Cline, one of the Party’s so-called Texas martyrs, had just been released from prison after serving thirteen years of a life sentence for murder. In 1911 he had been the sole American among a band of Mexicans who had organized an expedition in Texas to join the Mexican revolutionaries in their fight against the government of Porfirio Díaz. When Texas Rangers found a dead Mexican spy tied to a tree, they pursued and captured Cline and a dozen of the expedition. Cline maintained that he was innocent of the spy’s death, and the American Federation of Labor had frequently demanded his liberation. He was finally freed by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson.
Cline’s long imprisonment for a revolutionary cause was expected to make him attractive to Sacco and Vanzetti. The real object of his visit was to persuade them to let the International Labor Defense take charge of their fight. Cline explained persuasively that the Boston Defense Committee was run by amateurs who were unable to grasp the class significance of the case. Even so, Cannon would be willing to form a united front organization with certain members of the Defense Committee on condition that the headquarters was moved to Chicago. There the Communist International would be able to bring an overwhelming force into operation that would compel the Massachusetts reactionaries to stay their hand. As a final glittering attraction Cline promised Sacco and Vanzetti that Clarence Darrow would take over from Thompson as their chief counsel.
Running through the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, unaltered in the alterations of their moods, is their sense of outraged bewilderment at their predicament. What had brought them behind bars? What had taken Sacco from his neat Stoughton bungalow, his red-haired wife, the light-long summer evenings in his vegetable garden? What had taken Vanzetti from the Plymouth streets overlooking the harbor? What had ended the brightness of their years of freedom?
To each man the insistent answer was that they had been radicals, that however small they may have seemed to the men of state, the latter had nevertheless banded together to crush them. The owners of the Cordage works, of the Lawrence mills, those who lived in the big houses on the hill, who controlled the government and the police, who lived at the expense of the workers, this gross capitalistic world, this dying order would kill to preserve its insecure position. District Attorney Katzmann’s taunting phrases, the dry words that rustled from Judge Thayer’s set lips—these were the voices of executioners.
After the Supreme Court’s rejection of Thompson’s appeal on May 12, Vanzetti wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
Yesterday we got the last struck. It end all. We are doomed beyond any kind of doubts. I am sorry for myself. It is creuil to be insulted, umiliated, wronged, imprisoned, doomned, under infamous charges, for crimes of which I am utterly innocent in the whole sense of the word. But more for myself, I am sorry for my father, my sisters and my brothers, and for poor Rosi and her two children.
Both prisoners had been heartened by the renewed demonstrations in Europe and felt uncritically grateful to the International Labor Defense for its belligerent propaganda. Both felt at times that—as the Communists had said all along—only direct revolutionary action by the masses could save them. Both were divided between the class-struggle interpretation of their dilemma and their attachment to bourgeois partisans like Mrs. Evans. Both were inconsistent in their attitudes—as who might well not be after seven years in the shadow of the electric chair.
Sacco, in particular, with his more dogmatic mentality and limited outlook, tended to distort the possibilities of justice that could transcend class.
Let us tell you sincerely, dear comrade [he wrote a member of the International Labor Defense], that for hereafter I will never fall into another new delusion again, if I don’t see first the day of my freedom. Even when Mrs. Elizabeth G. Evans—that through all these struggle years she has been kind to me as kind as good mother can be, come to tell me “Nick! you again.” No! No! Six long torment years gives me enough experience because it is a great masterpiece for me and to anybody else not to be disappointed any more. Poor mother! She is so sincere and faithful to the law of the man that she has forgot very early that the history of all the government it were always and everytime the martyrdom of the proletariat. But, however, we will stick like a good Communard soldier to the end of the battle and looking into the eyes of our enemy, face to face, to tell them our last breath—which I had always faith—that you, the comrades and all the workers of the world solidarity, would free Sacco and Vanzetti tomorrow.