Facing the chair

by John Dos Passos

It put on the stand Mrs. Simon Johnson, wife of a garage keeper, who at the request of the police, telephoned them when Michael Boda called on the night of May 5 for his own automobile—an Overland—which was stored in the Johnson garage.

She asserted that Sacco and two other Italians were with Boda that night, and was quite certain about it, although her husband testified that Mrs. Johnson was in the light when she observed the four men, and that the visitors were in the shadow. Johnson knew Boda well, and he took an oath that Boda had owned and driven an Overland car, but never to his knowledge had driven a Buick.

Finally, however, the prosecution summoned Napoleon Ensher, a milkman, who said he didn’t know Boda by name, but that he knew who was meant, and that he had once seen Boda driving a Buick—maybe four weeks ago, maybe eight weeks ago. There was no showing that Ensher had any knowledge of different makes of automobiles, nor any explanation of how he happened to notice what kind of a car was being driven by a man whose name he didn’t know—a man who simply passed one day a long time ago, passed “waving his head.” Other makes of automobiles might easily be confused with a Buick by a person unfamiliar with their differences.

On this extremely flimsy evidence, in the face of an alibi that would certainly have been accepted had the defense witnesses been Americans instead of Italians, Vanzetti was convicted of attempted highway robbery and given the enormous sentence of from twelve to fifteen years. The indictment carried two counts: attempt to murder and attempt to rob. Judge Thayer instructed the jury to disregard the first count, but, such was the feeling against the defendant that they brought in a verdict of Guilty on both counts. Sentence however was only passed on the latter. In his charge to the jury Judge Thayer had said that the crime was “cognate with the defendant’s ideals” as a radical.

SACCO AND VANZETTI

But what sort of a trap was it into which Sacco and Vanzetti stepped the evening of May 5th?

Their arrest seems to go back to the fact that in the famous January raids Police Chief Stewart of Bridgewater helped Department of Justice agents rout four Lithuanians out of their beds and drag them off to Deer Island. That seems to have started him on a career of red-baiting.

Later, at the request of the Department of Justice, he arrested and engineered the deportation of a certain Coacci, a member of the vaguely outlined group, readers of Galleani’s paper, to which Sacco and Vanzetti belonged. Coacci was deported from Ellis Island on April 18, leaving behind a wife who was about to have a baby. Chief Stewart was worrying about the series of holdups, committed it was thought by Italians, which were earning the police considerable adverse criticism in the community. Something had to be done. It was not until Coacci had been shipped off that Stewart got the idea that perhaps he might be implicated in the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes. It turned out that Coacci had worked in the L. Q. White shoe factory some time before the Bridgewater attempt. Stewart hatched the theory that perhaps the little house where Coacci lived was the bandit headquarters. Boda was a salesman and drove a car. Stewart found him and questioned him. Boda’s car was being repaired at Johnson’s garage a little down the road. Then Stewart found out from Johnson that the car had been brought in for repairs some time near the date of the South Braintree murders. He told him to phone for the police if anyone came to take Boda’s car away.

So Stewart, the small town cop, found himself in charge of the case. Captain Proctor, head of the state police, stepped out after warning him that he thought the trap had snapped on the wrong birds. The theory elaborated by him and by Katzmann was that the five men who committed the South Braintree crime (years later identified by Madeiros as members of the Morelli gang of Providence) were Boda, Orciani and Coacci, and after their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti thrown in to make up the exact total. Coacci was escaping with the swag. Federal agents had his trunk seized and brought back when he landed in Italy, but nothing of a suspicious nature was found in it. Orciani was found to have been at work on the day of the crime. Boda disappeared. All of which proved conclusively that Sacco and Vanzetti were the criminals.

No one who remembers the winter of 1919–20 can deny that even the mildest radicals, whether citizens or aliens, were looked upon every man jack of them as criminals and bombers by the police and good people generally all over the Union. In conversation the phrase “He ought to be in jail” followed after the word Red as naturally as a tail follows a dog. The news of the death of Salsedo had thrown the few remaining Italian radicals round Boston into a panic. That night Sacco and Vanzetti were trying to hide incriminating literature and at the same time to call a protest meeting in Brockton on May 9th. When they met Boda and Orciani outside the home of the garage-keeper Johnson in West Bridgewater that night of the fifth, they were already pretty much alarmed. When Johnson began to make excuses to them about Boda’s car, saying that they could not take it out as it did not have the proper license plate, they must have felt pretty uneasy. Actually Mrs. Johnson was telephoning the police. Boda’s car was a small Overland, that would have been hard to match with the Buick that was being looked for in connection with the South Braintree crime, but the $2,000 reward offered by the shoe factory was worth taking a chance for. Probably the very fact of four wops wanting to go riding in a car was suspicious to the Johnsons. Anyway the four men got nervous. Boda and Orciani rode off on Orciani’s motorcycle, and Sacco and Vanzetti got aboard a street car. Crossing into Brockton they were arrested. The police thought they were arresting Boda.