Judge Thayer was vibrant with anger at the verdict. “Mr. Foreman,” he asked testily, “did you take into consideration the testimony that was given us here by the police officers that the defendant told them he believed in the overthrow of the government? Didn’t you hear the testimony to the effect that the defendant said in the presence of witnesses and in the conversations he had with officers that he did not like this form of government and that the only true government was the kind run by workingmen? How did you arrive at the verdict that you announce?”
Unintimidated, and with equal testiness, the foreman replied that “the jurors disregarded the testimony of the officers after they understood the definition of ‘advocating anarchy,’ as given by the court, to be the act of a person who actually used violence in bringing about his aims and not the advocacy of those aims when he talked on the subject.”
Although this verdict showed that in Norfolk County ordinary men could still think clearly and act justly, it also showed the bias of Judge Thayer. Curiously enough, the prosecution of Zagroff was conducted by Assistant District Attorney Kane, who would shortly assist Katzmann in the prosecution of Vanzetti at Plymouth. Zagroff was defended by Katzmann’s brother Percy.
In February, at Moore’s request, the trial was postponed from March until May 31 so that he could secure an affidavit in Italy from Giuseppe Adrower, a former consulate clerk who claimed to have seen Sacco in Boston on the day of the crime. The ninety days that followed were a period of rapid polarization. Moore, the artist, had taken two aliens, neither of whom sympathized or cooperated with the organized labor movement, and fashioned them into generic figures of the workingman. He had made ringingly spectacular claims about the fate of accused anarchists in Norfolk County, and now the community responded by accepting his challenge. During Vanzetti’s first trial there had been almost no mention of his social and political beliefs, but long before anarchism became an issue in the Dedham court everyone on the jury, in the courthouse, in the town was aware of it. Moore’s class-angling in troubled waters had stirred the depths. While no one can now say for certain that, solely in the light of the evidence presented, Sacco and Vanzetti would have been acquitted if they had been Elks or members of the American Legion, they would certainly have had a much better chance.
It was Moore the artist who painted the affair in broad expressionistic strokes, embellished it and retouched it, spread the panoramic design on a world canvas. But for Moore there would have been no case as it is today remembered, and the Dedham trial—whatever its outcome—would have been as forgotten now as the then-sensational Zimmerman trial.
By the time the formal preparations for the trial were being made, Moore had created the situation he wanted. Nick and Bart, the two Italians at first mentioned so casually, had become symbols of man’s injustice to man. No one, whatever his views, could now take the trial casually. If the Defense Committee members already saw the shadow of injustice lying across the path of their imprisoned comrades, the citizens of Dedham had a feeling of sinister forces in the offing. Any morning the mannered inhabitants of the High Street half expected to see the columns of the courthouse collapse under a dynamite charge. Sedate Dedham beside its winding river began to take on the aspect of a besieged town with the courthouse a forward bastion. The blue-coated local police, out in force, were augmented by a detachment of the recently formed paramilitary State Constabulary. The tension was sharp as an east wind.
A week before the trial, Stewart interviewed George Kelley. Kelley still considered himself a friend of Sacco’s and said so. The arrest made no difference. He had visited Sacco in jail, and his wife had stayed with Rosina during her confinement. Many a time before this trouble the two men, next-door neighbors, had chatted together at the end of a long summer evening as Sacco was coming in from his garden. Kelley did not think much of Sacco’s socialist ideas and had warned him about airing them too freely. But Sacco had just laughed, saying that what was in the heart had to come out of the mouth.
Stewart asked Kelley if he could describe Sacco’s cap. Kelley said all he could remember about it was that it was dark. Then Stewart showed him a cap and asked if it was Sacco’s. It was the cap found near Berardelli’s body. Kelley did not want to say. When Stewart pressed him for a definite opinion, he still declined. “I have an opinion about the cap,” he said finally, expressing the prevailing Dedham atmosphere, “but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.”
Moore and the Defense Committee had had differing ideas about how the defense should be managed. Local lawyers might be useful, indeed necessary, but Moore wanted them subordinate, subject to his direction. He was in no hurry. This was, after all, his case. Not until May did he start looking for any legal assistance. On the nineteenth he wrote to a friend: