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Sacco and Vanzetti, Guilty After All?

When a judge sentenced two Italian anarchists named Sacco and Vanzetti to die for a crime they said they didn’t commit, an international furor erupted.

Many believed Sacco and Vanzetti guilty of only two things: foreign birth and radical beliefs. The eyes of the world then focused their home, Boston’s North End, during their trial, conviction and appeals. Protesters demonstrated in major cities around the world. A petition demanding a new trial had 600,000 signatures and celebrities wrote letters begging for clemency.

One of those celebrities, muckraker Upton Sinclair, decided to write a novel about the case. But by the time he finished the book, called Boston, Sacco and Vanzetti had died. And Sinclair believed them guilty.

Sacco and Vanzetti

On April 15, 1920, two men shot and killed Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter in cold blood. A paymaster and guard for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Co., they were carrying the company payroll through the streets of Braintree, Mass. The two armed robbers grabbed the loot, more than $15,000, and fled in a getaway car.

Several weeks later, police arrested Nicolo Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fishmonger, on a streetcar. They had no police record, but they did carry loaded guns. Their trial then began the next June.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Red Scare

The crime took place during the Red Scare, a time of heightened fears about foreign terrorists.

In the spring of 1919, Italian anarchists tried to bomb political and business leaders throughout the United States. In April and in June they delivered 45 bombs to such prominent men as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., and U.S. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Only some of the bombs detonated, killing two and injuring two.

But one bomb nearly killed Palmer and it demolished his house. Palmer responded throughout 1919 and 1920 by having thousands of people arrested just on suspicion of radical activity. Some who got caught up in his dragnet had done nothing but talk with an accent.

But Palmer got hundreds deported.

Anarchists then retaliated with bombings at U.S. embassies and on Wall Street, which killed 38 people.

Death Sentence

In Boston, the judge handed down the death sentence to Sacco and Vanzetti. Many viewed the trial as tainted by prejudice against Italians. Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law School professor, said the judge handled the case with ‘misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions and mutilations.’

Sacco and Vanzetti became a cause celebre around the world. For the next six years, newspapers carried stories of efforts to save their lives. Protesters demonstrated on their behalf in major cities on every continent but Antarctica.

Portrait of a young muckraker

Upton Sinclair

In 1927, Upton Sinclair had a reputation as a bestselling writer and a Socialist. His novel The Jungle had exposed conditions in the meatpacking industry and led to the federal Meat Inspection Act.

Sinclair joined in the chorus from to stay the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

He called their conviction, ‘the most shocking crime that has been committed in American history since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.’

Sinclair had worked undercover for seven weeks in a meatpacking plant to write The Jungle. In researching his novel about Sacco and Vanzetti, Sinclair spent six weeks in Boston gathering material. He interviewed Vanzetti, attended a funeral, got the court transcript, interviewed reporters and sent hundreds of letters to verify facts.

As he wrote the novel, his doubts grew about their innocence. Then on Aug. 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair in Charlestown State Prison.

Anthony Arthur, in his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, recounted how the author discovered that Sacco and Vanzetti had committed the murders.

One of their lawyers, Fred Moore, told him they had done it — but that the whole legal system was corrupt.

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth,” wrote Sinclair. “He then told me that the men were guilty and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”

Wonder and Doubt

Knowing their lawyer believed in the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti, Sinclair didn’t know what to do. He called it the most difficult ethical problem of his life.

In the end, he left the reader of Boston uncertain – ‘to wonder and doubt,’ in his words — about their guilt or innocence. He believed that an unjust system condemned Sacco and Vanzetti as anarchists and foreigners from the start.

Sinclair hoped to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year, 1929, but lost out to Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary.

Boston, By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13436452. This story was updated in 2022.

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Emma Goldman Opens An Anarchist Ice Cream Shop in Worcester, Mass.

Emma Goldman could have made a fortune from her ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass.

It was 1892, and she was a Russian Jewish immigrant who’d discovered the anarchist movement. She believed all forms of government are wrong, harmful and unnecessary because they rest on violence.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman wanted to inspire the laboring masses to rise up and throw off the chains of capitalism. Ironically, she was quite good at her own little capitalist venture.

She served ice cream, fried pancakes and made tea for a steady stream of customers. But one day she suddenly stopped because a newspaper headline caught her eye.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Kovno in Russia, now the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, on June 27, 1869. She immigrated to the United States in 1885 to escape poverty and anti-Semitism. At first she lived with her older half-sister in Rochester, N.Y. She worked in a factory, married and then divorced.

After three years she moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. On her first day in the city, she met Alexander Berkman in a café frequented by radicals. Berkman had fallen under the influence of Johann Most, anarchist speaker and publisher of Die Freiheit newspaper – and grandfather of longtime Celtics radio announcer, Johnny Most.

Berkman took her to hear Most speak that night. At first he revolted her because of his twisted face, the result of a childhood disease. But then he captivated her.

Johann Most

Emma Goldman ended up following Most and falling in love with Berkman. Most encouraged her to speak publicly. The first time she took the speaker’s platform, she wrote, her mind went blank. Then, she wrote,

…something strange happened. In a flash I saw it—every incident of my three years in Rochester: the Garson factory, its drudgery and humiliation, the failure of my marriage, the Chicago crime…I began to speak. Words I had never heard myself utter before came pouring forth, faster and faster.

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman around 1918.

Worcester

By 1891, Most was in prison. Emma Goldman supported herself sewing boys’ jumpers, but she worked 18 hour days. She and her lover’s cousin, Modest Stein, got jobs with a photographer in Springfield, Mass. They did so well they decided to go out on their own. So Goldman and Stein invited Berkman to join them, and they moved to Worcester, fixed up a studio and put out a sign. However, no customers came.

Their landlord advised them to open an ice cream parlor.

They had $50 in savings, and their landlord loaned them $150. The threesome fitted out a derelict shop and served sandwiches and coffee. Soon they paid back their landlord and bought a soda fountain.

Events 500 miles away would soon overtake them.

The site of an ice cream shop run by Emma Goldman.

Homestead

Andrew Carnegie owned the Homestead Steel Works in western Pennsylvania, and put Henry Clay Frick in charge of the company’s operations. The two men wanted to break the union, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Frick locked the union workers out of their jobs on June 28, 1892. The Knights of Labor, which represented mechanics and transportation workers, voted to strike in sympathy. So did workers at other plants. They set up pickets to prevent the company from bringing in strikebreakers.

Frick hired 300 armed Pinkerton detectives to get into the plant. A battle broke out in which nine workers – including a young boy – were killed. The conflict didn’t end until 8,000 state militiamen put it down. Seven Pinkertons also died in the violence.

Obsessed

For entire nights, Emma Goldman wrote, the three ice cream entrepreneurs would sit up discussing the Homestead strike.

One afternoon a customer came in for ice cream while Emma was alone in the store. She served him his ice cream while he read the newspaper, and saw the headline about Homestead.

The newspaper reported that Frick evicted the families of strikers from company houses while sheriffs’ deputies carried pregnant women out into the street. Frick told the workers he would rather see them dead than concede to their demands.

State militia heading toward Homestead strikers.

Emma Goldman described what happened next in her autobiography. The customer said, “Are you sick, young lady? Can I do anything for you?” She told him he could give her the newspaper in exchange for the ice cream and then closed the store.

She ran home, and she, Stein and Berkman decided they had to join the workers. Their landlord told them they were crazy because their ice cream parlor would bring them a fortune. They turned the store over to the landlord and took the morning train to New York.

Assassination Attempt

Ultimately, Frick prevailed over the workers.

“Frick was the symbol of wealth and power, of the injustice and wrong of the capitalistic class, as well as personally responsible for the shedding of the workers’ blood,” Emma Goldman later wrote.

So the anarchists decided to kill Henry Frick. They thought his assassination would inspire the working masses to revolt against the capitalist system.

Berkman went to Pennsylvania and, wearing a black suit and a derby hat, entered Frick’s office. He shot at him twice and missed, but managed to stab him three times. Berkman ended up in prison for 14 years for the attempted assassination.

Artiists conception of the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick.

Aftermath

The working masses did not rise up and revolt as a result of Berkman’s assassination attempt.

When prison authorities released Berkman, Emma Goldman met him with a bouquet of roses. Their affair eventually foundered, but they remained friends.

Emma Goldman went to prison several times over the next few decades for inciting to riot, for conspiring to induce men to resist the draft, for planning President McKinley’s assassination (she didn’t) and for illegally distributing information about birth control. She also founded the journal Mother Earth.

Emma Goldman 1901 mug shot

The United States deported her to Russia in 1919 because of her anarchist beliefs. She witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, but eventually denounced the Communist regime. For the rest of her life she supported anarchist causes in Europe. She defined anarchism as the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion, the liberation of the body from the dominion of property and liberation of everybody from the restraints of government.

She died in 1940 in Toronto, Canada.

The ice cream parlor at 86 Winter St. is now a tapas bar next to the highway.

Images: Site of the anarchist ice cream shop, By Victor Grigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67893771. This story was updated in 2022.

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S. Z. Poli, New Haven’s Italian P.T. Barnum

Twenty-one-year-old S. Z. Poli came to America in 1881 with little more than the ability to carve lifelike figures from wax. He parlayed that skill into a theatrical empire and prestige in his adopted home of New Haven.

S. Z. Poli

Players like Houdini, Sophie Tucker and George M. Cohan performed for working-class immigrants in his magnificent theaters throughout the Northeast.

New England’s Yankee elite never quite accepted the Italian immigrant who put on vaudeville shows. He probably didn’t care. He liked and understood the working-class immigrants who came to the United States to work in its burgeoning factories. They were the ones who filled his theatres in such blue-collar cities as Worcester, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Springfield and Hartford.

“I have remained always a showman,” he said. “I have sought neither diversion nor profit outside the theatrical field.”

People often compared him to P.T. Barnum, another Connecticut showman.

Wax Anarchists

Sylvester Zefferino Poli was born at 10 p.m., on New Year’s Eve 1859 in Piano di Coreglia, Tuscany. He liked to joke, “I was a year old, two hours after I was born.”

His father was a church organist, his mother a baker. As a boy he showed promise as an artist. During the Franco-Prussian War, the family gave refuge to a noted sculptor, M. Dublex. Sylvester Poli then went to Paris with Dublex as his apprentice.

After he finished his military obligation in Italy, he returned to Paris to work at the Musee Grevin, a wax museum. He modeled in wax historical figures such as kings, queens, presidents, inventors, murderers and Jesus Christ.

Then he immigrated to the New York City in 1881 and took a job with the Eden Musee, which displayed ‘The Wonders of the World in Wax.’ In 1885 he married Rosa Leverone, and they had five children.

Poli’s Palace Theater in Waterbury

S. Z. Poli’s big break came with the death sentence of seven anarchists for the Haymarket riot in Chicago. The men were railroaded by the court, and the trial created an international sensation. While the anarchists awaited death, Poli got permission to reproduce them in wax with their real clothes. He exhibited the figures in a storefront, then took them on the road. In 1888, he formed a partnership and opened dime museums in Toronto, Rochester, N.Y., and Staten Island.

New Haven

He then moved to New Haven in 1892 and built the Poli Eden Musee, another wax museum. The next year he opened Poli’s Wonderland Theatre in New Haven and staged ‘high-class’ vaudeville shows that ran as long as 12 hours. The shows were aimed at a working- and middle-class audience. The Yankee old guard viewed them as lowbrow, a sign of cultural decline.

Vaudeville had emerged from minstrel shows, burlesque, circus acts and dime museums, which P.T. Barnum took to their highest level. Early vaudeville was often bawdy and crude, the audience fueled by liquor.

S. Z. Poli, like his rival Benjamin Franklin Keith, insisted on elevating the tone of vaudeville. “Always, and at all times, I have been a strong believer in morality,” he said. “I have insisted always on clean shows, and have never tolerated anything that could be fairly regarded as unfit for public presentation.”

Poli hired now-legendary entertainers: Harry Houdini, Shirley Booth, Bert Lahr, Mae West, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Ray Bolger, Bill “Bo Jangles” Robinson, Will Rogers, Eva Tanguay, Theda Bara, Fred Allen and Baby Rose Marie (who later appeared on The Dick Van Dyke Show). He showed the first motion picture ever seen in New Haven in a theater he bought to show it in.

Architectural Gems

From his first museum in New Haven, S. Z. Poli went on to build and remodel magnificent, heavily embellished theaters. Some fell to the wrecking ball. Others reopened and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Some are haunted wrecks.

By 1916 he was the world’s largest individual theater owner.

Poli’s Theater in Springfield

Ultimately he owned 28 theaters, 18 in Connecticut. (Click here for a complete list.) When he retired at age 69 he also owned three hotels, 500 offices and two building sites.

S. Z. Poli remodeled or built magnificent showplaces. The Poli Palace in Bridgeport, now abandoned and said to be haunted, was designed in the Beaux Arts style by Thomas Lamb and was the largest theater in Connecticut.

When he bought the Franklin Square Theatre in Worcester, he renamed it the Grand and hired Lamb to double its seating capacity and transform it into a glittering palace. It is now the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts and run as a nonprofit.

In Waterbury, Conn., the opulent Palace Theater reopened as a performing arts center. Thomas Lamb designed it with grand lobby spaces and ornate dome ceilings.

The Palace Theater in Waterbuy.

Friends in High Places

George M. Cohan described S.Z. Poli as a shrewd businessman and a warm friend. As a member of the Four Cohans, he once haggled with Poli over their pay. Poli stubbornly refused to give them a raise. Cohan and his sister then performed, their parents in the audience celebrating their 25^th wedding anniversary. After the show, the house lights went on, and ushers marched down the aisle carrying an ornate silver serving set that they presented to Mr. and Mrs. Cohan, with the Polis’ compliments. So George asked S.Z. why he’d resisted giving them a raise when the gift cost far more than the difference in their wages. Poli then replied, “George, the salary was business, the gift is friendship.”

For his own anniversary celebration, S.Z. and Rosa Poli hosted a gala celebration at their home in New Haven. The local newspaper called it one of the handsomest entertainments ever given in the city. Their lawn was turned into enchanted gardens with hundreds of Japanese lanterns and an orchestra played until the early morning hours. Mayor Frank Rice was there, along with lawyers, corporate heads, garage owners, carpenters and clerks.

He never lost touch with his working-class roots, staying involved with the Italian community and helping the working poor. During World War I he helped organize a National Guard Company of Italian soldiers to demonstrate their patriotism to the United States.

Interior of the Hanover Theatre in Worcester

Legacy of S.Z. Poli

Poli retired in 1929, having sold an interest in his theaters to Fox New England Theaters. After the stock market crash, Fox went into bankruptcy and Poli retained control. He then sold the remaining theaters to Loew’s in 1934. He died three years later in his home in Woodmont, Conn., on May 31, 1937. Poli left an estate worth $30 million.

Poli’s New Haven theater under the wrecking ball. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

He is credited with helping to transform the variety show into the vaudeville show.

Brett Page in 1915 described the transformation:

From the old variety show, made up of a singer of topical songs, an acrobatic couple, a tight-rope walker, a sidewalk “patter” pair, and perhaps a very rough comedy sketch, there has developed a performance that sometimes includes as many as ten or twelve acts, each one presented by an artist whose name is known around the world. One of the laments of the old vaudeville performers is that they have a place in vaudeville no more. The most famous grand opera singers and the greatest accost and actresses appear in their room. The most renowned dramatists write some of its playlets. The finest composers cut down their best-known works to fit its stage.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Palace Theater By Koskenart – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51408720.

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‘Havlicek Stole the Ball!’: The Greatest Broadcast Moment Ever in Basketball

To the New England sports fan, the phrase ‘Havlicek stole the ball!’ is as profound and as personal as ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ is to Irish Democrats.

Johnny Most high above courtside.

‘Havlicek stole the ball!’ was the most famous radio call in basketball history. The lore about it is as much about the colorful radio announcer Johnny Most as it is about the Boston Celtics’ all-time high scorer, John Havlicek.

Most was the radio voice of the Celtics during the team’s golden era, from 1953 to 1990. Many fans would watch the game on television with the sound turned down and Johnny Most turned up.

High Above Courtside

Johnny Most was born on June 15, 1923 in New York City and named after his grandfather, Johann Most, an anarchist newspaper editor. After Most served with distinction as an aerial gunner in World War II, he went into broadcasting.

He established himself high above courtside in the old Boston Garden, back in the day when fans could run into players on the way to their seats. He called games in a voice that sounded like a cheese grater. His explanation: he gargled with Saniflush.

Newspaper reporters who sat beneath Most had to dodge his long cigarette ashes that fluttered down through the floorboards. He once dropped a cigarette into his lap and set his pants on fire while on the air.

Havlicek Stole The Ball

He was a notorious homer who — according to one referee — could cause a riot at High Mass. To Most, the game was a morality play in which his beloved Celtics were the good guys and the opposing players were thugs and cheats.

He didn’t like Lakers star Wilt Chamberlain one little bit. In 1969, the Lakers were favored to win the NBA championship. When the Celtics arrived at the Lakers’ Forum for the final game, they found thousands of victory balloons tied to the ceiling, the USC Trojan Marching band on the sidelines and cases of champagne stacked outside the Lakers’ locker room. During the game, Chamberlain famously left the court with a knee injury, but wanted back in when his replacement started producing. The Celtics won that game, and the championship. Most was not gracious:

We busted their balloons! The USC Band is packing their instruments and all the champagne has suddenly gone flat. And then there’s poor Wilt, who probably is icing his boo-boo right now while picking up a crying towel.

Johnny Most was also a poet who published a volume of poetry called Feelings: Private Thoughts and Poems.

‘Havlicek Stole the Ball’

John Havlicek

It was on April 15, 1965 that Havlicek stole the ball, during the closing seconds of Game 7 against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1965 Eastern Conference Finals. The Celtics’ lead had melted away to one point. Philadelphia had the ball out of bounds and a good chance to win. Philadelphia guard Hal Greer tossed the ball to Chet Walker, but Havlicek tipped the ball to Celtic Sam Jones in one of the greatest NBA plays ever.

From his perch high above courtside, Most screamed over the WHDH airwaves:

Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones! Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over. It’s all over! Johnny Havlicek is being mobbed by the fans!

The Celtics won, 110-109, and delirious fans carried Havlicek off the court. The Celtics went on to win their seventh consecutive championship.

Johnny Most, Bernard Cardinal Law and Mayor Ray Flynn celebrating the Celtics’ championship at City Hall in 1984.

Later in his career Most was notorious for nicknaming opposing players. Magic Johnson was ‘Crybaby,’ Isiah Thomas was ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ and Washington Bullets players Rick Mahorn and Jeff Ruland were interchangeably ‘McFilthy’ and ‘McNasty.’ Most especially hated Detroit Pistons player Bill Laimbeer, a ‘dirty rotten player’ he nicknamed ‘Big Baby.’ (Watch Most trash the opposing teams here.)

He retired in 1990 due to failing health. Johnny Most died on Jan. 4, 1993, in Hyannis, Mass. John Havlicek died on April 25, 2019, having suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

This story was updated in 2022. Photo of Most in 1984 courtesy By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65419210

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