Facing the chair

by John Dos Passos

SACCO AND VANZETTI

But what sort of a trap was it into which Sacco and Vanzetti stepped the evening of May 5th?

Their arrest seems to go back to the fact that in the famous January raids Police Chief Stewart of Bridgewater helped Department of Justice agents rout four Lithuanians out of their beds and drag them off to Deer Island. That seems to have started him on a career of red-baiting.

Later, at the request of the Department of Justice, he arrested and engineered the deportation of a certain Coacci, a member of the vaguely outlined group, readers of Galleani’s paper, to which Sacco and Vanzetti belonged. Coacci was deported from Ellis Island on April 18, leaving behind a wife who was about to have a baby. Chief Stewart was worrying about the series of holdups, committed it was thought by Italians, which were earning the police considerable adverse criticism in the community. Something had to be done. It was not until Coacci had been shipped off that Stewart got the idea that perhaps he might be implicated in the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes. It turned out that Coacci had worked in the L. Q. White shoe factory some time before the Bridgewater attempt. Stewart hatched the theory that perhaps the little house where Coacci lived was the bandit headquarters. Boda was a salesman and drove a car. Stewart found him and questioned him. Boda’s car was being repaired at Johnson’s garage a little down the road. Then Stewart found out from Johnson that the car had been brought in for repairs some time near the date of the South Braintree murders. He told him to phone for the police if anyone came to take Boda’s car away.

So Stewart, the small town cop, found himself in charge of the case. Captain Proctor, head of the state police, stepped out after warning him that he thought the trap had snapped on the wrong birds. The theory elaborated by him and by Katzmann was that the five men who committed the South Braintree crime (years later identified by Madeiros as members of the Morelli gang of Providence) were Boda, Orciani and Coacci, and after their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti thrown in to make up the exact total. Coacci was escaping with the swag. Federal agents had his trunk seized and brought back when he landed in Italy, but nothing of a suspicious nature was found in it. Orciani was found to have been at work on the day of the crime. Boda disappeared. All of which proved conclusively that Sacco and Vanzetti were the criminals.

No one who remembers the winter of 1919–20 can deny that even the mildest radicals, whether citizens or aliens, were looked upon every man jack of them as criminals and bombers by the police and good people generally all over the Union. In conversation the phrase “He ought to be in jail” followed after the word Red as naturally as a tail follows a dog. The news of the death of Salsedo had thrown the few remaining Italian radicals round Boston into a panic. That night Sacco and Vanzetti were trying to hide incriminating literature and at the same time to call a protest meeting in Brockton on May 9th. When they met Boda and Orciani outside the home of the garage-keeper Johnson in West Bridgewater that night of the fifth, they were already pretty much alarmed. When Johnson began to make excuses to them about Boda’s car, saying that they could not take it out as it did not have the proper license plate, they must have felt pretty uneasy. Actually Mrs. Johnson was telephoning the police. Boda’s car was a small Overland, that would have been hard to match with the Buick that was being looked for in connection with the South Braintree crime, but the $2,000 reward offered by the shoe factory was worth taking a chance for. Probably the very fact of four wops wanting to go riding in a car was suspicious to the Johnsons. Anyway the four men got nervous. Boda and Orciani rode off on Orciani’s motorcycle, and Sacco and Vanzetti got aboard a street car. Crossing into Brockton they were arrested. The police thought they were arresting Boda.

We’re going to be deported, thought Sacco and Vanzetti, and naturally did their best not to implicate their friends and comrades.

The fact that they were armed was a piece of horrible bad luck. If it hadn’t been for the revolvers and shotgun shells found on them they would probably have been released as was Orciani whom the police picked up a couple of days later. But why were they armed, everybody asks. Vanzetti had bought the gun to protect his earnings as a fishpeddler. It was a time of many holdups. Sacco was accustomed to carry a gun as night watchman at the Three K’s Factory. A great many people of all classes get a feeling of strength and manhood out of toting a gun. Put yourself in their place. Haven’t there been times when you who are reading this would have been pretty embarrassed to explain your actions if suddenly arrested and bullied and crossquestioned by a lot of bulls in a station house? Add to that the chance connection of revolvers, shells, the draft of an anarchist leaflet. Many a man has died in the Chair on flimsier evidence than that. That’s always the answer of the man in the street when you press him about this case. Many a good guy’s been electrocuted on less than that.

It’s time that you realized fully, you who are reading this, man or woman, laborer or whitecollar worker, that if Sacco and Vanzetti die in the Chair as the result of a frameup based on an unlucky accident, your chance of life will be that much slimmer, if you ever come to be arrested as a result of a similar unlucky chain of circumstances. Justice can’t be embalmed in the dome of a courthouse. It’s got to be worked for, fought for daily by those who want it for themselves and for their neighbors.

A great many men and women do realize it. That’s why Sacco and Vanzetti are alive today.

So it was that it was as a convicted highway robber that Vanzetti was tried for murder with Sacco. If it hadn’t been for that fact it would have been much harder to convict the two men at Dedham.

By one of those agreements of counsel that seem so ghastly to a layman, the defense contracted not to produce character witnesses for Vanzetti, if the prosecution abstained from bringing up the previous conviction. It was a skeleton in the closet, never mentioned, but on everyone’s mind all through the trial.

X
THE DEDHAM TRIAL

Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of committing a $15,776 payroll robbery and murdering Frederick Parmenter, paymaster, and Alexander Berardelli, payroll guard, at South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920. Parmenter and Berardelli were employees of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company.

Both defendants were tried before Superior Judge Webster Thayer at Dedham in June and July 1921, the trial extending seven weeks, and were convicted of first degree murder by a jury which the defense attorneys contend was irregularly and illegally selected. The verdict carries a penalty of death in the electric chair.

The crime was committed at 3.05 p. m. on Pearl street, in front of the four-story Rice and Hutchins shoe factory. This building was filled with workers. Four rows of windows looked out upon the scene of the shooting. While the glass in them was opaque, as soon as the shots were heard, many windows were thrown open.

Many other workers saw the crime from the windows of the Slater and Morrill shoe factory a short distance west of the Rice and Hutchins plant. And directly opposite was an excavation where numerous laborers were at work.

Just before the shooting a train had come in letting off passengers at the nearby railroad station. Numerous persons were on the street as the bandits fled, their number swelled quickly by the sound of the shots and the wave of excitement that traveled like the wind through the small town. Westward on Pearl Street the bandit-automobile sped, crossing the New Haven tracks increasing in speed as it proceeded, and continuing the main streets of the town.

This was but one of a series of payroll robberies in Eastern Massachusetts, of which the perpetrators had invariably escaped. These bandits too, got away. The authorities were on the defensive; public indignation was high. Search for the bandits was participated in by the state police and local police, with the active co-operation of the Department of Justice and various agencies employed by the allied manufacturing and banking interests. These included the Pinkerton Detective Agency, acting in the behalf of the Travelers’ Insurance Company, which insured the Slater and Morrill payroll. Investigation by these forces continued from April 15, 1920 to May 31, 1921, when Sacco and Vanzetti were brought to trial.

Of the scores who saw the crime and escape, and with so many powerful agencies co-operating in the search, how many witnesses were brought against Sacco and Vanzetti? A trifling number, as will appear in this analysis; while a very much larger number of those who saw the crime are positive that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti were the bandits.

Several important witnesses for the prosecution were seriously discredited, while various responsible persons who saw the events connected with the crime and who declared that the arrested men were not the bandits, were pushed aside by the state after it interviewed them.

Here follows a careful analysis of the actual testimony for Sacco and Vanzetti. This analysis is the result of a searching study of the 3,900 pages of official transcript. Every statement set down here, unless otherwise specified, is borne out by the court record.

The mass of evidence which went toward the setting of the crime but which had no bearing on the guilt or innocence of the accused is eliminated, while evidence introduced piecemeal and in haphazard order is assembled and arranged under appropriate heads.

The testimony relating only to Vanzetti is presented first because it is the shorter and thus more easily disentangled from the mass of detail under which its inadequacy was hidden. Such an arrangement throws into bold relief the injustice of the court’s refusal to separate the trials of the two men. A request for the separation was entered by the defense at the opening and again at the close of the trial. “Where is there anything prejudicial to Vanzetti,” asked the judge, “if proper instructions are given to the jury?” But juries, despite formal instruction to count this fact against Defendant No. 1 and that fact against Defendant No. 2, inevitably tend to count all facts against both when they are tried together. The human mind is not a mechanical instrument which functions according to judicial instructions.

Then the case against Sacco is treated in full, and finally the evidence applicable to both men is analyzed.