That depression year of 1908 was a sorry time for a friendless stranger to arrive in the United States. Like all immigrants facing the unknown, Vanzetti sought out his fellow countrymen; one of them found him a job in a fashionable restaurant where he worked as a dishwasher and slept in a vermin-infested garret. Three months later he moved on to a similar job at Mouquin’s. As in so many such places the glittering dining room bore little relation to the squalid kitchen. The scullery where Vanzetti worked was windowless.
When the electric light for some reason was out, it was totally dark so that we couldn’t move without running into things. The vapor of the boiling water where the plates, pans and silver were washed formed great drops of water on the ceiling, took up all the dust and grime there, then fell slowly one by one upon my head, as I worked below. During working hours the heat was terrific. The table leavings amassed in barrels near the pantry gave out nauseating exhalations. The sinks had no direct sewerage connection. Instead, the water was permitted to overrun to the floor. In the center of the room there was a drain. Every night the pipe was clogged and the greasy water rose higher and higher and we trudged in the slime.
We worked twelve hours one day and fourteen the next, with five hours off every other Sunday. Damp food hardly fit for dogs and five or six dollars a week was the pay. After eight months I left the place for fear of contracting consumption.
Three months he tramped the streets of New York looking for work. Behind the bright towering façade of the world city he saw the human refuse that slept out of doors and rummaged in garbage barrels. There were two worlds—he could see them for himself—the world of those who sat at the tables of Mouquin’s, and the world of those like himself who worked in sculleries. And for him they were irreconcilable. At an employment agency he met a young Italian who had not eaten for two days. Vanzetti bought him a meal. They decided to strike out into the country where they thought there would be a better chance of finding work and where at least the air would be clean.
With Vanzetti’s last savings they bought tickets and took a steamboat up the Connecticut River to Hartford. They then set off, aimless and hopeful, knocking on doors and asking for work but rarely finding any. A farmer they encountered took pity on them, fed them, and let them stay two weeks on his farm although he had no real need of their labor. Vanzetti never forgot the man’s kindness.
Their wanderings took them from village to village. Penniless, often soaked by rain, they were glad to find a few slices of bread at the end of the day or an abandoned stable to sleep in. Finally they managed to get work in a brick factory near Springfield, Massachusetts. The other man soon quit, but Vanzetti stayed on, the hard labor at the furnaces compensated for after work by the gay spirits of a little colony of his countrymen, natives of Piedmont, Tuscany, and Venice. In the evenings, someone would strike up a tune on a violin or an accordion. Some would dance. Vanzetti like to watch them, keeping time to the music with his foot.
Later he went to Meriden, Connecticut, where he worked almost beyond his strength in the stone pits. His friends kept urging him to go back to his trade as a pastry cook, insisting that the unskilled worker was the lowest animal in the social system. After two years Vanzetti returned to New York and took a job as assistant pastry chef in the Savarin Restaurant on Broadway. Eight months later he was unexpectedly discharged. He found a new job in a Seventh Avenue hotel, only to be discharged again after five months. Finally he learned the reason. The employment agencies were splitting their fees with the chefs, who found hiring and firing more profitable than keeping regular help.
Again he was out of work, walking the streets, unable to find a job even as a dishwasher, buffeted by the weather, sometimes sleeping in doorways, his clothes lined with newspapers to keep out the cold. After five months he learned of an employment agency that was looking for pick-and-shovel workers.
It was necessary [he recalled] to present one’s self with unbuttoned shirts, because they wanted to see what one was like, they wanted to see the hair on the chest of the worker, and good for me that I am Latin with haired chest. They used to say: “You are too small—you are too old.”
He was sent to a barrack settlement near Springfield, Massachusetts, and put to work on the railroad. After he had swung a pick several months and saved enough to pay off his debts in New York—a little over a hundred dollars—he moved on to Worcester, first working on the Boston & Albany Railroad, then in various factories.