Now is the time for all labor to be aroused and to rally as one vast host to vindicate its assailed honor, to assert its self-respect, and to issue its demand that in spite of the capitalist-controlled courts of Massachusetts honest and innocent workingmen whose only crime is their innocence of crime and their loyalty to labor, shall not be murdered by the official hirelings of the corporate powers that rule and tyrannize over the state.
It does not matter what the occupation of the worker may be, what he is in theory of belief, what union or party he belongs to, this is the supreme cause of us all and the call comes to each of us and to all of us to unite from coast to coast in every state and thruout the whole country to protest in thunder tones against the consummation of that foul and damning crime against labor in the once proud state of Massachusetts.
A thousand protest meetings should be called at once and ring with denunciation of the impending crime.
A million letters of indignant resentment should roll in on the governor of Massachusetts and upon members of the house of representatives and the senate of the United States.
It is this, and this alone, that will save Sacco and Vanzetti. We cannot ignore this duty to ourselves, to our martyr comrades, to our cause, to justice and humanity without being guilty of treason to our own manhood and outraging our own souls.
Arouse ye toiling millions of the nation and swear by all you hold sacred in the cause of labor and in the cause of truth and justice and all things of good report, that Sacco and Vanzetti, your brothers and mine, innocent as we are, shall not be foully murdered to glut the vengeance of a gang of plutocratic slave drivers!
“WHEN KATZMANN ASKED ME WHAT I THOUGHT OF SACCO AS A PARTICIPANT IN THE BRAINTREE HOLDUP, I EXPLAINED TO HIM THAT ANARCHISTS DO NOT COMMIT CRIMES FOR MONEY BUT FOR A PRINCIPLE, AND THAT BANDITRY WAS NOT IN THEIR CODE”.
—from a letter dated Chicago, Ill. September 29th written by Feri Felix Weiss to the editor of the Boston Globe, published with an accompanying affidavit in the New York World, October 13, 1926.
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR DEMANDS INVESTIGATION
On October 11th, 1926, the American Federation of Labor Convention in Detroit, representing millions of working men passed the following resolution proposing that the American Federation of Labor demand an investigation of the activities of agents of the Department of Justice in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.