FACING THE CHAIR
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 themItalians. 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.