Through the Civil Liberties Committee link a number of elderly Boston women of assured position and belligerent good works began their participation in the case. In the social-worker tradition of Elizabeth Peabody, with the inherited wealth to be cultured as Boston understood the word, they functioned as nonconformists within the Back Bay circle of conformity. The most conspicuous and determined of these was Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a pacifist and campaigner for women’s suffrage. Level-headed and charming, she avoided the crackpot label so easily attached to middle-aged female reformers. Hundreds of prisoners in Massachusetts jails were indebted to her often-anonymous kindness. Dozens owed their freedom to her. She had married a promising young lawyer, a friend and classmate of Louis Brandeis at the Harvard Law School, who died a few years after graduating. During the whole period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case she lived in the Brandeis household, where the children called her Auntie Bee. When Eugene Lyons and his young wife first came to Boston, Mrs. Evans furnished their apartment for them simply by opening the cellar where Justice Brandeis had stored some of his furniture. She seemed to know everyone, not only in Boston but throughout the country, and she had the key to people as well as buildings. When she was drawn into the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she saw it as just one more worthy cause, but as the months passed she developed a preoccupying attachment for the two men that would last through the years to their execution.
Moore soon brought the case to the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, and the organization did much to interest native Americans in the predicament of the two Italians. The minutes of its meeting on November 22, 1920, read:
Mary Heaton Vorse reported on the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, two young Italian anarchists on trial in Boston for highway robbery and murder, stating that they had been indicted on questionable circumstances and because of their activity on behalf of Andrea Salsedo, a political prisoner who committed suicide by throwing himself from the Park Row Building, New York, while being held for deportation. It was agreed that the Union should do everything possible to secure publicity for this case.
Mary Heaton Vorse was a writer with one foot in Greenwich Village and the other in the radical labor movement, the prototype of a number of women who would eventually become concerned in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Brought up in the cultivated restriction of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst, educated abroad, her experiences in the 1912 Lawrence strike turned her sympathies and her writings to the workers and the dispossessed. One can trace her career by the titles of her many books, from The Breaking in of a Yachtsman’s Wife to Strike—A Novel of Gastonia.
After Tresca told her of Sacco and Vanzetti, calling their case a frame-up as bad as the Mooney case, Mrs. Vorse went to Dedham to visit Sacco. In the outline of the case she wrote for Norman Thomas’ magazine, The World Tomorrow, she described Sacco in his gray prison trousers and striped blue cotton shirt as
a little fellow so life-loving that even six months of inaction in jail had not effaced his vividness. Short, clean-cut as a Roman coin, eyes that looked at you straight, and above all a friendly way with him almost like that of a child who had never known anything but affection. There was something about Sacco that made you think of swift happy things—a jumping fish, a bird on the wing.
She concluded with a paraphrase of Moore:
Active labor men have all the dice loaded against them. All labor is on trial with Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It is bound up with all the fight that is going on for the closed shop and the determinations of the employers to smash the worker’s organizations.
The New Republic in its December 29 issue carried John Beffel’s article, “Eels and the Electric Chair.” This account of the Plymouth trial asked for a reversal of Vanzetti’s conviction lest there be “another conviction which will send him through a little green door into a wired chamber of death.”
Thus, by the New Year, with the trial scheduled to begin in Dedham on March 7, 1921, one of the left-liberal magazines most widely circulated among the intelligentsia of the United States had made the names of Sacco and Vanzetti at least fleetingly familiar to its readers. Moore’s case was beginning to gather momentum. Art Shields’ pamphlet “Are They Doomed? The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the Grim Forces Behind It” (actually, Beffel wrote most of it) appeared early in the year as the first general statement of the defense position. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Workers’ Defense Union distributed fifty thousand copies before the trial. The cover had a sensational drawing by Robert Minor showing Salsedo hurtling from a skyscraper window. Shields described the Brockton arrest as a frame-up from beginning to end, the murder charge against the two men “a mere device to get them out of the way,” and stated that they were practically the last of the Italian radicals in New England who had not already been jailed or deported.[6]