by Constable Bowles as having a close-cropped mustache, and Slip
Harding had so described him to a detective the afternoon of the
crime, adding “I did not get much of a look at his face, but I think
he was a Pole.” Nevertheless, he no sooner caught sight of the
droop-mustached Vanzetti in the Brockton station than he pointed to
him with great positiveness as the man with the shotgun. Cox, on the
other hand, was inclined to think Vanzetti was not the man. Bowles
thought that he might have been.
While these identifications were being made, Chief Stewart and
Assistant District Attorney William Kane took the handcuffed but
still unperturbed Orciani on an identification marathon from
Brockton to Needham to Braintree to Bridgewater. Faced with Sacco
and Vanzetti, Orciani smilingly declared that he had never seen them
before in his life. In Needham George Hassam said Orciani was not the
man who had tried to borrow his dealer’s plates in December. When
Orciani was displayed in the Braintree town hall, three witnesses
identified him as one of the April 15 gunmen. In Bridgewater Harding
was positive that Orciani had been one of the gunmen in the December
24 holdup.
Back in Brockton, Orciani was taken to court and charged with
exceeding the speed limit on his motorcycle and not having a
taillight, the only things the police could pin on him for the
moment. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he was held without bail. Although
state and local police combed their districts for Boda they could
find no trace of him.
The headlines of the Boston _Evening Globe_ of May 6 announced that
Governor Calvin Coolidge had vetoed the 2.75 Beer Bill. Tucked away
on page six were several short paragraphs about “Bert Vanzetti, 32,
of Plymouth, and Mike Sacco, 34, of South Stoughton ... arraigned
this morning in the Brockton Police Court charged with carrying
concealed weapons.” The last paragraph mentioned that an unnamed
witness was almost sure that one of the men under arrest had driven
the getaway car the day of the South Braintree murders.
These few lines were the first notice in print of what would in the
next seven years become the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MEN AND THE TIMES
An introspective man, the sensitivity of his features concealed
by prominent cheekbones and the drooping thatch of his ferocious
mustache, Vanzetti was well known in North Plymouth’s Italian
settlement. Unmarried, he boarded with the Fortini family in a
house halfway up Cherry Lane. Daily he sold fish to the Italian
and Portuguese families, pushing his cart with its clanking brass
scales and load of haddock, cod, halibut, and swordfish along Cherry
Lane and Cherry Court and Standish Avenue. The fish for his regular
customers he carefully wrapped in newspapers, marking the packages
with the name and price.
Most of the Italians of North Plymouth worked at the Plymouth Cordage
Company. Vanzetti had been employed there for eighteen months during
1914 and 1915 but had quit when they wanted him to shift from an
outside to an inside job, preferring to work outdoors on the Plymouth
breakwater. He had been on the strikers’ fund committee in the
Cordage strike that broke out over a wage dispute in January 1916. At
that time the men were receiving eight dollars a week, the women six.
The strikers demanded twelve and eight dollars, but finally accepted
the company’s offer of a general raise of a dollar. After that,
Vanzetti never worked or attempted to work for the Cordage again.
In the spring of 1919, in an effort to be independent of bosses and
foremen, he bought his pushcart and scales and knives from a friend
who was going back to Italy.
Each morning at the Fortinis’ he would come downstairs in his
slippers, take his boots from the zinc platform under the coal stove,
and put them on before having breakfast. Then he would push his cart
either to the town pier or the railroad station, returning to the
Fortinis’ with his load of fish, which he could clean in the cellar.
When fish were scarce he would go clamming on the flats between the
town pier and the Cordage plant. He liked being on the windy beach.
Everybody knew the fish peddler, Bart the Beard, along the narrow
lanes of his route, even the Yankee policemen. Children loved
him. At mealtimes he was welcome in the Italian kitchens along
his route, where he would sit at the table with his elbows on the
checkered cotton tablecloth drinking coffee (for some years he had
drunk nothing stronger) while the others downed glasses of homemade
red-eye. He liked to talk and he liked to read. Over the years he
had read Darwin, Marx, Spencer, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Zola, in random
persistent efforts to overcome his lack of formal education. 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. 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.
Sacco, as a skilled piece worker, often earned sixty or seventy
dollars a week. A short, muscular man, he read little except the
daily paper and repetitious anarchist tracts, preferring to spend
his free time in his garden. Often he would be there at sunrise of a
summer morning before going off to the factory, and after hours he
would be working among his vegetables until dark. Sometimes he gave
Michael Kelley beans and corn and tomatoes to distribute to poor
families in the vicinity. Kelley thought well of Sacco. During the
cold months he gave him the small extra job of tending the factory
furnace. When Sacco stoked the fire in the evening he always checked
the premises. Mornings he always made sure that the place was warm
by the time the workers arrived. Whenever he went to the factory
after hours he carried his 32-caliber Colt with him. Kelley warned
him several times to get a permit from the chief of police if he
wanted to carry a pistol.
Sacco had come to the United States in 1908, the same year as
Vanzetti. In the dozen years since their arrival they had both kept
close to the immigrant community. They spoke scarcely more than a
pidgin English.
“Nameless, in the crowd of nameless ones,” Vanzetti described himself
in his twenty-page autobiography, “The Story of a Proletarian Life,”
that he wrote in the Charlestown prison.
He was born in June 1888 into a prosperous family of Villafalletto,
Piedmont, a village on the Magra River. Life in northwest Italy had
the harshness of most peasant life, but the landscape itself could
have served to illustrate the _Georgics_. Villafalletto was a rich
agricultural community raising corn, wheat, beets, silkworms, and
three crops of hay yearly. In the surrounding Alpine hills were
apples, pears, cherries, grapes, plums, figs, and peaches. Vanzetti’s
earliest memories were of his father planting peaches, of blue
flowers in the garden of his house, and of his mother giving him
honey every morning from a beehive.
Vanzetti lived with his parents, a brother, and two sisters until
his fourteenth year. At school, loving study “with a real passion,”
he won examination prizes that included a second prize in religious
catechism. Under other circumstances the eager introspective boy
might have developed into a teacher or scholar. William Thompson, who
became Vanzetti’s counsel in 1924, thought he was one of the most
gifted men he had known and—applying a Boston yardstick—felt that
with an education he might have been a Harvard professor.
Vanzetti’s father was a practical peasant-minded man. For some time
he could not make up his mind whether to apprentice his son or to
let him continue his studies. But when he read in the _Gazzetta del
Popolo_ that forty-two Turin lawyers had applied for a position
paying thirty-five lire a month, he decided then and there that
education was a waste of money.
_And so [Vanzetti wrote] in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor
Conino, who ran a pastry shop in the city of Cuneo, and left me there
to taste for the first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor. I
worked for about twenty months there—from seven o’clock each morning
until ten at night, every day, except for a three-hour vacation twice
a month. From Cuneo I went to Cavour and found myself installed in
the bakery of Signor Goitre, a place that I kept for three years.
Conditions were no better than in Cuneo, except that the fortnightly
free period was of five hours’ duration._
Later he became a caramel-maker in Turin. Scarcely out of his
childhood, drifting from city to city, reading whatever came to
hand, he found nothing to replace the memory of Villafalletto.
His companions, the casual workers of the urban proletariat, were
blasphemously Marxist, and he, still loyal to his heritage, would
occasionally defend his religion with his fists. Yet, as the hard
years of his adolescence passed, he too was drawn to the socialist
image of a better world. His Catholicism eroded to a vague deism.
Early in 1907, working again in Turin, he fell ill of pleurisy, and
his father came from Villafalletto to take him home. In spite of his
suffering, when he saw from the train the deep green of his native
countryside Vanzetti felt renewed.
_And so I returned after six years spent in the fetid atmosphere of
bakeries and restaurant kitchens, with rarely a breath of God’s air
or a glimpse of His glorious world. Six years that might have been
beautiful to a boy avid of learning and thirsty for a refreshing
draught of the simple country life of his native village. Years of
the great miracle which transforms the child into the man. Ah, that I
might have had the leisure to watch the wonderful unfoldment!_
After two months in bed, nursed by his mother, he began to recover.
He was now twenty years old. Later he was to describe the period
of his convalescence as one of the happiest of his life, a time of
gardening, of talking, and wandering through the woods bordering the
Magra. The happiness was brief, for his mother developed cancer and
after three agonizing months died. Vanzetti cared for her as she had
cared for him. He remained at her bedside day and night. For the last
two months of her life he did not even undress. She died in his arms.
In after years he recalled that death in all its immediacy:
_It was I who laid her in her coffin, I who accompanied her to the
final resting place, I who threw the first handful of earth over her
bier. And it was right that I should do so, for I was burying part of
myself ... the void left has never been filled._
It was in the days following her death that he decided to go to
America, to that land across the ocean where the past might be
erased. On June 9, 1908, he left Villafalleto, accompanied far down
the road by his tearful relatives and neighbors. After traveling
across France he embarked at Le Havre in the packed steerage of a
giant liner.
New York, the impersonal sky-swept metropolis, seemed to him from the
huddled deck both inviting and threatening. In his autobiography one
can sense the bewilderment of the immigrant coming down the gangplank.
_How well I remember standing at the Battery, in lower New York,
upon my arrival, alone, with a few poor belongings in the way of
clothes, and very little money. Until yesterday I was among folks
who understood me. This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land
where my language meant little more to the native than the pitiful
noises of a dumb animal. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here
was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer.
The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me._
That depression year of 1908 was a sorry time for a friendless
stranger to arrive in the United States. Like all immigrants facing
the unknown, Vanzetti sought out his fellow countrymen; one of them
found him a job in a fashionable restaurant where he worked as a
dishwasher and slept in a vermin-infested garret. Three months later
he moved on to a similar job at Mouquin’s. As in so many such places
the glittering dining room bore little relation to the squalid
kitchen. The scullery where Vanzetti worked was windowless.
_When the electric light for some reason was out, it was totally
dark so that we couldn’t move without running into things. The vapor
of the boiling water where the plates, pans and silver were washed
formed great drops of water on the ceiling, took up all the dust and
grime there, then fell slowly one by one upon my head, as I worked
below. During working hours the heat was terrific. The table leavings
amassed in barrels near the pantry gave out nauseating exhalations.
The sinks had no direct sewerage connection. Instead, the water was
permitted to overrun to the floor. In the center of the room there
was a drain. Every night the pipe was clogged and the greasy water
rose higher and higher and we trudged in the slime._
_We worked twelve hours one day and fourteen the next, with five
hours off every other Sunday. Damp food hardly fit for dogs and five
or six dollars a week was the pay. After eight months I left the
place for fear of contracting consumption._
Three months he tramped the streets of New York looking for work.
Behind the bright towering façade of the world city he saw the human
refuse that slept out of doors and rummaged in garbage barrels. There
were two worlds—he could see them for himself—the world of those who
sat at the tables of Mouquin’s, and the world of those like himself
who worked in sculleries. And for him they were irreconcilable. At an
employment agency he met a young Italian who had not eaten for two
days. Vanzetti bought him a meal. They decided to strike out into the
country where they thought there would be a better chance of finding
work and where at least the air would be clean.
With Vanzetti’s last savings they bought tickets and took a steamboat
up the Connecticut River to Hartford. They then set off, aimless and
hopeful, knocking on doors and asking for work but rarely finding
any. A farmer they encountered took pity on them, fed them, and let
them stay two weeks on his farm although he had no real need of their
labor. Vanzetti never forgot the man’s kindness.
Their wanderings took them from village to village. Penniless,
often soaked by rain, they were glad to find a few slices of bread
at the end of the day or an abandoned stable to sleep in. Finally
they managed to get work in a brick factory near Springfield,
Massachusetts. The other man soon quit, but Vanzetti stayed on, the
hard labor at the furnaces compensated for after work by the gay
spirits of a little colony of his countrymen, natives of Piedmont,
Tuscany, and Venice. In the evenings, someone would strike up a tune
on a violin or an accordion. Some would dance. Vanzetti like to watch
them, keeping time to the music with his foot.
Later he went to Meriden, Connecticut, where he worked almost beyond
his strength in the stone pits. His friends kept urging him to go
back to his trade as a pastry cook, insisting that the unskilled
worker was the lowest animal in the social system. After two years
Vanzetti returned to New York and took a job as assistant pastry
chef in the Savarin Restaurant on Broadway. Eight months later he
was unexpectedly discharged. He found a new job in a Seventh Avenue
hotel, only to be discharged again after five months. Finally he
learned the reason. The employment agencies were splitting their fees
with the chefs, who found hiring and firing more profitable than
keeping regular help.
Again he was out of work, walking the streets, unable to find a job
even as a dishwasher, buffeted by the weather, sometimes sleeping in
doorways, his clothes lined with newspapers to keep out the cold.
After five months he learned of an employment agency that was looking
for pick-and-shovel workers.
_It was necessary [he recalled] to present one’s self with unbuttoned
shirts, because they wanted to see what one was like, they wanted to
see the hair on the chest of the worker, and good for me that I am
Latin with haired chest. They used to say: “You are too small—you are
too old.”_
He was sent to a barrack settlement near Springfield, Massachusetts,
and put to work on the railroad. After he had swung a pick several
months and saved enough to pay off his debts in New York—a little
over a hundred dollars—he moved on to Worcester, first working on the
Boston & Albany Railroad, then in various factories.
In 1914 he arrived in Plymouth where he was employed as a gardener,
then with a loading gang in the Plymouth Cordage Company. Through
all his working years he spent his scant free hours in reading. “Ah,
how many nights I sat over some volume by a flickering gas jet,” he
wrote, “far into the morning hours! Barely had I laid my head on my
pillow when the whistle sounded and back I went to the factory or
stone pits.” His reading was now mostly political: Gorki and Merlino,
Reclus, Marx, Leon de Labriola, the _Testament_ of Carlo Pisacani,
Mazzini’s _Duties of Man_.
He boarded at first with Vincenzo Brini and his wife Alfonsina in
Suosso’s Lane, one of the unpaved unnumbered streets, like Cherry
Street and Cordage Lane, of North Plymouth’s Little Italy. The houses
were either the barracklike structures of the Cordage Company or else
square boxes with haphazard additions, always with a grape arbor in
the rear. They clustered round the Cordage plant like houses round a
medieval cathedral.
The Brini house was a wooden double tenement opposite the Amerigo
Vespucci Club, the social center of the Italian colony. Vanzetti had
been drawn to Brini by his anarchist beliefs. Brini was a forceful,
outstanding man, respected in the community for an integrity strong
enough to overcome the suspicion of his free-thinking. For, in the
pattern of immigrant groups, the Italians of Plymouth were more
devout than those of the old country, their religion reinforcing
their nationality in a foreign land. The Brini house was a way
station for every passing anarchist. Luigi Galleani had stopped
there, and big, genial, bearded Carlo Tresca, and the poet Arturo
Giovannitti, and Malatesta himself, the aristocrat turned radical,
with his beautiful voice. Night after night they used to sit in the
Brini kitchen, talking, talking, talking of the brave new world to
come.
Vanzetti felt himself more a relative than a boarder in the four
years he lived at the Brinis’. He was fond of the little girls,
LeFavre and Zora, but their brother Beltrando came to seem almost
a son to him. Vanzetti always had time for the children when the
parents had none. He used to take Beltrando on walks, showing him
the kinds of flowers, or in the early evening pointing out the
constellations. On Saturdays Beltrando would sometimes help him with
the pushcart. Vanzetti liked to listen when Beltrando practiced his
violin. Though he could not read music, Vanzetti had a sharp ear for
the wrong note. “Paganini” he called the boy.
Although the Cordage strike had left him blacklisted in the local
factories, Vanzetti stayed on at the Brinis’ taking odd jobs: carting
bricks, digging cellars, building breakwaters, cutting ice, or
after a northeaster shoveling snow for the town or the railroad. He
continued in this casual way until the spring of 1917.
* * * * *
Nicola Sacco had been baptized Ferdinando, a name he sometimes
used in later life, but when his eldest brother, Nicola, died, he
inherited the name by which he came to be generally known. The third
of seventeen children, he was born in 1891 into a prosperous peasant
family living on the outskirts of Torremaggiore, an Adriatic village
in the foothills of the Appenines. His father, who owned olive groves
and vineyards and who had married the daughter of an oil and wine
merchant, was not made conservative by his prosperity. He belonged to
a local republican club. Nicola’s older brother Sabino went one step
further and became a socialist.
Recalled from his Dedham prison cell, those early years at
Torremaggiore became a sun-drenched idyll that Sacco would sometimes
describe in letters that were at the same time exercises in English:
_About sixty step from our vineyard we have a large piece of lant
full of any quatity of vegetables that my brothers and I we used to
coltivate them. So every morning before the sun shining used comes
up and at night after the sun gos out I used to put one quarts of
water on every plant of flowers and vegetables and the small fruit of
little trees. While I was finished my work the sun shining was just
coming up and I used always jumping upon well wall and look at the
beauty sun shining and I do not know a long I used remane there look
at that enchanted scene of beautiful._
At fourteen he left school to work in the fields. He became the
reliable son. Sometimes his father would send him off in a cart
paying off workmen or buying supplies. When the grapes were ripe he
used to sleep in a hayrick to guard the vineyards. Summers he tended
the steam engine that threshed all the wheat of the region. He liked
machines.
When Sabino was called up for his three years in the army, Nicola
took over as the head of the family. A trustworthy boy, old for his
age, he still did not want to settle down in Torremaggiore. Sabino
had long been fascinated by the dream of going to America and his
younger brother absorbed the idea from him. Their father had a friend
who had some years before emigrated to Milford, Massachusetts, and
when they wrote to him he replied enthusiastically, urging them to
come over as soon as possible.
Sabino finished his army years in the spring of 1908. In April he and
Nicola sailed from Naples on one of the White Star ships. They landed
in East Boston just before Nicola’s seventeenth birthday, and went at
once to Milford.
The realities of immigrant life were too much for Sabino. Within a
year he returned to Italy. Nicola stayed on. For his first few months
he worked in Milford as a water boy with a road gang. Sometimes the
engineer would let him tend the steam roller. He liked to stand
beside the clanking shining engine, stoking it with coal or squirting
oil into it from the long-nozzled can. After three months, however,
he was given a pick and shovel. Then for a year he worked in the
foundry of the Draper Corporation in Hopedale, trimming slag off pig
iron.
As an unskilled foreign laborer he was at the bottom of the heap
and he knew it. He decided to learn a trade. In Milford, Michael
Kelley, then superintendent of the Milford Shoe Company, ran a school
where immigrants could learn edge-trimming, lasting, stitching, and
the other processes of shoe manufacture. The course lasted three
months and cost fifty dollars. More burdensome than the fee was the
necessity of spending a quarter of a year without earning anything.
But Sacco took the chance and the course. He became a skilled edger.
The benefits were immediate. Where before he had been earning $1.15
a day, he could now earn $40 or $50 or more a week. After a short
period in another factory, Sacco went to work in the Milford Shoe
Company, remaining there from 1910 until the spring of 1917.