For more than six months we, the undersigned lawyers, whose sworn duty
it is to uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States, have
seen with growing apprehension the continued violation of that
Constitution and breaking of those Laws by the Department of Justice
of the United States government.
Under the guise of a campaign for the suppression of radical
activities, the office of the Attorney General, acting by its local
agents throughout the country, and giving express instructions from
Washington, has committed continual illegal acts. Wholesale arrests
both of aliens and citizens have been made without warrant or any
process of law; men and women have been jailed and held _incomunicado_
without access of friends or counsel; homes have been entered without
search warrant and property seized and removed; other property has
been wantonly destroyed; workingmen and workingwomen suspected of
radical views have been shamefully abused and maltreated. Agents of
the Department of Justice have been introduced into radical
organizations for the purpose of informing upon their members or
inciting them to activities; these agents have even been instructed
from Washington to arrange meetings upon certain dates for the express
object of facilitating wholesale raids and arrests. In support of
these illegal acts, and to create sentiment in its favor, the
Department of Justice has also constituted itself a propaganda bureau,
and has sent to newspapers and magazines of this country quantities of
material designed to excite public opinion against radicals, all at
the expense of the government and outside the scope of the Attorney
General’s duties.
We make no argument in favor of any radical doctrine as such, whether
Socialist, Communist or Anarchist. No one of us belongs to any of
these schools of thought. Nor do we now raise any question as to the
Constitutional protection of free speech and a free press. We are
concerned solely with bringing to the attention of the American people
the utterly illegal acts which have been committed by those charged
with the highest duty of enforcing the laws—acts which have caused
widespread suffering and unrest, have struck at the foundation of
American free institutions, and have brought the name of our country
into disrepute.
These acts may be grouped under the following heads:
(1) _Cruel and Unusual Punishments_:
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides:
“Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed,
nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
Punishments of the utmost cruelty, and therefore unthinkable in
America, have become usual. Great numbers of persons arrested, both
aliens and citizens, have been threatened, beaten with blackjacks, or
actually tortured * * *
(2) _Arrests without Warrant_:
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution provides:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon
probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly
describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be
seized.”
Many hundreds of citizens and aliens alike have been arrested in
wholesale raids, without warrants or pretense of warrants. They have
then either been released, or have been detained in police stations or
jails for indefinite lengths of time while warrants were being applied
for. This practice of making mass raids and mass arrests without
warrant has resulted directly from the instructions, both written and
oral, issued by the Department of Justice at Washington.
(3) _Unreasonable Searches and Seizures_:
The Fourth Amendment has been quoted above.
In countless cases agents of the Department of Justice have entered
the homes, offices, or gathering places of persons suspected of
radical affiliations, and, without pretense of any search warrant,
have seized and removed property belonging to them for use by the
Department of Justice. In many of these raids property which could not
be removed or was not useful to the Department, was intentionally
smashed and destroyed.
(4) _Provocative Agents_:
We do not question the right of the Department of Justice to use its
agents in the Bureau of Investigation to ascertain when the law is
being violated. But the American people have never tolerated the use
of undercover provocative agents or “agents provocateurs,” such as
have been familiar in old Russia or Spain. Such agents have been
introduced by the Department of Justice into the radical movements,
have reached positions of influence therein, have occupied themselves
with informing upon or instigating acts which might be declared
criminal, and at the express direction of Washington have brought
about meetings of radicals in order to make possible wholesale arrests
at such meetings.
(5) _Compelling Persons to be Witnesses against Themselves_:
The Fifth Amendment provides as follows:
“No person * * * shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a
witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law.”
It has been the practice of the Department of Justice and its agents,
after making illegal arrests without warrant, to question and to force
admission from him by terrorism, which admissions were subsequently to
be used against him in deportation proceedings.
(6) _Propaganda by the Department of Justice_:
The legal functions of the Attorney General are: to advise the
Government on questions of law, and to prosecute persons who have
violated federal statutes. For the Attorney General to go into the
field of propaganda against radicals is a deliberate misuse of his
office and a deliberate squandering of funds entrusted to him by
Congress. * * *
Since these illegal acts have been committed by the highest legal
powers in the United States, there is no final appeal from them except
to the conscience and condemnation of the American people. American
institutions have not in fact been protected by the Attorney General’s
ruthless suppression. On the contrary these institutions have been
seriously undermined, and revolutionary unrest has been vastly
intensified. No organizations of radicals acting through propaganda
over the last six months could have created as much revolutionary
sentiment in America as has been created by the acts of the Department
of Justice itself.
Even were one to admit that there existed any serious “Red menace”
before the Attorney General started his “unflinching war” against it,
his campaign has been singularly fruitless. Out of the many thousands
suspected by the Attorney General (he had already listed 60,000 by
name and history on November 14, 1919, aliens and citizens) what do
the figures show of net results? Prior to January 1, 1920, there were
actually deported 263 persons. Since January 1 there have been
actually deported 18 persons. Since January 1 there have been ordered
deported an additional 529 persons and warrants for 1,547 have been
cancelled (after full hearings and consideration of the evidence) by
Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis F. Post, to whose courageous
re-establishment of American Constitutional Law in deportation
proceedings are due the attacks that have been made upon him. The
Attorney General has consequently got rid of 810 alien suspects,
which, on his own showing, leaves him at least 59,160 persons (aliens
and citizens) still to cope with.
It has always been the proud boast of America that this is a
government of laws and not of men. Our Constitution and laws have been
based on the simple elements of human nature. Free men cannot be
driven and repressed; they must be led. Free men respect justice and
follow truth, but arbitrary power they will oppose until the end of
time. There is no danger of revolution so great as that created by
suppression, by ruthlessness, and by deliberate violation of the
simple rules of American law and American decency.
It is a fallacy to suppose that, any more than in the past, any
servant of the people can safely arrogate to himself unlimited
authority. To proceed upon such a supposition is to deny the
fundamental American theory of the consent of the governed. Here is no
question of a vague and threatened menace, but a present assault upon
the most sacred principles of our Constitutional liberty.
_The foregoing report has been prepared May, 1920, under the auspices
of the National Popular Government League, Washington, D. C._
R. G. BROWN, Memphis, Tenn.
ZECHERIAH CHAFEE, JR., Cambridge, Mass.
FELIX FRANKFURTER, Cambridge, Mass.
ERNST FREUND, Chicago, Ill.
SWINBURNE HALE, New York City
FRANCIS FISHER KANE, Philadelphia, Pa.
ALFRED S. NILES, Baltimore, Md.
ROSCOE POUND, Cambridge, Mass.
JACKSON H. RALSTON, Washington, D. C.
DAVID WALLERSTEIN, Philadelphia, Pa.
FRANK P. WALSH, New York City.
TYRRELL WILLIAMS, St. Louis, Mo.
The raids were particularly intense and violent in the industrial towns
round Boston and culminated in the captives being driven through the
streets of Boston chained together in fours. There were raids in Boston,
Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield,
Chicopee Falls, Lowell, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Lawrence and Haverhill.
Unfortunate people after being beaten up and put through the third
degree were concentrated at Deer Island under the conditions that have
become public through U. S. Circuit Judge Anderson’s decision on the
cases that came up before him.
Now it is this ring of industrial towns round Boston that furnish the
background of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. There is no doubt that the
American born public in these towns on the whole sympathizes with the
activities of the detectives. The region has been for many years one of
the most intense industrial battlegrounds in the country. People slept
safer in their beds at the thought of all these agitators, bombsters,
garlic-smelling wops, and unwashed Russians being under lock and key at
Deer Island.
Eastern Massachusetts has a threefold population living largely from
manufacturing of textiles and shoes and other leather goods. With the
decline of shipping and farming the old simonpure New England stock,
Congregationalist in faith, Republican in politics, has been pretty well
snowed under by the immigration first of Irish Catholics, congenital
Democrats and readers of Hearst papers, now assimilated and respectable,
and then of Italians, Poles, Slovaks, transplanted European peasants
tenderly known to newspaper readers as the scum of the Mediterranean or
the scum of Central Europe. There’s no love lost between the first two
classes, but they unite on the question of wops, guineas, dagoes. The
January raids, the attitude of press and pulpit, howling about
atrocities, civilization (which usually means bank accounts) endangered,
women nationalized, put the average right-thinking citizen into such a
state of mind that whenever he smelt garlic on a man’s breath he walked
past quickly for fear of being knifed. A roomful of people talking a
foreign language was most certainly a conspiracy to overturn the
Government. Read over the articles in the _Boston Transcript_ on the
soviet conspiracy at that time and you will see what kind of stuff was
being ladled out even to the intelligent highbrow section of the
entrenched classes.
It was into this atmosphere of rancor and suspicion, fear of holdups and
social overturn that burst the scare headlines of the South Braintree
murders. Pent-up hatred found an outlet when the police in Brockton
arrested Sacco and Vanzetti, wops who spoke broken English, anarchists
who believed neither in the Pope nor in the Puritan God, slackers and
agitators, charged with a peculiarly brutal and impudent crime. Since
that moment these people have had a focus for their bitter hatred of the
new, young, vigorous, unfamiliar forces that are relentlessly sweeping
them on to the shelf. The people of Norfolk county and of all
Massachusetts decided they wanted these men to die.
Meanwhile the red delirium over the rest of the country had slackened.
Something had happened that had made many people pause and think.
About dawn on May 3rd the body of Andrea Salsedo, an anarchist printer,
was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row in New York. He had jumped
or been thrown from the offices of the Department of Justice on the
fourteenth floor of the Park Row building, where he and his friend Elia
had been secretly imprisoned for eight weeks. Evidently they had
continually tortured him during that time; Mr. Palmer’s detectives were
“investigating” anarchist activity. A note had been smuggled out
somehow, and a few days before Vanzetti had been in New York as the
delegate of an Italian group to try to get the two men out on bail.
After Salsedo’s death Elia was hurried over to Ellis Island and
deported. He died in Italy. But from that time on the holy enthusiasm
for red-baiting subsided. That tortured body found dead and bleeding in
one of the most central and public spots in New York shocked men back
into their senses.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in the trolley car in Brockton the
night of May 5th, Sacco had in his pocket the draft of a poster
announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder
of their comrade. They were going about warning the other members of
their group to hide all incriminating evidence in the way of “radical”
books and papers so that, in the new raid that they had been tipped off
to expect, they should not be arrested and meet the fate of Salsedo.
Don’t forget that people had been arrested and beaten up for
distributing the Declaration of Independence.
IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FRAME-UPS
But why were these men held as murderers and highwaymen and not as
anarchists and advocates of the working people?
It was a frameup.
That does not _necessarily_ mean that any set of government and
employing class detectives deliberately planned to fasten the crime of
murder on Sacco and Vanzetti. Though in this case it is almost certain
that they did.
The frameup is an unconscious (occasionally semiconscious) mechanism. An
unconscious mechanism is a kink in the mind that makes people do
something without knowing why they do it, and often without knowing that
they are doing it. It is the sub-rational act of a group, serving in
this case, through a series of pointed unintentions, the ends of a
governing class.
Among a people that does not recognize or rather does not admit the
force and danger of ideas it is impossible to prosecute the holder of
unpopular ideas directly. Also there is a smouldering tradition of
freedom that makes those who do it feel guilty. After all everyone
learnt the Declaration of Independence and _Give me Liberty or Give me
Death_ in school, and however perfunctory the words have become they
have left a faint infantile impression on the minds of most of us. Hence
the characteristic American weapon of the frameup. If a cop wants to
arrest a man he suspects of selling dope he plants a gun on him and
arrests him under the Sullivan Law. If a man is organizing a strike in a
dangerously lively way you try to frame him under the Mann Act or else
you get hold of a woman to sue him for breach of promise. If a
representative votes against war you have him arrested for breach of
decency in an automobile on a Virginia roadside. If two Italians are
spreading anarchist propaganda, you hold them for murder.
The frameup is a process that you can’t help feeling, but like most
unconscious processes it’s very hard to trace step by step. Half the
agents in such a process don’t really know what they are doing. Hence
the average moderately fairminded newspaper reader who never has had
personal experience of a frameup in action is flabbergasted when you
tell him that such and such a man who is being prosecuted for
wifebeating is really being prosecuted because he knows the origin of
certain bonds in a District Attorney’s safe.
In this neatly swept courtroom in Dedham with everything so varnished
and genteel it is hardly possible to think of such a thing as a frameup,
and yet.... Under these elms, in these white oldtime houses of Dedham,
in front of these pious Georgian doorways.... The court has for the
seventh time affirmed its will to send two innocent men to the electric
chair.
V
THE OUTLAW CREED
But what is this criminal garlic-smelling creed that the people of
Massachusetts will not face openly?
For half a century Anarchy has been the bogy of American schoolmasters,
policemen, old maids, and small town mayors. About the time of the
assassination of McKinley a picture was formed in the public mind of the
anarchist; red-handed, unwashed foreigner whom nobody could understand,
sticks of dynamite in his pocket and bomb in the paper parcel under his
arm, redeyed housewrecker waiting only for the opportunity to bite the
hand that fed him. Since the Russian Revolution the picture has merged a
little with that of the sneaking, slinking, communist Jew, enviously
undermining Prosperity and Decency through secret organizations ruled
from Moscow.
Gradually among liberals and intelligent people generally certain phases
of anarchism have meanwhile been reluctantly admitted into respectable
conversation under the phrase ‘philosophical anarchist’, which means an
anarchist who shaves daily, has good manners and is guaranteed not to
act on his beliefs. Certain people of the best society, such as
Kropotkin and Tolstoy, princes both, having through their anarchy made
themselves important figures in European thought and literature, it was
impossible to exclude them longer from the pale of decency.
What is this outlaw creed?
When Christianity flourished in the Mediterranean basin, slave and
emperor had the hope of the immediate coming of Christ’s kingdom, the
golden Jerusalem that would appear on earth to put an end to the tears
and aches of the faithful. After the first millennium, the City of God,
despaired of on earth, took its permanent place in the cloudy firmament
with the Virgin Mary at the apex of the feudal pyramid. With the decay
of feudalism and the coming of the kingdoms of this world the church
became more and more the instrument of the governing orders. Undermined
by the eighteenth century, overthrown by the French revolution, the
church was restored by the great reaction as the strongest bulwark of
Privilege. But in the tough memories of peasants and fishermen—their
sons worked in factories—there remained a faint trace of the vanished
brightness of the City of God. All our citydwelling instinct and culture
has been handed down to us from these countless urban generations,
Cretans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Latins of the Mediterranean basin,
Italians of the hilltowns. It is natural that the dwellers on those
scraggy hills in sight of that always blue sea should have kept alight
in their hearts the perfect city, where the strong did not oppress the
weak, where every man lived by his own work at peace with his neighbors,
the white Commune where man could reach his full height free from the
old snarling obsessions of god and master.
It is this inner picture that is the core of feeling behind all
anarchist theory and doctrine. Many Italians planted the perfect city of
their imagination in America. When they came to this country they either
killed the perfect city in their hearts and submitted to the system of
dawg eat dawg or else they found themselves anarchists. There have been
terrorists among them, as in every other oppressed and despised sect
since the world began. Good people generally have contended that
anarchism and terrorism were the same thing, a silly and usually
malicious error much fostered by private detectives and the police
bomb-squads.
An anarchist workman who works for the organization of his fellow
workmen is a man who costs the factory owners money; thereby he is a
bomb-thrower and possible murderer in the minds of the majority of
American employers.
In his charge to the jury in the Plymouth trial Judge Thayer definitely
said that the crime of highway robbery was consistent with Vanzetti’s
ideals as a radical.
Yet under the conflict between employer and workman, and the racial
misunderstanding, in themselves material enough for the creation of a
frameup, might there not be a deeper bitterness? The people of
Massachusetts centuries ago suffered and hoped terribly for the City of
God. This little white courthouse town of Dedham, neat and exquisite
under its elms, is the symbol of a withered hope, mortgaged at six per
cent to the kingdoms of this world. It is natural that New Englanders,
who feel in themselves a lingering of the passionate barbed desire of
perfection of their ancestors, should hate with particular bitterness,
anarchists, votaries of the Perfect Commune on earth. The irrational
features of this case of attempted communal murder can only be explained
by a bitterness so deep that it has been forgotten by the very people it
moves most fervidly.
VI
FREE MEN
It was about dawn on Monday, May 3rd, 1920, that the body of Andrea
Salsedo was found smashed on the pavement of Park Row. At that time
Bartolomeo Vanzetti was peddling fish in the pleasant little Italian and
Portuguese town of North Plymouth. He was planning to go into fishing
himself in partnership with a man who owned some dories. Early mornings,
pushing his cart up and down the long main street, ringing his bell,
chatting with housewives in Piedmontese, Tuscan, pidgin English, he
worried about the raids, the imprisonment of comrades, the lethargy of
the working people. He was an anarchist, after the school of Galleani.
Between the houses he could see the gleaming stretch of Plymouth Bay,
the sandy islands beyond, the white dories at anchor. About three
hundred years before, men from the west of England had first sailed into
the grey shimmering bay that smelt of woods and wild grape, looking for
something; liberty ... freedom to worship God in their own manner ...
space to breathe. Thinking of these things, worrying as he pushed the
little cart loaded with eels, haddock, cod, halibut, swordfish, Vanzetti
spent his mornings making change, weighing out fish, joking with the
housewives. It was better than working at the great cordage works that
own North Plymouth. Some years before he had tried to organize a strike
there and been blacklisted. The officials and detectives at the Plymouth
Cordage Works, the largest cordage works in the world, thought of him as
a Red, a slacker and troublemaker.
His life up to his settling in Plymouth you can read in his own words in
these extracts from the _Story of a Proletarian Life_ that he wrote in
Charlestown jail:
My life cannot claim the dignity of an autobiography. Nameless, in the
crowd of nameless ones, I have merely caught and reflected a little of
the light from that dynamic thought or ideal which is drawing humanity
towards better destinies.
I was born on June 11, 1888, of G. Battista Vanzetti and Giovanna
Vanzetti, in Villafalletto, province of Cuneo, in Piedmont. The town,
which rises on the right bank of the Magra, in the shadows of a
beautiful chain of hills, is primarily an agricultural community. Here
I lived until the age of thirteen in the bosom of my family.
I attended the local schools and loved study. My earliest memories are
of prizes won in school examinations, including a second prize in the
religious catechism. My father was undecided whether to let me
prosecute studies or to apprentice me to some artisan. One day he read
in the _Gazzetta del Popolo_ that in Turin forty-two lawyers had
applied for a position paying 35 lire monthly. The news item proved
decisive in my boyhood, for it left my father determined that I should
learn a trade and become a shop-keeper.
And so in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor Conino, who ran a
pastry shop in the city of Cuneo, and left me there to taste, for the
first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor. I worked for about
twenty months there—from seven o’clock each morning until ten at
night, every day, except for a three-hour vacation twice a month. From
Cuneo I went to Cavour and found myself installed in the bakery of
Signor Goitre, a place that I kept for three years. Conditions were no
better than in Cuneo, except that the fortnightly free period was of
five hours duration.
I did not like the trade, but I stuck to it to please my father and
because I did not know what else to choose. In 1905 I abandoned Cavour
for Turin in the hope of locating work in the big city. Failing in
this hope, I went on further to Courgne where I remained working six
months. Then back to Turin, on a job as caramel-maker.
In Turin, in February of 1907, I fell seriously ill. I was in great
pain, confined indoors, deprived of air and sun and joy, like a “sad
twilight flower.” But news of my plight reached the family and my
father came from Villafalletto to take me back to my birthplace. At
home, he told me, I would be cared for by my mother, my good, my
best-beloved mother.
Science did not avail, nor love. After three months of brutal illness
she breathed her last in my arms. She died without hearing me weep. It
was I who laid her in her coffin; I who accompanied her to the final
resting place; I who threw the first handful of earth over her bier.
And it was right that I should do so, for I was burying part of
myself.... The void left has never been filled.
This desperate state of mind decided me to abandon Italy for America.
On June 9, 1908, I left my dear ones. My sorrow was so great at the
parting that I kissed my relatives and strained them to my bosom
without being able to speak. My father, too, was speechless in his
profound sorrow, and my sisters wept as they did when my mother died.
My going had excited interest in the village and the neighbors crowded
the house, each with a word of hope, a blessing, a tear. In a crowd
they followed me far out on the road, as if a townsman were being
exiled forever.
After a two-day railway ride across France and more than seven days on
the ocean, I arrived in the Promised Land. New York loomed on the
horizon in all its grandness and illusion of happiness. I strained my
eyes from the steerage deck, trying to see through this mass of
masonry that was at once inviting and threatening to the huddled men
and women in the third class.
In the immigration station I had my first great surprise. I saw the
steerage passengers handled by the officials like so many animals. Not
a word of kindness, of encouragement, to lighten the burden of fears
that rests heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores. Hope,
which lured these immigrants to the new land, withers under the touch
of harsh officials. Little children who should be alert with
expectancy, cling instead to their mothers’ skirts, weeping with
fright. Such is the unfriendly spirit that exists in the immigration
barracks.
How well I remember standing at the Battery, in lower New York, upon
my arrival, alone, with a few poor belongings in the way of clothes,
and very little money. Until yesterday I was among folks who
understood me. This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land where
my language meant little more to the native (so far as meaning is
concerned) than the pitiful noises of a dumb animal. Where was I to
go? What was I to do? Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled
by and did not answer. The automobiles and the trolleys sped by,
heedless of me.
I had note of one address, and thither a fellow-passenger conducted
me. It was the house of a countryman of mine, on —— street, near
Seventh Avenue. I remained there a while, but it became all too
evident that there was no room for me in his house, which was
overstocked with human beings, like all workingmen’s houses. In deep
melancholy I left the place towards eight in the evening to look for a
place to sleep. I retraced my steps to the Battery, where I took a bed
for the night in a suspicious-looking establishment, the best I could
afford. Three days after my arrival, the compatriot already mentioned,
who was head cook in a rich club on West —— street overlooking the
Hudson River, found me a post in his kitchen as dishwasher. I worked
there three months. The hours were long; the garret where we slept was
suffocatingly hot; and the vermin did not permit me to close an eye.
Almost every night I sought escape in the park.
Leaving this place, I found the same kind of employment in the Mouquin
Restaurant. What the conditions there are at present I do not know.
But at that time, thirteen years ago, the pantry was horrible. There
was not a single window in it. When the electric light for some reason
was out, it was totally dark, so that one couldn’t move without
running into things. The vapor of the boiling water where the plates,
pans and silver were washed formed great drops of water on the
ceiling, took up all the dust and grime there, then fell slowly one by
one upon my head, as I worked below. During working hours the heat was
terrific. The table leavings amassed in barrels near the pantry gave
out nauseating exhalations. The sinks had no direct sewerage
connection. Instead, the water was permitted to overrun to the floor.
In the center of the room there was a drain. Every night the pipe was
clogged and the greasy water rose higher and higher and we trudged in
the slime.
We worked twelve hours one day and fourteen the next, with five hours
off every Sunday. Damp food hardly fit for dogs and five or six
dollars a week was the pay. After eight months I left the place for
fear of contracting consumption.
That was a sad year. What toiler does not remember it? The poor slept
outdoors and rummaged the garbage barrels to find a cabbage leaf or a
rotten potato. For three months I searched New York, its length and
its breadth, without finding work. One morning, in an employment
agency, I met a young man more forlorn and unfortunate than I. He had
gone without food the day before and was still fasting. I took him to
a restaurant, investing almost all that remained to me of my savings
in a meal which he ate with wolfish voracity. His hunger stilled, my
new friend declared that it was stupid to remain in New York. If he
had the money, he said, he would go to the country, where there was
more chance of work, without counting the pure air and the sun which
could be had for nothing. With the money remaining in my possession we
took the steamboat for Hartford, Connecticut, the same day.
From Worcester I transferred to Plymouth (that was about seven years
ago), which remained my home until the time I was arrested. I learned
to look upon the place with a real affection, because as time went on
it held more and more of the people dear to my heart, the folks I
boarded with, the men who worked by my side, the women who later
bought the wares I had to offer as a peddler.
In passing, let me say how gratifying it is to realize that my
compatriots in Plymouth reciprocate the love I feel for them. Not only
have they supported my defense—money is a slight thing after all—but
they have expressed to me directly and indirectly their faith in my
innocence. Those who rallied around my good friends of the defense
committee, were not only workers, but businessmen who knew me; not
only Italians, but Jews, Poles, Greeks and Americans.
Well, I worked in the Stone establishment for more than a year, and
then for the Cordage Company for about eighteen months. My active
participation in the Plymouth cordage strike made it certain that I
could never get a job there.... As a matter of fact, because of my
more frequent appearance on the speaker’s platform in working class
groups of every kind, it became increasingly difficult to get work
anywhere. So far as certain factories were concerned I was definitely
“blacklisted.” Yet, every one of my many employers could testify that
I was an industrious, dependable workman, that my chief fault was in
trying so hard to bring a little light of understanding into the dark
lives of my fellow workers. For some time I did manual work of the
hardest kind in the construction undertakings of Sampson & Douland,
for the city. I can almost say that I have participated in all the
principal public works in Plymouth. Almost any Italian in the town or
any of my foremen of my various jobs can attest my industry and
modesty of life during this period. I was deeply interested by this
time in the things of the intellect, in the great hope that animates
me even here in the dark cell of a prison while I await death for a
crime I did not commit.
My health was not good. The years of toil and the more terrible
periods of unemployment had robbed me of much of my original vitality.
I was casting about for some salutary means of eking out my
livelihood. About eight months before my arrest a friend of mine who
was planning to return to the home country said to me: “Why don’t you
buy my cart, my knives, my scales, and go to selling fish instead of
remaining under the yoke of the bosses?” I grasped the opportunity,
and so became a fish-vender, largely out of love for independence.
At that time, 1919, the desire to see once more my dear ones at home,
the nostalgia for my native land had entered my heart. My father, who
never wrote a letter without inviting me home, insisted more than
ever, and my good sister Luigia joined in his pleas. Business was none
too fat, but I worked like a beast of burden, without halt or stay,
day after day.
December 24, the day before Christmas, was the last day I sold fish
that year. A brisk day of business I had, since all Italians buy eels
that day for the Christmas Eve feasts. Readers may recall that it was
a bitter-cold Christmas, and the harsh weather did not let up after
the holidays; and pushing a cart along is not warming work. I went for
a short period to more vigorous, even if no less freezing work. I got
a job a few days after Christmas cutting ice for Mr. Petersani. One
day, when he hadn’t enough to go round, I shovelled coal for the
Electric House. When the ice job was finished I got employment with
Mr. Howland, ditch-digging, until a snow storm made me a man of
leisure again. Not for longer than a few hours. I hired myself out to
the town, cleaning the streets of the snow, and this work done, I
helped clean the snow from the railroad tracks. Then I was taken on
again by the Sampson Construction people who were laying a water main
for the Puritan Woolen Company. I stayed on the job until it was
finished.
Again I found no job. The railroad strike difficulties had cut off the
cement supply, so that there was no more construction work going on. I
went back to my fish-selling, when I could get none, I dug for clams,
but the profit on these was lilliputian, the expenses being so high
that they left no margin. In April I reached an agreement with a
fisherman for a partnership. It never materialized, because on May 5,
while I was preparing a mass meeting to protest against the death of
Salsedo at the hands of the Department of Justice, I was arrested. My
good friend and comrade Nicola Sacco was with me.
“Another deportation case,” we said to one another.
At the same time Nicola Sacco was living in Stoughton, working an edging
machine at the Three K’s shoe factory, where star workmen sometimes make
as high as eighty or ninety dollars a week. He had a pretty wife and a
little son named Dante. There was another baby coming. He lived in a
bungalow belonging to his employer, Michael Kelley. The house adjoined
Kelley’s own house and the men were friends. Often Kelley advised him to
lay off this anarchist stuff. There was no money in it. It was dangerous
the way people felt nowadays. Sacco was a clever young fellow and could
soon get to be a prosperous citizen, maybe own a factory of his own some
day, live by other men’s work. But Sacco working in his garden in the
early morning before the whistles blew, hilling beans, picking off
potatobugs, letting grains of corn slip by threes or fours through his
fingers into the finely worked earth, worried about things. He was an
anarchist. He loved the earth and people, he wanted them to walk
straight over the free hills, not to stagger bowed under the ordained
machinery of industry; he worried mornings working in his garden at the
lethargy of the working people. It was not enough that he was happy and
had fifteen hundred or more dollars in the bank for a trip home to
Italy.
Two men sitting on a bench in the bright birdcage of Dedham jail. When
he wants to, one of them will get up and go out, walk along the street,
turn his nose into the wind, look up at the sky and clouds, board
streetcars, buy train tickets. The other will go back to his cell.
Twentythree hours a day in a cell for a thousand days, for three years,
for six years, now the seventh year is tediously unreeling.... Sacco in
prisonclothes, with the prison pallor under the black hair on his head,
with the prison strain under his eyes, in grey baggy prison clothes,
telling about his life in the unimaginable days when he was free. A bell
rings; the prisoners file by to the messroom, putty faces, slouched
bodies in baggy grey denim, their hands tucked under their folded
arms.... Sacco was born in Torremaggiore in the province of Foggia in
the sunny southern foothills of the Appenines; his father was a
substantial Italian peasant who married the daughter of an oil and wine
merchant. His father belonged to the republican club of the town, his
older brother Sabino was a socialist. He went to school and worked in
his father’s vineyards and helped with the olive oil business. His
oldest brother Nicola (whose name he afterwards took; when a child he
was known as Ferdinando) died, Sabino was conscripted into the army;
that left him the head of the family. He was often sent round the
country in a cart to make payments for his father, to pay off workmen or
buy supplies. He was the trusted boy of the family. But better than
anything he liked machines. Summers when there was nothing that needed
doing in the vineyard he worked stoking the big steam threshing machine
that threshed all the wheat of the region. Better than school or farming
or working for his father he liked working round engines. He dreamed
about going to America, the land of engines.
When he was seventeen he set out with his brother Sabino; they were
going to make their fortunes in the land of machines and dollars. In
April 1908 they landed in Boston. Sacco had good luck. He worked hard.
He hadn’t been in this country two weeks before he had a job as waterboy
with a road gang near Milford. He liked it especially when the engineer
let him help with the steam roller. He liked to stand beside the hot
wheezing petulant engine, stoking it with coal, squirting oil out of an
oilcan. But there wasn’t much money in it; winter came on. He got a job
in the Hopedale mills trimming the slag off pigiron. He worked there a
year. By that time he realized that he ought to learn a definite trade.
An unskilled laborer was a mat for everybody to wipe their feet on. He
paid fifty dollars to a man to teach him to run an edging machine. A
friend of his worked as an edger in a shoefactory and made good money.
That way he would have a machine all to himself.
About that time his brother Sabino had gone back to Italy, to the oil
and wine business; he had had enough of America. Nicola wanted to stay
on some more. First he got a job in a shoefactory in Webster, but then
he went back to Milford where he worked as an edger till 1917. If he
hadn’t met his wife he would have gone home. At that time he was a
socialist interested in _Il Proletario_, a paper that Giovannitti
edited, fond of acting plays with titles like _Senza Padrone_, _Tempeste
Sociali_. It was at a dance he had gotten up as a benefit for an old
accordeon player who was paralyzed, that he first met Rosa his wife. She
won a box of candy in the raffle. She was from the north of Italy and
had the dark auburn hair Lombard women are famous for. They married and
were very happy; a son was born to them whom they named Dante.
Towards 1913 Sacco began to go around to an anarchist club, the Circolo
di Studi Sociali. He found the men there more intelligent, more anxious
to read, more willing to work for the education of their fellow workers.
In 1916 the group held manifestations of sympathy and collected money to
help the strike Carlo Tresca was running in Minnesota. The Milford
police forbade the meetings and arrested the speakers. Sacco was among
them. They were convicted in Milford for disturbing the peace, but
discharged before a superior court in Worcester.
Those were exciting years, full of the rumblings of revolution. The
successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviki in Russia made it seem
that the war would end in universal revolution. Then Mr. Wilson began
his great crusade. In May 1917, with several friends, Sacco went south
to Mexico to avoid registering for the draft. It was on the train he
first met Vanzetti.
When he came back from Mexico three months later he worked in a candy
factory in Cambridge, then in East Boston and at last moved out to
Stoughton, where he was a trusted man in the Three K’s Factory of the
Kelleys.
Sacco before his arrest was unusually powerfully built, able to do two
men’s work. In prison he was able to stand thirtyone days of hunger
strike before he broke down and had to be taken to the hospital. In
prison he has learned to speak and write English, has read many books,
for the first time in his life has been thrown with nativeborn
Americans. They are so hard and brittle. They don’t fit into the bright
clear heartfelt philosophy of Latin anarchism. These are the people who
coolly want him to die in the electric chair. He can’t understand them.
When his head was cool he’s never wanted anyone to die. Judge Thayer and
the prosecution he thinks of as instruments of a machine.
VII
SLACKERS, REDS
Three years before Sacco and Vanzetti had both of them had their
convictions put to the test. In 1917, against the expressed votes of the
majority, Woodrow Wilson had allowed the United States to become
involved in the war with Germany. When the law was passed for compulsory
military service a registration day for citizens and aliens was
announced. Most young men submitted whatever their convictions were. A
few of those who were morally opposed to any war or to capitalist war
had the nerve to protest. Sacco and Vanzetti and some friends ran away
to Mexico. There, some thirty of them lived in a set of adobe houses.
Those who could get jobs worked. It was share and share alike.
Everything was held in common. There were in the community men of all
trades and conditions; bakers, butchers, tailors, shoemakers, cooks,
carpenters, waiters. Sacco got a job in a bakery and when the others
were hard up would take his pay in bread. Saturday nights he’d trudge
home to the community with a bag of fresh loaves of bread over his
shoulder. It was a momentary realization of the hope of anarchism. But
living was difficult in Mexico and they began to get letters from the
States telling that it was possible to avoid the draft, telling of high
wages. Little by little they filtred back across the border. Sacco and
Vanzetti went back to Massachusetts.
There was an Italian club that met Sunday evenings in a hall in Maverick
Square, East Boston, under the name of the Italian Naturalization Club.
Workmen from the surrounding industrial towns met to play bowls and
discuss social problems. There were anarchists, syndicalists, socialists
of various colors. The Russian revolution had fired them with new hopes.
The persecution of their comrades in various parts of America had made
them feel the need for mutual help. While far away across the world new
eras seemed to be flaring up into the sky, at home the great machine
they slaved for seemed more adamant, more unshakable than ever.
Everywhere aliens were being arrested, tortured, deported. To the war
heroes who had remained at home any foreigner seemed a potential
Bolshevik, a menace to the security of Old Glory and liberty bonds and
the bonus. When Elia and Salsedo were arrested in New York there was
great alarm among the Italian radicals around Boston. Vanzetti went down
to New York to try to hire a lawyer for the two men. There he heard many
uneasy rumors. The possession of any literature that might be
interpreted as subversive by ignorant and brutal agents of the
departments of Justice and Labor was dangerous. It was not that
deportation was so much to be feared, but the beating up and third
degree that preceded it.
On the evening of May 5th, Sacco and Vanzetti with the handbill on them
announcing a meeting of protest against what they considered the murder
of Salsedo, went by trolley from Stoughton to West Bridgewater to meet a
man named Boda who they thought could lend them a car. Very likely they
thought they were being trailed and had put revolvers in their pockets
out of some confused feeling of bravado. If the police pounced on them
at least they would not let themselves be tortured to death like
Salsedo. But they were afraid to use Boda’s car because it lacked a 1920
license plate and started back to Stoughton on the trolley, probably
very uneasy. When they were arrested as the trolley entered Brockton
they forgot all about their guns. They thought they were being arrested
as Reds in connection with the projected meeting. When they were
questioned at the police station their main care was not to implicate
any of their friends. They kept remembering the dead body of Salsedo,
smashed on the pavement of Park Row.
VIII
JAILBIRDS
The faces of men who have been a long time in jail have a peculiar
frozen look under the eyes. The face of a man who has been a long time
in jail never loses that tightness under the eyes. Sacco has been six
years in the county jail, always waiting, waiting for trial, waiting for
new evidence, waiting for motions to be argued, waiting for sentence,
waiting, waiting, waiting. The Dedham jail is a handsome structure, set
among lawns, screened by trees that wave new green leaves against the
robinsegg sky of June. In the warden’s office you can see your face in
the light brown varnish, you could eat eggs off the floor it is so
clean. Inside the main reception hall is airy, full of sunlight. The
bars are bright with reflected spring greens, a fresh peagreen light is
over everything. Through the bars you can see the waving trees and the
June clouds roaming the sky like cattle in an unfenced pasture. It’s a
preposterous complicated canary cage. Why aren’t the birds singing in
this green aviary? The warden politely shows you a seat and as you wait
you notice a smell, not green and airy this smell, a jaded heavy greasy
smell of slum, like the smell of army slum, but heavier, more hopeless.
Across the hall an old man is sitting in a chair, a heavy pearshaped
man, his hands limp at his sides, his eyes are closed, his sagged face
is like a bundle of wet newspapers. The warden and two men in black
stand over him, looking down at him helplessly.
At last Sacco has come out of his cell and sits beside me. Two men
sitting side by side on a bench in a green, bird cage. When he feels
like it one of them will get up and walk out, walk out into the sunny
June day. The other will go back to his cell to wait. He looks younger
than I had expected. His face has a waxy transparency like the face of a
man who’s been sick in bed for a long time; when he laughs his cheeks
flush a little. At length we manage both of us to laugh. It’s such a
preposterous position for a man to be in, like a man who doesn’t know
the game trying to play chess blindfolded. The real world has gone. We
have no more grasp of our world of rain and streets and trolleycars and
cucumbervines and girls and gardenplots. This is a world of phrases,
_prosecution, defence, evidence, motion, irrelevant, incompetent and
immaterial_. For six years this man has lived in the law, tied tighter
and tighter in the sticky filaments of law-words like a fly in a
spiderweb. And the wrong set of words means the Chair. All the moves in
the game are made for him, all he can do is sit helpless and wait,
fastening his hopes on one set of phrases after another. In all these
lawbooks, in all this terminology of clerks of the court and counsel for
the defence there is one move that will save him, out of a million that
will mean death. If only they make the right move, use the right words.
But by this time the nagging torment of hope has almost stopped, not
even the thought of his wife and children out there in the world,
unreachable, can torture him now. He is numb now, can laugh and look
quizzically at the ponderous machine that has caught and mangled him.
Now it hardly matters to him if they do manage to pull him out from
between the cogs, and the wrong set of words means the Chair.
The warden comes up to take down my name. “I hope your wife’s better,”
says Sacco. “Pretty poorly,” says the warden. Sacco shakes his head.
“Maybe she’ll get better soon, nice weather.” I have shaken his hand, my
feet have carried me to the door, past the baggy pearshaped man who is
still collapsed half deflated in the chair, closed crinkled eyelids
twitching. The warden looks into my face with a curious smile. “Leaving
us?” he asks. Outside in the neat streets the new green leaves are
swaying in the sunlight, birds sing, klaxons grunt, a trolleycar
screeches round a corner. Overhead the white June clouds wander in the
unfenced sky.
Going to the State Prison at Charlestown is more like going to Barnum
and Baileys. There’s a great scurry of guards, groups of people waiting
outside; inside a brass band is playing _Home Sweet Home_. When at
length you get let into the Big Show, you find a great many things
happening at once. There are rows of chairs where pairs of people sit
talking. Each pair is made up of a free man and a convict. In three
directions there are grey bars and tiers of cells. The band inside plays
bangingly “If Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot.” A short broadshouldered man
is sitting quiet through all the uproar, smiling a little under his big
drooping mustache. He has a domed, pale forehead and black eyes
surrounded by many little wrinkles. The serene modeling of his
cheek-bones and hollow cheeks makes you forget the prison look under his
eyes.
This is Vanzetti.
And for the last six years, three hundred and sixtyfive days a year,
yesterday, today, tomorrow, Sacco and Vanzetti wake up on their prison
pallets, eat prison food, have an hour of exercise and conversation a
day, sit in their cells puzzling about this technicality and that
technicality, pinning their hopes to their alibis, to the expert
testimony about the character of the barrel of Sacco’s gun, to Madeiros’
confession and Weeks’ corroboration, to action before the Supreme Court
of the United States, and day by day the props are dashed from under
their feet and they feel themselves being inexorably pushed towards the
Chair by the blind hatred of thousands of wellmeaning citizens, by the
superhuman, involved, stealthy, soulless mechanism of the law.
IX
THE PLYMOUTH TRIAL OF VANZETTI ALONE
“But Vanzetti had a criminal record,” they tell you, “he was serving a
jail sentence when he was brought up for trial with Sacco.”
This is the story of Vanzetti’s criminal record.
In 1914 Vanzetti had a job loading rope coils on freightcars with the
outside gang of the Plymouth Cordage. The Plymouth Cordage is the
largest in the world, and virtually owns Plymouth and the surrounding
towns where colonies of Italians and Portuguese worked (at that time for
a maximum of nine dollars a week) tending the spinning machines that
transform hemp shipped up from Yucatan into rope and binder twine. On
January 17, 1916, there was a big walkout, the first in the history of
the Cordage. Vanzetti was one of the organizers of the strike. After the
plant had been shut down for a month in the busiest season, the company
conceded a raise. Since then wages have risen to round twenty five a
week. Vanzetti was always in the front, picketing, making speeches. He
was the only employee who did not get his job back when the strike was
settled.
At the time of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti there was a general
impression that the gunmen in a Buick car who attempted to hold up a
paytruck of the L. Q. White company in Bridgewater on the morning of day
before Christmas 1919, were Italians and the same as those who had made
off with the South Braintree payroll.
It was impossible to implicate Sacco in that affair as he had been
working that day. Vanzetti was his own boss, so he could not give
himself a certificate of employment. He was taken over to Plymouth and
brought to trial under Judge Thayer in June, Mr. Katzmann prosecuting
the case for the state. It is very probable that the man hired to defend
Vanzetti deliberately gave away his client’s case. In any event he
showed criminal negligence in neglecting to file a bill of exceptions
and in refusing to allow Vanzetti to take the stand in his own defence.
This is what Vanzetti himself says about it in a letter to some friends
in Mexico:
“As for Mr. Vahey, he had asked me very little concerning my defence,
and, from after the preliminary hearing to the end of the trial, he
did not put to me a single new question about the case. On the
contrary, he began to promise me the electric chair. ‘They will put
you with Sacco’, and ... at this point he used to cease to speak, to
begin to whistle, tracing upward spiral motions with his right hand,
its index finger straight up. This is the sole Herculean fatigue
accomplished by Mr. Vahey in my defence, while smoking big cigars
bought him by the poor Italian people. But Mr. Vahey’s words proved
that he knew before the Plymouth trial that I would be indicted for
the Braintree robbery and slaying * * * To suppose that Mr. Vahey and
his agent Govoni might have been induced to such conduct by their
conviction of my guilt, would be as wrong as it is unjust. There had
been nothing in the case to justify, not even to excuse, such a doubt.
I have always protested my innocence; the Italian population and some
Americans of Plymouth had run in a mass to prove it. The preliminary
hearing had proved the impossibility and inconsistency of the charge
against me as the record shows. The truth is that both the prosecution
and the defence counsel had realized that without the latter’s
betrayal the frameup in the making would have been an utter failure;
hence the betrayal.”
The Bridgewater holdup had occurred at 7.35 A. M. It was an armed attack
on three occupants of the L. Q. White Shoe Company’s paytruck. This
truck had obtained the weekly allotment of money for White’s, said to be
$33,000, at a bank in the public square, and was on its way to the shoe
factory.
Its route lay northward on Broad Street, along which a trolley track
runs. One block north of the public square, Hale Street, a narrow lane,
cuts into Broad Street from the east, and ends there. One block farther
north there are railroad tracks and a depot, the latter being set back
considerably from Broad Street to the east, so that it cannot be seen
from the crime-zone.
As the paytruck approached Hale Street, two men on foot began firing at
the three on board—a paymaster, a special officer, and a chauffeur. The
fire was returned. One bandit had a revolver, and the other a shotgun.
Later Vanzetti was declared to be the shotgun man. The truck escaped
around a trolleycar.
No one was injured, nor were any bullet marks afterwards found. The
bandits jumped into an automobile which waited with engine running in
Hale street, and fled.
At that hour Vanzetti was actually 28 miles away—in Plymouth, where he
was well known as a fishseller. December 24th stands out always on the
Italian calendar. Among the Catholics it is a fast day, and fish is the
logical food. But the feasting spirit of the Christmas-tide is in the
air, and the fish of ordinary days is not rich enough, so the Italians
eat eels.
Vanzetti had taken orders in advance from numerous families for eels. On
the evening of December 23rd, he arranged with thirteen-year-old
Bertrando Brini to have him help in the delivery of the eels. Next
morning the two went through the streets together making those
deliveries. They were seen by many people. That day stood out in
Bertrando’s memory because it was then he earned his Christmas money.
Eighteen reputable witnesses vouched for Vanzetti’s whereabouts on that
day. Nine of those had been at home when he brought the eels, and talked
with him. John Di Carlo, proprietor of a shoe store, testified that
Vanzetti came to his store while he was cleaning up that morning—between
7:15 and 7:40 A. M. Every hour of Vanzetti’s time that Christmas Eve was
accounted for.
Those who swore that they purchased eels from him included Mrs. Mary
Fortini, Mrs. Rosa Forni, Rosa Balboni, Teresa Malaguice, Adelaide
Bongiovanni, Marquetta Fiochi, Emma Bosari, Enrico Bastoni, a baker, and
Vincent J. Longhi.
All these are persons of good repute. Their testimony was
straightforward and certain. The prosecution made no serious attempt to
disprove it.
Prosecutor Katzmann, who says this is solely a criminal case, asked Di
Carlo during cross-examination:
“Have you ever discussed government theories over there between you?”
and “Have you discussed the question of the poor man and the rich man
between you?” (Trial record, Page 47).
And when Michael Sassi, cordage worker, was testifying for Vanzetti, the
prosecutor asked: “Have you heard anything of his political speeches to
fellow workers at the Cordage?”
Witnesses for the prosecution were few and inconsistent; several altered
their testimony, consciously or unconsciously, to fit the prosecution’s
needs.
Frank W. Harding, better known as “Slip,” originally described the
shotgun bandit as “smooth-shaven,” according to the Boston Globe of
December 24, 1919. But in the official transcript of the preliminary
hearing of Vanzetti on May 10, he uses five lines to describe the
“overgrown Charlie Chaplin” moustache of the same man. This description
was given after he had seen Vanzetti.
Similar alteration of testimony was made by Benjamin J. Bowles, one of
the men on the paytruck. Bowles is a special officer for the White Shoe
Company and member of Chief Stewart’s police force in Bridgewater. At
the preliminary hearing Bowles swore the shotgun man’s moustache was
“short and croppy.” But presently it became known that Policemen
Schilling and Gault, of Plymouth, together with the Chief of Police
there and various prominent persons, would testify for the defense that
Vanzetti’s moustache had been full and flowing for years. So in the
trial Bowles declared that the shotgun man’s moustache was “bushy.”
Bowles’ “pretty positive” identification, thrice repeated at the
preliminary hearing (Page 32, preliminary record), became “positive” in
the trial. (Page 25, trial record.)
Although refusing to make a positive identification for the
commonwealth, Paymaster Alfred E. Cox reversed his general testimony at
the trial and gave a description which would fit the defendant. In the
Brockton police court on May 10, Cox declared several times that the
shotgun man, in contrast to the other bandit, was “short and of slight
build” (Page 11, preliminary record), the “short” fellow of the
attacking party.
This was bad for the commonwealth’s case. But it didn’t stand. Bowles
followed Cox with a “five feet eight inches” description which fitted
Vanzetti better, and said that the shotgun man was the taller of the
two. Then, when the case went to trial, Bowles was called first and Cox
carefully patterned his description after him and let the bandit grow
taller. When Bowles again said “five feet eight inches” Cox repeated
“five feet eight inches.”
Bowles gave a description of the shotgun man’s hair, eyes, face and
clothes of minute completeness. Such fullness of detail six months after
he had seen a man for only a few chaotic seconds seems incredible.
Bowles described graphically how he helped operate the motor truck after
Earl Graves, the driver, collapsed from fright with the first bullet,
and how they steered around a trolley car directly ahead of them.
And most marvelous of all—at the very time when he was doing this, he
was engaged in a pistol duel with another bandit from the one he was
describing. This other bandit, he said, was fully eight feet away from
the shotgun man. All this is in the preliminary trial record.
At the trial however the defense attorneys challenged Bowles on the
latter point and he promptly changed his testimony, saying now that his
second shot was fired at the shotgun man. But he had just said that he
was from 25 to 50 yards away when he fired the second shot.
Mrs. Georgina Brooks is an elderly woman who appears to have
supernatural powers. Buildings become transparent when they stand in her
way. She declared she saw “fire and smoke from a gun” while she stood in
a window of the railway station, 75 feet back from Broad Street and 300
feet from Hale Street where the events took place.
But there is a two-story frame house half-way along Broad Street which
completely shuts off an observer in that window from any view of the
crime-area!
Mrs. Brooks makes no secret of being able to see only the vague
silhouette of objects before her with one of her eyes, and she has been
taking treatment for the other. But on the way to the railroad station
with a small child before the shooting, she took observations afterwards
useful to the prosecution. She was walking north on the west side of
Broad Street, she said, when she noticed an automobile drawn up in Hale
street, east of the eastern sidewalk line on Broad Street. The rear of
the car was toward her.
For some unexplained reason she became interested in that car, although
its appearance was not unusual. She led the child across Broad Street
and into Hale Street, and went out of her way to pass around the front
end of the automobile. In it, she said, were four men. Three of these
she took no notice of; but she scrutinized the fourth—a man with a dark
face, moustache and dark soft hat, who “seemed like some kind of a
foreigner.”
She looked twice at this man, who in return looked at her “severely”;
and she continued to turn and look at him as she and the child proceeded
to the railroad station. That man, she declared, to quote from the trial
record, “That man, I should judge, was the defendant.”
Paymaster Cox testified at the preliminary hearing, as did Mrs. Brooks,
that Vanzetti had worn a hat. But this detail given by Cox was carefully
suppressed by the prosecution during the trial. Chief Stewart exhibited
in court a cap, which he claimed to have taken from Vanzetti’s home;
then he produced a witness, Richard Grant Casey, who said he thought he
saw this cap on the shotgun man’s head on December 24.
Maynard Freeman Shaw, 14-year-old high school prodigy, stood behind a
tree and saw the shotgun man running 145 feet away. He was one of those
who “identified” Vanzetti. He admitted he never had more than a fleeting
glimpse of the bandit’s face.
“I could tell he was a foreigner by the way he ran,” young Shaw
testified at the trial.
“What sort of a foreigner?” asked the defense.
“Either Italian or Russian.”
“Does an Italian or a Russian run differently from a Swede or a
Norwegian?”
“Yes.”
“What is the difference?”
“Unsteady.”
Courtroom spectators were impressed by the heroic recital of “Slip”
Harding. He described modestly his own coolness under fire; how he stood
in the open during the gun-play in the Bridgewater attack. Some
onlookers assert that Harding was behind a tree, but he testified that
he took down the number of the bandits’ automobile as it sped away. Then
he gave the memorandum to Police Chief Stewart, he said, and failed to
keep a copy of it.
When Stewart went on the witness stand he stated that he had mislaid
that important memorandum. After spending a whole day searching for the
automobile number, he had to confess that he had lost it. Later,
however, he gave “from memory” a number which he asserted was that of
the bandit-car. That was six months after the crime. The number Stewart
gave was that of a car stolen from Francis Murphy, a Natick shoe
manufacturer, in November, 1919.
Two days after the South Braintree holdup, an abandoned Buick
automobile, identified as Murphy’s, was found several miles away. The
prosecution contended that it was used in both crimes.
Vanzetti was connected with that car by the thinnest threads. Remember
the three shotgun shells found in his pocket many days after the second
holdup. The prosecutors tried to introduce as evidence a fourth shotgun
shell, alleged to have been found alongside the automobile. Judge Thayer
would not admit its introduction.
Whether that shell actually was found beside the car may be questioned,
in the light of a news story in the Boston Globe of April 19. That story
told of State Detective Scott and Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan of
Braintree beating the bush for the missing $15,000 payroll.
(A curious thing about the South Braintree crime is that no trace of the
stolen money, or of the black boxes that were said to have contained it,
has been found. Stewart had an idea it was in Coacci’s trunk. It was not
there. The only mention of any money that could possibly have come from
that source was the two thousand dollars Madeiros went South with late
in 1920. Being questioned by Mr. Thompson he refused to say where it
came from, but it is to be inferred that it was part of the South
Braintree loot.)
“Their search was fruitless,” according to the Globe, “except for
finding of an empty RIFLE shell.”
Failing to get the fourth shotgun shell into evidence, the commonwealth
tried another way to link Vanzetti with the Buick car.
It proceeded to build its case upon the shoulders of two missing men—a
shaky scaffolding, but one which served the prosecution’s purposes.
It put on the stand Mrs. Simon Johnson, wife of a garage keeper, who at
the request of the police, telephoned them when Michael Boda called on
the night of May 5 for his own automobile—an Overland—which was stored
in the Johnson garage.
She asserted that Sacco and two other Italians were with Boda that
night, and was quite certain about it, although her husband testified
that Mrs. Johnson was in the light when she observed the four men, and
that the visitors were in the shadow. Johnson knew Boda well, and he
took an oath that Boda had owned and driven an Overland car, but never
to his knowledge had driven a Buick.
Finally, however, the prosecution summoned Napoleon Ensher, a milkman,
who said he didn’t know Boda by name, but that he knew who was meant,
and that he had once seen Boda driving a Buick—maybe four weeks ago,
maybe eight weeks ago. There was no showing that Ensher had any
knowledge of different makes of automobiles, nor any explanation of how
he happened to notice what kind of a car was being driven by a man whose
name he didn’t know—a man who simply passed one day a long time ago,
passed “waving his head.” Other makes of automobiles might easily be
confused with a Buick by a person unfamiliar with their differences.
On this extremely flimsy evidence, in the face of an alibi that would
certainly have been accepted had the defense witnesses been Americans
instead of Italians, Vanzetti was convicted of attempted highway robbery
and given the enormous sentence of from twelve to fifteen years. The
indictment carried two counts: attempt to murder and attempt to rob.
Judge Thayer instructed the jury to disregard the first count, but, such
was the feeling against the defendant that they brought in a verdict of
Guilty on both counts. Sentence however was only passed on the latter.
In his charge to the jury Judge Thayer had said that the crime was
“cognate with the defendant’s ideals” as a radical.