Anticipating the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision, the Red Aid’s Central European Headquarters in Berlin began in February 1926, to flood Europe with Sacco-Vanzetti propaganda and plans for a united front of artists, writers, actors, scholars, and teachers.
The anarchists had never ceased their sporadic and individualistic action, but international anarchy no longer rivaled Marxism as a world movement, as it had in Bakunin’s day, and it persisted mostly in the Latin countries. The Sacco-Vanzetti case contained, among many other things, the last gesture of international anarchism. Yet the anarchists by themselves could have accomplished little. It was the executive committee of the Communist International, with its tight organization and intricate networks, that was able to stir the streets. By the autumn of 1926 the groundwork had been laid for the world-wide agitation to come.
The year 1926 brought a belated stirring of interest in the case throughout the United States, partly as a reaction to the renewed agitation overseas as reported in such mass-circulation journals as the Literary Digest, partly because of the Supreme Court’s decision in May, and partly from the labors of the Defense Committee. In Massachusetts there was a quickening of emotions lying dormant since 1921, a xenophobic reaction by the community to criticism from outsiders that would rise to hysteria as world agitation rose.[23]
Robert Lincoln O’Brien, the half-Irish half-old-Yankee editor of the Boston Herald, whose reaction to the Sacco-Vanzetti case remained essentially neutral, observed that “a surprising number of groups and elements of the community came to regard leniency for Sacco and Vanzetti as an assault upon the honor of the Commonwealth.” That feeling, still amorphous in the spring of 1926, hardened under the impact of hostile gestures from overseas and was suddenly exacerbated in June when the house of Samuel Johnson in West Bridgewater was demolished by a bomb. Whoever planted the bomb apparently mistook Johnson’s house for that of his brother Simon, who with his wife had received a reward of several hundred dollars after their court testimony. No one was ever apprehended in this or any other bombings connected with the case, and the Defense Committee at once repudiated the act, but to the community it seemed a confirmation of its worst fears in regard to radicals. Guards were at once placed around the houses of Judge Thayer and of Chief Justice Arthur Rugg. District Attorney Wilbar announced that he would ask for the immediate imposition of the death penalty on Sacco and Vanzetti.
The Commonwealth was coming to feel that reviews enough had been made, the matter had been discussed long enough. Doubts expressed from outside, either in the United States or overseas, merely sharpened the edge of Massachusetts majority opinion. The Boston architect C. Howard Walker, on returning from Europe at the height of the agitation, declared himself “enough of a Machiavellian to rejoice in the electrocutions whether the accused are innocent or guilty.”
Stubbornly the Massachusetts community, the articulate, rooted middle-class community, closed ranks. Granville Hicks, teaching at Smith College, helped organize a clemency meeting in Northampton in the spring of 1927. So strong was the feeling of the townspeople against Sacco and Vanzetti that it broke up in bedlam. It was not, Hicks had to admit, just the rich and powerful who were against the two Italians: “It was also the doctors, the lawyers, the shopkeepers, the farmers, the workers. It was practically all my neighbors in Northampton except for the other members of the college faculty. The battle was between the intellectuals and everybody else.”
There was, however, a thoughtful minority made uneasy by the slow steamroller of Massachusetts justice. Liberals like Edward Filene, John Moors of the brokerage house of Moors & Cabot, and Professor Felix Frankfurter joined with conservatives like Joseph Walker, a former Republican speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador to Italy, in questioning the legal proceedings. Names old and distinguished were added to the list of protesters—the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the philosopher William Hocking, William Allan Neilson, the president of Smith College, and the Harvard economist Frank Taussig.
In June 1925 the American branch of the International Red Aid was set up in Chicago as the International Labor Defense. For the Communists the Sacco-Vanzetti case was an issue ripe for manipulation. By exploiting it, the Party hoped to confirm its pose as the champion of the oppressed and for the first time develop into an American mass movement. After his expulsion from the Party, James Cannon, the International Labor Defense’s executive secretary, was to admit privately—much as Moore did—that he felt Sacco was guilty. But to the Communists guilt or innocence was immaterial. What mattered was the inflammability of the cause.
For Cannon and his lieutenant Max Shachtman, editor of the monthly Labor Defender, the efforts of the Boston Defense Committee were naïve, self-defeating, contaminated by “the slow poison of middle-class treachery.” Thompson, the aloof upper-class lawyer, had announced that he would not tolerate “pressure from the outside,” meaning in Shachtman’s view “the mass movement of labor that could surround Sacco and Vanzetti with a wall of iron against the attacks of their enemies.” That the Defense Committee could replace a class fighter like Moore with a reactionary like Thompson was merely another demonstration of the liberal fallacy—belief in the law, in justice above class, in all the paraphernalia that concealed the claws of capitalist society. Abstract justice could play no role, in Shachtman’s pronouncement as echoed by the Daily Worker, since “Sacco and Vanzetti were being legally assassinated because of their political and economic views and activities.”