By RALPH IZARD |

justice, for
now we do

because of if.

“Tf it had not been
have lived out my
dorsiere to scorning men. I might have died,

triumph. Never in our

. do such
ae Paki understanding of men as
by accident. Our words—our

pains—nothing!
lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-
peddier—all! That last moment belongs to

us—that agony is our triumph:

RAMED

Today, as after World War I,
a frantic ‘red’ hysteria is be-
ing whipped up in the U.S.
This is the story of two men,
guilty of no crime, who died

for this thing, I might
life talking at street

a failure. Now we are
and our

work for tolerance, for

The taking of our lives—

td
:

BARTOLOMEO VANZETTI

FEW printing pressmen still on duty stood outside the

: newspaper shops along Park Row as. the
into the streets between the grimy buildings.

hats fashioned from newspapers bore th
As they idled in the still-cool breeze,

dull, sickening thud on the cobble- }
Stones, The body of what had
een a man lay inert, the life
bleeding out of it on the street in_
front of No. 15 Park Row. :

The quiet was shattered with
men running, with shouts from
pened windows on the fourteenth
floor of No, 15 Park Row, the
Offices of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation,

“Who is it? Who is it?” the im-

Mediate crowd about the body de-
manded,

An ‘immaculately-clad but S08-
8y-eyed FBI agent shouldered in
among them,

“Just another one of those for-
Signers,” he told the crowd. “He
Jumped, see? He jumped.”

At his bidding a policeman dis-
Persed the crowd. Other COPS
tossed the remains of Andrea Sal-
Sedo into the “D,O.A.” basket and
Clanged off to the morgue.

The young Italian had had few

daylight slid
Their square
e date: May 4, 1920.
there was a sudden

visitors during all the weeks that
the FBI had held him without
warrant upon the fourteenth floor.
One of the few had been the tall,
rather stooped man with a kindly,
manner, and the long black mous-
tache customary among his Ital-
jan countrymen.

“Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a , fish
peddler, from Boston,” he had
told the FBI man who had asked
him who he was and why he
wanted to see “this radical, An-

drea Salsedo.” '
“we are friends,” Vanzetti told

him.

e
To the FBI in 1920, this was a

~ damning admission. The pack had

peen in full ery since the preced-
ing May Day, hunting down all
“radicals” — “Bolsheviks, they
were called by a press as wilfully
ignorant of the meaning of the
word (“majority”) as it was
vicious in its application.

The greatest strike wave in
U.S. history had mounted in the
first year after the “war for the
division of the world.’ William
Z, Foster, now national chairman
of the U.S. Communist Party,
fought a two-front battle against
the Morgan monopoly in steel, and
against a renegade official of the
AFL. In the nation’s coal mines,
textile mills, packinghouses, work-
ing people fought their exploiters
for the right to live.

Employers fought back with all
the forces of violence at their
command—the police, the newly-
organized American Legion,
goons, gunmen, professional
strikebreakers. Peaceful marchers
on May Day, 1919, imbued with
the new hope given mankind by
the young socialist Soviet Repub-
lic, were charged by mounted po-
lice, tanks, armored cars, club-
swinging Legionnaires.

And all the while the jungle
drums of the shyster press boom-
ed louder, louder, louder. Head-
lines leaped out black with hys-
teria, Arrests mounted in the
scores, the hundreds, the thous-
ands. Labor leaders, the foreign
born, “radicals” of all kinds from

’ the socialists of that day to mem-

bers of the new-fledged Commun-
ist Party, were caught in the
dragnet.

But by 1920, the fomented hys-
teria had begun to die. Depression
had taken the edge off the radical
hunts and persecution of the for-
eign born. New victims were
needed.

In the few days after Vanzetti’s
visit, and before Salsedo went to
his death from the window of the
FBI office, his friends sought to
organize a protest meeting on Sal-
sedo's behalf. Helping Vanzetti
was Nicola Sacco, “a good shoe-
maker” from Stoughton, Mass.

But their protest meeting was
never held. On learning that Sal-
sedo was dead, the Italian-born
workers took fright, Sacco, ex-
plaining in court their actions on
the night of their arrest, said, .

“Vanzetti come into the hall. He
told us we are to get ready and
advise our friends, any friend who
knows a friend as a socialist and
active in the movement of labor,
why, they are advised to get the
books and literature to put some
place and hide, not to find by the
police or the state. And another
thing he says nobody know why
they arrest Salsedo .. .”

Going to get the car of @ friend,
Sacco and Vanzetti, with two
others, walked into an elaborate
and blundering police trap set for
a gang which had recently com-
mitted two payroll robberies. They

were charged with robbery and *

murder. But the first questions
asked of Sacco and Vanzetti by

the police had nothing to do with .

robbery or murder.

“fTe asked me why we were in
Bridgewater,” Vanzetti told the
court, “how long I know Sacco,
if I am a radical, if I am an an-
archist, or Communist, and he
asked me if I believe in the gov-
ernment of the United States.”

One witness “positively identi-
fied” Sacco from one fleeting
glimpse she had gained of the
payroll robbery car. Later it de-
veloped that her exact identifica-
tion—“hair two to two and one-
half inches long, a good-sized left
hand, dark eyebrows’—was the
result of having had Sacco point-
ed out to her a number of times
in the police station.

Another woman, “of doubtful

“reputation,” also positively identi-

fied Sacco. Later the defense pro-

‘d@uced a witness whom she had

told:

“They are bothering the life out
of me. I just come from jail, The
government men took me down
and wanted me to recognize those
men (Sacco and Vanzetti) and I
don’t know a thing about them.

I have never seen them and I
can’t recognize them.”

Another witness “identified”
Vanzetti as one of five occupants
of a car that passed him in South
Braintree on the day of the rob-
bery. A rail crossing gatekeeper
was “positive” that Vanzetti was
the driver of the, payroll robbery
car, who had aimed a revolver at
him.

But the gatekeeper recanted
when other witnesses identified
the driver as “a young, small,
light-haired man.” J

But there was even more clinch-
ing evidence that the two radicals
had been deliberately framed. In
the fifth year of their imprison-
ment, a young Portuguese was
confined with Sacco and Vanzetti.
In November, 1925, he sent a note
to Sacco in which he said:

“I hereby confess to being in
the South Braintree shoe company
crime and Sacco and Vanzetti
was not in said crime.”

It was signed, Celestino F. Ma-
deiros. Madeiros had been a young
member of “the Morelli gang,”
notorious Providence, R.I., hood-
lums. All the testimony—identifi-
cation of the driver, the appear-
ance of the two who had done
the killing-—and all the material
eyidence—the marks of the fatal
bullets, young Madeiros’ bank ac-
count—fitted the Morelli gang to
the crime exactly and specifically.

No evidence was ever given
that could have fastened the
crime upon Sacco and Vanzetti
“beyond the shadow of a doubt.”
Indeed, all evidence implicating
them is shadowy, vague, dubious
and suppositious.

How then could Judge Webster
Thayer, of an old Worcester fam-
ily, of supposed high probity, of
apparently stainless record on the
bench—how could he have in-
structed the jury as he did? Jus-
tice Frankfurter has called his
25,000 word charge to the jury “a
farrago of misquotations, misrep-
representations, suppressions and
mutilations.”

Judge Thayer was apparently

s

«

JOSEPH STAROBIN

AN you imagine a situation
in which you are doing
people great damage by giving
_them things for nothing?
That’s what’s involved in the
Marshall Plan for Italy.
Americans believe they are do-
ing the Italians a great favor
by shipping all the coal they
use, all the oil, seventy percent
of their wheat—for what ap-
pears to be nothing.

In reality, the greatest, harm
is being done.

Italian industry ,particularly
in the great factories of Milan,
Turin, Genoa and Bologna, is
capable of turning out ex-
cellent machinery, elec-
trical equipment, automobiles.
Thanks to the quick work of
the Partisans in ’43-44, the in-
dustries of this vital area
emerged undamaged. And the
workers have detailed plans
for running them more effi-
ciently.

But where is the market?
Western Europe hardly: needs
these goods. Neither does the
U.S. Italy herself could absorb
a great deal if her internal

- market were expanded, but
that “requires a drastic agrar-
ian reform. And that’s some-
thing which Italians hear
about only on the eve of elec-
tions. Neither the Church nor
the landlords—the backbone

‘of the government—will toler-
ate the necessary scope of
agrarian reform.

Obviously, Italy’s only pros-

—_—The threat to Italy—

‘ sorption by American trusts.

no believer in abstractions. His
justice was class justice. He was
not trying two men for a South
Braintree payroll robbery, and
the killing of two fellow men. He
was delivering the merciless judg-
ment of a frightened class which
felt itself threatened by man's ir-
resistible march to the future, a
class which valued—and values—
its seat upon the backs of other
men far above all considerations,
least of all human life and ab-
stract conceptions of “justice.”

Palmer and the whole army of
searet agents, cops, the press, ly-
ing informers and American Le-
gionnaires had cooperated to cre-
ate the atmosphere in which two
men innocent of any crime upon
the statute books could be sent to
their deaths. Their society claim-
ed its victims when Sacco and
Vanzetti went to the electric chair
at midnight of August 22-23, 1927.

Before they died, millions over
the earth had lifted their voices in
protest. Parties and leaders over
the world had denounced the sen-
tence against Sacco and Vanzetti
as class murder. In San Francisco,
Chicago, New York, the other
great working class cities of the
world, millions of men and wom-
en struggled to save Sacco and
Vanzetti until the electric chair
exacted the last thin shudder of
their lives.

They say that when the final
signal came at last to the thous-
ands massed in the death watch
upon Boston Common that night
of August 22-23, a great sigh went
up from them, But there was no
need for tears.

The final triumph would not be-
long to the Judge Thayers, the
A. Mitchell Palmers, or to their
class, Never. It would belong to
the men who could say with Van-
zetti:

“Our words, our lives, Our
pains—nothing!

“The taking of our lives —
lives of a good shoemaker and
a poor fishpeddler—all!

“That last moment belongs to
us—that agony is our triumph.”

pect is to sell the countries of
eastern Europe, which are in-
dustrializing, rapidly. That
goes for the Soviet Union, too.
But the Marshall Plan steps
in—in two ways. By sending
Italy the expensive coal which
could come from Poland, the
oil which should come from
Romania, the wheat which
Hungary produces, the Mar-
shall Plan has the effect of
undermining Italian industry.
Its factories have nowhere to
sell. They are thus being closed.
down, and thousands of work-
ers are being added to Italy's
2.3 million unemployed.
Secondly, the Marshall Plan-
ners have the right—under the
law which most Americans
considered so generous—to de-
cide with whom Italy shall
trade. James Zellerbach, of the
American Crown-Zellerbach
Corporation is the ERP ad-
ministrator here, and he has
said that Italians cannot sell
to eastern Europe any goods
made with American materials
which can possibly be con-
strued as strategic products.
You can see what that means
‘0 a country which so heavily
depends on American raw ma-
terials, Its trade with eastern
Europe is a fraction of what
it was before the war, and
what it could be. The Marshall
Plan keeps Italy alive—but
only at the price of her slow—
and not to slow—starvation as
an independent nation, At the
price; it must be added, of dis-
mantling Italy's industrial
capacity or facilitating its ab-

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—SEPTEMBER 3, 1948—PAGE 11