When he was seventeen he set out with his brother Sabino; they were going to make their fortunes in the land of machines and dollars. In April 1908 they landed in Boston. Sacco had good luck. He worked hard. He hadn’t been in this country two weeks before he had a job as waterboy with a road gang near Milford. He liked it especially when the engineer let him help with the steam roller. He liked to stand beside the hot wheezing petulant engine, stoking it with coal, squirting oil out of an oilcan. But there wasn’t much money in it; winter came on. He got a job in the Hopedale mills trimming the slag off pigiron. He worked there a year. By that time he realized that he ought to learn a definite trade. An unskilled laborer was a mat for everybody to wipe their feet on. He paid fifty dollars to a man to teach him to run an edging machine. A friend of his worked as an edger in a shoefactory and made good money. That way he would have a machine all to himself.
About that time his brother Sabino had gone back to Italy, to the oil and wine business; he had had enough of America. Nicola wanted to stay on some more. First he got a job in a shoefactory in Webster, but then he went back to Milford where he worked as an edger till 1917. If he hadn’t met his wife he would have gone home. At that time he was a socialist interested in Il Proletario, a paper that Giovannitti edited, fond of acting plays with titles like Senza Padrone, Tempeste Sociali. It was at a dance he had gotten up as a benefit for an old accordeon player who was paralyzed, that he first met Rosa his wife. She won a box of candy in the raffle. She was from the north of Italy and had the dark auburn hair Lombard women are famous for. They married and were very happy; a son was born to them whom they named Dante.
Towards 1913 Sacco began to go around to an anarchist club, the Circolo di Studi Sociali. He found the men there more intelligent, more anxious to read, more willing to work for the education of their fellow workers. In 1916 the group held manifestations of sympathy and collected money to help the strike Carlo Tresca was running in Minnesota. The Milford police forbade the meetings and arrested the speakers. Sacco was among them. They were convicted in Milford for disturbing the peace, but discharged before a superior court in Worcester.
Those were exciting years, full of the rumblings of revolution. The successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviki in Russia made it seem that the war would end in universal revolution. Then Mr. Wilson began his great crusade. In May 1917, with several friends, Sacco went south to Mexico to avoid registering for the draft. It was on the train he first met Vanzetti.
When he came back from Mexico three months later he worked in a candy factory in Cambridge, then in East Boston and at last moved out to Stoughton, where he was a trusted man in the Three K’s Factory of the Kelleys.
Sacco before his arrest was unusually powerfully built, able to do two men’s work. In prison he was able to stand thirtyone days of hunger strike before he broke down and had to be taken to the hospital. In prison he has learned to speak and write English, has read many books, for the first time in his life has been thrown with nativeborn Americans. They are so hard and brittle. They don’t fit into the bright clear heartfelt philosophy of Latin anarchism. These are the people who coolly want him to die in the electric chair. He can’t understand them. When his head was cool he’s never wanted anyone to die. Judge Thayer and the prosecution he thinks of as instruments of a machine.
VII
SLACKERS, REDS
Three years before Sacco and Vanzetti had both of them had their convictions put to the test. In 1917, against the expressed votes of the majority, Woodrow Wilson had allowed the United States to become involved in the war with Germany. When the law was passed for compulsory military service a registration day for citizens and aliens was announced. Most young men submitted whatever their convictions were. A few of those who were morally opposed to any war or to capitalist war had the nerve to protest. Sacco and Vanzetti and some friends ran away to Mexico. There, some thirty of them lived in a set of adobe houses. Those who could get jobs worked. It was share and share alike. Everything was held in common. There were in the community men of all trades and conditions; bakers, butchers, tailors, shoemakers, cooks, carpenters, waiters. Sacco got a job in a bakery and when the others were hard up would take his pay in bread. Saturday nights he’d trudge home to the community with a bag of fresh loaves of bread over his shoulder. It was a momentary realization of the hope of anarchism. But living was difficult in Mexico and they began to get letters from the States telling that it was possible to avoid the draft, telling of high wages. Little by little they filtred back across the border. Sacco and Vanzetti went back to Massachusetts.
There was an Italian club that met Sunday evenings in a hall in Maverick Square, East Boston, under the name of the Italian Naturalization Club. Workmen from the surrounding industrial towns met to play bowls and discuss social problems. There were anarchists, syndicalists, socialists of various colors. The Russian revolution had fired them with new hopes. The persecution of their comrades in various parts of America had made them feel the need for mutual help. While far away across the world new eras seemed to be flaring up into the sky, at home the great machine they slaved for seemed more adamant, more unshakable than ever. Everywhere aliens were being arrested, tortured, deported. To the war heroes who had remained at home any foreigner seemed a potential Bolshevik, a menace to the security of Old Glory and liberty bonds and the bonus. When Elia and Salsedo were arrested in New York there was great alarm among the Italian radicals around Boston. Vanzetti went down to New York to try to hire a lawyer for the two men. There he heard many uneasy rumors. The possession of any literature that might be interpreted as subversive by ignorant and brutal agents of the departments of Justice and Labor was dangerous. It was not that deportation was so much to be feared, but the beating up and third degree that preceded it.
On the evening of May 5th, Sacco and Vanzetti with the handbill on them announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder of Salsedo, went by trolley from Stoughton to West Bridgewater to meet a man named Boda who they thought could lend them a car. Very likely they thought they were being trailed and had put revolvers in their pockets out of some confused feeling of bravado. If the police pounced on them at least they would not let themselves be tortured to death like Salsedo. But they were afraid to use Boda’s car because it lacked a 1920 license plate and started back to Stoughton on the trolley, probably very uneasy. When they were arrested as the trolley entered Brockton they forgot all about their guns. They thought they were being arrested as Reds in connection with the projected meeting. When they were questioned at the police station their main care was not to implicate any of their friends. They kept remembering the dead body of Salsedo, smashed on the pavement of Park Row.