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Fall Guys BY ANDREW SINCLAIR VANZETTI knew why he and Sacco were burned in the electric chair. 'We were tried during a time that has now passed into history. I mean by that, a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate against the people of our principles,' against the foreigner, against slackers . .

That hysteria of resentment and hate had a long history. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists at a time when their party seemed more likely than the Bolsheviks to destroy and replace governments, particularly in the United States.

Four anarchists were hanged in Chicago in 1887 for the bombing of the Haymarket. Emma Goldman's anarchist lover, Alexander Berkman, badly wounded the financier, Henry Clay Frick, during the Homestead strike. The anarchist Czolgosz shot the Prisident in 1901; in the words of the blues, the result was Oh, Roosevelt's in the White House drinkin' out of a silver cup McKinley's in the graveyard never wake up He's gone a long long time. . . .

Revolutionary forces attracted a mass follow- ing in the United States before the First World War. The Industrial Workers of the World, or the Wobblies, numbered up to 80.000 people dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism and the government. They needed to find only a similar chaos to Russia's in 1917. But, at the time of the Bolsheviks' triumph in Russia. the Wobblies were crushed in America.

The First World War also brought to the boil American hysteria 'against the foreigner, against slackers.' Theodore Roosevelt wanted the lead- ing Progressive of the time. Senator Bob La Follette, hanged because he voted against the declaration of war. Pacifists were traitors, when militant'America was invaded by what Woodrow Wilson feared that he had unloosed, 'the spirit of ruthless brutality.' And as for the foreigner, agitation against him had become virulent with the flood of 'new immigrants.' A million immi- grants a year came to the United States in the first fifteen years of this century. There had been many riots against aliens, before the war loosed an orgy of revenge against all things German. When a child's disease became 'liberty' measles, and schoolboys chose Greek to study rather than German for fear of being lynched on street- cars, patriotism became merely an excuse for persecution.

This nativist hysteria was translated after the war into an attack on the Reds. The success of the Russian revolution led to the suppression of the liberties won by the American revolution. It is true that anarchist bombings did take place after the Armistice, and that 1919 saw in the United States a period of 'industrial war.' But nothing except the fear of the time and the political ambitions of the Attorney-General can excuse the Red Scare of that year.

It was in this time of strife between conser- vatism and radicalism, between the old rural American values and the new urban immigrant values, that Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists, were arrested for the murder of a paymaster and his guard in a hold-up in South Braintree, Massachusetts. A gang of five men. probably of alien origin, had snatched the pay- roll of a company and had killed to do so. The job appeared to have been professionally planned.

Since anarchists were associated with murder at the time, police investigations led to the arrest of Nicola Sacco, a 'good shoemaker,' and Bar- tolomeo Vanzetti, a 'poor fish-peddler.' Unfor- tunately for them, they were both carrying revolvers. Sacco had a Colt, and an assortment of bullets, some of which were of an obsolete kind. One obsolete bullet had killed the payroll guard. Vanzetti also carried a loaded revolver. along with four shotgun shells filled with buck- shot rather than birdshot. A shotgun had been used during the robbery.

At first, the police were not convinced that the two anarchists had done the murders. At least, they wanted the two Italians deported. But Sacco told lies about his acquisition of his re- volver; later he was to admit that he carried it 'because we were at war with the government.' The trial of the two began at Dedham, Massa- chusetts, where a jury had recently freed an anarchist on subversive charges, despite the anger of the reactionary Judge Thayer.

The trial would have remained a minor affair of justice or injustice, if a noted labour lawyer, Fred Moore, had not intervened. He had himself appointed to run the defence. He immediately and flamboyantly set about raising money and publicity. He made Sacco and Vanzetti into martyrs. Unfortunately, he could not acquit them of being accused as murderers. In fact. Sacco and Vanzetti came to loathe Moore so much that they thought he was responsible for their plight. In their opinion, he had antagonised the judge at the Dedham trial until they had no chance. They thought he used their case for self-advertisement, that he was more interested in them as class symbols than as flesh and blood. Sacco ended by dismissing Moore. A conserva- tive and proper Bostonian. William Thompson, took over the case, and was trusted by Sacco and Vanzetti even in the death-house.

Ranks of witnesses for the prosecution and the defence testified under oath that Sacco and Vanzetti were or were not at the scene of the crime. The damning evidence was their posses- sion of the revolvers. Ballistics 'experts'—that science was still in its cradle—compared bullets and pistols in what the Boston Post called 'a wilderness of lands and grooves.' The balance of the evidence pointed to the fact that a bullet from Sacco's Colt had killed the guard. Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty by the jury. There was no disagreement among the twelve jurors.

The written proceedings of the trial show that the evidence presented before the court was almost sufficient to convict the two anarchists. Although the prosecuting attorney was allowed to drag in the facts that the accused were revo-

lutiottary anarchists and had dodged the draft during the war, Judge Thayer was scrupulously careful not to prejudice his summing-up in case of reversal by the State Supreme Court. It was only outside the court-room that he referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as 'anarchist bastards.'

Due to the complications of the American legal system, it took Sacco and Vanzetti six years to die, while vain appeals were made on their behalf. The first blow was the fact that an investigating committee led by the rigorous President of Harvard, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, found them guilty. As one of Lowell's Harvard classmates said, he was a fair man except for one thing, he was 'incapable of seeing that two wops could be right and the Yankee judiciary wrong.'

Protests were vocal, and sometimes dangerous. It was strange to find Stalin and Mussolini, Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein all asking for mercy. Mass riots took place in front of

American embassies. A grenade was sent to the American ambassador in Paris, wrapped, as a joke, in the Action Francaise. Alfred Dreyfus himself volunteered to come out of obscurity

and cross the Atlantic to plead for Sacco and Vanzetti. The American flag was even burned in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In America itself, the case united all belief behind the radicals. 'Don't you see the glory of this case.' Upton Sinclair wrote in Boston. 'It kills off the liberals.' It was the only protest which acted as an antidote to the greedy glitter of the decade. The intellectuals on the left agitated, appealed and gave money. When Sacco and Vanzetti died, Malcolm Cowley wrote:

March on. 0 dago Christs. while we march on to spread your name abroad like ashes in the winds of God.

Their name is still spread abroad as the ashes of injustice.

And yet, was there injustice? Francis Russell, at the beginning of his quest after the truth, believed in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.

But by the end of his admirable, detailed, pene- trating, gripping and fair book on the case, Tragedy in Dedham,* he was not sure.

Moore himself said to Upton Sinclair that he came to believe that 'Saccci was probably, Van- zetti pos3ibly guilty.' Carlo Tresca, the acknow- ledged leader of the anarchists in America, told Max Eastman a few days before his own murder by a Soviet agent, 'Sacco was guilty but Van-

zetti was not.' A detailed ballistics test made in 196I.on the bullets in the case, which may have been substituted, proves conclusively that the death bullet was fired from the pistol which Sacco was carrying.

Thus the irony of history is that Sacco was probably guilty. He claimed that he was inno- cent; but he was probably only innocent in so far as the high cause of anarchism absolved him

from guilt. Yet Vanzetti was: almost certainly in-

nocent There is repeated testimony that he was peddling, eels on the murder day. He probably died to stay loyal tck.:Sacco and his cause; when Moore told him that'he could get off alone, he chose to stand or, burn with Sacco. He once said

that it was an evil to be arrested, but a still greater evil to desert a comrade.

Whether guilty or not, the burning of Sacco and Vanzetti shows one thing. Where there is doubt, there should be no execution. And there should he no execution, because there is always doubt in human justice.

* TRACED,/ IN DEDHAM. By Francis Russell. (Longmans. 42s.)