A month after Congress declared war, President Wilson signed the Selective Military Conscription Bill, requiring every male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, whether or not a citizen of the United States, to register on June 5, 1917. The official notice explained that registration did not mean liability to military service except for citizens or those who had taken out first papers. Sacco and Vanzetti were not liable, but so remote were they from ordinary American life that neither of them understood this. The passage of the act filled them with panic. A week before the registration date they left for Mexico. It was only a week before this that Sacco and Vanzetti had first met.
Some thirty New England anarchists formed a cooperative community in Monterrey. Those who could found jobs. Sacco worked in a bakery, sometimes taking his pay in bread and carrying a sack of it back to the others. But life in the adobe huts was difficult. From the United States letters came telling of high wages there and how easy it was to avoid the draft. Gradually the Monterrey anarchists slipped back across the border. Sacco, who had suffered much from the separation from his family, returned to Massachusetts late in August. Under his mother’s maiden name of Mosmacotelli he rejoined his wife in Cambridge and worked briefly for the New England Candy Company, going on to a succession of poorly paid jobs in East Boston and Haverhill, and a better one in Brockton. This he gave up rather than buy a Liberty Bond. For a short period in October 1917 he was employed by Rice & Hutchins in South Braintree, but quit when he found that he was making only thirteen dollars a week.
A few days before the Armistice, when it was obvious that war was ending, Sacco reappeared under his own name at the Three-K Shoe Factory in South Stoughton. It was a small plant of about 125 workers, owned by the same Michael Kelley who had run the apprentice school in Milford. Sacco walked into his office and said, “I am Nick.” At first Kelley could not place him. Then he remembered the deft young Italian he had taught six years before. He called his elder son and told him, “George, if you need an edge-trimmer, here’s a good man.” And Sacco was a good man: steady, arriving early and staying late, “a great fellow to clean up everything.”
Unlike Sacco, Vanzetti had no personal goal. Returning to the United States at about the same time as Sacco, he wandered for a year: first to St. Louis; then Youngstown, Ohio; Farrell, Pennsylvania; and finally, in the summer of 1918, back to Plymouth. For a few months he stayed again with the Brinis, then Vincenzo found him a room with the Fortinis in Cherry Lane. But though Vanzetti no longer lived at the Brinis’, the old intimacy remained.
For a year Vanzetti worked at various jobs. Then he bought his pushcart. He had no competitors in North Plymouth, and there were days when he would sell up to two hundred pounds of fish. The difficulty was the supply. Often the trawlers did not go out until April, and sometimes they came back with empty holds. During the slack summer of 1919 Vanzetti worked for the town, but in the autumn he again pushed his cart. Sometimes he had to go to the Boston docks for his fish. When he was in the city he would drop in to see his friend, the printer Aldino Felicani, in the press room of the Italian daily La Notizia, or else would take the one-cent ferry to East Boston to visit some of his anarchist comrades there. After the first of Attorney General Palmer’s Red raids in November, Vanzetti told Felicani they should plan to set up an underground press.
In 1917 the slogans that after the war came to seem as shabby as a last-season’s theater poster had rung taut and true. Beat the Hun! Stand by the President! Keep the World Safe for Democracy!
It had been a time of sauerkraut turned liberty cabbage, of Wagner turned John Philip Sousa, of the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Dr. Karl Muck, driven from the podium and dachshunds driven from the streets. Several states had even passed laws against speaking German. High schools dropped the language from their curricula. Upper-school boys of my school, Roxbury Latin, who were still allowed the choice between Greek and German, used to joke that it was better to choose Greek because you could study it on the streetcar.
Except for the scapegoat Germans, all American racial and religious groups were welded into the unity of the war years. Only a meager minority, a few hundred thousand at most, continued to stand aside. What opposition to the war still remained came from the foreign-born of the big cities with their inherited dread of conscription, from the dwindling Socialist Party, the still belligerently confident Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—and from the anarchists.
War unity, seeming at the time to be forged in steel, has a way shortly afterward of showing its puttylike consistency—as 1919 soon demonstrated. In a soothing-syrup speech that year Senator Warren G. Harding coined normalcy, a word that has endured because it somehow expressed the common yearning to return to the idealized prewar period.