Transcriber’s Note
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TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
_In his Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard,
Lowes Dickinson inquired,
“Is immortality desirable?”
I almost think it is,
if only to get at the truth
of the Sacco-Vanzetti case._
—FERRIS GREENSLET
TRAGEDY
IN DEDHAM
THE STORY OF THE
SACCO-VANZETTI CASE
_Francis Russell_
NEW YORK / TORONTO / LONDON McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC.
TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
COPYRIGHT © 1962 BY FRANCIS RUSSELL.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF
MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT
WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.
_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number_: 62-13822
54340
CONTENTS
CHRONOLOGY vii
MAPS xii
ONE THE TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM 1
TWO HISTORY,
WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE 10
THREE APRIL 15, 1920 28
FOUR BRIDGEWATER
AND WEST BRIDGEWATER 49
FIVE THE NIGHT OF MAY 5 60
SIX THE MEN AND THE TIMES 71
SEVEN THE PLYMOUTH TRIAL 93
EIGHT THE YEAR BETWEEN 107
NINE THE TRIAL—I 129
TEN THE TRIAL—II 158
ELEVEN THE TRIAL—III 176
TWELVE POST-TRIAL—I 216
THIRTEEN POST-TRIAL—II 237
FOURTEEN THE CONFESSIONS 270
FIFTEEN MORE HISTORY,
WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE 302
SIXTEEN 1926 326
SEVENTEEN 1927 349
EIGHTEEN THE PUBLIC
AND THE LOWELL COMMITTEE 380
NINETEEN AUGUST 1927 404
TWENTY AFTERMATH 451
SOURCES
AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 467
INDEX 471
CHRONOLOGY
1919
June 2. Attorney General Palmer’s house bombed,
Washington, D.C.
November 7. First of the Palmer Red raids.
November 23. Buick belonging to F. J. Murphy stolen
in Needham.
December 22. License plates stolen from Hassam’s garage,
Needham.
December 24. Bridgewater holdup.
1920
January 2. Red raids in thirty-three cities.
January 6-7. License plates stolen from car, Needham.
February 25. Elia and Salsedo detained in New York
by Department of Justice.
April 15. Holdup and murders in South Braintree.
April 17. Discovery of abandoned Murphy Buick.
April 20. Stewart interviews Boda.
April 25. Vanzetti goes to New York.
May 5. Sacco and Vanzetti arrested.
May 6. Orciani arrested. Katzmann questions
Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco’s preliminary
hearing on South Braintree charge.
May 11. Orciani released.
May 18. Vanzetti’s preliminary hearing on South
Braintree charge.
June 11. Vanzetti indicted for Bridgewater
holdup.
June 22-July 1. Vanzetti tried for Bridgewater holdup.
August 16. Vanzetti sentenced.
August 19. Fred Moore takes up defense of Sacco
and Vanzetti.
September 16. Wall Street bomb explosion.
1921
January. Negotiations between Angelina DeFalco
and Defense Committee.
May 31-July 14. Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.
October. Mass demonstrations in Europe against
verdict.
October 29, November 5. Motion for new trial argued.
November 8. First supplementary (Ripley) motion
filed.
December 24. Thayer denies motion for new trial.
1922
May 4. Second supplementary (Gould-Pelser)
motion filed.
July 22. Third supplementary (Goodridge) motion
filed.
September 11. Fourth supplementary (Andrews) motion
filed.
1923
March 8. William Thompson agrees to argue supplementary
motions.
April 23. Sacco committed to Bridgewater State
Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
April 30. Fifth supplementary (Hamilton-Proctor)
motion filed.
September 29. Sacco discharged from Bridgewater
Hospital.
October 1-November 8. Hearings on the supplementary motions.
1924
August. Moore withdraws from case.
October 1. Thayer denies all five supplementary
motions.
1925
January 2-May 28. Vanzetti committed to Bridgewater
Hospital.
June. International Labor Defense takes up
case.
November 18. Madeiros confesses.
1926
February. Renewed demonstrations overseas.
May 12. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
rejects Thompson’s appeal from Thayer’s
denial of the supplementary motions;
convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti confirmed.
May 15-20. Madeiros’ second trial.
May 22. Herbert Ehrmann finds trail of Morelli
gang.
May 26. Motion based on Madeiros confession
filed.
June 2. Samuel Johnson’s house bombed.
September 13-17. Thompson argues Madeiros motion before
Thayer.
October 23. Thayer denies Madeiros motion.
1927
January 27,28. Thompson appeals Thayer’s denial of
October 23 to Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court.
March. Frankfurter’s _Atlantic Monthly_ article.
April 5. Supreme Court affirms Thayer’s denial of
October 23.
April 9. Sacco and Vanzetti sentenced.
May 4. Governor Fuller receives Vanzetti’s clemency
petition.
June 1. Fuller appoints Advisory (“Lowell”)
Committee.
June 3. Calvin Goddard tests shells and bullets.
July 27. Lowell Committee reports findings to
Governor Fuller.
August 3. Fuller refuses clemency.
August 5. Bombings in New York, Philadelphia,
Baltimore.
August 7. Lowell Committee report made public.
August 15. Juror McHardy’s house dynamited.
August 23. Madeiros, Sacco, and Vanzetti executed.
1932
September 27. Thayer’s house bombed.
1959
April 2. Massachusetts Legislature Committee
hearing on posthumous pardon for Sacco
and Vanzetti.
1961
October 11. Re-examination of ballistics evidence by
Jac Weller and Frank Jury.
[Illustration:
BEFORE THE SHOOTING:
1 Neal
2 Tracey
3 Heron
4 Novelli
5 Behrsin
DURING THE SHOOTING:
6 Where Buick waited
7 Where Berardelli fell
8 Where Parmenter fell
9 Bostock
10 Wade
11 Nichols
12 McGlone
13 Langlois
14 Pelser
15 Liscomb
16 Laborers at excavation
AFTER THE SHOOTING:
17 Kennedy, Hayes
18 Splaine, Devlin
19 Carrigan
20 Pierce, Ferguson
21 Levangie
22 Workers on railroad
23 Gould
24 Burke
25 DeBeradinis
26 Goodridge
27 Damato
]
[Illustration: Brockton map]
CHAPTER ONE
THE TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
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. Sacco and
Vanzetti have become a symbol, and, like all symbols, the meaning
varies with those who adopt it.
I myself do not have any memory of the trial, being then in the
sixth grade of the Boston public schools, but I do remember from my
eighteenth year the agitation and excitement of those summer weeks
in 1927 preceding the two men’s execution. The day they were to die
I spent the better part of the afternoon walking over Beacon Hill
and across the Common in the muted August sunshine. Police were
everywhere, hard-faced and angry, some of them carrying rifles—a
thing I had never seen before. Pickets with placards marched up and
down before the Bulfinch façade of the State House. Periodically the
police carted groups of them away in a patrol wagon to the Joy Street
Station. Almost at once their places were filled by others. Buses
kept arriving from New York hung with signs proclaiming SACCO AND
VANZETTI MUST NOT DIE! and trailing red paper streamers. As the buses
pulled into Park Square those inside began to sing “The Red Flag.”
They looked like foreigners, most of them. I did not like their
looks. I sensed in myself the hostility of the bourgeois world toward
those two men. In spite of any pickets and red-streamered buses from
New York, I knew that they were going to die that night. As I walked
under the lindens on the Tremont Street side of the Frog Pond I felt
a sense of oneness with the community that was asserting itself. I
was glad Sacco and Vanzetti were going to die.
It never occurred to me that they might be innocent. In the
shabby-genteel private school I went to in Roxbury none of the
masters would have dreamt of such a thing. We took our opinions
from them and from our parents. The father of one of my classmates
was Reporter of Decisions of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. He
published in 1927 a much-approved pamphlet on the trial in which
he demonstrated the quasi-divine status of Massachusetts justice,
a status that made even the appointment of the Lowell Committee to
investigate the case a reflection on the Commonwealth’s judicial
system. According to the reporter, that system, sanctified by the
past, could not err. Such a conservative position was common enough
in Massachusetts then. Nor did it change. Thirty years later the
reporter still listed his pamphlet in _Who’s Who_ as his single
literary accomplishment.
By and large one’s view of the case depended on one’s status in
the community. 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. Van Amburgh, through laboratory examinations,
was certain that one of the recovered murder bullets had been fired
from Sacco’s gun. This convinced my father, although—as it came out
later—it never convinced Captain Proctor of the State Police.
My Aunt Amy, who was a social worker and lived in the Elizabeth
Peabody House, was equally convinced of the two men’s innocence. This
again was not from studying the evidence—it was simply the way one
had to feel if one was a social worker. Nobody could have continued
to stay at the Elizabeth Peabody House who felt otherwise—not that
such a person would ever have been there in the first place. One of
the proud moments of Aunt Amy’s life was when she was arrested for
picketing the State House and taken away in a patrol wagon. I think
she was almost disappointed that the policeman who arrested her was
so courteous about it.
I do not know when my views about Sacco and Vanzetti changed. It must
have been sometime in the thirties, when I happened to read a book
of their letters. Those letters were just not congruous with the
sordid and mercenary Braintree murders. 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.
Dedham, where the trial took place, is a colonial backwater. For
the most part it is a mill town stretched along the loops of the
Charles River, but the older section near the High—not Main—Street
is a well-preserved relic, with spacious frame houses of the
mid-eighteenth century and later and more grandiloquent mansions
of the century’s end. The courthouse, built in 1827, is a stone
building with massive Greek-revival columns. Its Roman dome, soberly
proportioned to the columns, is the most conspicuous object in
Dedham. From the flat country beyond the river it looms above the
elms, flanked by white meeting-house spires, a symbol of authority.
Almost always when I see the great dome so secure above the peaceful
community I find myself thinking back to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial.
Whatever one’s feelings about the trial, its presence still seems
tangible in the courthouse and the High Street.
I felt the presence in 1953, thirty-two years after the trial, when
I was called on to serve for a month as a juror in the same paneled
room where Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and found guilty and,
after all the exceptions and delays, were sentenced to death six
years later. Scarcely a day of that month passed but there was some
reference to the case.
Sometimes during the lunch hour one of us would ask the old sheriff
about the trial. In his blue serge cutaway he had served the
Dedham court for forty years. For him the law revealed there was
majestically certain. I do not think he ever entertained the idea
that it might err or that the Sacco-Vanzetti decision might have been
unjust. To think this would have been to challenge the things that
had become part of him—his engraved brass buttons, his white mace
with the blue state seal on it. His office did not, however, keep
him from having his personal feelings. He had come to like Sacco and
Vanzetti. “They were good boys,” he told us. “I knew Nick best, but
they were both good boys. Never any trouble.”
At the end of the afternoon session he occasionally took a few of
us through the jail, two streets away, and—after showing us the
reception hall and the dining room and the laundry—he would point out
the cells Sacco and Vanzetti had occupied. “I was in the court,” he
told us one afternoon, “that day when Judge Thayer sentenced them.
Vanzetti made his speech first, that long speech—maybe you heard
about it. And all the time he was talking Judge Thayer just sat there
with his chin in his hand looking down at his desk. Never moved. But
when Vanzetti finished, then he let him have it.”
On our way into the courtroom we would pass the prisoners’ cage, used
in all Dedham murder trials. In this cage Sacco and Vanzetti had sat.
The cage is often mentioned in the literature of the case, as if the
men had been exhibited in court like monkeys in a zoo. But in spite
of its name the cage is no cage at all. It is a topless enclosure of
metal lattice about three feet high in front, rising to five feet in
the back. Except for its symbolism there is nothing very formidable
about it.
I was on a civil jury. Most of our cases concerned personal injuries.
One of our last, involving a woman who had cut her leg in the door
of a car, made the courtroom buzz as the lawyer for the plaintiff
appeared. The clerk came over to the rail and muttered something to
our foreman.
The lawyer was a portly man in his seventies, with a manner so
assured that it was almost contemptuous. He was nearly bald, his
face florid, with the flesh sagging under the cheeks. Behind his
rimless spectacles his pale blue eyes watered. He was dressed with
the conservatism of a Boston banker, wearing a hard-woven worsted
suit cut in characteristic pear-shaped style. Two points of a linen
handkerchief projected sharply from his breast pocket. His shoes
were of Scotch grain. His voice was upper-class Bostonian—with that
elastic prolongation of the vowel sounds that has come to be known as
the Harvard accent. As soon as he opened his argument he lapsed into
Victorian rhetoric.
The clerk’s remark was passed along the jury box. The man next to me
nudged my elbow. “That’s Katzmann,” he said, “the fellow that got
Sacco and Vanzetti.”
He seemed a culmination of the ghosts of the month. There he was
again, in Judge Webster Thayer’s old courtroom, at the scene of his
triumph of a generation before. As he faced us, spinning polysyllabic
phrases out of nothing, I tried to form an impression of him divorced
altogether from the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If I had seen him only at
that moment, I should have thought him empty and pompous, but I
should also have admitted his basic honesty.
He died the following autumn. Some months later I talked with a judge
who had known Katzmann. When I told about seeing him at Dedham he
asked me my opinion of the man. I said he was verbose, third-rate,
not wholly grammatical. He laughed. “That describes most of us
lawyers,” he said. “As for Katzmann, he was average—an average
district attorney, a little tricky like most of them, but no worse
than most out to get a conviction. He thought Sacco and Vanzetti were
guilty. I’m sure he never changed his mind.”
Four decades have passed since the trial. Judge Thayer, Katzmann,
President Lowell, Governor Fuller, and most of the jurors and
witnesses are dead. What remains out of this shadowed past? Beyond
all else, doubt. Refusing to face this doubt, the two sides became
irreconcilable. One side felt, as did the court reporter in his
pamphlet, that anything less than the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
would undermine the Massachusetts judiciary. The other side demanded
that the whole proceedings of Judge Thayer’s court be repudiated.
There should have been some middle way out, some face-saving formula
that would at least have pacified if not contented the reporter and
his kind and yet given the men their lives. Whatever the defense’s
private opinion of Judge Thayer, it would have been better to
have said less about him and to have concentrated on the evidence
discovered after the trial. That this evidence changed nothing was
preeminently the responsibility of President Lowell. Working as he
did in private with his committee, unhampered by the strict rules of
legal evidence, he had the opportunity to examine all the facts. A
word from him, an indirect indication, and Governor Fuller would have
stayed the death sentences and ordered a new trial.
Governor Fuller, of course, took his cue from the Lowell Report. If
he, the parvenu, had not been so in awe of Lowell and the Back Bay
ascendancy he represented, perhaps he would have acted otherwise. His
jail meetings with Sacco and Vanzetti are said to have been friendly.
Once or twice a year in the decade after World War II, going into the
State Street Trust Building, I used to see Fuller. The doorman would
see him first and swing the door open with a ringing “Good morning,
Governor.” I could slip through in the eddy. The old financial
clipper would billow ahead of me under full sail. Self-esteem carried
him along like a favoring wind. His was the pride of manner that had
reached its goal. An Alger story of the new century. From a Malden
bicycle shop to the head of the Packard agency for New England when
Packard was the Rolls-Royce of America. A mansion on the water side
of Beacon Street hung with Gainsboroughs and Romneys and Raeburns.
That was the first stage. Then the governorship. And when Packard
slipped in the Depression, the ex-governor sensed the moment of ebb
and shifted to Cadillac.
There was a cragginess to his features in age. More and more he came
to resemble the Back Bay Brahmins he so much admired. I suppose
Sacco and Vanzetti, those men whose hands he had shaken so long ago
in the death cells, had become blurred impressions, overlaid by
eighteenth-century paintings and the tailfins of Cadillacs. “Our
reputation is your protection,” said the governor’s used-car ads. Yet
I never saw him sweeping into the State Street Trust but I thought of
his role in the case.
Public opinion in Massachusetts was against Sacco and Vanzetti. To
the community they were two murderers who had been given a fair trial
and every opportunity for appeal afterward. The whole thing had gone
on for much too long. Radicals and anarchists and Communists were
trying to use the case as a lever to pry apart the foundations of law
and order. But Massachusetts was not going to be dictated to by such
people. There might be demonstrations in front of American embassies
throughout the world, there might be more bombs planted in the houses
of those concerned—as had already happened to a witness and one of
the jurors. Nothing like that was going to change the course of
justice! Conservative opinion more and more adopted the point of view
that Sacco and Vanzetti had become a challenge to society that could
be answered only by their deaths.
Literary talent was the forte of the other side. That side consisted
of the literary left, radicals, liberals, Communists, woolly
well-meaning progressives like my Aunt Amy, plus a large scattering
of people who could not be labeled politically but whose sense
of justice had been outraged. Some of these latter were starched
conservatives. The crystallized view of the opposition was that
Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a malignant conspiracy.
Neither judge nor district attorney had really believed them guilty
of murder. The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome
agitators.
For the Communists—to whom this case in its later stages gave their
first opportunity for an international mass appeal—Sacco and Vanzetti
were martyrs of the proletariat, murdered by reactionaries trying to
preserve an unjust social order. Seen from this point of view, two
alien Reds could expect no justice from a Massachusetts court or a
Dedham jury.
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. Granted even
that the foreman was prejudiced, some of the others would have stood
out against injustice. I felt sure that when the jurors decided that
Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, it was because they were convinced
that they were guilty of murder.
Thinking of the great trial, I found myself wondering how I should
have voted, had I been on that jury. As soon as I had the time I read
the transcript of the record. Much it could not offer—the atmosphere
of the court, with its tensions, the appearance of the witnesses
and the defendants, the subtleties that could be gathered from a
tone of voice but could not be preserved in black and white. Yet the
substance, the prime matter of the trial, endured, each word spoken
during that six weeks pressed and dried between the now-yellowing
pages. As the inchoate mass gradually took shape for me, I tried to
disavow any preconceptions, to imagine myself in the jury box at
Dedham occupied solely with the question of whether two men murdered
two other men, and knowing no more about it in advance than the
evidence offered. How should I have judged?
I knew one thing—that I should have disregarded the testimony of the
experts. My month had taught me that. Experts canceled each other out
as the paid bias of either side, and a jury then decided on other
grounds. The real grounds in this case were the half-dozen or so
witnesses who identified Sacco—and to a lesser extent Vanzetti—as
being at or near the scene of the murder on that April day. In
opposition to them were an equal number of witnesses who testified
that these two were not the men. It was a question finally of which
group to believe. The weakest part of the Commonwealth’s case was
that it never established an adequate motive for the crime.
On the other hand Sacco and Vanzetti were armed the night the police
picked them up, Sacco with an automatic of the type that fired the
murder bullet, Vanzetti with a revolver that might have been taken
from the murdered guard. This was the most damaging evidence against
them. Sacco maintained that he had tucked his gun inside his belt
that afternoon and forgotten about it. Vanzetti said that he carried
his for protection. Both statements may have been true. Often the
lame excuse is the truthful one. Yet here were two philosophical
anarchists who maintained that the use of force was never justified,
not even for the advancement of their beliefs, who boasted that they
had never shed blood, but when they were picked up, they had on them
weapons of force. If they had not been armed the chances are they
would never have been tried.
The trial may well have been more unfair than seems apparent in the
record. There the most glaring fault is the district attorney’s
harrying interrogation of the two men as to their beliefs, their
lack of patriotism, and their reasons for running away to avoid the
draft. The impropriety stares out of the printed page. Here certainly
was error, yet I cannot believe that this was primary in the
jury’s verdict. On the other hand, the judge’s charge, which Felix
Frankfurter so condemned, seems reasonable enough in cold print. I
was finally left with the feeling that if I had been on the original
jury, I should have voted with the others. Yet I was not really
certain.
Looked back at over the lapse of years, the case of Sacco and
Vanzetti becomes a tragedy in the classical sense. It was no
melodrama, as many have seen it, with good neatly divided from
evil. Katzmann was as sharp as most district attorneys out for a
conviction, a limited man but not a bad one. Judge Thayer could
not hide the bias of his obsessions. He was indiscreet and he was
weak, but he made an effort to conduct the trial fairly. Both he and
Katzmann believed to their dying day that Sacco and Vanzetti were
guilty.
It was not a conspiracy of evil men against noble men, as Maxwell
Anderson saw it in his play _Gods of the Lightning_. There was
something more, something deeper and more embracing in the case. It
was in fact fate that was the mover behind the events at the Dedham
courthouse in the spring of 1921. And it was fate in the ironic Greek
sense, dwarfing all the participants, ending in inexorable disaster.
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 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.
And as in Greek tragedy the hero condemns himself unknowingly in his
own words, is doomed by his own inner weakness, so in the end are
Sacco and Vanzetti doomed by theirs. The men of peace go armed. Fate
plus human weakness—that is the basis of high tragedy, a tragedy such
as theirs that they played out to the end with bravery and dignity.
It was a tragedy for everyone concerned with the case, and in the end
it is best accepted so, as it was by the Greeks.
CHAPTER TWO
HISTORY, WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE
Walking up State Street a third of a century after the executions,
on another August afternoon, I wondered again about the enigma of
the case. The whole drama had been played out within twenty miles of
here: in South Braintree, in Bridgewater, in sedate Dedham, in the
gilt-domed State House beyond the Common, and finally just across
Prison Point Bridge in the granite fortress of the now-demolished
state prison. Would it ever become as clear-cut as the Dreyfus
affair, where everyone was at last satisfied of the grossness of
the injustice done? That still seemed unlikely. In 1950 the seven
surviving jury members were interviewed as to their later opinions.
The decades had only confirmed their belief in the rightness of
their verdict. In 1959 a judiciary committee of the Massachusetts
legislature had refused to consider granting Sacco and Vanzetti a
posthumous pardon.
Where the past is reduced to shelves of documents in a library it
becomes manageable enough for the scholar or historian to make
his evaluation. 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?
Boston seemed downcast, heatstruck. The Old State House at the head
of State Street had, I noticed, been steam-cleaned, and the clock
over the balcony had been replaced by a more authentic sundial. As I
reached the subway entrance under the ancient foundations, an eddy
of heat snapped in my face like a dirty towel. At that moment a herd
of tourists following the Freedom Trail had paused at Point 9 to get
Freedom Stamps from the slot machine for their souvenir albums. A
shiny-faced man in a Hawaiian sport shirt was maneuvering against
the sun to get a photograph of the lion-and-unicorn supports on the
Old State House facade, no doubt thinking they went back to 1776
instead of merely to a twentieth-century Armenian tinsmith’s shop.
Watching the tourists, I felt I ought to have some sort of souvenir
book myself to paste with self-congratulatory stamps for interviewing
people on an afternoon like this.
My first call was on a corporation lawyer who had spent years
writing a book to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. His
firm, occupying the sixth floor of a large old-fashioned building
on Federal Street, was ostentatiously shabby with a well-preserved
Edwardian décor. A horseshoe-shaped receptionist’s desk dominated an
outer office.
The man in his seventies who showed me into his private office
without shaking hands was less the calcined Boston type than I had
expected. There was a metallic quality about his eroding features.
His wiry gray hair fluffed over the collar of a rumpled white
shirt. He had taken off his coat, exposing waist-high trousers held
up by police galluses. His eyebrows were tufted and he wore round
gold-rimmed spectacles.
“I did not,” he announced, “like the tone of your Sacco-Vanzetti
article in _American Heritage_ at all. Nevertheless I am willing to
see you. What is it you want to know?”
I told him I was trying to write an impartial study of all the events
in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that I knew he thought they were guilty,
and that I wanted to include his point of view.
His knees creaked a little as he sat down opposite me. A smile broke
through his clouded face. “If you want to write a book like your
article you could probably finish it in four or five months; but
if you really want to be honest, it will take you two years just
to do the preliminary reading. The fundamental thing is to make
the proper comparisons between the trial record and that of the
governor’s committee. Of course if you tell the truth you’ll never
find a publisher. Because if you really go into the case you can only
conclude that those two Italians were guilty. And you’ll never get a
hearing on that. Why? Because their innocence has become a liberal
trademark. There has never been any real doubt about this case among
those who know about it. It was just used by people—by the anarchists
and that radical lawyer of theirs and then the Communists.
“The case was open and shut. Everyone at the Dedham trial was
convinced they were guilty, except a few old women social workers
and Frank Sibley of the _Globe_. Sacco and Vanzetti said the night
they were arrested they were out to pick up anarchist literature
from their friends because they were afraid of the Department of
Justice raids. That was May fifth, though. All those anarchists knew
beforehand that the raids were going to take place on May first. No,
they weren’t out to pick up their anarchist papers that night. They
were going to Bridgewater with guns on them to get a car because they
knew that next day was payday at the factories. They needed money for
the defense of their comrade Elia in New York, and they were going to
get it in the only way they knew.”
I said that I could not imagine why, if a man had shot someone, he
would be foolish enough to have the murder weapon in his belt three
weeks later. Any sensible murderer would have thrown the gun away.
“Ordinarily, yes,” he went on, “but they had those guns on them
very simply because they needed them, because they were planning a
robbery next day. That radical business was an excuse they concocted
afterward—and don’t forget it was the defense that introduced
anarchism into the case. During the trial they had some Italian
professor from the North End testify that he had seen Sacco in town
the day of the South Braintree murders and that Sacco had left him to
go to the Italian Consulate. But it took him over a year to tell that
tale. If, as soon as he’d heard Sacco was arrested, this man had gone
to Katzmann and told him he’d been with Sacco that day, then they
could have gone directly to the Italian consul. And if the consul had
confirmed the story, that would have been the end of the case. But
they didn’t because they couldn’t fake that fast, because the whole
alibi was something they concocted months afterward.”
“Moore, their counsel, knew they were guilty. He was just in it
for the money. Why, all in all they collected a third of a million
dollars for their defense fund. They say that Italian anarchist
printer fellow who organized it made himself a small fortune. Moore
finally had to quit the case or they’d have arrested him for perjury.
He chased one witness, that poor fellow Goodridge, to Maine after the
trial and pretended he was going to have him arrested if he didn’t
change his testimony. The Andrews woman from Quincy who identified
Sacco—he had her beaten up. Orciani—the third one they arrested—he
probably was the one who did it. Orciani had a time-clock alibi for
the day of the robbery so they couldn’t touch him, but you know it’s
easy enough to get some other man to punch your time card. He was in
the court for the early part of the trial. He was the one the defense
said sold the gun to Vanzetti, but Moore could never get him to
testify. That was the way it was all through with the defense—lies,
cheating, evasion.”
I mentioned that some of the prosecution witnesses had changed their
stories several times between the preliminary hearing and the Dedham
trial.
“Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t convicted on the testimony of the
witnesses,” he said. “It was the evidence of the bullets that
convicted them. Some of the bullets they found on Sacco were so
obsolete that the State Police experts couldn’t find any duplicates
when they wanted to make firing tests. Yet the same kind of obsolete
bullet was found in the guard’s body. As far as witnesses go, you
may not be able to describe a man properly but if you see him again
you’ll recognize him. Could you describe our receptionist now?”
I had to admit that I could not.
“Yet you just talked with her. But if you went out there you would
know if another girl had taken her place. You see!”
He paused and I could hear the squeak of his swivel chair. “Maxwell
Anderson wrote a play about the case just after the executions. He
had dinner with me afterward and I told him he was barking up the
wrong tree. I explained why, and I think I convinced him. Then he
wrote _Winterset_, and in that he saw the case quite differently.
To my mind the greatest wrong, the greatest injustice in the whole
trial, was done to Webster Thayer. He was an upstanding man, and they
took years off his life. The trial grew to be an obsession with him
later, but it’s small wonder the way he was threatened. He once told
me that every day at noon he telephoned home to see if his house was
all right, and every day he felt sick inside thinking it might be
blown up. You remember they finally did dynamite it.
“One of the jurors, Dever, became a lawyer afterward and he wrote an
account of his experiences during the trial. Simon and Schuster would
have published it. They found it all very interesting, if he’d only
put in a happy ending: tell how he changed his original opinion and
decided they were innocent. But Dever wouldn’t do it, so he never did
find a publisher. That’s the situation I’ve been up against. That’s
what you’ll face if you’re honest. It’ll take you five years, and
you’ll come up against a stone wall.”
He stood up abruptly and stalked to a table on which were two piles
of manuscript, each over a foot high. “Here’s my answer,” he said,
patting them. “This is my book on the case, the definitive answer.
But do you think any publisher will touch it? Of course not. Can’t
you imagine what the _Times_ and the _Herald Trib_ and the _Saturday
Review_ would say to anything like this?”
The chapters of the book were bound separately. He let me leaf
through the one on the ballistics testimony while he moved over to a
row of filing cabinets labeled S-V. “Look,” he said, rolling open the
drawers one after another. “That’s the raw material. It would take
you years to get all that together, years. Much of it’s not even in
the record. There’s the report from the Attorney General’s office,
for example—never been released. I can’t even tell you how I got it.
“You aren’t a lawyer, your mind isn’t trained to evaluate,” he said,
leading me out to the elevator. “If you’ll take my advice, kindly
meant, just give up the whole business.”
When I stepped from the air-conditioned building onto sun-baked
Federal Street the city growled. The sky beyond Post Office Square
looked rancid. I remembered the World War II British Army expression
for accumulated paperwork: _bumf_. Those tight-packed filing cabinets
with their formidable accumulation of details were bumf. The
transcript of the record itself ran to over six thousand pages, and
on top of this was enough additional bumf to bury me.
My next call was to be on Aldino Felicani, the man the lawyer
had dismissed as “that Italian anarchist printer fellow.” An
extraordinary old man, Felicani. The organizer of the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee, he seemed so much a part of the past that I could
never quite get used to the idea of his still being around. He was
an anachronism. Whenever I saw him in public he wore the red shirt,
the black Latin Quarter tie, and the wide-brimmed hat that had been
the anarchist uniform in Bakunin’s time. So I had seen him last at
the legislature’s Judiciary Committee hearing for a posthumous pardon
for Sacco and Vanzetti. As I watched him listening to the proceedings
I thought of the charge Vanzetti had given him: “Avenge our blood!
Clear our names!” I had heard Felicani repeat it many times in his
heavy accent.
Sacco and Vanzetti had about as much chance of getting a pardon from
that legislative committee as Benedict Arnold. The gum-chewing
faces behind the oak desks in the State House’s Gardner Auditorium
were implacable. When my father had been in the legislature during
World War I, the characteristic member had been a lawyer, Republican,
middle- to upper-class, interested more in maintaining the _status
quo_ than in himself. In 1959 the social revolution of forty years
was apparent enough in these lower-middle-class legislators whose
interest was mainly in keeping their feet in the trough.
Yet from these men representing a new emergent class I should somehow
have expected more charity for the two dead Italians. Instead
there was entrenched hatred, concentrating in the chairman as he
interrogated Judge Musmanno.
Justice Michael Musmanno of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, one
of Sacco and Vanzetti’s final counsel, was the main speaker in favor
of the committee’s bill. Silver-maned and silver-tongued, he unwound
reels of words until he was stopped by the chairman’s hard voice. The
latter had the features of the ur-Celt: savage blue eyes, gray shaggy
hair looped over the back of his collar like an old-time United
States senator.
“Look, Judge, why did Vanzetti have the loaded revolver on him, and
a pocketful of slugs that fit it and why did he go for it when the
police grabbed him?”
Musmanno tried to explain that carrying revolvers was then a common
custom in America, especially among Italians, and that it was a right
guaranteed by the Constitution. The chairman’s voice, burred as a
cat’s tongue, broke in.
“You mean to tell me that the district attorney, the judge, the
jury, the governor, the president of Harvard, the Supreme Court of
Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States—they’re all
wrong and you’re right?”
Musmanno maintained that this was just what he was trying to tell
him. Applause from the audience, in which I saw old Felicani join,
brought the familiar threat to have the hall cleared. That audience
was a curious conglomeration of the elderly, a scattering of
students, and a cluster of beatniks at the side in beards and blue
denims tied up with rope.
The elderly were survivors of an old storm, their eccentricities
accentuated by age, the crackpot label attached to their clothes,
their hats, their gestures. Emotionally they were drawn to lost
causes, and here they gathered again like old soldiers at a reunion.
The Sacco-Vanzetti case with its drawn-out tragic climax had been
for them a generation ago a self-fulfillment in indignation that
they were now reliving. At one point a woman near the exit caused a
stir, almost a suspension of the hearing, by holding up Sacco’s and
Vanzetti’s death masks.
* * * * *
Felicani’s Excelsior Press was on the ground floor of a decrepit
building near the foot of Milk Street under the shadow of the new
John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald Expressway where the business district
fringes into the Italian North End. Every time I saw the large red
and green linoleum squares on the floor of that familiar little
office I thought back to the hopscotch games of my childhood. The
walls were of pebbled tin sheeting painted with mauve Chemtone.
Next to Felicani’s desk was a pay telephone and just above it an
oak-framed clock, invariably six minutes fast. On top of a filing
cabinet next to a spindly philodendron plant was a plaster bust of
the dead anarchist leader, Carlo Tresca.
I was glad to find the old man there on this hot August afternoon.
A man who towered in any crowd and looked more like a viking than a
Latin, he was wearing a brightly patterned sport shirt. His gray eyes
peered with astigmatic blankness until he recognized me and smiled. I
told him of the mass of bumf I had just encountered.
“Yes,” he said, offering me a chair, “but what were they, those
papers? I have almost as many papers myself. If your lawyer’s wrong
at the start, it doesn’t matter how many files he has. There are not
many of us left from those days, the ones who really knew.”
I asked Felicani what he had done immediately after the two men’s
arrest. He thought for a moment.
“It’s strange,” he said. “When you begin to think, then all the
memories come back, just as clearly as if it all happened yesterday.
I knew Vanzetti best. He was one of my closest friends. As soon as he
was arrested he got word to me and I got the others together. We went
to see them at the Brockton police station. We raised money—two or
three dollars here, another dollar there. It’s all down in writing,
every penny. Then, at the first trial for the Bridgewater holdup,
Thayer gave Vanzetti twelve to fourteen years. When Tresca heard
that he came on from New York. ‘What is going on here?’ he asked us.
‘Fourteen years? Is that what you do?’ So then he got Moore, the
lawyer from the Lawrence strike, to come in and take charge of the
case.”
“I know this may be painful to you,” I told him, “but I have
a letter from Upton Sinclair, who talked with Moore after the
executions. Moore told him then—his exact words were: ‘Sacco was
probably, Vanzetti possibly guilty’.”
Felicani’s sport shirt rippled as he shrugged his vast shoulders.
“I’ve heard things of that kind, so many rumors. You know, Sinclair
wrote most of _Boston_ right here in this office. I don’t see why he
didn’t mention it to me. Moore was angry after he left the case. His
anger just got too big.”
I knew that Sacco had come to distrust Moore, but I did not know the
details of Moore’s leaving. Felicani was roundabout in answering me.
“I never say Moore kept money for himself. He was an honest man. But
for all the money you gave him, he wanted more always—for witnesses,
for travels, for new investigations. He had no idea of money. If you
gave him a thousand dollars every other day Moore was all right, but
we didn’t have that much, the committee. Finally I tightened the
purse strings. Then Moore started his own committee to raise money.
That was why he got into a fight with Sacco, how the bitterness
started. That was why we let Moore go and got Thompson.”
His voice was heavy with regret. “Ah, if we had had Thompson from
the beginning, then we would have got them off. When we first went
to him he was cold. He listened to us and he said he’d take the case
for twenty-five thousand dollars. When he started he didn’t know the
difference between an anarchist and a Communist. You could tell that
by an appeal he drew up that Vanzetti corrected. After he talked for
some time with Vanzetti, he understood. It made all the difference.
He took part then as if we were friends. A wonderful man, Thompson.
An aristocrat, the way the word should mean. He would have made
mincemeat of a man like Katzmann, if only we’d had him instead of
Moore.”
One thing I had been wanting to ask was about the various bombings
connected with the case. Would he agree that anarchists had been
responsible for them? 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
he was. But a holdup murder, to kill innocent men like that? It was
quite impossible.
“Think of the times,” he said, lifting his hands palms upward. “I
carried a pistol in my pocket then. I never fired it, I didn’t
even know how to load it, but it gave me strength to feel it in my
pocket.” He stopped as if he were thinking again of those far-off
days. I watched him, the peaceable elderly printer who had outlived
his party and his time. Where the word _anarchism_ had once aroused
fear, it now brought a kind of nostalgia. Violent some of the
anarchists may have been, but there had been an integrity about them,
a trust in human nature that I could never have. Now here he was,
gnarled and sturdy as an old oak, speaking to me of the lost comrades
of his young manhood.
Afterward, as I walked out into the reverberant street, I felt I had
put the bumf into perspective. I knew it was intuition rather than
reason, that the historical method had fallen by the wayside, yet I
did not see how anyone could spend an afternoon talking with Aldino
Felicani and still feel that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. But
that was the difficulty in trying to form any picture of an event by
talking with the survivors. The three principals in the case whom
I had seen in the flesh and who were now dead—District Attorney
Katzmann, Governor Fuller, President Lowell of Harvard—I had judged
harshly. But others I met, whom I had expected to find fools or
knaves, I had found neither.
Among these was Michael Stewart, the Bridgewater police chief whose
suspicions started the events that led to the arrest of Sacco and
Vanzetti. Some time after the trial Stewart had left Bridgewater
to become police chief of Scituate, a seaside town southeast of
Braintree. He had a speech about the case that he liked to deliver
at men’s-club meetings. Now retired, he lived with his son in a
white bungalow near Scituate Harbor. I knew the inside of it well:
the gumwood trim, the nicknacks on the tapestry-brick mantel, the
Child Jesus of Prague under cellophane, the sofa and the overstuffed
chairs. Whenever I rang the bell I could see Stewart through the
glass as he came limping to the door, lame from some old police
injury. There was an unmistakable Celtic look about him from the cut
of his mouth to the blueness of his eyes and the wave to his white
hair.
Never since the night in 1920 that he had driven down to the Brockton
police station to interview Sacco and Vanzetti had he ever had any
doubt about their guilt. To him, it was all very simple. Godless men,
atheists like Sacco and Vanzetti, were capable of any crime. Yet his
relations with them after their arrest were for a period amiable, and
he had liked Vanzetti.