Chapter TWENTY: Aftermath

During the last hour before the executions Mary Donovan, Felicani, Gardner Jackson and his sister Edith, Ruth Hale, Jeannette Marks, and Joseph Moro waited in the inner office of the Hanover Street headquarters. “They must be starting now,” someone remarked at midnight. “Let us be quiet.”

The outer room was full of people, heavy with cigarette smoke, darkly expectant. All evening there had been a constant coming and going, a mixture of North End Italians and strangers from outside Massachusetts. Some minutes before midnight Mother Bloor puffed up the stairs, having been bailed out earlier by Mary Donovan.

The group in the inner office did not move. After twenty minutes the telephone rang twice, the prearranged signal that the executions had taken place. Jackson picked up the receiver, listened, and still holding it to his ear nodded to the others. No one spoke. Felicani’s face was a white mask. Then Mary Donovan cried out, “I can’t believe it!” After several seconds she stood up, opened the door to the anteroom, and said sternly, “It’s all over.” Moro bit at a sheaf of papers he held in his hand, then began to sob. Outside there was a babble of voices rising to shouts. Some of the less-restrained Italians threw themselves down on the floor and howled. The rest began to grope their way down the steep stairs. As Mary Donovan turned back to the little office, the telephone bell tinkled again. “Come,” she told the others, “let us not answer the telephone any more.”

For many, as for those at the defense headquarters, that night was to be the dividing line of their lives. Ferris Greenslet, the biographer of the Lowells, stood with the crowd on Boston Common staring up at the oval windows of the governor’s office, “hoping, doubting, despairing.” From Parlor D at the Bellevue, a few minutes before midnight, Tom O’Connor telephoned John Vahey at Plymouth. “This is Vanzetti,” he announced to the lawyer savagely. “Thanks to you I’ll be dead in twenty minutes!” O’Connor would spend the rest of his life trying to vindicate the two dead men.

Helen Peabody, a young artist who had marched across the Charlestown Bridge with Fred Beal’s group, somehow managed to slip through the police lines to the gates of the prison, where she was arrested and taken inside to the guardroom. Although offered a chair by one of the guards, she insisted on standing at attention until after the executions.

Beal, his lip gashed from a policeman’s blow, was sitting in a cell in the City Square station house when a matronly woman he did not know arrived to post his bail. “They’ve done it,” she told him softly. “Sacco and Vanzetti are dead.” In just two years Beal himself, as a textile workers’ organizer, would be on trial for his own life on a trumped up murder charge in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Noel and Herta Field, sitting beside the radio in their Washington, D.C., apartment, listened to the last-minute efforts with waning hope. The shock of the executions was for them the beginning of a long journey leftward that would lead them to a Communist prison cell in Hungary. Rockwell Kent withdrew a show of his paintings in Worcester and began a life-long boycott of Massachusetts.

Shortly before midnight Mrs. Evans went with Alice Hamilton to the roof of the Women’s City Club on Beacon Street from where they could see the State House dome and across the Charles River basin the illuminated octagon of the prison. While they waited, the Church of the Advent bell tower below them sounded the quarters. At a quarter past twelve Mrs. Evans murmured, “Good-by, Sacco.”

In New York John Haynes Holmes, the pastor of the Community Church, held a watch-night service at which La Guardia and others spoke.

_Those who spoke said what was right to say [Holmes wrote]. By common consent those present put anger aside, and moved to higher levels of the spirit. Watchers in Boston flashed to New York the fateful moment when the two men died. Something happened in that moment when myriads of hearts, the world around, were cleansed of fear and hate. In them Sacco and Vanzetti were born again, and will surely live._

Others were not able to attain such humanistic serenity. For Eugene Lyons, in the New York Tass office, Sacco and Vanzetti had become like members of his own family. Up until the execution hour he kept cabling the news to Moscow. When the two men died, he recalled,

_the case which was integrated with my own existence, intimate as few things in life ever become intimate, was over, finished. Nothing to do but go home to bed.... I remember wondering why I could not weep and shriek with the hurt of it, just as I was to wonder seven years later at my father’s coffin._

With the news of the executions, Europe seethed. The issues of the case that had confused and divided the United States seemed perfectly clear in transatlantic perspective. The inhabitants of expatriate Elliot Paul’s tiny left-bank Rue de la Huchette represented the workers generally in their indignant conviction that Sacco and Vanzetti had been murdered because they were foreign anarchists and leaders of American labor, and that Judge Thayer and Governor Fuller had destroyed them for the good of their own privileged kind. Paul saw the week of rioting that followed as the first of a series of quakes that would jar France’s hostile classes apart and lead to the death of the Third Republic. On the day of the executions Paris was like a city under siege. A general strike halted almost all traffic. Soldiers with machine guns took up positions in the principal squares and along the boulevards. Republican Guards were out in their brass helmets. The American Embassy was ringed with tanks. In the working-class districts—which the bourgeois took care to avoid—the metal shutters were closed. Yet there were no demonstrations during the day, and except for the soldiers and the guns and the tanks the city seemed almost empty. Pierre Van Paassen remembered the silence of the streets as so intense it was almost frightening. But early on the following morning, when _L’Humanité_ spread the news in an extra sheet with one black-splashed word “_Assassinés!_,” the militants struck out. On the Boulevard Sebastopol they tore the iron lamp posts from the concrete and tossed them through plate-glass windows, then looted the largest grocery store in Paris and pelted the police with canned goods from behind a barricade of tables and carts. With linked arms, fifty abreast, they surged across the Place de l’Opéra while long-aproned café waiters scurried to hide the seltzer siphons. Sixty police were injured in a pistol battle when a mob tried to set up barricades in front of the American Embassy. In Montmartre the front of the Moulin Rouge was demolished.

In Geneva, the evening before the executions, a mob of five thousand roamed the streets for several hours, overturning American cars, sacking shops displaying American goods, and gutting theaters showing American films. Finally the mob gathered to smash the windows of the Palace of the League of Nations. One rioter was killed, a number injured, after troops with fixed bayonets were sent in.

In Germany _Die Rote Fahne_ and other Communist papers appeared on August 23 with black borders. There were demonstrations in Bremen and Wilhelmshaven, and a two-hour torchlight parade in Stuttgart. A marcher was killed in Leipzig; in Hamburg a number of demonstrators were wounded, and a policeman and a worker killed. At one of the largest meetings in the history of the Weimar Republic, Ernst Thälmann compared the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti to that of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The playboy mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, in Berlin on a visit, was booed as he entered the City Hall. _Die Rote Fahne_ advised him to spend his vacation on Governor Fuller’s farm.

In England forty protesters were injured in a riot at the Marble Arch, and on the night of the executions a crowd gathered before Buckingham Palace and sang “The Red Flag.” On the day of the funeral the flag on the building of the Labor Party was at half-mast. Flags were at half-mast throughout the Soviet Union. A street in Moscow was named for Sacco and Vanzetti, and Sovkino, the state motion picture bureau, ordered an Austrian company to start making a film about them. Later the Soviet Government named a pencil factory in their memory and for years produced pencils stamped with their names.

Many were hurt in Oporto, Portugal, when police broke up a demonstration in front of the American Consulate. In Rosario, Argentina, throngs waited in silence and bared their heads when just after midnight the news of the executions reached them. Buenos Aires experienced a general strike. In Mexico City, Diego Rivera spoke at a mass meeting. In Sydney, Australia, a huge procession protested the executions. In South Africa the American flag was burned on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall.

Nothing comparable occurred in the United States in the six-day interval between the executions and the funeral. A plan of the International Labor Defense and the New York Emergency Committee to have the ashes of Sacco and Vanzetti brought to New York for a Union Square memorial meeting broke up in recriminations between the International Labor Defense and the Boston committee. The Communists blamed Mary Donovan, Michael Gold describing her as “an obscure, spiteful female with a great lust for publicity.”

For Boston, on the morning after the executions, the case at last seemed finished. The _Herald_ sprinkled its editorial page with relieved metaphors:

_The time for all discussion is over. The chapter is closed. The die is cast. The arrow has flown. Now let us go forward to the duties and responsibilities of the common day with a renewed determination to maintain our present system of government, and our existing social order._

The evening _Transcript_ viewed the executions more bluntly as “the only possible end.”

During the forenoon Dr. Magrath performed the legally required autopsies, and later in the day the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti were taken to the National Casket Company’s room in Merrimac Street. A New Bedford undertaker claimed Madeiros’ body.

The committee had planned a ritual lying-in-state, but could find no one in the city willing to rent a hall for the purpose. Mary Donovan wanted the bodies taken to the Hanover Street rooms. When some of the Parlor D people tried to tell her that the rickety building would not stand the strain, she turned on them furiously, shouting “They belong to me now!” As soon as the owner of the building heard that the coffins might be brought there, he barred the entrance with a heavy vertical joist.

While the committee members searched and argued, the bodies remained at the National Casket Company. William Gropper arrived from New York to make the death masks. When it became clear that no halls would be available in the city, Edward Holton James offered the use of his Mount Vernon Street town house. However, the committee decided to use Joseph Langone’s funeral parlor at the foot of Hanover Street.

Joseph Langone, the dapper, diminutive North End undertaker, was one of the most prominent members of the Italian colony. In his official capacity he always wore a tail coat and silk hat, and prided himself on the punctiliousness with which he observed the etiquette of death. His two massive Cunningham hearses with their custom-built Brewster bodies and silver flambeaux on the sides were the most elegant in the city. To him were left the funeral arrangements.

Wednesday at midnight he brought the corpses to his workroom, embalmed and dressed them, and placed them in their coffins. Only just in time did Gardner Jackson discover that Langone planned to have Sacco and Vanzetti wearing tuxedos.

Madeiros had gone on display in Rogers & Silvia’s undertaking parlor in Providence, and during the day some ten thousand sightseers came to view his corpse. The bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti were not shown until Thursday evening. During the afternoon crowds began to gather in front of Langone’s parlor, and the police had to rope off the sidewalks for several blocks. A police guard was posted at the parlor entrance.

At seven o’clock the doors were opened and the spectators flooded through the little room at the rate of thirty-seven a minute. The mahogany coffins were so close together that only a single line could file between them. On each was a laurel wreath from the committee. The dead men’s faces were drawn and hollow, the color of bronze. The room was banked to the ceiling with scarlet-flowered wreaths and sprays. One ribbon on a floral piece read ASPETTANDO L’ORA DI VENDETTA—“Awaiting the hour of vengeance.” Another read merely REVENGE. Several read MASSACHUSETTS THE MURDERER.

In each corner of the parlor stood a committee member or friend as guard of honor. Eight thousand of the dedicated and the curious passed through Langone’s that evening, only the stiff-faced anarchists with their wide black hats and butterfly ties distinguishable in the anonymous throng.

Just as the doors were to open, Mary Donovan posed at the head of the coffins with a sign: “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHISTIC BASTARDS?”—JUDGE WEBSTER THAYER. When Langone, fearing for his license, refused to allow her to continue there, she stalked outside with the placard and showed it to reporters. A police sergeant snatched it from her. There was a scuffle, the placard was torn up, and she was taken to the station, charged with inciting to riot and distributing anarchistic literature.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the bodies lay in state from six in the morning until ten at night. A hundred thousand people filed through the narrow parlor—so many that the terrazzo floor and the marble threshold began to crack. Huge floral pieces kept arriving by the hour. The windows of adjoining shops were borrowed to display them. Everyone in the North End, whatever his politics, viewed the bodies at least twice. In after years a common question of the district was: “Were you at Langone’s?” Many North Enders dropped by on their way to work. Children made a game of seeing how many times they could dart in and out. Afternoons the line extended up the street beyond the double line of ropes. Evenings it reached over a third of a mile to Waldron’s Casino.

It was planned to hold the funeral on Sunday and to have the bodies cremated at the Forest Hills Crematory. The health commissioner granted an extension of the four-day burial law. Saturday, Langone re-embalmed the bodies. Jackson wanted to have a procession with a band, the coffins carried by relays of pallbearers past the State House and through the heart of the city. Superintendent Crowley told Jackson he would allow nothing of the kind. There was to be no band, no filing past the State House, the coffins must be in hearses, and although those who wished might follow on foot there were to be no banners carried or shown.

Sunday morning broke gray and desolate. A line of sightseers and sympathizers still passed through the undertaking parlor for a last look at the now much-darkened faces. At ten o’clock Langone locked his doors and closed the coffin lids.

The procession was to start from North End Park near the Paul Revere House. Five hundred policemen patrolled the North End. Seventy mounted police were assigned to guard the cortège. The police were edgy, resentful of the gadfly agitation that had kept them on twenty-four-hour call for the last two weeks. Just to make certain there would be no gesture before the State House, Crowley had the pavement at Beacon and Tremont streets ripped up. Heavy trucks loaded with sand were placed there, as well as at the corner of Park Street. Police also blocked off the streets behind the State House.

All during the morning crowds collected along Hanover Street, trampling the turf of North End Park into mud. The men—many wearing black neckties, and red carnations in their buttonholes—outnumbered the women eight to one. Four open cars heaped with scarlet blossoms stood in front of Langone’s. At 1:30 a column of mounted police cantered over the cobbles of Scollay Square and formed a double line along Hanover Street. Volunteers now began to remove the dozens of floral pieces from the undertaking rooms and the shop windows. Some of the pieces were so large that it took half a dozen men to carry them. At 2:20 the topheavy hearses drew up in front of the funeral parlor, and members of the committee earned out the coffins while Langone supervised them nervously in tail coat and silk hat.

In spite of Superintendent Crowley’s order, a group of men in black moved through the crowd, quietly passing out red felt armbands stamped REMEMBER JUSTICE CRUCIFIED! AUGUST 22, 1927. At half past two Alfred Baker Lewis, as organizer of the procession, gave the signal. The two Cunninghams glided from the curb, the cortège advanced up Hanover Street. First came four mounted policemen in black rubber capes. Then a single marcher led the way with the committee’s laurel wreaths. Behind him six men, with some difficulty, carried an eight-foot-high floral piece showing photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti and inscribed MARTYRS OF MASSACHUSETTS. Two rows of marchers carrying smaller floral pieces were followed by the hearses, moving side by side and flanked by an honor guard. Behind the hearses more volunteers carried more floral displays—eighteen in all. Then came the open cars heaped with flowers, and two limousines with drawn curtains, one carrying Rosina, Dante, Luigia, and Felicani, the other, members of the committee. Fifteen mounted police rode on either side.

The marchers followed in close-packed ranks, eight abreast, stern-faced, overwhelmingly Italian. Five thousand started from North End Park. It was the most spectacular funeral the city had ever seen.

The sidewalks of Hanover Street were packed with watchers. As the hearses moved up the gradient to Scollay Square, the undertone of muttering was punctuated by the clop of horseshoes on the rain-glazed cobblestones. The marchers, their arms now linked, stretched down the street to the curve of North End Park. On they came, over the cobbles and glistening parallels of car-tracks into Scollay Square, past the pawnshops and the painless dentists, past Waldron’s Casino, past the drab lodgings of the American House and the Crawford Chambers, the cheap shoe and clothing shops, the pasticcerias, the shoeshine parlors, the poolrooms, and the bowling alleys. Hundreds of faces clustered in the second- and third-story windows. Along the six-mile route two hundred thousand watched the procession. The March of Sorrow they called it afterward.

At first the attitude of the police seemed neutral, but as the hearses and limousines crossed Scollay Square and turned left into Tremont Street, a detachment of state troopers in trucks cut between them and the massed marchers. Halted momentarily, the marchers surged over the sidewalks, sifted past the subway entrances, picked their way among the stalled vehicles. So great was the crush in Scollay Square that a plate-glass store front caved in. There was a moment of panic as the glass crashed on the pavement. The police now seemed less neutral. Two bystanders were arrested for jeering at them.

Still numbering in thousands, the marchers formed up again on the wide length of Tremont Street, linked twenty-five abreast from curb to curb. As they reached the corner of Park Street they began to put on their armbands, and suddenly the dark ranks were bright with scarlet. An occasional marcher would fall out. Others joined in from the throngs lining Boston Common. A fleet of taxicabs followed the marchers, ready to pick up the footsore at a flat rate of a dollar apiece to Forest Hills. Mike Flaherty, near the head of the procession, spotted Felix Frankfurter and his wife in a doorway near Park Street and beckoned to them. They joined with him as far as Boylston Street. At the corner of the Common, those who had carried the largest floral pieces began to tear them apart and strew the blossoms in the street before the oncoming hearses.

From Tremont Street through the slum miles of the South End and the Negro district the police at each intersection directed traffic into the now thinning ranks. Near Roxbury Crossing the hearses unaccountably speeded up to twenty-five miles an hour and were soon over a mile ahead of those on foot. Scrambling to catch up, the marchers broke ranks, many dropping out or taking to cabs. A hardy remnant of a few hundred red armbands reached the elevated station at Egleston Square within sight of Forest Hills and continued along Washington Street under the dripping el structure.

Up to this point the spectators had been impassive, but now, in the Irish Catholic district of Forest Hills, they turned hostile. Jeering faces filled the windows of the three-deckers flanking the el, and there were derisive shouts of “Guineas” and “Go home!”

The remaining marchers were passing the office of the Metropolitan Coal Company, a few hundred feet from the Forest Hills terminal, when the police charged them. No one knew why. At one instant the bedraggled armbanded figures were trudging along in the drizzle, at the next the police were flailing at them with their nightsticks, led by a furious sergeant wielding a heavy-handled umbrella. At the impact the ranks broke, most of the marchers bolting up Washington Street. The charging police seemed to go completely out of control. Anyone with an armband became a fair target. Men were dragged from the running boards of cars and beaten. Others trying to escape on foot were cornered in dead-end alleys. Dozens of fugitives burst into the yard of the Gulf Refining Company in a last attempt to dodge the swinging clubs. A Boston _Post_ reporter, himself running, saw several men clubbed and kicked as they fell, and he caught a glimpse of a girl in a doorway, her face in her hands and her split chin dripping blood. The rain began to fall in torrents.

Not more than 150 marchers finally managed to work their way down side streets and back lots to join up on the other side of the terminal. When they arrived at the crematory on Walk Hill Street, a half-mile beyond, the hearses had already arrived, the coffins had been carried into the chapel, and the gates were locked.

Several thousand others who had come safely by car were waiting inside the grounds on the downhill slope in front of the chapel, watched impassively but without anger by the mounted police. The sodden, weary marchers could do no more than stand with bared heads while the cremation took place.

Only the committee and those closest to the defense were admitted to the small chapel. Luigia and Rosina chose to remain outside in the car. There was no formal service. Mary Donovan read five bitter paragraphs by Gardner Jackson, scarcely able to control her voice as she spoke the words over the coffins:

_You, Sacco and Vanzetti, are the victims of the crassest plutocracy the world has known since ancient Rome.... And now Massachusetts and America have killed you—murdered you because you were Italian anarchists.... In your martyrdom we will fight on and conquer._

That was all. At 4:30 the coffins were placed in the retort chambers. The gates were opened, the hearses and the curtained limousines rolled away, the police reined in their restive horses as the crowd dissolved into small groups and individuals making their way unmolested along Walk Hill Street. Those who looked back saw a thin column of smoke rising from the crematory’s central chimney, black and unwavering against the low sullen sky.

* * * * *

Like the Dreyfus case to which it has been so often compared, the Sacco-Vanzetti case became a tumult of the intellectuals. As I look back on it, my father and my Aunt Amy in their lesser way were representative of that tumult. For my father Sacco and Vanzetti became a challenge to the institutions he believed in, and he shut his mind against them. After Captain Van Amburgh’s testimony convinced him they were guilty he did not concern himself further with the fairness of the trial, although as an honest man he took a thin view of Judge Thayer. My Aunt Amy could not imagine that her friends of the Elizabeth Peabody House and The Women’s City Club might be wrong, that John Haynes Holmes, whom she had known as a young man, might be wrong, that liberalism could be wrong. She, too, closed her mind.

For the more extreme partisans on both sides the belief in the guilt or the innocence of the two Italians became a dogma. Just before the 1961 ballistics tests were conducted a member of the Committee for the Vindication of Sacco and Vanzetti told me that even if a test should show indisputably that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, he would still be convinced that Sacco was innocent.

For myself, I found that when I examined the various confessions, they had a way of falling apart. After Sammarco’s lie-detector test there was nothing to be said for Silva’s Bridgewater tale. Madeiros’ various statements about South Braintree had just too many discrepancies in them. Once I had driven and checked the getaway route and found that the license-plate number of the murder car noted down in South Braintree was last identified by Julia Kelliher in Brockton eight miles beyond Randolph, I could no longer believe that the bandits had switched cars in the Randolph Woods. They would not have been foolish enough to go to the useless trouble of putting the telltale plates on a second car and driving away in it. Nor did it seem possible for Madeiros, if he had been in the back seat of the Buick, to have mistaken two metal boxes planted at his feet for a leather bag. And of course if he and the Morellis had not arrived at South Braintree until noon—as he claimed—then who were the men who shadowed Neal, who strolled around the town during the morning, who spoke to Lola Andrews? It has been asserted that Madeiros had nothing to gain by making a fraudulent confession to the South Braintree crime, but in fact by making one he prolonged his life two years.

The hypothesis that the Morelli gang committed the South Braintree holdup is at first plausible, yet it is too closely bound to the Madeiros confession to stand alone. Extraordinary coincidences are brought to light in Ehrmann’s book but, just in the matter of the cars, I could not imagine the one that Mike Morelli was casually driving through the center of New Bedford three hours after the crime was the murder car. Nor could I believe that the Morellis would on three separate occasions drive forty miles to an obscure Boston suburb to steal two sets of license plates and a car. Why all the way to Needham when there were so many nearer places? It was as absurd as imagining Mike, the night of the crime, driving the Buick back through those miles of waste land to abandon it in Brockton when all the police in New England were on the alert for it.

As for Joe Morelli’s confession, he knew how much money Silva had made with his pseudo-confession, and he may have thought Morris Ernst an easy mark. When he was writing his autobiography in the Lewisburg penitentiary, he used as source material Osmond Fraenkel’s 550-page summary of the case. The still-extant volume, inscribed “Joseph Morelli, Nov. 10, 1935,” is larded with marginal notes made by Joe and his friends. Yet the later parts of Joe’s autobiography were written after he had lost contact with Ernst. To dismiss it completely is to leave a number of intruding questions unanswered. How did it happen that Joe was so familiar with the names Coacci, Boda, and Orciani—all mentioned only casually in the trial record? How did he know that Coacci had worked at Slater & Morrill unless he had had some contact with him? Was there something, after all, in the persistent rumors that Berardelli had recognized the men who shot him? It was hard to imagine Sacco, even harder to imagine Vanzetti, associated with the anthropoid Morellis, but Boda, as a bootlegger, would have needed underworld connections for his supplies. For a time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley, within walking distance of Needham. Boda drove a car. He fits the description of the man who tried to borrow license plates at Hassam’s garage. And it is easier to imagine him walking from Wellesley to Needham to steal plates and a car than it is to imagine the Morellis making the successive trips from Providence.

Having begun the writing of this book with the assumption that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, I found myself holding to it with an increasingly troubled mind as my work progressed, but I did not begin to consider whether they might not, after all, have been guilty until I learned of what Moore had told Upton Sinclair. That Moore had come to doubt his hotly held convictions made me feel I must at least re-examine mine. Moore, the dedicated radical, the battler for lost and almost-lost causes, was not the man to have denied himself out of pique. His reasons for his change of mind must have been profound. According to Eugene Lyons, he had spent much time following the trail of a criminal group he had reason to believe was involved in the South Braintree crime. “But when he got near the end of the trail,” Lyons wrote, “the Italian anarchist members of the Defense Committee called him in and ordered him to ‘lay off.’ They wouldn’t say why, but the inference is that they feared his line of investigation.”

One of Moore’s investigators told me that Moore had finally come to the conclusion that Boda was the man who engineered the holdup. As convincing to me as Moore’s reluctant reversal was the fact that Upton Sinclair’s experience seemed to support it.

_I had visited Sacco’s family [Sinclair wrote in 1953], and I felt certain that there was some dark secret there. Nobody would be frank with me, and everybody was suspicious even though I had been introduced and vouched for by Mrs. Evans, a great lady of Boston who had led and financed the fight for freedom of these two Italians._

To thousands like my Aunt Amy the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti appeared so transparent that it should have been obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the case. Yet at the very core of the defense there was disbelief. I was overwhelmed when I discovered that even Carlo Tresca shared it—Tresca, the acknowledged and admired leader of the anarchists in the United States, to whom they turned as a matter of course when they were in trouble. No one, not even the police who arrested him—and he had been arrested thirty-six times—questioned his integrity. He looked after his own. According to Sinclair, when Moore was leaving for Boston in 1920, Tresca—to Moore’s annoyance—put two comrades wanted by the police for a robbery in the car with him. In the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, Tresca played the part of guardian angel or great-uncle. If anyone should have had inside knowledge of the affair, Tresca was the man.

In 1943, a few weeks before Tresca was murdered in New York by the Italian-born Soviet agent Enea Sormenti, Max Eastman, who had known Tresca for years and had written a profile on him for _The New Yorker_, talked with him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case:

_I felt close enough to ask him one day, when whispers had reached me concerning Upton Sinclair’s distressing experiences in Boston:_

_“Carlo, would you feel free to tell me the truth about Sacco and Vanzetti?”_

_He answered: “Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was not.”_

_At that moment some people entered the room where we were talking and I lost the chance to ask more. I lost it permanently, for I had no opportunity to see Carlo again before he was himself shot by an assassin._

The reasons for Tresca’s answer died with him, yet they must have been compelling or he would have skirted the question.

Thirteen years after Tresca’s death a new and conclusive series of ballistics tests was to bear him out. Many times postponed, they were finally conducted in the laboratory of the Massachusetts State Police on October 11, 1961, by Jac Weller, the honorary curator of the West Point Museum, and Colonel Frank Jury, a former head of the Firearms Laboratory of the New Jersey State Police.

The one certain method of determining whether two bullets have passed through the same gun barrel is examination with a comparison microscope, which brings the bullets together in one fused image. If the striations match, the conclusion is that both bullets were fired from the same weapon.

Using a comparison microscope and bullets they themselves had just fired from Sacco’s pistol, Weller and Jury determined beyond dispute that Bullet III had been fired from that pistol. The other five bullets, they found, had all been fired from a single unknown gun. As for the four shells that Bostock had picked up and given to Fraher, three had been fired in an unknown gun. Weller and Jury agreed, after comparing the breechblock markings of Shell W with those of a newly fired test shell, that Shell W had unquestionably been fired in Sacco’s pistol. Thus, the comparison microscope findings of 1961 confirmed the tests made by Major Goddard in 1927.

Turning to the question of a bullet substitution, Weller and Jury found it unlikely that the prosecution or its agents would have attempted to obtain suitable bullets by firing them from Sacco’s pistol into a side of beef; such a deception would not only have been difficult to keep secret, but the method would have offered no certainty of a plausibly lopsided bullet.

Captain Proctor had custody of the bullets and the guns, the bullets from the time of Berardelli’s autopsy until they were offered in evidence at the trial. If any substitution was made, Proctor was the only one with the extended opportunity to accomplish it. Van Amburgh was called to the trial as an outside expert; at that time he would have had neither the motive nor the occasion to make such a substitution.

When, just before the ballistics testimony at the trial, Van Amburgh, Proctor, and the defense expert Burns test-fired Sacco’s pistol, none of them was able to get hold of any obsolete Winchester cartridges similar to Bullet III. Proctor fired three Winchesters of the new type without the cannelure; Van Amburgh fired three Peters; Burns fired eight U.S. cartridges. None of these could have been used as a substitute for the obsolete Winchester Bullet III.

That Proctor made any switch of bullets or shells seems impossible in view of his character and the relevant facts. Proctor was amateurish in his knowledge of ballistics, and it was for other reasons than the bullet evidence that he felt Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty. At the trial he had not thought Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, and in 1923, in his affidavit for Thompson, he still insisted that Sacco’s pistol had not fired the mortal bullet. But if the prosecution had somehow replaced the original Bullet III by a falsely marked bullet actually test-fired from Sacco’s pistol, there would have been no need for Van Amburgh to be so qualifying in his identification of the bullet, and no need for Proctor to use his ambiguous “It is consistent with.” Both he and Van Amburgh would have _known_ that the false bullet came from Sacco’s pistol and could have said so flatly.

Then, too, there is the matter of motive. When the case first came to trial it was no earth-shaking issue for District Attorney Katzmann or for the State Police. Katzmann, if he had lost, would still have been re-elected district attorney. The case could not have been worth the risk of detection and disgrace for him or for Proctor to forge the evidence for a conviction.

After examining Bullet III, Weller and Jury concluded that it had been fired into a body—though whether a human or animal body, whether living or dead, they could not say. They did not think it possible that the slightly flattened side of the bullet could have been produced in a test firing. In contrast to Ehrmann and Wilbur Turner, Thompson’s expert, Weller and Jury did not find that the identifying scratches on the bullet’s base varied noticeably from the scratches on the other three bullets.

The inquest record of April 17, 1920, bears out these findings. Eighteen days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Dr. Frederick Jones testified that the bullet which lodged against Berardelli’s hip bone and was subsequently marked III had been slightly flattened as it came to rest against the bone. Dr. Magrath, who performed the autopsy, identified the bullet at the trial a year later by the three scratches he had made on it:

_As I found it, it lay sideways against the flat surface of the hip bone, and in my opinion the flattening of the bullet was due its striking that bone side on. The bone is curved at that point, and a very slight amount of impact from the more pointed part of the bullet would bring its side against the bone, if it had not force enough at that point to perforate the bone and go through it, which it did not._

The cumulative evidence is overwhelming that the Colt automatic found on Sacco the night of his arrest was one of the two pistols used to kill Berardelli. Even if one accepts the possibility that someone other than Sacco fired the Colt, Sacco knew who that someone was.

Vanzetti’s innocence is, at least for me, confirmed by my talks with Brini and by Tresca’s admission to Eastman, as well as by the contradictions to the court testimony brought out in the Pinkerton reports. Yet it would have been like Vanzetti to go to the chair rather than betray a friend. He had once remarked that it was an evil to be arrested, but a still greater evil to desert a comrade. When Moore was preparing his closing argument at Dedham, he felt that if he sacrificed Sacco he had a fighting chance of persuading the jury to acquit Vanzetti. “So I put it up to Vanzetti,” he later wrote; “‘What shall I do?’ and he answered, ‘Save Nick, he has the woman and child.’”

Both men died bravely, undoubtedly fortified by the thought, expressed by them many times, that they were dying for the working class of the world. Vanzetti, in the death chamber, calmly reasserted his innocence. Yet it is noteworthy that Sacco, who had refused to sign all pleas for clemency, chose rather in his last moment to proclaim his vindicating belief in anarchy.

It is possible that Sacco, whatever his guilt, may have considered himself innocent in the sense that he was serving a higher cause. His dreams were of violence. He was, as he told Thompson, at war with the government. To defend anarchy in the persons of his comrades Elia and Salsedo may have seemed to him to justify Parmenter and Berardelli sprawled in the gravel. The paymaster and his guard would merely be soldiers on the other side of the barricades, their deaths insignificant in comparison with the triumph of the cause. Vanzetti could express his anarchistic beliefs and then say, “Of course, I may be wrong.” Sacco could not qualify himself. His was the iron belief, one that has caused so much slaughter in the world, that the cause is more important than the individual. So he turned with fanatic hatred against Moore; so he applied the imagery of the Passion to his dilemma; so he died.

Over forty years have passed since the convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti. Their case was the American case of the century, one that became all things to all men. So divisive was it, that only now is it possible to see it in perspective. The accusations and counteraccusations fade, those who played their roles in it die, but the tragedy—however one may define it—remains.

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In spite of the great amount of material that may be found in print about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, important new information came to light during the writing of _Tragedy in Dedham_, much of it from the following persons. While many of them hold opposing views, I am grateful to them all for giving me of their knowledge and time:

Ben Bagdikian, Dr. William C. Boyd, Alfonsina Brini, Beltrando Brini, Paul J. Burns, Frank W. Buxton, Albert L. Carpenter, John Conrad, Anthony W. DiCecca, Barbara B. Dolliver, John Dos Passos, Michael J. Dray, Max Eastman, Herbert B. Ehrmann, Aldino Felicani, Michael C. Flaherty, Frank S. Giles, the late James M. Graham, Alden Hoag, John Hurd, Frank J. Jury, Suzanne La Follette, Isaac Don Levine, the Reverend Donald G. Lothrop, Eugene Lyons, Charles A. McCarthy, Robert A. McLean, Robert H. Montgomery, Mary DeP. Murray, Shelley A. Neal, Willis A. Neal, Tom O’Connor, James Rorty, Joseph Sammarco, Charles E. Sands, the late Dr. Warren Stearns, Michael E. Stewart, the Reverend Hillyer H. Stratton, Upton Sinclair, Jac Weller, Otto Zausmer.

For permission to quote passages from their writings about the case I am indebted to Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr., Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Robert H. Montgomery, and Upton Sinclair. Permission to quote from the manuscript of John F. Dever was granted by his executor; permission to quote from two letters in _The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti_ was granted by the publisher, The Viking Press, Inc.

I wish also to acknowledge the help of the Braintree Public Library, the Boston Public Library, the libraries of the Boston _Globe_ and the Providence _Journal_, the Boston Athenaeum, the Dartmouth College Library, and the Harvard Law School Library.

Among the many sources I consulted, the following were the most pertinent:

Colp, Ralph, Jr. “Sacco’s Struggle for Sanity.” _The Nation_, Vol.
187, No. 4 (August 16, 1958).

——. “Bitter Christmas: A Biographical Inquiry into the Life of
Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” _The Nation_, Vol. 187, No. 22 (December 27,
1958).

Dr. Colp consulted the files of the Massachusetts Department of
Mental Health in writing these accounts of the periods when Sacco
and Vanzetti were confined in mental institutions.

Dever, John F. _Memoirs of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case._ Manuscript,
estate of John F. Dever.

Presents the Dedham trial from the jury’s point of view.

Dos Passos, John. “Facing the Chair.” Boston, Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee, 1927.

Eastman, Max. “Is This the Truth about Sacco and Vanzetti?”
_National Review_, Vol. XI, No. 16 (October 21, 1961).

Eastman’s account of Carlo Tresca’s assertion of Sacco’s guilt;
incorporates the essence of Upton Sinclair’s “The Fishpeddler and
the Shoemaker.”

Ehrmann, Herbert B. _The Untried Case: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and
the Morelli Gang._ Second edition, New York, The Vanguard Press,
Inc., 1960.

A brilliant working-out of the hypothesis that the South
Braintree crime was committed by the Morelli Gang of Providence,
Rhode Island. It remains, however, only a hypothesis.

Frankfurter, Felix. _The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti._ Boston,
Little, Brown & Co., 1927.

Frankfurter, Marion D., and Jackson, Gardner. _The Letters of Sacco
and Vanzetti._ New York, The Viking Press, Inc., 1928.

The manuscript originals of most of these letters, plus others,
are in the Harvard Law School Library. The published versions
have been edited as to spelling and grammar, a number of
class-war and anticlerical passages have been suppressed, and in
some cases meanings have been altered.

_The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler._ Four reels of
documentary motion picture film. Thought to be lost, discovered
in Rockport, Massachusetts, in 1960 by Tom O’Connor, Donald G.
Lothrop, and Francis Russell. Now in possession of Brandeis
University.

Joughin, G. Louis, and Morgan, Edmund M. _The Legacy of Sacco and
Vanzetti._ New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., 1948.

At the time of its publication the most balanced and
comprehensive study. Morgan wrote the chapters on the two trials
and their legal aftermaths; Joughin dealt with the historical,
sociological, and literary aspects of the case.

Lyons, Eugene. _Assignment in Utopia._ New York, Harcourt, Brace &
Co., Inc., 1937.

Montgomery, Robert H. _Sacco-Vanzetti—The Murder and the Myth._ New
York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1960.

The first book attempting to prove that the trial and subsequent
proceedings were fair and that the men were justly convicted.
While arid in style, it offers a careful analysis of the evidence
and presents many telling points requiring detailed answers from
those who think otherwise.

Morelli, Joseph. _Autobiography._ Manuscript, 574 pages.

Copies are said to be in the possession of the author’s
granddaughter, a Providence criminal lawyer, and Louis V.
Jackvony, Jr., son of the one-time counsel for the Morellis.

Musmanno, Michael A. _After Twelve Years._ New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1939.

An account, by one of the younger defense lawyers, of the last
legal maneuvers.

_Pinkerton Report on the South Braintree Holdup._ Manuscript,
Travelers Insurance Company, Hartford, Connecticut.

This report does not appear in _The Sacco-Vanzetti Case:
Transcript of the Record_....

_Record of Public Hearing Before Joint Committee of the
Judiciary of the Massachusetts Legislature on the Resolution of
Representative Alexander J. Cella, Recommending a Posthumous Pardon
for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti._ Boston, Committee for
the Vindication of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1959.

_The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the Record of the Trial of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Courts of Massachusetts
and Subsequent Proceedings, 1920-1927._ New York, Henry Holt & Co.,
Inc., 1928-1929.

The five volumes and supplemental volume include the complete
record of the Dedham trial, a nearly complete record of
Vanzetti’s Plymouth trial, the various appeals and their
outcomes, affidavits concerning Madeiros and the Morellis, a
partial record of the Lowell Committee hearings, the minutes of
the Parmenter-Berardelli inquest, and the Pinkerton report on the
Bridgewater holdup.

Sinclair, Upton. “The Fishpeddler and the Shoemaker.” New York,
_Institute of Social Studies Bulletin_, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer,
1953).

Article expressing Sinclair’s doubts of Sacco’s innocence and
reporting Fred Moore’s similar doubts.

Vanzetti, Bartolomeo. “The Story of a Proletarian Life.” Boston,
The Sacco-Vanzetti New Trial League, 1924.

Zelt, Johannes. _Proletarischer Internationalismus im Kamp um Sacco
und Vanzetti._ East Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1958.

Drawing on records in Moscow, this book contains valuable
information about the Communist-controlled development of
the protest movement in Central Europe and the directed
demonstrations inside the Soviet Union. Its balancing of facts,
however, cannot always be relied on. Typical of its distortions
is Zelt’s quotation from _Putj MOPR_, the organ of the
International Red Aid, to the effect that “in 1926 the students
of the University of Brockton, in spite of a ban by reactionary
professors, unanimously chose as their graduation thesis ‘The
Case of Sacco and Vanzetti.’” There is, of course, no college or
university in Brockton, but according to the Boston _Herald_ of
June 3, 1927, “discussion of the Sacco-Vanzetti case by the class
in current events in the local high school has been banned by the
history teacher, Miss Sarah McGrory, on the theory the students
are not old enough to understand it. The action was taken by the
teacher after the class, in its usual manner of selection of a
subject for discussion, voted in favor of the Sacco-Vanzetti
case.”

INDEX

Adrower, Giuseppe, 124, 173-174, 193

Affe (Afa), Carlos, 183, 196-197

Aiken, John, 127, 128, 216

Anderson, George, 423, 443, 446

Anderson, Maxwell, 8, 13

Andrews, Lola, 12, 32-33, 146-151, 153, 224, 230-232, 390

Andrews motion, 221, 264, 265

Arrogni, Harry, 155

Atwater, Eldridge, 161

Atwood, Alfred, 136, 212

automobile, getaway:
at Bridgewater, 49, 50, 51-52
at Dedham trial, 156, 204-205
in Madeiros’ confession, 281, 300, 301, 461
in Manley woods, 56-57
at Plymouth trial, 99
route checked by Francis Russell, 306, 307-308
at South Braintree, 38, 39, 41, 44-46
stolen from Francis Murphy, 51

Bagdikian, Ben, 305, 309

Baker, Alta, 44

Balboni, Carlo, 102

Balboni, Rosa, 102

Barone, Bibber, 290, 292, 299, 300

Barr, C. A., 52-53, 56

Barry, John, 267, 268

Bastoni, Enrico, 102

Beal, Fred, 421, 448, 452

Bedard, Alfred, 282

Beffel, John Nicholas, 113, 115, 116

Behrsin, Hans, 34-35, 37, 69, 146

Benchley, Robert, 391, 412

Benkosky, Steve (Steve the Pole), 294, 295, 297, 300

Bent, Silas, 304, 312

Berardelli, Alessandro, 35, 36, 37-38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 314, 462
autopsy on, 47, 158
revolver of, 26, 142, 160-162, 163, 176

Berardelli, Sarah, 162, 176, 391-392

Bernkopf, Elizabeth, 246-247, 412

Blackwell, Alice Stone, 253

Bloor, Ella Reeve, 436, 448, 451

Boda, Mike, 54, 55, 57-59, 60-61, 70, 88, 91, 92, 96-97, 101, 140,
156, 166, 178, 180, 181, 183, 190, 197, 314, 462
pistol of, 58, 295 fn.

Boice, Mae, 284, 286-287, 299

bombings, 17, 84-85, 117, 121, 219, 331, 412, 426

Bongiovanni, Adeladi, 103

Borsari, Emma, 103

Bosco, Albert, 172, 182, 193, 395-397

Bostock, Jimmy, 37, 38, 40, 42, 47, 48, 69, 142, 159, 162, 224

Bowles, Benjamin, 49-50, 69, 94, 99

Boyd, Dr. William, 318

Brandeis, Louis, 114, 435

Branting, George, 386

Brenner, William, 39, 146, 307

Brini, Alfonsina, 77, 104, 169-170

Brini, Beltrando, 21-23, 78, 103-104, 369, 392, 466

Brini, Vincenzo, 77, 93, 95, 104

Brooks, Edward, 152

Brooks, Georgina, 95, 99-100

Brouillard, Albert, 51, 52, 57, 58, 118, 148, 356

Broun, Heywood, 419

Bruno, “Doggy,” 272-273, 319, 320, 321, 324

Bullard, F. Lauriston, 344-345

bullets, 13, 47, 158-160, 201, 202, 205, 209, 212, 233, 234-235,
242-244, 314-318, 376-377, 402, 415, 461, 464-465

Burgess, Henry, 105

Burke, Frank, 40, 69, 164, 224, 225, 297

Burns, James, 158-159, 160, 163, 295, 376, 464

Cahoon, Dr. Charles, 238

Callahan, Jack, 271, 304

Callahan, William, 68, 93, 94, 139, 164, 166

Campbell, Dr. C. MacFie, 239

Campbell, Julia, 31-33, 149, 151

Cannon, James, 332, 333, 335

Canter, Harry, 253, 405, 416, 421

cap, found near Berardelli, 42, 47, 125, 157, 183, 190, 194, 197,
401, 415

Carbarn Bandits, 349-350

Carbone, Antony, 122, 340

Carpenter, Albert, 224, 231, 253, 278, 279

Carrigan, Mark, 36, 40, 69, 142

Carter, Edward, 164

Casey, Richard, 52, 101

Cellucci, Joseph, 167

Cerro, Henry, 167

Chase, Elmer, 41, 168

Chisholm, George, 44

Christophori, Esther, 103

Cicchetti, Beniamino, 118, 120

Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti, 427

Clark, Francis, 45, 301

Cline, Charles, 335-336, 338

Coacci, Ferruccio, 54, 55-56, 57, 96, 97, 112, 140, 287 fn., 462
pistol of, 58

Codman, John, 114, 253, 382

Coes, Loring, 194, 391

Colarossi, Vincent, 177

Colbert, Maurice, 40

Cole, Austin, 62, 101, 152-153

Collins, John, 315, 316-317

Colp, Dr. Ralph, 241

Communists, and Sacco-Vanzetti case, 6-7, 217-218, 328-329, 330,
332-333, 335-336, 338, 366-367, 454

Connolly, Michael, 62-63, 100, 156, 406

Conrad, John, 324, 325

Constantino, Dominic, 146

Cook, Waldo, 419, 427

Coolidge, Calvin, 406-407, 435

Corl, Melvin, 170, 177

Cox, Alfred E., 49-50, 69, 94, 99, 390, 403

Cummings, Homer S., 250-51

Daley, William, 244, 263

Damato, Nicola, 41, 155

Darroch, Lola, 111, 224, 232, 253

Darrow, Clarence, 336, 338

DeBeradinis, Louis, 41, 69

Debs, Eugene, 326

DeFalco, Angelina, 118-121

Defense Committee, 107, 141, 219, 222, 267, 326, 333-334, 335, 338,
417, 427
and conduct of defense, 125-126

DeForest, Ralph, 34

Dentamore, Antonio, 182, 196, 395, 396

Department of Justice, 121-123, 340-341, 426-427, 433

Desmond, Walter, 44, 168, 300

Dever, John, 13, 133-136, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153,
155, 159, 163, 164, 170-171, 174-175, 180, 211-212, 233, 413

Devlin, Frances, 35, 36, 40, 69, 143, 144, 165

Di Bona, Candido, 412

DiCarlo, John, 102

DiCecca, Anthony, 319-323

Dodson, William, 270 fn.

Dolbeare, Harry, 31, 151-152

Donato, Narciso, 89-90

Donovan, Mary, 268, 334, 356, 362, 384, 405, 408, 416-417, 424, 425,
436, 451, 454, 456

Dorr, Wilson, 45, 168

Dos Passos, John, 421

Doyle, Tommy, 224, 225, 228, 278

Dray, Michael, 24-26

Dreyfus, Alfred, 381

Driver, Thomas, 285

Duval, Clement, 86

Eastman, Max, 463

eels, delivery from Corso & Cannizzo, 404-405

Ehrmann, Herbert, 3, 286-289, 292-298, 308, 314, 355, 369, 376, 402,
404-405, 411, 461, 465

Elia, Roberto, 12, 88-91

Emerson, Marion, 108

Ensher, Napoleon, 101, 156

Ernst, Morris, 303-305, 308, 309, 310, 314, 462

Ettor, Joe, 109, 326

Evans, Elizabeth Glendower, 114, 139, 157, 165-166, 190, 207, 223,
237-238, 240, 244, 252, 258, 327, 334, 336, 337, 341, 356, 362,
382, 385, 419, 423, 452

Evarts, Richard, 411, 431, 433, 435

Fabbri, Amleto, 267, 333

Falcone, Emilio, 166

Falzini, Luigi, 160, 161

Farmer, Albert, 44, 300, 301

Farnum, George, 433

Faulkner, John, 152, 153

Felicani, Aldino, 14, 15, 16-18, 82, 107, 108, 113, 139, 172, 177,
252, 253, 268, 269, 334-335, 338, 356, 404, 405, 409, 424, 432,
434, 458
and DeFalco episode, 118, 119, 120
and defense funds, 223, 333

Ferguson, Lawrence, 165

Ferrari, Joseph, 282, 298, 299, 322, 356

Field, Elias, 242, 243, 411, 412, 433, 442

Finerty, John, 422, 428, 443, 446

Fiochi, Margherita, 103

Fitzemeyer, George, 162-163

Fitzgerald, J. Henry, 160, 163

Flaherty, Michael, 268, 459

Fleming, Michael, 290-291, 299, 356

Florence, Aldeah, 176

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 108, 109, 113, 116, 268, 269

Flynn, William J., 87, 88, 89

Foley, William, 166

Fortini, Mary, 102, 404

Fraher, Thomas, 47, 48, 370, 401

Frankfurter, Felix, 8, 87, 268, 286, 332, 334, 341, 353-354, 366, 383,
408, 411, 424, 435, 459
_Atlantic Monthly_ article, 352-353
_vs._ John Wigmore, 371-372

Frantello, Albert, 36, 48, 69, 165

Frazer, Dr. John Chisholm, 46, 141

Fuller, Alvan T., 20, 23, 278, 346, 347, 349, 353, 355, 363, 366-367,
368, 389, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426-427, 441, 446-447
character of, 5-6, 350-351
investigation by, 369-370, 373, 390-391, 392, 404, 405, 406, 407,
408-409
and Madeiros, 378-379, 388
and Vanzetti, 394

Fuller, Charles, 56-57, 156

Gaines, Mary, 198

Galleani, Luigi, 78, 80, 84, 86, 87, 88

Gallivan, Jeremiah, 43-44, 47, 118, 397, 401, 412, 415

Ganley, John, 131, 212

Gatti, Nicola, 167

Geary, Daniel, 288

Gerard, George, 136, 175, 212

Gill, Augustus, 234, 376, 390

Giovannitti, Arturo, 78, 80, 109, 326

Goddard, Calvin, 376-377, 402, 415, 464

Goodridge, Carlos, 12, 41, 154, 155-156, 224, 228-230, 390

Goodridge motion, 221, 228, 246, 264, 265

Gould, Roy, 36-37, 224-225, 369, 403, 415

Gould-Pelser motion, 221, 224, 263, 265

Govoni, Doviglio, 93, 94, 102

Grabill, Ethelbert Vincent, 367, 371, 431

Graham, James, 94, 95-96, 97, 98, 105, 443

Grant, Robert, 373, 375, 389, 400, 403, 413, 414

Graves, Earl, 49-50, 51, 52, 94

Greenslet, Ferris, 374, 451

Guadagni, Felice, 93, 119, 120, 171-172, 173, 182, 193, 253, 395-397,
405

Guerin, Lieutenant, 198, 199

Guidierris, Sibriano, 167

Guidobone, Angelo, 170

Hamilton, Albert, 233-235, 242-243, 262, 295, 377, 402
and switched pistol barrels, 247-249

Hamilton-Proctor motion, 221, 233, 244, 247, 264, 265

Hapgood, Powers, 436, 441, 442

Harding, Frank (“Slip”), 50, 52, 69, 70, 94-95, 99

Hassam, George, 51, 69, 100
garage of, 96, 271 fn., 462

Hassam, John, 232, 369

Hassam, Lola, 31. _See also_ Andrews, Lola

Hawley, Frank, 198, 199

Hayes, James, 195-196

Hayes, Louise, 36, 39, 69, 295, 403

Hays, Arthur Garfield, 428, 433

Hellyer, Henry, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 167-168, 198, 339

Henderson, Jessica, 238, 419, 432, 434

Heron, William, 33, 154, 155

Hersey, Wallace, 131, 221

Hewins, Mabel, 45

Hicks, Granville, 332

Hill, Arthur Dehon, 235-236, 244, 245, 327, 411, 412, 419-421, 422,
424, 430-431, 432, 433, 435, 440

Holladay, Paula, 436, 437

Holmes, John Haynes, 366, 427, 452, 460

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 84, 353, 423, 433, 446

Hunting, Dr. Nathaniel, 46, 141

Hurwitz, Albert, 275-277

Iacovelli, Henry, 197, 198

Iscorla, Pedro, 166

Israel, Harold, 249-250, 251

Jack, Cerise Carman, 139, 166, 238, 258, 326, 327, 346, 382

Jackson, Frank, 397, 398, 400

Jackson, Gardner, 334-335, 338, 383, 384, 392, 404, 405, 406, 408,
424, 451, 456, 457, 460

Jackson, William Schuyler, 428, 433, 446

Jackvony, Louis, 302, 305, 310

Jacobs, Ellsworth, 292-293

James, Edward Holton, 370, 371, 417, 436, 442, 455

Jesse, Frank, 170, 177

Jocomo, John, 274-275

Johnson, Ruth, 60-61, 66, 100, 106

Johnson, Samuel, 57, 331

Johnson, Simon, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 100, 106, 178, 181

Jones, Dr. Frederick, 47, 141, 465

Jury, Frank, 464, 465

Kane, Francis Fisher, 428, 433

Kane, William, 69, 95, 97, 98, 124

Karnes, Robert, 288

Katzmann, Frederick Gunn, 8, 20, 22, 24, 68, 93, 96, 114, 118, 121,
122, 282, 340, 353, 354, 395, 401, 465
character of, 4-5, 25-26, 66-67
cross-examination of Sacco, 184-186, 188-191
cross-examination of Vanzetti, 179-181
at Dedham trial, 130, 133, 136, 138, 139, 142, 145, 146, 149, 151,
158, 161, 178, 418 fn.
and DeFalco episode, 119, 120
and Orciani, 162, 190
at Plymouth trial, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106
summation at Dedham trial, 202-205

Katzmann, Percy, 119, 120, 124

Kelley, George, 82, 92, 125, 157, 174, 190, 194

Kelley, Michael, 72, 73, 79, 82, 173, 191

Kelley, William, 290-292

Kelliher, Julia, 45, 301, 461

Kennedy, Minnie, 36, 39, 69, 295, 403

King, Harry, 136, 329 fn.

King, John, 52, 100

Kurlansky, Harry, 150-151

LaBrecque, Alfred, 150, 298

La Guardia, Fiorello, 366, 441, 452

Langlois, Edgar, 39, 144

Laughton, Warren, 61, 62, 64

Lawrence, Bishop William, 363-365, 389, 418

LeBaron, Frank, 55-56, 64

Letherman, Lawrence, 275, 340, 341, 342

Levangie, Mike, 29, 40, 48, 69, 151

Levine, Isaac Don, 426, 427, 428, 442

Lewis, Alfred Baker, 405, 416, 421, 458

Lippmann, Walter, 419

Liscomb, Barbara, 39, 167

Lloyd, John, 45

Longhi, Vincent, 103

Lopez, Frank, 113, 197, 216, 224, 252, 253, 267

Loring, Fred, 42, 47, 157

Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 2, 5, 372, 373-375, 389, 402, 403, 413
and Bosco-Guadagni alibi, 395-397

Lowell Committee, 315, 373, 376, 388, 389, 395, 402
report of, 407, 413-415, 417, 419

Luban, Jacob, 273, 274-277, 279, 321

Lummus, Henry, 282, 285, 328

Lyons, Eugene, 110, 111-112, 114, 216, 222, 225, 226, 253, 329 fn.,
333, 334, 383, 452, 462

Lyons, Fred, 271 fn.

McAnarney, Jeremiah, 25-26, 126, 127, 129-130, 131-132, 135, 139,
140, 147, 153, 155, 171, 174, 176, 179, 185, 192, 200, 220, 221,
307, 341
summation at Dedham, 201-202

McAnarney, John, 126, 127, 132-133, 179, 268, 406

McAnarney, Thomas, 126-127, 130, 159, 164, 213, 215, 245-246

McCullum, Peter, 39, 146, 162, 307

MacDonald, Herman, 369, 373, 390, 392, 407

McGlone, Jim, 37, 42, 144

McHardy, Lewis, 136, 426

McLaughlin, Dr. Joseph, 266, 430, 449, 450

McLean, Bob, 305, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 316

MacMechan, Virginia, 258, 259

McNamara, Frank, 136, 221

McNaught, Henry, 152

Madeiros, Celestino, 279-285, 286-287, 289-290, 294, 298, 299-300,
301, 314, 341-342, 377-379, 388, 405, 406, 409, 413, 423, 441,
449-450, 455, 456, 461

Magazu, Peter, 41, 154, 155

Magrath, Dr. George Burgess, 47, 141, 158, 418, 449, 455, 465

Mahoney, Margaret, 31, 35, 142, 162

Malaguti, Terese, 102

Mancini, Tony, 294-295, 296-298, 314

Marden, Frank, 135, 221

Marks, Jeannette, 384, 451

Mede, Jimmy, 271-272, 273-274, 277-278, 320, 321-323, 324

Meyerson, Dr. Abraham, 238, 239, 368

Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 421, 428, 441

Minor, Robert, 116

Moller, Emil, 278-279

Monello, Angelo, 172-173, 182

Monterios, Barney, 284-285, 290, 299, 309

Moore, Fred H., 13, 16, 109, 119, 120, 123, 125-126, 127, 220, 246,
251, 327, 333, 363, 382, 383, 463, 466
and Albert Hamilton, 233-234, 249
and ballistics evidence, 159, 201
and bombings, 219
and Carlos Goodridge, 228-230, 264
as creator of Sacco-Vanzetti case, 108, 110-111, 112-114, 124-125,
252
at Dedham trial, 129-133, 135, 136-137, 139, 140, 144, 145, 153,
154, 164, 166, 191
and defendants’ guilt or innocence, 12, 17, 256-257, 462-463
and defendants’ radicalism, 179, 221
and Emil Moller, 278-279
and Frank Lopez, 224
and Jimmy Mede, 274, 278, 321
and Joe Sammarco, 322, 325
and Lola Andrews, 146-151, 230-232
and Lottie Tatillo, 398-399, 400
and Louis Pelser, 225-227
and Luban and Silva, 274-277
money problems of, 222-223
and New Trial League, 252-253
relationship with Sacco, 241, 254-256
and Roy Gould, 225
summation at Dedham, 200-201

Moors, John, 332, 363, 374, 392, 427

Morelli, Frank, 293

Morelli, Helen, 312-313

Morelli, Joe, 279, 288, 289, 292, 295-296, 297, 298, 302-303, 308, 311
autobiography of, 304-305, 309-310, 312-314, 461-462

Morelli, Mike, 292, 308, 461

Morelli Gang, 3, 284, 287-288, 289, 290, 293, 294, 341, 461

Moro, Joseph, 333, 384, 406, 408, 421, 424, 451

Mucci, Leon, 112, 196

Murphy, Dr. John, 50, 100

Musmanno, Michael, 15, 391-392, 411-412, 421, 422, 428, 430, 431,
432-433, 435, 443, 446-447, 448

Mussolini, Benito, 380-381

Neal, Shelley, 28-31, 35, 43, 117, 141-142

New Trial League, 252-253, 254, 267

Nichols, Annie, 39, 166

Novelli, Jenny, 34, 69, 167-168, 339

Oates, “Guinea,” 272-273, 318, 320, 321, 324

O’Brien, Robert Lincoln, 331, 344, 369-370, 418

O’Connell, William Cardinal, 367, 434

O’Connor, Tom, 338-339, 391, 401, 443, 452

Orciani, Ricardo, 13, 19, 65-66, 69-70, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 140,
156, 161, 162, 178, 181, 183, 190, 197, 314, 462

Packard, Lottie, 229, 415. _See also_ Tatillo, Lottie

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 91, 123
bombing of house, 84-85, 88
Red raids of, 53, 82, 87-88

Papa, Vittorio, 102

Parker, Dorothy, 421, 432

Parker, Seward, 136, 212, 221

Parmenter, Frederick, 35-36, 37-38, 40, 42-43, 46

Pelser, Louis, 39, 145-146, 224, 225-227, 263, 307, 390

Pieraccini, Ralph, 287, 292

Pierce, Edward Peter, 352, 355

Pierce, Wilfred, 165

Pinkerton reports, 168, 338-340, 392, 466

Pool, Elmer, 45

Pound, Roscoe, 87, 286, 366

Prince, Dr. Morton, 345-346, 363, 417

Proctor, William, 2, 47, 100, 158, 160, 164, 242, 244, 345, 395, 402,
464-465
testimony re Bullet III, 159, 243, 247, 264-265, 354, 415

Quintiliano, Luigi, 91, 193, 197

Ranney, Dudley, 281, 288, 289, 291, 292, 298, 299, 300, 341, 367, 376,
377, 395, 402, 403, 406

Rantoul, Lois, 139, 157, 194, 341, 412

Ravachol, François, 86

Reading, Arthur, 420, 431, 447

Reed, Austin, 45-46, 152-153, 212

Reid, Robert, 145, 224, 225

Ricci, Angelo, 40, 198

Ricci, Dominic, 174

Richards, John, 287, 293-294, 296, 390

Richardson, James, 265, 412

Ripley, Walter, 135, 140, 163, 212, 214, 221, 244

Ripley motion, 221, 262-263, 265

Robinson, Merton, 235

Rose, Reginald, 329 fn.

Rosen, Joseph, 168-169, 177, 403

Ross, Joseph, 166, 190, 191, 192

Rugg, Arthur Prentice, 285, 352, 355

Ruzzamenti, John, 122

Sacco, Dante, 211, 327, 393, 431

Sacco, Ines, 130, 237, 244, 327, 393

Sacco, Nicola:
alibi of, 171-174
anarchism of, 86, 260-261
arrest of, 63-65
break with Moore, 254-255
cap of, 97, 157, 183, 190, 194, 197, 199, 415
character of, 72-73, 81-82
and departure for Italy, 91-92
early life of, 78-80
and Fuller’s decision, 409
guilt of, 466
hearing on South Braintree crime, 94 fn.
hunger strike of, 237, 238
identifications of, 69, 143-145, 147-148
indicted, 116
interpretation of case, 336, 337
and James Graham, 94, 96
last words of, 450, 466
letter to son, 438-439
and Madeiros confession, 279-280
mental breakdown of, 239-242
in Mexico, 81
in Morelli confession, 314
pistol of, 8, 64, 73, 139, 158, 183, 189, 203, 233, 234-235,
247-249,
314-316, 415, 464-465, 466
speech at sentencing, 357-358
as symbol, 1, 348
testimony, 181-192

Sacco, Rosina, 72, 80, 91, 92, 97, 112, 125, 211, 214, 238, 240, 244,
306, 327, 341, 356, 386, 392, 409, 419, 424, 425, 430, 432, 434,
438, 441, 446-447, 458, 460
and Fred Moore, 113, 130, 132, 178, 207
testimony at Dedham, 197-198

Salsedo, Andrea, 87, 88-91

Sammarco, Joe, 272, 273, 274, 278, 319-325, 461

Sargent, John, 340, 426, 433

Sawyer, Roland, 365-366

Shachtman, Max, 328, 332-333, 338

Shaw, George Bernard, 330, 331 fn.

Shaw, Maynard, 100

shells, 42, 47, 159, 212, 234, 314, 315, 376-377, 464

Shields, Art, 113, 116, 222

Sibley, Frank, 12, 154, 185-186, 211, 233, 334, 412

Silva, Frank, 271-273, 274-278, 279, 318, 320, 321, 322, 324-325, 461

Sinclair, Upton, 17, 256, 304, 463

Sisk, James, 109, 127

Slater, Rexford, 161

Splaine, Mary, 35, 36, 40, 47, 48, 69,143-144, 165, 297, 345-346

Squires, Francis J., 119, 120, 121 fn., 282

Stearns, Warren, 19-21

Stewart, Michael, 18-19, 50-51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58-59, 60, 62,
64-65, 69, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 118, 125, 148, 158, 198, 199,
394, 398, 418 fn.

Stone, Harlan, 435, 441

Stong, Phil, 386-387, 388 fn.

Stratton, Samuel, 373, 375

Sullivan, Simon, 105-106

Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts, 328, 351-352, 354-355, 431

Taft, William Howard, 418, 435

Tatillo, Lottie, 397-400

Thayer, Webster, 4, 5, 13, 54, 123-124, 127-128, 261, 328, 344, 346,
354, 369, 389, 406, 419-420, 460
and Mrs. Bernkopf, 246-247
character of, 97-98
charge to Dedham jury, 8, 205-210
at Dedham trial, 129-133, 134-135, 136-137, 140, 141, 148, 149,
150,
154, 157, 178-179, 192, 193-194, 199, 210-211
and Lowell Committee, 414
and Madeiros motion, 341, 342-343, 351, 353
at Plymouth trial, 101, 105, 106
sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti, 356-359, 361-362
and supplementary motions, 244-246, 262-265
and switched pistol barrels, 248-249

Thomas, 280, 281. _See also_ Driver, Thomas

Thomas, Dr. Albert, 238

Thompson, William G., 17, 108, 132-133, 235-236, 243, 244, 245, 247,
257, 265, 268-269, 278, 322, 326, 328, 333, 337, 338, 347, 353,
354, 362, 363, 366, 367, 369, 378, 383, 395, 401, 403, 409, 410,
414, 415, 419, 422, 426
and Bosco-Guadagni alibi, 396-397, 402
and Calvin Goddard, 376, 377
and Department of Justice, 340-342
and Jimmy Weeks, 289, 291-292
last talk with Vanzetti, 443-445
and Lottie Tatillo, 399-400
and Madeiros, 280, 281, 285-286, 290, 299, 339, 346, 351-352
opinion of Vanzetti, 73, 327
and Wilbur Turner, 402

Thorndike, Herbert, 94, 95

Totty, Warren, 51

Tracey, William, 33, 154

Tresca, Carlo, 16, 78, 80, 85, 90, 91, 107-108, 109, 110, 115, 432,
463, 466

Turner, Wilbur, 402, 465

Vahey, James, 274

Vahey, John, 93-94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 282, 443

Valdinoce, Carlo, 88

Valdinoce, Susie, 327

Van Amburgh, Charles, 2, 158, 159-160, 235, 248, 249-251, 295, 460,
464-465

Vanzetti, Bartolomeo:
alibi for Bridgewater crime, 101-104
alibi for South Braintree crime, 168-170
anarchism of, 86, 260
arrest of, 63-65
and Back Bay women, 258
character of, 71-72
clemency petition of, 367-368
development in prison, 257, 259-260, 261
early life of, 73-78
eulogy of Sacco, 362-363
and Fuller’s decision, 409-410
identifications of, 69, 94-95, 99-100, 151, 152-153
indicted for South Braintree crime, 116
innocence of, 466
interpretation of case, 336, 337
and James Graham, 95-96
and Jimmy Mede, 273-274
and John Vahey, 93-94, 95, 359, 429
last interviews with Thompson, 422, 443-445
last words of, 450, 466
letter to Dante Sacco, 439-440
and Lowell Committee, 390
mental breakdown of, 266-267
in Mexico, 81
moods in prison, 347
in Morelli confession, 314
revolver of, 8, 15, 19, 26, 64, 68, 139, 142, 160-162, 163, 203,
209, 233, 235, 314-316, 403
speech at sentencing, 358-361
statement for United Press, 428-430
as symbol, 1, 259, 348
testimony at Dedham, 176-181
tried for Bridgewater crime, 97, 98-106

Vanzetti, Luigia, 393, 416, 424, 432, 434, 438, 441, 446, 458, 460

Vaughn, Earl, 62-63, 156, 406

Ventola, Angelo, 66

Ventola, Joseph, 54, 55, 57, 66, 97

Vernazano, John, 104, 105

Vorse, Mary Heaton, 114-115

Wade, Lewis, 34-35, 38, 48, 69, 142-143, 162, 297, 307

Wadsworth, Lincoln, 162, 403

Wait, William Cushing, 352, 354

Walsh, Frank, 428, 433

Waugh, Frank, 131

Weeks, Jimmy, 282, 284, 285, 289, 290-292, 296, 297, 298, 299

Weller, Jac, 464, 465

Wells, H. G., 381

West, William J., 121, 340, 341

Weyand, Fred, 121, 122, 340, 342

Wiggin, Joseph, 369, 390, 391, 446

Wigmore, John, 371-372

Wilbar, Winfield, 282, 291, 298, 331, 355, 357

Williams, Harold, 215, 227, 247, 248, 249
at Dedham trial, 138, 139-140, 142-143, 144, 147, 150, 156, 157,
163
and DeFalco episode, 118, 119

Williams, John, 171-172, 182, 193

Wind, Max, 56, 156

Winslow, Gertrude, 238, 356

Witner, Adolph, 273, 274-277

Zagroff, Segris, 123-124

Zelt, Johannes, 217

Zorian, Harold, 121, 340

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Francis Russell has contributed historical and critical articles to such periodicals as _American Heritage_, _Horizon_, _The Yale Review_, _The Antioch Review_, _The Christian Science Monitor_, and abroad to _Irish Writing_, _The Observer_, _The Countryman_, _Time & Tide_, and others. It was while serving on a jury in Dedham, Massachusetts, thirty-two years after Sacco and Vanzetti had been tried and condemned in the same courtroom, that he began his investigation of the written and unwritten history of the case that resulted in _Tragedy in Dedham_.

Born in Boston in 1910, he attended the Roxbury Latin School. Following several undergraduate years in France and Germany, he returned to New England and graduated from Bowdoin in 1933. In 1937 he received an A.M. from Harvard. During World War II he served in the Canadian Army as a captain in the Intelligence Corps. After the war he was a political intelligence officer with the British 30th Corps in Hildesheim, Germany. In 1955 his volume of critical essays on Joyce, Kafka, and Gertrude Stein was published in England as _Three Studies in 20th Century Obscurity_. He is co-author of _The American Heritage Book of the Pioneer Spirit_. He lives in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts.

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 172 Changed: Felicani than asked him if he realized this
to: Felicani then asked him if he realized this

pg 186 Changed: anger of frustation pulsing through him
to: anger of frustration pulsing through him

pg 193 Changed: He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 abili
to: He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 alibi

pg 194 Changed: frustations of the past week
to: frustrations of the past week

pg 197 Changed: dark one with the earlaps
to: dark one with the earflaps

pg 200 Changed: agreed to divide their alloted morning
to: agreed to divide their allotted morning

pg 226 Changed: bought a dinner cigars & cigaretts
to: bought a dinner cigars & cigarettes

pg 227 Changed: finaly had my whole story
to: finally had my whole story

pg 254 Changed: shympaty and forgiveness the poor Nick is
to: sympathy and forgiveness the poor Nick is

pg 290 Changed: with Barney Monteiros at the Bluebird Inn
to: with Barney Monterios at the Bluebird Inn

pg 293 Changed: but they acted apprenhensive of something
to: but they acted apprehensive of something

pg 309 Changed: get to the bottom of the kidnaping
to: get to the bottom of the kidnapping

pg 389 Changed: State Street less instransigent
to: State Street less intransigent

pg 393 Changed: degenareted who perjured against us
to: degenerated who perjured against us

pg 428 Changed: By truths I mean the real condictions
to: By truths I mean the real conditions

pg 454 Changed: In England forty protestors were injured
to: In England forty protesters were injured