for foreigners working in factories. Most of the pupils showed up
in their work clothes, sweaty and indifferent, but Sacco always
arrived washed and shaved, in a decent suit of clothes. His teacher
remembered his courtesy, his eager mind. She liked him, as did
everyone else in the clanbound community, even though they all knew
that he was a radical.[2] Sacco joined the Italian dramatic society
and took part in most of the neighborhood social events. It was at a
benefit dance he got up for a crippled accordion player that he met
Rosina Zambelli. She was sixteen that year, 1912, and had arrived
from a convent school in Italy only a few months before to live with
her parents. Father Zambelli heard a lot about Sacco as soon as he
began to court Rosina. A _sovversivo_, a free-thinker! When the
_sovversivo_ eloped with his daughter, Zambelli was furious. “That
one will end on the gallows!” he shouted. Later he became somewhat
reconciled with his son-in-law.
Sacco was happier in his married life than he had ever been before.
But for this it is probable that in a few years he would have
followed his brother back to Italy. He never identified himself with
America. He kept to the society of Italians and gave up his efforts
to learn English. Like many radical-minded Italian immigrants of the
time, he found himself drawn to anarchism. Until coming to America
he had been a republican. In Milford he read _Il Proletario_, a
paper edited by the poet-anarchist Giovannitti, Galleani’s _Cronaca
Sovversiva_, and other more fugitive sheets. Sometimes he and Rosina
acted in fund-raising propaganda melodramas with titles like _Senza
Padrone_ and _Tempeste Sociale_.
In 1913 he joined a local anarchist club, the Circolo di Studi
Sociali. He helped organize meetings in neighboring towns,
distributed crudely printed apocalyptic pamphlets, raised small sums
of money, and occasionally welcomed visiting leaders like Tresca or
Galleani. In 1916 his club held a meeting in Milford to raise money
to support a strike Tresca was running in Minnesota. The meeting did
not have a police permit and the speakers were arrested, among them
Sacco. He was convicted and paid a fine for disturbing the peace. It
was the only time he was ever arrested until the May night when he
was picked up on the Brockton streetcar.
* * * * *
For most Americans the belated entry of the United States into World
War I was an exhilarating experience. The bloody reality of the Civil
War had long since been embroidered by legend. After half a century
of peace—the Spanish-American affair was, after all, little more than
a maneuver—combat could again seem the grandest of human hazards. For
Sacco and Vanzetti the complex tragedy of the war was simplified to
the formula of predatory capitalism. Their attitude was summed up in
the Anarchist-Communist Anti-Conscription Appeal, which demanded that
the workers refuse to serve in the Army at any cost.
A month after Congress declared war, President Wilson signed the
Selective Military Conscription Bill, requiring every male between
the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, whether or not a citizen of
the United States, to register on June 5, 1917. The official notice
explained that registration did not mean liability to military
service except for citizens or those who had taken out first
papers. Sacco and Vanzetti were not liable, but so remote were they
from ordinary American life that neither of them understood this.
The passage of the act filled them with panic. A week before the
registration date they left for Mexico. It was only a week before
this that Sacco and Vanzetti had first met.
Some thirty New England anarchists formed a cooperative community
in Monterrey. Those who could found jobs. Sacco worked in a bakery,
sometimes taking his pay in bread and carrying a sack of it back to
the others. But life in the adobe huts was difficult. From the United
States letters came telling of high wages there and how easy it was
to avoid the draft. Gradually the Monterrey anarchists slipped back
across the border. Sacco, who had suffered much from the separation
from his family, returned to Massachusetts late in August. Under
his mother’s maiden name of Mosmacotelli he rejoined his wife in
Cambridge and worked briefly for the New England Candy Company, going
on to a succession of poorly paid jobs in East Boston and Haverhill,
and a better one in Brockton. This he gave up rather than buy a
Liberty Bond. For a short period in October 1917 he was employed by
Rice & Hutchins in South Braintree, but quit when he found that he
was making only thirteen dollars a week.
A few days before the Armistice, when it was obvious that war was
ending, Sacco reappeared under his own name at the Three-K Shoe
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. Returning to the United
States at about the same time as Sacco, he wandered for a year: first
to St. Louis; then Youngstown, Ohio; Farrell, Pennsylvania; and
finally, in the summer of 1918, back to Plymouth. For a few months he
stayed again with the Brinis, then Vincenzo found him a room with the
Fortinis in Cherry Lane. But though Vanzetti no longer lived at the
Brinis’, the old intimacy remained.
For a year Vanzetti worked at various jobs. Then he bought his
pushcart. He had no competitors in North Plymouth, and there were
days when he would sell up to two hundred pounds of fish. The
difficulty was the supply. Often the trawlers did not go out until
April, and sometimes they came back with empty holds. During the
slack summer of 1919 Vanzetti worked for the town, but in the autumn
he again pushed his cart. Sometimes he had to go to the Boston docks
for his fish. When he was in the city he would drop in to see his
friend, the printer Aldino Felicani, in the press room of the Italian
daily _La Notizia_, or else would take the one-cent ferry to East
Boston to visit some of his anarchist comrades there. After the first
of Attorney General Palmer’s Red raids in November, Vanzetti told
Felicani they should plan to set up an underground press.
* * * * *
In 1917 the slogans that after the war came to seem as shabby as a
last-season’s theater poster had rung taut and true. _Beat the Hun!
Stand by the President! Keep the World Safe for Democracy!_
It had been a time of sauerkraut turned liberty cabbage, of Wagner
turned John Philip Sousa, of the conductor of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, Dr. Karl Muck, driven from the podium and dachshunds
driven from the streets. Several states had even passed laws against
speaking German. High schools dropped the language from their
curricula. Upper-school boys of my school, Roxbury Latin, who were
still allowed the choice between Greek and German, used to joke that
it was better to choose Greek because you could study it on the
streetcar.
Except for the scapegoat Germans, all American racial and religious
groups were welded into the unity of the war years. Only a meager
minority, a few hundred thousand at most, continued to stand aside.
What opposition to the war still remained came from the foreign-born
of the big cities with their inherited dread of conscription, from
the dwindling Socialist Party, the still belligerently confident
Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—and from the anarchists.
War unity, seeming at the time to be forged in steel, has a way
shortly afterward of showing its puttylike consistency—as 1919 soon
demonstrated. In a soothing-syrup speech that year Senator Warren G.
Harding coined _normalcy_, a word that has endured because it somehow
expressed the common yearning to return to the idealized prewar
period.
Instead of normalcy, 1919 was a year of fragmentation that began with
President Wilson triumphant on his European journey and ended with
him in America broken and defeated. It was the year of the High Cost
of Living (as inflation was then known), the year of the great steel
strike, the Seattle general strike, the outlaw railway strikes, coal
strikes, textile strikes, maritime strikes, telephone operators’
strikes, the Boston police strike, actors’ strikes, even strikes of
rent-payers. At one point almost three million workers were out.
Above all it was a year of antitheses. The first year of peace, it
saw the United States reject the peace treaty. In Versailles the
League of Nations was born, while in Berlin the Spartacist revolt
was bloodily suppressed. The AEF paraded under Madison Square’s
plaster triumphal arch in New York, and just before Christmas the
Spanish-American War transport _Buford_—nicknamed the Soviet Ark—left
Ellis Island for Russia with a load of assorted radical deportees
that included Emma Goldman. Within a few months of each other the
American Legion and the American Communist Party were founded.
“Hell will now be for rent,” Billy Sunday announced triumphantly as
Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the prohibition
amendment; at the same time a crime wave surged from coast to coast.
It was a year of violence. When President Wilson landed in Boston on
February 23 after his return from the Paris Peace Conference, Secret
Service men lined the roofs and all windows were ordered closed as he
drove through the streets. The day before, two members of the Groupa
Pro Prensa, a Spanish anarchist circle in Philadelphia, were arrested
by Secret Service agents and accused of plotting the President’s
assassination. On April 28 Mayor Ole Hansen of Seattle, who had
been denouncing the Red Menace, received a bomb package in the mail.
The following afternoon a maid at the Atlanta home of Senator Thomas
Hardwick, former chairman of the Committee on Immigration, opened
a package that blew off her hands. Subsequently, thirty-four bomb
packages were put in the mails addressed to Attorney General Palmer,
the Postmaster General, the Secretary of Labor, the Commissioner of
Immigration, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge K. M. Landis (who
had recently presided at an anarchist trial), Senator Lee Overman
(chairman of a committee investigating Bolshevism), J. P. Morgan,
John D. Rockefeller, and others.
May Day, the first since the Armistice and the second since the
Bolshevik _coup d’état_ in Russia, was anticipated by the police in
all major American cities. Attorney General Palmer had announced that
there was a plot afoot to kill high officials and force American
recognition of Soviet Russia. But the bomb packages were followed
by nothing so drastic. In New York a Tom Mooney protest meeting
that overflowed Carnegie Hall was charged by ex-servicemen in
uniform. The New York offices of the socialist _Call_ were sacked
by a mob of soldiers and sailors. There were demonstrations and
counter-demonstrations in Chicago, and in Cleveland a man was killed
when paraders carrying a red flag were attacked. The worst street
fighting took place in Boston when the Communist-dominated Lettish
Workmen’s Society attempted to hold a parade after a mass meeting in
the Dudley Street Opera House.
In mid-May Luigi Galleani, the leading anarchist figure in the
United States, was taken to the East Boston Immigration Station for
deportation. A man of leonine bearing and much charm, Galleani had
edited the brilliantly inflammatory _Cronaca Sovversiva_ in Paterson,
New Jersey, in Barre, Vermont, and finally in Lynn, Massachusetts.
“Our master,” Vanzetti called him.
Following his deportation, on the evening of June 2, bombs exploded
in eight cities. The chief target was Attorney General Palmer, whose
house at 2132 R Street, Washington, had its front blown in just as
he was going to bed. Windows of neighboring houses were shattered,
including those of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt
directly across the street. Apparently the bomb had gone off
prematurely, killing its carrier, for parts of a body were found up
and down the street, one fragment lying on the Roosevelt doorstep.
The police also found a cheap suitcase large enough to hold about
twenty-five pounds of dynamite, two pistols, a derby, a sandal, and
shreds of a pin-stripe suit and a polka-dot bow tie. About fifty
printed pink flyers entitled PLAIN WORDS were scattered over the
neighborhood. Several of these were picked up by Secretary Roosevelt.
They read:
_The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in
America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must
reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked._
_A time has come when the social question’s solution can be delayed
no longer; the class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete
victory for the international proletariat...._
_Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding, do not
say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first
to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order,
in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded
slaves...._
_There will have to be bloodshed ... we will destroy to rid the world
of your tyrannical institutions...._
_Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!_
_The Anarchist Fighters._
The same evening a watchman was killed in New York when a bomb
exploded on the steps of the town house of Judge Charles Nott. Our
Lady of Victory Church in Philadelphia was bombed, and in Pittsburgh
there were blasts at the homes of United States District Judge W. H.
Thompson, who had once presided over a prosecution of Carlo Tresca,
and Chief Inspector W. W. Sibray of the Bureau of Immigration.
In Boston Judge Hayden, who had dealt severely with the arrested
May Day paraders, had his house almost demolished by a bomb made
of iron pipe stuffed with shrapnel and dynamite. In suburban
Newtonville, a similar bomb blew off the side of the house belonging
to Representative Leland Powers, who had sponsored an anti-anarchy
bill in the state legislature. Copies of PLAIN WORDS were found in
the vicinity of both explosions.
Except for the watchman and the obliterated carrier, no one was
injured in any of the bombings, but the effect over the country was
one of dismay at the recurring challenge and indignation against
the alien radicals held responsible. The New York _Times_ might
consider the bombings of “Bolshevik or I.W.W. origin,” but the
public generally believed them the work of anarchists. Ever since
Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre of 1886, when six policemen were
killed by a bomb thrown at an anarchist meeting, Americans had been
haunted by the image of the terrorist alien. President McKinley’s
assassination by the half-mad half-anarchist Leo Czolgosz hardened
the image. Such acts were in the tradition of the propaganda of
the deed, as proclaimed by anarchist patriarchs like Malatesta and
furthered gleefully by disciples like Johann Most in his _Science
of Revolutionary Warfare—A Manual of Instruction in the Use and
Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating
Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poison, Etc., Etc._
But for their rare spectacular gestures of political violence,
the anarchists would doubtless have been left to wither in the
obscurity of their cult. The nobly absurd anarchic conception of
a governmentless future when, in Vanzetti’s words, man would no
longer be wolf to the man, was held in America by only a miniscule
group—mostly immigrants from the more backward countries to whom it
seemed quite feasible that workers could run factories cooperatively.
Because by his philosophy of freedom each anarchist made his own
basic decisions, there was no way of separating the theorist from the
activist. Sacco and Vanzetti were said to be quietistic anarchists—as
opposed to the activist bombers of June 2—yet the dividing line was
as difficult to establish in 1919 as it was two generations before
with the abolitionists, whose ranks could include John Greenleaf
Whittier and John Brown.
“Property is theft,” Proudhon had said, and some anarchists accepted
this literally, asserting, in Galleani’s words, “the right to
expropriate the bourgeoisie—which lives by theft—whenever the need
presses or the struggle against the evil social order demands it.”
During the 1880s in Paris, one such anarchist expropriator, Clement
Duval, was convicted of robbery and sent to Devil’s Island. His
successor, François Ravachol, became one of the saints of anarchism
through his bombings of the houses of judges. In the course of
various robberies Ravachol committed several brutal murders.[3]
Galleani spoke well of both Duval and Ravachol, and when Duval
escaped from Devil’s Island and reached the United States,
published his prison memoirs and a biographical sketch in _Cronaca
Sovversiva_. In 1917 this material appeared in book form, edited by
Andrea Salsedo, a forty-year-old Sicilian who had helped Galleani
with his newspaper.
* * * * *
The bombing of his house may well have caused Attorney General Palmer
to believe that “resident aliens in large numbers and of a desperate
type” were conspiring to overthrow the government by means of a
“physical force revolution.” Certainly from then on Red plots became
his phobia. Appointing William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret
Service, Director of the Bureau of Investigation, Palmer ordered him
to conduct “a dragnet for Reds all over the country.”
The first raids took place on November 7, the second anniversary
of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly, an army of government agents,
local police, and special deputies, augmented by a haphazard swarm
of private detectives, many of dubious background, swooped down on
the various headquarters of the Communist Party, the Communist Labor
Party, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Russian anarchists.
During that wild and vengeful night the raiders smashed their way
into buildings in all the large cities, wrecked property, broke open
safes, and indifferent to warrants and the niceties of habeas corpus
hustled thousands of citizens as well as noncitizens to the lockup.
But the November raids were only a prelude to the sweeping raids of
January 2, 1920. These were timed to take place simultaneously in
thirty-three cities. Six thousand warrants were issued, and thousands
of aliens were picked up with or without warrants. Subsequently,
about three thousand were held for deportation—although in the end
only 446 of these were deported.
In Massachusetts there were fourteen such raids, and in Boston five
hundred aliens were marched through the streets in chains and taken
to the Deer Island House of Correction, where they were isolated in
brutally chaotic conditions.
The callous illegalities of the raiding procedures caused much
indignation among native Americans. In Boston, Federal Judge George
Anderson spoke out sharply against the mob actions of government
agents. Twelve nationally known lawyers, among them Zechariah Chafee,
Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter, all of the Harvard Law School,
collaborated on a report condemning the illegal practices of the
Justice Department.
If the raids caused indignation among the native-born, among the
alien radicals they caused terror. No one seemed safe from the
midnight knock on the door, the hard-faced men with clubs, the
blinding lights and the hammering questions of the night-long
interrogation. Rumor exaggerated the Palmer proceedings to outright
murder as they were discussed by Sacco and his friends in Stoughton
and by Vanzetti and his comrades on Sunday afternoons in the Italian
Independent Naturalization Club of East Boston.
* * * * *
After months of following each clue, even to tracing the polka-dot
tie to the store that sold it, Department of Justice agents concluded
that the man blown to pieces in the bombing of Attorney General
Palmer’s house was an Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoce, a member
of the dynamite-minded group in Paterson, New Jersey. Valdinoce had
been associated there with Galleani in the printing of the _Cronaca
Sovversiva_. In addition, Flynn, the new Bureau of Investigation
director, had collected enough evidence to convince him that an
explosion of the same date in Paterson was the work of another local
anarchist, Ruggero Baccini, who had since been deported. There were
no clues in the other eleven bombings, though Flynn was certain that
they were all the work of anarchists and that the dynamite had come
from Paterson. Efforts to determine the origin of the PLAIN WORDS
flyer failed.
Then, in February 1920, Flynn received a tip from an ostensible
direct-action anarchist named Ravarini. Recently, in Boston,
Ravarini had sold subscriptions to Malatesta’s _Umanita Nuova_ to
Sacco, Vanzetti, Boda, and Orciani, among others. He told a federal
agent that a Roberto Elia, a printer at Canzani’s Printing Shop in
Brooklyn, New York, was engaged in publishing anarchist literature,
including flyers. On the night of February 25, Bureau agents picked
up Elia in his lodgings. At the print shop the agents turned up pink
paper similar to that of the flyer and unearthed from the Canzani
fonts the peculiar S that had not matched the typeface used for the
first nine letters of the title PLAIN WORDS. Canzani’s typesetter
turned out to be Galleani’s old associate, Andrea Salsedo.
Salsedo and Elia, questioned separately, at first maintained they
knew nothing about PLAIN WORDS. They were taken to the Manhattan
offices of the Department of Justice at 21 Park Row and there they
remained until the morning of May 2 when Salsedo’s smashed body was
found on the pavement, fourteen floors beneath the window of his
room. It was believed by the anarchists at the time, and afterward by
many liberals, that Salsedo had been tortured by Bureau agents and
then thrown from the window. Actually, Salsedo was a suicide.
Neither he nor Elia was under formal arrest at Park Row, although
the agents made it clear that the alternative to staying was jail or
deportation. According to a Department of Justice report, Salsedo
confessed that he had printed PLAIN WORDS. Elia admitted that he had
been in the shop and that he had delivered a bundle of the flyers to
Carlo Recchi, a member of the Galleani group. After consulting with
their lawyer, Narciso Donato, the men agreed that they would remain
in the Department’s offices, “that their whereabouts should remain
unknown to all except their families, their attorney, and certain
of their friends, and, further, that neither should be subjected to
interrogation or examination without the presence of their attorney.”
Donato later said that his clients had been well treated and had been
questioned only when he was present.
Subsequently, Elia was deported. Before leaving the country he set
down his own version of the events at Park Row in an affidavit for
one of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense lawyers. On March 8, he related,
while being taken to an interrogation room, he had passed another
room where he had seen Salsedo surrounded by four agents in their
shirtsleeves. Then, while he himself was being interrogated, he had
heard Salsedo scream. The next morning he had been taken to Director
Flynn’s office.
_I was alone in the outer room [Elia deposed] until Salsedo came in
with Mr. Donato. Salsedo’s face and forehead were bruised from the
beating he had received. He had red spots and scratches on his cheeks
and temples and his eyes were vacant. He was depressed. I never saw
him normal during all the times after that we were together._
_In Mr. Flynn’s waiting room Salsedo told me about his interrogation
the night before. They showed him a bloody sandal and said “You see
this blood? This is the blood of the man who was blown up. Tell me
whose blood that is.” He would say that he did not know, and they
would swear at him and strike him in the face or body with the heel
of the sandal. They did this over and over again._