Benjamin Sacco

“ 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. ”

“ Codman, the latter a cousin by marriage of the head of the Civil Liberties Committee. Sacco always took a more trusting attitude toward women than toward men.
Evenings were the most difficult for “thes sad reclus,” as he whimsically termed himself. He kept thinking of the bungalow in South Stoughton, how he would sometimes visit friends after supper and come back with the sleeping Dante in his arms and Rosina beside him. ”

“ She now insisted that Sacco had worked for Rice & Hutchins in 1908 at the time of a strike—it was then and only then she had known him. That was [Pg 400] the time when he had struck her with the last, and she had thought to herself: “That man will do something before he dies.” ”

“ It was dangerous the way people felt nowadays. Sacco was a clever young fellow and could soon get to be a prosperous citizen, maybe own a factory of his own some day, live by other men’s work. But Sacco working in his garden in the early morning before the whistles blew, hilling beans, picking off potatobugs, letting grains of corn slip by threes or fours through his fingers into the finely worked earth, worried about things. He was an anarchist. He loved the earth and people, he wanted them to walk straight over the free hills, not to stagger bowed under the ordained machinery of industry ”

“ Carlos E. Goodridge, (who, after the trial, was discovered to have been a fugitive from justice in another state, and to have given evidence under a false name) , swore that at the time of the shooting he was in a pool room in South Braintree; heard shots; stepped to the door; saw the automobile coming toward him, and when he got to the sidewalk a man in the automobile “poked a gun” over towards him—whereupon he “went back into the pool room.”
About seven months later [1] he identified Sacco as that man for the first time, [1] and identified him again at the trial. ”

“ And he had read the anarchist fathers, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Malatesta, long since convinced that only anarchism could strike off the chains that fettered human freedom. His best-thumbed books, however, were The Divine Comedy and Renan’s Life of Jesus. Anarchist that he was, in his personal relations he was not a doctrinaire. At one time he had enrolled in an evening course given by a liberal Protestant minister in Plymouth.
Sacco would never have set foot inside a church. Like his friend a member of the loose-knit Galleani group of New England anarchists, he was rigidly class-conscious. ”

“ Sacco found the ultimate outlet to his anger in Moore and the New Trial League. The latter had sent him several pamphlets and flyers from the new organization. Reading them, Sacco—as on that July day in court three years before—erupted. He had never liked the Westerner, but this was the last straw. On August 18 he spent the afternoon in his cell penning a letter that was a distillation of his bitterness. ”

“ Man leaned out of the car with gun in hand, came opposite, pointed gun at him, pulled trigger; no explosion.
“That bandit was pale, had a long face, awful white,” said De Berardinis, “and he had light hair. A thin fellow, light weight. Not like Sacco. The one I saw was light. Sacco is dark.”
This is the complete identification case against Sacco so far as the murder scene is concerned. As has been shown, Pelser is discredited by his self-contradictions on the stand, and both his testimony and Goodridge’s is refuted by several undiscredited witnesses. ”

“ Many celebrated men at home and abroad have declared them to be innocent, their defense has fought a heroic fight, while the machinery of the law has steadily brought them closer to death day by day, until there now stands between them and execution in the week of July 10th of this year, one man, Governor Alvin T. Fuller of Massachusetts.
Widespread ignorance on the part of the general public of the actual testimony on which the conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti was secured has made it advisable that a brief summary of the testimony of outstanding importance at the trial should be made. ”

“ He had brought them visitors, arranged for their English lessons, and encouraged them by letters and by visits, disregarding and excusing Sacco’s latent hostility. The reward for his efforts had been the sullen suspicions of the doctrinaire anarchists. They were always a problem to him. “The practical difficulty with such men as Felicani, Lopez and some of the others,” he complained in a letter, “is not that they do not want to help, but that in many cases they do not know how to help. They are not affiliated with either the American organized labor nor with the Italian labor movement.” ”

“ That day, according to his account, he left Stoughton on the 8:56 A.M. train for Boston to go to the Italian consulate and apply for a foglio di via, a one-way passport to Italy. He arrived at the South Station and walked from there along Atlantic Avenue to the North End. On Prince Street he bought a copy of La Notizia and spent some time reading it. Then he walked down Hanover Street, turned the corner, and ran into his friend Angelo Monello. Together they walked to Washington Street; Sacco continued alone, looking in the store windows and pricing the new suits and straw hats. ”

“ Sacco parried, “it is, but men have to defend themselves. In the country you don’t know what you need.” [11]
[Pg 190]
As to his other lies, Sacco had lied when he denied knowing Orciani. He had lied about the time he worked in South Braintree because he was afraid if the police found out he had been working there under the name of Mosmacotelli he would be punished as a slacker and they would find the radical literature in his house. He had lied when he said he had known Vanzetti only a year and a half because he did not want to tell about their going to Mexico. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By common consent those present put anger aside, and moved to higher levels of the spirit. Watchers in Boston flashed to New York the fateful moment when the two men died. Something happened in that moment when myriads of hearts, the world around, were cleansed of fear and hate. In them Sacco and Vanzetti were born again, and will surely live.
Others were not able to attain such humanistic serenity. For Eugene Lyons, in the New York Tass office, Sacco and Vanzetti had [Pg 453] become like members of his own family. Up until the execution hour he kept cabling the news to Moscow. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ As the paymaster and guard fell, an automobile carrying several men drew up. The bandits seized the boxes of money, threw them into the car, jumped in, and were off.
Charged with the murder on May 5, 1920, three weeks after the crime, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the former an industrious workman with a family, the latter a fish peddler, both extreme radicals, were put on trial on May 31, 1921, at Dedham, Norfolk County, Massachusetts. The presiding Judge was Webster Thayer, of Worcester. ”

“ In spite of the remonstrances of the foreman, he had pushed ahead of the others when he heard the shots until as the Buick passed he was standing just behind the gate-tender. He had been that close, and he had seen three men distinctly: the pale driver, the dark man beside him, and a man in the back who was firing a gun. Sacco was none of these men—nor was Vanzetti. ”

“ Campbell, she saw a car standing outside the factory. She saw a “very light man” inside the car (concededly neither Sacco nor Vanzetti) and another man “bending over the hood of the car,” whom she characterized as a “dark complexioned man.” She went into the factory in search of a job, and at the time had no talk with either of the men. When she came out, “fifteen minutes later,” the dark man “was down under the car, like he was fixing something,” and she asked him the way to another factory. ”

“ It seems that unscrupulous individuals like himself become necessary when states get into trouble and have to pass through political, financial, and moral crises. It is said that Sacco with his imperturbable assurance and ingenious and resourceful mind has quite won the King’s favour. Just look at him! Why, with that crowd of courtiers round him, one might think him the master of this palace! ”

“ Although Sacco had planned to have its contents kept secret, the Defense Committee persuaded him to allow them to release it immediately for its propaganda effect, to sway every ounce of opinion possible in the last hours.
Facing extinction, Sacco achieved the slow-moving dignity that came, as a rule, more easily to Vanzetti:
Much have we suffered during this long Calvary. We protest today as we protested yesterday. We protest always for our freedom. ”

“ Amid the distortions of gossip there is the more coldly remembered fact that those who testified for the defense lost their jobs. Among others, Brenner and McCullum, who contradicted Pelser in court, were discharged soon afterward, as was Lewis Wade, who disappointed the prosecution by not identifying Sacco positively. All South Braintree still firmly believes that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. ”

“ Jenny Novelli described the man she had seen in the car who looked so much like her friend as having “dark hair and a dark complexion, like a man that has to shave every day.” Neither prisoner was that man. Just after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Hellyer, the Pinkerton operative, had shown Mrs. Novelli a photograph of Sacco and she said it greatly resembled the man next to the driver. She now denied ever making such a tentative identification. Sacco was not the man. ”

“ As he was going in to Boni’s Restaurant he met Professor Guadagni, and they sat down at a table together. Albert Bosco was already there, and later Mr. Williams, the advertising man, joined them. Sacco stayed about an hour and afterward went uptown to the consulate on Berkeley Street. Arriving there at two, he said to the clerk, “I like to get a passport for my whole family. ”

“ In his counsels to his children, he compares a gambler to a sink of all the vices, and in writing of his early life at Sacco he describes himself as an idle profligate, and tells how he entirely neglected his profession. If indeed such monstrous cantles were cut out of his time through idleness he must, though his life proved a long one, have possessed extraordinary power of rapid production; for the huge mass of his published work, without taking any account of the many manuscripts he burned from time to time, would, in the case of most men, represent the ceaseless labour of a long life. ”

“ As soon as Assistant District Attorney Williams read the letter, forwarded to him by Katzmann, he had Pelser up on the courthouse carpet. Williams asked him if he did not remember looking at Sacco’s picture and saying “That looks like the man,” of seeing Sacco and exclaiming “By George! If he isn’t the man he is a dead image for him.” Pelser now maintained that what he had said on the stand was the truth as he believed it, and that nothing had since happened to change his mind. The fact was that when he had talked to Moore in Boston he was in no condition to know what he was saying. ”

“ Frank Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, described her. “A nut. She is crazy and has been for years,” was Police Chief Gallivan’s opinion.
After Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Lottie told Jackson that she had seen Sacco in South Braintree the day of the murders and remembered he used to work in Rice & Hutchins. Later she elaborated on this story to John Shea, the local policeman, who passed her on to Stewart and Brouillard. She claimed she had recognized [Pg 398] Sacco’s picture in the paper after his arrest because she had known him in 1915 ”

“ The champion of life and of the liberty should not yield before the death.
Sacco’s nature had a darker turbulence. The now obsolete term anarchist-communist would have applied to him as it would never have applied to Vanzetti. Anarchist though he called himself, he saw life in terms of the Marxist class struggle, in which “as long as this sistem of things, the exploitation of man on other man reign, will remain always the fight between those two opposite class.” Unlike Vanzetti, he did not concern himself with anarchism as the rejection of government, but with the immediacy of conflict. ”