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The first was Mitchell Palmer's red delirium which caused him to hunt radicals with the same zeal but much more frenzy than the old Massachusetts witch hunters in every corner of the land. The second was a wave of payroll robberies obviously executed by a skilled and experienced gang of bandits. In April, 1920, both these currents crossed the paths of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Vanzetti reports the removal of a preputial calculus weighing 224 grams. Phillipe mentions the removal of a calculus weighing 50 grams from the prepuce of an Arab boy of seven. Croft gives an account of some preputial calculi removed from two natives of the Solomon Islands by an emigrant medical officer in Fiji.
Both came to this country like all our countrymen in search of peace and work and plenty. Both found only hard work and hard knocks. Sacco was a shoe-worker. Vanzetti had followed many trades after his arrival here in the summer of 1908. He worked in mines, mills, factories. Finally he landed in a cordage plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts. That was the last factory job he held.
A short distance, such a short distance from where I scribble these words, Vanzetti died. No more childish thought than atonement was ever conceived. It is a base and baseless gratification. Evil is not recalled. So I do not sentence myself for the murder of Vanzetti or for my manifold crimes; who am I to pass judgment, even on me?
The witnesses for the defense proved the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti beyond the shadow of a doubt. Sacco had an official from the Italian Consulate in Boston to testify for him. He had been in Boston on the day of the Bridgewater crime enquiring about a passport to Italy for himself, his wife and child.
On May 5, Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and held on suspicion of being the guilty bandits. After he nabbed them, Chief of Police Stewart discovered, with the aid of Department of Justice agents, that he had two dangerous radicals marked for "watching" in Department files in Washington.
To me those words are particularly poignant. For I am an Italian, and proud to be of the same people that produced such a great spirit as Vanzetti, the descendant of Garibaldi, the forerunner of those heroic anti-fascist brothers who are today fighting Fascism and Mussolini in Italy and in Spain. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were poor Italian workers.
He appointed a special commission of professors headed by President Lowell of Harvard, and they upheld it. Four justices of the United States Supreme Court were contacted for a stay of execution. All refused. On August 22, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were legally murdered by the State of Massachusetts.
In keeping green the memories of these proletarian heroes, the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party and other progressive and revolutionary organizations are preserving one of the most glorious of all American revolutionary traditions. The lives of Parsons, Fischer, Engel, Spies and Lingg, and Sacco and Vanzetti, must be made more than ever the inspiration of the proletarian youth.
These early martyrs to labor's cause were legally lynched because of their loyal and intelligent struggle for and with the working class. Their murder was encompassed by the same capitalist forces which, in our day, we have seen sacrifice Tom Mooney, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, McNamara, and a host of other champions of the oppressed.
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