FOOTNOTES:
[4] The preliminary hearing on his participation in the South Braintree murders followed on May 26 before Judge Avery in the Quincy District Court. Sacco, against whom the evidence seemed more substantial, had appeared in the Quincy Court on May 8.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE YEAR BETWEEN
A few days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti their typesetter friend Aldino Felicani organized a defense committee among the East Boston anarchists. The seventeen members were skilled workers—one was a building contractor—but they were men detached from American life, distrustful of outsiders. The freeing of their comrades from the ominous charge hanging over them was, they felt, their affair. Their first pamphlet, published in Italian, appealed to “Men of Good Will.”
Two of our active good friends and comrades ... have become involved in one of those tragic, dark legal plots in which innocence has all the semblance of guilt, and honesty has the hypocritical mask put on by the subtlest of rogues.... In a country where subversive ideas are persecuted with Inquisitorial fury, anarchists are beyond the pale.... We are convinced that an attempt is being made, through the persons of Sacco and Vanzetti, to strike at all subversive elements and their libertarian ideas. A sentence ... would serve, in the hands of our enemies, to show that lovers of liberty are common criminals and that their ideas are not entitled to any of the civil freedoms.... We face a severe, a terrible test.
Energetically the committee raised a defense fund from the nickels and dimes and quarters of their countrymen in the crowded streets of the North End and East Boston. It was the committee that hired Graham as counsel, counting on his American skill to mediate between the two Italians and the complexities of Massachusetts justice. For the committee, the result of the Plymouth trial was a disaster.
In New York, Carlo Tresca and his fellow anarchists were appalled by the verdict. Tresca sent Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom he had been living since he met her in a 1912 May Day parade, to talk matters over with Felicani. “Gurley,” the founder and secretary of the Workers’ Defense Union, was bound for Boston in any case, to see what could be done for the aliens imprisoned on Deer Island as a result of the Palmer raids. With Mrs. Marion Emerson, secretary of a workers’ defense organization in Boston, she made her way through the twisting streets of the North End to the offices of La Notizia, and there, under the shadow of the Old North Church spire, they talked with the tall, indignant Felicani, who at that time could speak only through an interpreter. So it was that Gurley and Mrs. Emerson on a July afternoon in 1920 were the first non-Italian sympathizers to hear the story of Sacco and Vanzetti. Later Felicani took them to see the other now thoroughly worried members of the committee, who asked them to try to arrange English-speaking protest meetings and to help find a lawyer who would understand the defendants’ radical viewpoint.
Returning to New York, Gurley hired the Forward Hall on East Broadway for a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting. She, the president of the Free Speech League, and the veteran anarchist Harry Kelly, were the speakers. So few people showed up that the caretaker of the hall insisted on immediate payment. “You’ll never get it in a collection,” he explained. Shortly afterward Mrs. Emerson organized a similarly uneventful meeting in the rickety Grand Opera House in Boston’s South End.
It was through Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, both of whom had known him and worked with him over the years, that Fred Moore now entered the case. It was a fateful entry. At this point, while Sacco and Vanzetti were still inconspicuous foreigners whose names meant nothing, a capable conservative lawyer like their later counsel William Thompson might have secured their acquittal. Moore, the radical labor lawyer, was to make them internationally famous, to link their names indissolubly, but he may well have signed their death warrants in the process.
Tresca had met Moore eight years earlier during the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 and the murder trial that was its by-product.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city of unrelieved drabness on the banks of the Merrimack, was in 1912 a polyglot company town owned by the Lawrences and the Lowells, and worked by Italians, Germans, French-Canadians, Poles, Lithuanians, Belgians, and Syrians, with a scattering of Russians, Jews, and Greeks. When the Massachusetts legislature in its 1911 autumn session reduced the work week from fifty-six to fifty-four hours, the Lawrence textile mills countered by reducing wages correspondingly. Weekly pay then averaged $8.76 a week for adults, $5 or less for the many child workers.
The calculated meanness of the reduction, amounting only to about twenty-five cents, so infuriated the workers that on January 12, 1912, they spontaneously downed tools, in some cases smashing the looms. There followed a bitter struggle that brought twenty-three thousand workers onto the streets. After a number of riots between strikers and police, Governor Eugene Foss called out the militia.
The strike was taken over and managed by the I.W.W. with anarchist assistance. From New York came Joe Ettor of the I.W.W. executive board, and Arturo Giovannitti. Ettor was an organizer, Giovannitti a persuasive speaker who kept up the strikers’ courage through the bitter winter. In finally winning the strike the I.W.W. reached the peak of its influence in the East.
One afternoon while police and militia were charging a picket line, a girl worker, Annie Lopizza, was shot dead. No one knew who fired the shot, but the police at once arrested “the troublemakers” Ettor and Giovannitti as accessories to murder. They were held without bail until the end of the strike.
With the leaders in jail the I.W.W.’s Big Bill Haywood, the one-eyed giant who was already almost a legend, came to Lawrence and took command. With him he brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. By the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial she had become enormously fat, but in 1912 she was a slim young firebrand with flashing blue eyes and a lacerating tongue. Theodore Dreiser had called her the East Side Joan of Arc. An Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee was at once formed, and Haywood had Fred Moore brought on from California. The strategy of the committee was to have the indefatigable and ingenious Moore help in selecting the witnesses and collecting evidence but to have the case tried by a well-known local conservative. James Sisk, a staid Lynn lawyer, was chosen to represent Ettor and Giovannitti in court.
The results of this strategy were highly successful. In spite of the pressure of moneyed opinion against them, Ettor and Giovannitti, appearing before the Irish-Catholic Judge Joseph Quinn and a native-American jury, were acquitted.
It was this pattern that Tresca had in mind when he sent Moore to Boston in the fall of 1920. Moore was again to be the assiduous and inspired fact-gatherer. He would again prepare the brief and then some irreproachable Massachusetts lawyer would try the case. Such, too, was the intention of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when it accepted Moore. It was not Moore’s intention at all.
Moore, then in his late thirties, was the barrister bohemian in looks, dress, and manner. His long hair seemed to flow back from his forehead, he often wore sandals, and the broad-brimmed Western hat he brought with him from California became almost his trademark in Boston. He had started out as a railroad attorney in Seattle, then moved on to Los Angeles where for a time he seemed a brilliant young corporation lawyer on the way up. But money and an established bourgeois existence meant nothing to him. When a casual I.W.W. acquaintance arrested in a free-speech fight in San Diego telephoned him for help, Moore picked up his broad-brimmed hat and a revolver, told his associates he would be back shortly, and walked out of the promise of his law career. After that he went wherever his underdog interests took him. He became a labor defense expert, particularly devoted to serving the I.W.W., drifting from one labor fight to another, taking on the hopeless, desperate cases that could not afford better-known lawyers.
When he ran into Tresca in New York in the summer of 1920, he had just come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had defended “Big Boy” Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer charged with dynamiting the house of a Standard Oil official. The charge was a frame-up, a fact cheerfully accepted by the townspeople, the prosecution, the defense, the judge, and the jury. Fortunately for Moore, one of the jurymen with a personal grudge against Standard Oil held out for acquittal. In a second trial the fraud was too apparent and Krieger was freed.
As Moore headed for Boston he was certain it would be a similar story with Sacco and Vanzetti, and the more he reflected on the ramifications of the South Braintree crime the more convinced he became that this backwater New England affair could be his big case, the culmination of his career.
Eugene Lyons, the young left-wing labor journalist who had been with Moore in Oklahoma and who later followed him to Massachusetts to work for the Defense Committee, was awed by the lawyer’s dexterity. Moore, he wrote long afterward,
was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized the materials of a world issue in what appeared to others a routine matter. A socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and returned to New York to report that “there’s no story in it ... just a couple of wops in a jam.” Not one of the members of the defense committee formed immediately after the men’s arrest suspected that the affair was anything larger than it seemed. When the case grew into a historical tussle, these men were utterly bewildered. But Moore saw its magnitude from the first. His legal tactics have been the subject of dispute and recrimination. I think that there is some color of truth, indeed, to the charge that he sometimes subordinated the literal needs of legalistic procedure to the larger needs of the case as a symbol of the class struggle. If he had not done so, Sacco and Vanzetti would have died six years earlier, without the solace of martyrdom.
With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore proceeded to clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case.
Arriving in Boston, Moore installed himself at 5 Rollins Place, a small four-story brick house in a cul-de-sac of Beacon Hill in that no-man’s land where proper Boston tapers off into the improper. The house, masked by a wooden porch with Greek-revival columns, and the brick-paved roadway, too narrow for any vehicle, seemed to suggest that whoever might live there would be gone tomorrow, a feeling that harmonized with Moore’s personality. Shortly after moving in, Moore married Lola Darroch, the handsome young woman who had been with him during the Krieger trial. Their marriage lasted officially a little over a year, though unofficially it was concluded much sooner when Lola was supplanted by a Lithuanian stenographer. In the environment this seemed rational enough. Wherever Moore went in his travels he pursued his weakness, which he considered a need, for pretty young women.
Five Rollins Place was a catchall: a home for Moore and his assorted associates, an informal office, a dormitory for out-of-town enthusiasts, Italian and otherwise, a lodging house for prospective witnesses and intellectuals and freshly minted college girls heavy with purpose. There were nights of talk and more talk, of makeshift Prohibition drinking, of song and vacillating affections. Eugene Lyons, an almost daily visitor, later wrote that:
Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this tense atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck detectives sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A.F. of L. officials hobnobbed with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired little poetess swept like a tornado through the defense group, working havoc among the harassed men and spreading despair among their wives and sweethearts; she dominated the lives of a writer, a strike leader, a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in quick succession, with forays into the domestic preserves of half a dozen others, while composing soulful verses in defense of the accused Italians. A gawky, half-savage boy lured from the Maine woods to plead with his mother, a crucial identification witness, to retract her perjured testimony, had to be forced, literally, to take a bath; soon he blossomed into a spic-and-span U.S. Marine. One of the closest comrades and most ardent defenders of Sacco fell hopelessly in love with Sacco’s wife (he married her after Sacco’s execution). Within the larger drama of the case, there developed complicated cycles of lesser dramas of private emotion.
Before going to Boston, Lyons had gone to Italy in pursuit of revolutions. Moore wrote him there, persuading him to create propaganda for the case and to interview potential witnesses. In that convulsive period of red-flagged cities and rising Fascism the arrest of two Italians in a New England mill town was a small enough pebble on an eroding beach, but Lyons—through Sacco’s brother Sabino, now the mayor of Torremaggiore—managed to get Leon Mucci to bring the Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Italian Chamber of Deputies for its initial foreign mention.[5]
Coacci, Lyons found in a sleepy village in the Marchesan hills, posing grandly as an international revolutionary:
His shelves were lined with brochures on the home manufacture of bombs and he professed himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So deep, however, had the fear of American law and the police entered his heart that it needed a week of pleading and threatening and pressure by Merlino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, to bring this terrorist to the point of signing an innocuous affidavit in support of Sacco’s alibi.
Sacco and Vanzetti were to typify a cause, Moore explained to a friend, adding, “In saving them we strengthen our muscles, develop our forces preparatory to the day when we save ourselves.” The more extreme anarchists of the Defense Committee were critical of such an attitude, feeling that Moore was more interested in building up the biggest labor case in history than in the fate of the men involved. This, too, was Rosina Sacco’s feeling from the first time she met Moore. Not interested in issues, she merely wanted her Nick back to resume their old family life, to see the new baby Ines, born four months after his arrest. Instinctively she distrusted the sparkle of the bohemian lawyer.
Moore’s initial objective was to expand the case beyond the parochial limits of Norfolk County. With this in mind he worked up a number of sensational appeals, following the pattern customary both in American criminal cases and in charity drives. He wrote, he telegraphed, he traveled, he sent out assistants, volunteers, anyone whom he could persuade to lend a hand. His salary ($150 a week) never seemed to cover his expenses. He was lawyer, detective, fund-raiser, and propagandist combined. At their annual conventions the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the American Federation of Teamsters found themselves demanding the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, although few of the delegates had ever heard their names before some official friendly to Moore introduced the resolution. If Moore sent word that there was a frame-up in the offing, his word was enough for the central labor unions in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Worcester, Seattle, and Salem, just as it was for the United Mine Workers, the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, and dozens of other organizations Moore had known or assisted. Although their resolutions may have been quickly presented and quickly put aside, their effect was to be cumulative.
By the end of 1920 there were stirrings across the country, and echoes from overseas. To anyone with as sensitive an ear as Moore’s they were a promise of what was to come.
Moore’s temporary office in the Olympian Building at 3 Tremont Row, echoing with talk and typewriters and shuffling feet, was like a bus terminal in its comings and goings. In one corner the blond Lithuanian stenographer hammered away at the keys. Opposite her John Nicholas Beffel, a free-lance socialist journalist from New York, sat chain-smoking and preparing press releases in English. Art Shields, sent on by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, assisted him. Frank Lopez, a young Spanish anarchist, a cabinetmaker by trade, preserved somehow by Moore from a deportation order, got out propaganda for the Spanish-speaking world. Felicani and the committee, from an upstairs room on Battery Street, took care of the Italian publicity.
Only gradually did Moore bridge the gap between the Italian anarchists and the indigenous Boston liberals. When he approached John Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee, Codman asked for satisfactory proof that Sacco and Vanzetti would not be given an impartial trial. He had served recently on a jury in Dedham and said he had been impressed by District Attorney Katzmann’s ability and fairness. Moore eventually managed to convince Codman to the extent that in February 1921 the Civil Liberties Committee contributed five hundred dollars to the Defense Committee. Later in the year it published its own pamphlet: “Sacco and Vanzetti: Shall There be a Mooney Frame-up in New England?”
Through the Civil Liberties Committee link a number of elderly Boston women of assured position and belligerent good works began their participation in the case. In the social-worker tradition of Elizabeth Peabody, with the inherited wealth to be cultured as Boston understood the word, they functioned as nonconformists within the Back Bay circle of conformity. The most conspicuous and determined of these was Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a pacifist and campaigner for women’s suffrage. Level-headed and charming, she avoided the crackpot label so easily attached to middle-aged female reformers. Hundreds of prisoners in Massachusetts jails were indebted to her often-anonymous kindness. Dozens owed their freedom to her. She had married a promising young lawyer, a friend and classmate of Louis Brandeis at the Harvard Law School, who died a few years after graduating. During the whole period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case she lived in the Brandeis household, where the children called her Auntie Bee. When Eugene Lyons and his young wife first came to Boston, Mrs. Evans furnished their apartment for them simply by opening the cellar where Justice Brandeis had stored some of his furniture. She seemed to know everyone, not only in Boston but throughout the country, and she had the key to people as well as buildings. When she was drawn into the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she saw it as just one more worthy cause, but as the months passed she developed a preoccupying attachment for the two men that would last through the years to their execution.
Moore soon brought the case to the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, and the organization did much to interest native Americans in the predicament of the two Italians. The minutes of its meeting on November 22, 1920, read:
Mary Heaton Vorse reported on the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, two young Italian anarchists on trial in Boston for highway robbery and murder, stating that they had been indicted on questionable circumstances and because of their activity on behalf of Andrea Salsedo, a political prisoner who committed suicide by throwing himself from the Park Row Building, New York, while being held for deportation. It was agreed that the Union should do everything possible to secure publicity for this case.
Mary Heaton Vorse was a writer with one foot in Greenwich Village and the other in the radical labor movement, the prototype of a number of women who would eventually become concerned in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Brought up in the cultivated restriction of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, educated abroad, her experiences in the 1912 Lawrence strike turned her sympathies and her writings to the workers and the dispossessed. One can trace her career by the titles of her many books, from The Breaking in of a Yachtsman’s Wife to Strike—A Novel of Gastonia.
After Tresca told her of Sacco and Vanzetti, calling their case a frame-up as bad as the Mooney case, Mrs. Vorse went to Dedham to visit Sacco. In the outline of the case she wrote for Norman Thomas’ magazine, The World Tomorrow, she described Sacco in his gray prison trousers and striped blue cotton shirt as
a little fellow so life-loving that even six months of inaction in jail had not effaced his vividness. Short, clean-cut as a Roman coin, eyes that looked at you straight, and above all a friendly way with him almost like that of a child who had never known anything but affection. There was something about Sacco that made you think of swift happy things—a jumping fish, a bird on the wing.
She concluded with a paraphrase of Moore:
Active labor men have all the dice loaded against them. All labor is on trial with Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It is bound up with all the fight that is going on for the closed shop and the determinations of the employers to smash the worker’s organizations.
The New Republic in its December 29 issue carried John Beffel’s article, “Eels and the Electric Chair.” This account of the Plymouth trial asked for a reversal of Vanzetti’s conviction lest there be “another conviction which will send him through a little green door into a wired chamber of death.”
Thus, by the New Year, with the trial scheduled to begin in Dedham on March 7, 1921, one of the left-liberal magazines most widely circulated among the intelligentsia of the United States had made the names of Sacco and Vanzetti at least fleetingly familiar to its readers. Moore’s case was beginning to gather momentum. Art Shields’ pamphlet “Are They Doomed? The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the Grim Forces Behind It” (actually, Beffel wrote most of it) appeared early in the year as the first general statement of the defense position. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Workers’ Defense Union distributed fifty thousand copies before the trial. The cover had a sensational drawing by Robert Minor showing Salsedo hurtling from a skyscraper window. Shields described the Brockton arrest as a frame-up from beginning to end, the murder charge against the two men “a mere device to get them out of the way,” and stated that they were practically the last of the Italian radicals in New England who had not already been jailed or deported.[6]
The New York office of the Workers’ Defense Union sent out weekly Sacco-Vanzetti releases, most of them written by Beffel, to more than five hundred papers. Gurley Flynn went on a speaking tour, explaining the case to college liberal clubs, including those at Pennsylvania and Harvard, as well as to the captive audience of Mrs. Evans’ League for Democratic Control.
After his sentencing at Plymouth, Vanzetti was taken to the Charlestown State Prison, across the river from Boston. That granite fortress, built in 1820, was surrounded by a disintegrating brick slum fouled with the smoke of the Everett chemical plants.
On his arrival Vanzetti went through the usual routine. He was questioned in the interview cell, then given a shower and issued prison clothes, a blanket roll, an enamel slop bucket and a smaller wooden bucket for drinking water, and locked in his cell. Within a few days he was assigned to the shop making auto-license plates, one of the few production tasks allowed convict labor.
The machinery of the law continued to function with bureaucratic regularity. Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted on September 11, 1920, charged with the murder of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick A. Parmenter. Five days afterward a bomb explosion seared New York’s Wall Street, killing thirty persons. The crime, never solved, was generally believed to be the work of anarchists. On September 28 Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned. They pleaded not guilty.
Sacco, as a prisoner still awaiting trial, remained in the Dedham county jail where he had been taken after his preliminary hearing. Unlike the overcrowded Charlestown fortress, the Dedham jail, located on a rural side street, was a relatively pleasant place with fewer than seventy prisoners, most of whom the warden knew by their first name. It was like a well-kept ship, the walls and floors bright with paint, brass shining. The reception room, with its oak benches and bookcases, gave the fugitive impression of a library. There, prisoners could visit with friends and relatives without a guard being present.
What was hardest for Sacco to endure was the idleness. From the time the sun rose until it set, there was a gap of hours marked only by meals and the swing of the shadow from east to west across the recreation-room floor. Except for the few trusties who stoked the boilers or worked in the tailor shop or the laundry or did the cooking, there was no way to kill time except by talking or playing cards.
Inactivity and restraint chafed Sacco’s spirit. He missed his wife and son; the baby he had never seen he could not get out of his mind. To this man of abundant energy, for whom the day had never been long enough, the tedium of empty hours became a frenzy of frustration. Yet in this early period he never seemed to doubt that he would be eventually set free.
Sacco and Vanzetti saw each other seldom during the seven years of their imprisonment. Except for the six weeks of the trial and the final period in the death house, they would meet only briefly when some new motion or empty formality brought them into court. Sometimes they would not meet for a year.
Although the interest aroused by the case was still spotty, there was more awareness of the coming trial outside Massachusetts than there was within the state. In Norfolk County it was more or less taken for granted that the suspects were guilty. The Braintree Observer of May 8, 1920, had announced that the two South Braintree “yeggs” had been positively identified. It said nothing more about the case till the trial began.
By the time the Thayer Academy boys in their black-and-orange jerseys were holding their autumn football practice behind the Braintree town hall the April robbery was no longer a matter of general conversation. However, Shelley Neal still thought of it each time the payroll came in, delivered now by armed guards, and the girls in the Slater & Morrill offices still liked to gossip about it during the lunch hour.
Two days after the Plymouth trial ended, Katzmann appointed Chief Stewart his official investigator. Stewart’s friend Alfred Brouillard, on leave from the State Police, was made his assistant.
Proud of his new status and glad to resign his Bridgewater job, Stewart did most of his sleuthing under the direction of the Assistant District Attorney, Harold Williams. From Katzmann the chief received the four shotgun-shell exhibits of the Plymouth trial. Now, the district attorney told him, it was up to him to dig up the right kind of witnesses. Stewart had little to go on at first. As a starter he went to the Boston Public Library and read the accounts of the South Braintree crime in the back numbers of all the Boston papers, copying down the names of persons mentioned. He and Brouillard were on their own. Chief Gallivan was no help at all. Stewart usually found him sitting on the Braintree town-hall steps with a quid in his cheek.
Not until the new year was the approaching trial mentioned again in the Boston papers. Then a Dedham court interpreter, Angelina DeFalco, spread it briefly across the front pages after Moore had her arrested.
The affair had its origins just before the New Year, when Felicani received a telephone call from Beniamino Cicchetti of Providence, Rhode Island, who introduced himself as a “compatriot of ideas” and said that he had an important letter concerning Sacco and Vanzetti. He agreed to meet Felicani at the Defense Committee headquarters on Sunday morning, January 2.
Like Govoni in Plymouth, Cicchetti was a fixer who followed his special line in the Italian Federal Hill section of Providence, arranging bail and, on a percentage basis, collecting defense funds. For Italians who had run afoul of the law he was useful, almost necessary, to know. An oily, persuasive man, he bustled into the Battery Street office and assured Felicani he knew a woman who could do a great deal for Sacco and Vanzetti. When Felicani showed interest, he bustled out again and returned almost at once with a dumpy nearsighted woman in her early twenties whom he introduced as Mrs. DeFalco.
She explained that she had come from the Dedham court, and that if the Defense Committee would put up a sufficient sum she could guarantee Sacco’s freedom. Felicani asked her how it could be done. “Oh,” she told him, “we have a little society of our own, Fred Katzmann, Mr. Squires, and Percy Katzmann.”[7] When Felicani asked about Vanzetti she said that was something else again, and that she would have to consult Fred. She then tried unsuccessfully to reach the district attorney by telephone. Felicani did not say much. He told her he would have to consult with the rest of the Defense Committee, and she agreed to meet him next day, suggesting at the same time that he bring along five hundred dollars as a deposit.
They met the following morning with Professor Guadagni in a coffee house in North Square. Mrs. DeFalco told them that fifty thousand dollars would be needed to take care of everything. First of all, she said, the committee must appoint Squires and Percy Katzmann counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti. Money spent on other lawyers would be wasted. When they had paid the fifty thousand dollars, Percy would take charge of the defense. Fred would not prosecute, but the case would be given to Harold Williams or one of the other assistant district attorneys. Guadagni said the committee could not collect so much money quickly, and suggested that Mrs. DeFalco take ten thousand dollars and get the case postponed until September. She said she would see what she could do, and Felicani and Guadagni agreed to meet with her again.
During the week various members of the committee met almost daily with Mrs. DeFalco, though as yet she was paid no money. She made an appointment with Felicani and Guadagni for Friday at the defense headquarters. Following Moore’s advice, Felicani concealed a microphone in the room so that a public stenographer in the basement could take down the conversation in shorthand.
Mrs. DeFalco said she had come to complete arrangements with them, that Fred Katzmann and Squires had assured her of the freedom of the two men, but that by Monday the committee must pay fifteen thousand dollars. The money was to be paid to Squires or Percy Katzmann and all the committee’s evidence was to be turned over to the latter. After the payment there would be a mock trial with the jury made up so that the foreman would be a member of the county ring. She told them it was a simple matter to fix a jury.
When Guadagni objected that fifteen thousand was still too much, Mrs. DeFalco telephoned the Dedham courthouse and after talking briefly with someone not identified, told them that five thousand would be enough for a start; they would also reduce the remainder to thirty-five thousand, which had to be paid as soon as the trial was postponed. She said she had arranged to have the lawyers meet the committee members at her house that evening. Felicani and Guadagni agreed to drive out.
They left Boston about eight o’clock. When they reached the back street in East Dedham where the DeFalcos lived, they hesitated. The small square house was brightly lit and two cars were parked in front of it. Felicani and Guadagni decided not to go in. Before leaving, they copied down the license numbers of the cars. One turned out to be Squires’, the other Fred Katzmann’s.
The members of the committee were inclined to pay the money. Not so Moore. Suspecting that the defense might be charged with trying to bribe public officials, he—over Felicani’s protest—had Cicchetti and Mrs. DeFalco arrested. Cicchetti was released but Mrs. DeFalco was held on the technical charge of attempting to solicit law business, not being an attorney. As no money had changed hands this was all she could be charged with.
On the stand in the Boston municipal court she gave a rambling account of how Cicchetti, a brother-in-law of her brother, had asked her if she could help him see his friend Sacco. He had also asked if she and her brother would go to Boston with him to see Felicani about getting a Norfolk County lawyer to defend Sacco and Vanzetti. She admitted that she had had talks with members of the Defense Committee. One morning she had met Guadagni, who introduced himself as Mr. Giovannitti of New York. He had told her the committee had a lawyer, Moore, whom they were paying three hundred dollars a week although he was not doing much. When Felicani had asked her what lawyer she would recommend she had named Squires, whom she knew because her husband was his gardener. She had arranged a meeting for them with Squires at her home, but Felicani and Guadagni had never showed up.
District Attorney Katzmann then took the stand to deny that he knew Mrs. DeFalco. He had never even heard of her until her arrest. Percy Katzmann said he had known her for about seven years and had employed her as an interpreter in his Italian cases. Mrs. DeFalco had asked him several times if he would take on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and though he first told her he would not, out of friendship for her he had agreed to meet Felicani and Guadagni at her house.
Inspector Flaherty, who had arrested Mrs. DeFalco, testified she had said then she would “fix those anarchists.” She was found not guilty. Judge Murray called her conduct “imprudent, unwise, but not criminal.”[8]
Whatever Mrs. DeFalco had been up to, the episode and the standing of the men involved gave the Greater Boston community its first inkling of the enlarged dimensions of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore’s propaganda efforts were getting not only action but reaction.
Even before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, their names were in the files of the Department of Justice. After the Plymouth trial the Boston office began to take a more active interest in them. Agents were assigned to attend the various Sacco-Vanzetti defense meetings. One of them, Harold Zorian, even managed to become a collector for the Defense Committee, although, as he admitted afterward, he kept most of the money for himself.
William J. West, the agent in charge of the Boston office’s Radical Division, furnished memoranda regularly to District Attorney Katzmann about Sacco and Vanzetti’s anarchist activities. As Fred Weyand, one of the Department’s Boston agents explained it:
The understanding in this case between the agents of the Department of Justice in Boston and the District Attorney followed the usual custom, that the Department of Justice would help the District Attorney to secure a conviction, and that he in turn would help the agents of the Department of Justice to secure information that they might desire.
Weyland, West, and other agents attended the Dedham trial in the expectation of finding sufficient evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti to deport them as anarchists in case they were acquitted of murder.
In the autumn of 1920, either West or Katzmann conceived the idea of planting an informer in the cell next to Sacco. West hoped to find out something about the Wall Street bomb explosion of September 16. Although all the clues in that bombing had come to nothing, the Justice Department held to its theory that the explosion was the work of anarchists. West and Katzmann talked the matter over with Feri Felix Weiss, formerly one of West’s agents. Weiss operated his own “Scientific-Secret-Service,” but still did occasional work for the Department’s Bureau of Investigation. He sent a letter to an informer, John Ruzzamenti, in Reddington, Pennsylvania, asking if he would be willing to help in getting evidence against two probable criminals. He might have to stay in jail for a few days, but success in this job might lead to bigger investigations, like the Wall Street explosion, with juicier expense accounts. The eager Ruzzamenti arrived on Weiss’s doorstep two days after Christmas.
Katzmann, on meeting Ruzzamenti in his courthouse office, appeared bluffly cordial, helping him off with his overcoat and calling him John. He then explained his plan. Ruzzamenti would be arrested with burglar tools in the act of breaking into a house. The sheriff would see that he was placed in the cell adjoining Sacco’s. Ruzzamenti would act depressed for the first few days and say nothing, then try to strike up a conversation.
Ruzzamenti objected to being tagged with a police record and when Katzmann could not change his mind, he suggested that Ruzzamenti go to Stoughton and see what he could ferret out there. They would arrange that he got some sort of job in the town, perhaps in a shoe factory. As an Italian he might even manage to rent a room from Rosina Sacco. Katzmann said he had reports that she was in an upset state. It should be easy to establish friendly relations with her.
To this proposal Ruzzamenti agreed. Whether or not Katzmann was serious about it or was just thinking aloud, he soon afterward dropped the idea as well as any connection with Ruzzamenti. He and West and Weiss managed to place a more amenable informer near Sacco. The man, Antony Carbone, spent several days in the jail and managed to talk with Sacco at intervals but could find out nothing.
The guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti in regard to the South Braintree murders was of no direct concern to the Department of Justice. Most of the Boston agents who knew anything about the case felt that Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty. This was the opinion of Fred Weyand, who later deposed:
From my investigation, combined with the investigation made by the other agents of the Department in Boston, I am convinced not only that these men had violated the Selective Service rules and regulations and evaded the draft, but that they were anarchists, and that they ought to have been deported. By calling these men anarchists, I do not mean necessarily that they were inclined to violence, nor do I understand all the different meanings that different people would attach to the word “anarchist.” What I mean is that I think they did not believe in organized government or in private property. But I am also thoroughly convinced, and always have been, and I believe that it is and always has been the opinion of such Boston agents of the Department of Justice as had any knowledge on the subject, that these men had nothing whatever to do with the South Braintree murders, and that their conviction was the result of cooperation between the Boston agents of the Department of Justice and the District Attorney. It was the general opinion of the Boston agents of the Department of Justice having knowledge of the affair that the South Braintree crime was committed by a gang of professional highwaymen.
Six months before the trial Moore was reiterating the claim, sensationally and vociferously, that Sacco and Vanzetti would not and could not get a fair hearing in the biased atmosphere of Norfolk County. In his experience rigged trials were common enough, but beyond this it was part of his tactics to claim unfairness in advance.
Many earnest defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti have maintained, as did Moore, that in the postwar period of xenophobia no alien holding extreme political beliefs could possibly have found justice in conservative Dedham at the hands of a local jury. As early as January 1921, a Defense Committee pamphlet claimed that “a Northern jury does not examine the law and the evidence impartially when a murder accusation is leveled against a member of the Mediterranean race whose reputation is colored with the fanciful versions of the Mafia that furnished Sunday-Magazine readers mental diet for so many years.”
Yet, in contrast to these a priori beliefs, a case tried in Dedham in April 1920 demonstrated that the citizens of Norfolk had lost neither their sense of justice nor their common sense. The very week Attorney General Palmer was curling the hair of the credulous by announcing that on May Day the Reds planned to make the national capital “the scene of the slaughter of high officials” an alien anarchist with the outlandish name of Segris Zagroff was brought before Judge Thayer, charged with advocating the overthrow of the government by violence. Zagroff had been picked up in a foreign radical club in Norwood, the walls of which were hung with pictures of the new Bolshevik Russian leaders. He freely and volubly admitted to the police that he was an anarchist and that he did not approve of the American form of government. In spite of his statements the Dedham jury freed him.
Judge Thayer was vibrant with anger at the verdict. “Mr. Foreman,” he asked testily, “did you take into consideration the testimony that was given us here by the police officers that the defendant told them he believed in the overthrow of the government? Didn’t you hear the testimony to the effect that the defendant said in the presence of witnesses and in the conversations he had with officers that he did not like this form of government and that the only true government was the kind run by workingmen? How did you arrive at the verdict that you announce?”
Unintimidated, and with equal testiness, the foreman replied that “the jurors disregarded the testimony of the officers after they understood the definition of ‘advocating anarchy,’ as given by the court, to be the act of a person who actually used violence in bringing about his aims and not the advocacy of those aims when he talked on the subject.”
Although this verdict showed that in Norfolk County ordinary men could still think clearly and act justly, it also showed the bias of Judge Thayer. Curiously enough, the prosecution of Zagroff was conducted by Assistant District Attorney Kane, who would shortly assist Katzmann in the prosecution of Vanzetti at Plymouth. Zagroff was defended by Katzmann’s brother Percy.
In February, at Moore’s request, the trial was postponed from March until May 31 so that he could secure an affidavit in Italy from Giuseppe Adrower, a former consulate clerk who claimed to have seen Sacco in Boston on the day of the crime. The ninety days that followed were a period of rapid polarization. Moore, the artist, had taken two aliens, neither of whom sympathized or cooperated with the organized labor movement, and fashioned them into generic figures of the workingman. He had made ringingly spectacular claims about the fate of accused anarchists in Norfolk County, and now the community responded by accepting his challenge. During Vanzetti’s first trial there had been almost no mention of his social and political beliefs, but long before anarchism became an issue in the Dedham court everyone on the jury, in the courthouse, in the town was aware of it. Moore’s class-angling in troubled waters had stirred the depths. While no one can now say for certain that, solely in the light of the evidence presented, Sacco and Vanzetti would have been acquitted if they had been Elks or members of the American Legion, they would certainly have had a much better chance.
It was Moore the artist who painted the affair in broad expressionistic strokes, embellished it and retouched it, spread the panoramic design on a world canvas. But for Moore there would have been no case as it is today remembered, and the Dedham trial—whatever its outcome—would have been as forgotten now as the then-sensational Zimmerman trial.
By the time the formal preparations for the trial were being made, Moore had created the situation he wanted. Nick and Bart, the two Italians at first mentioned so casually, had become symbols of man’s injustice to man. No one, whatever his views, could now take the trial casually. If the Defense Committee members already saw the shadow of injustice lying across the path of their imprisoned comrades, the citizens of Dedham had a feeling of sinister forces in the offing. Any morning the mannered inhabitants of the High Street half expected to see the columns of the courthouse collapse under a dynamite charge. Sedate Dedham beside its winding river began to take on the aspect of a besieged town with the courthouse a forward bastion. The blue-coated local police, out in force, were augmented by a detachment of the recently formed paramilitary State Constabulary. The tension was sharp as an east wind.
A week before the trial, Stewart interviewed George Kelley. Kelley still considered himself a friend of Sacco’s and said so. The arrest made no difference. He had visited Sacco in jail, and his wife had stayed with Rosina during her confinement. Many a time before this trouble the two men, next-door neighbors, had chatted together at the end of a long summer evening as Sacco was coming in from his garden. Kelley did not think much of Sacco’s socialist ideas and had warned him about airing them too freely. But Sacco had just laughed, saying that what was in the heart had to come out of the mouth.
Stewart asked Kelley if he could describe Sacco’s cap. Kelley said all he could remember about it was that it was dark. Then Stewart showed him a cap and asked if it was Sacco’s. It was the cap found near Berardelli’s body. Kelley did not want to say. When Stewart pressed him for a definite opinion, he still declined. “I have an opinion about the cap,” he said finally, expressing the prevailing Dedham atmosphere, “but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.”
Moore and the Defense Committee had had differing ideas about how the defense should be managed. Local lawyers might be useful, indeed necessary, but Moore wanted them subordinate, subject to his direction. He was in no hurry. This was, after all, his case. Not until May did he start looking for any legal assistance. On the nineteenth he wrote to a friend:
The defense committee has agreed to pay the McAnarney brothers who are supposed to be the highest grade porch climbers in the business, $10,000 for their professional ability. They don’t care how we get the money. We don’t particularly care how they get results.
The McAnarneys, John, Thomas, and Jeremiah, had been practicing law together thirty years in the tide-edged granite city of Quincy, five miles south of Boston. John had been for thirteen years city solicitor as well as president of the county bar association. Thomas was associate justice of the district court. Jeremiah, the youngest, was in general practice, and counsel for the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway. Second-generation Irish-Americans, piously Catholic, conservative in attitudes and beliefs, they represented the middle class that had moved away from the proletarian South Boston matrix that had first sheltered the beaten immigrant survivors of the Famine years. So far had the McAnarneys evolved in the more open environment of Quincy that they had even become Republican—still an act of apostasy in South Boston, if rewarding elsewhere. Thomas had been appointed to the bench by Governor Calvin Coolidge.
John McAnarney was the head of the family, partly from being the eldest but mostly because of his assimilated dignity. White-haired, formal in speech and sedate in manner, he had in his late middle age come to resemble the Yankee prototypes that the Irish were replacing. He kept a second office in Boston where, as the years passed, he spent the greater part of his time, concerning himself more with banks and investments than actions and torts. He moved familiarly in the Boston legal world that was so much a postgraduate extension of the Harvard Law School; he numbered his acquaintances from the law firms with the triple-barreled names; he became a recognized figure on the well-beaten path from State Street through Pemberton Square to the State House.
Thomas, the judge, was the family wit. Frail and in failing health, his legal work off the bench had become nominal. Jerry was the trial lawyer of the family. He was Jerry to everybody. The priest who baptized him had been the last to call him Jeremiah. Unlike John, he had not conformed to State Street, and his speech still bore traces of the South Boston flats. Short, short-mustached, ruddy-faced, he had a tendency to trip over his grammar if he became excited. When he hurried down the street, as he always did, he seemed to do a little clog dance. He had a habit of buttonholing people, in the literal sense, emphasizing the point he was making with a jab of an index finger toward his auditor’s chest. He also had the reputation of winning his cases.
When Moore, prodded by the committee, finally decided to use local reinforcement, he consulted James Sisk, with whom he had worked on the Ettor-Giovannitti case in Lawrence. Sisk, who had since been appointed to the superior court, recommended the McAnarney combination. Moore went to John in his Boston office. McAnarney said he no longer took court cases. His brother Jerry, he felt, would be the one to deal with a case like this, with Tom perhaps helping out. He would talk it over with them, but before doing so he wanted to know more about the two Italians. Like everyone else, he had been shocked by the South Braintree murders. Any man, it was true, was entitled to a defense, but if Sacco and Vanzetti had been in any way concerned with this crime his office wanted nothing to do with keeping them from getting the punishment they deserved. Only if the men were innocent would the McAnarneys consider taking part. Moore was convincing.
The three McAnarneys drove over to Dedham and spent the better part of an afternoon in the jail’s reception room talking with Sacco and with his wife, who happened to be there on a visit. Sacco was forthright. The McAnarneys felt satisfied with the answers they received. After leaving the jail John McAnarney met Moore and the two of them walked the back streets of Dedham for an hour, discussing the matter. McAnarney said he had put Sacco through every test he could think of and his answers—in fact everything about him—convinced him that the man was innocent. His brothers felt the same way. His office could work for Sacco’s acquittal with a clear conscience. The McAnarneys would accept the brief.
The measure of Moore’s success in building up the Sacco-Vanzetti case was sensed by the legal profession some time before the rest of Massachusetts became aware of it. Judge Thayer, stimulated by the prospect (and with a blindness to proprieties that would later become increasingly apparent), wrote to his fellow Dartmouth alumnus, Chief Justice John Aiken, requesting that he be appointed presiding judge at the Dedham trial. Thayer apparently saw nothing improper in the request. In fact he may well have visioned himself as a judicial Peter plugging the American dike against the flooding seas of radicalism. Years later at a Dartmouth reunion, he told a friend that if he knew the Reds were outside the door and he could save his country by walking through it to be shot down by them he would be glad to sacrifice his life.
Apparently the impropriety of Thayer’s approach to the chief justice was offset by their Dartmouth kinship. Aiken, too, must have been sniffing the wind when he wrote in reply: “I am assigning you to hear the most important murder case tried in Massachusetts since the last century, if not in all time.”