“Think of the times,” he said, lifting his hands palms upward. “I carried a pistol in my pocket then. I never fired it, I didn’t even know how to load it, but it gave me strength to feel it in my pocket.” He stopped as if he were thinking again of those far-off days. I watched him, the peaceable elderly printer who had outlived his party and his time. Where the word anarchism had once aroused fear, it now brought a kind of nostalgia. Violent some of the anarchists may have been, but there had been an integrity about them, a trust in human nature that I could never have. Now here he was, gnarled and sturdy as an old oak, speaking to me of the lost comrades of his young manhood.
Afterward, as I walked out into the reverberant street, I felt I had put the bumf into perspective. I knew it was intuition rather than reason, that the historical method had fallen by the wayside, yet I did not see how anyone could spend an afternoon talking with Aldino Felicani and still feel that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. But that was the difficulty in trying to form any picture of an event by talking with the survivors. The three principals in the case whom I had seen in the flesh and who were now dead—District Attorney Katzmann, Governor Fuller, President Lowell of Harvard—I had judged harshly. But others I met, whom I had expected to find fools or knaves, I had found neither.
Among these was Michael Stewart, the Bridgewater police chief whose suspicions started the events that led to the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. Some time after the trial Stewart had left Bridgewater to become police chief of Scituate, a seaside town southeast of Braintree. He had a speech about the case that he liked to deliver at men’s-club meetings. Now retired, he lived with his son in a white bungalow near Scituate Harbor. I knew the inside of it well: the gumwood trim, the nicknacks on the tapestry-brick mantel, the Child Jesus of Prague under cellophane, the sofa and the overstuffed chairs. Whenever I rang the bell I could see Stewart through the glass as he came limping to the door, lame from some old police injury. There was an unmistakable Celtic look about him from the cut of his mouth to the blueness of his eyes and the wave to his white hair.
Never since the night in 1920 that he had driven down to the Brockton police station to interview Sacco and Vanzetti had he ever had any doubt about their guilt. To him, it was all very simple. Godless men, atheists like Sacco and Vanzetti, were capable of any crime. Yet his relations with them after their arrest were for a period amiable, and he had liked Vanzetti.
“Sacco I never paid much attention to,” he told me. “He was just a sap, but Vanzetti was a real interesting man. I used to drive him to the Plymouth trial from the jail, and each morning I saw him I’d say ‘Hello, Bertie,’ and he’d say ‘Hello, Mike.’ Sometimes he used to sing songs for us in Italian on the way over, and he had quite a voice. After he heard me testify in court though, the next time he saw me he raised his hands—he was handcuffed—and shook them at me. And he never spoke to me again. The thing I remember most about him is his eyes. He had terrible eyes, like fire when he looked at you.”
Though Orciani, who was with Sacco and Vanzetti just before their arrest, had produced a watertight alibi after he was picked up, Stewart was nevertheless convinced of his guilt. “For my money Orciani was the cleverest of the lot,” he told me. “That’s how he managed to rig himself up such a good alibi. He was one of those wise guys. During the trial he used to go to court every day. There was a little room in back the defense had for exhibits and things like that, and he had charge of it. Most of the time he’d stand in the doorway watching what went on in court. Well, Katzmann spotted him there and the day they were cross-examining Vanzetti and asking him about where he got his gun, Katzmann looked straight at Orciani and said, ‘I’ll tell you, Mr. Vanzetti, where you got that gun.’ You could hear his voice right down the corridor. ‘You got it from your friend Orciani after he took it off of Berardelli’s dead body.’ Katzmann pointed his finger right at him and Orciani ducked. That was the last time he ever showed up.”
One late-summer afternoon I drove to Billerica to meet Dr. Warren Steams, dean emeritus of Tufts Medical School, who as state prison psychiatrist had seen Sacco and Vanzetti regularly in the years following their conviction. I found him in the study of his classically square colonial mansion facing the common. He was listening to a middle-aged man in heavy tortoise-shell spectacles who held an open book in his left hand and pointed to a passage with his right.
“It says here,” the man explained, “ten thousand people were there to see him hanged. That was 1820. I wonder what would draw all those people to an execution?”
Steams, with his wreath of kinky white hair surrounding a bald dome, looked amiable, but his voice was tart. “Cruelty. If it were announced that I was going to be publicly tortured and hanged next Monday morning on Boston Common there’d be at least a hundred and fifty thousand people there to see it.”