When Sabino was called up for his three years in the army, Nicola took over as the head of the family. A trustworthy boy, old for his age, he still did not want to settle down in Torremaggiore. Sabino had long been fascinated by the dream of going to America and his younger brother absorbed the idea from him. Their father had a friend who had some years before emigrated to Milford, Massachusetts, and when they wrote to him he replied enthusiastically, urging them to come over as soon as possible.
Sabino finished his army years in the spring of 1908. In April he and Nicola sailed from Naples on one of the White Star ships. They landed in East Boston just before Nicola’s seventeenth birthday, and went at once to Milford.
The realities of immigrant life were too much for Sabino. Within a year he returned to Italy. Nicola stayed on. For his first few months he worked in Milford as a water boy with a road gang. Sometimes the engineer would let him tend the steam roller. He liked to stand beside the clanking shining engine, stoking it with coal or squirting oil into it from the long-nozzled can. After three months, however, he was given a pick and shovel. Then for a year he worked in the foundry of the Draper Corporation in Hopedale, trimming slag off pig iron.
As an unskilled foreign laborer he was at the bottom of the heap and he knew it. He decided to learn a trade. In Milford, Michael Kelley, then superintendent of the Milford Shoe Company, ran a school where immigrants could learn edge-trimming, lasting, stitching, and the other processes of shoe manufacture. The course lasted three months and cost fifty dollars. More burdensome than the fee was the necessity of spending a quarter of a year without earning anything. But Sacco took the chance and the course. He became a skilled edger.
The benefits were immediate. Where before he had been earning $1.15 a day, he could now earn $40 or $50 or more a week. After a short period in another factory, Sacco went to work in the Milford Shoe Company, remaining there from 1910 until the spring of 1917.
Three evenings a week he attended English classes, then compulsory for foreigners working in factories. Most of the pupils showed up in their work clothes, sweaty and indifferent, but Sacco always arrived washed and shaved, in a decent suit of clothes. His teacher remembered his courtesy, his eager mind. She liked him, as did everyone else in the clanbound community, even though they all knew that he was a radical.[2] Sacco joined the Italian dramatic society and took part in most of the neighborhood social events. It was at a benefit dance he got up for a crippled accordion player that he met Rosina Zambelli. She was sixteen that year, 1912, and had arrived from a convent school in Italy only a few months before to live with her parents. Father Zambelli heard a lot about Sacco as soon as he began to court Rosina. A sovversivo, a free-thinker! When the sovversivo eloped with his daughter, Zambelli was furious. “That one will end on the gallows!” he shouted. Later he became somewhat reconciled with his son-in-law.
Sacco was happier in his married life than he had ever been before. But for this it is probable that in a few years he would have followed his brother back to Italy. He never identified himself with America. He kept to the society of Italians and gave up his efforts to learn English. Like many radical-minded Italian immigrants of the time, he found himself drawn to anarchism. Until coming to America he had been a republican. In Milford he read Il Proletario, a paper edited by the poet-anarchist Giovannitti, Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva, and other more fugitive sheets. Sometimes he and Rosina acted in fund-raising propaganda melodramas with titles like Senza Padrone and Tempeste Sociale.
In 1913 he joined a local anarchist club, the Circolo di Studi Sociali. He helped organize meetings in neighboring towns, distributed crudely printed apocalyptic pamphlets, raised small sums of money, and occasionally welcomed visiting leaders like Tresca or Galleani. In 1916 his club held a meeting in Milford to raise money to support a strike Tresca was running in Minnesota. The meeting did not have a police permit and the speakers were arrested, among them Sacco. He was convicted and paid a fine for disturbing the peace. It was the only time he was ever arrested until the May night when he was picked up on the Brockton streetcar.
For most Americans the belated entry of the United States into World War I was an exhilarating experience. The bloody reality of the Civil War had long since been embroidered by legend. After half a century of peace—the Spanish-American affair was, after all, little more than a maneuver—combat could again seem the grandest of human hazards. For Sacco and Vanzetti the complex tragedy of the war was simplified to the formula of predatory capitalism. Their attitude was summed up in the Anarchist-Communist Anti-Conscription Appeal, which demanded that the workers refuse to serve in the Army at any cost.