Watson - Sacco and Vanzetti

Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and several others in this book were far from proficient in English. Lest their writing be truncated by the Latin sic following each spelling or grammatical error, the author has taken extra care to reproduce their words precisely as written without noting them as such.

Late in the summer of 1927, a distant bell echoed throughout the world. Its tolling resounded from Europe to Australia, from Paraguay to Japan. And for one agonizing Monday in August, all talk of tomorrow ceased and all attention focused on a hulking granite prison in Massachusetts where Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were due to die at midnight.

Eulogized as the good shoemaker and the poor fish peddler, they had become the most famous people on the planet. Some considered them demonicmurderers, anarchists, immigrants bent on savaging all the institutions that Americans hold dear. Others saw them as shining lights, gentle pacifists framed by a heartless judge and a ruthless prosecutor. Few knew them as men, one a dedicated father, the other a vagabond with the soul of a poet, both fierce militants. And at the approach of executions the whole world would witness, millions could not look but could not look away.

Outside the American embassy in Paris, tanks squared off against angry mobs. Londons Hyde Park teemed with protesters. Across South America, widespread walkouts shut down factories and transportation. Restless crowds swarmed the streets of Sydney, Bucharest, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Athens, Prague, Johannesburg, Marrakech

Throughout America, the Jazz Age America of flappers and rumble seats, Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, talk across back fences was of the two Italians, their eloquent pleas of innocence, the doubts clouding the verdict, the evidence of their guilt. Rank-and-file workers had contributed the modern equivalent of millions to free them. Now it all came down to midnight. Would there be another stay of execution? A last-minute pardon? Another bomb destroying a Manhattan subway or another jurors home? As darkness fell, lawyers raced to find a judge who might intervene. Radio stations promised to stay on the air late. Marchers outside the locked-down prison gazed at a watchtower where a light would dim when the switch was thrown.

The drama did not end that day, nor had it started with a 1920 gangland murder. The deepening saga of Sacco and Vanzetti, which descended into a deathwatch, opens like a package rigged with dynamite.

And so, I think it best you follow me for your own good, I shall be your guide and lead you out through an eternal place

Where you will hear desperate cries, and see tormented shades, some as old as Hell itself.

Dante, Inferno

N eatly wrapped and labeled, thirty identical bombs were mailed from Manhattan in late April 1919. Each was addressed to a prominent AmericanJohn D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Oliver Wendell Holmesand each was a masterpiece of sinister intent. Enveloped in brown paper, the long, thin packages were marked GIMBEL BROTHERS, NEW YORKSAMPLE and graced with a drawing of an Alpine mountaineer. Depending on their destinations, some bombs were mailed earlier than others so that all would be detonated in one devastating May Day demonstration.

Along with the more famous recipients, the targets of the plot included many prominent Americans singled out for suppressing radicals. Among these were Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, congressmen from both parties, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the future baseball commissioner whose court had found scores of Wobblies from the Industrial Workers of the World guilty of sedition. Seattles mayor, targeted for breaking a general strike that winter, received the first bomb.

Taking the tan package from the mayors mail, a clerk unwrapped it upside down. A slim vial of acid fell to the floor, leaving hundreds of metal slugs packed around a stick of dynamite. The package was taken to the bomb squad, who admired its ingenuity. The following day in Georgia, an ex-senator received a Gimbels package. His wife started to open it but, thinking it contained only pencils, told her maid to put the contents in a cabinet. Tearing off the paper, the maid unscrewed the top of the enclosed tube. Two screws punctured a glass phial, pouring acid onto cotton wadding. The acid soaked through the cotton. The bomb blew off the maids hands. That afternoon, a dozen other Gimbels packages arrived in post offices throughout the nation.

The broadest assassination plot in American history was foiled by a postal clerk. At 2:00 a.m. on April 30, Charles Kaplan was riding the El train home to Harlem. Weary from the night shift, he sat reading a newspaper. He was drawn to a story from Atlanta about a bomb blowing off a maids hands. As the train rattled him toward home, Kaplan read about the infernal machine and the Negro servant it had nearly killed. The description of the package struck the clerk as familiar. In the bleary-eyed darkness, he hopped off the El and took a train back to his midtown post office, where he and a supervisor found sixteen identical packages in the parcel post room. All were marked gimbel brothers, new yorksample. Neither caution nor carelessness explained why they had not been sent. Sealed with a red sticker denoting first-class mail, the bombs had been delayed for insufficient postage.