One Summer: America, 1927 (39 page)

Two soldiers and a policeman who tried to go to the aid of a woman who had fainted were themselves carried away, as if on a great tide. Others struggled not to be pushed under the wheels of the cautiously advancing motorcade. It was a wonder that many weren’t crushed or asphyxiated. As it was, one man died of a heart attack and over a hundred people were injured seriously enough to need treatment at field stations that had been set up around the common. Fourteen people required hospitalization, and nearly everyone, according to the
Times
correspondent, “returned home with bruised bodies and torn clothing.”

None of this would get better as the tour proceeded. Jostled, pounded on the back, tearfully adored, Charles Lindbergh was beginning to realize that this was not a passing thing. This was now his life.

It must have seemed as if nothing could eclipse the intensity of interest in him, but in fact something was about to, at least temporarily. In a prison nearby—close enough that those inside could clearly hear the cheers that greeted Lindbergh’s arrival—two mild-mannered Italian anarchists sat on death row awaiting execution for murders that millions of people across the planet were certain they did not commit.

Their names were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and because of them the world was about to light up once more.

•
AUGUST
•
THE ANARCHISTS

I never know, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this court.

—NICOLA SACCO
,
on being sentenced to death

20

Just after three on a mild, sunny afternoon in April 1920, two employees of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, set off along a dusty, sloping road from the company’s offices on Railroad Avenue to a separate factory building about two hundred yards away on Pearl Street. Frederick Parmenter was a payroll clerk, Alessandro Berardelli was his guard. They were carrying $15,776.51 in cash in two metal boxes, the week’s wages for five hundred employees. Their route took them past another shoe factory, Rice and Hutchins, which occupied a five-story building built hard by the road, giving it a dark and looming air.

As Parmenter and Berardelli passed the Rice and Hutchins factory, two men who had been loitering nearby stepped forward and demanded the cash boxes. Before Berardelli could respond, one of the robbers shot him three times. Berardelli sank to his knees and fell forward onto his hands, head hanging. He coughed up blood and struggled to breathe. The gunman then turned to Parmenter, who was looking on aghast, and shot him. Stunned and gravely wounded, Parmenter dropped the cash box and staggered into the road in a reflexive attempt to get away. One of the robbers—it is not clear from witness accounts which it was, or even whether a third gunman now appeared—followed Parmenter into the road and calmly dropped him with a single shot in the back.
A gunman—again, witnesses could not agree which—turned to the crouching Berardelli and fired two shots into him from above, killing him.

A blue car containing two or possibly three other men screeched up, collected the robbers and cash boxes, and sped off across the tracks of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, firing at onlookers as it went. The entire incident lasted no more than a minute. It is testament to how swift and shocking the robbery was that witnesses could not agree even roughly on how many gunmen they saw or which did the shooting.

No one would ever have guessed that this cold-blooded but fairly commonplace killing on a back lane of South Braintree would capture the world’s attention, but what happened there that day made it the most consequential crime scene on earth in the 1920s. Today little remains from that afternoon. The factory buildings are long gone, as are the cafés and small businesses that stood scattered along the street. Braintree is no longer a factory town, but a pleasant suburb, twelve miles south of Boston. Pearl Street is a busy thoroughfare with turning lanes and traffic lights on gantries above the road. Where Parmenter and Berardelli fell is the site of a neighborhood shopping center, Pearl Plaza, anchored by a Shaw’s supermarket and an Office Max supplies store. Beside a railroad bridge that wasn’t there in 1927 is a small memorial to the two victims of the crime, erected in 2010 on the ninetieth anniversary of the robbery.

Berardelli died at the scene. He was forty-five years old and, like the two men eventually convicted of his killing, from Italy. He had worked for Slater & Morrill for about a year, and left a wife and two children. Parmenter died at Quincy City Hospital the next morning. A devoted churchgoer who was popular with his workmates, he also left a wife and two children. That is about all that is known of the two victims.

The getaway car, a stolen Buick, was found abandoned at a place called Manley Woods two days later. Police at that time were looking for the perpetrators of a similar but botched holdup in nearby Bridgewater the previous Christmas Eve. Chief Michael E. Stewart of the Bridgewater Police Department decided, for reasons unattached to evidence, that the culprits in both cases were Italian anarchists. He discovered that a man of radical sympathies named Ferruccio Coacci lived near where the getaway
car was found and for that reason made him the chief suspect. As
The New Yorker
archly noted some time later, Stewart concluded “that after a hold-up and murder, the murderer would naturally abandon the car practically in his own front yard.”

Although Stewart was indeed the chief of police for Bridgewater, the title suggests a scale of operations that considerably exceeded the reality. Stewart’s “force” was a single part-time assistant. Stewart himself had no training in investigating murders and almost no experience of serious crimes. That is no doubt why he investigated with such enthusiasm. This was the chance of a lifetime for him.

Coacci was quickly eliminated as a suspect: he had gone back to Italy. Living in the house now was a man named Mario Buda, and Stewart, in his dogged way, transferred his suspicions to him. On learning that Buda had a car in for repairs in the Elm Square Garage in West Bridgewater, Stewart left strict instructions with the proprietor to phone him the moment Buda called for it.

One evening three weeks later that call came. The garage owner told Stewart that Buda and three other men had just come for the car but had left directly because it wasn’t ready—Buda and one man on a motorcycle with a sidecar, the other two on foot. The two on foot were thought to be traveling to Brockton by streetcar, so Stewart alerted the police there. When the streetcar reached Brockton, a policeman boarded it, surveyed the few passengers, and detained two uneasy-looking Italian men: Bart Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco. They were found to be carrying loaded pistols and a good deal of ammunition, some of it for guns other than the kinds they carried. They also possessed anarchist literature.

For Chief Stewart that was enough. Though neither man had been arrested for anything before and though Stewart had no evidence to suggest that either had been anywhere near South Braintree at the time of the murders, he had them charged.

It was not a good time to be either a radical or an alien in America, and a positively dangerous time to be both. America was in the grip of something known as the Great Red Scare. In 1917 and 1918, Congress
had enacted two startlingly restrictive laws, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. Together these provided severe penalties for anyone found guilty of displaying almost any kind of disrespect to the American government, including its symbols—the flag, military uniforms, historic documents, or anything else in which was deemed to repose the glory and dignity of the United States of America—and these were imposed with a harsh and punitive zeal. “Citizens were imprisoned for criticizing the Red Cross at their own dinner tables,” one commentator noted. A clergyman in Vermont was given a fifteen-year jail term for handing out half a dozen pacifist leaflets. In Indiana, a jury took just two minutes to acquit a man who had shot an immigrant for speaking ill of America.

Crazily, it became riskier to say disloyal things than to do them. A person who refused to obey the draft law could be imprisoned for one year, but a person who urged others to disobey the draft law could be imprisoned for twenty years. More than a thousand citizens were jailed under the terms of the Espionage Act in its first fifteen months. It was hard to know what could get you in trouble. A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence. The judge allowed that such a depiction would be “permissible or even commendable” in ordinary times, but “in this hour of national emergency” Goldstein enjoyed “no right to subvert the purposes and destiny of the nation.” For insulting a foreign army from 150 years earlier, Goldstein was sentenced to twelve years in prison.

Though the espionage and sedition laws were intended only as wartime measures, matters actually worsened with peace. The return home of two million job-seeking soldiers and the simultaneous dismantling of the wartime economy gave America a severe recession. Racial tensions erupted into riots in two dozen cities where blacks had moved in search of better jobs. In Chicago, where the black population had doubled in a decade, a black youth who fell asleep on a raft on Lake Michigan and drifted onto a white beach was stoned to death by a white crowd, provoking two weeks of bitter rioting in which thirty-eight people were killed and whole neighborhoods razed.

At the same time much of the nation was rocked by industrial unrest.
Longshoremen, clothworkers, cigar makers, construction workers, steel-workers, telephone operators, elevated rail and subway workers, coal miners, and even Broadway actors all walked off their jobs. At one point in 1919, two million people were out on strike.

Foreign agitators and radical organizations like the union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—whose members were known as Wobblies for reasons that have never been determined—were widely blamed for the troubles. In Boston and Cleveland, the police helped citizens beat up May Day paraders; then the police in Boston went out on strike themselves (the event that propelled Calvin Coolidge to national prominence). In Washington State, Wesley Everest, an IWW employee, was hauled into the street by a mob, which beat him and cut off his genitals. As he begged the mob to put him out of his misery, his tormentors took him to a city bridge, dangled him over the side on a rope, and then shot him. His death was ruled a suicide. No charges were brought.

At the height of the tumult, someone—a disgruntled alien, it was presumed—began sending bombs. In Atlanta, a maid in the home of Senator Thomas R. Hardwick, head of the Senate Immigration Committee, had just taken delivery of a small brown package and was carrying it to the kitchen when it exploded, blowing off her hands. The next day a New York postal employee read about the bombing and realized that the description of the parcel exactly matched sixteen parcels he had put aside at a sorting office for insufficient postage. He rushed back to work and found the packages still there. All were addressed to prominent public figures—John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the chief justice of the United States, and several governors and congressmen. All bore return address labels to the Gimbel Brothers department store at Thirty-Second and Broadway in Manhattan. It was subsequently discovered that several other packages had already been posted. In one bizarre incident, a package was returned to Gimbel Brothers for insufficient postage. A Gimbel’s clerk opened the package, examined the odd contents—bottle of acid, timer, explosives—then packed it all up again, added the necessary postage, and mailed it on. Altogether thirty-six bombs were found.
Apart from the unfortunate maid, no one else was injured and no arrests were made.

But that was not the end of it. Just over a month later, on a balmy evening in a quiet, wealthy neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his wife were preparing to retire in their house at 2132 R Street NW when they heard a thump downstairs—“as if something had been thrown against the front door,” Palmer related afterward. A moment later the night was rent by a tremendous explosion, which blew out the front of the Palmer house and left every room exposed, as in a dollhouse. People in neighboring houses were thrown from their beds. Windows were broken for blocks around.

Stumbling through the smoke and dust, the Palmers—both miraculously unhurt—went downstairs and stepped out onto an eerie scene of devastation. Blast debris was everywhere—hanging from trees, littering the street, strewn over neighboring lawns and rooftops. Much of it was still smoking. Scattered about in an unintentionally festive manner were anarchist leaflets.

One of the first people on the scene was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who lived almost directly opposite. He had just parked and gone in after an evening out. The bomber had probably waited in the shadows for him to go, then proceeded to deposit the bomb. Had Roosevelt arrived a minute later, he might well have been killed and America would have a different history. Roosevelt found Mr. and Mrs. Palmer whitened with plaster dust and wandering in shock. The attorney general was speaking, distractedly, in the pronouns of his Quaker childhood, addressing his neighbors as “thee” and “thou.”