Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [63]
Maybe no one knew anything; certainly they weren’t telling. As Sacco, who worked for a shoe factory, had a stamped time-card for Christmas Eve 1919, Vanzetti alone was tried for being part of the attempted robbery in South Braintree. The court case was staged in Plymouth, where he was a known anarchist. Despite the eighteen mostly Italian witnesses Vanzetti produced to testify to his whereabouts selling fish on 24 December (eels are an Italian Christmas delicacy), nine of whom had actually spoken to him, Vanzetti was convicted on evidence such as that of a fourteen-year-old boy who admitted he had not seen the face of the fleeing man purported to be Vanzetti, but swore he “could tell he was a foreigner by the way he ran.” One witness was asked whether he had ever heard any of Vanzetti’s entirely unrelated political speeches to the striking cordage workers, four years earlier. Judge Webster Thayer—who asked for and received permission to preside over the South Braintree case as well—told the jury in his summing-up that the crime was “cognate” with Vanzetti’s radical ideas.
After Vanzetti was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years for attempted robbery at Bridgewater, he and Sacco were tried for their part in the South Braintree murders in a courtroom heavily and dramatically fortified against a potential bomb attack. Twenty-two of the thirty-five eyewitnesses to the crime were certain that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been there; seven were unable to make any kind of identification; of the four who identified Sacco, two were discredited and the other two changed their first accounts to incriminate him; only one, who had elsewhere contradicted the evidence he gave in court, positively identified Vanzetti. Both men had alibis for that day, but these were disregarded by the jury. Although many of the Justice Department agents apparently thought that the theft and murders had been committed by professional highway robbers, one of the detectives working on the case was later quoted as saying, “They were bad actors anyway and got what was coming to them.” Off the record, Judge Thayer was said to have said that he wanted to see the bastards hanged.
The two men were convicted and sentenced to death by Thayer in July 1921. “There was not a vibration of sympathy in his tone when he did so,” said Vanzetti later. “I wondered as I listened to him, why he hated me so. Is not a Judge supposed to be impartial? But now I think I know—I must have looked like a strange animal to him, being a plain worker, an alien, and a radical to boot. And why was it that all my witnesses, simple people who were anxious to tell the simple truth, were laughed at and disregarded? No credence was given to their words because they, too, were merely aliens.”
Over the next few years, while Sacco and Vanzetti waited for a retrial, the Red Scare fueled by Palmer’s brutal raids abated. The threat of a widespread Bolshevik rising seemed less and less likely as stability returned to Europe. Despite Palmer’s dire warnings of imminent revolution on American soil, the chaos he had predicted did not come to pass. Americans wanted to forget the recent turmoil and concentrate on the future. When Warren Harding came to office seeking “a return to normalcy” he declared, “Too much has been said about Bolshevism in America.”
But immigrants continued to flood into America. Between June 1920 and June 1921, the year of Sacco and Vanzetti’s first trial, 800,000 people,