Harding, disregarding his first statement about a Hudson, again
described the Bridgewater car as a seven-passenger Buick. The
“croppy” mustache of the bandit that he “did not get much of a
look at” was now “a heavy dark mustache that had been trimmed.”
On December 24 he had described the shotgun bandit to a Pinkerton
investigator as “slim, five feet ten inches, wore a long black
overcoat and a derby hat.” Now he described him: “Long coat, no hat,
high forehead, hair was short, dark complected man, I should say,
high cheekbones, rather hard, broad face and the head, perhaps, more
a round head, bullet shaped.”
Mrs. Brooks repeated her story of crossing in front of the parked
car and looking through the windshield at the driver. She had picked
Vanzetti out of a lineup of four men in the Brockton police station
as that driver. Facing him in the courtroom, she was still certain
he had been the driver. After she had entered the railway station,
she testified she heard shots and, looking out the window, saw the
flashes from two gun barrels as the L. Q. White truck lurched down
Broad Street. In cross-examining her Vahey questioned whether it
was possible (as indeed it was not) to have an unimpeded view of
the street from the station, and whether in fact she had seen the
shooting at all. Mrs. Brooks became confused and hesitant, but Vahey
did not press the point. Neither did he bring out the fact that
Vanzetti did not know how to drive.
The only other witness to identify Vanzetti in court was Maynard
Shaw, a schoolboy who had been delivering papers at the time of the
attempt. From one hundred fifty feet away on Broad Street he had seen
a dark-mustached man with a shotgun get out of a touring car on the
corner and fire at the payroll truck. “He is the one I saw,” the boy
said, pointing at Vanzetti. He added that even at a distance he knew
the man was a foreigner “by the way he ran.” Vahey made much of this
remark, asking Shaw whether Italians and Russians ran differently
from Swedes or Norwegians and how anybody could tell the difference.
Shaw had not paid much attention to the bandits’ car, thinking it a
Hudson or a Buick. Later, though he did not explain why, he concluded
it was a Buick.
The other witnesses were routine. John King of Grove Street had been
in his upstairs bedroom when he heard the car roar by. Looking out,
he noted it was a seven-passenger Buick. Dr. Murphy once more told of
picking up the spent shotgun shell. Simon and Ruth Johnson appeared
and told their stories, and George Hassam, the Needham garage owner,
told his. Officer Connolly told of arresting Vanzetti. Chief Stewart
submitted a transcript of his interview with the defendant. Most of
it was excluded because of its references to political beliefs.
Captain William Proctor of the State Police, testifying as a
ballistics expert, claimed that the 12-gauge Winchester shell Dr.
Murphy had found in the gutter and the Winchester shells found in
Vanzetti’s pocket were identical, except that one was empty and the
others loaded. Vahey objected that the shell in the gutter might
have been dropped there by any passing hunter and that there was no
connection between it and the shells found on Vanzetti four months
later. Judge Thayer overruled Vahey and admitted the shells as
evidence for the jury to pass on.
Sacco’s name was mentioned only once during the trial, when Austin
Cole, the streetcar conductor, testified that he had seen Sacco and
Vanzetti on the Brockton car not only the night of their arrest but
also on the fourteenth or fifteenth of April, when the two men had
got on at the same Sunset Avenue stop at the same time and had got
off at Brockton. On that first night, according to Cole, Sacco had
paid the fares with a quarter and a nickel. “I changed the quarter,”
Cole continued, “and I said to him ‘To Brockton?’ He says ‘Yes.’ I
said, ‘It will be thirty cents.’ ‘I know it,’ he says and he handed
me a nickel and the other hand was thrust into the pocket, and he
asked for two transfers. When I was talking with him he smiled and I
noticed the gold tooth on Sacco.”
Vahey wanted to know how the conductor could remember a particular
day of no special significance among many days he could not remember
at all. Cole maintained that he had worked Wednesday and Thursday,
the fourteenth and fifteenth, and not again until the following
Tuesday. He remembered those dates particularly because he associated
them with Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth.
Katzmann’s efforts to link Boda with the holdup attempt were
fumbling. One witness, Napoleon Ensher, who lived a quarter of a
mile from Puffer’s Place, said that early in the spring he had
seen Boda drive past in a Buick and that Boda had waved to him.
At the Dedham trial a year later Ensher’s evidence was ruled out
as unsubstantiated. Another witness, Richard Casey, had watched
the bandit car stop near his house at the corner of Broad and Main
Streets. He described the driver as a man with a short mustache and
prominent nose, wearing either a velour or a black soft hat. All that
Casey could remember of the man next to the driver was that he wore
a brown cap. When Stewart showed him half a dozen caps, Casey picked
out the one that the chief had taken from Vanzetti’s room.
District Attorney Katzmann took three and a half days to present his
case. On Monday, June 28, just before the noon recess, he announced
that the Commonwealth rested.
The defense lawyers did not search Bridgewater for refuting
witnesses. Their strategy was to rely on Vanzetti’s alibi as
established by his North Plymouth neighbors. Judge Thayer charged
the jury that if they could conclude Vanzetti was in Plymouth on the
morning of December 24, the case was ended. In addition the defense
had collected several witnesses to testify that during all the years
Vanzetti had lived in Plymouth he had never worn anything but his
present shaggy mustache.
Awed and uneasy, the Italian witnesses marshaled by Vahey sat
together in the back of the courtroom talking in whispers and
waiting for their names to be called. Except for those who were
American-born, they spoke through the interpreter, Govoni. First to
take the stand was Vittorio Papa, the elusive Poppy Vanzetti had
claimed he was trying to visit the night of his arrest. Papa merely
said that he had been friendly with Vanzetti in Plymouth and that
when he moved to East Bridgewater he had asked his friend to come and
visit him. He had not given Vanzetti his address there.
Papa was followed by Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, who told how
on that day before Christmas she had gone upstairs and called her
lodger at a quarter past six. A few minutes later he had come down
in his stocking feet, wearing overalls and a green sweater. She had
warmed some milk for his breakfast. After drinking it, he had put on
his boots and gone out.
A day or two before, a barrel of eels had come down from Boston for
him by express, and she happened to be at home when it arrived.
Vanzetti had spent the evening of the twenty-third in the kitchen
cleaning and weighing them, wrapping them in newspapers, and
ticketing them for delivery next day. After he left the house the
morning of the twenty-fourth, he came back again about eight o’clock
with a boy who was helping him, and the two of them had loaded the
pushcart and a wheelbarrow with the packages of eels.
Carlo Balboni, a night fireman at the Cordage, said he had left the
plant at six in the morning and gone directly to the Fortinis’ to
pick up the eels he had ordered the day before. Vanzetti was still
in bed when he got there and Mrs. Fortini had gone upstairs to wake
him. John DiCarlo, a shoemaker on Court Street, said that on December
24 he had opened his shop as usual at 7:15 and was just starting to
sweep the place out when Vanzetti came in with a package of eels.
DiCarlo could even remember that they weighed a pound and a half.
Rosa Balboni of South Cherry Street said that Vanzetti had delivered
the eels she had ordered in the afternoon, but she had also seen him
early that morning as she was going to the baker’s. Enrico Bastoni,
the Cherry Street baker, told the court that Vanzetti had come to his
shop the day before Christmas just before eight o’clock to see if he
could rent a horse and truck for the day. But that day Bastoni needed
them himself. It was a little before eight when Vanzetti arrived, for
just afterward Bastoni heard the second Cordage whistle blow. Terese
Malaguti, also of Cherry Street, said that she had bought eels from
Vanzetti the same morning and that he had come about seven o’clock,
when the first whistle blew. Adeladi Bongiovanni remembered that
she had bought three pounds of eels at forty cents a pound. The boy
brought them to the door and she had offered him two dollars, but as
he had no change she had gone out in the street and paid Vanzetti
herself. Just as the boy arrived she had been cooking polenta, and
while she was out chatting with Vanzetti the polenta caught fire. Her
next-door neighbors, Margherita Fiochi and Emma Borsari, told how
they had also bought eels from Vanzetti that morning, as did a high
school student, Esther Christophori, living in Suosso’s Lane, and
young Vincent Longhi of 42 Cherry Street, both of whom testified in
English.
In dealing with this solid block of testimony Katzmann tried to
discredit it generally. He asked the witnesses how they could recall
the details of one particular day among all the other days of the
year. Might not Vanzetti as easily have delivered his eels on the
twenty-third as the twenty-fourth? His landlady, for example,
although she said she had called him at quarter past six the day
before Christmas, could not recall what time he got up the day after
Christmas, or New Year’s Day or Washington’s Birthday or any other
specific day.
The most important witness for Vanzetti was thirteen-year-old
Beltrando Brini. The defense claimed he had been Vanzetti’s helper
on his morning round delivering the eels. Nicknamed Dolly, he was an
intelligent, nervous boy, small for his age, looking rather helpless
in his Norfolk knickerbocker suit and high boots. On the night of
December 23, he told the court, two men had brought a half a pig
to his house in Suosso’s Lane. His father had ordered the pig for
Christmas. That same night Vanzetti had stopped in to ask if the boy
would help him deliver eels next day. Dolly promised he would. On
that damp and muddy morning before Christmas he met Vanzetti first
in front of Maxwell’s Drugstore. Near the drugstore Dolly’s father
had run into him, taken one look at his boots, and told him to go
home and get his rubbers. At first the boy could not find them. By
the time he had located them under the stairs and hurried back to
Vanzetti’s house in Cherry Street it was eight o’clock, for as he
trotted along he could hear the Cordage whistle blowing.
Vanzetti was putting his packages of eels in his pushcart and an
extra wheelbarrow when Dolly arrived. He told the boy he had wanted
to hire a horse and cart but could not find one. The two of them
started out with wheelbarrow and pushcart, making their deliveries to
the regular customers up and down Cherry Street, Cherry Place, Cherry
Court, and finally down to Court Street. Dolly had worked from eight
in the morning until two in the afternoon, when Vanzetti paid him off.
On Christmas Eve, Vanzetti dropped in at the Brinis’. When he left
he noticed the children’s stockings hanging by the mantel and put
two half-dollars in each one. On Christmas Day Vanzetti stopped in
again, and Dolly thanked him for the half-dollars and showed him his
Christmas presents.
Katzmann began his cross-examination with deceptive gentleness,
calling the boy “son” and asking if he would like to testify sitting
down. As he continued, his voice hardened and he began to box the boy
in with questions. How many times had he told his story? How many
times had he gone over it with his parents? With Mr. Vahey? Had he
learned it just like a piece at school? Who corrected him when he
left something out? The district attorney stalked him through all the
details of the morning: the houses where the boy had left packages,
the weight of the basket he carried, the time he started and the time
he finished his deliveries. Had he finished at one-fifteen, or was it
one-twenty? The boy squirmed and looked pleadingly at Judge Thayer,
but there was no relief coming from that stiff-robed parchment-faced
figure. Young Brini had to admit that he had repeated his story a
number of times to his parents and others, and that when he repeated
it and omitted anything his father would correct him.
Beltrando’s parents, Vincenzo and Alfonsina, both testified. Vincenzo
told of meeting his boy in the lane on the morning of December 24
and sending him back for his rubbers. He also mentioned the side of
pig that had arrived the night before, when Vanzetti dropped in for
a visit. Vanzetti’s mustache was untrimmed then, just the same that
night as it was now. Alfonsina corroborated her husband. In a lengthy
cross-examination Katzmann tried to force her into admitting that she
had coached her son in his story, but the most she would say was that
she had listened to him tell it a number of times.
John Vernazano, the Court Street barber who had shaved Vanzetti and
cut his hair for the last five or six years, now took the stand
to say that he had never trimmed Vanzetti’s mustache, that it had
always been just as it was today. He received unexpected confirmation
from two non-Italian members of the Plymouth police force. Officer
John Gault said that he knew Vanzetti and had seen him three or
four times a week for several years. Gault had never noticed any
change or alteration in the Italian’s mustache, but under Katzmann’s
cross-examination he admitted that he had not paid any particular
attention to it. Officer Joseph Schilling had seen Vanzetti off and
on several times a week in the months before his arrest, and his
mustache had always looked the same. It might not have been the same,
Schilling admitted, but he had never noticed any difference.
Cross-examining Vernazano, Katzmann asked him if he knew William
Douglass, the proprietor of the Samoset House, and if the man had
a mustache. The barber said he knew Douglass by sight and that he
had a small light mustache. Katzmann then produced the clean-shaven
Douglass on the stand to say that he had never had a mustache.
On this inconclusive note the defense ended its case on Monday
morning, July 1. Judge Thayer, in a short, conventional charge to
the jury, instructed them that no inference should be drawn against
the defense witnesses because they were Italians. However, in spite
of the judge’s words, the Italians’ embarrassment as they spoke
through their interpreter undoubtedly made the Anglo-Saxon jury feel
that—in Vanzetti’s later words—“all the wops stick together.” If
the headmaster of the Plymouth High School or the wife of the local
Congregational minister had testified to buying fish from Vanzetti
on the morning of December 24, that would have been as good as a
directed verdict. But these swarthy aliens were suspect.
The jury retired at 10:15. Henry Burgess, the foreman, was curious
about what was inside the shotgun shells and just before lunch
he opened two of them. They were loaded, not with birdshot, but
buckshot. Simon Sullivan and several of the other jurors took a few
of the pellets as souvenirs.
After the lunch recess the jury resumed deliberation. At 4:18 it
brought in its verdict, finding Vanzetti guilty of assault with
intent to rob and guilty on three counts of assault with intent to
murder. As the foreman pronounced the word “guilty,” a protesting
wail broke out from the thickset peasant women in the back of the
courtroom. Vanzetti remained calm. “_Coraggio!_” he called out to
them as he was led away.
The echo of Vanzetti’s voice subsided into the dusty calm of legal
decorum. Vanzetti’s friends moved toward the exits, looking back
now and then at the men filing out of the jury box. Judge Thayer,
after Vahey and Graham had stepped forward to consult with him,
extended the time for filing exceptions to August 18 and set bail at
twenty-five thousand dollars.
Several days later Juror Sullivan happened to run into Judge Thayer
in a Brockton store and mention that he and a couple of others had
taken away some of the buckshot. Judge Thayer ordered him to see
that all of it was at once returned to the district attorney. The
chastened Sullivan brought the pellets back, and Katzmann warned him
not to say anything more about the matter.
On August 16 Vahey filed a bill of exceptions in which he requested
that the shotgun-shell evidence and the testimony of Simon and Ruth
Johnson be excluded. The exceptions were not allowed, and Vahey
did not carry the matter further. On that same morning, in the
almost-deserted courtroom, Vanzetti appeared for sentencing. He stood
in the dock, an alien, slightly bent figure, flanked by his guards,
with high forehead and high cheekbones and flowing mustache. The heat
of the day had not yet set in, and the oval windows were open. If the
prisoner had glanced to his left he could have looked down Brewster
Street to the blue line of Plymouth Harbor. Instead, he stared ahead
at Judge Thayer sitting on the dais beneath the Plymouth seal, and
the judge stared back from the mask of his withered face.
Then Judge Thayer began to pronounce sentence in his precise
dessicated voice, the phrases falling like a curtain: “The Court
having considered the offense whereof the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti
is convict does order and adjudge that the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti
suffer imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve years nor
more than fifteen years, one day thereof solitary imprisonment and
the residue of said term confinement to hard labor, in and within
the limits of our State Prison situate in Boston in our County of
Suffolk.”
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The preliminary hearing on his participation in the South
Braintree murders followed on May 26 before Judge Avery in the
Quincy District Court. Sacco, against whom the evidence seemed more
substantial, had appeared in the Quincy Court on May 8.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE YEAR BETWEEN
A few days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti their typesetter
friend Aldino Felicani organized a defense committee among the East
Boston anarchists. The seventeen members were skilled workers—one was
a building contractor—but they were men detached from American life,
distrustful of outsiders. The freeing of their comrades from the
ominous charge hanging over them was, they felt, their affair. Their
first pamphlet, published in Italian, appealed to “Men of Good Will.”
_Two of our active good friends and comrades ... have become involved
in one of those tragic, dark legal plots in which innocence has all
the semblance of guilt, and honesty has the hypocritical mask put on
by the subtlest of rogues.... In a country where subversive ideas
are persecuted with Inquisitorial fury, anarchists are beyond the
pale.... We are convinced that an attempt is being made, through the
persons of Sacco and Vanzetti, to strike at all subversive elements
and their libertarian ideas. A sentence ... would serve, in the
hands of our enemies, to show that lovers of liberty are common
criminals and that their ideas are not entitled to any of the civil
freedoms.... We face a severe, a terrible test._
Energetically the committee raised a defense fund from the nickels
and dimes and quarters of their countrymen in the crowded streets of
the North End and East Boston. It was the committee that hired Graham
as counsel, counting on his American skill to mediate between the
two Italians and the complexities of Massachusetts justice. For the
committee, the result of the Plymouth trial was a disaster.
In New York, Carlo Tresca and his fellow anarchists were appalled
by the verdict. Tresca sent Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom he
had been living since he met her in a 1912 May Day parade, to talk
matters over with Felicani. “Gurley,” the founder and secretary of
the Workers’ Defense Union, was bound for Boston in any case, to see
what could be done for the aliens imprisoned on Deer Island as a
result of the Palmer raids. With Mrs. Marion Emerson, secretary of a
workers’ defense organization in Boston, she made her way through the
twisting streets of the North End to the offices of _La Notizia_, and
there, under the shadow of the Old North Church spire, they talked
with the tall, indignant Felicani, who at that time could speak only
through an interpreter. So it was that Gurley and Mrs. Emerson on a
July afternoon in 1920 were the first non-Italian sympathizers to
hear the story of Sacco and Vanzetti. Later Felicani took them to see
the other now thoroughly worried members of the committee, who asked
them to try to arrange English-speaking protest meetings and to help
find a lawyer who would understand the defendants’ radical viewpoint.
Returning to New York, Gurley hired the Forward Hall on East Broadway
for a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting. She, the president of the
Free Speech League, and the veteran anarchist Harry Kelly, were the
speakers. So few people showed up that the caretaker of the hall
insisted on immediate payment. “You’ll never get it in a collection,”
he explained. Shortly afterward Mrs. Emerson organized a similarly
uneventful meeting in the rickety Grand Opera House in Boston’s South
End.
It was through Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, both of whom had
known him and worked with him over the years, that Fred Moore now
entered the case. It was a fateful entry. At this point, while Sacco
and Vanzetti were still inconspicuous foreigners whose names meant
nothing, a capable conservative lawyer like their later counsel
William Thompson might have secured their acquittal. Moore, the
radical labor lawyer, was to make them internationally famous, to
link their names indissolubly, but he may well have signed their
death warrants in the process.
Tresca had met Moore eight years earlier during the Lawrence Textile
Strike of 1912 and the murder trial that was its by-product.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city of unrelieved drabness on
the banks of the Merrimack, was in 1912 a polyglot company town owned
by the Lawrences and the Lowells, and worked by Italians, Germans,
French-Canadians, Poles, Lithuanians, Belgians, and Syrians, with a
scattering of Russians, Jews, and Greeks. When the Massachusetts
legislature in its 1911 autumn session reduced the work week from
fifty-six to fifty-four hours, the Lawrence textile mills countered
by reducing wages correspondingly. Weekly pay then averaged $8.76 a
week for adults, $5 or less for the many child workers.
The calculated meanness of the reduction, amounting only to about
twenty-five cents, so infuriated the workers that on January 12,
1912, they spontaneously downed tools, in some cases smashing the
looms. There followed a bitter struggle that brought twenty-three
thousand workers onto the streets. After a number of riots between
strikers and police, Governor Eugene Foss called out the militia.
The strike was taken over and managed by the I.W.W. with anarchist
assistance. From New York came Joe Ettor of the I.W.W. executive
board, and Arturo Giovannitti. Ettor was an organizer, Giovannitti
a persuasive speaker who kept up the strikers’ courage through the
bitter winter. In finally winning the strike the I.W.W. reached the
peak of its influence in the East.
One afternoon while police and militia were charging a picket line,
a girl worker, Annie Lopizza, was shot dead. No one knew who fired
the shot, but the police at once arrested “the troublemakers” Ettor
and Giovannitti as accessories to murder. They were held without bail
until the end of the strike.