Two of our active good friends and comrades ... have become involved in one of those tragic, dark legal plots in which innocence has all the semblance of guilt, and honesty has the hypocritical mask put on by the subtlest of rogues.... In a country where subversive ideas are persecuted with Inquisitorial fury, anarchists are beyond the pale.... We are convinced that an attempt is being made, through the persons of Sacco and Vanzetti, to strike at all subversive elements and their libertarian ideas. A sentence ... would serve, in the hands of our enemies, to show that lovers of liberty are common criminals and that their ideas are not entitled to any of the civil freedoms.... We face a severe, a terrible test.
Energetically the committee raised a defense fund from the nickels and dimes and quarters of their countrymen in the crowded streets of the North End and East Boston. It was the committee that hired Graham as counsel, counting on his American skill to mediate between the two Italians and the complexities of Massachusetts justice. For the committee, the result of the Plymouth trial was a disaster.
In New York, Carlo Tresca and his fellow anarchists were appalled by the verdict. Tresca sent Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom he had been living since he met her in a 1912 May Day parade, to talk matters over with Felicani. “Gurley,” the founder and secretary of the Workers’ Defense Union, was bound for Boston in any case, to see what could be done for the aliens imprisoned on Deer Island as a result of the Palmer raids. With Mrs. Marion Emerson, secretary of a workers’ defense organization in Boston, she made her way through the twisting streets of the North End to the offices of La Notizia, and there, under the shadow of the Old North Church spire, they talked with the tall, indignant Felicani, who at that time could speak only through an interpreter. So it was that Gurley and Mrs. Emerson on a July afternoon in 1920 were the first non-Italian sympathizers to hear the story of Sacco and Vanzetti. Later Felicani took them to see the other now thoroughly worried members of the committee, who asked them to try to arrange English-speaking protest meetings and to help find a lawyer who would understand the defendants’ radical viewpoint.
Returning to New York, Gurley hired the Forward Hall on East Broadway for a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting. She, the president of the Free Speech League, and the veteran anarchist Harry Kelly, were the speakers. So few people showed up that the caretaker of the hall insisted on immediate payment. “You’ll never get it in a collection,” he explained. Shortly afterward Mrs. Emerson organized a similarly uneventful meeting in the rickety Grand Opera House in Boston’s South End.
It was through Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, both of whom had known him and worked with him over the years, that Fred Moore now entered the case. It was a fateful entry. At this point, while Sacco and Vanzetti were still inconspicuous foreigners whose names meant nothing, a capable conservative lawyer like their later counsel William Thompson might have secured their acquittal. Moore, the radical labor lawyer, was to make them internationally famous, to link their names indissolubly, but he may well have signed their death warrants in the process.
Tresca had met Moore eight years earlier during the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 and the murder trial that was its by-product.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city of unrelieved drabness on the banks of the Merrimack, was in 1912 a polyglot company town owned by the Lawrences and the Lowells, and worked by Italians, Germans, French-Canadians, Poles, Lithuanians, Belgians, and Syrians, with a scattering of Russians, Jews, and Greeks. When the Massachusetts legislature in its 1911 autumn session reduced the work week from fifty-six to fifty-four hours, the Lawrence textile mills countered by reducing wages correspondingly. Weekly pay then averaged $8.76 a week for adults, $5 or less for the many child workers.
The calculated meanness of the reduction, amounting only to about twenty-five cents, so infuriated the workers that on January 12, 1912, they spontaneously downed tools, in some cases smashing the looms. There followed a bitter struggle that brought twenty-three thousand workers onto the streets. After a number of riots between strikers and police, Governor Eugene Foss called out the militia.
The strike was taken over and managed by the I.W.W. with anarchist assistance. From New York came Joe Ettor of the I.W.W. executive board, and Arturo Giovannitti. Ettor was an organizer, Giovannitti a persuasive speaker who kept up the strikers’ courage through the bitter winter. In finally winning the strike the I.W.W. reached the peak of its influence in the East.
One afternoon while police and militia were charging a picket line, a girl worker, Annie Lopizza, was shot dead. No one knew who fired the shot, but the police at once arrested “the troublemakers” Ettor and Giovannitti as accessories to murder. They were held without bail until the end of the strike.