prematurely, killing its carrier, for parts of a body were found up and down the street, one fragment lying on the Roosevelt doorstep. The police also found a cheap suitcase large enough to hold about twenty-five pounds of dynamite, two pistols, a derby, a sandal, and shreds of a pin-stripe suit and a polka-dot bow tie. About fifty printed pink flyers entitled PLAIN WORDS were scattered over the neighborhood. Several of these were picked up by Secretary Roosevelt. They read:
The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked.
A time has come when the social question’s solution can be delayed no longer; the class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete victory for the international proletariat....
Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding, do not say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded slaves....
There will have to be bloodshed ... we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions....
Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!
The Anarchist Fighters.
The same evening a watchman was killed in New York when a bomb exploded on the steps of the town house of Judge Charles Nott. Our Lady of Victory Church in Philadelphia was bombed, and in Pittsburgh there were blasts at the homes of United States District Judge W. H. Thompson, who had once presided over a prosecution of Carlo Tresca, and Chief Inspector W. W. Sibray of the Bureau of Immigration.
In Boston Judge Hayden, who had dealt severely with the arrested May Day paraders, had his house almost demolished by a bomb made of iron pipe stuffed with shrapnel and dynamite. In suburban Newtonville, a similar bomb blew off the side of the house belonging to Representative Leland Powers, who had sponsored an anti-anarchy bill in the state legislature. Copies of PLAIN WORDS were found in the vicinity of both explosions.
Except for the watchman and the obliterated carrier, no one was injured in any of the bombings, but the effect over the country was one of dismay at the recurring challenge and indignation against the alien radicals held responsible. The New York Times might consider the bombings of “Bolshevik or I.W.W. origin,” but the public generally believed them the work of anarchists. Ever since Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre of 1886, when six policemen were killed by a bomb thrown at an anarchist meeting, Americans had been haunted by the image of the terrorist alien. President McKinley’s assassination by the half-mad half-anarchist Leo Czolgosz hardened the image. Such acts were in the tradition of the propaganda of the deed, as proclaimed by anarchist patriarchs like Malatesta and furthered gleefully by disciples like Johann Most in his Science of Revolutionary Warfare—A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poison, Etc., Etc.
But for their rare spectacular gestures of political violence, the anarchists would doubtless have been left to wither in the obscurity of their cult. The nobly absurd anarchic conception of a governmentless future when, in Vanzetti’s words, man would no longer be wolf to the man, was held in America by only a miniscule group—mostly immigrants from the more backward countries to whom it seemed quite feasible that workers could run factories cooperatively. Because by his philosophy of freedom each anarchist made his own basic decisions, there was no way of separating the theorist from the activist. Sacco and Vanzetti were said to be quietistic anarchists—as opposed to the activist bombers of June 2—yet the dividing line was as difficult to establish in 1919 as it was two generations before with the abolitionists, whose ranks could include John Greenleaf Whittier and John Brown.
“Property is theft,” Proudhon had said, and some anarchists accepted this literally, asserting, in Galleani’s words, “the right to expropriate the bourgeoisie—which lives by theft—whenever the need presses or the struggle against the evil social order demands it.” During the 1880s in Paris, one such anarchist expropriator, Clement Duval, was convicted of robbery and sent to Devil’s Island. His successor, François Ravachol, became one of the saints of anarchism through his bombings of the houses of judges. In the course of various robberies Ravachol committed several brutal murders.[3]
Galleani spoke well of both Duval and Ravachol, and when Duval escaped from Devil’s Island and reached the United States, published his prison memoirs and a biographical sketch in Cronaca Sovversiva. In 1917 this material appeared in book form, edited by Andrea Salsedo, a forty-year-old Sicilian who had helped Galleani with his newspaper.
The bombing of his house may well have caused Attorney General Palmer to believe that “resident aliens in large numbers and of a desperate type” were conspiring to overthrow the government by means of a “physical force revolution.” Certainly from then on Red plots became his phobia. Appointing William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret Service, Director of the Bureau of Investigation, Palmer ordered him to conduct “a dragnet for Reds all over the country.”
The first raids took place on November 7, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly, an army of government agents, local police, and special deputies, augmented by a haphazard swarm of private detectives, many of dubious background, swooped down on the various headquarters of the Communist Party, the Communist Labor Party, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Russian anarchists. During that wild and vengeful night the raiders smashed their way into buildings in all the large cities, wrecked property, broke open safes, and indifferent to warrants and the niceties of habeas corpus hustled thousands of citizens as well as noncitizens to the lockup.
But the November raids were only a prelude to the sweeping raids of January 2, 1920. These were timed to take place simultaneously in thirty-three cities. Six thousand warrants were issued, and thousands of aliens were picked up with or without warrants. Subsequently, about three thousand were held for deportation—although in the end only 446 of these were deported.
In Massachusetts there were fourteen such raids, and in Boston five hundred aliens were marched through the streets in chains and taken to the Deer Island House of Correction, where they were isolated in brutally chaotic conditions.
The callous illegalities of the raiding procedures caused much indignation among native Americans. In Boston, Federal Judge George Anderson spoke out sharply against the mob actions of government agents. Twelve nationally known lawyers, among them Zechariah Chafee, Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter, all of the Harvard Law School, collaborated on a report condemning the illegal practices of the Justice Department.
If the raids caused indignation among the native-born, among the alien radicals they caused terror. No one seemed safe from the midnight knock on the door, the hard-faced men with clubs, the blinding lights and the hammering questions of the night-long interrogation. Rumor exaggerated the Palmer proceedings to outright murder as they were discussed by Sacco and his friends in Stoughton and by Vanzetti and his comrades on Sunday afternoons in the Italian Independent Naturalization Club of East Boston.
After months of following each clue, even to tracing the polka-dot tie to the store that sold it, Department of Justice agents concluded that the man blown to pieces in the bombing of Attorney General Palmer’s house was an Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoce, a member of the dynamite-minded group in Paterson, New Jersey. Valdinoce had been associated there with Galleani in the printing of the Cronaca Sovversiva. In addition, Flynn, the new Bureau of Investigation director, had collected enough evidence to convince him that an explosion of the same date in Paterson was the work of another local anarchist, Ruggero Baccini, who had since been deported. There were no clues in the other eleven bombings, though Flynn was certain that they were all the work of anarchists and that the dynamite had come from Paterson. Efforts to determine the origin of the PLAIN WORDS flyer failed.
Then, in February 1920, Flynn received a tip from an ostensible direct-action anarchist named Ravarini. Recently, in Boston, Ravarini had sold subscriptions to Malatesta’s Umanita Nuova to Sacco, Vanzetti, Boda, and Orciani, among others. He told a federal agent that a Roberto Elia, a printer at Canzani’s Printing Shop in Brooklyn, New York, was engaged in publishing anarchist literature, including flyers. On the night of February 25, Bureau agents picked up Elia in his lodgings. At the print shop the agents turned up pink paper similar to that of the flyer and unearthed from the Canzani fonts the peculiar S that had not matched the typeface used for the first nine letters of the title PLAIN WORDS. Canzani’s typesetter turned out to be Galleani’s old associate, Andrea Salsedo.
Salsedo and Elia, questioned separately, at first maintained they knew nothing about PLAIN WORDS. They were taken to the Manhattan offices of the Department of Justice at 21 Park Row and there they remained until the morning of May 2 when Salsedo’s smashed body was found on the pavement, fourteen floors beneath the window of his room. It was believed by the anarchists at the time, and afterward by many liberals, that Salsedo had been tortured by Bureau agents and then thrown from the window. Actually, Salsedo was a suicide.
Neither he nor Elia was under formal arrest at Park Row, although the agents made it clear that the alternative to staying was jail or deportation. According to a Department of Justice report, Salsedo confessed that he had printed PLAIN WORDS. Elia admitted that he had been in the shop and that he had delivered a bundle of the flyers to Carlo Recchi, a member of the Galleani group. After consulting with their lawyer, Narciso Donato, the men agreed that they would remain in the Department’s offices, “that their whereabouts should remain unknown to all except their families, their attorney, and certain of their friends, and, further, that neither should be subjected to interrogation or examination without the presence of their attorney.” Donato later said that his clients had been well treated and had been questioned only when he was present.
Subsequently, Elia was deported. Before leaving the country he set down his own version of the events at Park Row in an affidavit for one of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense lawyers. On March 8, he related, while being taken to an interrogation room, he had passed another room where he had seen Salsedo surrounded by four agents in their shirtsleeves. Then, while he himself was being interrogated, he had heard Salsedo scream. The next morning he had been taken to Director Flynn’s office.
I was alone in the outer room [Elia deposed] until Salsedo came in with Mr. Donato. Salsedo’s face and forehead were bruised from the beating he had received. He had red spots and scratches on his cheeks and temples and his eyes were vacant. He was depressed. I never saw him normal during all the times after that we were together.
In Mr. Flynn’s waiting room Salsedo told me about his interrogation the night before. They showed him a bloody sandal and said “You see this blood? This is the blood of the man who was blown up. Tell me whose blood that is.” He would say that he did not know, and they would swear at him and strike him in the face or body with the heel of the sandal. They did this over and over again.
Mr. Donato told me that we were charged with murder in the first degree. Salsedo said “I do not want to die. We have done nothing, but we are in a trap. What are we to do? I will admit that I printed PLAIN WORDS, because I cannot stand any more, and maybe I will help myself.”...
On the next day we were questioned by Mr. Flynn. Salsedo said that he had printed the leaflet in May 1919; that I had nothing to do with it; that it had been ordered by one Recchi. I stated that I had seen Salsedo printing it, but had nothing to do with it....
After that we were not formally questioned any more and we were very well treated. A room was fitted up for us with two beds. We had good meals; we were taken out for walks; once we were taken to the movies. When any one asked me if I was content or if I was willing to stay at the Department of Justice I always said “Yes,” because I did not want to go to prison and I thought that all depended upon the good will of the agents....
Mr. Donato came to see us frequently. So did Salsedo’s wife, who sought to tranquillize him. But Salsedo was always despondent and in fear. He would say, “We who are innocent, are in jail. Maybe those who are guilty are out there in freedom.” I would tell him that we would be free, but he did not believe it. He would lie groaning and lamenting all the night. He complained continually of pains in his stomach and head. He was always nervous. He refused absolutely to eat. He showed clear signs of an unbalancing mind....
On the evening of Sunday, May 2nd, Salsedo walked a little with me in the corridor as was our custom. He went to bed about nine o’clock. Then I sat with the Department of Justice agents who were smoking and telling stories. About eleven o’clock I came into our room with Palmera the interpreter. Salsedo begged me to turn off the light; he said “I have a terrible headache. That cigarette you gave me hurt me.”
I went to bed. For a long time I heard Salsedo groaning and lamenting. Then I fell asleep. I know nothing more until I was awakened by the watchman who came to call us every morning between five and six o’clock so that we should be up before the cleaning women came to the offices. I said “Is it not early?” He answered, “Your comrade is dead. He has jumped from the window.”
To the anarchist groups of New York, New Jersey, and New England the detention of Elia and Salsedo was ominous. Tresca, who had succeeded the deported Galleani as leader, consulted with Donato, but was unable to see the men. He suspected the lawyer of back-hand dealings with the Department of Justice.
On Sunday afternoon, April 25, fifteen or twenty of the East Boston anarchists, meeting in their hall overlooking the docks, discussed what they could do for Elia and Salsedo. Sacco, Vanzetti, and Orciani were present. Ever since they had learned of their comrades’ mysterious detention these men had been raising money and sending it on without, however, knowing just where it was going. Somebody from Boston, they now decided, must go to New York and find out what was happening. Vanzetti, being self-employed and having no family responsibilities, was chosen. He left that evening on the train.
In New York he found that Tresca could give him little new information. Luigi Quintiliano, the chairman of a committee to defend Palmer raid victims, warned Vanzetti that there would soon be more raids and urged him to tell his Massachusetts friends to get rid of any anarchist literature they might possess.
Vanzetti passed on this warning when he returned to Boston, but about Salsedo and Elia he had no more to tell than was known before.
In spite of the Attorney General’s prediction that a gigantic bomb plot and general strike would erupt on May Day, the day was for the most part a quiet one all over the country. Palmer’s zeal produced only a few victims, among them members of the Association of Harvard Clubs who, marching in Washington behind their crimson banners, found themselves mistaken for a Red parade. Public opinion began to turn against the Attorney General, even as his shadow still loomed large over the alien radicals.
At their Sunday meeting on May 2, the East Boston Anarchists were not aware of any change in the public temper. To them the times seemed desperate, with the possibility of a police ambush at the next corner. Most of their talk was about getting rid of their anarchist literature. Orciani, who had recently seen Boda, reported that the latter still owned a car; he thought they might use it for rounding up the literature. Sacco suggested that he and Vanzetti and Orciani should meet with Boda some time early in the week. Vanzetti reminded everyone that there would be a meeting in Brockton on May 9 to raise money for Salsedo and Elia.
After the meeting Sacco told Vanzetti that on the ninth he and his family would be on their way to Italy. He suggested that Vanzetti come back to Stoughton with him for a last visit. Vanzetti promised to come down the following afternoon.
Monday morning Vanzetti visited the Boston piers but found that fish was still scarce and too expensive for his pushcart customers. He had lunch with some Italian friends near Haymarket Square and heard the news of Salsedo’s death. Late in the afternoon he took the train for Stoughton.
Only Rosina and the child were at the bungalow when he arrived. Sacco had quit his job on Saturday, but had gone back to the factory to help break in a new man. He returned just after five o’clock.
Tuesday morning Sacco had to go in to Boston to the Italian Consulate for his passport. Vanzetti spent the day reading. After Sacco had picked up the passport he rode out to Hyde Park on the el to meet Orciani, who had come down from Readville on his motorcycle. They talked again about the books and pamphlets that had to be collected, and Orciani said they could arrange with Boda to get the car the next evening. He gave Sacco a ride back to Stoughton. As they chugged into the yard of the bungalow they saw young George Kelley, the factory superintendent, who lived next door. Sacco introduced him to Orciani. They stood there a few minutes talking about motorcycles and the weather. Orciani said he would be over again next afternoon.
On Wednesday Sacco stayed home all day. He and Vanzetti chopped wood in the morning, had lunch, took a walk, and then sat down in the kitchen while Rosina went on with the packing. Vanzetti said afterward that he happened to notice several shotgun shells on top of the kitchen cabinet. Rather than see them thrown out he put them in his pocket, thinking he might sell them to some comrade in Plymouth and perhaps make a quarter for the cause.
Orciani arrived on his motorcycle about half past four, the elusive Boda in the sidecar. Boda told them he had telephoned the garage man about his car; they could pick it up that evening. After the four ate supper, Orciani and Boda left on the motorcycle, having agreed to meet Sacco and Vanzetti at Elm Square in West Bridgewater.
Sacco and Vanzetti caught the 7:20 streetcar for Brockton. There they found they had to wait for the Bridgewater car. It was growing dark. Vanzetti went into a store on Main Street and bought several cigars. Then the two men had a cup of coffee in a lunchroom. While they drank it Vanzetti took out a paper and pencil and began to write the notice for the Sunday meeting in Brockton.
He continued to work on it after they boarded the Bridgewater car. Just before they reached West Bridgewater he gave the notice to Sacco and told him it was ready for the printer. At the Elm Square they waited a while under the street light by the Johnson brothers’ garage, which was shut. Then, after starting toward Bridgewater, they turned back, recrossed the square, and walked in the direction of Brockton. As they reached the railroad bridge they saw the solitary beam of a motorcycle headlight snaking toward them.