Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday August 23, 1921 Dedham, Massachusetts – July 14th, Sacco and Vanzetti Convicted of Murder
From the Industrial Pioneer of August 1921:
Sacco-Vanzetti: Victims
By Art Shields
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Nicola Sacco, Rosina Sacco
AMERICAN workers are getting hardened to the prostitution of capitalist courts,—so the conviction of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the court house at Dedham, Mass. [on July 14, 1921], does not bring the shock that such action would have brought ten years ago, but none the less the case is the most glaring perversion of that abstraction known as “justice” that has been seen in years.
The multitude of evidence proving the innocence of these two working men of the charge of killing a paymaster and a shoe company guard at South Braintree, Mass., in May, 1920 has been put before working class readers time and again, so there is no need to go over it here. Nor is it necessary to recount again the methods which the Department of Justice and the labor-hating state police of Massachusetts used, to put over their nefarious act. It has been told before in this case and others, the putting of stoolpigeons into adjacent cells with stories of their I. W. W. connections and their desire for dynamite to blow up the prison, for the purpose of entrapping the defendant into conversation in order to pervert his remarks later. The use of witnesses, who were far away from the scene, the burglarizing of defense offices; these and a dozen other dirty finkstunts are nothing new to any intelligent worker.
The point is that these workingmen, whose crime was their advocacy of economic direct action in the shoe and cordage mills of New England, and their determined resistance to the murder tactics of the secret police in the case of their fellow worker, Andrea Salsedo, who pitched to his death from the fourteenth story window of the Department of Justice in New York, the point is that these men have lost a legal battle with the owners of the law.
The lives of Sacco and Vanzetti will not be saved without direct action. This does not mean to state that further legal efforts will not also be necessary. But what is meant it that the added power, the kind of power that obtained the release of Ettor, Giovannitti and Caruso from the death cage at Salem, after the Lawrence strike of nine years ago, comes from the force of organized labor in motion.
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