RADICALS: Pardon?

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"I saw there was not what I was thinking before ... I could not afford much a family the way did have the idea before. I could not put any money in the bank; I could no push my boys some to go to school and other things ... I could see the best men, intelligent, education, they been arrested and sent to prison and died in prison for years and years without getting them out, and Debs, one of the great men in his country, he is in prison, still away in prison, because he is a Socialist ... the capitalist class they don't want our child to go to high school or college or Harvard College . . . they want the working class to be a low all the times, be underfoot, and not to be up with the head. . . . Sometimes you see the Rockefellers, Morgans ... they give five hundred thousand dollars to Harvard College, they give a million dollars for another school. Everybody say, 'Well, D. Rockefeller is a great man, the best man in the country.' I want to ask him who is going to Harvard College? What benefit the working class they will get by those million dollars they give by Rockefeller, D. Rockefeller? . . . men who is getting $21 a week or $30 a week, I don't care if he gets $80 a week ... he can't live and send his child and go to Harvard College if he wants to eat everything nature will give him. . . . We no want fight by the gun. . . . What is war? The war is not shoots like Abraham Lincoln's and Abe Jefferson, to fight for the free country . . . but they are War for the great millionaire. . . . They are War for business, million dollars come on the side." What, ask Sacco-Vanzetti adherents, must have been the effect on the jury of these fulminations against "D. Rockefeller," against "Harvard College," against wars with "million dollars come on the side"?—especially at a time (1921) when Red-hunting was a national pastime? Were Messrs. Sacco and Vanzetti convicted not of murder but of radicalism? As an illustration of prejudice, Liberals also put forward a remark alleged to have been made, before the trial, by Jury Foreman Ripley, who is said to have informed a friend that he wa; going to serve on the jury in the trial of the two "ginneys" (vulgar term for Italians) and, upon his friend's opining that they were innocent, replied, "Damn them, they ought to hang anyway." In addition to attacking the trial itself, friends of Mr. Sacco and Mr. Vanzetti also have collected new evidence to answer the question: If Messrs. Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent, who is guilty? For in November, 1925, a convict, confined in the same prison with Mr. Sacco, made a written confession of having taken part in the payroll robbery and stated that Messrs. Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the bandit-gang. Testimony of this convict (one Celestino P. Madeiros) lead to an investigation involving a group of criminals known as the "Morelli gang." Police, however, maintain that the "Morelli gang" did not commit the Braintree crime, point out that two of the group were in jail at the time, and refuse to attach much weight to the testimony given by one convict in behalf of another.

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