Internationale Revue i 10 1927-1929

[p. 330]

About American justice¹⁾

The conscience of humanity is outraged by a terrible wrong - the whole world protests, yet one single person, an American Governor, has the power to defy the enlightened and human sentiment of the entire world and to send two innocent men to their death!

Incredible and paralising is the thought. Yet that is just the situation in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Is this the triumph of American ‘civilisation’? If this be the true spirit and meaning of Americanism, then all its industrial and financial achievements are but so many instruments of inhuman brutality and fiendish torture.

The Federal Government of the United States is trying to shift responsibility for the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti. President Coolidge and his Secretary of State Kellogg have instructed the various American embassies and consulates to announce that the Federal Government has no jurisdiction in the case, has nothing to do with it - that it is entirely the affair of the State of Massachusetts. But this assertion is entirely false, both in principle and in fact.

The Federal Constitution is the supreme law for the entire United States. The Constitution forbids any person within the country to be deprived of his liberty or life without ‘due process of law’. Has there been a due process of law, even, in the Sacco and Vanzetti case? Have they not been convicted by a judge who has been proven as prejudiced against them? Have they been permitted to have their case reviewed by the Supreme Court of the State, by judges not prejudiced beforehand? No! Their appeals for review have been refused by the same judge Thayer who himself convicted them.

Furthermore, the Federal Constitution expressly forbids ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, and surely Sacco and Vanzetti have been tortured for now seven years in the most cruel and fiendish manner. The Federal Government has the constitutional and legal right to intercede in these proceedings. More - it is the sworn duty and moral obligation of the President to see to it that no wrong is suffered by any citizen or inhabitant of the country of which he is the Chief Executive. There are various legal and constitutional means by which President Coolidge could, if he would, terminate the shameful Massachusetts outrage. Lightly shifting the responsibility upon Massachusetts will not clear President Coolidge of his complicity in the judicial murder of two innocent men.

Equally false is the assertion of the Federal Government that it is in fact not involved in the wrong conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti. The original persecution of those two men was begun by the Federal Government. It was the agents of the Federal Government who hounded Sacco and Vanzetti, arrested their friends and tortured them for evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti, till one of the victims, Salsedo, was driven so desperate by the torture that he jumped out of a 14-story window in the building of the Department of Justice, on May 4, 1920. It was the agents of the Federal Government who gathered evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti.

Federal Government to ‘get’ those two men. His sworn testimony is a part of the records in the case.

So, both in principle and in fact, the Federal Government is just as much responsible in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti as the State of Massachusetts, all the strenuous denials of Coolidge notwithstanding.

‘The law is supreme’, the American courts assert, and that is why two innocent men must die, because the technicalities of American jurisprudence do not permit a new trial for them. But where is this American worship of the letter of the law when a rich man kills an inoffensive poor workingman, or when the millionaire Thaw shoots a man to death in cold blood, or when the New-York police club to death a boy for distributing a leaflet against the blockade of Russia?

This hypocritical alleged loyalty to the letter of the law has a striking parallel in the notorious case of Thomas Mooney, in the State of California.

Mooney and his friend Billings were active labor men in San Francisco. They had organised the street car workers and conducted several strikes. The traction interests determined to get these men out of the way. Repeatedly they tried to send them to prison on trumped up charges, but they failed. Then came the Preparedness Parade in San Francisco, in 1917, and that gave the traction company the desired opportunity. A bomb exploded in the parade, - there are many people in California who are convinced that it was done by the agents of the traction company itself. Mooney and Billings and Mrs. Mooney were immediately arrested and charged with the crime, though it was proven that Mooney and his wife were not in the city on that day. The case against them was prosecuted practically by the private detective Swanson of the traction company. Mooney and Billings were convicted, and Mooney was sentenced to death.

The whole country knew that Mooney and Billings were innocent. Every witness has since confessed to perjury; it has been proven that evidence against the men was bought for money by the detectives of the traction company. Every juror in the case has made

1) Geschreven vóórdat de justitie-moord plaats vond.

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an affidavit since the trial that he did not believe the witnesses against Mooney. The presiding judge himself has signed a document that he would not have convicted Mooney if he had known the true facts in the case. Yet the Supreme Court of the State of California has refused Mooney a new trial, just as the Supreme Court of Massachusetts has refused a new trial to Sacco and Vanzetti.

The death sentence of Mooney became such a scandal in America that President Wilson appointed a special commission to investigate the case. The report of the commission proved that the whole case against Mooney was manufactured by the detectives, and that Mooney, Mrs. Mooney and Billings were absolutely innocent. The San Francisco authorities threatened to lynch the commission, and President Wilson's personal investigator had to save his life by fleeing the city in secret.

Every day brought additional evidence to prove that Mooney was convicted on false testimony. His entire innocence was established absolutely, yet the Governor of California insisted that he must die. The President again interceded in the case. He wired to the Governor of California asking for clemency for Mooney, and he followed it with two letters to the Governor. But the Governor of California, ‘loyal to the letter of the law’ and incidentally to the orders of the traction company, ignored the request of President Wilson.

But the situation became so tense and threatening that the death sentence of Thomas Mooney was finally commuted to imprisonment for life, and Mooney and Billings were sent to prison. They are still in the California penitentiary, already ten years, in spite of being admittedly innocent.

Such is American judicial procedure. And in view of this and similar cases, in view particularly of the present terrible Sacco and Vanzetti legal outrage, dare the American courts assert that they stand for justice? Has the world ever witnessed a more horrible perversion of the very meaning of humanity and civilisation? Aug. 21, 1927

ALEXANDER BERKMAN