Francis Russell

“ During my month in Dedham I used to wonder about that earlier jury. Drawn in much the same way that we were, the jurors could not have been so very different from ourselves. And what were we? Some middle class, some working class, a few of us stupid, a few opinionated, but most of us reasonable enough to weigh an issue. At least we tried to overcome our prejudices. The jury I sat on would have been prejudiced against Reds, but it would not have convicted a Communist on a capital charge because of his political beliefs. It did not seem to me the Sacco-Vanzetti jury could have been otherwise. ”

“ She is so sincere and faithful to the law of the man that she has forgot very early that the history of all the government it were always and everytime the martyrdom of the proletariat. But, however, we will stick like a good Communard soldier to the end of the battle and looking into the eyes of our enemy, face to face, to tell them our last breath—which I had always faith—that you, the comrades and all the workers of the world solidarity, would free Sacco and Vanzetti tomorrow. ”

“ Foreman and gentlemen of the jury—you may remain seated—the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most important service. Although you knew that such service would be arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier, responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty. There is no better word in the English language than ‘loyalty.’ For he who is loyal to God, to country, to his state and to his fellow men, represents the highest and noblest type of true American citizenship, than which there is none grander in the entire world. ”

“ Now, igoring and denia all the proofs of or innocence and insult us and murder us we are innocent.
This is the way of plutocracy against liberty, against the people. Revenge our blood. We die for Anarcy. Long life Anarcy.
Yet by afternoon Vanzetti had so recovered himself that he was able to give Mrs. Evans a remarkably detached view of Fuller.
We are his opposite all at all and all in all, while our enemies are affines to him in all-most everything. Consciousely, subconsciousely and unconsciousely he cannot escape to be tremendously influenced and predisposed against us. ”

“ Why was it that in the fifteen months between the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision and the executions the case of Sacco and Vanzetti became the most widely known and bitterly felt of its generation? They were not conscious martyrs. Nor, if it be assumed that they were innocent, were they uniquely so. It was already a cruel commonplace of the century for innocent men to die ignominiously and obscurely for their beliefs under red, black, white, or varicolored flags. ”

“ There were murmurs of “We do, we do,” from the jury box. Vanzetti stood in the cage, his arm still raised in the air. Then suddenly Sacco’s voice rang through the courtroom: “Sono innocente!”
“Sono innocente!” he shouted again, and behind the cage Rosina cried loudly, ran to him breaking through the ring of guards and throwing her arms around his neck. Her hat fell off and her copper-red hair tumbled about her neck. “You bet your life,” she babbled. Then she cried out as if overwhelmed, “What am I going to do? I’ve got two children. Oh, Nick. They kill my man.” ”

“ So he turned with fanatic hatred against Moore; so he applied the imagery of the Passion to his dilemma; so he died.
Over forty years have passed since the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their case was the American case of the century, one that became all things to all men. So divisive was it, that only now is it possible to see it in perspective. The accusations and counteraccusations fade, those who played their roles in it die, but the tragedy—however one may define it—remains. ”

“ Gentlemen, that passes the bounds of human credulity. You can’t believe that. You cannot have looked on Mary Splaine, a smart businesswoman, you cannot have looked on the gentle Frances Devlin and have seen the truth shining like stars out of her young womanly eyes and believe for a moment that either or both of them would dare, before a court of justice or before God their Maker, condemn Sacco to his death with a willful lie. You cannot believe that, gentlemen, having seen those women.”
He agreed that Levangie, the gate-tender, was wrong in saying that Vanzetti had driven the car. ”

“ As with many criminal lawyers, the law was for him, like politics, a game where at times one might have to cut a few corners, but in the end the best man usually won, and the loser congratulated the winner. It was a game played with other men’s years and sometimes with their lives—but still a game. Such was the man, soon to become a symbol of chicanery and deceit for indifferently informed protestors all over the world, as he arrived at the Brockton police station for the routine questioning of two holdup suspects. ”

“ Dramatic, impulsive, abounding in cheerful energy, with a bronze ex-serviceman’s pin in his buttonhole and wearing a poet’s brown tie, Musmanno had quit the promising beginnings of his law practice to offer all his talents to the Defense Committee. Sometimes his zeal would trip him, as when he drove down to the New Haven slum where Berardelli’s widow was living. She would not talk about the events at South Braintree and refused to sign an appeal. The most Musmanno could bring her to say was that she did not want to see innocent men punished. ”

“ Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker, lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of Liberty, and to his love for mankind; money, rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate. ”

“ The Supreme Court’s decision was like the tolling of a bell. In the next fifteen months the case would become a passionate issue, the linked Italian names a battle cry in all comers of the globe. Millions of men in dozens of countries, most of them with only a hazy and often erroneous notion of the facts, would identify themselves with the condemned Italians with such binding emotion that the fate of the two men would come to seem the very symbol of man’s injustice to man. For many European radicals the case loomed up as the most important occurrence since the Russian Revolution. ”

“ The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which began as the prosecution for a commonplace if brutal murder, developed gradually into one of the world’s great trials. In the end it was much more than a trial. It became one of those events that divide a society. Although the issues that it raised have been overlaid by war and political events, they never wholly die. Even today middle-aged men and women, hearing by some chance the names Sacco and Vanzetti, still find themselves stirred by the passion and violence of their younger days. ”

“ You forget all the population that has been with us for seven years, to sympathize and give us all their energy and all their kindness. You do not care for them. Among that peoples and the comrades and the working class there is a big legion of intellectual people which have been with us for seven years, but to not commit the iniquitous sentence, but still the Court goes ahead. And I think I thank you all, you peoples, my comrades who have been with me for seven years, with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and I will give my friend a chance. ”

“ What benefit the working class they will get by those million dollars they give by Rockefeller, D. Rockefellers? They won’t get, the poor class, but I want men to live like men. I like men to get everything that nature will give best, because they belong—we are not the friend of any other place, but we are belong to nations.... So that is why I love people who labor and work and see better conditions every day develop, makes no more war. We no want fight by the gun, and we don’t want to destroy young men. ”

“ In the autumn Judge Thayer underwent an operation, causing a further delay.
Sacco chafed under his barred restraint. He was not one to find escape in reading or thinking his thoughts. Even the anarchism that was so fundamental to him attracted him more by its unrelenting code than by its philosophy. He was a man of abounding physical energy for whom work and love were necessary releases. Jail was an exercise in patience that he could never learn. Several times in the course of his years at Dedham he approached and even crossed the borderline of sanity. ”

“ Nevertheless, Vanzetti was as harsh in his judgments of the new Russia as he was of the old America. To his mind all governments were oppressive, whether they ruled in the name of proletariat, king, or constitution. His frequently expressed disbelief in the progress of the Russian Revolution, his contrary belief that “the Bolsheviki leaders’ dictatorship is an increased perfectioned exploitation of the proletariat,” constantly embarrassed the editors of the Daily Worker and the Labor Defender. ”

“ To defend anarchy in the persons of his comrades Elia and Salsedo may have seemed to him to justify Parmenter and Berardelli sprawled in the gravel. The paymaster and his guard would merely be soldiers on the other side of the barricades, their deaths insignificant in comparison with the triumph of the cause. Vanzetti could express his anarchistic beliefs and then say, “Of course, I may be wrong.” Sacco could not qualify himself. His was the iron belief, one that has caused so much slaughter in the world, that the cause is more important than the individual. ”

“ Somehow in the years at Charlestown, Vanzetti—the misfit, the wanderer—became the master of language. Even in his early fumblings with grammar he was always eloquent. As early as December 1921, after a brief glimpse of the close-ranged Roxbury streets on the way to his Dedham hearing he could write: “O, funny, humble, old, little houses that I love; little house always big enough for the greatest loves, and most saint affects.” ”

“ Earlier than Sacco he sensed that the two of them had become symbols such as Moore had foreseen at the very beginning. The week before the Dedham trial he had written to Alice Blackwell:
What has been done for us by the people of the world, the laborers (I mean workers) and the greatest minds and hearts proves beyond any possible doubt that a new conception of justice is planing its way in the soul of mankind: a justice centered on man as man. ”

“ Thompson flared up at Ranney’s mention of secrets: “I will say to your Honor that a government which has come to value its own secrets more than it does the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny, whether you call it a republic, a monarchy, or anything else. Secrets! Secrets! And he says you should abstain from touching this verdict of your jury because it is so sacred. ”

“ That the Defense Committee could replace a class fighter like Moore with a reactionary like Thompson was merely another demonstration of the liberal fallacy—belief in the law, in justice above class, in all the paraphernalia that concealed the claws of capitalist society. Abstract justice could play no role, in Shachtman’s pronouncement as echoed by the Daily Worker, since “Sacco and Vanzetti were being legally assassinated because of their political and economic views and activities.” ”

“ Judge Thayer stared at his bench as if he were unaware of the [Pg 359] man addressing him. The judge’s impassivity nettled Vanzetti and as he continued his voice showed it. His eyes seemed to flash at the bent figure whom he had once called a black-gowned cobra.
“Is it possible that only a few on the jury, only two or three men, who would condemn their mother for worldly honor and for earthly fortune; is it possible that they are right against what the world, the whole world has say it is wrong and that I know that it is wrong? ”

“ But where it is still an actual present in the contradictory minds of living men, what yardstick can one use except that of preconceptions? Was the chief of police who arrested Sacco and Vanzetti a forger of evidence? Did their first lawyers betray them? Was the district attorney a barrator with his hand out under the table? Was the judge mad? Was President Lowell of Harvard a Yankee bigot? Many upright men had maintained these things. Were Sacco and Vanzetti quietistic anarchists, or did they believe in the politics of the deed? ”

“ Katzmann know that we were against the war because we did not believe in the purpose for which they say that the war was done. We believe it that the war is wrong, and we believe this more now after ten years that we understood it day by day—the consequences and the result of the after war. We believe more now than ever that the war was wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind: ‘Look out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. ”

“ Moore asked if he would go on the stand again and take back what he had said. Pelser hesitated. Moore bore down on him: “You can tell anything that is the truth. If it’s not true that he is the dead image, then you owe it to yourself and your conscience to tell it. If it is the truth, for God’s sake stick to your story. It might come to the point when in order to save a couple of men’s lives it is going to be necessary—you have got the stuff to come through if it is necessary, that right?” ”

“ He wondered why the defense had produced no witnesses from Rice & Hutchins, where Sacco had worked, to say he was not the man. He concluded with a flourish: “You are the consultants here, gentlemen, the twelve of you, and the parties come to you and ask you to find out what the truth is on the two issues of guilt or innocence. Men of the jury, do your duty. Do it like men. Stand together, men of Norfolk!” ”

“ In addition the man had in his pocket a penciled announcement in Italian that read:
Proletarians, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the owners. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak. ”