FOOTNOTES:
[10] The two shells that had not been tampered with during the Plymouth trial were admitted in evidence at Dedham after several witnesses claimed to have seen what they thought was a shotgun protruding from the rear of the getaway car.
[11] Long after the trial Sacco admitted privately to Thompson, his later counsel, that he was carrying the Colt that night “because we were at war with the government.”
[12] During the trial Ross’s wife gave birth to a son. To the immense delight of the judge, he was named Webster Thayer Ross. Katzmann became the child’s godfather. As it did for Mrs. DeFalco, the calling of court interpreter eventually proved too much for Ross: In 1926 he was sentenced to the Middlesex House of Correction after pleading guilty to attempting to bribe a judge.
[13] Leon Mucci, the deputy from the district that included Torremaggiore.
CHAPTER TWELVE
POST-TRIAL: I
The convictions made the Friday headlines of all the Boston papers, but by mid-August references to Sacco and Vanzetti had disappeared from even the back pages. Theirs had been just another Massachusetts murder trial, longer than most, but finished now in every sense. So it seemed to J. Weston Allen, the Attorney General, when he sent a letter of congratulation to District Attorney Katzmann. So it seemed to Chief Justice Aiken, who wrote to his colleague and fellow Dartmouth alumnus Webster Thayer that “Your management of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti entitles you to the highest degree summa cum laude.” Whatever undercurrents of radical protest might still persist, they remained well below the surface of middle-class complacency.
But while in the United States the storm centered in Massachusetts subsided, overseas there were increasing rumblings broken by occasional flashes of lightning. As early as August 6, 1921, the Executive Committee of the Chamber of Labor Unions in Rome sent a telegram to President Harding expressing the hope that “the crime of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti will not be recorded.” Eugene Lyons in his six months in Italy had done a skillful publicity job, for by the time of the trial, Italians were generally convinced that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. The Latin anarchists in the United States had written voluminously to their comrades in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, laying the groundwork for the later agitation. Frank Lopez, through his contacts with the more important South American newspapers, had managed to appeal to the widespread anti-gringo feeling there.
Although American consulates and embassies overseas had begun to receive letters of protest in September, the real force of the agitation did not strike until October, when large Communist-organized demonstrations took place in many cities. For all their tenacity, the anarchists were no longer a mass organization and, so far as European developments were concerned, the East German historian Johannes Zelt is undoubtedly right in claiming that “from the beginning the Communists stood at the head of the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign.” In a tactic foreshadowing the Popular Front of the thirties, the Communist International called on all Communists, socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists to unite for the rescue of Sacco and Vanzetti—while, at the same time, the anarchists in the Soviet Union were being liquidated en masse. The organized protest, as it spread across Europe, would include men of good will of all beliefs and persuasions, but control of the movement stayed in the hands of the Communist International and, later, the subsidiary International Red Aid, founded by the Cheka chief, Dzerzhinsky.
For the Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti were pawns in the class struggle, convenient symbols to be exploited in a drive for power where the blood of even anarchist martyrs might become the seed of the Party. However the anarchists were to feel about the Communists taking over—and in time they would feel bitter indeed—the Party had the tight organization, the mass control, and the finances that made quick action easy. On September 20 the Central Committee for Action of the French Communist Party began making plans for a monster demonstration before the American Embassy. According to the resolution then drawn up, “Only direct and clearly revolutionary action can save the Italian liberators Sacco and Vanzetti from the death penalty to which they have been condemned.” The Communist daily L’Humanité opened a subscription fund for the two men and proclaimed: “There is an American Embassy in Paris. We owe it a visit!”