by Bryson, Bill
Berardelli died at the scene. He was forty-five years old and, like the two men eventually convicted of his killing, from Italy. He had worked for Slater & Morrill for about a year, and left a wife and two children. Parmenter died at Quincy City Hospital the next morning. A devoted churchgoer who was popular with his workmates, he also left a wife and two children. That is about all that is known of the two victims.
The getaway car, a stolen Buick, was found abandoned at a place called Manley Woods two days later. Police at that time were looking for the perpetrators of a similar but botched holdup in nearby Bridgewater the previous Christmas Eve. Chief Michael E. Stewart of the Bridgewater Police Department decided, for reasons unattached to evidence, that the culprits in both cases were Italian anarchists. He discovered that a man of radical sympathies named Ferruccio Coacci lived near where the getaway car was found and for that reason made him the chief suspect. As The New Yorker archly noted some time later, Stewart concluded “that after a hold-up and murder, the murderer would naturally abandon the car practically in his own front yard.”
Although Stewart was indeed the chief of police for Bridgewater, the title suggests a scale of operations that considerably exceeded the reality. Stewart’s “force” was a single part-time assistant. Stewart himself had no training in investigating murders and almost no experience of serious crimes. That is no doubt why he investigated with such enthusiasm. This was the chance of a lifetime for him.
Coacci was quickly eliminated as a suspect: he had gone back to Italy. Living in the house now was a man named Mario Buda, and Stewart, in his dogged way, transferred his suspicions to him. On learning that Buda had a car in for repairs in the Elm Square Garage in West Bridgewater, Stewart left strict instructions with the proprietor to phone him the moment Buda called for it.
One evening three weeks later that call came. The garage owner told Stewart that Buda and three other men had just come for the car but had left directly because it wasn’t ready—Buda and one man on a motorcycle with a sidecar, the other two on foot. The two on foot were thought to be traveling to Brockton by streetcar, so Stewart alerted the police there. When the streetcar reached Brockton, a policeman boarded it, surveyed the few passengers, and detained two uneasy-looking Italian men: Bart Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco. They were found to be carrying loaded pistols and a good deal of ammunition, some of it for guns other than the kinds they carried. They also possessed anarchist literature.
For Chief Stewart that was enough. Though neither man had been arrested for anything before and though Stewart had no evidence to suggest that either had been anywhere near South Braintree at the time of the murders, he had them charged.
It was not a good time to be either a radical or an alien in America, and a positively dangerous time to be both. America was in the grip of something known as the Great Red Scare. In 1917 and 1918, Congress had enacted two startlingly restrictive laws, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. Together these provided severe penalties for anyone found guilty of displaying almost any kind of disrespect to the American government, including its symbols—the flag, military uniforms, historic documents, or anything else in which was deemed to repose the glory and dignity of the United States of America—and these were imposed with a harsh and punitive zeal. “Citizens were imprisoned for criticizing the Red Cross at their own dinner tables,” one commentator noted. A clergyman in Vermont was given a fifteen-year jail term for handing out half a dozen pacifist leaflets. In Indiana, a jury took just two minutes to acquit a man who had shot an immigrant for speaking ill of America.
Crazily, it became riskier to say disloyal things than to do them. A person who refused to obey the draft law could be imprisoned for one year, but a person who urged others to disobey the draft law could be imprisoned for twenty years. More than a thousand citizens were jailed under the terms of the Espionage Act in its first fifteen months. It was hard to know what could get you in trouble. A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence. The judge allowed that such a depiction would be “permissible or even commendable” in ordinary times, but “in this hour of national emergency” Goldstein enjoyed “no right to subvert the purposes and destiny of the nation.” For insulting a foreign army from 150 years earlier, Goldstein was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
Though the espionage and sedition laws were intended only as wartime measures, matters actually worsened with peace. The return home of two million job-seeking soldiers and the simultaneous dismantling of the wartime economy gave America a severe recession. Racial tensions erupted into riots in two dozen cities where blacks had moved in search of better jobs. In Chicago, where the black population had doubled in a decade, a black youth who fell asleep on a raft on Lake Michigan and drifted onto a white beach was stoned to death by a white crowd, provoking two weeks of bitter rioting in which thirty-eight people were killed and whole neighborhoods razed.
At the same time much of the nation was rocked by industrial unrest. Longshoremen, clothworkers, cigar makers, construction workers, steel-workers, telephone operators, elevated rail and subway workers, coal miners, and even Broadway actors all walked off their jobs. At one point in 1919, two million people were out on strike.
Foreign agitators and radical organizations like the union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—whose members were known as Wobblies for reasons that have never been determined—were widely blamed for the troubles. In Boston and Cleveland, the police helped citizens beat up May Day paraders; then the police in Boston went out on strike themselves (the event that propelled Calvin Coolidge to national prominence). In Washington State, Wesley Everest, an IWW employee, was hauled into the street by a mob, which beat him and cut off his genitals. As he begged the mob to put him out of his misery, his tormentors took him to a city bridge, dangled him over the side on a rope, and then shot him. His death was ruled a suicide. No charges were brought.
At the height of the tumult, someone—a disgruntled alien, it was presumed—began sending bombs. In Atlanta, a maid in the home of Senator Thomas R. Hardwick, head of the Senate Immigration Committee, had just taken delivery of a small brown package and was carrying it to the kitchen when it exploded, blowing off her hands. The next day a New York postal employee read about the bombing and realized that the description of the parcel exactly matched sixteen parcels he had put aside at a sorting office for insufficient postage. He rushed back to work and found the packages still there. All were addressed to prominent public figures—John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the chief justice of the United States, and several governors and congressmen. All bore return address labels to the Gimbel Brothers department store at Thirty-Second and Broadway in Manhattan. It was subsequently discovered that several other packages had already been posted. In one bizarre incident, a package was returned to Gimbel Brothers for insufficient postage. A Gimbel’s clerk opened the package, examined the odd contents—bottle of acid, timer, explosives—then packed it all up again, added the necessary postage, and mailed it on. Altogether thirty-six bombs were found. Apart from the unfortunate maid, no one else was injured and no arrests were made.
But that was not the end of it. Just over a month later, on a balmy evening in a quiet, wealthy neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his wife were preparing to retire in their house at 2132 R Street NW when they heard a thump downstairs—“as if something had been thrown against the front door,” Palmer related afterward. A moment later the night was rent by a tremendous explosion, which blew out the front of the Palmer house and left every room exposed, as in a dollhouse. People in neighboring houses were thrown from their beds. Windows were broken for blocks around.
Stumbling through the smoke and dust, the Palmers—both miraculously unhurt—went downstairs and stepped out onto an eerie scene of devastation. Blast debris was everywhere—hanging fr
om trees, littering the street, strewn over neighboring lawns and rooftops. Much of it was still smoking. Scattered about in an unintentionally festive manner were anarchist leaflets.
One of the first people on the scene was Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who lived almost directly opposite. He had just parked and gone in after an evening out. The bomber had probably waited in the shadows for him to go, then proceeded to deposit the bomb. Had Roosevelt arrived a minute later, he might well have been killed and America would have a different history. Roosevelt found Mr. and Mrs. Palmer whitened with plaster dust and wandering in shock. The attorney general was speaking, distractedly, in the pronouns of his Quaker childhood, addressing his neighbors as “thee” and “thou.”
It was clear that the bomber had been blown to pieces by his own device. Alice Longworth, Roosevelt’s cousin, who was also present, reported that “it was difficult to avoid stepping on bloody chunks of human being.” One of the bomber’s legs was on a doorstep across the street. Another was fifty feet away. A big section of torso, with clothing still attached, was dangling from the cornice of a house on a neighboring street. Another indeterminate chunk of flesh and cartilage had crashed through a window of a house across the way and landed at the foot of the bed of Helmar Byru, minister plenipotentiary of Norway. Most of the scalp was found two blocks away on S Street. To reach that point—both distant and uphill—the top of the bomber’s head must have been launched on a trajectory 100 feet high and 250 feet long. It was a big bomb.
So many body parts were lying about that officials at first thought there had been two bombers, or perhaps one bomber and an unidentified, innocent passerby. Clearly the bomb had gone off prematurely. The presumption was that the bomber had tripped as he was about to set it on the Palmers’ steps.
Before the night was out newswires were clicking with reports that bombs of similar destructive magnitude had gone off in seven other localities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Paterson, New Jersey, and Newtonville, Massachusetts. Only one other person was killed—a night watchman in New York—but the knowledge that terrorists could mount coordinated violence on such a scale left many Americans distinctly unnerved. The bombs elsewhere were in some cases wholly mysterious, possibly because they had been delivered to the wrong houses. In Philadelphia, one of the bombs blew apart the house of a jeweler who had no connection to government or politics. Another severely damaged a Catholic church. Why the bombers targeted a Catholic church was never established.
Thanks largely to the fact that the Washington bomber had been wearing a distinctive polka-dot tie, detectives were able to identify him as Carlo Valdinoci. This was a big loss to the anarchist movement. Though just twenty-four, Valdinoci had become a legend in the underground. Federal agents had recently tracked him to a house in West Virginia, but he had escaped just ahead of them, adding to his reputation for cunning and invincibility. Valdinoci had been on the run since 1917 after an infamous bombing in Youngstown, Ohio. That bomb had not gone off as planned either. In fact, it had not gone off at all, so the police, unbelievably, took it to the station house and placed it on a table in the main operations room in order to examine it closely. As they tinkered with it, it exploded, killing ten policemen and a woman who had come to report a robbery. The bombers were never caught, and the case was never solved. Radical cases rarely were.
The bombings had a wondrous effect on the mind of A. Mitchell Palmer. A lantern-jawed Democrat from Pennsylvania, he had been attorney general for just three months but had already been the target of two bombs—the “Gimbel’s” bomb that never reached him and now this one that most assuredly did. This left him powerfully inclined to listen to a young adviser in the Justice Department who had developed a private theory that America’s immigrant subversives, in league with international Communists, were planning a coup. The young man’s name was J. Edgar Hoover, and he convinced Palmer that the plotters existed in vast numbers and were planning an imminent strike.
Hoover, who had only just graduated from law school, was put in charge of a hitherto inconsequential corner of the Alien Registration Section known as the Radical Division. He assembled an index file containing more than two hundred thousand names of individuals and organizations, all neatly cross-referenced. Forty translators were taken on to pore over radical publications, of which the tireless quantifier Hoover counted more than six hundred.
Palmer had high hopes of becoming his party’s presidential nominee in 1920. Dealing decisively with radical elements became his strategy for showing what a muscular individual he was. In a series of apocalyptic speeches, he warned that the flames of revolution were sweeping across the country, “licking the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.” Palmer claimed that some five million Communists and fellow travelers were planning the overthrow of America. With his thrusting jaw and tough rhetoric, Palmer became known to his admirers as “the Fighting Quaker.” He had just launched what was quickly dubbed the Great Red Scare.
Eagerly encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer prepared a series of raids on radical gathering spots. The first were held on November 7, 1919—the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution—and mostly involved federal agents and police in twelve cities storming selected clubs and cafés, smashing furniture, and arresting everyone in sight. In New York, police raided the Union of Russian Workers, beating anyone who protested or even questioned what they were doing. The union was merely a social club, where members could go to play chess or take classes to improve their English; it had never had any connection to radical affairs. In Hartford, Connecticut, police arrested a large number of suspects—the exact number is uncertain—then arrested anyone who came to ask after them. In Detroit, an entire orchestra and all the patrons of a particular restaurant were among eight hundred detainees who were held for up to a week in a windowless corridor without adequate water, toilets, or space to lie down. Eventually all were released without charge.
Palmer was so pleased with the publicity his raids generated and the fear they instilled that he ordered a second, larger set of raids in the new year. This time some six thousand to ten thousand people (accounts vary widely) were arrested in at least seventy-eight cities in twenty-three states. Again, there was much needless destruction of property, arrests without warrants, and beating of innocent people. The Great Red Scare proved to be not so scary after all. In total, the authorities seized just three pistols and no explosives. No evidence of a national conspiracy was uncovered. The failure to catch any bombers or find any hint of a planned insurrection ended Palmer’s political prospects. At the Democratic convention in 1920, the delegates selected James M. Cox, governor of Ohio, to run against another Ohioan, Warren G. Harding. Although the Palmer raids didn’t achieve anything, they had a powerful effect on national sentiment, which is almost certainly why Chief Stewart of Bridgewater decided, without benefit of evidence, that the murderers in his district were foreign anarchists. And it is why Sacco and Vanzetti never really stood a chance.
Between 1905 and 1914, ten million people, mostly from southern and eastern Europe, poured into the United States—a country that had only eighty-three million people to begin with. The numbers of immigrants changed the face of urban America utterly. By 1910, immigrants and the children of immigrants made up almost three-quarters of the populations of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Boston.
Sacco and Vanzetti were among 130,000 Italians who arrived in 1908 alone. Sacco, from Torremaggiore, in southeastern Italy, was just sixteen years old on arrival. Vanzetti, who came from the more prosperous northern Piedmont, not far from France, was three years older. Neither would ever see his homeland again. Though both settled in New England, they would not meet until 1917.
Sacco was small, lithe, and handsome—“clean cut as a Roman coin,” in the
words of one contemporary. Descriptions make him sound rather like the young Al Pacino—small, good-looking, quiet-spoken. He didn’t drink or gamble. He got a job in a shoe factory and soon was a skilled craftsman on good wages. Four years after his arrival in America he married and started a family. At the time of his arrest he was thirty years old and a hardworking family man. He didn’t seem an obvious candidate for anarchy.
Vanzetti was a different matter. Though in Italy he had trained as a pastry chef—a respectable profession—in America he worked as a common laborer at the lowest wages, almost as if he were seeking out privation to prove a point about the evils of capitalism. He was frequently unemployed, always hard up, and occasionally near starvation. In the spring of 1919, however, his economic circumstances and, it would seem, his entrepreneurial spirit took a sudden turn for the better when he bought a fish cart complete with knives, weighing scales, and a bell for attracting customers, and became a mobile fish vendor in Plymouth, Massachusetts. At the time of his arrest, he was thirty-three years old and doing rather well.
Vanzetti was an intellectual by nature. He read a great deal and lived quietly and soberly. He never had a girlfriend. He had a melancholy air and a sad, gentle smile. His eyes had “a tenderness that haunted one,” a friend recalled. His most conspicuous attribute, after 1917, was a vast, drooping mustache. Although his manner was affable and even sweet-natured, he was a bitter foe of the state. “Vanzetti was anarchism personified,” one associate said.
Vanzetti and Sacco were not especially great friends. They lived thirty miles apart—Sacco in Stoughton, near Bridgewater, and Vanzetti in Plymouth—and had known each other for less than three years when they became eternally yoked by the payroll murders in South Braintree.