Rank-and-file demonstrators had scarcely heard the names of the two Italians when they received orders to take to the streets, but in their militancy they responded, just as they had for other issues and would again when some central committee pressed a different propaganda button.
The October demonstrations were centered in France and Italy, with echoes in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia. Concerned for the moment with other matters, the German Communist Party did not participate. In Paris, even before the end of September various committees for action had met. Eight thousand militants filled the Salle Wagram and, on leaving, sang the “Internationale” while from a doorway someone lobbed a grenade at the drawn-up police, wounding several of them. The American Embassy was deluged with letters and telegrams. On October 19 a grenade, wrapped with sinister humor in a copy of the Royalist Action Française, was sent through the mail to the new American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. The valet who opened the package set off the fuse but managed to throw it into a bathroom, where it went off, wounding him slightly and demolishing the room. On the twenty-fourth, ten thousand police and eighteen thousand troops had to be called out to hold back the vast crowd demonstrating before the American Embassy.
The wave spread across Europe. In Switzerland the Communists organized demonstrations in Zurich, Basle, and Geneva. In St. Gall a letter to the American Consulate protesting the judicial murder of “Sachi” and Vanzetti was signed by Communists, syndicalists, socialists, and trade unionists. Amsterdam workers held a protest meeting, as did the Dutch Free Thinkers. Communists marched in the streets of The Hague, Brussels, Liége, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. The American ambassador in Madrid was threatened with assassination. In Lisbon a bomb was exploded in the vestibule of the consulate-general shortly after a letter had been placed under the door demanding the release of the “Brockton anarchists.” Medical students of Portugal’s National College struck for a day to show their sympathy. Although a demonstration by English Communists before the American Embassy fizzled out in a London rain, the Party’s Tooting branch forwarded its objections in a letter to the ambassador. A polite communication was sent to Washington by the Communist Party of Ireland.
When November found the Massachusetts prisoners still alive and no date set for their execution, the Communist International turned off the spigot and the European agitation dried up, but a new wave of agitation now began in Central and South America. The Latin American movement was less well organized, less literate, and, as might be expected, more violent. Anarchists of Guadalajara, Mexico, paraded behind red and black banners reading: “Yankee bourgeoisie, if you assassinate our comrades, Sacco and Vanzetti, your lives and your interests will pay the penalty.” La Junta Federal of Santiago, Chile, announced that “the day the Communists of the world learn that Sacco and Vanzetti have been shot, the residences of all American ambassadors which exist in various countries will be destroyed by a tremendous charge of dynamite.” In Havana, anarchist circulars warned that “in Cuba, Yankee tyrants are not lacking in whom to let fall the vengeful dagger.” A bomb was found in the embassy garden in Rio de Janeiro. The American consul in Mexico City received anonymous threats from “the comrades of Saco and Banzet.” There were demonstrations in front of the United States embassies and consulates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Panama.
In Massachusetts the overseas disturbances, recorded with increasing frequency in the local papers, stirred up feelings of apprehension. Moore was dismayed, and said so. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how any intelligent and sane person sincerely interested in obtaining ultimate justice for these two men could hope that this sort of thing could benefit them.” The bombings, he tried to make out, were the work either of enemies or insane people. Prompted by Moore, and aware of the hardening of community opinion, the Defense Committee issued a disclaimer, maintaining that
the lurid plots and threats attributed to mythical individuals referred to as Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers are so thoroughly harmful to the effort being made to save the two men from the electric chair that they could not have originated in the minds of friends. Either they were planned by persons desirous of putting the case of the two prisoners in disrepute or they are lies pure and simple.
Two days after the trial’s end the defense lawyers filed the customary motion for a new trial on the grounds that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence. This motion was scheduled to be argued before Judge Thayer in Dedham on Saturday, October 29. On the twenty-eighth the Boston papers spread a sensational story that groups of Italians were coming to the hearing from New York dressed in army uniforms and carrying automatics. Extra police were at once stationed throughout the city, and the Post Office and the Federal Building placed under guard. At the South Station plain-clothes men watched each incoming train. That night the Dedham jail was surrounded with searchlights.
Saturday morning the courthouse was more heavily guarded than at any time during the trial. State troopers, mounted and on motorcycles, patrolled the streets, and portly Colonel Foote, the Commissioner of Public Safety, came over from the State House in person. Plain-clothes men in all their obviousness tramped up and down the High Street. The Boston riot squad appeared, loaned for the day by the Boston police commissioner. The public was banned from the courthouse. Reporters who were admitted were patted for weapons.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in and their handcuffs taken off, there were fewer than fifty persons in the courtroom. Three months had done much to alter the two men. In July, overwhelmed by the verdict, they had felt isolated. Now the news from overseas had given them the satisfaction of knowing that there were workers the world over who were not going to stand by while the courts of Massachusetts sent their comrades to the electric chair. Newly confident, Sacco and Vanzetti were also full of resentment, particularly against the debonair district attorney whom they once more faced.
Both Moore and Jerry McAnarney well knew there was no chance that Judge Thayer would overrule the jury’s verdict, but the motion was a legal step always taken in murder cases. The arguments and counterarguments lasted all that Saturday and the following Saturday, Moore appealing particularly to the fact that the jury had given no consideration to the alibi witnesses. While Katzmann was delivering his arguments defending the verdict, the men in the cage kept interrupting and contradicting him. When he told of taking a witness to the Dedham jail who picked out Sacco from a group of prisoners, Sacco jumped up in the cage and accused the district attorney of having prompted the witness. “Yes,” he shouted to Judge Thayer, who motioned to a deputy, “that man he said, ‘There’s Sacco.’ That’s the way he know!” The deputy grabbed Sacco by the arm. “Go easy!” Sacco cried out, trying to brush him off. Vanzetti now broke in savagely: “You bring every crook in Massachusetts to testify against us! You and every man of sense know it.” Judge Thayer observed acidly that the defendants ought not to interrupt. When they continued to shout and gesticulate, he again signaled to the deputies to quiet them. He too had been hearing of the turmoil in Europe, and had been receiving letters and telegrams daily—some of them threatening—demanding a new trial. His house in Worcester was now under guard, and he was simmeringly aware that last summer’s court session and verdict had by no means ended the case. “These cases,” he announced with controlled but still obvious anger as he looked sourly at the cage, “seem to have assumed a state, national and international interest. Overseas a statement was published that the presiding justice said to the jury that these men must be convicted because they were Italians and radicals. That statement was absolutely false.”