Yet in spite of such sentiments he would continue to prefer the conservative Thompson to the radicals.
Vanzetti, in his enthusiasm for the éclat of the International Labor Defense activities, could write to Cannon in an almost similar tone:
The echo of your campaign in our behalf has reached my heart. I repeat, I will repeat to the last, only the people, our comrades, our friends, the world revolutionary proletariat can save us from the powers of the capitalist reactionary hyenas, or vindicate our names and our blood before history.
Nevertheless, Vanzetti was as harsh in his judgments of the new Russia as he was of the old America. To his mind all governments were oppressive, whether they ruled in the name of proletariat, king, or constitution. His frequently expressed disbelief in the progress of the Russian Revolution, his contrary belief that “the Bolsheviki leaders’ dictatorship is an increased perfectioned exploitation of the proletariat,” constantly embarrassed the editors of the Daily Worker and the Labor Defender. The anti-revolutionary, anti-Marxist individualistic anarchist, Proudhon, remained his ideal, and the Frenchman’s ringing words: “Liberty of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of labor, of commerce, and of teaching, the free disposal of the products of labor and industry—liberty, infinite, absolute, everywhere and forever,” are often echoed in Vanzetti’s letters.
The first reaction of Sacco and Vanzetti to Cline’s proposal was to accept it and let the International Labor Defense see what it could do. However they might differ theoretically from the Communists, such potent help was not to be spurned. And for all the Defense Committee’s efforts, they were still in jail after six years. Clarence Darrow—the untidy colossus who had slipped the noose from so many necks—appeared as a sudden new hope, a more certain guide than Thompson out of their legal labyrinth. Even though their trust and confidence in the Boston lawyer remained intact, they felt that they had nothing to lose by the change and much to gain.
Felicani, with whom they talked it over, felt otherwise. His distrust of the Communists was innate, and he, as the organizer of the Defense Committee, had a much clearer view of the Party’s reasons for taking up the case than did his two comrades. Darrow himself, in Felicani’s opinion, could do no more than Thompson had done and would do.[24]
Sacco and Vanzetti finally agreed to reject Cannon’s offer. When Cline reported this to Chicago, the Labor Defender struck back at the Defense Committee savagely, accusing it of “trying to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way.” When Shachtman claimed that it was the Communists’ “campaign for international solidarity that has so far saved Sacco and Vanzetti from the death chair,” Jackson’s Bulletin announced angrily that “the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee has no official relationship with the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party, or the Sacco-Vanzetti Conferences, which we understand were organized through the ILD.”
During the summer and autumn of 1926 a whole new aspect of the case was opened up by the defense’s belated discovery that Pinkerton Detective Agency reports had been filed on both the South Braintree and the Bridgewater holdups. The existence of these primal documents became known largely through the efforts of Tom O’Connor, a State House News Service reporter who had first become interested in the case in 1920 after reading about it in the New Republic.
O’Connor kept in touch with developments after the trial, dropping in from time to time at Moore’s office and at the Hanover Street headquarters. Making his own investigations in Providence and elsewhere, he finally became so engrossed in the case that he gave up his State House job to work for Thompson without pay.