Meanwhile the red delirium over the rest of the country had slackened. Something had happened that had made many people pause and think.
About dawn on May 3rd the body of Andrea Salsedo, an anarchist printer, was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row in New York. He had jumped or been thrown from the offices of the Department of Justice on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row building, where he and his friend Elia had been secretly imprisoned for eight weeks. Evidently they had continually tortured him during that time; Mr. Palmer’s detectives were “investigating” anarchist activity. A note had been smuggled out somehow, and a few days before Vanzetti had been in New York as the delegate of an Italian group to try to get the two men out on bail. After Salsedo’s death Elia was hurried over to Ellis Island and deported. He died in Italy. But from that time on the holy enthusiasm for red-baiting subsided. That tortured body found dead and bleeding in one of the most central and public spots in New York shocked men back into their senses.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in the trolley car in Brockton the night of May 5th, Sacco had in his pocket the draft of a poster announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder of their comrade. They were going about warning the other members of their group to hide all incriminating evidence in the way of “radical” books and papers so that, in the new raid that they had been tipped off to expect, they should not be arrested and meet the fate of Salsedo.
Don’t forget that people had been arrested and beaten up for distributing the Declaration of Independence.
IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FRAME-UPS
But why were these men held as murderers and highwaymen and not as anarchists and advocates of the working people?
It was a frameup.
That does not necessarily mean that any set of government and employing class detectives deliberately planned to fasten the crime of murder on Sacco and Vanzetti. Though in this case it is almost certain that they did.
The frameup is an unconscious (occasionally semiconscious) mechanism. An unconscious mechanism is a kink in the mind that makes people do something without knowing why they do it, and often without knowing that they are doing it. It is the sub-rational act of a group, serving in this case, through a series of pointed unintentions, the ends of a governing class.
Among a people that does not recognize or rather does not admit the force and danger of ideas it is impossible to prosecute the holder of unpopular ideas directly. Also there is a smouldering tradition of freedom that makes those who do it feel guilty. After all everyone learnt the Declaration of Independence and Give me Liberty or Give me Death in school, and however perfunctory the words have become they have left a faint infantile impression on the minds of most of us. Hence the characteristic American weapon of the frameup. If a cop wants to arrest a man he suspects of selling dope he plants a gun on him and arrests him under the Sullivan Law. If a man is organizing a strike in a dangerously lively way you try to frame him under the Mann Act or else you get hold of a woman to sue him for breach of promise. If a representative votes against war you have him arrested for breach of decency in an automobile on a Virginia roadside. If two Italians are spreading anarchist propaganda, you hold them for murder.