Dreamers and Deceivers (22 page)

•  •  •

In response to the attack on his home, Attorney General Palmer ordered the FBI to conduct a series of raids along the East Coast against the ring of primarily Italian anarchists believed to be responsible for the bombing of his home, along with a string of other bombings around the United States that had left dozens dead.

Palmer believed that these people were the same kind of fanatics who had plunged Europe into a world war five years earlier after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He was determined to stamp them out.

The first U.S. war on terrorism had begun.

South Braintree, Massachusetts

April 15, 1920

3:02
P.M.

The four-story redbrick building that housed the Slater-Morrill shoe factory looked just like the hundreds of other factories that dotted the suburban landscape around Boston.

Frederick Parmenter, the company’s paymaster, and Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, were getting set to hand out the weekly payroll. The 9:18 train from Boston had brought the cash to the office that morning, and now the paymaster and guard were carrying the two heavy boxes containing more than fifteen thousand dollars from the main office to the factory on Pearl Street.

•  •  •

Two men slouched against the iron fence outside the shoe factory, the brims of their hats low on their foreheads. They nervously fingered the weapons concealed in their jackets. Maybe this is what martyrdom felt like, they thought. Their friend Valdinoci had not thought he would die that night outside Attorney General Palmer’s house. But they knew his death had not been in vain: The first acts of terrorism in America had put the anarchists on the map and signaled that the revolution had begun.

The revolution would go nowhere, however, without cash. Anarchists were being rounded up and jailed, and the cause was in desperate need of money. And that was why these two men now stood outside the shoe factory.

Parmenter and Berardelli got to within a few feet of the men before the gunshots rang out. The paymaster and security guard fell to the ground, the heavy payroll boxes making a loud clang as they hit the ground.

A dark blue Buick pulled up to the scene. The two killers grabbed the boxes and jumped into the backseat as the car screeched away.

As they drove away, the two men looked up and saw Slater-Morrill employees peering out from the grimy windows. The killers opened the side windows, stuck their guns out, and opened fire, watching as the workers ducked to avoid the bullets and shattering glass.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti ducked back inside the car and smiled. The fewer witnesses the better.

U.S. Courthouse

Dedham, Massachusetts

July 13, 1921

Sacco and Vanzetti sat silently in their cage as the trial that had captured the attention of the nation—and much of the world—played out before them. They had maintained their innocence from the moment they were questioned. They had never wavered. The real killers, they claimed, were still at large.

Their lawyer argued that the only culprits in the Dedham courtroom were xenophobia, paranoia, and a biased and broken system of justice.

“What is your full name?” asked the prosecutor.

“Lewis Pelser,” the witness replied.

“Where do you live?

“Two eighty-seven Centre Street, Jamaica Plain.”

“And what is your occupation?”

“Shoecutter.”

Pelser’s testimony went on for half an hour. He explained how he had been at the shoe factory the day Berardelli and Parmenter were gunned down. He had looked out the window and seen two men fleeing the scene.

“Do you see in the courtroom the man you saw shooting Berardelli that day?” the prosecutor asked him.

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was him, but he is a dead image of him.”

“Who is the man you are referring to?”

“The fellow on the right here.” He pointed at the man neatly dressed in a white shirt and black tie, with a prominent jaw, notched chin, and bushy eyebrows. It was Nicola Sacco.

•  •  •

“Are you ready to proceed, Mr. Moore?” Judge Webster Thayer asked from the bench.

Fred Moore, the lead attorney for the defense, had been waiting for this moment his entire life. It was the trial of the century, and this, his closing argument, would be his starring role in the proceedings. Moore was a well-known socialist lawyer who had previously represented members of the Industrial Workers of the World and other radicals.

“If it please the Court, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury, I know of no time when a lawyer quite as keenly feels his responsibility as he does at the conclusion of a capital case.”

For the next forty-five minutes, Moore examined the evidence and the witnesses presented by the prosecution and raised doubts about their credibility.

“In the course of the arguments had in this case, attention will be directed, I take it, to the peculiar type of mind represented by the defendant, to the fact that the defendant has opinions and ideas foreign
to the opinions and ideas of the vast majority of the American citizenship.”

Moore ended with a final plea to the nine stone-faced jurors. “We of counsel and the Court cannot divide or assume your responsibilities. You are the responsible men. You are the judges of the facts. The Court gives you the law, but you, only you, can pronounce the verdict upon facts, and when you pronounce the verdict, gentlemen, remember that you are duty bound to give it in accordance with the facts as you believe them to have been found on the witness stand.”

The jury ultimately did just that. After deliberating for only a few hours, their verdict was unanimous.

Six Years Later

Moscow, Russia

August 25, 1927

Joseph Stalin was enraged at the news that Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed two days earlier in Boston. Six years of appeals and delays had exhausted the doomed pair’s legal options. They were gone, but they would not be forgotten—not if Stalin had anything to say about it. On his orders, the Soviet navy christened one vessel the
Sacco
and another the
Vanzetti.
Streets in every major city in Russia were renamed for the men.
The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti,
a book that collected their numerous writings from jail, was immediately translated into Russian and sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Just outside Moscow, the Sacco and Vanzetti pencil factory was built, Every one of the hundreds of millions of pencils it produced would be emblazoned with the names of the two martyrs. The pencils would be distributed to schools around the Soviet bloc so that students learning spelling and math would also learn that America was a horrible, unjust place where innocent men were executed for their political opinions.

Boston, Massachusetts

October 1, 1928

Upton Sinclair had a lot in common with Joseph Stalin: Both men viewed America as the greatest force of evil in the world; both saw capitalism as slavery; and both were willing to do just about anything to further the cause of global socialism.

That’s what made them revolutionaries.

In recent months, Sinclair had been hard at work on his new novel,
Boston,
about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti. He was confident that his research would prove that the executed anarchists had been innocent—meaning the American government had been wrong and the Soviet government had been right. He was pursuing leads and interviewing witnesses, much as he had done twenty years earlier in the Chicago stockyards.

Trying to obtain a transcript of the court proceedings, Sinclair had written letters to dozens of lawyers, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who had become a prominent advocate for Sacco and Vanzetti. He pleaded with Frankfurter to send him his copy of the transcript: “Perhaps a thousand times as many people will read my novel as will ever look at the official record.”

Modesty had never been one of Upton Sinclair’s strengths, but in this case, his belief in the size of his readership was well founded.
The Jungle
had been a national bestseller. He knew that
Boston
would be as well. After all, he was Upton Sinclair, America’s foremost truth teller, a man of unimpeachable integrity, a writer of guts and grit willing to trudge through blood and muck to find a kernel of truth. The public
needed
to know how capitalist titans and corrupt politicians and a perverted justice system chewed their citizens up and spit them out!

That’s how his readers saw him.

That’s how he saw himself.

Denver, Colorado

October 27, 1928

Upton Sinclair and Fred Moore sat alone in a hotel room across from the Denver train station. The literary giant intended to get answers to his questions and finally put his mind at ease.

Several days earlier, Sinclair had telegraphed Sacco and Vanzetti’s lawyer asking if he, Sinclair, could stop in Denver on his way home to Los Angeles in order to interview Moore for his forthcoming book. Something had been eating at Sinclair. When he had pored over every detail in the case and completed his research, he sensed that something was amiss—and it bothered him. No one could say that Sinclair didn’t have a discerning eye for detail.

As he’d read the cross-examination of Sacco, he found a discrepancy in the defendant’s alibi. Seven defense witnesses had testified that Sacco was at the U.S. passport office in Boston at the time of the murder and far from the shoe factory in Braintree. But Sacco’s own testimony on cross-examination contradicted important details in those witnesses’ testimonies.

Sinclair had already asked several of the witnesses what they made of the contradiction. A number of them had admitted that Sacco’s testimony had been concocted to conceal his role in various 1919 terrorist attacks, such as the one targeting Attorney General Palmer. Still, the defense witnesses had all insisted that Sacco was innocent of the Boston murders.

So now Sinclair had turned directly to Fred Moore for answers.

“Fred, tell me the whole truth about the case,” Sinclair begged.

Moore stared at him for a long moment. “First,” Moore replied, “tell me what you have got.”

Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains

October 28, 1928

3:08
A.M.

Sinclair tossed and turned in his narrow bunk as the train crossed the Continental Divide and steamed down the western slope toward California. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Fred Moore had told him.

At first, Moore hadn’t wanted to talk. But Sinclair tricked Moore into thinking that he already knew the important facts, so Moore eventually opened up. He started talking. And talking. And talking.

Before long, Sinclair was sorry he’d gotten Fred Moore started. Because Moore told him something he didn’t want to hear.

The question now was what to do with the information. A million thoughts flooded through Sinclair’s mind as the train sped through the night, but none more important than what Moore’s revelation might mean for the future of socialism. Sinclair’s life had been spent in service to an ideological cause. Nothing mattered more to him than the fight against capitalism. Not his wife. Not his son. Not the applause and accolades that came from his fans’ embrace of
The Jungle.
Nothing.

Of course, there was no denying that all of the attention was nice. He hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much, and when he began working on
Boston,
he hadn’t expected to have such a strong desire to experience it again. Gradually, the need for accolades became more than a bonus; it became a need.

And so, as he listened to the rhythm of the train’s wheels against the tracks, the question that had been foremost in his mind drifted away. Of course he continued to think about what Moore’s secret would mean for socialism, but he also began to ask a much more personal question: “What does Moore’s revelation mean for me?”

Los Angeles, California

January 27, 1929

Sinclair beamed with pride. The first edition of
Boston
was an instant bestseller. As he felt the book’s smooth pages and green cover, he
marveled at his writing and the important message of socialist revolution that it offered to his fans and followers.

At the climax of the story, the book’s narrator summarizes the inspiration that Sinclair hoped Sacco and Vanzetti would provide to millions in the aftermath of their execution.

To a hundred million groping, and ten times as many still in slumber, the names of Sacco and Vanzetti would be the eternal symbols of a dream, identical with civilization itself, of a human society in which wealth belongs to the producers of wealth, and the rewards of labor are to the laborers.

As much as Sinclair enjoyed reading—and rereading—his soaring rhetoric, he enjoyed hearing the liberal intelligentsia’s reaction to it even more. They didn’t just like it, they
loved
it. They didn’t just admire him, they
worshipped
him.
Boston
was greeted by Sinclair’s fans as some combination of the Gospel according to St. Marx and the Stone Tablets brought down from Mount Socialism. The
Nation
compared him to Charles Dickens. The
New York Times
praised the book as “a literary achievement . . . wrought into a narrative on the heroic scale with form and coherence.” Noted playwright George Bernard Shaw told Sinclair, “When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels.”

Sinclair memorized every positive review and every letter of praise. He repeated them in his head—and to anyone who would indulge him in conversation. The book had accomplished exactly what he’d hoped by giving inspiration and ammunition to budding socialists everywhere, and, as a side benefit, it brought him more of the praise and applause to which he had become addicted.

Boston
was another milestone in Upton Sinclair’s storied literary career. The doubts he’d entertained on that sleepless train ride through the Rockies were long behind him. Upton Sinclair thought little anymore of Fred Moore or the secret he’d shared.