VIFREE 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 theStory of a Proletarian Lifethat 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 theGazzetta del Popolothat 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 backto 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 pitifulnoises 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 youngman 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 evenhere 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 fatherbelonged 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 inIl Proletario, a paper that Giovannitti edited, fond of actingplays with titles likeSenza 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.