Hellraisers Journal – Monday November 14, 1921 Dedham, Massachusetts – Attorneys Argue for New Trial for Sacco and Vanzetti
From the Appeal to Reason of November 12, 1921:
Guard All Roads During New Trial
of Sacco-Vanzetti
BY EUGENE LYONS.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Nicola Sacco, Rosina Sacco
Boston, Nov. 4-The courthouse in Dedham, Mass., and all the roads leading to it are in a state of siege, with mounted state constabulary, riot squads, and the rest of the terror brigades patrolling the neighborhood, as counsel for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two workingmen whose conviction on a far-fetched charge of murder has roused the proletariat of all nations, argue for a new trial before Judge Webster Thayer.
The hysterical precautions against dangers which do not exist except in the imaginations of alarmist newspaper editors have transformed the court so that it looks like a military camp prepared for battle, rather than a hall of justice. The presiding judge, although he has denied the fake stories of threats against his life, is heavily guarded. Among those who were searched for hidden weapons as they entered the room were many prominent New Englanders, among them John Codman, chairman of local Civil Liberties Union, Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower Evans and Mrs. William James, the widow of the great psychologist and philosopher.
It is in such an atmosphere that the appeal for a new trial was made by attorneys Fred H. Moore and J. J. McAnarney, on the ground that the evidence introduced against their clients did not warrant the verdict. They berated the court for its refusal to grant separate trials for the two defendants, the evidence against them being of a different nature. Mr. McAnarney asserted that the jury was undoubtedly influenced by the halo of terror thrown around the prisoners. Mr. Moore analyzed in detail the testimony against the men, showing how flimsy and untenable it is…..
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.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday June 1, 1921 Dedham, Massachusetts – Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti Begins
From the Boston Evening Globe of May 31, 1921:
SACCO-VANZETTI TRIAL HAS BEGUN ———- Parmenter and Berardelli Killed In Braintree Hold ———-
DEDHAM, May 31-At 2:25 this afternoon, after three talesmen had been examined, Wallace R. Hersey of Weymouth, a real estate dealer, was accepted as the first juryman to try Nicola Sacco and Bartholomeo [Bartolomeo] Vanzetti on a charge of murder of Frederick A. Parmenter, the paymaster of the later & Morrill Shoe Company, and Alessandro Beradelli, a guard, at South Braintree, on April 15, 1920. Parmenter was robbed of the factory payroll of $16,0OO.
Sacco was brought over from the Dedham Jail and Vanzetti was brought from the State Prison at Charlestown, in charge of Deputy Daniel A. Griffin. Warden Shattuck also accompanied the prisoner, who is serving a sentence of 12 to 15 years for attempted highway robbery at Bridgewater.
The State, was prepared to put on the stand employes of the factory who were witnesses of the robbery and shooting. The prosecution relies upon them and upon residents of towns through which the robbers fled in an automobile to establish the identity of the men or trial as those responsible for the murder.
Sacco is rather a young-looking man smooth-shaven. Vanzetti look older. He wears a mustache.
Various organizations throughout the country have contributed to a defense fund for Sacco and Vanzetti. The defense will offer an alibi for both men and will contend that they were arrested on this charge merely because of their known radical activities.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 14, 1921 Boston, Massachusetts – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaks for Sacco and Vanzetti
From The Boston Daily Globe of March 12, 1921:
MISS FLYNN RAPS “RED” HYSTERIA ———- Criticises Method Used in Prosecuting “Holdup Men” ———- Asks Twentieth Century Club if Justice Is Being Done Immigrants ———
In defending Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two Italians who are to be tried for the murder and robbery of a paymaster in East Braintree some months ago, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, at the Twentieth Century Club last night [March 11th], denounced the methods used in prosecuting them, warmly upheld the foreign born workmen, or their children, as the victims of gross misconceptions among the so-called “American” population, excoriated this same attitude as unjustified, stupid and cruel-the product of fear and the “Red” hysteria.
Miss Flynn spoke before the New England Civil Liberties Committee.
[Said Miss Flynn:]
If a man is active in the labor movement and is trying to bring about better working conditions in industry, we have been taught to look behind charges brought against him. The Mooney case taught us to investigate before conviction, not afterward. We are willing to assume that men interested in labor movements are not of the criminal type.
That may not be a good reason in law, but it is perfectly true. No one with a studious, thoughtful mind can on the spur of the moment plan a crime requiring the skill of practiced criminals.
Touching on the popular prejudice against the alien element, she said she had read a sketch by Owen Wister, in which Mr. Wister compared aliens to guests within our house, who. if they did not like our ways, are privileged to leave, but not privileged to break up our home.
[She said:]
Yes, but they are not guests who sit in the parlor playing the piano while we are out in the kitchen doing the work. Not by a good deal. We are sitting in the parlor and they are washing the dishes, scrubbing the floor, fixing the furnace and doing all the drudgery we can load on them.If they were really guests we might expect them to reciprocate; but we expect them to do all the work and have nothing to say about the conditions under which they do it.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 2, 1921 Salsedo Dead in New York City; Sacco and Vanzetti in Danger in Massachusetts
From the New York Liberator of March 1921:
One Dead-Two in Danger
By Robert Minor
-by Art Shields -cover design by Robert Minor
OUT of a window high in an office building in Park Row, a man’s body took the long drop to the street below. Early morning newspaper distributors and a policeman smoothed back the black hair on the head that rolled loosely. There were the fine forehead of olive skin, the black eyes and aquiline nose of an Italian.
The body had fallen from a window that gaped open in the half-dark of dawn, fourteen stories above. Investigation of the fourteenth floor showed that this was a window of a secret prison kept by the agents of the United States Department of Justice.
Do you remember “Palmer’s Revolution?” It was dated for May 1st, 1920. The Italian workman’s plunge to death on May 3rd from Palmer’s secret prison was its only casualty.
The secret jail, hidden away in an office building in the heart of the business district, was the headquarters for “Palmer’s Revolution.” In that resort, away from the restraints of regular prisons, Palmer’s agents handled “reds.” Andrea Salsedo was one of the working men that was being handled there. There was another man in the prison, Roberto Elia, a friend of the dead man. Elia had seen that Salsedo’s head and face were a mass of bruises. Salsedo had been taken out each day three times, he said, to be questioned and to be beaten so as to make him give the answers that were wanted. Elia said that he heard Salsedo’s screams while he was being tortured, and saw the agents examine Salsedo’s eyes and finger nails to learn whether the beating was going so far as to endanger life. When Elia went to sleep at night, the agents pointed to the open window, saying: “Don’t forget this is the fourteenth floor.”
In the morning Elia was told that Salsedo had “jumped out of the window.” The newspaper men and city policemen and strangers came, asking questions. The pile of shapeless flesh in the pool of blood below the window of the secret prison was embarrassing to Palmer and to Flynn of the Secret Service. Even the capitalist press stirred a little with the tang of the mystery. Did the man jump and kill himself, or was he thrown from the window? Was he thrown out alive? Or was a dead body dropped from the window to conceal the manner in which death had taken place?
The newspapers were shut off at last. The body was quickly buried without any coroner’s inquest. Roberto Elia was the only one who knew anything-except Palmer’s men. He was quickly deported to Italy, where he disappeared from sight. Then the Italian population of various American industrial districts began to make trouble. Agitators began to make protest meetings.
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday January 5, 1921 Dedham, Massachusetts – A Visit with Nicola Sacco, Gallant Fighter
From The World Tomorrow of January 1921:
Sacco and Vanzetti
By MARY HEATON VORSE
WE drove through the sweet New England towns on our way to the jail in Dedham , where Nicola Sacco has been sitting for six months , deprived of all occupation, waiting his trial.
He is accused of having killed two men on April 15th and having made off in an automobile with $ 18,000 from the pay roll of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Plant in South Braintree. Labor is again on trial in Massachusetts.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti is also accused of this crime. But he is not in Dedham Jail because he has already begun serving a fifteen year sentence in Charlestown. On December 24th, 1919 , there was an attempted hold-up in Bridgewater of another shoe company. No arrests were made-not until May 5th, 1920. There were eighteen people who swore an alibi for Vanzetti. Eighteen people testified that on the afternoon and evening of December 24th Vanzetti was selling eels in Plymouth, for eels on Christmas Eve are to Italians what turkeys are to us on Thanksgiving. These witnesses knew Vanzetti very well, for he was a fish peddler in Oldtown, where they lived. But the testimony of these eighteen people did not count with the American jury. There were three people who identified Vanzetti as the man whom they had seen six months before driving in an automobile, from which shots were fired in Bridgewater. One of the women who identified Vanzetti was blind in one eye. But their identification convicted him.
As for Sacco, not one of the people brought in to identify him swear that this was the man they saw shooting, yet he is held without bail.
But Sacco and Vanzetti are offenders of another sort than criminal offenders. They have both taken an active part as labor leaders among the Italians. Not only were they gallant fighters, both of them, but they were inconveniently holding meetings about Salsedo– Salsedo, who went crazy—maybe—and on May 1st jumped from the fourteenth floor window of the Post Office Building in New York City, where he had been illegally detained by the Department of Justice agents for months—the only man who died in Mr. Palmer’s great May Day revolution. Among the Italians there is a ghastly suspicion that Salsedo did not jump-anyway, it was mighty inconvenient having young men holding meetings about him.
————————
WE drove through the sweet New England towns on our way to the jail in Dedham , where Nicola Sacco has been sitting for six months , deprived of all occupation, waiting his trial.