Facing the chair

by John Dos Passos

This is the story of Vanzetti’s criminal record.

In 1914 Vanzetti had a job loading rope coils on freightcars with the outside gang of the Plymouth Cordage. The Plymouth Cordage is the largest in the world, and virtually owns Plymouth and the surrounding towns where colonies of Italians and Portuguese worked (at that time for a maximum of nine dollars a week) tending the spinning machines that transform hemp shipped up from Yucatan into rope and binder twine. On January 17, 1916, there was a big walkout, the first in the history of the Cordage. Vanzetti was one of the organizers of the strike. After the plant had been shut down for a month in the busiest season, the company conceded a raise. Since then wages have risen to round twenty five a week. Vanzetti was always in the front, picketing, making speeches. He was the only employee who did not get his job back when the strike was settled.

At the time of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti there was a general impression that the gunmen in a Buick car who attempted to hold up a paytruck of the L. Q. White company in Bridgewater on the morning of day before Christmas 1919, were Italians and the same as those who had made off with the South Braintree payroll.

It was impossible to implicate Sacco in that affair as he had been working that day. Vanzetti was his own boss, so he could not give himself a certificate of employment. He was taken over to Plymouth and brought to trial under Judge Thayer in June, Mr. Katzmann prosecuting the case for the state. It is very probable that the man hired to defend Vanzetti deliberately gave away his client’s case. In any event he showed criminal negligence in neglecting to file a bill of exceptions and in refusing to allow Vanzetti to take the stand in his own defence.

This is what Vanzetti himself says about it in a letter to some friends in Mexico:

“As for Mr. Vahey, he had asked me very little concerning my defence, and, from after the preliminary hearing to the end of the trial, he did not put to me a single new question about the case. On the contrary, he began to promise me the electric chair. ‘They will put you with Sacco’, and ... at this point he used to cease to speak, to begin to whistle, tracing upward spiral motions with his right hand, its index finger straight up. This is the sole Herculean fatigue accomplished by Mr. Vahey in my defence, while smoking big cigars bought him by the poor Italian people. But Mr. Vahey’s words proved that he knew before the Plymouth trial that I would be indicted for the Braintree robbery and slaying * * * To suppose that Mr. Vahey and his agent Govoni might have been induced to such conduct by their conviction of my guilt, would be as wrong as it is unjust. There had been nothing in the case to justify, not even to excuse, such a doubt. I have always protested my innocence; the Italian population and some Americans of Plymouth had run in a mass to prove it. The preliminary hearing had proved the impossibility and inconsistency of the charge against me as the record shows. The truth is that both the prosecution and the defence counsel had realized that without the latter’s betrayal the frameup in the making would have been an utter failure; hence the betrayal.”

The Bridgewater holdup had occurred at 7.35 A. M. It was an armed attack on three occupants of the L. Q. White Shoe Company’s paytruck. This truck had obtained the weekly allotment of money for White’s, said to be $33,000, at a bank in the public square, and was on its way to the shoe factory.

Its route lay northward on Broad Street, along which a trolley track runs. One block north of the public square, Hale Street, a narrow lane, cuts into Broad Street from the east, and ends there. One block farther north there are railroad tracks and a depot, the latter being set back considerably from Broad Street to the east, so that it cannot be seen from the crime-zone.

As the paytruck approached Hale Street, two men on foot began firing at the three on board—a paymaster, a special officer, and a chauffeur. The fire was returned. One bandit had a revolver, and the other a shotgun. Later Vanzetti was declared to be the shotgun man. The truck escaped around a trolleycar.

No one was injured, nor were any bullet marks afterwards found. The bandits jumped into an automobile which waited with engine running in Hale street, and fled.