Sacco & Vanzetti

On the morning of April 15, 1920, a paymaster and guard walked through the streets of South Braintree, Mass., carrying a shoe factory's payroll of $15,000. They never reached the factory. Two men, apparently Italians, shot them to the death, grabbed the money, escaped in an automobile.

Three weeks later Bartolomeo Vanzetti, fish-pedler, and Nicola Sacco, factory worker, were arrested as suspicious characters. They were radicals, and in 1920 the U. S. Government was a militant radical- hunter. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts found them guilty of the Braintree murders, sentenced them to death, despite numerous witnesses who said that they had bought eels and fish from Mr. Vanzetti in North Plymouth at the hour of the crime, despite the Italian consul at Boston who swore that Mr. Sacco had come to him to procure a passport to Italy on that April morning.

The international episode of Sacco and Vanzetti (TIME, Aug. 9) began its run. In Paris and Mexico City, in Italy and South America, thousands clamored that a Red-fearing U. S. had blindfolded the goddess of Justice to get rid of two Italians. Bombs were tossed at U. S. embassies with a casual malice. One autumn day in Paris in 1921, Ambassador Herrick's valet opened the morning's mail. "Bang!" went a nefarious machine. He was wounded. Many a man-- Remain Rolland, Fritz Kreisler, Professor Einstein, Count von Bernstorff, H. L. Mencken, Eugene V. Debs--demanded a new trial for the fish peddler and the factory worker.

Anatole France, just before he died, told the U. S. to "fear to make martyrs" of them. In 1923 Mr. Sacco went on a month's hunger strike. . . . Three more years passed. . . . The electric chair drew nearer.

Denial of a new trial was handed down last May. But, eloquent Boston lawyer William G. Thompson, counsel for Mr. Sacco and Mr. Vanzetti, was in no mood to toss aside lightly his six years' labor, particularly when he still holds two powerful items of evidence.

Last week in the Superior Court at Dedham, Mass., he presented his evidence to Judge Webster E. Thayer at the hearing to determine whether. or not there shall be a new trial.

His first item was a 132-page confession from one Celestino Madeiros, Portuguese garage-keeper, laborer, bootlegger, who is now awaiting execution for the Wrentham bank murder. Celestino says that he and certain members of the Morelli gang of Providence (now serving sentences in Atlanta and Leavenworth for stealing from freight cars) are the guilty ones in the Braintree murders, that he is willing to "tell everything," when the trial comes up, if the State will postpone his own execution long enough. Assistant District Attorney Dudley P. Ranney scoffed at this confession of a "murderer to whom penalties for lying mean nothing."

Lawyer Thompson's second item was a broadside against the U. S. Department of Justice. He linked the Sacco and Vanzetti case with the 1920 anti-Red drive of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, produced ex-Government agents who swore that conviction for murder was simply "one way of disposing of them," that there were files of evidence which the Department of Justice refused to reveal. Lawyer Thompson burst ihto flames:

"Who is the worse murderer-- the man who stands up and shoots, prepared to take the consequences, or the man who takes $8 a day from his Government to send men to death for their opinions in order to help the aspirations of his chief, who hopes, through prosecution of radicals, to become President of the United States? . . .

"I'll again say to you that a government which values its secrets more than the lives of two men has become a tyranny even if it is called a democracy."

For five days, Judge Webster Thayer conducted the hearing. Then he packed up great piles of affidavits and briefs, retired to ponder several weeks before deciding for or against a new trial. Meanwhile, behind prison bars, a fish-pedler and a factory worker dream their radical philosophies, consider their three hopes of escape from "martyrdom":

1) Judge Thayer may grant them a new trial.

2) If not, they may be able to carry the case to the U. S. Supreme Court.

3) If all courts fail them, a pardon from Governor Fuller of Massachusetts can save them from the electric chair.