Sacco and Vanzetti

“ Yet in his private life he was much more the petty-bourgeois than Vanzetti. Domesticity, which meant little to Vanzetti, touched Sacco more deeply than anything else. He lived with his wife Rosina and his seven-year-old son Dante in a five-room bungalow rented from Michael Kelley, the owner of the Three-K Shoe Company, where he worked. His wife, who was expecting another child, was a delicately featured auburn-haired woman of the northern Italian type. As is often the case with Latin women, she left politics to the men and held to her inherited Catholic faith. ”

“ A great many men and women do realize it. That’s why Sacco and Vanzetti are alive today.
So it was that it was as a convicted highway robber that Vanzetti was tried for murder with Sacco. If it hadn’t been for that fact it would have been much harder to convict the two men at Dedham.
By one of those agreements of counsel that seem so ghastly to a layman, the defense contracted not to produce character witnesses for Vanzetti, if the prosecution abstained from bringing up the previous conviction. It was a skeleton in the closet, never mentioned, but on everyone’s mind all through the trial. ”

“ SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI. IS JUSTICE DEAD? As she walked along the mall a crowd began to fall in behind her. Most of those following her were indifferent if not hostile, but a few sympathizers produced Sacco-Vanzetti placards from under their coats. She continued her Pied Piper walk, gathering several thousand in her wake by the time she reached Tremont Street. The police did not interfere until the crowd spilled over into the roadway and blocked traffic. ”

“ Sacco and Vanzetti were figures of Greek tragedy: the doomed king’s son becomes in modern dress two Italian workmen. Fate lurks behind them at each step. Sacco scarcely misses a day at his factory except the day of the murders. If he had missed any other day, the [Pg 9] factory records would have been his alibi. Without him it is agreed that Vanzetti could not have been convicted. Fate engineered the almost accidental arrest of the two men as they were riding on the Brockton streetcar. But for fate, Sacco would have been off to his native country in three days. ”

“ On August 22, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were legally murdered by the State of Massachusetts. The tragedy of their untimely and cruel death is still an open wound in the hearts of many of us who remember them as shining spirits, as truly great men such as only the lowly of the earth can produce.
We of the International Labor Defense call upon all the progressive people in America today to help us honor their memories by helping us fight the reaction, the bigotry, which brought about their death, by helping us defend and protect the victims of the present and the future. ”

“ The lives of Parsons, Fischer, Engel, Spies and Lingg, and Sacco and Vanzetti, must be made more than ever the inspiration of the proletarian youth. We must indeed realize in life the noble last words of Spies, spoken as he stood on the gallows with the hangman's noose around his neck:
"There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are strangling today." ”

“ Sacco and Vanzetti themselves were said to have been philosophical anarchists, as opposed to violence as Tolstoy was. But where did the dividing line come?
Felicani stared at me with his guileless eyes. “You know,” he said, “there are times when a man is so desperate that he will do such a thing as set off a bomb. When that happens and to what man, I don’t know. Vanzetti never could have done anything like that—but, yes, in certain circumstances Sacco might have. That is the type of man [Pg 18] he was. But a holdup murder, to kill innocent men like that? ”

“ Mrs. Johnson telephoned the police. The car, not being available, the Italians left, Sacco and Vanzetti to board a street-car for Brockton, Boda and the fourth member, Orciani, on a motorcycle. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on the street-car, Orciani was arrested the next day, and Boda was never heard of again.
Stewart at once sought to apply his theory of the commission of the two “jobs” by one gang. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs, police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters, covering the trial for the Boston Globe, did not like it. ”

“ As to the question, Who were the murderers if Sacco and Vanzetti were not? I thought I found that answered later by one of their counsel, Herbert Ehrmann, whose book The Untried Case seemed to prove that the men who did the killing were from the Morelli Gang of Providence. If one accepted that explanation, reinforced by other evidence as time went on, everything apparently fitted together. One of the Morellis looked enough like Sacco to have been his brother. ”

“ Seeing them, Sacco grew bitter about his own enforced idleness. “We’re capitalists,” Vanzetti jollied him. “We have home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re nonproducers—live off other men’s work; when Libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.”
Sacco’s mood changed and he seemed amused. Then a deputy approached as a sign that Stong’s time was up. He had managed so far to cover his feelings by a forced cheerfulness but, as he rose to go, Vanzetti spotted the lurking dismay in the other’s feature. ”

“ At the Dedham jail he was put in the cell next to Sacco. He could see Sacco going out to meet his wife and kids when they came to see him. The idea of an innocent man going to the chair worried him. For him everything had crashed. It had been on his own confession that he had been convicted of the Wrentham murder. He seems to have puzzled for a long time to find some way of clearing Sacco and Vanzetti without inculpating his old associates, even though he had fallen out with them long ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The inhabitants of expatriate Elliot Paul’s tiny left-bank Rue de la Huchette represented the workers generally in their indignant conviction that Sacco and Vanzetti had been murdered because they were foreign anarchists and leaders of American labor, and that Judge Thayer and Governor Fuller had destroyed them for the good of their own privileged kind. ”

“ For my father Sacco and Vanzetti became a challenge to the institutions he believed in, and he shut his mind against them. After Captain Van Amburgh’s testimony convinced him they were guilty he did not concern himself further with the fairness of the trial, although as an honest man he took a thin view of Judge Thayer. My Aunt Amy could not imagine that her friends of the Elizabeth Peabody House and The Women’s City Club might be wrong, that John Haynes Holmes, whom she had known as a young man, might be wrong, that liberalism could be wrong. ”

“ Four witnesses squarely contradicted Goodridge’s belated identification. (a) Andrew Manganaro, the employer of Goodridge, told Goodridge, after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, that he (Goodridge) should go and see if he could recognize them and find out if they were the murderers. ”

“ If one was middle-class and Republican and read the Herald mornings and the Transcript nights, one thought Sacco and Vanzetti guilty. Any latent doubts subsided after President Lowell of Harvard issued his report. But if one was a university liberal, one tended to think the trial unfair, and if one read the Nation or New Republic one was sure they were innocent.
My father was a lawyer and a Republican. He believed the two men guilty not from any particular study of the trial itself but because of his acquaintance with Captain Van Amburgh, a ballistics expert who testified at the trial. ”

“ Sacco and Vanzetti were to typify a cause, Moore explained to a friend, adding, “In saving them we strengthen our muscles, develop our forces preparatory to the day when we save ourselves.” The more extreme anarchists of the Defense Committee were critical of such [Pg 113] an attitude, feeling that Moore was more interested in building up the biggest labor case in history than in the fate of the men involved. This, too, was Rosina Sacco’s feeling from the first time she met Moore. ”

“ Sacco was more explicit than Vanzetti about why they had gone to West Bridgewater the following evening. “We decided in the meeting in Boston to get those books and papers,” he told the court, “because in New York there was somebody said they were trying to arrest all the socialists and the radicals and we were afraid to get all the people arrested, so we were advised by some friends and we find out and Vanzetti take the responsibility to go over to the friends to get the books out and get no trouble. The literature, I mean, the socialist literature.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Factory in South Stoughton. It was a small plant of about 125 workers, owned by the same Michael Kelley who had run the apprentice school in Milford. Sacco walked into his office and said, “I am Nick.” At first Kelley could not place him. Then he remembered the deft young Italian he had taught six years before. He called his elder son and told him, “George, if you need an edge-trimmer, here’s a good man.” And Sacco was a good man: steady, arriving early and staying late, “a great fellow to clean up everything.”
Unlike Sacco, Vanzetti had no personal goal. ”

“ Like everyone else, he had been shocked by the South Braintree murders. Any man, it was true, was entitled to a defense, but if Sacco and Vanzetti had been in any way concerned with this crime his office wanted nothing to do with keeping them from getting the punishment they deserved. Only if the men were innocent would the McAnarneys consider taking part. Moore was convincing. ”

“ I can make you. I am stronger than you are.” Sacco smiled, took a mug of soup that one of the guards had poured out, lifted it, and said ironically, “Good health to all of you.”
The day after McHardy’s house was bombed, Hill appeared at the heavily guarded Pemberton Square Courthouse to argue the exceptions [Pg 431] before the four available members of the Supreme Court. Impassively the justices listened to the familiar argument that Judge Thayer himself had become a defendant and that to allow him to hear any question concerning Sacco and Vanzetti was to make him a judge in his own case. ”

“ This is that the long delay in determining the fate of the two men is a reproach to American justice. It is something that is almost impossible to explain to foreigners.
Outside opposition and criticism had long since contracted the mood of the Massachusetts community beyond reason. With each external attack the community ranks closed in an emotional need—masquerading as justice—to see Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This feeling was reinforced by the bombing on August 15 of the East Milton home of Dedham juror Lewis McHardy. ”

“ The London Times felt that it was not the wrongs of the trial that had so stirred the public’s imagination but the fact that any man should be kept so long in suspense. The suspense was particularly aggravated by Massachusetts’ means of execution: Far more than the traditional noose, the electric chair was a horror symbol to the European.
If—regardless of the question of their guilt or innocence—Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed within a few months of their conviction (as would have happened had they been tried in most European countries) , their names today would be almost unknown. ”