LETTER OF FERI FELIX WEISS
The letter annexed to the affidavit follows:
Chicago, Ill., Sept. 19, 1926
Editor, Boston Globe,
Boston, Mass.
Dear Sir:—
It has just come to my attention—stationed as I am in the Government service in the West—that my name has been mentioned in your account of the “Sacco and Vanzetti” affair through an affidavit by former District Attorney Katzmann on one hand, and the connection of Ruzzamenti on the other.
The facts, as far as I am concerned with this case, are as follows:
Katzmann sent for me at the time to learn what I knew about Sacco, having been Special Agent of the United States Department of Justice in charge of investigations covering anarchists and similar criminals whose aim was the forceful overthrow of the Government of the United States. I told Katzmann that I knew that Sacco was an active anarchist, connected with the famous or notorious Galleani group of Lynn, Mass., who had bomb-outrages on the brain. When Katzmann asked me what I thought of Sacco as a participant in the Braintree holdup, I explained to him that anarchists do not commit crimes for money but for a principle, and that banditry was not in their code.
It was at the suggestion of Katzmann that I wrote the undercover informant Ruzzamenti whether he was willing to go to jail and share the cell with Sacco to find out what Sacco had to tell about his connection with the Braintree affair. Ruzzamenti did not answer this letter by a letter, but took the first train from Pennsylvania to Boston. Though this was against my arrangement with him, I faced the situation, and sent him to Katzmann, who had agreed over the phone to talk to Ruzzamenti regarding the plan we had in mind. Katzmann then decided, after a talk with Ruzzamenti, that he better drop the matter.
Ruzzamenti tried to collect expenses from Katzmann, but failed. Then Ruzzamenti turned around and sold out to the defense. He used my letter to him as evidence. The first I knew of Ruzzamenti’s treachery was when I received a warning from a friendly source in Spain to the effect that my letter had been broadcasted in mimeograph form to aid in the collection of funds for the Sacco and Vanzetti defense. My friend sent me warning lest the rabid Latin anarchists should take it into their heads to “get square” with me for trying to “frame Sacco.”
The truth in the “framing” was that we intended to put Ruzzamenti in with Sacco as much to clear Sacco of any guilt in the Braintree affair as to find him guilty! I had no interest whatsoever in railroading an innocent man to the electric chair, and Lawyer Thompson’s reference to me as “being heartless” is absurd, if not ridiculous. My entire connection with this case was outlined here, and my only motive in trying to clear up the mystery was to aid justice.
That I should be abused and besmirched with mud by both sides, the defense as well as the District Attorney, when I acted as any patriotic citizen would to protect the life and property of all, is a sad reflection upon legal ethics in Massachusetts. I leave it to the public to pass judgment in view of the above cited facts. That Katzmann is trying to wash his hands of the Ruzzamenti fiasco, putting the blame on me; that Ruzzamenti delivered my life into the hands of the international Reds the world over by his treachery, reminds me of the two characters in the New Testament who always seem to enjoy a resurrection: Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot.
Respectfully,
Feri Felix Weiss
“Have Attorney General Sargent and his subordinates ... stooped so low, and are they so degraded that they are willing by the concealment of evidence to enter into a fraudulent conspiracy with the government of Massachusetts to send two men to the electric chair, not because they were murderers but because they were radicals?”
(All attempts on the part of the defense to secure information from the Department of Justice files on the case have so far proved fruitless. Chief Counsel Thompson has written the Attorney General of the United States on the subject and in spite of the intercession of Senator Butler of Massachusetts, received no satisfactory reply. The Department of Justice refuses to give up its secrets.)
Where are Sacco and Vanzetti in all this? A broken man in Charlestown, a broken man in a grey birdcage in Dedham, struggling to keep some shreds of human dignity in face of the Chair? Not at all.
Circumstances sometimes force men into situations so dramatic, thrust their puny frames so far into the burning bright searchlights of history that they or their shadows on men’s minds become enormous symbols. Sacco and Vanzetti are all the immigrants who have built this nation’s industries with their sweat and their blood and have gotten for it nothing but the smallest wage it was possible to give them and a helot’s position under the bootheels of the Arrow Collar social order. They are all the wops, hunkies, bohunks, factory fodder that hunger drives into the American mills through the painful sieve of Ellis Island. They are the dreams of a saner social order of those who can’t stand the law of dawg eat dawg. This tiny courtroom is a focus of the turmoil of an age of tradition, the center of eyes all over the world. Sacco and Vanzetti throw enormous shadows on the courthouse walls.
William G. Thompson feels all this dimly when, the last affidavit read, he pauses to begin his argument. But mostly he feels that as a citizen it is his duty to protect the laws and liberties of his state and as a man to try to save two innocent men from being murdered by a machine set going in a moment of hatred and panic. He is a broadshouldered man with steely white hair and a broad forehead and broad cheek-bones. He doesn’t mince words. He feels things intensely. The case is no legal game of chess for him.
“I rest my case on these affidavits, on the other five propositions that I have argued, but if they all fail, and I cannot see how they can, I rest my case on that rock alone, on the sixth proposition in my brief—innocent or guilty, right or wrong, foolish or wise men—these men ought not now to be sentenced to death for this crime so long as they have the right to say, “The government of this great country put spies in my cell, planned to put spies in my wife’s house, they put spies on my friends, took money that they were collecting to defend me, put it in their own pocket and joked about it and said they don’t believe I am guilty but will help convict me, because they could not get enough evidence to deport me under the laws of Congress, and were willing as one of them continually said to adopt the method of killing me for murder as one way to get rid of me.””
Ranney’s handling of the case has been pretty perfunctory throughout, he has contented himself with trying to destroy the Court’s opinion of Madeiros’ veracity. A criminal is only to be believed when he speaks to his own detriment. He presents affidavits of the Morelli’s and their friends denying that they had ever heard of Madeiros, tries to imply that Letherman and Weyand were fired from the government employ and had no right to betray the secrets of their department. He knows that he does not need to make much effort. He is strong in the inertia of the courts. The defence will have to exert six times the energy of the prosecution to overturn the dead weighty block of six other motions denied.
Thompson comes back at him with a phrase worthy of Patrick Henry.
... “And I will say to your honor that a government that has come to honor its own secrets more than the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny whether you call it a republic or monarchy or anything else.”
Then the dry, crackling, careful voice of Judge Thayer and the hearing is adjourned.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, all who have had business before the honorable the justice of the superior court of the southeastern district of Massachusetts will now disperse. The court is adjourned without day.
God Save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The Court refused to grant a new trial. The Court has decided that Sacco and Vanzetti must die.
God Save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
III
THE RED DELIRIUM
How is all this possible? Why were these men ever convicted in the first place? From the calm of the year of our Lord 1926 it’s pretty hard to remember the delirious year 1920.
On June 3rd 1919 a bomb exploded outside the Washington house of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In the previous months various people had received bombs through the mail, one of them blowing off the two hands of the unfortunate housemaid who undid the package. No one, and least of all the federal detectives ever seems to have discovered who committed these outrages or why they were committed. But their result was to put a scare into every public official in the country, and particularly into Attorney General Palmer. No one knew where the lightning would strike next. The signing of peace had left the carefully stirred up hatred of the war years unsatisfied. It was easy for people who knew what they were doing to turn the terrors of government officials and the unanalyzed feeling of distrust of foreigners of the average man into a great crusade of hate against reds, radicals, dissenters of all sorts. The Department of Justice, backed by the press, frenziedly acclaimed by the man on the street, invented an immanent revolution. All the horrors of Russian Bolshevism were about to be enacted on our peaceful shores. That fall the roundup began. Every man had his ear to his neighbor’s keyhole. This first crusade culminated in the sailing of the Buford, the “soviet ark” loaded with alien “anarchists” and in the preparation of the famous list of eighty thousand radicals who were to be gotten out of the way.
But that was not enough to satisfy the desire for victims of the country at large, and the greed of the detectives and anti-labor operatives of different sorts who were making a fat living off the Department of Justice. So the January raids were planned.
The following paragraph from Louis F. Post’s book shows that he, seeing the thing from the inside as Assistant Secretary of Labor, felt that the hysteria was being pretty consciously directed:
“The whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with ‘labor spy’ interests—the interests, that is, of private detective agencies which, in the secret service of masterful corporations, were engaged in generating and intensifying industrial suspicions and hatreds. It was under these influences, apparently, that the appropriations authorized by Congress “for the detection and prosecution of crimes” exclusively, were in part diverted to the rounding-up of aliens, not as criminals but as the possible subjects for administrative deportation.”
The January raids were aimed at the “Communists.”
“Hardly had the year nineteen-twenty opened” says the former Assistant Secretary of Labor, “when the Department of Justice entered upon the red crusade for which its raiding of the preceding November had been a tryout. Numerously recruited for the occasion from roughneck groups of the strikebreaking variety and actively supported by local police authorities, the detective auxiliary of the Department of Justice spent the night of the second day in January at raiding lawful assemblages in more than thirty cities and towns of the United States—thirty-three being the number officially reported. Their object was wholesale arrests in furtherance of the plans already outlined for mass deportations of alien members of the Communist and the Communist-Labor parties. The approximate number of arrests officially reported was 2,500.”
The details can be read in the pamphlet on Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice prepared in May of the same year by a committee of twelve well-known lawyers.
Here is the preface to that pamphlet:
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
For more than six months we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States, have seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that Constitution and breaking of those Laws by the Department of Justice of the United States government.
Under the guise of a campaign for the suppression of radical activities, the office of the Attorney General, acting by its local agents throughout the country, and giving express instructions from Washington, has committed continual illegal acts. Wholesale arrests both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any process of law; men and women have been jailed and held incomunicado without access of friends or counsel; homes have been entered without search warrant and property seized and removed; other property has been wantonly destroyed; workingmen and workingwomen suspected of radical views have been shamefully abused and maltreated. Agents of the Department of Justice have been introduced into radical organizations for the purpose of informing upon their members or inciting them to activities; these agents have even been instructed from Washington to arrange meetings upon certain dates for the express object of facilitating wholesale raids and arrests. In support of these illegal acts, and to create sentiment in its favor, the Department of Justice has also constituted itself a propaganda bureau, and has sent to newspapers and magazines of this country quantities of material designed to excite public opinion against radicals, all at the expense of the government and outside the scope of the Attorney General’s duties.
We make no argument in favor of any radical doctrine as such, whether Socialist, Communist or Anarchist. No one of us belongs to any of these schools of thought. Nor do we now raise any question as to the Constitutional protection of free speech and a free press. We are concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American people the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged with the highest duty of enforcing the laws—acts which have caused widespread suffering and unrest, have struck at the foundation of American free institutions, and have brought the name of our country into disrepute.
These acts may be grouped under the following heads:
(1) Cruel and Unusual Punishments:
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides:
“Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Punishments of the utmost cruelty, and therefore unthinkable in America, have become usual. Great numbers of persons arrested, both aliens and citizens, have been threatened, beaten with blackjacks, or actually tortured * * *
(2) Arrests without Warrant:
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution provides:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Many hundreds of citizens and aliens alike have been arrested in wholesale raids, without warrants or pretense of warrants. They have then either been released, or have been detained in police stations or jails for indefinite lengths of time while warrants were being applied for. This practice of making mass raids and mass arrests without warrant has resulted directly from the instructions, both written and oral, issued by the Department of Justice at Washington.
(3) Unreasonable Searches and Seizures:
The Fourth Amendment has been quoted above.
In countless cases agents of the Department of Justice have entered the homes, offices, or gathering places of persons suspected of radical affiliations, and, without pretense of any search warrant, have seized and removed property belonging to them for use by the Department of Justice. In many of these raids property which could not be removed or was not useful to the Department, was intentionally smashed and destroyed.
(4) Provocative Agents:
We do not question the right of the Department of Justice to use its agents in the Bureau of Investigation to ascertain when the law is being violated. But the American people have never tolerated the use of undercover provocative agents or “agents provocateurs,” such as have been familiar in old Russia or Spain. Such agents have been introduced by the Department of Justice into the radical movements, have reached positions of influence therein, have occupied themselves with informing upon or instigating acts which might be declared criminal, and at the express direction of Washington have brought about meetings of radicals in order to make possible wholesale arrests at such meetings.
(5) Compelling Persons to be Witnesses against Themselves:
The Fifth Amendment provides as follows:
“No person * * * shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
It has been the practice of the Department of Justice and its agents, after making illegal arrests without warrant, to question and to force admission from him by terrorism, which admissions were subsequently to be used against him in deportation proceedings.
(6) Propaganda by the Department of Justice:
The legal functions of the Attorney General are: to advise the Government on questions of law, and to prosecute persons who have violated federal statutes. For the Attorney General to go into the field of propaganda against radicals is a deliberate misuse of his office and a deliberate squandering of funds entrusted to him by Congress. * * *
Since these illegal acts have been committed by the highest legal powers in the United States, there is no final appeal from them except to the conscience and condemnation of the American people. American institutions have not in fact been protected by the Attorney General’s ruthless suppression. On the contrary these institutions have been seriously undermined, and revolutionary unrest has been vastly intensified. No organizations of radicals acting through propaganda over the last six months could have created as much revolutionary sentiment in America as has been created by the acts of the Department of Justice itself.
Even were one to admit that there existed any serious “Red menace” before the Attorney General started his “unflinching war” against it, his campaign has been singularly fruitless. Out of the many thousands suspected by the Attorney General (he had already listed 60,000 by name and history on November 14, 1919, aliens and citizens) what do the figures show of net results? Prior to January 1, 1920, there were actually deported 263 persons. Since January 1 there have been actually deported 18 persons. Since January 1 there have been ordered deported an additional 529 persons and warrants for 1,547 have been cancelled (after full hearings and consideration of the evidence) by Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, to whose courageous re-establishment of American Constitutional Law in deportation proceedings are due the attacks that have been made upon him. The Attorney General has consequently got rid of 810 alien suspects, which, on his own showing, leaves him at least 59,160 persons (aliens and citizens) still to cope with.
It has always been the proud boast of America that this is a government of laws and not of men. Our Constitution and laws have been based on the simple elements of human nature. Free men cannot be driven and repressed; they must be led. Free men respect justice and follow truth, but arbitrary power they will oppose until the end of time. There is no danger of revolution so great as that created by suppression, by ruthlessness, and by deliberate violation of the simple rules of American law and American decency.
It is a fallacy to suppose that, any more than in the past, any servant of the people can safely arrogate to himself unlimited authority. To proceed upon such a supposition is to deny the fundamental American theory of the consent of the governed. Here is no question of a vague and threatened menace, but a present assault upon the most sacred principles of our Constitutional liberty.
The foregoing report has been prepared May, 1920, under the auspices of the National Popular Government League, Washington, D. C.
R. G. Brown, Memphis, Tenn.
Zecheriah Chafee, Jr., Cambridge, Mass.
Felix Frankfurter, Cambridge, Mass.
Ernst Freund, Chicago, Ill.
Swinburne Hale, New York City
Francis Fisher Kane, Philadelphia, Pa.
Alfred S. Niles, Baltimore, Md.
Roscoe Pound, Cambridge, Mass.
Jackson H. Ralston, Washington, D. C.
David Wallerstein, Philadelphia, Pa.
Frank P. Walsh, New York City.
Tyrrell Williams, St. Louis, Mo.
The raids were particularly intense and violent in the industrial towns round Boston and culminated in the captives being driven through the streets of Boston chained together in fours. There were raids in Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee Falls, Lowell, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Lawrence and Haverhill. Unfortunate people after being beaten up and put through the third degree were concentrated at Deer Island under the conditions that have become public through U. S. Circuit Judge Anderson’s decision on the cases that came up before him.
Now it is this ring of industrial towns round Boston that furnish the background of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. There is no doubt that the American born public in these towns on the whole sympathizes with the activities of the detectives. The region has been for many years one of the most intense industrial battlegrounds in the country. People slept safer in their beds at the thought of all these agitators, bombsters, garlic-smelling wops, and unwashed Russians being under lock and key at Deer Island.
Eastern Massachusetts has a threefold population living largely from manufacturing of textiles and shoes and other leather goods. With the decline of shipping and farming the old simonpure New England stock, Congregationalist in faith, Republican in politics, has been pretty well snowed under by the immigration first of Irish Catholics, congenital Democrats and readers of Hearst papers, now assimilated and respectable, and then of Italians, Poles, Slovaks, transplanted European peasants tenderly known to newspaper readers as the scum of the Mediterranean or the scum of Central Europe. There’s no love lost between the first two classes, but they unite on the question of wops, guineas, dagoes. The January raids, the attitude of press and pulpit, howling about atrocities, civilization (which usually means bank accounts) endangered, women nationalized, put the average right-thinking citizen into such a state of mind that whenever he smelt garlic on a man’s breath he walked past quickly for fear of being knifed. A roomful of people talking a foreign language was most certainly a conspiracy to overturn the Government. Read over the articles in the Boston Transcript on the soviet conspiracy at that time and you will see what kind of stuff was being ladled out even to the intelligent highbrow section of the entrenched classes.
It was into this atmosphere of rancor and suspicion, fear of holdups and social overturn that burst the scare headlines of the South Braintree murders. Pent-up hatred found an outlet when the police in Brockton arrested Sacco and Vanzetti, wops who spoke broken English, anarchists who believed neither in the Pope nor in the Puritan God, slackers and agitators, charged with a peculiarly brutal and impudent crime. Since that moment these people have had a focus for their bitter hatred of the new, young, vigorous, unfamiliar forces that are relentlessly sweeping them on to the shelf. The people of Norfolk county and of all Massachusetts decided they wanted these men to die.
Meanwhile the red delirium over the rest of the country had slackened. Something had happened that had made many people pause and think.
About dawn on May 3rd the body of Andrea Salsedo, an anarchist printer, was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row in New York. He had jumped or been thrown from the offices of the Department of Justice on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row building, where he and his friend Elia had been secretly imprisoned for eight weeks. Evidently they had continually tortured him during that time; Mr. Palmer’s detectives were “investigating” anarchist activity. A note had been smuggled out somehow, and a few days before Vanzetti had been in New York as the delegate of an Italian group to try to get the two men out on bail. After Salsedo’s death Elia was hurried over to Ellis Island and deported. He died in Italy. But from that time on the holy enthusiasm for red-baiting subsided. That tortured body found dead and bleeding in one of the most central and public spots in New York shocked men back into their senses.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in the trolley car in Brockton the night of May 5th, Sacco had in his pocket the draft of a poster announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder of their comrade. They were going about warning the other members of their group to hide all incriminating evidence in the way of “radical” books and papers so that, in the new raid that they had been tipped off to expect, they should not be arrested and meet the fate of Salsedo.
Don’t forget that people had been arrested and beaten up for distributing the Declaration of Independence.
IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FRAME-UPS
But why were these men held as murderers and highwaymen and not as anarchists and advocates of the working people?
It was a frameup.
That does not necessarily mean that any set of government and employing class detectives deliberately planned to fasten the crime of murder on Sacco and Vanzetti. Though in this case it is almost certain that they did.
The frameup is an unconscious (occasionally semiconscious) mechanism. An unconscious mechanism is a kink in the mind that makes people do something without knowing why they do it, and often without knowing that they are doing it. It is the sub-rational act of a group, serving in this case, through a series of pointed unintentions, the ends of a governing class.
Among a people that does not recognize or rather does not admit the force and danger of ideas it is impossible to prosecute the holder of unpopular ideas directly. Also there is a smouldering tradition of freedom that makes those who do it feel guilty. After all everyone learnt the Declaration of Independence and Give me Liberty or Give me Death in school, and however perfunctory the words have become they have left a faint infantile impression on the minds of most of us. Hence the characteristic American weapon of the frameup. If a cop wants to arrest a man he suspects of selling dope he plants a gun on him and arrests him under the Sullivan Law. If a man is organizing a strike in a dangerously lively way you try to frame him under the Mann Act or else you get hold of a woman to sue him for breach of promise. If a representative votes against war you have him arrested for breach of decency in an automobile on a Virginia roadside. If two Italians are spreading anarchist propaganda, you hold them for murder.
The frameup is a process that you can’t help feeling, but like most unconscious processes it’s very hard to trace step by step. Half the agents in such a process don’t really know what they are doing. Hence the average moderately fairminded newspaper reader who never has had personal experience of a frameup in action is flabbergasted when you tell him that such and such a man who is being prosecuted for wifebeating is really being prosecuted because he knows the origin of certain bonds in a District Attorney’s safe.
In this neatly swept courtroom in Dedham with everything so varnished and genteel it is hardly possible to think of such a thing as a frameup, and yet.... Under these elms, in these white oldtime houses of Dedham, in front of these pious Georgian doorways.... The court has for the seventh time affirmed its will to send two innocent men to the electric chair.
V
THE OUTLAW CREED
But what is this criminal garlic-smelling creed that the people of Massachusetts will not face openly?
For half a century Anarchy has been the bogy of American schoolmasters, policemen, old maids, and small town mayors. About the time of the assassination of McKinley a picture was formed in the public mind of the anarchist; red-handed, unwashed foreigner whom nobody could understand, sticks of dynamite in his pocket and bomb in the paper parcel under his arm, redeyed housewrecker waiting only for the opportunity to bite the hand that fed him. Since the Russian Revolution the picture has merged a little with that of the sneaking, slinking, communist Jew, enviously undermining Prosperity and Decency through secret organizations ruled from Moscow.
Gradually among liberals and intelligent people generally certain phases of anarchism have meanwhile been reluctantly admitted into respectable conversation under the phrase ‘philosophical anarchist’, which means an anarchist who shaves daily, has good manners and is guaranteed not to act on his beliefs. Certain people of the best society, such as Kropotkin and Tolstoy, princes both, having through their anarchy made themselves important figures in European thought and literature, it was impossible to exclude them longer from the pale of decency.
What is this outlaw creed?
When Christianity flourished in the Mediterranean basin, slave and emperor had the hope of the immediate coming of Christ’s kingdom, the golden Jerusalem that would appear on earth to put an end to the tears and aches of the faithful. After the first millennium, the City of God, despaired of on earth, took its permanent place in the cloudy firmament with the Virgin Mary at the apex of the feudal pyramid. With the decay of feudalism and the coming of the kingdoms of this world the church became more and more the instrument of the governing orders. Undermined by the eighteenth century, overthrown by the French revolution, the church was restored by the great reaction as the strongest bulwark of Privilege. But in the tough memories of peasants and fishermen—their sons worked in factories—there remained a faint trace of the vanished brightness of the City of God. All our citydwelling instinct and culture has been handed down to us from these countless urban generations, Cretans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Latins of the Mediterranean basin, Italians of the hilltowns. It is natural that the dwellers on those scraggy hills in sight of that always blue sea should have kept alight in their hearts the perfect city, where the strong did not oppress the weak, where every man lived by his own work at peace with his neighbors, the white Commune where man could reach his full height free from the old snarling obsessions of god and master.
It is this inner picture that is the core of feeling behind all anarchist theory and doctrine. Many Italians planted the perfect city of their imagination in America. When they came to this country they either killed the perfect city in their hearts and submitted to the system of dawg eat dawg or else they found themselves anarchists. There have been terrorists among them, as in every other oppressed and despised sect since the world began. Good people generally have contended that anarchism and terrorism were the same thing, a silly and usually malicious error much fostered by private detectives and the police bomb-squads.
An anarchist workman who works for the organization of his fellow workmen is a man who costs the factory owners money; thereby he is a bomb-thrower and possible murderer in the minds of the majority of American employers.
In his charge to the jury in the Plymouth trial Judge Thayer definitely said that the crime of highway robbery was consistent with Vanzetti’s ideals as a radical.
Yet under the conflict between employer and workman, and the racial misunderstanding, in themselves material enough for the creation of a frameup, might there not be a deeper bitterness? The people of Massachusetts centuries ago suffered and hoped terribly for the City of God. This little white courthouse town of Dedham, neat and exquisite under its elms, is the symbol of a withered hope, mortgaged at six per cent to the kingdoms of this world. It is natural that New Englanders, who feel in themselves a lingering of the passionate barbed desire of perfection of their ancestors, should hate with particular bitterness, anarchists, votaries of the Perfect Commune on earth. The irrational features of this case of attempted communal murder can only be explained by a bitterness so deep that it has been forgotten by the very people it moves most fervidly.
VI
FREE MEN
It was about dawn on Monday, May 3rd, 1920, that the body of Andrea Salsedo was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row. At that time Bartolomeo Vanzetti was peddling fish in the pleasant little Italian and Portuguese town of North Plymouth. He was planning to go into fishing himself in partnership with a man who owned some dories. Early mornings, pushing his cart up and down the long main street, ringing his bell, chatting with housewives in Piedmontese, Tuscan, pidgin English, he worried about the raids, the imprisonment of comrades, the lethargy of the working people. He was an anarchist, after the school of Galleani. Between the houses he could see the gleaming stretch of Plymouth Bay, the sandy islands beyond, the white dories at anchor. About three hundred years before, men from the west of England had first sailed into the grey shimmering bay that smelt of woods and wild grape, looking for something; liberty ... freedom to worship God in their own manner ... space to breathe. Thinking of these things, worrying as he pushed the little cart loaded with eels, haddock, cod, halibut, swordfish, Vanzetti spent his mornings making change, weighing out fish, joking with the housewives. It was better than working at the great cordage works that own North Plymouth. Some years before he had tried to organize a strike there and been blacklisted. The officials and detectives at the Plymouth Cordage Works, the largest cordage works in the world, thought of him as a Red, a slacker and troublemaker.
His life up to his settling in Plymouth you can read in his own words in these extracts from the Story of a Proletarian Life that he wrote in Charlestown jail:
My life cannot claim the dignity of an autobiography. Nameless, in the crowd of nameless ones, I have merely caught and reflected a little of the light from that dynamic thought or ideal which is drawing humanity towards better destinies.
I was born on June 11, 1888, of G. Battista Vanzetti and Giovanna Vanzetti, in Villafalletto, province of Cuneo, in Piedmont. The town, which rises on the right bank of the Magra, in the shadows of a beautiful chain of hills, is primarily an agricultural community. Here I lived until the age of thirteen in the bosom of my family.
I attended the local schools and loved study. My earliest memories are of prizes won in school examinations, including a second prize in the religious catechism. My father was undecided whether to let me prosecute studies or to apprentice me to some artisan. One day he read in the Gazzetta del Popolo that in Turin forty-two lawyers had applied for a position paying 35 lire monthly. The news item proved decisive in my boyhood, for it left my father determined that I should learn a trade and become a shop-keeper.
And so 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.
I did not like the trade, but I stuck to it to please my father and because I did not know what else to choose. In 1905 I abandoned Cavour for Turin in the hope of locating work in the big city. Failing in this hope, I went on further to Courgne where I remained working six months. Then back to Turin, on a job as caramel-maker.
In Turin, in February of 1907, I fell seriously ill. I was in great pain, confined indoors, deprived of air and sun and joy, like a “sad twilight flower.” But news of my plight reached the family and my father came from Villafalletto to take me back to my birthplace. At home, he told me, I would be cared for by my mother, my good, my best-beloved mother.
Science did not avail, nor love. After three months of brutal illness she breathed her last in my arms. She died without hearing me weep. 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.
This desperate state of mind decided me to abandon Italy for America. On June 9, 1908, I left my dear ones. My sorrow was so great at the parting that I kissed my relatives and strained them to my bosom without being able to speak. My father, too, was speechless in his profound sorrow, and my sisters wept as they did when my mother died. My going had excited interest in the village and the neighbors crowded the house, each with a word of hope, a blessing, a tear. In a crowd they followed me far out on the road, as if a townsman were being exiled forever.
After a two-day railway ride across France and more than seven days on the ocean, I arrived in the Promised Land. New York loomed on the horizon in all its grandness and illusion of happiness. I strained my eyes from the steerage deck, trying to see through this mass of masonry that was at once inviting and threatening to the huddled men and women in the third class.
In the immigration station I had my first great surprise. I saw the steerage passengers handled by the officials like so many animals. Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, to lighten the burden of fears that rests heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores. Hope, which lured these immigrants to the new land, withers under the touch of harsh officials. Little children who should be alert with expectancy, cling instead to their mothers’ skirts, weeping with fright. Such is the unfriendly spirit that exists in the immigration barracks.
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 (so far as meaning is concerned) 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.
I had note of one address, and thither a fellow-passenger conducted me. It was the house of a countryman of mine, on —— street, near Seventh Avenue. I remained there a while, but it became all too evident that there was no room for me in his house, which was overstocked with human beings, like all workingmen’s houses. In deep melancholy I left the place towards eight in the evening to look for a place to sleep. I retraced my steps to the Battery, where I took a bed for the night in a suspicious-looking establishment, the best I could afford. Three days after my arrival, the compatriot already mentioned, who was head cook in a rich club on West —— street overlooking the Hudson River, found me a post in his kitchen as dishwasher. I worked there three months. The hours were long; the garret where we slept was suffocatingly hot; and the vermin did not permit me to close an eye. Almost every night I sought escape in the park.
Leaving this place, I found the same kind of employment in the Mouquin Restaurant. What the conditions there are at present I do not know. But at that time, thirteen years ago, the pantry was horrible. There was not a single window in it. When the electric light for some reason was out, it was totally dark, so that one 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 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.
That was a sad year. What toiler does not remember it? The poor slept outdoors and rummaged the garbage barrels to find a cabbage leaf or a rotten potato. For three months I searched New York, its length and its breadth, without finding work. One morning, in an employment agency, I met a young man more forlorn and unfortunate than I. He had gone without food the day before and was still fasting. I took him to a restaurant, investing almost all that remained to me of my savings in a meal which he ate with wolfish voracity. His hunger stilled, my new friend declared that it was stupid to remain in New York. If he had the money, he said, he would go to the country, where there was more chance of work, without counting the pure air and the sun which could be had for nothing. With the money remaining in my possession we took the steamboat for Hartford, Connecticut, the same day.
From Worcester I transferred to Plymouth (that was about seven years ago), which remained my home until the time I was arrested. I learned to look upon the place with a real affection, because as time went on it held more and more of the people dear to my heart, the folks I boarded with, the men who worked by my side, the women who later bought the wares I had to offer as a peddler.
In passing, let me say how gratifying it is to realize that my compatriots in Plymouth reciprocate the love I feel for them. Not only have they supported my defense—money is a slight thing after all—but they have expressed to me directly and indirectly their faith in my innocence. Those who rallied around my good friends of the defense committee, were not only workers, but businessmen who knew me; not only Italians, but Jews, Poles, Greeks and Americans.
Well, I worked in the Stone establishment for more than a year, and then for the Cordage Company for about eighteen months. My active participation in the Plymouth cordage strike made it certain that I could never get a job there.... As a matter of fact, because of my more frequent appearance on the speaker’s platform in working class groups of every kind, it became increasingly difficult to get work anywhere. So far as certain factories were concerned I was definitely “blacklisted.” Yet, every one of my many employers could testify that I was an industrious, dependable workman, that my chief fault was in trying so hard to bring a little light of understanding into the dark lives of my fellow workers. For some time I did manual work of the hardest kind in the construction undertakings of Sampson & Douland, for the city. I can almost say that I have participated in all the principal public works in Plymouth. Almost any Italian in the town or any of my foremen of my various jobs can attest my industry and modesty of life during this period. I was deeply interested by this time in the things of the intellect, in the great hope that animates me even here in the dark cell of a prison while I await death for a crime I did not commit.
My health was not good. The years of toil and the more terrible periods of unemployment had robbed me of much of my original vitality. I was casting about for some salutary means of eking out my livelihood. About eight months before my arrest a friend of mine who was planning to return to the home country said to me: “Why don’t you buy my cart, my knives, my scales, and go to selling fish instead of remaining under the yoke of the bosses?” I grasped the opportunity, and so became a fish-vender, largely out of love for independence.
At that time, 1919, the desire to see once more my dear ones at home, the nostalgia for my native land had entered my heart. My father, who never wrote a letter without inviting me home, insisted more than ever, and my good sister Luigia joined in his pleas. Business was none too fat, but I worked like a beast of burden, without halt or stay, day after day.
December 24, the day before Christmas, was the last day I sold fish that year. A brisk day of business I had, since all Italians buy eels that day for the Christmas Eve feasts. Readers may recall that it was a bitter-cold Christmas, and the harsh weather did not let up after the holidays; and pushing a cart along is not warming work. I went for a short period to more vigorous, even if no less freezing work. I got a job a few days after Christmas cutting ice for Mr. Petersani. One day, when he hadn’t enough to go round, I shovelled coal for the Electric House. When the ice job was finished I got employment with Mr. Howland, ditch-digging, until a snow storm made me a man of leisure again. Not for longer than a few hours. I hired myself out to the town, cleaning the streets of the snow, and this work done, I helped clean the snow from the railroad tracks. Then I was taken on again by the Sampson Construction people who were laying a water main for the Puritan Woolen Company. I stayed on the job until it was finished.
Again I found no job. The railroad strike difficulties had cut off the cement supply, so that there was no more construction work going on. I went back to my fish-selling, when I could get none, I dug for clams, but the profit on these was lilliputian, the expenses being so high that they left no margin. In April I reached an agreement with a fisherman for a partnership. It never materialized, because on May 5, while I was preparing a mass meeting to protest against the death of Salsedo at the hands of the Department of Justice, I was arrested. My good friend and comrade Nicola Sacco was with me.
“Another deportation case,” we said to one another.
At the same time Nicola Sacco was living in Stoughton, working an edging machine at the Three K’s shoe factory, where star workmen sometimes make as high as eighty or ninety dollars a week. He had a pretty wife and a little son named Dante. There was another baby coming. He lived in a bungalow belonging to his employer, Michael Kelley. The house adjoined Kelley’s own house and the men were friends. Often Kelley advised him to lay off this anarchist stuff. There was no money in it. It was dangerous the way people felt nowadays. Sacco was a clever young fellow and could soon get to be a prosperous citizen, maybe own a factory of his own some day, live by other men’s work. But Sacco working in his garden in the early morning before the whistles blew, hilling beans, picking off potatobugs, letting grains of corn slip by threes or fours through his fingers into the finely worked earth, worried about things. He was an anarchist. He loved the earth and people, he wanted them to walk straight over the free hills, not to stagger bowed under the ordained machinery of industry; he worried mornings working in his garden at the lethargy of the working people. It was not enough that he was happy and had fifteen hundred or more dollars in the bank for a trip home to Italy.
Two men sitting on a bench in the bright birdcage of Dedham jail. When he wants to, one of them will get up and go out, walk along the street, turn his nose into the wind, look up at the sky and clouds, board streetcars, buy train tickets. The other will go back to his cell. Twentythree hours a day in a cell for a thousand days, for three years, for six years, now the seventh year is tediously unreeling.... Sacco in prisonclothes, with the prison pallor under the black hair on his head, with the prison strain under his eyes, in grey baggy prison clothes, telling about his life in the unimaginable days when he was free. A bell rings; the prisoners file by to the messroom, putty faces, slouched bodies in baggy grey denim, their hands tucked under their folded arms.... Sacco was born in Torremaggiore in the province of Foggia in the sunny southern foothills of the Appenines; his father was a substantial Italian peasant who married the daughter of an oil and wine merchant. His father belonged to the republican club of the town, his older brother Sabino was a socialist. He went to school and worked in his father’s vineyards and helped with the olive oil business. His oldest brother Nicola (whose name he afterwards took; when a child he was known as Ferdinando) died, Sabino was conscripted into the army; that left him the head of the family. He was often sent round the country in a cart to make payments for his father, to pay off workmen or buy supplies. He was the trusted boy of the family. But better than anything he liked machines. Summers when there was nothing that needed doing in the vineyard he worked stoking the big steam threshing machine that threshed all the wheat of the region. Better than school or farming or working for his father he liked working round engines. He dreamed about going to America, the land of engines.
When he was seventeen he set out with his brother Sabino; they were going to make their fortunes in the land of machines and dollars. In April 1908 they landed in Boston. Sacco had good luck. He worked hard. He hadn’t been in this country two weeks before he had a job as waterboy with a road gang near Milford. He liked it especially when the engineer let him help with the steam roller. He liked to stand beside the hot wheezing petulant engine, stoking it with coal, squirting oil out of an oilcan. But there wasn’t much money in it; winter came on. He got a job in the Hopedale mills trimming the slag off pigiron. He worked there a year. By that time he realized that he ought to learn a definite trade. An unskilled laborer was a mat for everybody to wipe their feet on. He paid fifty dollars to a man to teach him to run an edging machine. A friend of his worked as an edger in a shoefactory and made good money. That way he would have a machine all to himself.
About that time his brother Sabino had gone back to Italy, to the oil and wine business; he had had enough of America. Nicola wanted to stay on some more. First he got a job in a shoefactory in Webster, but then he went back to Milford where he worked as an edger till 1917. If he hadn’t met his wife he would have gone home. At that time he was a socialist interested in Il Proletario, a paper that Giovannitti edited, fond of acting plays with titles like Senza Padrone, Tempeste Sociali. It was at a dance he had gotten up as a benefit for an old accordeon player who was paralyzed, that he first met Rosa his wife. She won a box of candy in the raffle. She was from the north of Italy and had the dark auburn hair Lombard women are famous for. They married and were very happy; a son was born to them whom they named Dante.
Towards 1913 Sacco began to go around to an anarchist club, the Circolo di Studi Sociali. He found the men there more intelligent, more anxious to read, more willing to work for the education of their fellow workers. In 1916 the group held manifestations of sympathy and collected money to help the strike Carlo Tresca was running in Minnesota. The Milford police forbade the meetings and arrested the speakers. Sacco was among them. They were convicted in Milford for disturbing the peace, but discharged before a superior court in Worcester.
Those were exciting years, full of the rumblings of revolution. The successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviki in Russia made it seem that the war would end in universal revolution. Then Mr. Wilson began his great crusade. In May 1917, with several friends, Sacco went south to Mexico to avoid registering for the draft. It was on the train he first met Vanzetti.
When he came back from Mexico three months later he worked in a candy factory in Cambridge, then in East Boston and at last moved out to Stoughton, where he was a trusted man in the Three K’s Factory of the Kelleys.
Sacco before his arrest was unusually powerfully built, able to do two men’s work. In prison he was able to stand thirtyone days of hunger strike before he broke down and had to be taken to the hospital. In prison he has learned to speak and write English, has read many books, for the first time in his life has been thrown with nativeborn Americans. They are so hard and brittle. They don’t fit into the bright clear heartfelt philosophy of Latin anarchism. These are the people who coolly want him to die in the electric chair. He can’t understand them. When his head was cool he’s never wanted anyone to die. Judge Thayer and the prosecution he thinks of as instruments of a machine.
VII
SLACKERS, REDS
Three years before Sacco and Vanzetti had both of them had their convictions put to the test. In 1917, against the expressed votes of the majority, Woodrow Wilson had allowed the United States to become involved in the war with Germany. When the law was passed for compulsory military service a registration day for citizens and aliens was announced. Most young men submitted whatever their convictions were. A few of those who were morally opposed to any war or to capitalist war had the nerve to protest. Sacco and Vanzetti and some friends ran away to Mexico. There, some thirty of them lived in a set of adobe houses. Those who could get jobs worked. It was share and share alike. Everything was held in common. There were in the community men of all trades and conditions; bakers, butchers, tailors, shoemakers, cooks, carpenters, waiters. Sacco got a job in a bakery and when the others were hard up would take his pay in bread. Saturday nights he’d trudge home to the community with a bag of fresh loaves of bread over his shoulder. It was a momentary realization of the hope of anarchism. But living was difficult in Mexico and they began to get letters from the States telling that it was possible to avoid the draft, telling of high wages. Little by little they filtred back across the border. Sacco and Vanzetti went back to Massachusetts.
There was an Italian club that met Sunday evenings in a hall in Maverick Square, East Boston, under the name of the Italian Naturalization Club. Workmen from the surrounding industrial towns met to play bowls and discuss social problems. There were anarchists, syndicalists, socialists of various colors. The Russian revolution had fired them with new hopes. The persecution of their comrades in various parts of America had made them feel the need for mutual help. While far away across the world new eras seemed to be flaring up into the sky, at home the great machine they slaved for seemed more adamant, more unshakable than ever. Everywhere aliens were being arrested, tortured, deported. To the war heroes who had remained at home any foreigner seemed a potential Bolshevik, a menace to the security of Old Glory and liberty bonds and the bonus. When Elia and Salsedo were arrested in New York there was great alarm among the Italian radicals around Boston. Vanzetti went down to New York to try to hire a lawyer for the two men. There he heard many uneasy rumors. The possession of any literature that might be interpreted as subversive by ignorant and brutal agents of the departments of Justice and Labor was dangerous. It was not that deportation was so much to be feared, but the beating up and third degree that preceded it.
On the evening of May 5th, Sacco and Vanzetti with the handbill on them announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder of Salsedo, went by trolley from Stoughton to West Bridgewater to meet a man named Boda who they thought could lend them a car. Very likely they thought they were being trailed and had put revolvers in their pockets out of some confused feeling of bravado. If the police pounced on them at least they would not let themselves be tortured to death like Salsedo. But they were afraid to use Boda’s car because it lacked a 1920 license plate and started back to Stoughton on the trolley, probably very uneasy. When they were arrested as the trolley entered Brockton they forgot all about their guns. They thought they were being arrested as Reds in connection with the projected meeting. When they were questioned at the police station their main care was not to implicate any of their friends. They kept remembering the dead body of Salsedo, smashed on the pavement of Park Row.
VIII
JAILBIRDS
The faces of men who have been a long time in jail have a peculiar frozen look under the eyes. The face of a man who has been a long time in jail never loses that tightness under the eyes. Sacco has been six years in the county jail, always waiting, waiting for trial, waiting for new evidence, waiting for motions to be argued, waiting for sentence, waiting, waiting, waiting. The Dedham jail is a handsome structure, set among lawns, screened by trees that wave new green leaves against the robinsegg sky of June. In the warden’s office you can see your face in the light brown varnish, you could eat eggs off the floor it is so clean. Inside the main reception hall is airy, full of sunlight. The bars are bright with reflected spring greens, a fresh peagreen light is over everything. Through the bars you can see the waving trees and the June clouds roaming the sky like cattle in an unfenced pasture. It’s a preposterous complicated canary cage. Why aren’t the birds singing in this green aviary? The warden politely shows you a seat and as you wait you notice a smell, not green and airy this smell, a jaded heavy greasy smell of slum, like the smell of army slum, but heavier, more hopeless.
Across the hall an old man is sitting in a chair, a heavy pearshaped man, his hands limp at his sides, his eyes are closed, his sagged face is like a bundle of wet newspapers. The warden and two men in black stand over him, looking down at him helplessly.
At last Sacco has come out of his cell and sits beside me. Two men sitting side by side on a bench in a green, bird cage. When he feels like it one of them will get up and walk out, walk out into the sunny June day. The other will go back to his cell to wait. He looks younger than I had expected. His face has a waxy transparency like the face of a man who’s been sick in bed for a long time; when he laughs his cheeks flush a little. At length we manage both of us to laugh. It’s such a preposterous position for a man to be in, like a man who doesn’t know the game trying to play chess blindfolded. The real world has gone. We have no more grasp of our world of rain and streets and trolleycars and cucumbervines and girls and gardenplots. This is a world of phrases, prosecution, defence, evidence, motion, irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial. For six years this man has lived in the law, tied tighter and tighter in the sticky filaments of law-words like a fly in a spiderweb. And the wrong set of words means the Chair. All the moves in the game are made for him, all he can do is sit helpless and wait, fastening his hopes on one set of phrases after another. In all these lawbooks, in all this terminology of clerks of the court and counsel for the defence there is one move that will save him, out of a million that will mean death. If only they make the right move, use the right words. But by this time the nagging torment of hope has almost stopped, not even the thought of his wife and children out there in the world, unreachable, can torture him now. He is numb now, can laugh and look quizzically at the ponderous machine that has caught and mangled him. Now it hardly matters to him if they do manage to pull him out from between the cogs, and the wrong set of words means the Chair.
The warden comes up to take down my name. “I hope your wife’s better,” says Sacco. “Pretty poorly,” says the warden. Sacco shakes his head. “Maybe she’ll get better soon, nice weather.” I have shaken his hand, my feet have carried me to the door, past the baggy pearshaped man who is still collapsed half deflated in the chair, closed crinkled eyelids twitching. The warden looks into my face with a curious smile. “Leaving us?” he asks. Outside in the neat streets the new green leaves are swaying in the sunlight, birds sing, klaxons grunt, a trolleycar screeches round a corner. Overhead the white June clouds wander in the unfenced sky.
Going to the State Prison at Charlestown is more like going to Barnum and Baileys. There’s a great scurry of guards, groups of people waiting outside; inside a brass band is playing Home Sweet Home. When at length you get let into the Big Show, you find a great many things happening at once. There are rows of chairs where pairs of people sit talking. Each pair is made up of a free man and a convict. In three directions there are grey bars and tiers of cells. The band inside plays bangingly “If Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot.” A short broadshouldered man is sitting quiet through all the uproar, smiling a little under his big drooping mustache. He has a domed, pale forehead and black eyes surrounded by many little wrinkles. The serene modeling of his cheek-bones and hollow cheeks makes you forget the prison look under his eyes.
This is Vanzetti.
And for the last six years, three hundred and sixtyfive days a year, yesterday, today, tomorrow, Sacco and Vanzetti wake up on their prison pallets, eat prison food, have an hour of exercise and conversation a day, sit in their cells puzzling about this technicality and that technicality, pinning their hopes to their alibis, to the expert testimony about the character of the barrel of Sacco’s gun, to Madeiros’ confession and Weeks’ corroboration, to action before the Supreme Court of the United States, and day by day the props are dashed from under their feet and they feel themselves being inexorably pushed towards the Chair by the blind hatred of thousands of wellmeaning citizens, by the superhuman, involved, stealthy, soulless mechanism of the law.
IX
THE PLYMOUTH TRIAL OF VANZETTI ALONE
“But Vanzetti had a criminal record,” they tell you, “he was serving a jail sentence when he was brought up for trial with Sacco.”
This is the story of Vanzetti’s criminal record.
In 1914 Vanzetti had a job loading rope coils on freightcars with the outside gang of the Plymouth Cordage. The Plymouth Cordage is the largest in the world, and virtually owns Plymouth and the surrounding towns where colonies of Italians and Portuguese worked (at that time for a maximum of nine dollars a week) tending the spinning machines that transform hemp shipped up from Yucatan into rope and binder twine. On January 17, 1916, there was a big walkout, the first in the history of the Cordage. Vanzetti was one of the organizers of the strike. After the plant had been shut down for a month in the busiest season, the company conceded a raise. Since then wages have risen to round twenty five a week. Vanzetti was always in the front, picketing, making speeches. He was the only employee who did not get his job back when the strike was settled.
At the time of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti there was a general impression that the gunmen in a Buick car who attempted to hold up a paytruck of the L. Q. White company in Bridgewater on the morning of day before Christmas 1919, were Italians and the same as those who had made off with the South Braintree payroll.
It was impossible to implicate Sacco in that affair as he had been working that day. Vanzetti was his own boss, so he could not give himself a certificate of employment. He was taken over to Plymouth and brought to trial under Judge Thayer in June, Mr. Katzmann prosecuting the case for the state. It is very probable that the man hired to defend Vanzetti deliberately gave away his client’s case. In any event he showed criminal negligence in neglecting to file a bill of exceptions and in refusing to allow Vanzetti to take the stand in his own defence.
This is what Vanzetti himself says about it in a letter to some friends in Mexico:
“As for Mr. Vahey, he had asked me very little concerning my defence, and, from after the preliminary hearing to the end of the trial, he did not put to me a single new question about the case. On the contrary, he began to promise me the electric chair. ‘They will put you with Sacco’, and ... at this point he used to cease to speak, to begin to whistle, tracing upward spiral motions with his right hand, its index finger straight up. This is the sole Herculean fatigue accomplished by Mr. Vahey in my defence, while smoking big cigars bought him by the poor Italian people. But Mr. Vahey’s words proved that he knew before the Plymouth trial that I would be indicted for the Braintree robbery and slaying * * * To suppose that Mr. Vahey and his agent Govoni might have been induced to such conduct by their conviction of my guilt, would be as wrong as it is unjust. There had been nothing in the case to justify, not even to excuse, such a doubt. I have always protested my innocence; the Italian population and some Americans of Plymouth had run in a mass to prove it. The preliminary hearing had proved the impossibility and inconsistency of the charge against me as the record shows. The truth is that both the prosecution and the defence counsel had realized that without the latter’s betrayal the frameup in the making would have been an utter failure; hence the betrayal.”
The Bridgewater holdup had occurred at 7.35 A. M. It was an armed attack on three occupants of the L. Q. White Shoe Company’s paytruck. This truck had obtained the weekly allotment of money for White’s, said to be $33,000, at a bank in the public square, and was on its way to the shoe factory.
Its route lay northward on Broad Street, along which a trolley track runs. One block north of the public square, Hale Street, a narrow lane, cuts into Broad Street from the east, and ends there. One block farther north there are railroad tracks and a depot, the latter being set back considerably from Broad Street to the east, so that it cannot be seen from the crime-zone.
As the paytruck approached Hale Street, two men on foot began firing at the three on board—a paymaster, a special officer, and a chauffeur. The fire was returned. One bandit had a revolver, and the other a shotgun. Later Vanzetti was declared to be the shotgun man. The truck escaped around a trolleycar.
No one was injured, nor were any bullet marks afterwards found. The bandits jumped into an automobile which waited with engine running in Hale street, and fled.
At that hour Vanzetti was actually 28 miles away—in Plymouth, where he was well known as a fishseller. December 24th stands out always on the Italian calendar. Among the Catholics it is a fast day, and fish is the logical food. But the feasting spirit of the Christmas-tide is in the air, and the fish of ordinary days is not rich enough, so the Italians eat eels.
Vanzetti had taken orders in advance from numerous families for eels. On the evening of December 23rd, he arranged with thirteen-year-old Bertrando Brini to have him help in the delivery of the eels. Next morning the two went through the streets together making those deliveries. They were seen by many people. That day stood out in Bertrando’s memory because it was then he earned his Christmas money.
Eighteen reputable witnesses vouched for Vanzetti’s whereabouts on that day. Nine of those had been at home when he brought the eels, and talked with him. John Di Carlo, proprietor of a shoe store, testified that Vanzetti came to his store while he was cleaning up that morning—between 7:15 and 7:40 A. M. Every hour of Vanzetti’s time that Christmas Eve was accounted for.
Those who swore that they purchased eels from him included Mrs. Mary Fortini, Mrs. Rosa Forni, Rosa Balboni, Teresa Malaguice, Adelaide Bongiovanni, Marquetta Fiochi, Emma Bosari, Enrico Bastoni, a baker, and Vincent J. Longhi.
All these are persons of good repute. Their testimony was straightforward and certain. The prosecution made no serious attempt to disprove it.
Prosecutor Katzmann, who says this is solely a criminal case, asked Di Carlo during cross-examination:
“Have you ever discussed government theories over there between you?” and “Have you discussed the question of the poor man and the rich man between you?” (Trial record, Page 47).
And when Michael Sassi, cordage worker, was testifying for Vanzetti, the prosecutor asked: “Have you heard anything of his political speeches to fellow workers at the Cordage?”
Witnesses for the prosecution were few and inconsistent; several altered their testimony, consciously or unconsciously, to fit the prosecution’s needs.
Frank W. Harding, better known as “Slip,” originally described the shotgun bandit as “smooth-shaven,” according to the Boston Globe of December 24, 1919. But in the official transcript of the preliminary hearing of Vanzetti on May 10, he uses five lines to describe the “overgrown Charlie Chaplin” moustache of the same man. This description was given after he had seen Vanzetti.
Similar alteration of testimony was made by Benjamin J. Bowles, one of the men on the paytruck. Bowles is a special officer for the White Shoe Company and member of Chief Stewart’s police force in Bridgewater. At the preliminary hearing Bowles swore the shotgun man’s moustache was “short and croppy.” But presently it became known that Policemen Schilling and Gault, of Plymouth, together with the Chief of Police there and various prominent persons, would testify for the defense that Vanzetti’s moustache had been full and flowing for years. So in the trial Bowles declared that the shotgun man’s moustache was “bushy.”
Bowles’ “pretty positive” identification, thrice repeated at the preliminary hearing (Page 32, preliminary record), became “positive” in the trial. (Page 25, trial record.)
Although refusing to make a positive identification for the commonwealth, Paymaster Alfred E. Cox reversed his general testimony at the trial and gave a description which would fit the defendant. In the Brockton police court on May 10, Cox declared several times that the shotgun man, in contrast to the other bandit, was “short and of slight build” (Page 11, preliminary record), the “short” fellow of the attacking party.
This was bad for the commonwealth’s case. But it didn’t stand. Bowles followed Cox with a “five feet eight inches” description which fitted Vanzetti better, and said that the shotgun man was the taller of the two. Then, when the case went to trial, Bowles was called first and Cox carefully patterned his description after him and let the bandit grow taller. When Bowles again said “five feet eight inches” Cox repeated “five feet eight inches.”
Bowles gave a description of the shotgun man’s hair, eyes, face and clothes of minute completeness. Such fullness of detail six months after he had seen a man for only a few chaotic seconds seems incredible. Bowles described graphically how he helped operate the motor truck after Earl Graves, the driver, collapsed from fright with the first bullet, and how they steered around a trolley car directly ahead of them.
And most marvelous of all—at the very time when he was doing this, he was engaged in a pistol duel with another bandit from the one he was describing. This other bandit, he said, was fully eight feet away from the shotgun man. All this is in the preliminary trial record.
At the trial however the defense attorneys challenged Bowles on the latter point and he promptly changed his testimony, saying now that his second shot was fired at the shotgun man. But he had just said that he was from 25 to 50 yards away when he fired the second shot.
Mrs. Georgina Brooks is an elderly woman who appears to have supernatural powers. Buildings become transparent when they stand in her way. She declared she saw “fire and smoke from a gun” while she stood in a window of the railway station, 75 feet back from Broad Street and 300 feet from Hale Street where the events took place.
But there is a two-story frame house half-way along Broad Street which completely shuts off an observer in that window from any view of the crime-area!
Mrs. Brooks makes no secret of being able to see only the vague silhouette of objects before her with one of her eyes, and she has been taking treatment for the other. But on the way to the railroad station with a small child before the shooting, she took observations afterwards useful to the prosecution. She was walking north on the west side of Broad Street, she said, when she noticed an automobile drawn up in Hale street, east of the eastern sidewalk line on Broad Street. The rear of the car was toward her.
For some unexplained reason she became interested in that car, although its appearance was not unusual. She led the child across Broad Street and into Hale Street, and went out of her way to pass around the front end of the automobile. In it, she said, were four men. Three of these she took no notice of; but she scrutinized the fourth—a man with a dark face, moustache and dark soft hat, who “seemed like some kind of a foreigner.”
She looked twice at this man, who in return looked at her “severely”; and she continued to turn and look at him as she and the child proceeded to the railroad station. That man, she declared, to quote from the trial record, “That man, I should judge, was the defendant.”
Paymaster Cox testified at the preliminary hearing, as did Mrs. Brooks, that Vanzetti had worn a hat. But this detail given by Cox was carefully suppressed by the prosecution during the trial. Chief Stewart exhibited in court a cap, which he claimed to have taken from Vanzetti’s home; then he produced a witness, Richard Grant Casey, who said he thought he saw this cap on the shotgun man’s head on December 24.
Maynard Freeman Shaw, 14-year-old high school prodigy, stood behind a tree and saw the shotgun man running 145 feet away. He was one of those who “identified” Vanzetti. He admitted he never had more than a fleeting glimpse of the bandit’s face.
“I could tell he was a foreigner by the way he ran,” young Shaw testified at the trial.
“What sort of a foreigner?” asked the defense.
“Either Italian or Russian.”
“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a Norwegian?”
“Yes.”
“What is the difference?”
“Unsteady.”
Courtroom spectators were impressed by the heroic recital of “Slip” Harding. He described modestly his own coolness under fire; how he stood in the open during the gun-play in the Bridgewater attack. Some onlookers assert that Harding was behind a tree, but he testified that he took down the number of the bandits’ automobile as it sped away. Then he gave the memorandum to Police Chief Stewart, he said, and failed to keep a copy of it.
When Stewart went on the witness stand he stated that he had mislaid that important memorandum. After spending a whole day searching for the automobile number, he had to confess that he had lost it. Later, however, he gave “from memory” a number which he asserted was that of the bandit-car. That was six months after the crime. The number Stewart gave was that of a car stolen from Francis Murphy, a Natick shoe manufacturer, in November, 1919.
Two days after the South Braintree holdup, an abandoned Buick automobile, identified as Murphy’s, was found several miles away. The prosecution contended that it was used in both crimes.
Vanzetti was connected with that car by the thinnest threads. Remember the three shotgun shells found in his pocket many days after the second holdup. The prosecutors tried to introduce as evidence a fourth shotgun shell, alleged to have been found alongside the automobile. Judge Thayer would not admit its introduction.
Whether that shell actually was found beside the car may be questioned, in the light of a news story in the Boston Globe of April 19. That story told of State Detective Scott and Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan of Braintree beating the bush for the missing $15,000 payroll.
(A curious thing about the South Braintree crime is that no trace of the stolen money, or of the black boxes that were said to have contained it, has been found. Stewart had an idea it was in Coacci’s trunk. It was not there. The only mention of any money that could possibly have come from that source was the two thousand dollars Madeiros went South with late in 1920. Being questioned by Mr. Thompson he refused to say where it came from, but it is to be inferred that it was part of the South Braintree loot.)
“Their search was fruitless,” according to the Globe, “except for finding of an empty RIFLE shell.”
Failing to get the fourth shotgun shell into evidence, the commonwealth tried another way to link Vanzetti with the Buick car.
It proceeded to build its case upon the shoulders of two missing men—a shaky scaffolding, but one which served the prosecution’s purposes.
It put on the stand Mrs. Simon Johnson, wife of a garage keeper, who at the request of the police, telephoned them when Michael Boda called on the night of May 5 for his own automobile—an Overland—which was stored in the Johnson garage.
She asserted that Sacco and two other Italians were with Boda that night, and was quite certain about it, although her husband testified that Mrs. Johnson was in the light when she observed the four men, and that the visitors were in the shadow. Johnson knew Boda well, and he took an oath that Boda had owned and driven an Overland car, but never to his knowledge had driven a Buick.
Finally, however, the prosecution summoned Napoleon Ensher, a milkman, who said he didn’t know Boda by name, but that he knew who was meant, and that he had once seen Boda driving a Buick—maybe four weeks ago, maybe eight weeks ago. There was no showing that Ensher had any knowledge of different makes of automobiles, nor any explanation of how he happened to notice what kind of a car was being driven by a man whose name he didn’t know—a man who simply passed one day a long time ago, passed “waving his head.” Other makes of automobiles might easily be confused with a Buick by a person unfamiliar with their differences.
On this extremely flimsy evidence, in the face of an alibi that would certainly have been accepted had the defense witnesses been Americans instead of Italians, Vanzetti was convicted of attempted highway robbery and given the enormous sentence of from twelve to fifteen years. The indictment carried two counts: attempt to murder and attempt to rob. Judge Thayer instructed the jury to disregard the first count, but, such was the feeling against the defendant that they brought in a verdict of Guilty on both counts. Sentence however was only passed on the latter. In his charge to the jury Judge Thayer had said that the crime was “cognate with the defendant’s ideals” as a radical.