Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Duluth, Minnesota 1908 4- ir + £ jL 5K«a p&ftt'Ss ILL sw*UH»
Download 2.03 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- 322 SACCO AND VANZETTI
- THE WORLD AS JURY 323
- 324 SACCO AND VANZETTI
- A GHASTLY MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE” 325
- 326 SACCO AND VANZETTI
- THE DARK DAYS OF 1924 327
- 328 SACCO AND VANZETTI
- I believe he is suffering from a prison psychosis of temporary nature brought on by the extraordinary conditions in which a man of intense
Nothing has occurred up to this hour that has in any wise shaken our confidence in Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In fact, our confi dence is greater today than before they went on trial. Now we have their story, have seen them on the stand, and have heard the Commonwealth’s case, we sincerely believe that they are innocent of the Braintree crime. . . . We are determined that someway, somehow, the wrong the twelve men composing the jury at Dedham did Sacco and Vanzetti shall be righted. This was the verdict of millions. 322 SACCO AND VANZETTI The World As Jury Now began the long and difficult struggle for a new trial which for six years beat upon the ears of stone of the stiff-necked courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Those years were a long drawn-out torture for Sacco and Vanzetti, sustained only by the tremendous growth of the movement for their liberation. Vanzetti’s days of waiting were relieved by work in a shop in Charlestown Prison. He found great solace in reading and writing. His English improved and his writ ings in the new language were very beautiful. A remarkable friendship grew between the austere, elderly liberal, Mrs. Glenower Evans, and Vanzetti, as their published letters revealed. Sacco was much more dis turbed by his prison life. He longed for his wife and children, for his work in a shop and fellow-workers, for activity. Idleness tortured him. It was unfortunate that they could not have been together for those terrible years and sustained one another. The verdict of guilty was received with shocked incredulity around the world. A wave of indignant protest engulfed American embassies in every capital, large and small. Demonstrations mounted until the American press was full of news of barricaded ambassadors, and em bassies stormed, with troops turned out to guard them. The names of the once obscure Italian immigrants were on the protesting lips of shouting millions. Rome, Paris, Moscow, London, Barcelona, Milan, Genoa, Mexico City, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Havana, Toyko. Berlin, Lisbon, were among the places heard from in the news. In Par is 20 workers were wounded by the police. Debs sent the $5 he re ceived on his discharge from Atlanta Prison to the defense fund oi Sacco and Vanzetti. Tom Mooney, who had then been in prison for five years and had been saved from the gallows almost by a hair’s- breadth, linked his case with that of Sacco and Vanzetti, against the ad vice of many friends in California. He used his magazine, Tom Moon ey’s Monthly, to blast both frame-ups and to show how in both cases witnesses were being exposed as liars, perjurors, crooks—coerced oi bought and paid for. In a most dramatic parallel, these two example: of the deadly frame-up system, eventually fell apart. Labor.was fight ing it with two fists—in San Francisco and in Boston. If Sacco an< Vanzetti had been given life imprisonment, as was Tom Mooney, they too, would eventually have been vindicated and liberated. In the Mooney case, the star witnesses, Oxman and McDonald, an< THE WORLD AS JURY 323 the two Edeau women were thoroughly discredited by 1921. The same process then began in Boston. Of course, this all took time and did not result in motions for a new trial, based on an exposure of the witness es, until November 8, 1923. Meantime, an extensive appeal was pre pared to go before the State Supreme Court. One of the strongest legal points in it was the one Vanzetti had raised on my first visit to him. It argued that Judge Thayer, in refusing to give the defendants separate trials, had thus prejudiced their chances for justice. The defense attorneys, especially Fred Moore, did a heroic job in their tireless and devastating investigation of the State’s witnesses. Four motions were finally made for a new trial, but unfortunately they had to be presented first to the trial judge, Webster Thayer, whose prejudice was publicly known. He had openly discussed the case on the golf links in Worcester, where he lived, and his contempt for the defendants was well known. He asked the newspaper men several times during the trial what they thought of his conduct of the trial, and finally demanded that they publish a statement “that this trial is being conducted in a fair and impartial manner.” He turned to Frank P. Sib ley, star reporter of the Boston Globe and dean of the reporters, and asked, “Sibley—you are the oldest—what do you think?” Sibley gave his classical answer: “Your Honor, I have never seen anything like it!” For the next six years it was a horribly monotonous process of mak ing the motions for a new trial, and having them ridiculed and denied by Judge Thayer, who became increasingly hysterical, practically ma niacal on the subject of “those amychistic bastards!” as he described them to Professor Richardson of Dartmouth College in 1924. His full remark was “Did you see what I did to those amychistic bastards the other day?” (referring to a denial of new trial motions). “I guess that will hold them for a while! Let ’em go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!” Professor Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly, reviewing the case and exposing the errors, distortions and prejudices of Judge Thayer. It showed that Thayer had falsified the record on Sacco’s testimony, quoting bogus passages not actually in the record. The four new motions for a new trial started with the exposure of the jury foreman, Ripley, a former chief of police, who had told a friend of his, Daly, a few days before the trial that he was going to 324 SACCO AND VANZETTI serve on the jury trying those two “ginneys.” Daly remarked that he did not believe they were guilty, whereupon Ripley said heatedly, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway!” Felix Frankfurter re marked in his book on Sacco and Vanzetti, published in 1927: “The unfitness of a man in this frame of mind to serve on a jury needs no comment.” (It is difficult to understand why years later Justice Frank furter did not raise the same issue in relation to juror Russell Janney in the Dermis case, as did Justice Hugo Black.) Louis Pelzer and Lola Andrews, state witnesses, retracted their identification. Carlo E. Goodridge, an alias, was exposed as a degener ate and a criminal named Whitney whose record was known to the prosecutor when he placed him on the witness stand. Motions for a new trial were made in each instance. There was yet another motion calling for an invalidation of the verdict because foreman Ripley had brought four bullets, not in evidence, into the jury room for purposes of comparison with the fatal bullet in evidence and had shown them to the jury. In addition to all this, the defense had succeeded in locating a salesman, Roy Gould, who had been shot at by the bandits, a bullet going through his overcoat. He had notified the authorities of this fact and had been willing to testify. But the state did not call him, un doubtedly because he stated definitely that he had seen neither defend ant at that time. “A Ghastly Miscarriage of Justice” “Hope springs eternal in the human breast!” So it was with all who were defending Sacco and Vanzetti in the two years following the trial. The exposure of the three main witnesses as perjurors and liars, and of the outrageous conduct of the jury foreman, caused the Sacco and Vanzetti Committee to print a jubilant four-page leaflet, giving all the facts, headed “Victory Is In Sight.” It had a cover design of four bent prison bars in front of Sacco and Vanzetti, grasped in a powerful hand marked “labor.” The bars were labeled with the names of those ex posed—Goodrich, Andrews, Pelsen and Ripley. These exposures also caused the American Federation of Labor in its 1922 convention al Cincinnati, Ohio, to demand “a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, con victed of murder in the first degree by a biased jury under the instruc tions of a prejudiced judge in the State of Massachusetts.” In its next convention at El Paso, Texas, in 1924, the AFL charac “A GHASTLY MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE” 325 terized their prosecution as “a ghastly miscarriage of justice," and re iterated its demand “for a new trial for these defenseless victims of race and national prejudice and class hatred.” The Locomotive Engineers Journal said bluntly, “Must justice be so blind, judges s6 biased, that men can be hanged when the evidence declares conclusively that they are hot guilty?” But Judge Thayer procrastinated, and months passed before he ruled, and then he followed his set pattern of denial after de nial. Meantime, it was hard to keep up a sustained interest while the case dragged along without action. Other issues in the class struggle pushed to the front for public attention. There were 53 wartime pris oners left in federal penitentiaries in February 1923. There were pend ing appeals on some wartime cases. There were a large number of de portation cases in the courts. In Pennsylvania 38 Communists were indicted under the State Sedition Act and in Michigan 22 Communists were held under the state Criminal Syndicalist Act for attending a con vention at Bridgeman, Michigan, in the summer of 1922. In addition to all of this, the United Mine Workers was confronted by trials for murder and treason in West Virginia, growing out of the miners’ armed march of 1921 in Logan County, and the labor movement was fighting injunction proceedings in a dozen places. By November 1922, the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee had spent $155,000 and was $8,000 in debt. It had printed hundreds of thou sands of leaflets and pamphlets in English, Italian, Spanish, Portu guese, French and German. It had planned tours for Italian and Eng lish speakers, including Fred Biedenkapp, myself and others. It had employed publicity men, lawyers and investigators. The trial transcript was 10,000 pages long. It had called expert witnesses at heavy ex pense. It was quite desperate for funds. Unemployment was wide spread in New England, especially in the shoe and textile industries, and the miners were involved in a big strike. These workers had been heavy contributors for over two years. In 1922 there had been set up in New York City the American Fund for Public Service. Norman Thomas was president; Roger Bald win, secretary; and its board of directors were Harry F. Ward, William Z. Foster, James Weldon Johnson, Sidney Hillman, Lewis Gannett and Scott Nearing. Fred Moore made an application to them, through me, asking for funds up to $5,000 to do “special investigation work.” I forwarded the application to the fund office. It was popularly called “The Garland Fund” because it was set up with one million dollars by 326 SACCO AND VANZETTI a young man named Garland. Along with the application went a letter from the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee stating that they were fa miliar with the contents of the application, that their Committee “is fully advised of the plan of investigation outlined by Mr. Moore and if it can be carried into effect it will be with our entire approval.” This was signed by A. Felicani, F. Lopez and F. Guadagni, as Executive Committee. In view of future developments, this "document was ex tremely important. It referred to a new line of investigation outside of the trial—an at tempt to find out and prove who was actually guilty of the holdup and robbery at South Braintree. Fred Moore was convinced by some clues he ran across in Boston’s underworld that a well-trained payroll rob bery gang had not only committed this crime, but others before and after. It opened up the task of pursuing endless leads which took de fense investigators all over the country. On one of my innumerable speaking trips for Sacco and Vanzetti, I gave and received information from IWW prisoners in Leavenworth. But with the aid of the Garland Fund and the waning approval of the defense committee, Fred fever ishly pursued every clue. Some of the anarchists began to question this procedure. “It is the job of the government, not our job!” they would say. At the end of three long years, idle in a prison cell, taken into couri intermittently to be placed beside Vanzetti in the iron cage and to lis ten to futile legal arguments for a new trial scornfully ridiculed and re jected by the hateful Judge Thayer, Nicola Sacco took matters into hi.' own hands. He followed the example of the heroic McSweeney in Ire land and declared a hunger strike. For three days he refused to eat. B3 March 17, 1923 we sent out an appeal to labor, “Nicola Sacco i dying.” His wife, lawyers, comrades, pleaded with him; his co-defend ant, Vanzetti, sent him a message—but Sacco was determined to regis ter his protest. Judge Thayer, at this juncture, after consultation with judges of th Massachusetts Supreme Court, agreed to hear the long deferred mo tions for a new trial. Sacco was too weak to be brought into court. Alier ists were appointed and he was transferred to the Boston Psyche pathic Hospital for two weeks’ observation. To prove his sanity an that his hunger strike was a protest weapon, Sacco accepted food i the hospital after Judge Thayer acted. He was transferred to the Bridge water Hospital for the Criminal Insane and finally back to Dedhai THE DARK DAYS OF 1924 327 Jail, where he was allowed to do basket weaving to relieve the strain of idleness. But the fact that Fred Moore, as his attorney, had agreed to the examination as to his sanity by alienists was never forgiven by Sac co and, I believe, by Mrs. Sacco. It was a terrible decision for Fred Moore to have to make but he was determined to save Nick’s life, at all costs. ’ The Dark Days of 1924 The year 1924 was marked by increasing dissatisfaction on the part of the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee with Fred Moore’s spending money on “investigation.” Money came in slowly in small amounts and went out in big checks. It was hard for these workers to understand it, particu larly as there grew up an ideological objection to the whole business among the anarchists, in which Sacco emphatically joined. Vanzetti usually did not express any disagreement with Sacco on any issue. There was validity in Sacco’s position, which was, “Must we prove somebody else guilty in order to prove our innocence?” He said it was a bad example and would be used against other workers falsely ac cused of crime in similar frame-ups. He pointed out that Mooney and Billings were not following this course. His position was, “It is the duty of the prosecution, of the state, to find the guilty parties. It is not our business.” On the other hand, the lawyers and all practical-minded supporters of the defense asked why Sacco and Vanzetti should go to the electric chair for a gang of murders who would not lift a finger to save them. They pointed out that Mooney and Billings were sentenced to prison, not to death. And after Fred Moore had been forced to withdraw from the case, mainly at the insistence of Sacco and Vanzetti, new lawyers later followed the very clues he had labored so hard, and against such bitter opposition, to uncover. It was this question of both policy and tactics in legal defense that caused the break between Fred Moore and the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee. His efforts were heroic and his labor tremendous. He was supposed to be paid $150 a week but often he spent it all on the case. His mistakes were magnified out of all propor tion and his devotion and services overlooked when the break came. The defense counted heavily on the “Proctor motion,” following ex pert testimony that the mortal bullet could not possibly have come through Sacco’s pistol. This was buttressed by photographs. But the 328 SACCO AND VANZETTI state countered with other experts and it went beyond the comprehen sion of laymen. Judge Thayer, of course, always accepted the state’s experts as the more authoritative. The Proctor affidavit from a sick old man, near death, whose conscience forced him to speak out for men he believed to be innocent, revealed his part in the frame-up. It showed how the prosecutor had put questions to him, by agreement, that he could answer so that the jury would believe he was saying something different from what he was really saying. He said in his affidavit that the district attorney had wanted to ask him the flat ques tion—Was he convinced that the murder bullet had been fired by Sac co’s gun? And he had stated he would answer “No” to such a ques tion. Instead Katzman asked him a question so artfully designed that he could answer, “My opinion is that it is consistent with being fired by that pistol.” This was used as a direct affirmation by both the pros ecutor and the judge during the trial and afterward. In November 1924, the sadistic and shameful Judge Thayer once again dismissed motions for a new trial on the Proctor motion, and then went to Dartmouth College to a football game, where he made his disgraceful remark to Professor James Richardson (which I quoted above) about the defendants. The professor was so shocked and horri fied that he made an affidavit about it. By this time, practically every big trade union in the United States, state federations, central labor bodies and local unions had gone on record for a new trial. But a stub born, poisonous, withered old man, full of hate and fear, stood be tween Sacco and Vanzetti and the simple justice of a new trial. A New Trial League was organized that year in Boston, called together by Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower Evans, Mrs. Anna D. Davis, Alice Stone Blackwell, John Codman and other notable New England liberals, and John Van Vaerenewyck of the Cigarmakers Union, who sent out a new appeal to all American trade unions. The denial by Judge Thayer of the Proctor motion was a crown ing disappointment to patient and controlled Vanzetti. At Christmas 1924 he declared a hunger strike in protest. On January 3, 1925, he was committed by Judge Raymond of the Superior Court to the Bridge water State Hospital, following reports by state alienists. The defense attorneys secured the services of a well-known psychiatrist, Dr. Abra ham Meyerson, who examined Vanzetti. In his report he stated: I believe he is suffering from a prison psychosis of temporary nature brought on by the extraordinary conditions in which a man of intense NOW THE HIGHER COURTS 329 mental life finds himself. The long legal battle, the bombardment of atten tion on the part of the press of the world, and of international organiza tions, the impending sentence of death, prison discipline, confinement with lack of outdoors, have brought on a transient paranoid state. In my opin ion, he would be better off in a hospital than in his present environment. After five years of calm endurance of intolerable pressures, Vanzetti had broken under the strain and suspense. But what he suffered from was a grim horrible reality and not delusions! It was with this grave new development that we entered the fifth year of their living hell. All the motions for a new trial were exhausted and rejected by Judge Thayer. He had closed every door there. The case was due to be heard by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in the spring. I was in Massachusetts during December 1924, at the request of the Sacco- Vanzetti Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union. New life began to flow into the defense movement again as it moved forward, out of the long dreary hiatus of delays and stalling in Thayer’s court. The Sacco-Vanzetti Committee agreed to enlarge the committee to in clude representatives from the Boston labor movement to direct the renewed agitation and raise the funds necessary for the costly appeal to the higher court. John Barry, a steel worker, was elected chairman of the enlarged committee; Michael Flaherty, vice-chairman, was a painter and a member of the Boston Central Labor Union. The treas urer remained the faithful and hard-working linotype operator, A. Fel- icani, who worked every day in a shop and gave all his leisure time for seven years to the defense of his comrades. A coal miner, Emilio Coda, became the secretary. He sent out an appeal to all the locals of the United Mine Workers, which brought in $5,000 immediately. He also addressed a letter to all the locals of the International Ladies Gar ment Workers Union, reminding them of their generosity at two con ventions and that their president, Morris Sigmen, had visited Sacco and Vanzetti in prison to extend the union’s greetings. Now the Higher Courts It was decided in the Fall of 1924 by the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee to explore the necessity of reorganizing the legal team to present the ap peal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. It was argued strongly that a leading New England lawyer was now required, that Fred Moore, as an outsider, had two strikes against him. He had created animosities by his fighting attitude; the long delays, the complicated legal proce Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 2.03 Mb. Share with your friends:
|