As Vanzetti vaguely explained it, they planned to collect this
unspecified material “from any house and from any house in five or
six places, five or six towns. Three, five or six people have plenty
of literature, and we went, we intend to take that out and put that
in the proper place ... not subject to policemen go in and call for,
see the literature, see the papers, see the books, as in that time
they went through in the house of many men who were active in the
radical movement and socialist and labor movement, and go then and
take letters and take books and take newspapers, and put men in jail
and deported many.”
Everyone in the courtroom from Judge Thayer to the defendants
themselves knew that this was the great divide. In these few
sentences the issue of radicalism, moving so long just below the
surface, finally emerged. Katzmann at once objected, and his
objection was a warning to the defense. The district attorney was
perfectly willing to avoid any reference to the political views of
the two anarchists if the defense would agree to do the same. For
the latter it was a peculiar dilemma. Moore was aware of the latent
syllogism that the jurors no doubt then shared with most native-born
Americans. An anarchist is capable of anything; Sacco and Vanzetti
are anarchists; Sacco and Vanzetti are capable of anything: _Q.E.D._
Yet to go along with the district attorney, to gloss over the
defendants’ political beliefs, would be to destroy any explanation
except that of consciousness of guilt for their actions on the night
of their arrest.
Before Vanzetti took the stand, Judge Thayer had advised the
McAnameys that they had better consider whether or not they were
going to inject the radical issue into the trial. Moore insisted
there was no alternative. John McAnamey told his brothers the same
thing: that the defendants would have to tell about their connection
with the radical movement fully and frankly. Only thus could they
account for their equivocal behavior.
When Vanzetti from the stand finally pronounced the words _radical
movement_, John McAnamey was just leaving the courtroom. “As I
was passing out,” he testified six years later before the Lowell
Committee, “Judge Thayer looking over to me, well in his peculiar way
of laughing or smiling, sort of threw back his head as much as to
say, ‘Well you see Mr. McAnamey it is coming out.’ That is what he
was telling me by his facial gesture. That stands out clearly in my
mind. The government would have wanted that kept out of the case I am
thoroughly satisfied because how could the men explain the facts?”
Vanzetti admitted he had been in West Bridgewater once, six years
before his arrest, but said he had never been there again until May
5. He had never been to East Braintree, had never asked directions
of a stranger on the South Shore train, and he had not been in South
Braintree on April 15, 1920. When Jerry McAnamey asked him why he had
lied to Chief Stewart in the Brockton police station he answered:
“Because I was scared to give the names and addresses of my friends
as I know that almost all of them have some books and some newspapers
in their house by which authority take a reason for arresting them
and deport them.”
The direct examination continued until midafternoon. Then the
district attorney took over with a cross-examination that was to
last through the following morning. For this climax Katzmann pushed
Williams aside and took full command. His first question was barbed.
“So you left Plymouth, Mr. Vanzetti, in May 1917, to dodge the
draft, did you?” All that Vanzetti could answer was “Yes, sir.”
Katzmann made him admit that he had run away so that he would not
have to be a soldier.
“If I refused to go to war,” the nettled Vanzetti told his
interrogator, “I don’t refuse because I don’t like this country or I
don’t like the people of this country. I will refuse even if I was
in Italy and you tell me it is a long time I am in this country,
and I tell you that in this country as long time I am, that I found
plenty good people and some bad people, but that I was always working
hard as a man can work, and I have always lived very humble and—”
Katzmann, who had allowed him to go on that far, now demanded that
the answer be stricken out.
Vanzetti’s story shaped itself awkwardly through the counterpoint of
questions and answers. Katzmann hinted that when he was working on
the railroad at Springfield he had driven a truck. Vanzetti agreed
that there were trucks used, but denied he had ever driven one—he did
not know how to drive, still did not know. The district attorney then
asked him what he had really intended to do the night he and Sacco
had gone to West Bridgewater. To John Dever the answer did not seem
very cohesive: “We want to take the automobile, and then my intention
is to take the automobile with Boda, because I do not know how to
drive the automobile, to go to Bridgewater and if we will be able to
find the party, because I do not remember the address of the party.
I do not know exactly where he lived. We will tell to Pappi about
telling the Italian people of Bridgewater to come in Brockton next
Sunday at the speech, and after I found Pappi, and speak to Pappi, go
toward Plymouth and speak with my friends if I can find some friends
who want to take the responsibility of receiving such books in their
house, in his house.”
Vanzetti admitted that he had lied to Katzmann in the Brockton
station the morning after his arrest, even after the district
attorney had told him he was not compelled to answer questions. He
had lied about his revolver, about buying the cartridges and firing
them, about knowing Boda, about the motorcycle. “I was scared,” he
explained. Admitting that most of these lies would not have helped
conceal the names and addresses of his friends, he still insisted
that he had lied because he had been frightened about his friends’
safety and because Salsedo’s death in New York had made him afraid of
the police.
Katzmann hemmed him in, getting him to say there were half a dozen
people in Bridgewater from whom they were planning to collect
literature, forcing him to confess he knew none of their names. The
district attorney then questioned him about his stay in Mexico,
leading quietly up to the thundering demand: “And are you the man,
Mr. Vanzetti, that on May ninth was going to advise in public meeting
men who had gone to war? Are you that man?”
“Yes, sir,” Vanzetti told him. “I am that man, not the man you want
me, but I am that man.”
When Vanzetti had first been questioned in Brockton he could not
recall anything specific that he had been doing on April 15. Katzmann
now wanted to know how he could recall so much of that day fifteen
months later. It was, Vanzetti told him, because in Brockton he had
no idea he was going to be charged with murder. But “three or four
weeks after my arrest I understand enough to see that I have to be
very careful to save my life and my liberty and I have to remember.”
Thinking back, he was able to reconstruct most of the day by checking
with what he had been doing on the following Monday, Patriot’s Day,
and on other days. As for the night of his arrest, he had planned to
go on to Plymouth with Boda in the Overland. Sacco and Orciani were
to go back to Stoughton, and he had not expected to see Sacco again.
When asked again about the literature they planned to collect, he
said there must have been four or five hundred pounds of it, and that
he had been told by his friends in New York to get rid of it. In a
brief re-examination Vanzetti said again that when he was arrested he
had thought it was because of political matters since he was asked
“if I am a Socialist, if I am an I.W.W., if I am a Communist, if I am
a Radical, if I am a Blackhand.”
Through a day and a half the district attorney flashed questions
at Vanzetti so fast that his acquired English collapsed. Still, he
managed to keep his calm manner. Such self-control would be beyond
Sacco’s capacities. For a year now he had fretted in the Dedham jail,
and a month’s submission to the routine of the courtroom had brought
him close to the point of explosion—as the experienced Katzmann well
realized.
After Vanzetti was released from the stand, Simon Johnson returned to
answer a few questions about Boda’s Overland. This ended the morning
session. At the beginning of the afternoon session, at a word from
Moore, Sacco with one quick backward look at his wife stepped to the
stand.
In spite of his jail pallor and his thinning hair, Sacco still
kept an appearance of youth. Although born only three years after
Vanzetti, he seemed a generation younger. He was dressed in a neat
dark suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie. The _Post_
reporter found his appearance “frank and open.” He seemed glad
finally to be able to tell his story.
With Moore guiding him, he gave the matter-of-fact details of his
childhood in Torremaggiore, then told of his early longing to go
to America. “I was crazy to come to this country,” he explained,
“because I was liked a free country, call a free country.” It was a
fateful remark.
After Sacco’s arrival in America there were the years of odd jobs
before he learned a trade, there was his marriage, and finally there
was the black-edged letter from his father that made him decide to
go back to Italy. Only in passing did Sacco mention that he had left
the United States in June 1917 and returned sometime in August. All
this was just a preliminary to the history of April 15, 1920. That
day, according to his account, he left Stoughton on the 8:56 A.M.
train for Boston to go to the Italian consulate and apply for a
_foglio di via_, a one-way passport to Italy. He arrived at the South
Station and walked from there along Atlantic Avenue to the North
End. On Prince Street he bought a copy of _La Notizia_ and spent
some time reading it. Then he walked down Hanover Street, turned the
corner, and ran into his friend Angelo Monello. Together they walked
to Washington Street; Sacco continued alone, looking in the store
windows and pricing the new suits and straw hats. The morning was
getting on, and he thought he might as well have lunch and see about
his passport afterward.
As he was going in to Boni’s Restaurant he met Professor Guadagni,
and they sat down at a table together. Albert Bosco was already
there, and later Mr. Williams, the advertising man, joined them.
Sacco stayed about an hour and afterward went uptown to the consulate
on Berkeley Street. Arriving there at two, he said to the clerk, “I
like to get a passport for my whole family. He asked me—he said,
‘You bring picture?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so I gave it to him, see a big
picture. He says, ‘Well, I am sorry. This picture is too big.’
‘Well,’ I says, ‘can you cut and make him small?’ he said, ‘the
picture we cannot use, because it goes too big.’ I says, ‘Can you
cut?’ He says, ‘No, no use, because got to make a photograph just for
the purpose for the passport, small very small.’”
After a quarter of an hour at the consulate he went back to the North
End, dropped in at a café for a cup of coffee, and met Professor
Guadagni again with a Professor Dentamore. Then he went over to a
store on the other side of North Square to buy some groceries. Some
time in the afternoon he met a man named Afa—that was the way he
thought the name was spelled—and paid him fifteen dollars he owed
him. A little after four he took the train for Stoughton and arrived
there about six. On the way home he stopped off at the drugstore and
bought some elixir for a physic.
Sacco was interrupted by a wrangle between Moore and Judge Thayer
when Moore tried to bring in the details of the April 25 meeting at
the Naturalization Club, “to lay a foundation for the explanation
of the subsequent acts of the defendants.” Thayer ruled that the
subsequent acts must be proved before any explanation could be
offered, and the two debated noisily. When Sacco was finally allowed
to continue, he told how on May 4 he had gone to Boston for the last
time to pick up his passport. He had then taken the elevated to Hyde
Park to see Orciani. The two met on River Street, went to Orciani’s
house for the motorcycle, and then drove to Sacco’s home.
Sacco was more explicit than Vanzetti about why they had gone to West
Bridgewater the following evening. “We decided in the meeting in
Boston to get those books and papers,” he told the court, “because in
New York there was somebody said they were trying to arrest all the
socialists and the radicals and we were afraid to get all the people
arrested, so we were advised by some friends and we find out and
Vanzetti take the responsibility to go over to the friends to get the
books out and get no trouble. The literature, I mean, the socialist
literature.”
The dark cap that had been picked up near Berardelli’s body was
produced and Sacco tried it on. He said it was too small—and so it
seemed in the courtroom sketches made by the _Post_ cartoonist,
Norman (W. Norman Ritchie). With regard to the Colt taken from him
at the Brockton police station, he explained that his wife had found
it in a bureau drawer along with some bullets while she was cleaning
up, and asked him what he was going to do with it. “I said, ‘Well, I
go to shoot in the woods, me and Vanzetti.’ So I did. I took it in my
pocket. I put the revolver over here and the bullets in my pocket,
in my pocket back. Well, we started to talk in the afternoon, me and
Vanzetti, and half past four Orciani and Boda came over to the house,
so we started an argument and I forgot about to go in the woods
shooting, so it was still left in my pocket.” The bullets he had
bought on Hanover Street in 1917 or 1918.
His story of the trip to West Bridgewater and the subsequent arrest
and questioning did not differ greatly from Vanzetti’s, although
Sacco told in more detail of the identification witnesses coming to
the Brockton station. In the conclusion of his direct examination he
maintained that he had not been in South Braintree on April 15, 1920,
and that he had never made an attack on anyone or participated in any
crime, then or at any other date.
“Did you say you love a free country?” was Katzmann’s first rapier
question. And when Sacco answered yes, the district attorney thrust
again. “Did you love this country in the month of May 1917?” “I do
not say,” Sacco told him, “I don’t want to say I did not love this
country.” The other insisted. “Did you love this country in the month
of May 1917?” “If you can, Mr. Katzmann, if you give me that—I could
explain—” The district attorney had the Italian in the corner. “Do
you understand that question? Then you will please answer it.” “I
can’t answer it in one word,” Sacco insisted.
Katzmann’s voice was crusty with disbelief. “You can’t say whether
you loved the United States of America one week before the day to
enlist for the first draft?” “I can’t say in one word, Mr. Katzmann,”
Sacco replied.
“Did you,” the district attorney finally asked him, “go away to
Mexico to avoid being a soldier for this country that you loved?”
Sacco breathed deeply before he said “Yes.”
“And is that your idea of showing your love for this country?”
The other hesitated. He knew what he wanted to say but there was no
way for him to say it, no means to surmount the barrier of this alien
tongue. “Is that your idea of showing your love for America?” the
contemptuous voice persisted. “Yes,” Sacco said, and again he found
himself saying what he had not meant, what he did not want to say, to
the courtly, smiling district attorney.
It was question and answer, cat and mouse:
“Do you think it is a brave thing to do what you did?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it would be a brave thing to go away from your own wife
when she needed you?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you stay down in Mexico?”
“Well, first thing, I could not get my trade there. I had to do any
other job.”
“Why didn’t you stay down there, down in that free country, and work
with a pick and shovel?”
“I don’t think I did sacrifice to learn a job to go pick and shovel
in Mexico.”
“Is it because—is your love for the United States of America
commensurate with the amount of money you can get in this country
per week?”
“Better conditions, yes.”
“Better country to make money, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Sacco, that is the extent of your love for this country, isn’t
it, measured in dollars and cents?”
Jerry McAnarney kept objecting to such questioning. “You opened up
this whole subject,” Judge Thayer told him.
When McAnarney continued his objections, Thayer asked, “Is it not
your claim that the defendant wanted the automobile to prevent people
from being deported and to get this literature all out of the way?
Does he not claim that this was done in the interest of the United
States, to prevent violation of the law by the distribution of this
literature?”
The amazed McAnarney replied that the defense had taken no such
position. All they claimed was “that this man and Vanzetti were of
the class called socialists, that riot was running a year ago last
April, that men were being deported, that twelve to fifteen hundred
were seized in Massachusetts.”
Thayer returned to the theme. “Are you going to claim that what the
defendant did was in the interest of the United States to prevent
further crimes from being committed by the authorities?”
“Your Honor please,” Jerry McAnarney replied. “I now object to your
Honor’s statement as prejudicial to the rights of the defendants and
ask that this statement be withdrawn from the jury.”
Thayer denied any such effect. “There is no prejudicial remark made
that I know of, and none were intended. I simply asked you, sir,
whether you propose to offer evidence as to what you said to me.”
A lengthy dispute ensued, Katzmann defending his cross-examination
as “tending to attack the credibility of this man as a witness.”
Over Moore’s loudly voiced objections Judge Thayer decided to let
the district attorney question Sacco further as to what he meant by
loving a free country.
Frank Sibley, writing with the afternoon deadline only a few minutes
away, pricked up his ears at the “interest of the United States.” He
could scarcely believe it when he heard the judge’s caustic voice ask
about preventing crimes from being committed “by the authorities.”
Before he had a chance to think twice, the telegraph boy had taken
away the yellow sheet of paper with the phrase on it. The phrase
appeared in the evening _Globe_. When Sibley wrote his more extended
story for the next morning’s edition he omitted it. “I couldn’t
credit my remembrance, and so did not use the vicious sentence,”
he wrote Attorney General J. Weston Allen a few months later. His
colleague Shea of the _Post_ had also picked up the remark and used
it.
The next day Judge Thayer summoned Sibley to his chambers and angrily
insisted that he said no such thing. Sibley, having consulted with
Shea, refused to back down even when shown that the transcript of
the court stenographic notes did not contain the phrase. Just then
a bailiff appeared to announce the arrival of the jury, and Thayer
huffily broke off the conversation.
As the cross-examination continued, Sacco found himself caught in
a web of words of which he could see each strand as it formed,
from which he knew he could break out if only they would let him.
But always it was the _yes_ or _no_ answer demanded, always the
cutting-off of his explanation, that made it seem as if he had come
back from Mexico merely to eat better food and to make more money and
to be with his wife and speak a more familiar language. “Food, wife,
language, industry—that is love of country, is it?” Katzmann asked
him, and he found himself answering yes. The rules, the thin threads
of questions twisted about him, smothering his replies. He could feel
the anger of frustration pulsing through him at the reiterations.
Deftly the district attorney led him into the trap.
“What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a free country?”
“First thing I came to this country—”
“No, pardon me. What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a
free country?”
“Give me a chance to explain.”
“I am asking you to explain now.”
Suddenly Sacco felt himself clear of the web, standing free at
last with his own thoughts. The frustrations of his arrest and
imprisonment, the long months in jail, the legal niceties that had
sealed his mouth in the courtroom, now found violent relief in a
cascade of words. As he talked on, his wiry body seemed to grow
tense and his eyes snapped fire. At first some of the jurors smiled,
but before he had finished everyone in the courtroom was listening
intently.