But what sort of a trap was it into which Sacco and Vanzetti stepped the
evening of May 5th?
Their arrest seems to go back to the fact that in the famous January
raids Police Chief Stewart of Bridgewater helped Department of Justice
agents rout four Lithuanians out of their beds and drag them off to Deer
Island. That seems to have started him on a career of red-baiting.
Later, at the request of the Department of Justice, he arrested and
engineered the deportation of a certain Coacci, a member of the vaguely
outlined group, readers of Galleani’s paper, to which Sacco and Vanzetti
belonged. Coacci was deported from Ellis Island on April 18, leaving
behind a wife who was about to have a baby. Chief Stewart was worrying
about the series of holdups, committed it was thought by Italians, which
were earning the police considerable adverse criticism in the community.
Something had to be done. It was not until Coacci had been shipped off
that Stewart got the idea that perhaps he might be implicated in the
Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes. It turned out that Coacci had
worked in the L. Q. White shoe factory some time before the Bridgewater
attempt. Stewart hatched the theory that perhaps the little house where
Coacci lived was the bandit headquarters. Boda was a salesman and drove
a car. Stewart found him and questioned him. Boda’s car was being
repaired at Johnson’s garage a little down the road. Then Stewart found
out from Johnson that the car had been brought in for repairs some time
near the date of the South Braintree murders. He told him to phone for
the police if anyone came to take Boda’s car away.
So Stewart, the small town cop, found himself in charge of the case.
Captain Proctor, head of the state police, stepped out after warning him
that he thought the trap had snapped on the wrong birds. The theory
elaborated by him and by Katzmann was that the five men who committed
the South Braintree crime (years later identified by Madeiros as members
of the Morelli gang of Providence) were Boda, Orciani and Coacci, and
after their arrest, Sacco and Vanzetti thrown in to make up the exact
total. Coacci was escaping with the swag. Federal agents had his trunk
seized and brought back when he landed in Italy, but nothing of a
suspicious nature was found in it. Orciani was found to have been at
work on the day of the crime. Boda disappeared. All of which proved
conclusively that Sacco and Vanzetti were the criminals.
No one who remembers the winter of 1919–20 can deny that even the
mildest radicals, whether citizens or aliens, were looked upon every man
jack of them as criminals and bombers by the police and good people
generally all over the Union. In conversation the phrase “He ought to be
in jail” followed after the word Red as naturally as a tail follows a
dog. The news of the death of Salsedo had thrown the few remaining
Italian radicals round Boston into a panic. That night Sacco and
Vanzetti were trying to hide incriminating literature and at the same
time to call a protest meeting in Brockton on May 9th. When they met
Boda and Orciani outside the home of the garage-keeper Johnson in West
Bridgewater that night of the fifth, they were already pretty much
alarmed. When Johnson began to make excuses to them about Boda’s car,
saying that they could not take it out as it did not have the proper
license plate, they must have felt pretty uneasy. Actually Mrs. Johnson
was telephoning the police. Boda’s car was a small Overland, that would
have been hard to match with the Buick that was being looked for in
connection with the South Braintree crime, but the $2,000 reward offered
by the shoe factory was worth taking a chance for. Probably the very
fact of four wops wanting to go riding in a car was suspicious to the
Johnsons. Anyway the four men got nervous. Boda and Orciani rode off on
Orciani’s motorcycle, and Sacco and Vanzetti got aboard a street car.
Crossing into Brockton they were arrested. The police thought they were
arresting Boda.
We’re going to be deported, thought Sacco and Vanzetti, and naturally
did their best not to implicate their friends and comrades.
The fact that they were armed was a piece of horrible bad luck. If it
hadn’t been for the revolvers and shotgun shells found on them they
would probably have been released as was Orciani whom the police picked
up a couple of days later. But why were they armed, everybody asks.
Vanzetti had bought the gun to protect his earnings as a fishpeddler. It
was a time of many holdups. Sacco was accustomed to carry a gun as night
watchman at the Three K’s Factory. A great many people of all classes
get a feeling of strength and manhood out of toting a gun. Put yourself
in their place. Haven’t there been times when you who are reading this
would have been pretty embarrassed to explain your actions if suddenly
arrested and bullied and crossquestioned by a lot of bulls in a station
house? Add to that the chance connection of revolvers, shells, the draft
of an anarchist leaflet. Many a man has died in the Chair on flimsier
evidence than that. That’s always the answer of the man in the street
when you press him about this case. Many a good guy’s been electrocuted
on less than that.
It’s time that you realized fully, you who are reading this, man or
woman, laborer or whitecollar worker, that if Sacco and Vanzetti die in
the Chair as the result of a frameup based on an unlucky accident, your
chance of life will be that much slimmer, if you ever come to be
arrested as a result of a similar unlucky chain of circumstances.
Justice can’t be embalmed in the dome of a courthouse. It’s got to be
worked for, fought for daily by those who want it for themselves and for
their neighbors.
A great many men and women do realize it. That’s why Sacco and Vanzetti
are alive today.
So it was that it was as a convicted highway robber that Vanzetti was
tried for murder with Sacco. If it hadn’t been for that fact it would
have been much harder to convict the two men at Dedham.
By one of those agreements of counsel that seem so ghastly to a layman,
the defense contracted not to produce character witnesses for Vanzetti,
if the prosecution abstained from bringing up the previous conviction.
It was a skeleton in the closet, never mentioned, but on everyone’s mind
all through the trial.
X
THE DEDHAM TRIAL
Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of committing a $15,776 payroll
robbery and murdering Frederick Parmenter, paymaster, and Alexander
Berardelli, payroll guard, at South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920.
Parmenter and Berardelli were employees of the Slater and Morrill Shoe
Company.
Both defendants were tried before Superior Judge Webster Thayer at
Dedham in June and July 1921, the trial extending seven weeks, and were
convicted of first degree murder by a jury which the defense attorneys
contend was irregularly and illegally selected. The verdict carries a
penalty of death in the electric chair.
The crime was committed at 3.05 p. m. on Pearl street, in front of the
four-story Rice and Hutchins shoe factory. This building was filled with
workers. Four rows of windows looked out upon the scene of the shooting.
While the glass in them was opaque, as soon as the shots were heard,
many windows were thrown open.
Many other workers saw the crime from the windows of the Slater and
Morrill shoe factory a short distance west of the Rice and Hutchins
plant. And directly opposite was an excavation where numerous laborers
were at work.
Just before the shooting a train had come in letting off passengers at
the nearby railroad station. Numerous persons were on the street as the
bandits fled, their number swelled quickly by the sound of the shots and
the wave of excitement that traveled like the wind through the small
town. Westward on Pearl Street the bandit-automobile sped, crossing the
New Haven tracks increasing in speed as it proceeded, and continuing the
main streets of the town.
This was but one of a series of payroll robberies in Eastern
Massachusetts, of which the perpetrators had invariably escaped. These
bandits too, got away. The authorities were on the defensive; public
indignation was high. Search for the bandits was participated in by the
state police and local police, with the active co-operation of the
Department of Justice and various agencies employed by the allied
manufacturing and banking interests. These included the Pinkerton
Detective Agency, acting in the behalf of the Travelers’ Insurance
Company, which insured the Slater and Morrill payroll. Investigation by
these forces continued from April 15, 1920 to May 31, 1921, when Sacco
and Vanzetti were brought to trial.
Of the scores who saw the crime and escape, and with so many powerful
agencies co-operating in the search, how many witnesses were brought
against Sacco and Vanzetti? A trifling number, as will appear in this
analysis; while a very much larger number of those who saw the crime are
positive that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti were the bandits.
Several important witnesses for the prosecution were seriously
discredited, while various responsible persons who saw the events
connected with the crime and who declared that the arrested men were not
the bandits, were pushed aside by the state after it interviewed them.
Here follows a careful analysis of the actual testimony for Sacco and
Vanzetti. This analysis is the result of a searching study of the 3,900
pages of official transcript. Every statement set down here, unless
otherwise specified, is borne out by the court record.
The mass of evidence which went toward the setting of the crime but
which had no bearing on the guilt or innocence of the accused is
eliminated, while evidence introduced piecemeal and in haphazard order
is assembled and arranged under appropriate heads.
The testimony relating only to Vanzetti is presented first because it is
the shorter and thus more easily disentangled from the mass of detail
under which its inadequacy was hidden. Such an arrangement throws into
bold relief the injustice of the court’s refusal to separate the trials
of the two men. A request for the separation was entered by the defense
at the opening and again at the close of the trial. “Where is there
anything prejudicial to Vanzetti,” asked the judge, “if proper
instructions are given to the jury?” But juries, despite formal
instruction to count this fact against Defendant No. 1 and that fact
against Defendant No. 2, inevitably tend to count all facts against both
when they are tried together. The human mind is not a mechanical
instrument which functions according to judicial instructions.
Then the case against Sacco is treated in full, and finally the evidence
applicable to both men is analyzed.