_The evening of May 5th, 1920, Nicola Sacco, an Italian, working as
edger in a shoe factory, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, also an Italian, a
fishpeddler, were arrested in a streetcar in Brockton, Massachusetts.
The two men were known as radicals and were active in Italian working
class organizations in the vicinity of Boston. In Sacco’s pocket at the
time of his arrest was a draft of a handbill calling a meeting to
protest against the illegal imprisonment and possible murder of Salsedo
by agents of the Department of Justice. Salsedo was the anarchist
printer whose body was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row under
the windows of the New York offices of the Department of Justice, where
he and his friend Elia had been held without warrant for eight weeks of
the third degree. Sacco and Vanzetti were armed when arrested and lied
when questioned about their friends and associates. It came out later
that they had been trying to get the Overland car of a man named Boda
out of a garage in order to go about the country to their friends’
houses warning them of a new series of red raids they had been tipped
off to expect. At the same time they were collecting radical newspapers
and any literature that might seem suspicious to the police. They were
arrested, because the garage-owner phoned the police, having been warned
to notify them of the movements of any Italians who owned automobiles._
_A couple of weeks before, the afternoon of April 15, a peculiarly
impudent and brutal crime had been committed in South Braintree, a
nearby town, the climax of a long series of holdups and burglaries.
Bandits after shooting down a paymaster and his guard in the center of
the town had escaped in a Buick touring car with over fifteen thousand
dollars in cash. It was generally rumored that the bandits were most of
them Italians. The police had made a great fuss but found no clue to the
identity of the murderers. Public feeling was bitter and critical. A
victim had to be found. To prove the murderers to have been reds would
please everybody. So first Vanzetti was taken over to Plymouth and tried
as one of the men who had attempted to hold up a paytruck in Bridgewater
early in the morning of the previous Christmas Eve. He was convicted and
sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. Plymouth is owned by the
largest cordage works in the world. Several years before Vanzetti had
been active in a successful strike against the Cordage. Then he was
taken to Dedham and tried with Sacco for the murder of the paymaster and
his guard killed in South Braintree. After a stormy trial they were
convicted of murder in the first degree. Since then sentence has been
stayed by a series of motions for a new trial. One appeal to the Supreme
Judicial Court of Massachusetts has been refused and another is
pending._
_The most important evidence that has come up in the course of the
motions is the series of affidavits procured by the defense, proving, as
the labor press has always claimed, that operatives of the Department of
Justice were active in the trial, and lacking evidence on which to
deport Sacco and Vanzetti as radicals, helped in the frameup by which
they were convicted as murderers._
_“They were bad actors anyway and got what was coming to them,” one
detective is quoted as saying. That means that any man who gives up his
life to the hope of humanizing the treadmill of industry is a bad actor
in the minds of the governing class and governing class police. Sacco
and Vanzetti are not the only men who have been framed, but they have
become symbols. All over the world people are hopefully, heartbrokenly
watching the Sacco-Vanzetti Case as a focus in the unending fight for
human rights of oppressed individuals and masses against oppressing
individuals and masses._
I
WHERE THE CASE STANDS TODAY
On October 23rd 1926 Judge Webster Thayer handed down his decision on
the latest motions for a new trial, argued by the defense during the
week of September 13th. The decision is a document of something more
than thirty thousand words in length. A reader unskilled in the
technique of legal judgment gets the impression that the document is
more of a personal apologium and defense on the part of the court than
the impartial decision of a judge. Not a spark of scientific spirit, or
of the consciousness of the infinite possibilities of human error has
edged its way into those long involved sentences.
The confession of Madeiros and the elaborate circumstantial case evolved
from it by the defense, tending to prove that the South Braintree holdup
was committed by members of the Morelli gang of Providence, is dismissed
with the following statement:
In conclusion, in so far as the Madeiros affidavit is concerned, it
would have been an easy task for this court to transfer the
responsibility upon another jury, but if this were done it would be
the shirking of a solemn duty that the law places upon the trial
court. Guided by this solemn duty I have examined and studied for
several weeks without interruption, the record of the testimony upon
this motion and upon the Madeiros deposition; and being controlled
only by judgment, reason, and conscience, and after giving as
favorable consideration to these defendants as may be consistent with
a due regard for the rights of the public and sound principles of law,
I am forced to the conclusion that the affidavit of Madeiros is
unreliable, untrustworthy and untrue. To set aside the verdict of a
jury affirmed by the Supreme Judicial Court of this commonwealth on
such an affidavit would be a mockery upon truth and justice.
Therefore, exercising every right vested in this court in the granting
of motions for new trials by the law of this commonwealth, the motion
for a new trial is hereby denied.
Further on in this comment upon the plea that Department of Justice
agents worked with the prosecution to obtain conviction for murder
against Sacco and Vanzetti although they considered them to be innocent
(based on the now famous affidavits of Letherman and Weyand):
Cases cannot be decided on the ground of public opinion, but upon
reason, judgment, and in accordance with law; for cases cannot be
decided on mystery, suspicion or propaganda but upon the actual
evidence that is introduced at the trial. If this were otherwise God
help the poor defendants in criminal cases, if they are to be
acquitted and convicted, not upon evidence and the law, but upon
public opinion, which might be formed as the result of an unwarranted
public opinion or propaganda.
This might seem to the unlegal mind of a man smoking a cigar at a street
corner, a knife that cuts two ways. To continue further on:
Have Attorney General Sargent of the United States and his
subordinates and former Attorney General Palmer under the
administration of President Wilson (for most of the correspondence
took place under President Wilson’s administration) stooped so low and
are they so degraded that they were willing, by the concealment of
evidence to enter into a fraudulent conspiracy with the government of
Massachusetts to send two men to the electric chair, not because they
were murderers, but because they were radicals?
Judge Thayer answers, No. But will that be the verdict of fairminded men
and women when the full truth of this case is known? Will that be the
verdict of workingmen the world over who see their own image in Sacco
and Vanzetti? In the face of the evidence as it stands would a plain
mind, free from legal technicalities and sectional bitterness answer No?
This decision leaves one more chance of appeal to the Supreme Judicial
Court before sentence, but as that court makes decisions only on points
of law and not on the human merits of a case, the hope of reversal is
slim. After that the only appeal is to executive clemency, or to the
Supreme Court of the United States on the plea that the defendants were
convicted without due process of law. A pretty forlorn hope.
Sacco and Vanzetti are not asking for pardon, they are asking for
justice. Remember that when it became evident that Tom Mooney was
innocent of the Preparedness Parade bombing for which he had been
convicted in California, instead of his being freed, his sentence was
commuted to life. He is still in jail a victim of executive clemency.
Sacco and Vanzetti want justice, not clemency.
Only an immense surge of protest from all classes and conditions of men
can save them from the Chair.
II
THE HEARING OF THE SEVENTH MOTION
Another hearing of a motion for a new trial. Six have been denied so
far. Sacco and Vanzetti have been six years in jail. This time there are
no guards with riotguns, no state troopers riding round the courthouse.
No excitement of any sort. Everyone has forgotten the great days of the
Red Conspiracy, the passion to sustain law and order against the wave of
radicalism, against foreigners, and the ‘moral rats gnawing at the
foundations of the commonwealth’ that Attorney General Palmer spoke of
so eloquently. In this court there are no prisoners in a cage, no
hysterical witnesses, no credulous jury under the sign of the screaming
eagle. Quiet, dignity; almost like a class in a lawschool. The case has
been abstracted into a sort of mathematics. Only the lawyers for the
defense and for the prosecution, Ranney from the District Attorney’s
office, Thompson and Ehrmann for the defense, two small tables of
newspaper men, on the benches a few Italians, some professional liberals
and radicals, plainclothes men with rumpsteak faces occupying the end
seats.
The court attendants make everybody get up. The Judge comes in on the
heels of a man in a blue uniform. Judge Thayer is a very small man with
a little grey lined shingle face, nose glasses tilting out at the top
across a sudden little hawknose. He walks with a firm bustling tread.
The black gown that gives him the power of life and death (the gown of
majesty of the blind goddess the law) sticks out a little behind.
Another attendant walks after him. The judge climbs up to his high
square desk. The judge speaks. His voice crackles dryly as old papers.
Affidavits, affidavits read alternately by counsel in the stillness of
the yellowvarnished courtroom. Gradually as the reading goes on the
courtroom shrinks. Tragic figures of men and women grow huge like
shadows cast by a lantern on a wall; the courtroom becomes a tiny
pinhole through which to see a world of huge trampling forces in
conflict.
First it’s the story of the life of Celestino Madeiros, a poor
Portuguese boy brought up in New Bedford. He learned Americanism all
right, he suffered from no encumbering ideas of social progress; the law
of dawg eat dawg was morbidly vivid in his mind from the first. Hardly
out of school he was up in court for ‘breaking and entering’. No
protests from him about the war. He and his sister and another man
dressed up in uniform and collected money for some vaguely phoney
patriotic society, The American Rescue League. By the spring of 1920 he
was deep in the criminal world that is such an apt cartoon of the world
of legitimate business. He was making good. He was in with the Morelli
brothers of Providence, a gang of freight-car robbers, bootleggers,
pimps, hijackers and miscellaneous thugs. The great wave of highway
robbery that followed the war was at its height. For three years the
leaders of society had been proclaiming the worthlessness of human life.
Is it surprising that criminals should begin to take them at their word?
Scared to death, blind drunk, Madeiros, an overgrown boy of eighteen,
was in the back seat of the Buick touring car that carried off the
tragic holdup outside the Rice and Hutchins shoefactory at South
Braintree. Probably on his share of the payroll he went south, once he
got out of the Rhode Island jail where another episode of breaking and
entering had landed him. He came back north with his money spent and
worked as a bouncer at the Bluebird Inn, a ‘disorderly’ road house at
Seekonk, Mass. and fell at last into the clutches of the Massachusetts
law through a miserable failure to duplicate the daring South Braintree
holdup at Wrentham, where he shot an aged bank cashier and ran without
trying to get any loot. At his trial he sat so hunched and motionless
that he seemed an imbecile. Not even when his mother threw an epileptic
fit in the courtroom and was carried out rigid and foaming did he look
up. At the Dedham jail he was put in the cell next to Sacco. He could
see Sacco going out to meet his wife and kids when they came to see him.
The idea of an innocent man going to the chair worried him. For him
everything had crashed. It had been on his own confession that he had
been convicted of the Wrentham murder. He seems to have puzzled for a
long time to find some way of clearing Sacco and Vanzetti without
inculpating his old associates, even though he had fallen out with them
long ago. He tried to tell Sacco about it in the jail bathroom, but
Sacco, seeing Department of Justice spies everywhere—and with good
reason—wouldn’t listen to him. So at last he sent the warden a written
confession asking him to forward it to the _Boston American_. Nothing
happened. The warden kept his mouth shut. Eventually he sent a new
confession to Sacco enclosed in a magazine, begging him to let his
lawyer see it. “_I hereby confess to being in the South Braintree Shoe
Company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti were not in said crime._—CELESTINO
F. MADEIROS”.
Here is Madeiros’s own account of the crime:
On April 15, 1920, I was picked up about 4 A. M. at my boarding house,
181 North Main St., Providence, by four Italians who came in a Hudson
five-passenger open touring car. My sister’s landlord lived at the
same place. She was then a widow and her name was Mary Bover. She has
since been married, and now lives at 735 Bellville Avenue, New
Bedford. There was also living there at the same time a man named
Arthur Tatro, who afterwards committed suicide in the house of
Correction of New Bedford. He was Captain and I was Lieutenant in the
American Rescue League at that time. Two or three privates in the
league also lived there, whose names I do not remember.
We went from Providence to Randolph, where we changed to a Buick car
brought there by another Italian. We left the Hudson car in the woods
and took it again after we did the job, leaving the Buick in the woods
in charge of one man, who drove it off to another part of the woods,
as I understood.
After we did the job at South Braintree and changed back into the
Hudson car at Randolph, we drove very fast through Randolph, and were
seen by a boy named Thomas and his sister. His father lives on a
street that I think is called Prang Street, and is in the window metal
business or something of that kind. I became acquainted with him four
years later when I went to live in Randolph with Weeks on the same
street. Thomas told me one day in conversation that he saw the car
that did the South Braintree job going through Randolph very fast.
When we started we went from Providence first to Boston and then back
to Providence, and then back to South Braintree, getting there about
noon. We spent some time in a “speak easy” in South Braintree two or
three miles from the place of the crime, leaving the car in the yard
of the house.
When we went to Boston we went to South Boston and stopped in Andrews
Square. I stayed in the car. The others went in a saloon to get
information, as they told me, about the money that was to be sent to
South Braintree.
I had never been to South Braintree before. These four men persuaded
me to go with them two or three nights before when I was talking with
them in a saloon in Providence. The saloon was also a poolroom, near
my boarding house. They talked like professionals. They said they had
done lots of jobs of this kind. They had been engaged in robbing
freight cars in Providence. Two were young men from 20 to 25 years
old, one was about 40, the other about 35. All wore caps. I then was
18 years old. I do not remember whether they were shaved or not. Two
of them did the shooting—the oldest one and another. They were left on
the street. The arrangement was that they should meet me in a
Providence saloon the next night to divide the money. I went there but
they did not come.
I sat on the back seat of the automobile. I had a Colt 38 calibre
automatic but did not use it. I was told that I was there to help hold
back the crowd in case they made a rush. The curtains on the car were
flapping. I do not remember whether there was any shotgun or rifle in
the car or not.
These men talked a lot of New York. As soon as I got enough money I
went to New York and also Chicago hoping to find them in cabarets
spending the money, but I never found them.
They had been stealing silk, shoes, cotton, etc., from freight cars
sending it to New York. Two of them lived on South Main Street and two
on North Main Street, in lodging houses. I had known them three months
or four.
The old man was called Mike. Another one was called William or Bill. I
don’t remember what the others were called.
The money that they took from the men in South Braintree was in a
black bag, I think.