It has just come to my attention—stationed as I am in the Government
service in the West—that my name has been mentioned in your account of
the “Sacco and Vanzetti” affair through an affidavit by former
District Attorney Katzmann on one hand, and the connection of
Ruzzamenti on the other.
The facts, as far as I am concerned with this case, are as follows:
Katzmann sent for me at the time to learn what I knew about Sacco,
having been Special Agent of the United States Department of Justice
in charge of investigations covering anarchists and similar criminals
whose aim was the forceful overthrow of the Government of the United
States. I told Katzmann that I knew that Sacco was an active
anarchist, connected with the famous or notorious Galleani group of
Lynn, Mass., who had bomb-outrages on the brain. When Katzmann asked
me what I thought of Sacco as a participant in the Braintree holdup, I
explained to him that anarchists do not commit crimes for money but
for a principle, and that banditry was not in their code.
It was at the suggestion of Katzmann that I wrote the undercover
informant Ruzzamenti whether he was willing to go to jail and share
the cell with Sacco to find out what Sacco had to tell about his
connection with the Braintree affair. Ruzzamenti did not answer this
letter by a letter, but took the first train from Pennsylvania to
Boston. Though this was against my arrangement with him, I faced the
situation, and sent him to Katzmann, who had agreed over the phone to
talk to Ruzzamenti regarding the plan we had in mind. Katzmann then
decided, after a talk with Ruzzamenti, that he better drop the matter.
Ruzzamenti tried to collect expenses from Katzmann, but failed. Then
Ruzzamenti turned around and sold out to the defense. He used my
letter to him as evidence. The first I knew of Ruzzamenti’s treachery
was when I received a warning from a friendly source in Spain to the
effect that my letter had been broadcasted in mimeograph form to aid
in the collection of funds for the Sacco and Vanzetti defense. My
friend sent me warning lest the rabid Latin anarchists should take it
into their heads to “get square” with me for trying to “frame Sacco.”
The truth in the “framing” was that we intended to put Ruzzamenti in
with Sacco as much to clear Sacco of any guilt in the Braintree affair
as to find him guilty! I had no interest whatsoever in railroading an
innocent man to the electric chair, and Lawyer Thompson’s reference to
me as “being heartless” is absurd, if not ridiculous. My entire
connection with this case was outlined here, and my only motive in
trying to clear up the mystery was to aid justice.
That I should be abused and besmirched with mud by both sides, the
defense as well as the District Attorney, when I acted as any
patriotic citizen would to protect the life and property of all, is a
sad reflection upon legal ethics in Massachusetts. I leave it to the
public to pass judgment in view of the above cited facts. That
Katzmann is trying to wash his hands of the Ruzzamenti fiasco, putting
the blame on me; that Ruzzamenti delivered my life into the hands of
the international Reds the world over by his treachery, reminds me of
the two characters in the New Testament who always seem to enjoy a
resurrection: Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot.
Respectfully,
FERI FELIX WEISS
“_Have Attorney General Sargent and his subordinates ... stooped so
low, and are they so degraded that they are 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?_”
(All attempts on the part of the defense to secure information from the
Department of Justice files on the case have so far proved fruitless.
Chief Counsel Thompson has written the Attorney General of the United
States on the subject and in spite of the intercession of Senator Butler
of Massachusetts, received no satisfactory reply. The Department of
Justice refuses to give up its secrets.)
Where are Sacco and Vanzetti in all this? A broken man in Charlestown, a
broken man in a grey birdcage in Dedham, struggling to keep some shreds
of human dignity in face of the Chair? Not at all.
Circumstances sometimes force men into situations so dramatic, thrust
their puny frames so far into the burning bright searchlights of history
that they or their shadows on men’s minds become enormous symbols. Sacco
and Vanzetti are all the immigrants who have built this nation’s
industries with their sweat and their blood and have gotten for it
nothing but the smallest wage it was possible to give them and a helot’s
position under the bootheels of the Arrow Collar social order. They are
all the wops, hunkies, bohunks, factory fodder that hunger drives into
the American mills through the painful sieve of Ellis Island. They are
the dreams of a saner social order of those who can’t stand the law of
dawg eat dawg. This tiny courtroom is a focus of the turmoil of an age
of tradition, the center of eyes all over the world. Sacco and Vanzetti
throw enormous shadows on the courthouse walls.
William G. Thompson feels all this dimly when, the last affidavit read,
he pauses to begin his argument. But mostly he feels that as a citizen
it is his duty to protect the laws and liberties of his state and as a
man to try to save two innocent men from being murdered by a machine set
going in a moment of hatred and panic. He is a broadshouldered man with
steely white hair and a broad forehead and broad cheek-bones. He doesn’t
mince words. He feels things intensely. The case is no legal game of
chess for him.
“I rest my case on these affidavits, on the other five propositions that
I have argued, but if they all fail, and I cannot see how they can, I
rest my case on that rock alone, on the sixth proposition in my
brief—innocent or guilty, right or wrong, foolish or wise men—these men
ought not now to be sentenced to death for this crime so long as they
have the right to say, “The government of this great country put spies
in my cell, planned to put spies in my wife’s house, they put spies on
my friends, took money that they were collecting to defend me, put it in
their own pocket and joked about it and said they don’t believe I am
guilty but will help convict me, because they could not get enough
evidence to deport me under the laws of Congress, and were willing as
one of them continually said to adopt the method of killing me for
murder as one way to get rid of me.””
Ranney’s handling of the case has been pretty perfunctory throughout, he
has contented himself with trying to destroy the Court’s opinion of
Madeiros’ veracity. A criminal is only to be believed when he speaks to
his own detriment. He presents affidavits of the Morelli’s and their
friends denying that they had ever heard of Madeiros, tries to imply
that Letherman and Weyand were fired from the government employ and had
no right to betray the secrets of their department. He knows that he
does not need to make much effort. He is strong in the inertia of the
courts. The defence will have to exert six times the energy of the
prosecution to overturn the dead weighty block of six other motions
denied.
Thompson comes back at him with a phrase worthy of Patrick Henry.
... “And I will say to your honor that a government that has come to
honor its own secrets more than the lives of its citizens has become a
tyranny whether you call it a republic or monarchy or anything else.”
Then the dry, crackling, careful voice of Judge Thayer and the hearing
is adjourned.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye, all who have had business before the
honorable the justice of the superior court of the southeastern district
of Massachusetts will now disperse. The court is adjourned without day.
God Save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The Court refused to grant a new trial. The Court has decided that Sacco
and Vanzetti must die.
God Save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
III
THE RED DELIRIUM
How is all this possible? Why were these men ever convicted in the first
place? From the calm of the year of our Lord 1926 it’s pretty hard to
remember the delirious year 1920.
On June 3rd 1919 a bomb exploded outside the Washington house of
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. In the previous months various
people had received bombs through the mail, one of them blowing off the
two hands of the unfortunate housemaid who undid the package. No one,
and least of all the federal detectives ever seems to have discovered
who committed these outrages or why they were committed. But their
result was to put a scare into every public official in the country, and
particularly into Attorney General Palmer. No one knew where the
lightning would strike next. The signing of peace had left the carefully
stirred up hatred of the war years unsatisfied. It was easy for people
who knew what they were doing to turn the terrors of government
officials and the unanalyzed feeling of distrust of foreigners of the
average man into a great crusade of hate against reds, radicals,
dissenters of all sorts. The Department of Justice, backed by the press,
frenziedly acclaimed by the man on the street, invented an immanent
revolution. All the horrors of Russian Bolshevism were about to be
enacted on our peaceful shores. That fall the roundup began. Every man
had his ear to his neighbor’s keyhole. This first crusade culminated in
the sailing of the Buford, the “soviet ark” loaded with alien
“anarchists” and in the preparation of the famous list of eighty
thousand radicals who were to be gotten out of the way.
But that was not enough to satisfy the desire for victims of the country
at large, and the greed of the detectives and anti-labor operatives of
different sorts who were making a fat living off the Department of
Justice. So the January raids were planned.
The following paragraph from Louis F. Post’s book shows that he, seeing
the thing from the inside as Assistant Secretary of Labor, felt that the
hysteria was being pretty consciously directed:
“The whole red crusade seems to have been saturated with ‘labor spy’
interests—the interests, that is, of private detective agencies which,
in the secret service of masterful corporations, were engaged in
generating and intensifying industrial suspicions and hatreds. It was
under these influences, apparently, that the appropriations authorized
by Congress “for the detection and prosecution of crimes” exclusively,
were in part diverted to the rounding-up of aliens, not as criminals
but as the possible subjects for administrative deportation.”
The January raids were aimed at the “Communists.”
“Hardly had the year nineteen-twenty opened” says the former Assistant
Secretary of Labor, “when the Department of Justice entered upon the
red crusade for which its raiding of the preceding November had been a
tryout. Numerously recruited for the occasion from roughneck groups of
the strikebreaking variety and actively supported by local police
authorities, the detective auxiliary of the Department of Justice
spent the night of the second day in January at raiding lawful
assemblages in more than thirty cities and towns of the United
States—thirty-three being the number officially reported. Their object
was wholesale arrests in furtherance of the plans already outlined for
mass deportations of alien members of the Communist and the
Communist-Labor parties. The approximate number of arrests officially
reported was 2,500.”
The details can be read in the pamphlet on _Illegal Practices of the
Department of Justice_ prepared in May of the same year by a committee
of twelve well-known lawyers.
Here is the preface to that pamphlet: