to receive letters of protest in September, the real force
of the agitation did not strike until October, when large
Communist-organized demonstrations took place in many cities. For all
their tenacity, the anarchists were no longer a mass organization
and, so far as European developments were concerned, the East German
historian Johannes Zelt is undoubtedly right in claiming that “from
the beginning the Communists stood at the head of the Sacco-Vanzetti
campaign.” In a tactic foreshadowing the Popular Front of the
thirties, the Communist International called on all Communists,
socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists to unite for the rescue
of Sacco and Vanzetti—while, at the same time, the anarchists in the
Soviet Union were being liquidated en masse. The organized protest,
as it spread across Europe, would include men of good will of all
beliefs and persuasions, but control of the movement stayed in the
hands of the Communist International and, later, the subsidiary
International Red Aid, founded by the Cheka chief, Dzerzhinsky.
For the Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti were pawns in the class
struggle, convenient symbols to be exploited in a drive for power
where the blood of even anarchist martyrs might become the seed of
the Party. However the anarchists were to feel about the Communists
taking over—and in time they would feel bitter indeed—the Party
had the tight organization, the mass control, and the finances
that made quick action easy. On September 20 the Central Committee
for Action of the French Communist Party began making plans for a
monster demonstration before the American Embassy. According to the
resolution then drawn up, “Only direct and clearly revolutionary
action can save the Italian liberators Sacco and Vanzetti from the
death penalty to which they have been condemned.” The Communist
daily _L’Humanité_ opened a subscription fund for the two men and
proclaimed: “There is an American Embassy in Paris. We owe it a
visit!”
Rank-and-file demonstrators had scarcely heard the names of the two
Italians when they received orders to take to the streets, but in
their militancy they responded, just as they had for other issues
and would again when some central committee pressed a different
propaganda button.
The October demonstrations were centered in France and Italy, with
echoes in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia.
Concerned for the moment with other matters, the German Communist
Party did not participate. In Paris, even before the end of September
various committees for action had met. Eight thousand militants
filled the Salle Wagram and, on leaving, sang the “Internationale”
while from a doorway someone lobbed a grenade at the drawn-up police,
wounding several of them. The American Embassy was deluged with
letters and telegrams. On October 19 a grenade, wrapped with sinister
humor in a copy of the Royalist _Action Française_, was sent through
the mail to the new American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. The valet
who opened the package set off the fuse but managed to throw it into
a bathroom, where it went off, wounding him slightly and demolishing
the room. On the twenty-fourth, ten thousand police and eighteen
thousand troops had to be called out to hold back the vast crowd
demonstrating before the American Embassy.
The wave spread across Europe. In Switzerland the Communists
organized demonstrations in Zurich, Basle, and Geneva. In St. Gall
a letter to the American Consulate protesting the judicial murder
of “Sachi” and Vanzetti was signed by Communists, syndicalists,
socialists, and trade unionists. Amsterdam workers held a protest
meeting, as did the Dutch Free Thinkers. Communists marched in the
streets of The Hague, Brussels, Liége, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. The
American ambassador in Madrid was threatened with assassination. In
Lisbon a bomb was exploded in the vestibule of the consulate-general
shortly after a letter had been placed under the door demanding the
release of the “Brockton anarchists.” Medical students of Portugal’s
National College struck for a day to show their sympathy. Although
a demonstration by English Communists before the American Embassy
fizzled out in a London rain, the Party’s Tooting branch forwarded
its objections in a letter to the ambassador. A polite communication
was sent to Washington by the Communist Party of Ireland.
When November found the Massachusetts prisoners still alive and no
date set for their execution, the Communist International turned
off the spigot and the European agitation dried up, but a new wave
of agitation now began in Central and South America. The Latin
American movement was less well organized, less literate, and, as
might be expected, more violent. Anarchists of Guadalajara, Mexico,
paraded behind red and black banners reading: “Yankee bourgeoisie,
if you assassinate our comrades, Sacco and Vanzetti, your lives and
your interests will pay the penalty.” La Junta Federal of Santiago,
Chile, announced that “the day the Communists of the world learn that
Sacco and Vanzetti have been shot, the residences of all American
ambassadors which exist in various countries will be destroyed by
a tremendous charge of dynamite.” In Havana, anarchist circulars
warned that “in Cuba, Yankee tyrants are not lacking in whom to let
fall the vengeful dagger.” A bomb was found in the embassy garden
in Rio de Janeiro. The American consul in Mexico City received
anonymous threats from “the comrades of Saco and Banzet.” There were
demonstrations in front of the United States embassies and consulates
in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Panama.
In Massachusetts the overseas disturbances, recorded with increasing
frequency in the local papers, stirred up feelings of apprehension.
Moore was dismayed, and said so. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how
any intelligent and sane person sincerely interested in obtaining
ultimate justice for these two men could hope that this sort of thing
could benefit them.” The bombings, he tried to make out, were the
work either of enemies or insane people. Prompted by Moore, and aware
of the hardening of community opinion, the Defense Committee issued a
disclaimer, maintaining that
_the lurid plots and threats attributed to mythical individuals
referred to as Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers are so thoroughly harmful
to the effort being made to save the two men from the electric chair
that they could not have originated in the minds of friends. Either
they were planned by persons desirous of putting the case of the two
prisoners in disrepute or they are lies pure and simple._
Two days after the trial’s end the defense lawyers filed the
customary motion for a new trial on the grounds that the verdict was
against the weight of the evidence. This motion was scheduled to be
argued before Judge Thayer in Dedham on Saturday, October 29. On
the twenty-eighth the Boston papers spread a sensational story that
groups of Italians were coming to the hearing from New York dressed
in army uniforms and carrying automatics. Extra police were at once
stationed throughout the city, and the Post Office and the Federal
Building placed under guard. At the South Station plain-clothes
men watched each incoming train. That night the Dedham jail was
surrounded with searchlights.
Saturday morning the courthouse was more heavily guarded than at any
time during the trial. State troopers, mounted and on motorcycles,
patrolled the streets, and portly Colonel Foote, the Commissioner
of Public Safety, came over from the State House in person.
Plain-clothes men in all their obviousness tramped up and down the
High Street. The Boston riot squad appeared, loaned for the day
by the Boston police commissioner. The public was banned from the
courthouse. Reporters who were admitted were patted for weapons.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in and their handcuffs taken
off, there were fewer than fifty persons in the courtroom. Three
months had done much to alter the two men. In July, overwhelmed by
the verdict, they had felt isolated. Now the news from overseas
had given them the satisfaction of knowing that there were workers
the world over who were not going to stand by while the courts of
Massachusetts sent their comrades to the electric chair. Newly
confident, Sacco and Vanzetti were also full of resentment,
particularly against the debonair district attorney whom they once
more faced.
Both Moore and Jerry McAnarney well knew there was no chance that
Judge Thayer would overrule the jury’s verdict, but the motion
was a legal step always taken in murder cases. The arguments and
counterarguments lasted all that Saturday and the following Saturday,
Moore appealing particularly to the fact that the jury had given no
consideration to the alibi witnesses. While Katzmann was delivering
his arguments defending the verdict, the men in the cage kept
interrupting and contradicting him. When he told of taking a witness
to the Dedham jail who picked out Sacco from a group of prisoners,
Sacco jumped up in the cage and accused the district attorney of
having prompted the witness. “Yes,” he shouted to Judge Thayer, who
motioned to a deputy, “that man he said, ‘There’s Sacco.’ That’s the
way he know!” The deputy grabbed Sacco by the arm. “Go easy!” Sacco
cried out, trying to brush him off. Vanzetti now broke in savagely:
“You bring every crook in Massachusetts to testify against us! You
and every man of sense know it.” Judge Thayer observed acidly that
the defendants ought not to interrupt. When they continued to shout
and gesticulate, he again signaled to the deputies to quiet them. He
too had been hearing of the turmoil in Europe, and had been receiving
letters and telegrams daily—some of them threatening—demanding a
new trial. His house in Worcester was now under guard, and he was
simmeringly aware that last summer’s court session and verdict had by
no means ended the case. “These cases,” he announced with controlled
but still obvious anger as he looked sourly at the cage, “seem to
have assumed a state, national and international interest. Overseas
a statement was published that the presiding justice said to the
jury that these men must be convicted because they were Italians and
radicals. That statement was absolutely false.”
He and Moore continued their verbal dueling, carrying it over to
the concluding arguments on Saturday, November 5. When Moore tried
to explain how the issue of radicalism had injured his clients,
Judge Thayer pointed out his trial ruling that “No evidence of the
defendants’ radical activities or opinions would be allowed until the
defense released such matter themselves.” Moore characterized the
ruling as a Greek gift, the Virgilian reference escaping Judge Thayer.
Following this formal and predetermined motion the defense filed
five supplementary motions for a new trial: the Ripley motion, the
Gould-Pelser motion, the Goodridge motion, the Andrews motion, and
the Hamilton-Proctor motion.
A month or so after the trial Jerry McAnarney had met the jury
foreman, Walter Ripley—whom he had known for years—on the street in
Quincy. They stopped on the corner to talk, and Jerry learned for
the first time about the three cartridges that Ripley had casually
brought to court in his vest pocket and during the trial compared
with the five cartridges found in Vanzetti’s revolver. Ripley thought
nothing of the matter, but for Jerry it was the first crack in the
verdict. He now interviewed nine of the other jurors and obtained
affidavits from several of them. Wallace Hersey and Frank McNamara
admitted they had seen the Ripley bullets, Frank Marden and Seward
Parker that they had heard about them. Ripley himself had died of a
heart attack on October 10, before McAnarney could get an affidavit
from him. His widow signed an affidavit that her husband had had the
bullets with him during the trial. This admitted fact was the basis
of the first supplementary motion, a lengthy document that claimed in
substance that “if during the trial Ripley made a comparison between
these three cartridges and the five cartridges taken from Vanzetti’s
revolver, then the defendants are entitled to a new trial as a matter
of right.” The Ripley motion with its accompanying affidavits was
filed on November 8. Judge Thayer announced that he would set a
hearing date satisfactory to both sides.
On the afternoon before Christmas, 1921, exactly two years after
the Bridgewater crime, in a gray, nearly empty courtroom, the
wintry-faced Thayer denied the October motion for a new trial. “I
cannot,” he intoned, “as I must if I disturb these verdicts—announce
to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their
oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor,
judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust
reposed in them by the law as well as by the Court. And all for what
purpose? To take away the lives of two human beings created by their
own God. The human frailties of man, his tender regard and love for
human life and his profound sympathy for his fellow-men, when charged
with the gravest offence known to the law, repudiates the suggestion.”
Three days after this denial Fred Moore wrote to a friend:
_The one hope for these boys now rests in the hope that we may be
able to unearth new facts. This means endless investigations. It
means that every clue as to the real bandits must be followed up
expertly and carefully. As you know this means money._
Thus, briefly, Moore stated his problems for the next three years,
and the last problem would always be the most harassing, the one
that would seem to be squatting like a dollar sign on the doorstep
of Rollins Place each time he returned. For him money was a wretched
commodity, something that arrived in the morning and went out in
the afternoon, a means merely through which he might obtain more
publicity, wider investigations. His restless and inventive mind
never stopped thinking of new angles to explore. One week would
find him at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on a tip that two
inmates there were connected with the gang that, it was rumored, had
really pulled off the Bridgewater job. The next week might find him
uncovering the bigamous career of a prosecution witness. Pressed
constantly for funds, he wrote countless dunning letters, cajoled his
old radical friends and associates from coast to coast, unabashedly
appealed to prominent strangers, cultivated sympathetic old women.
Given enough money, he was sure he could win.
The trial had been over for half a year, the sentencing of the two
men lay somewhere in the months ahead. General interest dwindled.
Only the most faithful sympathizers still sent in contributions.
The Defense Committee had moved from Battery Street to the more
central Hanover Street, where most of the North End Italian shops
were located. Eugene Lyons, returned from Italy, now replaced Art
Shields. The new headquarters at number 256 was on the third floor,
a large garret anteroom leading into a small inner office. Every
Thursday night the committee members would climb the warped, narrow
stairs to listen to a repetition of what had been said the week
before. Three or four times a year there would be a meeting of
several hundred sympathizers at Paine Memorial Hall in the South
End, most of them Italian comrades, with a sprinkling of Back Bay
dissidents, members of the Civil Liberties Committee, and the more
radical trade-union officials.
_It was [Lyons wrote] a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched
company that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were
moved by an undiluted urge to save the two innocent men, others were
interested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still
others got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were
hot-headed and desperate Italians distrustful of all law, bitterly
sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits, and often
refusing in principle to cooperate with their own lawyers. At the
other extreme were men and women of old New England stock chiefly
concerned with saving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the
stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice. I can recall vital meetings
in which a snarling, red-headed Italian exponent of direct action
argued some question of policy with a benign pacifist like Mrs.
Evans. It was Moore’s delicate job to reconcile these people and
placate their idiosyncrasies._
The money that Moore needed in floods came in dribbles—$18.30 from
an Italian picnic in Connecticut, an anonymous dollar bill posted in
Seattle, $38.65 from the Pietro Gori Group of Nokomis, Illinois, the
occasional windfall of five hundred dollars collected by the Workers’
Defense Union at a New York meeting in Beethoven Hall, a small but
steady flow from Moore’s friends in the United Mine Workers. Moore
knew that what was required was a full-time treasurer to coordinate
finances and fund-raising. He wanted Felicani to quit _La Notizia_
and devote all his time to the job at a regular salary. Felicani
would not hear of it. He was willing to work until midnight each
night on the committee accounts, or on propaganda, or whatever else
needed doing, but those pathetically small sums that kept dribbling
in for the defense of his friends—he could not bear to pay himself
from that money. He insisted on keeping a record of every amount
received, no matter how small, and of every cent paid out.
Moore did not see the point of such finical accounting. To him it
was foolish to waste time on columns of figures when two men’s lives
were at stake. He and Felicani were always at odds about money. To
Felicani it seemed that no matter how much he provided, Moore always
needed more. It was as if the lawyer had a hole in his hand. For
Moore it was both ridiculous and humiliating that he, the general
counsel of the I.W.W., whose name struck sparks from coast to coast,
who had taken this case out of the gutter and made it a world issue,
should have to appear hat in hand before a printer-nobody to beg
for money—and often not get it! Time and again Moore saw what he
considered promising investigations shut off by the anarchists. Later
he was to ask himself if some deeper motive than a financial one lay
behind their refusals. On October 20, 1922, the doctrinaire Frank
Lopez, who had become secretary of the Defense Committee, wrote Moore:
_I warn you to keep your hands off of many things that in order to
obey or please other persons you had been trying to do for many
months past._
To supplement such part-time detectives as Robert Reid, Moore hired
two permanent investigators, Tommy Doyle and Albert Carpenter. Doyle,
a pious Catholic, was still young enough to think of himself as a
sleuth, so intrigued at playing Sherlock Holmes that he did not care
whether he was investigating thieves, anarchists, or Republicans.
Carpenter was an older man, more self-contained, oriented to
radical reform. He and Moore had first meet in San Diego, during
the free-speech fight of 1911. Together they had tracked down and
exposed the perjurer, Frank Oxman, in the Mooney-Billings case. In
Everett, Washington, in 1915, after a dockside clash in which five
I.W.W.’s and two sheriffs were killed and seventy-four Wobblies later
indicted for first-degree murder—a national record—Carpenter acted as
Moore’s chief investigator. In Chicago during the 1917 I.W.W. trials,
after Moore had been framed by the police and was on the run, it was
Carpenter who kept track of him through Lola Darroch, then Moore’s
secretary. Once Moore had settled down in Rollins Place, it seemed
only natural for him to send for his old reliable friend.
Moore had early become convinced that the South Braintree holdup was
the work of a gang of professionals. Also, his legal sixth sense
warned him there were unexplored depths to such equivocal witnesses
as Louis Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Carlos Goodridge. It seemed a pity
to him to have the money problem overshadowing all the others.
* * * * *
On May 4, 1922, Moore filed the second supplementary motion, the
Gould-Pelser motion. Roy Gould was the razor-paste salesman who on
the day of the South Braintree murders had stood near the crossing
and been fired at from the getaway car, the bullet passing through
his overcoat lapel. No one, not even Jimmy Bostock or Frank Burke,
had been so close to the moving car or had such a clear view of its
occupants. Immediately after the shooting Gould gave his name and
address to a Braintree policemen, John Heaney. Soon afterward he left
town to follow the summer carnivals and country fairs across New
England with his razor paste.
Moore first learned about Gould and his experience from Frank Burke,
who had known him for some time. No one, however, seemed to know
what had become of Gould. Moore sent Reid all over New England
inquiring at every carnival he could trace, without success. Finally
on November 3, while Burke was in Portland, Maine, on business, he
noticed Gould’s name on the register of his hotel. Burke was almost
too astonished to believe his eyes. When the two met, Gould said he
had gone to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island shortly after the
murder, and had not read much about the trial.
Moore came to Portland on the next train and found Gould perfectly
willing to tell his story about South Braintree. The man who had
fired at him that day, Gould said, was someone he could never forget.
Moore paid Gould’s way to Boston and there showed him photographs of
Sacco and Vanzetti. Gould was positive that neither was the man who
had fired at him. Later Moore took him to the Dedham jail where they
talked with Sacco. After watching Sacco for about ten minutes Gould
said he was certain that this was not the gunman and he was willing
to sign an affidavit to that effect.
It was Moore’s claim that Gould’s affidavit was “new and independent
testimony,” that the Commonwealth had known about him and yet made no
effort to call him as a witness, and that his identification would
have been sufficient to warrant a different verdict.
Louis Pelser was the next witness on Moore’s retribution list. All
Moore could learn of him at first was that after the trial he had
lost his job and left his parents’ flat in Jamaica Plain. Tommy Doyle
finally tracked him to a derelict South End rooming house. Pelser was
in an abject alcoholic state, red-eyed and maudlin. When he said he
had not eaten anything all day, Doyle bought him a meal, then gave
him seventy cents and paid his carfare to Moore’s Pemberton Square
office.
Doyle had telephoned ahead and Moore was waiting there with Lyons,
Reid, and a stenographer. Pelser sobered up when he saw them. As
always, when faced with authority, he began to doubt himself, what
he had seen, what he had previously said. Moore tried to reassure
him, patting him on the back and telling him “You look like a regular
fellow.” Pelser said that the day he arrived at Dedham District
Attorney Williams had taken him to a little upstairs room in the
courthouse and shown him several pictures of Sacco, asking if he was
the man he had seen below the factory window. “No,” Pelser had told
him, “I don’t think that’s the man I seen. I just got a glance of
everything. I could not identify if you brought me a hundred pictures
here.” Williams insisted that he, Pelser, knew “right well” Sacco was
the man.
Now, in the Pemberton Square office, Pelser said he “did not get a
good enough view to see any man.” How the “dead image stuff” had come
up in court he could not tell.
“Now why in God’s world did you testify as you did?” Moore bellowed
at the cowering sour-breathed Pelser.
“I must have been forced,” the other replied lamely. He still
maintained that he had seen a man with a gun, but he could in no way
describe him. The “dead image,” he admitted, had been a mistake.
Moore asked if he would go on the stand again and take back what he
had said. Pelser hesitated. Moore bore down on him: “You can tell
anything that is the truth. If it’s not true that he is the dead
image, then you owe it to yourself and your conscience to tell it. If
it is the truth, for God’s sake stick to your story. It might come
to the point when in order to save a couple of men’s lives it is
going to be necessary—you have got the stuff to come through if it is
necessary, that right?”
Pelser gulped out an abject “Yes.”