Like the Dreyfus case to which it has been so often compared, the Sacco-Vanzetti case became a tumult of the intellectuals. As I look back on it, my father and my Aunt Amy in their lesser way were representative of that tumult. For my father Sacco and Vanzetti became a challenge to the institutions he believed in, and he shut his mind against them. After Captain Van Amburgh’s testimony convinced him they were guilty he did not concern himself further with the fairness of the trial, although as an honest man he took a thin view of Judge Thayer. My Aunt Amy could not imagine that her friends of the Elizabeth Peabody House and The Women’s City Club might be wrong, that John Haynes Holmes, whom she had known as a young man, might be wrong, that liberalism could be wrong. She, too, closed her mind.
For the more extreme partisans on both sides the belief in the guilt or the innocence of the two Italians became a dogma. Just before the 1961 ballistics tests were conducted a member of the Committee for the Vindication of Sacco and Vanzetti told me that even if a test should show indisputably that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, he would still be convinced that Sacco was innocent.
For myself, I found that when I examined the various confessions, they had a way of falling apart. After Sammarco’s lie-detector test there was nothing to be said for Silva’s Bridgewater tale. Madeiros’ various statements about South Braintree had just too many discrepancies in them. Once I had driven and checked the getaway route and found that the license-plate number of the murder car noted down in South Braintree was last identified by Julia Kelliher in Brockton eight miles beyond Randolph, I could no longer believe that the bandits had switched cars in the Randolph Woods. They would not have been foolish enough to go to the useless trouble of putting the telltale plates on a second car and driving away in it. Nor did it seem possible for Madeiros, if he had been in the back seat of the Buick, to have mistaken two metal boxes planted at his feet for a leather bag. And of course if he and the Morellis had not arrived at South Braintree until noon—as he claimed—then who were the men who shadowed Neal, who strolled around the town during the morning, who spoke to Lola Andrews? It has been asserted that Madeiros had nothing to gain by making a fraudulent confession to the South Braintree crime, but in fact by making one he prolonged his life two years.
The hypothesis that the Morelli gang committed the South Braintree holdup is at first plausible, yet it is too closely bound to the Madeiros confession to stand alone. Extraordinary coincidences are brought to light in Ehrmann’s book but, just in the matter of the cars, I could not imagine the one that Mike Morelli was casually driving through the center of New Bedford three hours after the crime was the murder car. Nor could I believe that the Morellis would on three separate occasions drive forty miles to an obscure Boston suburb to steal two sets of license plates and a car. Why all the way to Needham when there were so many nearer places? It was as absurd as imagining Mike, the night of the crime, driving the Buick back through those miles of waste land to abandon it in Brockton when all the police in New England were on the alert for it.
As for Joe Morelli’s confession, he knew how much money Silva had made with his pseudo-confession, and he may have thought Morris Ernst an easy mark. When he was writing his autobiography in the Lewisburg penitentiary, he used as source material Osmond Fraenkel’s 550-page summary of the case. The still-extant volume, inscribed “Joseph Morelli, Nov. 10, 1935,” is larded with marginal notes made by Joe and his friends. Yet the later parts of Joe’s autobiography were written after he had lost contact with Ernst. To dismiss it completely is to leave a number of intruding questions unanswered. How did it happen that Joe was so familiar with the names Coacci, Boda, and Orciani—all mentioned only casually in the trial record? How did he know that Coacci had worked at Slater & Morrill unless he had had some contact with him? Was there something, after all, in the persistent rumors that Berardelli had recognized the men who shot him? It was hard to imagine Sacco, even harder to imagine Vanzetti, associated with the anthropoid Morellis, but Boda, as a bootlegger, would have needed underworld connections for his supplies. For a time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley, within walking distance of Needham. Boda drove a car. He fits the description of the man who tried to borrow license plates at Hassam’s garage. And it is easier to imagine him walking from Wellesley to Needham to steal plates and a car than it is to imagine the Morellis making the successive trips from Providence.
Having begun the writing of this book with the assumption that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, I found myself holding to it with an increasingly troubled mind as my work progressed, but I did not begin to consider whether they might not, after all, have been guilty until I learned of what Moore had told Upton Sinclair. That Moore had come to doubt his hotly held convictions made me feel I must at least re-examine mine. Moore, the dedicated radical, the battler for lost and almost-lost causes, was not the man to have denied himself out of pique. His reasons for his change of mind must have been profound. According to Eugene Lyons, he had spent much time following the trail of a criminal group he had reason to believe was involved in the South Braintree crime. “But when he got near the end of the trail,” Lyons wrote, “the Italian anarchist members of the Defense Committee called him in and ordered him to ‘lay off.’ They wouldn’t say why, but the inference is that they feared his line of investigation.”
One of Moore’s investigators told me that Moore had finally come to the conclusion that Boda was the man who engineered the holdup. As convincing to me as Moore’s reluctant reversal was the fact that Upton Sinclair’s experience seemed to support it.
I had visited Sacco’s family [Sinclair wrote in 1953], and I felt certain that there was some dark secret there. Nobody would be frank with me, and everybody was suspicious even though I had been introduced and vouched for by Mrs. Evans, a great lady of Boston who had led and financed the fight for freedom of these two Italians.
To thousands like my Aunt Amy the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti appeared so transparent that it should have been obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the case. Yet at the very core of the defense there was disbelief. I was overwhelmed when I discovered that even Carlo Tresca shared it—Tresca, the acknowledged and admired leader of the anarchists in the United States, to whom they turned as a matter of course when they were in trouble. No one, not even the police who arrested him—and he had been arrested thirty-six times—questioned his integrity. He looked after his own. According to Sinclair, when Moore was leaving for Boston in 1920, Tresca—to Moore’s annoyance—put two comrades wanted by the police for a robbery in the car with him. In the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, Tresca played the part of guardian angel or great-uncle. If anyone should have had inside knowledge of the affair, Tresca was the man.
In 1943, a few weeks before Tresca was murdered in New York by the Italian-born Soviet agent Enea Sormenti, Max Eastman, who had known Tresca for years and had written a profile on him for The New Yorker, talked with him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case: