CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1926
After the flare-up in 1921, the Sacco-Vanzetti case smoldered obscurely for five years. Occasional sparks were thrown up, as when Ettor and Giovannitti returned to Boston in 1925 to speak for their imprisoned comrades and Eugene Debs visited Vanzetti in Charlestown, but for the most part the issues seemed lost in a lawyer’s maze. Across the Atlantic the case had become overlaid by other events and other conflicts. If the average demonstrator of 1921 had suddenly been asked in 1926 whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, he would probably not have known.
In the United States, except in restricted circles of urban liberals and radicals, the names aroused no more response. The Defense Committee continued its Boston meetings. In December 1925 it published the first number of the Official Bulletin, a four-page booklet containing a message from Debs, a review of the ballistics evidence by Mrs. Evans, and an appeal to Governor Cox signed by George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, James Maxton, and other members of the English Labor Party.
Sacco, in Dedham, resumed his English lessons with Mrs. Jack. In Charlestown, Vanzetti’s literary activities expanded. He contributed articles to the New Jersey anarchist journal, L’Adunata del Refratti, wrote his short autobiography as well as the booklet Background to the Plymouth Trial, began to translate Proudhon’s The War and the Peace into English, and completed a novelette, Events and Victims, about his experiences in a factory before the United States entered the war. Both men were much heartened by Thompson’s taking over as their counsel. Sacco, in spite of his class-conscious rigidity, trusted the Boston conservative lawyer as he had never trusted Moore, and wrote enthusiastically of the “splendour defense” that Thompson and Hill had made in their first appearance. Vanzetti was even more enthusiastic.
Permit me to express my gratitude and my appreciation to you [he wrote Thompson in February 1926]. I understand that your work in our behalfe is underpaid; the must difficult test of you; the noble sentiments and impulse by which you were decide to take the side of two underdogs; this I understand. And I also hope to understand a little the brave, learned, beautiful fight that you are fighting in our behalfe, paying of it in peace, rest, interest and other universally desired things.
Ha! to have known you 6 year ago! I would never have been a convict.
Thompson, in turn, as the months went on, found himself drawn closer to the two men he had reluctantly elected to defend. In May 1927 he could write:
I went into this case as a Harvard man, a man of old American tradition, to help two aliens who had, I thought, been unjustly treated. I have arrived at a humbler attitude. Not since the martyrdoms of the sixteenth century has such steadfastness to a faith, such self-abnegation as that of these two Italians been seen on this earth.
The Harvard graduate, the man of old American traditions, the established lawyer, is now quite ready to say that nowhere in his soul is there to be found the faith, the splendid gentility, which make the man, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Thompson later admitted that the case had been something of a catastrophe for his firm: that by taking it he had lost friends, clients, and a great deal of money. But it was a choice he never regretted. He told Felicani that if he had understood the situation better at the beginning, he would not have taken a fee.