Just two days after Salsedo’s death, police arrested Sacco and Vanzetti on a streetcar near Brockton, Massachusetts. The police had been looking for suspects in a recent robbery and murder at the Slater and Morrill Shoe Factory in nearby South Braintree. The previous month, two armed men had detained paymaster Frederick Parmenter and his guard, Alessandro Berardelli, as they were transporting money from the payroll office. The men shot Parmenter and Berardelli, then fled in a Buick, along with three accomplices.
Sacco and Vanzetti had no idea why they were under arrest (police claimed that they were “suspicious characters” without mentioning the Braintree crimes), but they did know that radicals were being rounded up for deportation. Both men were armed, and Sacco had in his possession a leaflet advertising a meeting to protest the federal government’s brutal treatment of Salsedo and the deportation of Elia. Vanzetti was slated to speak at the meeting.
Not surprisingly, when asked about their politics, the two men denied being anarchists. The flyer, however, outed them as “Reds.” In addition to charging the pair with the Braintree crimes, police pinned a bungled robbery in nearby Bridgewater on Vanzetti.
Vanzetti went on trial for the Bridgewater burglary in the summer of 1920. Although he had an alibi (he was selling eels to his Italian customers for Christmas Eve dinner), the Italian witnesses who testified on his behalf failed to convince the jury. They found him guilty, and the judge issued a draconian sentence of twelve to fifteen years in prison. When he stood trial for the Braintree crimes, Vanzetti would face the jury as a convicted criminal.
Initially, support for Sacco and Vanzetti in the US was confined to anarchist circles. Led by Aldino Felicani, a printer and publisher and a friend of Vanzetti (although not one of the Galleanisti), Boston-based anarchists formed the Sacco Vanzetti Defense Committee to increase awareness of the case and raise funds for legal expenses. The circle of supporters widened exponentially when Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the former Industrial Workers of the World organizer and then-secretary of the Workers Defense Union in New York City, met with Felicani and the two prisoners.
For the next six years Flynn made Sacco and Vanzetti’s cause her own. She oversaw the publication of pamphlets and press releases, travelled around the country giving speeches on behalf of “the boys,” as she called them, and secured endorsements and donations to the defense fund from prominent liberals and mainstream and radical labor organizations. Along with labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, Flynn made a presentation to members of the ACLU’s national board, who voted to endorse the case, and she convinced the Massachusetts branch to follow suit.
The first Sacco and Vanzetti meetings with English speakers, in the summer of 1920, attracted just twenty-five people in New York and an only somewhat larger audience in Boston. But by the following April, Flynn reported that requests for speaking dates had dramatically increased. The Workers Defense Union was sending out weekly publicity releases to over five hundred newspapers. The Defense Committee was printing “hundreds of thousands of leaflets and pamphlets in English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.” And workers were covering the cost of most of these expenses. As Flynn later recounted, “the agitation among New England and New York workers for Sacco and Vanzetti began as a small spark at first. But it eventually spread around the world.”