at work every other day that winter and spring. Vanzetti was his own employer. He could not give himself a certificate he had been at work. His word was not taken as to his whereabouts, nor was the word of the greater part of the Italian colony in North Plymouth.
What about Coacci, the man who "skipped with the swag"? Immediately upon the arrest of the three Italians the police, with the help of Department of Justice agents, sought to catch Coacci, as soon as he landed on the Italian shore. They located Coacci, intercepted his trunk, had it taken back to America. The trunk was broken open and found to contain nothing except Coacci's own belongings. Yet in the face of all this the prosecuting attorney told the jury in the murder trial at Dedham a year and a half later that Coacci escaped to Italy with the swag.
Vanzetti's First Trial
After the fishy identifications of Vanzetti in connection with the Bridgewater crime and the rejection of witnesses who would not identify him Vanzetti was placed on trial. The trial was "staged" at Plymouth in June and it "ran" for a week. The outcome was a conviction, followed on August 16, 1920, by a sentence from Judge Webster Thayer of twelve to fifteen years in State prison for assault with intent to rob.
Fred H. Moore, a California lawyer, who became chief counsel after Vanzetti's Plymouth trial, had been one of the defending lawyers for Ettor and Giovannitti, leaders of the Lawrence strike of 1912, when they were tried on a charge of constructive murder. The trial of Sacco and Vanzetti at Dedham for the payroll robbery and murders at South Braintree began on May 31, 1921, and ended on July 14, the jury, after five hours' absence from the courtroom, brought in a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree against each defendant.
On the opening day of the trial the front entrance of the county courthouse at Dedham was guarded by an iron gate, behind which stood policemen and deputy sheriffs. They opened the gate, admitting only one man at a time. There was a big crowd around the courthouse, made up almost entirely of the 250 men who had been summoned as prospective jurors. Each of them, as he passed through the gate, was "frisked" for a concealed weapon. Newspaper men were felt over for guns for the first time in their career. Throughout the trial a squad of policemen, with riot guns at the ready, stood on the courthouse steps, guarding the place against "the anarchists." Troops of the State police patrol, on horseback, paraded about the otherwise quiet little town. Arrangements for guarding the courthouse were made by the State police in cooperation with the Department of Justice, the latter under the direction of William J. Burns, whose machinery had been taken over bodily when Harry M. Daugherty came in for his hectic term as Attorney-General.
The Parade of the Police
Sacco and Vanzetti were lodged in the county jail at Dedham, some two blocks from the courthouse. They were taken to the courthouse in the morning in the midst of a crowd of deputy sheriffs; they were taken back at noon the same way. A squad of twenty-eight men brought them back in the afternoon and took them away at night. All through the trial this march was made four times a day, through the public streets. Though the number of police was after a time reduced, there were never fewer than sixteen officers with the two defendants.
The panel of 250 jurors was exhausted without securing the required twelve good men and true, and a second panel of 250 was summoned and questioned without filling the box; a special panel was called and finally the deputies were sent out into the "highways and byways." Protest was vainly made by counsel for the defendants in regard to the manner in which the final lot of jurors was secured.
Before the trial opened every person who could read a newspaper knew that "Vanzetti, convicted holdup man, goes on trial today for murder." The agreement, made in the trial, that if the defense would not introduce character witnesses for Vanzetti the State would not refer to his conviction at Plymouth, was consequently a one-sided deal.
Moore began his task in a friendly atmosphere, but it was not long before Judge Thayer and he were locking horns. Hardly a day went by that Moore and the court did not get into a wrangle in the midst of which the jury would be excused. Moore's unfamiliarity with Massachusetts practice added to his troubles. His agressiveness, his long black hair, his somewhat dark visage, his dour manner, together with his open espousal of the radicalism of the defendants, did not tend to put him on a good footing in that tight little New England town. At a lunch-table of newspaper men reporting the trial Judge Thayer declared: "I will show them that no damn long-haired anarchist from California can come to Massachusetts and run this court."
The newspaper men reporting the trial were drawn into the battle between Moore and the court. According to Frank Sibley of the Boston Globe, Judge Thayer spoke to a group of reporters during a recess. Sibley reports the conversation as follows: "I think," said the Judye, "that I am entitled to have printed a statement in the Boston papers to the effect that this trial is being fairly and impartially conducted."
"To this nobody replied," according to Sibley, "whereupon Judge Thayer addressed one of the reporters by name. 'What do you say?' he asked. 'Is this trial being fairly and impartially conducted?' The reporter addressed replied emphatically: 'We have never seen anything like it.'"
Sacco Tells All
In planning the defense, Moore decided to face the whole truth, radicalism and all, and trust to the ultimate fairness of the judge and jury. The prosecution seized upon that attitude and capitalized it. The personal records of Sacco and Vanzetti, their participation in strikes and radical meetings, their visit to Mexico to avoid getting into the war, their attachment to supposedly anarchistic groups, the revelations of Chief Stewart and his anarchist catechism, all were constantly kept before the jury—and the public. Sacco took the stand in his own defense. The prosecution asked him little about the murder, but plied him with a maze of questions covering his philosophy of life, why he was against war, his attitude toward America, what he thought of Harvard College. In addition Sacco was egged into making a "soap-box" speech in the course of which he avowed his atheism. Forgotten was the question whether the defendants at the bar, under the evidence strictly related to the case, were of the band of five who killed the two shoe-company employees and ran off with the payroll. In the words of the foreman of the jury, a former chief of police of Quincy: "Damn them, they ought to hang anyway."
