Johnnies-come-lately though they might be, the Communists took the attitude that it was they who were the organizers of the protest movement. The Sacco-Vanzetti case was now theirs by right of Marxist eminent domain. And, here as abroad, they were able to bring about immediate sensational results. The International Labor Defense poured out posters and buttons and press releases, organized meetings all across the country, and collected large sums for what Cannon called “the protection” of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Of the millions collected by the Red Aid in various parts of the world for the defense of the convicted men, less than six thousand dollars ever found its way to the Defense Committee. There was no accounting for the balance. Felicani, who had so scrupulously recorded each dollar he received, was outraged. In July the Defense Committee warned in its Official Bulletin: “We are absolutely opposed to the collection of funds and the use of this cause to further special political or economic interests.” The Daily Worker and the International Labor Defense replied by calling the Defense Committee and its counsel ineffectual liberals who relied on bourgeois legal proceedings rather than the direct action of the workers.
Yet, whatever the Communists might claim, whatever self-advertising actions they might take, the shabby two-room headquarters at Hanover Street still remained the center of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. The yeast of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision worked as actively there as outside. Fabbri was succeeded as secretary by Joseph Moro, an Italian shoe-worker with a family, who gave up a job at forty dollars a week to work full time for the committee at ten dollars less. Eugene Lyons had left Boston at the end of 1922 to work for the New York branch of Tass, the Soviet news agency. Until 1926 no one took his place. As long as Moore remained in charge of the defense, Lyons continued to contribute articles and support, but Thompson’s advent was too much for him. Still wearing his Communist heart on his sleeve, still at the beginning of his long arc from left to right, he held to his opinion that the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti should be a class defense.
Through the quiescent years the members of the Defense Committee, working doggedly, had kept both the case and the defendants alive. As the tempo rose in 1926, so did the activity in Hanover Street. The headquarters developed into a small publishing house. Tables and typewriters and filing cabinets were wedged in by bales of pamphlets that served as seats for volunteer workers and visitors.
The moody, indefatigable Mary Donovan seemed always to be at her desk. Mrs. Evans appeared regularly, bringing with her such friends as Mrs. William James, the widow of the philosopher. Professor Frankfurter often trudged up the dark stairway accompanied by one or two of his sympathetic Harvard colleagues. In June a young Globe reporter, Gardner Jackson, gave up his newspaper job to take over where Lyons had left off. With the publicity under his enthusiastic control, the Official Bulletin—only one issue of which had appeared before this—now came out monthly.
Except for their energetic youth and their devotion to the same cause, the wealthy liberal “Pat” Jackson and the East Side Marxist Morris Gebelow, who wrote under the name of Eugene Lyons, had little in common. Jackson’s mother was the third wife of William Jackson, a Colorado banker and railroad owner whose second wife had been Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of Ramona. Starting at Amherst College, Pat joined the Army in 1917. After the war he studied at Columbia, took a turn at selling bonds, then worked in a Denver enterprise of his father’s before becoming cub reporter on the Globe, the paper that was reputed to print the name of every inhabitant of Greater Boston, and, if possible, his picture, at least twice a year.
Jackson had been gathering such neighborhood news for the Globe during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. At the end of many an afternoon he would see Frank Sibley stalking into the city room on his return from Dedham. Sibley’s indignation expanded by the day, the more so since he was confined to factual reporting and unable to write his personal reaction to the Dedham goings-on. Sometimes he would stop by the tall, shock-haired young reporter to let off steam.
It was through Sibley that Jackson met Felicani. Never before had the tweedy, rather elegant young man met anyone like this philosophical anarchist. Evening after evening now found Jackson working in the upstairs rooms on Hanover Street. Then, in the summer of 1926, Felicani persuaded him to give his full time to directing the Sacco-Vanzetti publicity.
As it would for many others in the year to come, the cause brought Jackson’s being into focus. Independent financially, vaguely liberal, he had never really known what he wanted to do until he found his goal in the struggle for the two Italians’ lives. Though later he would become a minor New Deal administrator and a friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s, this was to be the high spot of his life. Journalistic talent, energy, honesty, and dedication—these he brought to the cause with the fervency of a convert.
By August 1926 it was clear to James Cannon that the Defense Committee could be neither dislodged nor superseded and that the only other possibility was infiltration. To mark this change in tack the International Labor Defense sent two thousand dollars to the Hanover Street headquarters while the Labor Defender announced in conciliatory tones that it was no longer making a general appeal for funds: All future donations for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti should be sent direct to the Boston committee. In addition, Cannon sent Charles Cline to Boston to try to arrange an amalgamation of the committee with the International Labor Defense.