“When I was in Italy, a boy,” he began, “I was a republican, so I always thinking republicans has more chance to manage education, develop, to build some day his family, to raise the child and education, if you could. But that was my opinion; so when I came here to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before, but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there just as well.... Of course, over here there is good food, because it is bigger country, to any those who got money to spend, not for the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh.... When I been started work here very hard and been work thirteen years, hard worker, I could not put any money in the bank. I could no push my boy some to go to school and other things.... I could see the best men, intelligent, education, they been arrested and sent to prison and died in prison for years and years without getting them out, and Debs, one of the great men in his country, he is in prison, still away in prison, because he is a socialist. He wanted the laboring classes to have better conditions and better living, more education, give a push his son if he could have a chance some day, but they put him in prison. Why? Because the capitalist class, they know, they are against that, because the capitalist class, they don’t want our child to go to high school or to college or Harvard College. There would not be no chance, there would not be no—they don’t want the working class educationed; they want the working class to be a low all the times, be underfoot, and not to be up with the head. So, sometimes, you see, the Rockefellers, Morgans, they give fifty—mean they give five hundred thousand dollars to Harvard College, they give a million dollars for another school. Everybody say, ‘Well, D. Rockefeller is a great man, the best in the country.’ I want ask him who is going to Harvard College? What benefit the working class they will get by those million dollars they give by Rockefeller, D. Rockefellers? They won’t get, the poor class, but I want men to live like men. I like men to get everything that nature will give best, because they belong—we are not the friend of any other place, but we are belong to nations.... So that is why I love people who labor and work and see better conditions every day develop, makes no more war. We no want fight by the gun, and we don’t want to destroy young men. The mother been suffering for building the young man. Some day need a little more bread, so when the time the mother get some bread or profit out that boy, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and some of the peoples, high class, they send to war. Why? What is war? The war is not shoots like Abraham Lincoln’s and Abe Jefferson’s, to fight for the free country, for the better education, to give chance to any other peoples, not the white people but the blacks and the others, because they believe and know they are mens like the rest, but they are war for the great millionaire. No war for the civilization of men. They are war for business, million dollars come on the side. What right have we to kill each other? I been work for the Irish, I have been working with the German fellow, with the French, many other peoples. I love them people just as I could love my wife, and my people for that did receive me. Why should I go kill them men? What he done to me? He never done anything, so I don’t believe in no war. I want to destroy those guns.... I remember in Italy, a long time ago, about sixty years ago, I should say, yes, about sixty years ago, the government they could not control very much these two—devilment went on, and robbery, so one of the government in the cabinet he says, ‘If you want to destroy those devilments, if you want to take off all those criminals, you ought to give a chance to socialist literature, education of people, emancipation.’ That is why I destroy governments, boys. That is why my idea I love socialists. That is why I like people who want education and living, building, who is good, just as much as they could. That is all.”
Norman’s on-the-spot cartoon caught Sacco gesticulating fiercely, his string tie awry, the astonished jurymen leaning forward and Moore and Jerry McAnarney looking blank with dismay, the harassed court stenographer begging for mercy. Katzmann and Judge Thayer were shown with heads spinning. The district attorney’s head, however, was perfectly clear. Making no objections to the passionate outburst, he registered each point in his mind.
When Sacco finally finished and stood there in rumpled exhaustion a ponderous silence followed, broken only by a few muffled coughs among the spectators. Then the district attorney took up the threads of his web again. If, he asked, things were as bad in America as Sacco said, why had he not gone back to Italy where by his own admission the food was better, he could have lived as well, and he would not have had to work as hard? Did he intend to condemn Harvard College? Did he know how many children were being educated free by the city of Boston? Over the solid objections of the defense, Judge Thayer allowed such questions on the grounds that they referred to statements the defendant himself had made. Jerry McAnarney, losing his temper, announced that he objected both to the questions and the answers.
The South Braintree murders had drifted into the background. Gradually the district attorney’s questions led back to them. If Sacco and his friends had been so alarmed by Salsedo’s death, why did they wait three days before doing anything about collecting the incriminating papers? Why had Sacco said they were going out to pick up books and papers on the night of their arrest while Vanzetti had testified they were merely going to make arrangements to pick them up? “Probably I mistake or probably Vanzetti is right,” Sacco replied. Katzmann quietly asked a few irrelevant questions about the mackinaw Orciani was wearing. Then suddenly Sacco felt the knife at his throat: “Did you take that revolver off the person of Alessandro Berardelli when he lay on the sidewalk in front of the Rice and Hutchins factory?”
“No, sir.”
Defendant and prosecutor stared long and silently at each other in the quiet courtroom.
There were, Katzmann reminded Sacco, the lies he had told the night of his arrest. The district attorney led him over them. It was a lie, Sacco admitted, that he had bought his Colt in the North End. He had really bought it at a store in Milford in 1917. He had lied, too, about buying a new box of cartridges. The truth was that cartridges were hard to come by during the war and he had bought an odd lot of them in a partially filled box somewhere on Hanover Street. Katzmann at once wanted to know if the fact that he later learned there were four different kinds of cartridges had anything to do with his changing his story. If he had told the truth about that box, would it have helped to give away the names and addresses of his friends who had radical literature? Following each logical advantage, the district attorney pinned Sacco down to admitting he could give no reason for such lying that had anything to do with the names and addresses of anarchists.
Sacco still insisted that when he had gone out on May 5 with the Colt tucked in his belt he had forgotten about it. He was used to carrying it while on his watchman’s rounds, he said, though it was true he had not been a watchman during the winter of 1920. Sometimes when he went into Boston and came back late on the train he carried it.
“Wasn’t it a pretty unusual thing for you to carry the gun?” Katzmann thrust at him.
“Well,” Sacco parried, “it is, but men have to defend themselves. In the country you don’t know what you need.”[11]