Vanzetti - Defense Committee

Defense Committee

The Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee was formed on May 9, 1920, immediately following the arrests, by a group of fellow anarchists, headed by Vanzetti's 23-year-old friend Aldino Felicani. Over the next 7 years, it raised $300,000. Fred Moore drew on its funds for his investigations, though differences arose when Moore tried to determine who had committed the South Braintree crimes over objections from anarchists that he was doing the government's work. After the Committee hired William G. Thomson to manage the legal defense, he objected to its propaganda efforts.

A Defense Committee publicist wrote an article about the first trial that appeared in the New Republic. In the winter of 1920-21 the Defense Committee sent stories to labor union publications every week. It produced pamphlets with titles like Fangs at Labor's Throat, sometimes printing thousands of copies. It sent speakers to Italian communities in factory towns and mining camps. The Committee eventually added staff from outside the anarchist movement, notably Mary Donovan, a 40-year-old who had experience as a labor leader and Sinn Féin organizer. In 1927, she and Felicani together recruited Gardner Jackson, a Boston Globe reporter from a wealthy family, to manage publicity and serve as a mediator between the Committee's anarchists and the growing number of supporters with more liberal political views, socialites, lawyers, and intellectuals. He bridged the gap between the radicals and the social elite well enough for Sacco to thank him a few weeks before his execution: "We are one heart, but unfortunately we represent two different class....But, whenever the heart of one of the upper class join with the exploited workers for the struggle of the right in the human feeling is the feel of an spontaneous attraction and brotherly love to one another." John Dos Passos joined the committee and wrote its 127-page official review of the case: Facing the Chair: Story of Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen. After the executions, the Committee continued its work, helping to gather material that eventually appeared as The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti.