Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [62]
The Government and the Establishment were united in their support of Palmer’s extreme measures. “There is no time to waste on hair-splitting over infringements of liberty . . .” said the Washington Post. Warren Harding, at the start of his campaign for the presidency, delivered a tub-thumping speech to the Ohio Society. “Call it the selfishness of nationality if you will, I think it is an inspiration to patriotic devotion—To safeguard America first. To stabilize America first. To prosper America first. To exalt America first. To live for and revere America first . . . Let the internationalist dream and Bolshevist destroy . . . We proclaim Americanism and acclaim America.”
The Palmer raids were conducted particularly vigorously around Boston. A large community of immigrants, especially Italians, lived in the Bay area, their presence greatly resented by longer-established residents. About eight hundred people were arrested on 2 January 1920 and half were taken in chains to the immigrant station on Deer Island in Boston Harbor where they too were held in unsanitary, freezing conditions. Two of the prisoners died of pneumonia; another went mad; a third plunged to his death out of a fifth-story window. Later it emerged that a group of thirty-nine bakers arrested in Lynn, Massachusetts, had been gathered together not to ferment revolution, but simply to establish a cooperative bakery.
It was at this time, and in this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, that two crimes in particular were committed near Boston. In Bridgewater on Christmas Eve, 1919, four men had unsuccessfully attempted to hold up a payroll truck, and fired at the truck as it fled. Four months later, in April, a gang murdered a paymaster and his guard at a South Braintree shoe factory, escaping the scene with $15,000. Suspicion rested firmly on the immigrant community, and the police were under enormous pressure to find and convict the murderers.
The following month, the body of Andrea Salsedo, an Italian anarchist printer, was found smashed on the ground beneath the windows of the Department of Justice’s New York office. He and an associate had been held without warrants and probably tortured since their arrests eight weeks earlier. It was unclear whether Salsedo had jumped or was pushed. During his captivity, Bartolomeo Vanzetti had traveled to New York as a delegate from his local Italian society, hoping to stand bail for Salsedo and his friend.
Back in Boston two days after Salsedo’s death, Vanzetti and a fellow anarchist, Nicola Sacco, went to get an associate’s car out of the garage so that they could drive to the homes of various anarchists, warn them of Salsedo’s fate and tell them to hide away any incriminating political pamphlets—probably including the bomb-making manual, Health Is Within You. They had heard that the area was going to be raided again. Finding that the car did not have a current license plate, they left the garage and boarded a trolley-bus heading home. The garage owner, acting on official instructions to inform on any Italians who owned cars, called the police as soon as they had left. The police apprehended Sacco and Vanzetti on the trolley-bus and took them into custody.
Visibly nervous, aware that the authorities probably knew of their anarchist connections, the two men lied about the fact that they were carrying weapons and who their friends were. The officers who arrested them interpreted this as “consciousness of guilt”—although John Dos Passos, who later wrote an impassioned appeal for their release, suggested that it might have been “consciousness of the dead body of their comrade Salsedo lying smashed in the spring dawn two days before.”
The Department of Justice quickly realized that by convicting Sacco and Vanzetti for the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes they would be getting rid of two central members of the Galleanist group they had long hoped to smash. Even before they were arrested, Sacco and Vanzetti had been the