WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

As a Harvard undergraduate I had read Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti and had taken for granted that men who could write so movingly, and in Vanzetti's case so eloquently, could not have been guilty of the sordid holdup-murder for which they had been convicted. The dogma of their innocence, expounded until it became a fixed belief in most intellectual circles, I accepted as selfevident. According to that received dogma, Sacco and Vanzetti were harmless philosophical anarchists arrested during the hysteria of the postwar Red scare. The police, in cooperation with the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation, considered a robbery-murder charge a good way of getting rid of two troublesome agitators. No one involved could really have considered them guilty. Sacco's and Vanzetti's lives were snuffed out by Massachusetts reactionaries. Their trial, little better than a kangaroo court, was presided over by an intemperate, narrow-minded judge, a "black-gowned cobra" in Vanzetti's words, already determined to convict the defendants. The jury was made up of nativist bigots, the prosecution corrupt to the point of framing evidence. In the post-trial stages of the case, the parvenu governor of Massachusetts, Alvan T. Fuller, a bicycle mechanic who had turned to automobiles and made himself wealthy selling Packards to the rich, was no more than a toady to Beacon Hill Boston. Harvard's president A. Lawrence Lowell, reviewing the case, preferred to see the two anarchists die rather than to disturb the social structure.

My first lapse from this dogma came as I read through the trial transcript. Reluctantly I had to admit that, judging by the printed record, the trial had been proper, the verdict reasonable. Sacco and Vanzetti were armed when arrested--for all their explanations, a telling point against them. Judge Webster Thayer's conduct and remarks seemed temperate. His charge to the jury, so assailed by Professor Felix Frankfurter in his seminal book that did most to stir world opinion, seemed to me fair. No doubt the judge had practiced declamation at high school in the postCivil War period of oratory, but he could scarcely be faulted for that. "Let your eyes be blinded to every ray of sympathy or prejudice," he told the jury, "but let them ever be willing to receive the beautiful sunshine of truth, of reason and sound judgment."

It was for the court, he said, to decide questions of law. Only the jury could decide the facts. Alibis were always questions of facts. "The Commonwealth [he continued] claims that these defendants were two of a party of five who killed the deceased. The defendants deny it. What is the fact? The Commonwealth must satisfy you beyond reasonable doubt that the defendants did. If the Commonwealth has failed to satisfy you, that is the end of these cases and you will return verdicts of not guilty....On the other hand, if the Commonwealth has so satisfied, you will return a verdict of guilty against both defendants or either of them that you so find to be guilty.

"I have now finished my charge," he concluded. "My duties are now at end. I have tried to preside over the trial of these cases in a spirit of absolute fairness and impartiality to both sides. If I have failed in any respect you must not, gentlemen, in any manner fail yours. I therefore now commit to your sacred keeping the decision of these cases."

After the charge but before the jury had brought in its verdict, Sacco and Vanzetti's chief attorney, Fred Moore, a former general counsel for the Industrial Workers of the World, told the judge that whatever the verdict, no one could say that the defendants had not had a fair trial. Many would later say just that. I was no longer one of them.

I continued to think Sacco and Vanzetti innocent but now considered them victims of circumstance, a matter of mistaken identity and bad luck, their case a tragedy rather than a melodrama. From this altered point of view I wrote an article, "Tragedy in Dedham," that I later expanded to a book. In beginning the book I considered myself impartial, but I was much more emotionally committed to Sacco and Vanzetti than I then realized. Starting out, I had been convinced of their innocence and hoped with reasonable luck to prove this once and for all. But as I progressed, the road that had first seemed straight developed so many bends, twists, and reverses that, in the end, I found myself reluctantly facing in the opposite direction. It was a direction I had long tried to avoid. But questions that I had brushed aside as inconsequent returned to trouble me. Why did Sacco and Vanzetti lie after their arrest about matters that had no connection with their anarchist beliefs? Both described themselves as men of peace. Why were they armed when they were picked up by the police? Sacco had on his person a Colt automatic pistol and thirty-two cartridges--three Remington, sixteen Peters, seven U.S., and six Winchester, of an obsolete type. Unaware of the brand differences, he said he had bought his cartridges in a sealed box. By the time of his trial he had learned better. He now said he had bought an opened box of mixed cartridges.

A Winchester bullet of an obsolete type had been taken from the body of a guard shot down durins the holdup-murders for which Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted. An obsolete Winchester shell was one of four spent shells found at the murder scene, the others being two Peterses and a Remington. The prosecution claimed that the obsolete Winchester bullet and shell had been fired in Sacco's Colt, but the trial's ballistic tests were primitive. In spite of later, more sophisticated tests, I remained unconvinced, still hoping that further tests might establish that the fatal bullet and shell had not been fired in his Colt. Other aspects, nevertheless, disturbed me. Sacco's story on the night of his arrest did not ring true. On the day of the crime he had been absent from work, and alibi witnesses who testified to having seen him in Boston on that day were Italian radicals.

I became more ambivalent when I discovered that Moore had in the end doubted his clients' innocence. 

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