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This document summarizes key details from a longer text about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. It discusses how the author's views on the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti changed during his research. It highlights that the leader of the Italian anarchists Carlo Tresca privately believed Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent. Ballistics tests in 1961 confirmed that one bullet came from Sacco's pistol, supporting Tresca's view.
This document summarizes key details from a longer text about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. It discusses how the author's views on the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti changed during his research. It highlights that the leader of the Italian anarchists Carlo Tresca privately believed Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent. Ballistics tests in 1961 confirmed that one bullet came from Sacco's pistol, supporting Tresca's view.
This document summarizes key details from a longer text about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. It discusses how the author's views on the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti changed during his research. It highlights that the leader of the Italian anarchists Carlo Tresca privately believed Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was innocent. Ballistics tests in 1961 confirmed that one bullet came from Sacco's pistol, supporting Tresca's view.
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Another random document with no related content on Scribd: 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