The New York office of the Workers’ Defense Union sent out weekly Sacco-Vanzetti releases, most of them written by Beffel, to more than five hundred papers. Gurley Flynn went on a speaking tour, explaining the case to college liberal clubs, including those at Pennsylvania and Harvard, as well as to the captive audience of Mrs. Evans’ League for Democratic Control.
After his sentencing at Plymouth, Vanzetti was taken to the Charlestown State Prison, across the river from Boston. That granite fortress, built in 1820, was surrounded by a disintegrating brick slum fouled with the smoke of the Everett chemical plants.
On his arrival Vanzetti went through the usual routine. He was questioned in the interview cell, then given a shower and issued prison clothes, a blanket roll, an enamel slop bucket and a smaller wooden bucket for drinking water, and locked in his cell. Within a few days he was assigned to the shop making auto-license plates, one of the few production tasks allowed convict labor.
The machinery of the law continued to function with bureaucratic regularity. Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted on September 11, 1920, charged with the murder of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick A. Parmenter. Five days afterward a bomb explosion seared New York’s Wall Street, killing thirty persons. The crime, never solved, was generally believed to be the work of anarchists. On September 28 Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned. They pleaded not guilty.
Sacco, as a prisoner still awaiting trial, remained in the Dedham county jail where he had been taken after his preliminary hearing. Unlike the overcrowded Charlestown fortress, the Dedham jail, located on a rural side street, was a relatively pleasant place with fewer than seventy prisoners, most of whom the warden knew by their first name. It was like a well-kept ship, the walls and floors bright with paint, brass shining. The reception room, with its oak benches and bookcases, gave the fugitive impression of a library. There, prisoners could visit with friends and relatives without a guard being present.
What was hardest for Sacco to endure was the idleness. From the time the sun rose until it set, there was a gap of hours marked only by meals and the swing of the shadow from east to west across the recreation-room floor. Except for the few trusties who stoked the boilers or worked in the tailor shop or the laundry or did the cooking, there was no way to kill time except by talking or playing cards.
Inactivity and restraint chafed Sacco’s spirit. He missed his wife and son; the baby he had never seen he could not get out of his mind. To this man of abundant energy, for whom the day had never been long enough, the tedium of empty hours became a frenzy of frustration. Yet in this early period he never seemed to doubt that he would be eventually set free.
Sacco and Vanzetti saw each other seldom during the seven years of their imprisonment. Except for the six weeks of the trial and the final period in the death house, they would meet only briefly when some new motion or empty formality brought them into court. Sometimes they would not meet for a year.
Although the interest aroused by the case was still spotty, there was more awareness of the coming trial outside Massachusetts than there was within the state. In Norfolk County it was more or less taken for granted that the suspects were guilty. The Braintree Observer of May 8, 1920, had announced that the two South Braintree “yeggs” had been positively identified. It said nothing more about the case till the trial began.