Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [66]
To another, later that year, he made it sound almost as if arrest and imprisonment had allowed him to serve his principles: “We did not come to [be] vanquished but to win, to destroy a world of crimes and miseries and to re-build with its freed atoms a new world. I am disappointed, but not crushed. I have not become a rat or a renegade. And I can carry my burden to the last, and only that counts.” He refused to recant his beliefs and continued to call for vengeance, which he hoped would be realized as freedom for all. “But till then, the struggle goes on . . . till then, to fight is our duty, our right, our necessity.”
The Department of Justice would have seen these words in the context of Vanzetti’s links to the violent anarchist movement—and so they were meant; documents signed by Vanzetti and Sacco while they were in prison contain pointed references to Health Is Within You. But they also inspired their liberal supporters with a vision of Vanzetti, in particular, as a “philosophical” anarchist, a harmless dreamer, a would-be intellectual. Instead of a ferocious activist, they saw a poet and an idealist behind the large moustache.
Vanzetti contemplated his end with serenity and dignity. “Were I to recommence the ‘journey of life,’ I should tread the same road, seeking, however, to lessen the sum of my sins and errors and to multiply that of my good deeds.” With all the lyricism of the incarcerated, he wrote of his lost hopes of living “free among the green and in the sunshine under an open sky.”
He thanked well-wishers who had sent him flowers for his cell: “My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing colors and beauties forms: A giranium plant, a tulip and plant both from Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches buds and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a bouquet of May flowers from Mrs. Winslow.” How could Mrs. Evans or Mrs. Winslow see this gentle, nature-loving man as a murderer?
Sacco and Vanzetti’s adherents focused on the “noble” characters of the accused men, swearing that no one who knew them could believe either man capable of committing the crimes with which they were charged. Visitors and correspondents described them as warm, poetic, simple-hearted and sincere; every contact they had with them, they claimed, made the conviction of their innocence stronger. Judge Thayer, however, thought differently.
After six appeals their case was reopened in 1927. One of Sacco’s fellow prisoners in Dedham, Celestino Madeiros, had confessed to being part of the South Braintree gang and specified that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been there. He named his fellow conspirators as the Morelli brothers—one of whom bore a striking similarity to Nicola Sacco. Madeiros was able to demonstrate that he had received a large sum of money, his fifth-part share of the robbery. No money had ever been associated with either Sacco or Vanzetti, the alleged thieves.
Madeiros’s evidence corroborated the generally held opinion of the Boston Department of Justice agents that the South Braintree crimes had been committed by a professional gang of highway-men, but Judge Thayer (again presiding) dismissed it. The Department of Justice refused to open their files to disprove evidence gathered against them of spying and manipulating evidence and witnesses. A Justice Department agent who had placed a spy in prison with Sacco insisted that his “only motive in trying to clear up the mystery was to aid justice.”
Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyer protested: “A government that has come to honor