Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [69]
People involved in their conviction—the brother of the garage owner who had informed on them, Governor Fuller who had refused them clemency, one of their jurors, the executioner, Judge Thayer himself—were the focus of specific violent attacks. Thayer’s home was destroyed by a bomb and he spent the rest of his life living under permanent guard at his club in Boston.
It is still unclear whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti did commit the crimes for which they were killed. Upton Sinclair, whose novel Boston was an attempt to place the events surrounding their purported crime and trial in a believable fictional context, was convinced that both were innocent—until his interview with their first lawyer, Fred Moore, who told him that although he had never heard them confess to it, he thought they were guilty. Sinclair considered Moore unreliable (he was sacked from the defense team because he was a cocaine addict) but his faith in his heroes was shaken.
It seems unlikely that Vanzetti was involved either with the murders and robbery at South Braintree or with the attempted robbery at Bridgewater. Ballistics experts over the years have linked Sacco’s gun to the bullets fired at South Braintree, although others claim that the gun or the bullet-casings found in his pockets were tampered with at the time or afterwards. In the 1980s, the son of an anarchist associate of the two men said everyone in their inner circle knew that Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was not.
What they were clearly and proudly guilty of was political radicalism, but this was not the offense for which they were tried. Their trial was a shameful attempt by the Government to rid itself by the only means it knew how of two men who symbolized forces that it feared and would not try to understand. But much of America would have agreed with Judge Thayer’s unofficial verdict that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were “bastards” who deserved to die, regardless of the means used to achieve that end. It was these people who rushed in their millions to join the revived Ku Klux Klan.
The Ku Klux Klan marches openly down Pennsylvania Avenue, 1926.
8
THE Ku Klux KLAN REDUX
THE POST-CIVIL WAR KU KLUX KLAN HAD FADED OUT OF PUBLIC consciousness in the late nineteenth century, but in 1915 the Kentucky-born director D.W. Griffith made a movie adaptation of Tom Dixon’s best-selling novel of a decade earlier, The Clansman. The Birth of a Nation, starring Lillian Gish, showed the revival of the devastated post-war South as in large part due to the patriotism and loyalty of the Klan. Although Griffith claimed that his film merely reflected the period as he had read about it in history books—which it did; the history books of the time were uniformly racist—The Birth of a Nation served as inspiration to a new generation of fearful, prejudiced Americans who distrusted blacks as much as they resented immigrants.
One man observing the success of The Birth of a Nation with enraptured interest was Colonel “Doc” Simmons, a lonely thirty-five-year-old alcoholic recuperating in Atlanta after being hit by a car. Tall and impressive-looking, Simmons’s inflammatory oratorical skills (and zeal for the sound of his own voice) were reflected by his fiery red hair. One acquaintance described him as being “as full of sentiment as a plum is full of juice.”
He had been a Methodist circuit preacher; he was also an inveterate joiner of churches and societies. In 1915 he wore the lodge pins of thirteen groups including the Masons, the Knights of Pythias and the Woodmen of the World, for which he worked as promoter. Simmons assumed his title, Colonel, from the honorary rank he held in the Woodmen; the “Doc” came from a medical degree he claimed to have taken at Johns Hopkins University, but of which no evidence has been found.
On Thanksgiving night, 1915, just before the Atlanta première of The Birth of a Nation, Simmons took thirty-five men—including two former members of the Reconstruction Klan—up Stone