'This Is Our Agony . . .'

...Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, their creed was not just a philosophical exercise...

...Montgomery concludes that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and that they had a fair trial, in the courts and before Governor Fuller and the Lowell Committee...

...When they were arrested they were actively aiding their anarchist friends, some of whom in all probability had committed the bomb outrages that set off the Palmer raids and deportations...

...Nor can a political prisoner afford to admit his guilt...

...We fraternize the people with books, with the literature...

...Graham declared that Vanzetti's decision not to take the stand was his own, made after consultation with Sacco, and that fear of revealing his anarchist activities had nothing to do with it, since the question of radicalism had not then entered the case...

...after the trial, but before the Lowell Committee hearing, the just-invented comparison microscope showed that this bullet had been fired from Sacco's gun...

...Followers of Uuigi Galleani, and subscribers to his Chronica Soversiva, they believed in the use of violence to further their cause...

...One wishes that they had...

...In fact, their apparent sincerity constituted my chief reason for doubting that the "good shoemaker and the poor fish peddler," who were obviously not ordinary criminals, had violated and traduced their own normally gentle natures by participating in the South Braintree murder and robbery...

...As I said before, Judge Thayer know all my life, and he know that I am never guilty, never—not yesterday, not today, nor forever...

...also four loaded shotgun shells of the same make and caliber as shells picked up at the scene of the Bridge-water holdup...

...Well, you are the oppressor...

...This double frame of reference would also help to explain both the alibi concocted for Sacco by his anarchist friends and the unscrupulous defense activities, including the blackmailing of witnesses, resorted to by the anarchist attorney, Fred Moore, and by the Communist International Labor Defense...

...You try to put a path between us and some other nationality that hates each other...

...Montgomery does not propose this theory...

...Even if their inquiry had removed all doubts from their minds, they must have known that their affirmation of the death sentence would not remove the doubt that has haunted the minds of a whole generation of Americans who grew up during the '20s...

...You persecute the people, tyrannize them and kill them...

...That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been of the oppressed class...

...When the police arrested Vanzetti he carried a loaded Harrington and Richardson revolver of the same model and caliber as the revolver Berardelli was known to have been carrying at the time of the holdup...

...Nowhere, in fact, does he suggest that the political views of the accused motivated either the crimes or their extraordinarily convincing avowals of innocence...

...Were Sacco and Vanzetti genuinely innocent, or could they deny the truth with such passion because they felt they served a higher truth—the cause to which they were dedicated...

...To this end he cites interviews with the seven surviving jurors which were obtained in 1950 by Edward B. Simmons and published in the New Bedford Standard-Times...

...I know the sentence will be between two classes, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will always be collision between one and the other...

...Other significant post-trial testimony cited includes a statement obtained from James M. Graham, who was associated with Vahey, Van-zetti's counsel, when Graham was tried and convicted for the Bridge-water holdup...

...I, who 35 years ago marched in a protest parade before the Massachusetts State house and subsequently denounced Massachusetts justice in an extremely bad poem (one of many written after the executions, most of them bad), believed those denials...

...There is nothing qualified or evasive about these denials...

...Ironically, Vanzetti was never more wrong than when he said, in his famous last statement that moves us still, "Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as we now do by accident...

...Thus, Sacco and Vanzetti may have rationalized their passionate denials of the crimes with which they were charged...

...Reviewed by James Rorty Author, "Tomorrow's Food," "His Master's Voice" POLITICAL TRIALS are invariably inconclusive, since in the nature of the case the verdict cannot be accepted as just by the supporters of either side...

...Apparently, therefore, the Lowell Committee, which also interviewed the jurors, was right in finding that Judge Thayer did not communicate his prejudice to the jury...

...What one concludes from the book is that Sacco and Vanzetti were in all probability guilty, and that certainly, in view of the numerous appeals and the hearings by the Governor and the Lowell Committee, the full resources of Massachusetts justice were expended in their behalf...

...The legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti, whether myth or mystery, is not a happy one, nor can we use it to straighten our hands and hearts in a time of trouble...

...These doubts were renewed when, after reading Robert Montgomery's honest and able reappraisal of the court record, I re-read the letters and speeches of Sacco and Vanzetti assembled in 1923 by Marion Denman Frankfurter and Gardner Jackson...

...I am not only innocent of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stolen and I have never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth...

...And these gentle people are here arrayed with us in this court today...

...Sacco carried a 32-caliber Colt and cartridges of an obsolete make...

...Before he was sentenced, Vanzetti said: "I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime...

...hence, he and his supporters believe themselves morally right in denying the crime, no matter how manifest his guilt within the narrow legal frame of reference of the society which they reject...

...When both men denied committing any crime, were they speaking in a frame of reference different from that accepted by their judges and their liberal defenders...

...He was preceded by Sacco, who said: "I never knew, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this Court...

...But there remains that inextinguishable doubt...

...Theoretically, this would seem to be at least possible, and it is the only explanation that reconciles the apparent sincerity of their denials with the formidable evidence of their guilt—evidence strong enough in the case of Sacco at least, as the Lowell Committee declared in its findings, to have justified any jury in finding him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...

...No, Bartolo...

...An empty shell of the same make—the Fraher shell—was picked up near the scene of the shooting...

...After seven years prosecuting they still consider us guilty...

...The Communists, too, act and speak within a double frame of reference—"the truth is what serves the Party...

...We try the education of people always...

...Rather, he is concerned, in his review of the court record and of the subsequent hearings by Covernor Fuller and the Lowell Committee, to show that neither judge nor jury were influenced by political prejudice...

...All seven declared that the so-called radicalism of the defendants played no part in their verdict, and that the trial judge was fair...

...Both the Governor and the Committee, he rightly observes, would have relieved themselves of subsequent abuse and threats of violence if they had reached a compromise decision and commuted the sentences of the two anarchists to life imprisonment...

...The documents are as eloquent and convincing today as when I first read them...

...A bullet of the same caliber was found in the body of the guard, Berardelli...

...However illegal the offense charged in the indictment, the political spy or assassin does not consider himself morally wrong...

...Vanzetti made this decision despite warnings by his attorneys that his failure to take the stand would influence the jury unfavorably and possibly lead to his conviction, as it did...