Charlestown, Vanzetti’s literary activities expanded. He contributed
articles to the New Jersey anarchist journal, _L’Adunata del
Refratti_, wrote his short autobiography as well as the booklet
_Background to the Plymouth Trial_, began to translate Proudhon’s
_The War and the Peace_ into English, and completed a novelette,
_Events and Victims_, about his experiences in a factory before
the United States entered the war. Both men were much heartened by
Thompson’s taking over as their counsel. Sacco, in spite of his
class-conscious rigidity, trusted the Boston conservative lawyer
as he had never trusted Moore, and wrote enthusiastically of the
“splendour defense” that Thompson and Hill had made in their first
appearance. Vanzetti was even more enthusiastic.
_Permit me to express my gratitude and my appreciation to you_ [_he
wrote Thompson in February 1926_]. _I understand that your work in
our behalfe is underpaid; the must difficult test of you; the noble
sentiments and impulse by which you were decide to take the side
of two underdogs; this I understand. And I also hope to understand
a little the brave, learned, beautiful fight that you are fighting
in our behalfe, paying of it in peace, rest, interest and other
universally desired things._
_Ha! to have known you 6 year ago! I would never have been a convict._
Thompson, in turn, as the months went on, found himself drawn closer
to the two men he had reluctantly elected to defend. In May 1927 he
could write:
_I went into this case as a Harvard man, a man of old American
tradition, to help two aliens who had, I thought, been unjustly
treated. I have arrived at a humbler attitude. Not since the
martyrdoms of the sixteenth century has such steadfastness to a
faith, such self-abnegation as that of these two Italians been seen
on this earth._
_The Harvard graduate, the man of old American traditions, the
established lawyer, is now quite ready to say that nowhere in his
soul is there to be found the faith, the splendid gentility, which
make the man, Bartolomeo Vanzetti._
Thompson later admitted that the case had been something of a
catastrophe for his firm: that by taking it he had lost friends,
clients, and a great deal of money. But it was a choice he never
regretted. He told Felicani that if he had understood the situation
better at the beginning, he would not have taken a fee.
While the jail years for Sacco and Vanzetti passed with unrelenting
sameness, Rosina moved from the Stoughton bungalow to an old
farmhouse near Milford. Here Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Jack aided her, and
in addition she received a small monthly allowance from the Defense
Committee. Ines was now almost old enough to go to school; Dante had
reached the seventh grade. Even before Rosina left Stoughton she had
living with her as a companion Susie Valdinoce, the grave, sad-faced
sister of the man killed in the dynamiting of Attorney General
Palmer’s house.
* * * * *
The rejection of Thompson’s appeal by the Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court on May 12, 1926, marked the second stage of the
case. With the court’s decision, affirming the convictions, came
the realization that the affair was now moving toward a foreseeable
climax. For the prisoners it was as if they had been walking down a
long corridor of months and years, and now at last at the far end
they could glimpse the door of the execution chamber.
To those familiar with the formalisms of Massachusetts legal
procedure the court’s negative decision was expected. According to
the statutes of the Commonwealth it was not the function of the
higher court to review the facts of a case in an appeal but merely to
consider questions of law. That in Madeiros’ first trial Judge Lummus
had neglected to mention the presumption of innocence was an error
sufficient to overthrow an obviously justified verdict. Judge Thayer
had committed no such errors. Whatever his feelings, he had kept the
written record straight just as Thompson, at the beginning of the
trial, had predicted he would. In regard to the denied motions, the
Supreme Court ruled that as long as Judge Thayer had given these
consideration according to the prescribed legal forms, there would
be no review of his decision. These were matters for his discretion,
beyond the compass of any higher court.
The Supreme Court’s decision was like the tolling of a bell. In
the next fifteen months the case would become a passionate issue,
the linked Italian names a battle cry in all comers of the globe.
Millions of men in dozens of countries, most of them with only a hazy
and often erroneous notion of the facts, would identify themselves
with the condemned Italians with such binding emotion that the fate
of the two men would come to seem the very symbol of man’s injustice
to man. For many European radicals the case loomed up as the most
important occurrence since the Russian Revolution. Stalin, at the
1927 Party Congress, spoke of the recent Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration
as evidence that “we are on the threshold of new revolutionary
events.” The American Communist Max Shachtman asked rhetorically:
“Since the Russian Bolshevik revolution, where has there yet been a
cause that has drawn into its wake the people, not of this or that
land, but of all countries, millions from every part and corner of
the world; the workers in the metropolis, the peasant on the land,
the people of the half-forgotten islands of the sea, men and women
and children in all walks of life?”
That the renewed European agitation was conceived and directed by
the Communist International is beyond dispute—a fact proclaimed with
equal stridency by both Communists and their enemies. Moscow gave the
signal and the International Red Aid set the well-oiled machinery
in motion. But the Communists themselves must have been startled
by their own quick success. Their calculated gesture loosed an
avalanche, elemental and overwhelming, that spread beyond the bounds
of any political party or dogma. Men of good will everywhere rose up
to challenge the course of Massachusetts justice. There were protests
from the Vatican; from ex-Premier Caillaux of France; from Paul
Loebe, the president of the Reichstag; from Count Bernstorff, who had
been ambassador to the United States in 1917; from John Galsworthy,
Fritz Kreisler, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Albert
Einstein, and scores of other international figures.
Why was it that in the fifteen months between the Massachusetts
Supreme Court’s adverse decision and the executions the case of
Sacco and Vanzetti became the most widely known and bitterly felt
of its generation? They were not conscious martyrs. Nor, if it be
assumed that they were innocent, were they uniquely so. It was
already a cruel commonplace of the century for innocent men to die
ignominiously and obscurely for their beliefs under red, black,
white, or varicolored flags. In an era of bloodshed, violence, and
injustice, why should the names of these two obscure Italians stand
out, enduring over the years in literature, in art, in the theater,
and even in that newest of media, television?[22]
Perhaps it is that when any celebrated or notorious trial becomes
encrusted with doubts as to its justice, it becomes a focus for the
raging social passions of the moment. Certainly, in the grim weeks
before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the hundreds of thousands
of militants demonstrating in the world’s cities found their own
resentments and anger objectified in these two comrades whom they
considered victims of class justice. Frustration and the envy of
America’s callous wealth undoubtedly stirred them too, and the hope
that through such potent symbols of martyrdom the hated system could
be overthrown.
Among many Europeans unswayed by the more primitive emotions of
hate and revenge, there was the feeling that, beyond any question
of the fairness of the trial, the years under the shadow of death
were themselves torture enough to demand the commuting of the death
sentences. “We wish to see the lives of these men spared, whether
they are innocent or guilty,” said _Le Temps_ in Paris. The London
_Times_ felt that it was not the wrongs of the trial that had so
stirred the public’s imagination but the fact that any man should be
kept so long in suspense. The suspense was particularly aggravated
by Massachusetts’ means of execution: Far more than the traditional
noose, the electric chair was a horror symbol to the European.
If—regardless of the question of their guilt or innocence—Sacco
and Vanzetti had been executed within a few months of their
conviction (as would have happened had they been tried in most
European countries), their names today would be almost unknown.
To non-Americans the pettifogging byways of American justice, the
complications and contradictions and the time entailed in appealing
from state to federal courts, the to them astonishing fact that
even if injustice is being done by the judicial system of an
individual state, so long as it is being done within the limits of
the Constitution the national government can do nothing—such things
were outrageously incomprehensible. And the years of delay seemed to
presume doubt. “It is impossible for us on this side to feel that
execution would have been so long deferred,” George Bernard Shaw
wrote, “if the case were clear enough to justify this infliction.”
Anticipating the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision, the
Red Aid’s Central European Headquarters in Berlin began in February
1926, to flood Europe with Sacco-Vanzetti propaganda and plans for a
united front of artists, writers, actors, scholars, and teachers.
The anarchists had never ceased their sporadic and individualistic
action, but international anarchy no longer rivaled Marxism as a
world movement, as it had in Bakunin’s day, and it persisted mostly
in the Latin countries. The Sacco-Vanzetti case contained, among
many other things, the last gesture of international anarchism. Yet
the anarchists by themselves could have accomplished little. It was
the executive committee of the Communist International, with its
tight organization and intricate networks, that was able to stir the
streets. By the autumn of 1926 the groundwork had been laid for the
world-wide agitation to come.
The year 1926 brought a belated stirring of interest in the case
throughout the United States, partly as a reaction to the renewed
agitation overseas as reported in such mass-circulation journals
as the _Literary Digest_, partly because of the Supreme Court’s
decision in May, and partly from the labors of the Defense Committee.
In Massachusetts there was a quickening of emotions lying dormant
since 1921, a xenophobic reaction by the community to criticism from
outsiders that would rise to hysteria as world agitation rose.[23]
Robert Lincoln O’Brien, the half-Irish half-old-Yankee editor of the
Boston _Herald_, whose reaction to the Sacco-Vanzetti case remained
essentially neutral, observed that “a surprising number of groups
and elements of the community came to regard leniency for Sacco and
Vanzetti as an assault upon the honor of the Commonwealth.” That
feeling, still amorphous in the spring of 1926, hardened under the
impact of hostile gestures from overseas and was suddenly exacerbated
in June when the house of Samuel Johnson in West Bridgewater was
demolished by a bomb. Whoever planted the bomb apparently mistook
Johnson’s house for that of his brother Simon, who with his wife
had received a reward of several hundred dollars after their court
testimony. No one was ever apprehended in this or any other bombings
connected with the case, and the Defense Committee at once repudiated
the act, but to the community it seemed a confirmation of its worst
fears in regard to radicals. Guards were at once placed around the
houses of Judge Thayer and of Chief Justice Arthur Rugg. District
Attorney Wilbar announced that he would ask for the immediate
imposition of the death penalty on Sacco and Vanzetti.
The Commonwealth was coming to feel that reviews enough had been
made, the matter had been discussed long enough. Doubts expressed
from outside, either in the United States or overseas, merely
sharpened the edge of Massachusetts majority opinion. The Boston
architect C. Howard Walker, on returning from Europe at the height
of the agitation, declared himself “enough of a Machiavellian to
rejoice in the electrocutions whether the accused are innocent or
guilty.”
Stubbornly the Massachusetts community, the articulate, rooted
middle-class community, closed ranks. Granville Hicks, teaching at
Smith College, helped organize a clemency meeting in Northampton in
the spring of 1927. So strong was the feeling of the townspeople
against Sacco and Vanzetti that it broke up in bedlam. It was not,
Hicks had to admit, just the rich and powerful who were against the
two Italians: “It was also the doctors, the lawyers, the shopkeepers,
the farmers, the workers. It was practically all my neighbors in
Northampton except for the other members of the college faculty. The
battle was between the intellectuals and everybody else.”
There was, however, a thoughtful minority made uneasy by the
slow steamroller of Massachusetts justice. Liberals like Edward
Filene, John Moors of the brokerage house of Moors & Cabot, and
Professor Felix Frankfurter joined with conservatives like Joseph
Walker, a former Republican speaker of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives, and Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador
to Italy, in questioning the legal proceedings. Names old and
distinguished were added to the list of protesters—the historian
Samuel Eliot Morison, the philosopher William Hocking, William Allan
Neilson, the president of Smith College, and the Harvard economist
Frank Taussig.
* * * * *
In June 1925 the American branch of the International Red Aid was set
up in Chicago as the International Labor Defense. For the Communists
the Sacco-Vanzetti case was an issue ripe for manipulation. By
exploiting it, the Party hoped to confirm its pose as the champion
of the oppressed and for the first time develop into an American
mass movement. After his expulsion from the Party, James Cannon,
the International Labor Defense’s executive secretary, was to admit
privately—much as Moore did—that he felt Sacco was guilty. But to the
Communists guilt or innocence was immaterial. What mattered was the
inflammability of the cause.
For Cannon and his lieutenant Max Shachtman, editor of the monthly
_Labor Defender_, the efforts of the Boston Defense Committee
were naïve, self-defeating, contaminated by “the slow poison of
middle-class treachery.” Thompson, the aloof upper-class lawyer, had
announced that he would not tolerate “pressure from the outside,”
meaning in Shachtman’s view “the mass movement of labor that could
surround Sacco and Vanzetti with a wall of iron against the attacks
of their enemies.” That the Defense Committee could replace a class
fighter like Moore with a reactionary like Thompson was merely
another demonstration of the liberal fallacy—belief in the law, in
justice above class, in all the paraphernalia that concealed the
claws of capitalist society. Abstract justice could play no role,
in Shachtman’s pronouncement as echoed by the _Daily Worker_, since
“Sacco and Vanzetti were being legally assassinated because of their
political and economic views and activities.”
Johnnies-come-lately though they might be, the Communists took the
attitude that it was they who were the organizers of the protest
movement. The Sacco-Vanzetti case was now theirs by right of Marxist
eminent domain. And, here as abroad, they were able to bring about
immediate sensational results. The International Labor Defense poured
out posters and buttons and press releases, organized meetings all
across the country, and collected large sums for what Cannon called
“the protection” of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Of the millions collected by the Red Aid in various parts of the
world for the defense of the convicted men, less than six thousand
dollars ever found its way to the Defense Committee. There was
no accounting for the balance. Felicani, who had so scrupulously
recorded each dollar he received, was outraged. In July the Defense
Committee warned in its _Official Bulletin_: “We are absolutely
opposed to the collection of funds and the use of this cause to
further special political or economic interests.” The _Daily
Worker_ and the International Labor Defense replied by calling the
Defense Committee and its counsel ineffectual liberals who relied
on bourgeois legal proceedings rather than the direct action of the
workers.
Yet, whatever the Communists might claim, whatever self-advertising
actions they might take, the shabby two-room headquarters at Hanover
Street still remained the center of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. The
yeast of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision worked as actively
there as outside. Fabbri was succeeded as secretary by Joseph Moro,
an Italian shoe-worker with a family, who gave up a job at forty
dollars a week to work full time for the committee at ten dollars
less. Eugene Lyons had left Boston at the end of 1922 to work for the
New York branch of Tass, the Soviet news agency. Until 1926 no one
took his place. As long as Moore remained in charge of the defense,
Lyons continued to contribute articles and support, but Thompson’s
advent was too much for him. Still wearing his Communist heart on
his sleeve, still at the beginning of his long arc from left to
right, he held to his opinion that the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti
should be a class defense.
Through the quiescent years the members of the Defense Committee,
working doggedly, had kept both the case and the defendants alive.
As the tempo rose in 1926, so did the activity in Hanover Street.
The headquarters developed into a small publishing house. Tables and
typewriters and filing cabinets were wedged in by bales of pamphlets
that served as seats for volunteer workers and visitors.
The moody, indefatigable Mary Donovan seemed always to be at her
desk. Mrs. Evans appeared regularly, bringing with her such friends
as Mrs. William James, the widow of the philosopher. Professor
Frankfurter often trudged up the dark stairway accompanied by one
or two of his sympathetic Harvard colleagues. In June a young Globe
reporter, Gardner Jackson, gave up his newspaper job to take over
where Lyons had left off. With the publicity under his enthusiastic
control, the _Official Bulletin_—only one issue of which had appeared
before this—now came out monthly.
Except for their energetic youth and their devotion to the same
cause, the wealthy liberal “Pat” Jackson and the East Side Marxist
Morris Gebelow, who wrote under the name of Eugene Lyons, had little
in common. Jackson’s mother was the third wife of William Jackson, a
Colorado banker and railroad owner whose second wife had been Helen
Hunt Jackson, the author of _Ramona_. Starting at Amherst College,
Pat joined the Army in 1917. After the war he studied at Columbia,
took a turn at selling bonds, then worked in a Denver enterprise of
his father’s before becoming cub reporter on the _Globe_, the paper
that was reputed to print the name of every inhabitant of Greater
Boston, and, if possible, his picture, at least twice a year.
Jackson had been gathering such neighborhood news for the _Globe_
during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. At the end of many an afternoon he
would see Frank Sibley stalking into the city room on his return from
Dedham. Sibley’s indignation expanded by the day, the more so since
he was confined to factual reporting and unable to write his personal
reaction to the Dedham goings-on. Sometimes he would stop by the
tall, shock-haired young reporter to let off steam.
It was through Sibley that Jackson met Felicani. Never before had the
tweedy, rather elegant young man met anyone like this philosophical
anarchist. Evening after evening now found Jackson working in the
upstairs rooms on Hanover Street. Then, in the summer of 1926,
Felicani persuaded him to give his full time to directing the
Sacco-Vanzetti publicity.
As it would for many others in the year to come, the cause brought
Jackson’s being into focus. Independent financially, vaguely liberal,
he had never really known what he wanted to do until he found his
goal in the struggle for the two Italians’ lives. Though later he
would become a minor New Deal administrator and a friend of Franklin
Roosevelt’s, this was to be the high spot of his life. Journalistic
talent, energy, honesty, and dedication—these he brought to the cause
with the fervency of a convert.
By August 1926 it was clear to James Cannon that the Defense
Committee could be neither dislodged nor superseded and that the
only other possibility was infiltration. To mark this change in tack
the International Labor Defense sent two thousand dollars to the
Hanover Street headquarters while the _Labor Defender_ announced in
conciliatory tones that it was no longer making a general appeal for
funds: All future donations for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti
should be sent direct to the Boston committee. In addition, Cannon
sent Charles Cline to Boston to try to arrange an amalgamation of the
committee with the International Labor Defense.
Cline, one of the Party’s so-called Texas martyrs, had just been
released from prison after serving thirteen years of a life sentence
for murder. In 1911 he had been the sole American among a band of
Mexicans who had organized an expedition in Texas to join the Mexican
revolutionaries in their fight against the government of Porfirio
Díaz. When Texas Rangers found a dead Mexican spy tied to a tree,
they pursued and captured Cline and a dozen of the expedition. Cline
maintained that he was innocent of the spy’s death, and the American
Federation of Labor had frequently demanded his liberation. He was
finally freed by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson.
Cline’s long imprisonment for a revolutionary cause was expected to
make him attractive to Sacco and Vanzetti. The real object of his
visit was to persuade them to let the International Labor Defense
take charge of their fight. Cline explained persuasively that the
Boston Defense Committee was run by amateurs who were unable to grasp
the class significance of the case. Even so, Cannon would be willing
to form a united front organization with certain members of the
Defense Committee on condition that the headquarters was moved to
Chicago. There the Communist International would be able to bring an
overwhelming force into operation that would compel the Massachusetts
reactionaries to stay their hand. As a final glittering attraction
Cline promised Sacco and Vanzetti that Clarence Darrow would take
over from Thompson as their chief counsel.
* * * * *
Running through the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, unaltered in the
alterations of their moods, is their sense of outraged bewilderment
at their predicament. What had brought them behind bars? What had
taken Sacco from his neat Stoughton bungalow, his red-haired wife,
the light-long summer evenings in his vegetable garden? What had
taken Vanzetti from the Plymouth streets overlooking the harbor? What
had ended the brightness of their years of freedom?
To each man the insistent answer was that they had been radicals,
that however small they may have seemed to the men of state, the
latter had nevertheless banded together to crush them. The owners of
the Cordage works, of the Lawrence mills, those who lived in the big
houses on the hill, who controlled the government and the police,
who lived at the expense of the workers, this gross capitalistic
world, this dying order would kill to preserve its insecure position.
District Attorney Katzmann’s taunting phrases, the dry words that
rustled from Judge Thayer’s set lips—these were the voices of
executioners.
After the Supreme Court’s rejection of Thompson’s appeal on May 12,
Vanzetti wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
_Yesterday we got the last struck. It end all. We are doomed beyond
any kind of doubts. I am sorry for myself. It is creuil to be
insulted, umiliated, wronged, imprisoned, doomned, under infamous
charges, for crimes of which I am utterly innocent in the whole
sense of the word. But more for myself, I am sorry for my father, my
sisters and my brothers, and for poor Rosi and her two children._