Five Rollins Place was a catchall: a home for Moore and his assorted associates, an informal office, a dormitory for out-of-town enthusiasts, Italian and otherwise, a lodging house for prospective witnesses and intellectuals and freshly minted college girls heavy with purpose. There were nights of talk and more talk, of makeshift Prohibition drinking, of song and vacillating affections. Eugene Lyons, an almost daily visitor, later wrote that:
Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this tense atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck detectives sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A.F. of L. officials hobnobbed with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired little poetess swept like a tornado through the defense group, working havoc among the harassed men and spreading despair among their wives and sweethearts; she dominated the lives of a writer, a strike leader, a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in quick succession, with forays into the domestic preserves of half a dozen others, while composing soulful verses in defense of the accused Italians. A gawky, half-savage boy lured from the Maine woods to plead with his mother, a crucial identification witness, to retract her perjured testimony, had to be forced, literally, to take a bath; soon he blossomed into a spic-and-span U.S. Marine. One of the closest comrades and most ardent defenders of Sacco fell hopelessly in love with Sacco’s wife (he married her after Sacco’s execution). Within the larger drama of the case, there developed complicated cycles of lesser dramas of private emotion.
Before going to Boston, Lyons had gone to Italy in pursuit of revolutions. Moore wrote him there, persuading him to create propaganda for the case and to interview potential witnesses. In that convulsive period of red-flagged cities and rising Fascism the arrest of two Italians in a New England mill town was a small enough pebble on an eroding beach, but Lyons—through Sacco’s brother Sabino, now the mayor of Torremaggiore—managed to get Leon Mucci to bring the Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Italian Chamber of Deputies for its initial foreign mention.[5]
Coacci, Lyons found in a sleepy village in the Marchesan hills, posing grandly as an international revolutionary:
His shelves were lined with brochures on the home manufacture of bombs and he professed himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So deep, however, had the fear of American law and the police entered his heart that it needed a week of pleading and threatening and pressure by Merlino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, to bring this terrorist to the point of signing an innocuous affidavit in support of Sacco’s alibi.
Sacco and Vanzetti were to typify a cause, Moore explained to a friend, adding, “In saving them we strengthen our muscles, develop our forces preparatory to the day when we save ourselves.” The more extreme anarchists of the Defense Committee were critical of such an attitude, feeling that Moore was more interested in building up the biggest labor case in history than in the fate of the men involved. This, too, was Rosina Sacco’s feeling from the first time she met Moore. Not interested in issues, she merely wanted her Nick back to resume their old family life, to see the new baby Ines, born four months after his arrest. Instinctively she distrusted the sparkle of the bohemian lawyer.
Moore’s initial objective was to expand the case beyond the parochial limits of Norfolk County. With this in mind he worked up a number of sensational appeals, following the pattern customary both in American criminal cases and in charity drives. He wrote, he telegraphed, he traveled, he sent out assistants, volunteers, anyone whom he could persuade to lend a hand. His salary ($150 a week) never seemed to cover his expenses. He was lawyer, detective, fund-raiser, and propagandist combined. At their annual conventions the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the American Federation of Teamsters found themselves demanding the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, although few of the delegates had ever heard their names before some official friendly to Moore introduced the resolution. If Moore sent word that there was a frame-up in the offing, his word was enough for the central labor unions in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Worcester, Seattle, and Salem, just as it was for the United Mine Workers, the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, and dozens of other organizations Moore had known or assisted. Although their resolutions may have been quickly presented and quickly put aside, their effect was to be cumulative.
By the end of 1920 there were stirrings across the country, and echoes from overseas. To anyone with as sensitive an ear as Moore’s they were a promise of what was to come.
Moore’s temporary office in the Olympian Building at 3 Tremont Row, echoing with talk and typewriters and shuffling feet, was like a bus terminal in its comings and goings. In one corner the blond Lithuanian stenographer hammered away at the keys. Opposite her John Nicholas Beffel, a free-lance socialist journalist from New York, sat chain-smoking and preparing press releases in English. Art Shields, sent on by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, assisted him. Frank Lopez, a young Spanish anarchist, a cabinetmaker by trade, preserved somehow by Moore from a deportation order, got out propaganda for the Spanish-speaking world. Felicani and the committee, from an upstairs room on Battery Street, took care of the Italian publicity.
Only gradually did Moore bridge the gap between the Italian anarchists and the indigenous Boston liberals. When he approached John Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee, Codman asked for satisfactory proof that Sacco and Vanzetti would not be given an impartial trial. He had served recently on a jury in Dedham and said he had been impressed by District Attorney Katzmann’s ability and fairness. Moore eventually managed to convince Codman to the extent that in February 1921 the Civil Liberties Committee contributed five hundred dollars to the Defense Committee. Later in the year it published its own pamphlet: “Sacco and Vanzetti: Shall There be a Mooney Frame-up in New England?”