One Summer: America, 1927 (40 page)

It was clear that the bomber had been blown to pieces by his own device. Alice Longworth, Roosevelt’s cousin, who was also present, reported that “it was difficult to avoid stepping on bloody chunks of human being.” One of the bomber’s legs was on a doorstep across the street. Another was fifty feet away. A big section of torso, with clothing still attached, was dangling from the cornice of a house on a neighboring street. Another indeterminate chunk of flesh and cartilage had crashed through a window of a house across the way and landed at the foot of the bed of Helmar Byru, minister plenipotentiary of Norway. Most of the
scalp was found two blocks away on S Street. To reach that point—both distant and uphill—the top of the bomber’s head must have been launched on a trajectory 100 feet high and 250 feet long. It was a big bomb.

So many body parts were lying about that officials at first thought there had been two bombers, or perhaps one bomber and an unidentified, innocent passerby. Clearly the bomb had gone off prematurely. The presumption was that the bomber had tripped as he was about to set it on the Palmers’ steps.

Before the night was out newswires were clicking with reports that bombs of similar destructive magnitude had gone off in seven other localities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Paterson, New Jersey, and Newtonville, Massachusetts. Only one other person was killed—a night watchman in New York—but the knowledge that terrorists could mount coordinated violence on such a scale left many Americans distinctly unnerved. The bombs elsewhere were in some cases wholly mysterious, possibly because they had been delivered to the wrong houses. In Philadelphia, one of the bombs blew apart the house of a jeweler who had no connection to government or politics. Another severely damaged a Catholic church. Why the bombers targeted a Catholic church was never established.

Thanks largely to the fact that the Washington bomber had been wearing a distinctive polka-dot tie, detectives were able to identify him as Carlo Valdinoci. This was a big loss to the anarchist movement. Though just twenty-four, Valdinoci had become a legend in the underground. Federal agents had recently tracked him to a house in West Virginia, but he had escaped just ahead of them, adding to his reputation for cunning and invincibility. Valdinoci had been on the run since 1917 after an infamous bombing in Youngstown, Ohio. That bomb had not gone off as planned either. In fact, it had not gone off at all, so the police, unbelievably, took it to the station house and placed it on a table in the main operations room in order to examine it closely. As they tinkered with it, it exploded, killing ten policemen and a woman who had come to report a robbery. The bombers were never caught, and the case was never solved. Radical cases rarely were.

The bombings had a wondrous effect on the mind of A. Mitchell Palmer. A lantern-jawed Democrat from Pennsylvania, he had been attorney general for just three months but had already been the target of two bombs—the “Gimbel’s” bomb that never reached him and now this one that most assuredly did. This left him powerfully inclined to listen to a young adviser in the Justice Department who had developed a private theory that America’s immigrant subversives, in league with international Communists, were planning a coup. The young man’s name was J. Edgar Hoover, and he convinced Palmer that the plotters existed in vast numbers and were planning an imminent strike.

Hoover, who had only just graduated from law school, was put in charge of a hitherto inconsequential corner of the Alien Registration Section known as the Radical Division. He assembled an index file containing more than two hundred thousand names of individuals and organizations, all neatly cross-referenced. Forty translators were taken on to pore over radical publications, of which the tireless quantifier Hoover counted more than six hundred.

Palmer had high hopes of becoming his party’s presidential nominee in 1920. Dealing decisively with radical elements became his strategy for showing what a muscular individual he was. In a series of apocalyptic speeches, he warned that the flames of revolution were sweeping across the country, “licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.” Palmer claimed that some five million Communists and fellow travelers were planning the overthrow of America. With his thrusting jaw and tough rhetoric, Palmer became known to his admirers as “the Fighting Quaker.” He had just launched what was quickly dubbed the Great Red Scare.

Eagerly encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer prepared a series of raids on radical gathering spots. The first were held on November 7, 1919—the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution—and mostly involved federal agents and police in twelve cities storming selected clubs and cafés, smashing furniture, and arresting everyone in sight. In New York, police raided the Union of Russian Workers, beating anyone
who protested or even questioned what they were doing. The union was merely a social club, where members could go to play chess or take classes to improve their English; it had never had any connection to radical affairs. In Hartford, Connecticut, police arrested a large number of suspects—the exact number is uncertain—then arrested anyone who came to ask after them. In Detroit, an entire orchestra and all the patrons of a particular restaurant were among eight hundred detainees who were held for up to a week in a windowless corridor without adequate water, toilets, or space to lie down. Eventually all were released without charge.

Palmer was so pleased with the publicity his raids generated and the fear they instilled that he ordered a second, larger set of raids in the new year. This time some six thousand to ten thousand people (accounts vary widely) were arrested in at least seventy-eight cities in twenty-three states. Again, there was much needless destruction of property, arrests without warrants, and beating of innocent people. The Great Red Scare proved to be not so scary after all. In total, the authorities seized just three pistols and no explosives. No evidence of a national conspiracy was uncovered. The failure to catch any bombers or find any hint of a planned insurrection ended Palmer’s political prospects. At the Democratic convention in 1920, the delegates selected James M. Cox, governor of Ohio, to run against another Ohioan, Warren G. Harding. Although the Palmer raids didn’t achieve anything, they had a powerful effect on national sentiment, which is almost certainly why Chief Stewart of Bridgewater decided, without benefit of evidence, that the murderers in his district were foreign anarchists. And it is why Sacco and Vanzetti never really stood a chance.

Between 1905 and 1914, ten million people, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, poured into the United States—a country that had only eighty-three million people to begin with. The numbers of immigrants changed the face of urban America utterly. By 1910, immigrants and the children of immigrants made up almost three-quarters of the populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston.

Sacco and Vanzetti were among 130,000 Italians who arrived in 1908
alone. Sacco, from Torremaggiore, in southeastern Italy, was just sixteen years old on arrival. Vanzetti, who came from the more prosperous northern Piedmont, not far from France, was three years older. Neither would ever see his homeland again. Though both settled in New England, they would not meet until 1917.

Sacco was small, lithe, and handsome—“clean cut as a Roman coin,” in the words of one contemporary. Descriptions make him sound rather like the young Al Pacino—small, good-looking, quiet-spoken. He didn’t drink or gamble. He got a job in a shoe factory and soon was a skilled craftsman on good wages. Four years after his arrival in America he married and started a family. At the time of his arrest he was thirty years old and a hardworking family man. He didn’t seem an obvious candidate for anarchy.

Vanzetti was a different matter. Though in Italy he had trained as a pastry chef—a respectable profession—in America he worked as a common laborer at the lowest wages, almost as if he were seeking out privation to prove a point about the evils of capitalism. He was frequently unemployed, always hard up, and occasionally near starvation. In the spring of 1919, however, his economic circumstances and, it would seem, his entrepreneurial spirit took a sudden turn for the better when he bought a fish cart complete with knives, weighing scales, and a bell for attracting customers, and became a mobile fish vendor in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the time of his arrest, he was thirty-three years old and doing rather well.

Vanzetti was an intellectual by nature. He read a great deal and lived quietly and soberly. He never had a girlfriend. He had a melancholy air and a sad, gentle smile. His eyes had “a tenderness that haunted one,” a friend recalled. His most conspicuous attribute, after 1917, was a vast, drooping mustache. Although his manner was affable and even sweet-natured, he was a bitter foe of the state. “Vanzetti was anarchism personified,” one associate said.

Vanzetti and Sacco were not especially great friends. They lived thirty miles apart—Sacco in Stoughton, near Bridgewater, and Vanzetti in Plymouth—and had known each other for less than three years when they became eternally yoked by the payroll murders in South Braintree.

Arrested and taken in for questioning, they didn’t do at all well. They were unable to explain why they needed to be so extravagantly armed for a visit to a car repair shop. They claimed not to know Buda or the other man, and said they knew no one with a motorcycle—lies that were easily disproven. They denied that they were anarchists, and offered inconsistent and unpersuasive explanations for what had brought them to West Bridgewater. The suspicion has always been that they were there to move illicit materials—possibly explosives, possibly anarchist literature—and didn’t wish to incriminate themselves.

Buda and the fourth man, subsequently identified as Ricardo Orciani, were arrested and brought in for questioning but released: Orciani because he could prove he was at work at the time of both robberies, and Buda, who was very short and stocky, because he did not fit any of the witness descriptions. By default, therefore, Sacco and Vanzetti became the chief and only suspects, even though neither had a criminal record or links to any criminal gangs. All that the police had against them was that they were armed and untruthful when arrested.

Nearly all the evidence pointed away from them. They were the mildest of men. Nothing in their natures suggested the least capacity for violence. They had never even been known to raise their voices. No evidence of any kind, such as fingerprints on the stolen car, placed them at the scene of the crime.

Three witnesses, shown photographs, identified one of the gunmen as Anthony Palmisano—but Palmisano, it turned out, had been in prison in Buffalo since the previous January. At least two witnesses said that the principal gunman had a pencil-thin mustache, whereas Sacco had none and Vanzetti was famous for the luxuriant, drooping shag that all but covered his mouth. When Sacco and Vanzetti were paraded before witnesses they were not presented as part of a lineup, as procedures required, but shown individually to the witnesses, to whom it was made clear that these were the prime suspects. Even so, the woman who would be one of the chief witnesses at the subsequent trial failed to identify both men when standing right in front of them.

No one at first saw the arrest as a big story. A reporter from New York sent to Massachusetts to look into the story reported back to his editor:
“There’s nothing in it—just a couple of wops in a jam.” In Boston the big story in the spring of 1920 was how the Red Sox would do in their first season without Babe Ruth.

Vanzetti, to his astonishment, was charged not just with the South Braintree crime but also with the earlier one, at the L. Q. White Shoe Company factory in Bridgewater on Christmas Eve 1919. Sacco was not charged because he was able to produce a time card showing he was at work that day. Vanzetti was not short of alibis himself. Thirty witnesses testified that they had seen, talked to, or conducted business with him from his fish cart in Plymouth that day. Eels are a traditional Christmas dish for many Italians, so people remembered buying eels from him on the day before Christmas. Such evidence as was brought against Vanzetti was hardly the most persuasive. A witness, age fourteen, when asked how he knew one of the robbers was a foreigner, replied: “I could tell by the way he ran.”

The jury convicted him anyway, evidently discounting all the witness testimony on his behalf in the belief that “all the wops stick together,” as Vanzetti himself remarked bitterly afterward. Had a Protestant minister or school principal testified in Vanzetti’s favor, he would probably have been cleared, but unfortunately such people didn’t buy eels on Christmas Eve.

One quotation has often been attributed to the presiding judge at the Vanzetti trial, Webster Thayer: “This man, although he may not actually have committed the crime attributed to him, is nevertheless morally culpable, because [his] ideals are cognate with crime.” In fact, the statement is not in the trial transcript and no evidence exists that Thayer ever said such a thing. It was clear, however, that the judge had little sympathy for anarchists. He sentenced Vanzetti to twelve to fifteen years in prison—a stiff sentence for a man with no criminal record. To many observers this was clearly a travesty, and the second trial would make matters far worse.