With the leaders in jail the I.W.W.’s Big Bill Haywood, the one-eyed giant who was already almost a legend, came to Lawrence and took command. With him he brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. By the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial she had become enormously fat, but in 1912 she was a slim young firebrand with flashing blue eyes and a lacerating tongue. Theodore Dreiser had called her the East Side Joan of Arc. An Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee was at once formed, and Haywood had Fred Moore brought on from California. The strategy of the committee was to have the indefatigable and ingenious Moore help in selecting the witnesses and collecting evidence but to have the case tried by a well-known local conservative. James Sisk, a staid Lynn lawyer, was chosen to represent Ettor and Giovannitti in court.
The results of this strategy were highly successful. In spite of the pressure of moneyed opinion against them, Ettor and Giovannitti, appearing before the Irish-Catholic Judge Joseph Quinn and a native-American jury, were acquitted.
It was this pattern that Tresca had in mind when he sent Moore to Boston in the fall of 1920. Moore was again to be the assiduous and inspired fact-gatherer. He would again prepare the brief and then some irreproachable Massachusetts lawyer would try the case. Such, too, was the intention of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when it accepted Moore. It was not Moore’s intention at all.
Moore, then in his late thirties, was the barrister bohemian in looks, dress, and manner. His long hair seemed to flow back from his forehead, he often wore sandals, and the broad-brimmed Western hat he brought with him from California became almost his trademark in Boston. He had started out as a railroad attorney in Seattle, then moved on to Los Angeles where for a time he seemed a brilliant young corporation lawyer on the way up. But money and an established bourgeois existence meant nothing to him. When a casual I.W.W. acquaintance arrested in a free-speech fight in San Diego telephoned him for help, Moore picked up his broad-brimmed hat and a revolver, told his associates he would be back shortly, and walked out of the promise of his law career. After that he went wherever his underdog interests took him. He became a labor defense expert, particularly devoted to serving the I.W.W., drifting from one labor fight to another, taking on the hopeless, desperate cases that could not afford better-known lawyers.
When he ran into Tresca in New York in the summer of 1920, he had just come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had defended “Big Boy” Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer charged with dynamiting the house of a Standard Oil official. The charge was a frame-up, a fact cheerfully accepted by the townspeople, the prosecution, the defense, the judge, and the jury. Fortunately for Moore, one of the jurymen with a personal grudge against Standard Oil held out for acquittal. In a second trial the fraud was too apparent and Krieger was freed.
As Moore headed for Boston he was certain it would be a similar story with Sacco and Vanzetti, and the more he reflected on the ramifications of the South Braintree crime the more convinced he became that this backwater New England affair could be his big case, the culmination of his career.
Eugene Lyons, the young left-wing labor journalist who had been with Moore in Oklahoma and who later followed him to Massachusetts to work for the Defense Committee, was awed by the lawyer’s dexterity. Moore, he wrote long afterward,
was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized the materials of a world issue in what appeared to others a routine matter. A socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and returned to New York to report that “there’s no story in it ... just a couple of wops in a jam.” Not one of the members of the defense committee formed immediately after the men’s arrest suspected that the affair was anything larger than it seemed. When the case grew into a historical tussle, these men were utterly bewildered. But Moore saw its magnitude from the first. His legal tactics have been the subject of dispute and recrimination. I think that there is some color of truth, indeed, to the charge that he sometimes subordinated the literal needs of legalistic procedure to the larger needs of the case as a symbol of the class struggle. If he had not done so, Sacco and Vanzetti would have died six years earlier, without the solace of martyrdom.
With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore proceeded to clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case.
Arriving in Boston, Moore installed himself at 5 Rollins Place, a small four-story brick house in a cul-de-sac of Beacon Hill in that no-man’s land where proper Boston tapers off into the improper. The house, masked by a wooden porch with Greek-revival columns, and the brick-paved roadway, too narrow for any vehicle, seemed to suggest that whoever might live there would be gone tomorrow, a feeling that harmonized with Moore’s personality. Shortly after moving in, Moore married Lola Darroch, the handsome young woman who had been with him during the Krieger trial. Their marriage lasted officially a little over a year, though unofficially it was concluded much sooner when Lola was supplanted by a Lithuanian stenographer. In the environment this seemed rational enough. Wherever Moore went in his travels he pursued his weakness, which he considered a need, for pretty young women.