giant who was already almost a legend, came to Lawrence and took
command. With him he brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. By the time
of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial she had become enormously fat, but in
1912 she was a slim young firebrand with flashing blue eyes and a
lacerating tongue. Theodore Dreiser had called her the East Side Joan
of Arc. An Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee was at once formed,
and Haywood had Fred Moore brought on from California. The strategy
of the committee was to have the indefatigable and ingenious Moore
help in selecting the witnesses and collecting evidence but to have
the case tried by a well-known local conservative. James Sisk, a
staid Lynn lawyer, was chosen to represent Ettor and Giovannitti in
court.
The results of this strategy were highly successful. In spite of the
pressure of moneyed opinion against them, Ettor and Giovannitti,
appearing before the Irish-Catholic Judge Joseph Quinn and a
native-American jury, were acquitted.
It was this pattern that Tresca had in mind when he sent Moore to
Boston in the fall of 1920. Moore was again to be the assiduous and
inspired fact-gatherer. He would again prepare the brief and then
some irreproachable Massachusetts lawyer would try the case. Such,
too, was the intention of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when
it accepted Moore. It was not Moore’s intention at all.
Moore, then in his late thirties, was the barrister bohemian in
looks, dress, and manner. His long hair seemed to flow back from
his forehead, he often wore sandals, and the broad-brimmed Western
hat he brought with him from California became almost his trademark
in Boston. He had started out as a railroad attorney in Seattle,
then moved on to Los Angeles where for a time he seemed a brilliant
young corporation lawyer on the way up. But money and an established
bourgeois existence meant nothing to him. When a casual I.W.W.
acquaintance arrested in a free-speech fight in San Diego telephoned
him for help, Moore picked up his broad-brimmed hat and a revolver,
told his associates he would be back shortly, and walked out of the
promise of his law career. After that he went wherever his underdog
interests took him. He became a labor defense expert, particularly
devoted to serving the I.W.W., drifting from one labor fight to
another, taking on the hopeless, desperate cases that could not
afford better-known lawyers.
When he ran into Tresca in New York in the summer of 1920, he had
just come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had defended “Big Boy”
Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer charged with dynamiting the house of a
Standard Oil official. The charge was a frame-up, a fact cheerfully
accepted by the townspeople, the prosecution, the defense, the
judge, and the jury. Fortunately for Moore, one of the jurymen with
a personal grudge against Standard Oil held out for acquittal. In a
second trial the fraud was too apparent and Krieger was freed.
As Moore headed for Boston he was certain it would be a similar
story with Sacco and Vanzetti, and the more he reflected on the
ramifications of the South Braintree crime the more convinced he
became that this backwater New England affair could be his big case,
the culmination of his career.
Eugene Lyons, the young left-wing labor journalist who had been with
Moore in Oklahoma and who later followed him to Massachusetts to work
for the Defense Committee, was awed by the lawyer’s dexterity. Moore,
he wrote long afterward,
_was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized the materials
of a world issue in what appeared to others a routine matter. A
socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and returned to
New York to report that “there’s no story in it ... just a couple
of wops in a jam.” Not one of the members of the defense committee
formed immediately after the men’s arrest suspected that the affair
was anything larger than it seemed. When the case grew into a
historical tussle, these men were utterly bewildered. But Moore saw
its magnitude from the first. His legal tactics have been the subject
of dispute and recrimination. I think that there is some color of
truth, indeed, to the charge that he sometimes subordinated the
literal needs of legalistic procedure to the larger needs of the case
as a symbol of the class struggle. If he had not done so, Sacco and
Vanzetti would have died six years earlier, without the solace of
martyrdom._
_With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a
symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore proceeded to
clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case._
Arriving in Boston, Moore installed himself at 5 Rollins Place, a
small four-story brick house in a cul-de-sac of Beacon Hill in that
no-man’s land where proper Boston tapers off into the improper. The
house, masked by a wooden porch with Greek-revival columns, and the
brick-paved roadway, too narrow for any vehicle, seemed to suggest
that whoever might live there would be gone tomorrow, a feeling that
harmonized with Moore’s personality. Shortly after moving in, Moore
married Lola Darroch, the handsome young woman who had been with him
during the Krieger trial. Their marriage lasted officially a little
over a year, though unofficially it was concluded much sooner when
Lola was supplanted by a Lithuanian stenographer. In the environment
this seemed rational enough. Wherever Moore went in his travels he
pursued his weakness, which he considered a need, for pretty young
women.
Five Rollins Place was a catchall: a home for Moore and his assorted
associates, an informal office, a dormitory for out-of-town
enthusiasts, Italian and otherwise, a lodging house for prospective
witnesses and intellectuals and freshly minted college girls heavy
with purpose. There were nights of talk and more talk, of makeshift
Prohibition drinking, of song and vacillating affections. Eugene
Lyons, an almost daily visitor, later wrote that:
_Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this tense
atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck detectives
sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A.F. of L. officials hobnobbed
with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired little poetess
swept like a tornado through the defense group, working havoc
among the harassed men and spreading despair among their wives and
sweethearts; she dominated the lives of a writer, a strike leader,
a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in quick succession, with
forays into the domestic preserves of half a dozen others, while
composing soulful verses in defense of the accused Italians. A gawky,
half-savage boy lured from the Maine woods to plead with his mother,
a crucial identification witness, to retract her perjured testimony,
had to be forced, literally, to take a bath; soon he blossomed into
a spic-and-span U.S. Marine. One of the closest comrades and most
ardent defenders of Sacco fell hopelessly in love with Sacco’s wife
(he married her after Sacco’s execution). Within the larger drama
of the case, there developed complicated cycles of lesser dramas of
private emotion._
Before going to Boston, Lyons had gone to Italy in pursuit of
revolutions. Moore wrote him there, persuading him to create
propaganda for the case and to interview potential witnesses. In that
convulsive period of red-flagged cities and rising Fascism the arrest
of two Italians in a New England mill town was a small enough pebble
on an eroding beach, but Lyons—through Sacco’s brother Sabino, now
the mayor of Torremaggiore—managed to get Leon Mucci to bring the
Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Italian Chamber of Deputies
for its initial foreign mention.[5]
Coacci, Lyons found in a sleepy village in the Marchesan hills,
posing grandly as an international revolutionary:
_His shelves were lined with brochures on the home manufacture of
bombs and he professed himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So
deep, however, had the fear of American law and the police entered
his heart that it needed a week of pleading and threatening and
pressure by Merlino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist
movement, to bring this terrorist to the point of signing an
innocuous affidavit in support of Sacco’s alibi._
Sacco and Vanzetti were to typify a cause, Moore explained to a
friend, adding, “In saving them we strengthen our muscles, develop
our forces preparatory to the day when we save ourselves.” The more
extreme anarchists of the Defense Committee were critical of such an
attitude, feeling that Moore was more interested in building up the
biggest labor case in history than in the fate of the men involved.
This, too, was Rosina Sacco’s feeling from the first time she met
Moore. Not interested in issues, she merely wanted her Nick back to
resume their old family life, to see the new baby Ines, born four
months after his arrest. Instinctively she distrusted the sparkle of
the bohemian lawyer.
Moore’s initial objective was to expand the case beyond the parochial
limits of Norfolk County. With this in mind he worked up a number of
sensational appeals, following the pattern customary both in American
criminal cases and in charity drives. He wrote, he telegraphed, he
traveled, he sent out assistants, volunteers, anyone whom he could
persuade to lend a hand. His salary ($150 a week) never seemed to
cover his expenses. He was lawyer, detective, fund-raiser, and
propagandist combined. At their annual conventions the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers and the American Federation of Teamsters found
themselves demanding the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, although few
of the delegates had ever heard their names before some official
friendly to Moore introduced the resolution. If Moore sent word that
there was a frame-up in the offing, his word was enough for the
central labor unions in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Worcester, Seattle,
and Salem, just as it was for the United Mine Workers, the Minnesota
State Federation of Labor, and dozens of other organizations Moore
had known or assisted. Although their resolutions may have been
quickly presented and quickly put aside, their effect was to be
cumulative.
By the end of 1920 there were stirrings across the country, and
echoes from overseas. To anyone with as sensitive an ear as Moore’s
they were a promise of what was to come.
Moore’s temporary office in the Olympian Building at 3 Tremont Row,
echoing with talk and typewriters and shuffling feet, was like a
bus terminal in its comings and goings. In one corner the blond
Lithuanian stenographer hammered away at the keys. Opposite her
John Nicholas Beffel, a free-lance socialist journalist from New
York, sat chain-smoking and preparing press releases in English.
Art Shields, sent on by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, assisted him. Frank
Lopez, a young Spanish anarchist, a cabinetmaker by trade, preserved
somehow by Moore from a deportation order, got out propaganda for the
Spanish-speaking world. Felicani and the committee, from an upstairs
room on Battery Street, took care of the Italian publicity.
Only gradually did Moore bridge the gap between the Italian
anarchists and the indigenous Boston liberals. When he approached
John Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee, Codman
asked for satisfactory proof that Sacco and Vanzetti would not be
given an impartial trial. He had served recently on a jury in Dedham
and said he had been impressed by District Attorney Katzmann’s
ability and fairness. Moore eventually managed to convince Codman
to the extent that in February 1921 the Civil Liberties Committee
contributed five hundred dollars to the Defense Committee. Later in
the year it published its own pamphlet: “Sacco and Vanzetti: Shall
There be a Mooney Frame-up in New England?”
Through the Civil Liberties Committee link a number of elderly
Boston women of assured position and belligerent good works began
their participation in the case. In the social-worker tradition of
Elizabeth Peabody, with the inherited wealth to be cultured as Boston
understood the word, they functioned as nonconformists within the
Back Bay circle of conformity. The most conspicuous and determined of
these was Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a pacifist and campaigner for
women’s suffrage. Level-headed and charming, she avoided the crackpot
label so easily attached to middle-aged female reformers. Hundreds of
prisoners in Massachusetts jails were indebted to her often-anonymous
kindness. Dozens owed their freedom to her. She had married a
promising young lawyer, a friend and classmate of Louis Brandeis
at the Harvard Law School, who died a few years after graduating.
During the whole period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case she lived in the
Brandeis household, where the children called her Auntie Bee. When
Eugene Lyons and his young wife first came to Boston, Mrs. Evans
furnished their apartment for them simply by opening the cellar where
Justice Brandeis had stored some of his furniture. She seemed to know
everyone, not only in Boston but throughout the country, and she had
the key to people as well as buildings. When she was drawn into the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, she saw it as just one more worthy cause, but as
the months passed she developed a preoccupying attachment for the two
men that would last through the years to their execution.
Moore soon brought the case to the attention of the American Civil
Liberties Union in New York, and the organization did much to
interest native Americans in the predicament of the two Italians. The
minutes of its meeting on November 22, 1920, read:
_Mary Heaton Vorse reported on the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, two
young Italian anarchists on trial in Boston for highway robbery
and murder, stating that they had been indicted on questionable
circumstances and because of their activity on behalf of Andrea
Salsedo, a political prisoner who committed suicide by throwing
himself from the Park Row Building, New York, while being held for
deportation. It was agreed that the Union should do everything
possible to secure publicity for this case._
Mary Heaton Vorse was a writer with one foot in Greenwich Village and
the other in the radical labor movement, the prototype of a number
of women who would eventually become concerned in the Sacco-Vanzetti
case. Brought up in the cultivated restriction of Emily Dickinson’s
Amherst, educated abroad, her experiences in the 1912 Lawrence
strike turned her sympathies and her writings to the workers and the
dispossessed. One can trace her career by the titles of her many
books, from _The Breaking in of a Yachtsman’s Wife_ to _Strike—A
Novel of Gastonia_.
After Tresca told her of Sacco and Vanzetti, calling their case a
frame-up as bad as the Mooney case, Mrs. Vorse went to Dedham to
visit Sacco. In the outline of the case she wrote for Norman Thomas’
magazine, _The World Tomorrow_, she described Sacco in his gray
prison trousers and striped blue cotton shirt as
_a little fellow so life-loving that even six months of inaction in
jail had not effaced his vividness. Short, clean-cut as a Roman coin,
eyes that looked at you straight, and above all a friendly way with
him almost like that of a child who had never known anything but
affection. There was something about Sacco that made you think of
swift happy things—a jumping fish, a bird on the wing._
She concluded with a paraphrase of Moore:
_Active labor men have all the dice loaded against them. All labor
is on trial with Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It is bound
up with all the fight that is going on for the closed shop and the
determinations of the employers to smash the worker’s organizations._
The _New Republic_ in its December 29 issue carried John Beffel’s
article, “Eels and the Electric Chair.” This account of the Plymouth
trial asked for a reversal of Vanzetti’s conviction lest there be
“another conviction which will send him through a little green door
into a wired chamber of death.”
Thus, by the New Year, with the trial scheduled to begin in Dedham
on March 7, 1921, one of the left-liberal magazines most widely
circulated among the intelligentsia of the United States had made
the names of Sacco and Vanzetti at least fleetingly familiar to its
readers. Moore’s case was beginning to gather momentum. Art Shields’
pamphlet “Are They Doomed? The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the Grim
Forces Behind It” (actually, Beffel wrote most of it) appeared early
in the year as the first general statement of the defense position.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Workers’ Defense Union distributed fifty
thousand copies before the trial. The cover had a sensational drawing
by Robert Minor showing Salsedo hurtling from a skyscraper window.
Shields described the Brockton arrest as a frame-up from beginning to
end, the murder charge against the two men “a mere device to get them
out of the way,” and stated that they were practically the last of
the Italian radicals in New England who had not already been jailed
or deported.[6]
The New York office of the Workers’ Defense Union sent out weekly
Sacco-Vanzetti releases, most of them written by Beffel, to more than
five hundred papers. Gurley Flynn went on a speaking tour, explaining
the case to college liberal clubs, including those at Pennsylvania
and Harvard, as well as to the captive audience of Mrs. Evans’ League
for Democratic Control.
* * * * *
After his sentencing at Plymouth, Vanzetti was taken to the
Charlestown State Prison, across the river from Boston. That granite
fortress, built in 1820, was surrounded by a disintegrating brick
slum fouled with the smoke of the Everett chemical plants.
On his arrival Vanzetti went through the usual routine. He was
questioned in the interview cell, then given a shower and issued
prison clothes, a blanket roll, an enamel slop bucket and a smaller
wooden bucket for drinking water, and locked in his cell. Within a
few days he was assigned to the shop making auto-license plates, one
of the few production tasks allowed convict labor.
The machinery of the law continued to function with bureaucratic
regularity. Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted on September 11, 1920,
charged with the murder of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick A.
Parmenter. Five days afterward a bomb explosion seared New York’s
Wall Street, killing thirty persons. The crime, never solved, was
generally believed to be the work of anarchists. On September 28
Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned. They pleaded not guilty.
Sacco, as a prisoner still awaiting trial, remained in the Dedham
county jail where he had been taken after his preliminary hearing.
Unlike the overcrowded Charlestown fortress, the Dedham jail, located
on a rural side street, was a relatively pleasant place with fewer
than seventy prisoners, most of whom the warden knew by their first
name. It was like a well-kept ship, the walls and floors bright
with paint, brass shining. The reception room, with its oak benches
and bookcases, gave the fugitive impression of a library. There,
prisoners could visit with friends and relatives without a guard
being present.
What was hardest for Sacco to endure was the idleness. From the
time the sun rose until it set, there was a gap of hours marked
only by meals and the swing of the shadow from east to west across
the recreation-room floor. Except for the few trusties who stoked
the boilers or worked in the tailor shop or the laundry or did the
cooking, there was no way to kill time except by talking or playing
cards.
Inactivity and restraint chafed Sacco’s spirit. He missed his wife
and son; the baby he had never seen he could not get out of his mind.
To this man of abundant energy, for whom the day had never been long
enough, the tedium of empty hours became a frenzy of frustration.
Yet in this early period he never seemed to doubt that he would be
eventually set free.
Sacco and Vanzetti saw each other seldom during the seven years of
their imprisonment. Except for the six weeks of the trial and the
final period in the death house, they would meet only briefly when
some new motion or empty formality brought them into court. Sometimes
they would not meet for a year.
Although the interest aroused by the case was still spotty, there was
more awareness of the coming trial outside Massachusetts than there
was within the state. In Norfolk County it was more or less taken for
granted that the suspects were guilty. The Braintree _Observer_ of
May 8, 1920, had announced that the two South Braintree “yeggs” had
been positively identified. It said nothing more about the case till
the trial began.
By the time the Thayer Academy boys in their black-and-orange jerseys
were holding their autumn football practice behind the Braintree
town hall the April robbery was no longer a matter of general
conversation. However, Shelley Neal still thought of it each time
the payroll came in, delivered now by armed guards, and the girls in
the Slater & Morrill offices still liked to gossip about it during
the lunch hour.
Two days after the Plymouth trial ended, Katzmann appointed
Chief Stewart his official investigator. Stewart’s friend Alfred
Brouillard, on leave from the State Police, was made his assistant.
Proud of his new status and glad to resign his Bridgewater job,
Stewart did most of his sleuthing under the direction of the
Assistant District Attorney, Harold Williams. From Katzmann the chief
received the four shotgun-shell exhibits of the Plymouth trial. Now,
the district attorney told him, it was up to him to dig up the right
kind of witnesses. Stewart had little to go on at first. As a starter
he went to the Boston Public Library and read the accounts of the
South Braintree crime in the back numbers of all the Boston papers,
copying down the names of persons mentioned. He and Brouillard were
on their own. Chief Gallivan was no help at all. Stewart usually
found him sitting on the Braintree town-hall steps with a quid in his
cheek.
Not until the new year was the approaching trial mentioned again in
the Boston papers. Then a Dedham court interpreter, Angelina DeFalco,
spread it briefly across the front pages after Moore had her arrested.
The affair had its origins just before the New Year, when Felicani
received a telephone call from Beniamino Cicchetti of Providence,
Rhode Island, who introduced himself as a “compatriot of ideas” and
said that he had an important letter concerning Sacco and Vanzetti.
He agreed to meet Felicani at the Defense Committee headquarters on
Sunday morning, January 2.
Like Govoni in Plymouth, Cicchetti was a fixer who followed his
special line in the Italian Federal Hill section of Providence,
arranging bail and, on a percentage basis, collecting defense funds.
For Italians who had run afoul of the law he was useful, almost
necessary, to know. An oily, persuasive man, he bustled into the
Battery Street office and assured Felicani he knew a woman who
could do a great deal for Sacco and Vanzetti. When Felicani showed
interest, he bustled out again and returned almost at once with a
dumpy nearsighted woman in her early twenties whom he introduced as
Mrs. DeFalco.
She explained that she had come from the Dedham court, and that
if the Defense Committee would put up a sufficient sum she could
guarantee Sacco’s freedom. Felicani asked her how it could be done.
“Oh,” she told him, “we have a little society of our own, Fred
Katzmann, Mr. Squires, and Percy Katzmann.”[7] When Felicani asked
about Vanzetti she said that was something else again, and that she
would have to consult Fred. She then tried unsuccessfully to reach
the district attorney by telephone. Felicani did not say much. He
told her he would have to consult with the rest of the Defense
Committee, and she agreed to meet him next day, suggesting at the
same time that he bring along five hundred dollars as a deposit.