Most of the Italians of North Plymouth worked at the Plymouth Cordage Company. Vanzetti had been employed there for eighteen months during 1914 and 1915 but had quit when they wanted him to shift from an outside to an inside job, preferring to work outdoors on the Plymouth breakwater. He had been on the strikers’ fund committee in the Cordage strike that broke out over a wage dispute in January 1916. At that time the men were receiving eight dollars a week, the women six. The strikers demanded twelve and eight dollars, but finally accepted the company’s offer of a general raise of a dollar. After that, Vanzetti never worked or attempted to work for the Cordage again. In the spring of 1919, in an effort to be independent of bosses and foremen, he bought his pushcart and scales and knives from a friend who was going back to Italy.
Each morning at the Fortinis’ he would come downstairs in his slippers, take his boots from the zinc platform under the coal stove, and put them on before having breakfast. Then he would push his cart either to the town pier or the railroad station, returning to the Fortinis’ with his load of fish, which he could clean in the cellar. When fish were scarce he would go clamming on the flats between the town pier and the Cordage plant. He liked being on the windy beach.
Everybody knew the fish peddler, Bart the Beard, along the narrow lanes of his route, even the Yankee policemen. Children loved him. At mealtimes he was welcome in the Italian kitchens along his route, where he would sit at the table with his elbows on the checkered cotton tablecloth drinking coffee (for some years he had drunk nothing stronger) while the others downed glasses of homemade red-eye. He liked to talk and he liked to read. Over the years he had read Darwin, Marx, Spencer, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Zola, in random persistent efforts to overcome his lack of formal education. And he had read the anarchist fathers, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Malatesta, long since convinced that only anarchism could strike off the chains that fettered human freedom. His best-thumbed books, however, were The Divine Comedy and Renan’s Life of Jesus. Anarchist that he was, in his personal relations he was not a doctrinaire. At one time he had enrolled in an evening course given by a liberal Protestant minister in Plymouth.
Sacco would never have set foot inside a church. Like his friend a member of the loose-knit Galleani group of New England anarchists, he was rigidly class-conscious. Yet in his private life he was much more the petty-bourgeois than Vanzetti. Domesticity, which meant little to Vanzetti, touched Sacco more deeply than anything else. He lived with his wife Rosina and his seven-year-old son Dante in a five-room bungalow rented from Michael Kelley, the owner of the Three-K Shoe Company, where he worked. His wife, who was expecting another child, was a delicately featured auburn-haired woman of the northern Italian type. As is often the case with Latin women, she left politics to the men and held to her inherited Catholic faith.
Sacco, as a skilled piece worker, often earned sixty or seventy dollars a week. A short, muscular man, he read little except the daily paper and repetitious anarchist tracts, preferring to spend his free time in his garden. Often he would be there at sunrise of a summer morning before going off to the factory, and after hours he would be working among his vegetables until dark. Sometimes he gave Michael Kelley beans and corn and tomatoes to distribute to poor families in the vicinity. Kelley thought well of Sacco. During the cold months he gave him the small extra job of tending the factory furnace. When Sacco stoked the fire in the evening he always checked the premises. Mornings he always made sure that the place was warm by the time the workers arrived. Whenever he went to the factory after hours he carried his 32-caliber Colt with him. Kelley warned him several times to get a permit from the chief of police if he wanted to carry a pistol.
Sacco had come to the United States in 1908, the same year as Vanzetti. In the dozen years since their arrival they had both kept close to the immigrant community. They spoke scarcely more than a pidgin English.
“Nameless, in the crowd of nameless ones,” Vanzetti described himself in his twenty-page autobiography, “The Story of a Proletarian Life,” that he wrote in the Charlestown prison.
He was born in June 1888 into a prosperous family of Villafalletto, Piedmont, a village on the Magra River. Life in northwest Italy had the harshness of most peasant life, but the landscape itself could have served to illustrate the Georgics. Villafalletto was a rich agricultural community raising corn, wheat, beets, silkworms, and three crops of hay yearly. In the surrounding Alpine hills were apples, pears, cherries, grapes, plums, figs, and peaches. Vanzetti’s earliest memories were of his father planting peaches, of blue flowers in the garden of his house, and of his mother giving him honey every morning from a beehive.
Vanzetti lived with his parents, a brother, and two sisters until his fourteenth year. At school, loving study “with a real passion,” he won examination prizes that included a second prize in religious catechism. Under other circumstances the eager introspective boy might have developed into a teacher or scholar. William Thompson, who became Vanzetti’s counsel in 1924, thought he was one of the most gifted men he had known and—applying a Boston yardstick—felt that with an education he might have been a Harvard professor.
Vanzetti’s father was a practical peasant-minded man. For some time he could not make up his mind whether to apprentice his son or to let him continue his studies. But when he read in the Gazzetta del Popolo that forty-two Turin lawyers had applied for a position paying thirty-five lire a month, he decided then and there that education was a waste of money.