Gene Debs is dead. Gene Debs lives in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. This is his last appeal for justice.
The supreme court of Massachusetts has spoken at last and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, two of the bravest and best scouts that ever served the labor movement, must go to the electric chair.
The decision of this capitalist judicial tribunal is not surprising. It accords perfectly with the tragical farce and the farcical tragedy of the entire trial of these two absolutely innocent and shamefully persecuted working men.
The evidence at the trial in which they were charged with a murder they had no more to do with committing than I had, would have convicted no one but a “foreign labor agitator” in the hydrophobic madness of the world war. In any other case the perjured and flagrantly made-to-order testimony, repeatedly exposed and well known to the court, would have resulted in instantaneous acquittal. Not even a sheep-killing dog but only a “vicious foreign-radical” could have been convicted under such shameless evidence.
Sacco and Vanzetti were framed and doomed from the start. Not all the testimony that could have been piled up to establish their innocence beyond a question of doubt could have saved them in that court. The trial judge was set and immovable. There must be a conviction. It was so ordained by the capitalist powers that be, and it had to come. And there must be no new trial granted lest the satanic perjury of the testimony and the utter rottenness of the proceedings appear too notoriously rank and revolting in spite of the conspiracy of the press to keep the public in ignorance of the disgraceful and damaging facts.
Aside from the disgustingly farcical nature of the trial which could and should have ended in fifteen minutes in that masterclass court, the refined malice and barbaric cruelty of these capitalist tribunals, high and low, may be read in the insufferable torture inflicted thru six long, agonizing years upon their imprisoned and helpless victims.
It would have been merciful to the last degree in comparison had they been boiled in oil, burned at the stake, or had every joint torn from their bodies on the wheel when they were first seized as prey to glut the vengeance of slave drivers, who wax fat and savage in child labor and who never forgive an “agitator” who is too rigidly honest to be bribed, too courageous to be intimidated, and too defiant to be suppressed.
And that is precisely why the mill-owning, labor-sweating malefactors of Massachusetts had Sacco and Vanzetti framed, pounced upon, thrown into a dungeon, and sentenced to be murdered by their judicial and other official underlings.
I appeal to the working men and women of America to think of these two loyal comrades, these two honest, clean-hearted brothers of ours, in this fateful hour in which they stand face to face with their bitter and ignominious doom.
The capitalist courts of Massachusetts have had them on the rack day and night, devouring the flesh of their bodies and torturing their souls for six long years to finally deal the last vicious, heartless blow, aimed to send them to their graves as red-handed felons and murderers.
Would that it were in my power to make that trial judge and those cold-blooded gowns in the higher court suffer for just one day the agonizing torture, the pitiless misery, the relentless cruelty they have inflicted in their stony-hearted “judicial calmness and serenity” upon Sacco and Vanzetti thru six endless years!
Perhaps some day these solemn and begowned servants of the ruling powers may have to atone for their revolting crime against innocence in the name of justice!
They have pronounced the doom of their long suffering victims and the press declares that the last word has been spoken. I deny it.
There is another voice yet to be heard and that is the voice of an outraged working class. It is for labor now to speak and for the labor movement to announce its decision, and that decision is and must be, SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE INNOCENT AND SHALL NOT DIE!
To allow these two intrepid proletarian leaders to perish as red-handed criminals would forever disgrace the cause of labor in the United States. The countless children of generations yet to come would blush for their sires and grand sires and never forgive their cowardice and poltroonery.
It cannot be possible, and I shall not think it possible, that the American workers will desert, betray and deliver to their executioner two men who have stood as staunchly true, as unflinchingly loyal in the cause of labor as have Sacco and Vanzetti, whose doom has been pronounced by the implacable enemies of the working class.
Now is the time for all labor to be aroused and to rally as one vast host to vindicate its assailed honor, to assert its self-respect, and to issue its demand that in spite of the capitalist-controlled courts of Massachusetts honest and innocent workingmen whose only crime is their innocence of crime and their loyalty to labor, shall not be murdered by the official hirelings of the corporate powers that rule and tyrannize over the state.
It does not matter what the occupation of the worker may be, what he is in theory of belief, what union or party he belongs to, this is the supreme cause of us all and the call comes to each of us and to all of us to unite from coast to coast in every state and thruout the whole country to protest in thunder tones against the consummation of that foul and damning crime against labor in the once proud state of Massachusetts.
A thousand protest meetings should be called at once and ring with denunciation of the impending crime.
A million letters of indignant resentment should roll in on the governor of Massachusetts and upon members of the house of representatives and the senate of the United States.
It is this, and this alone, that will save Sacco and Vanzetti. We cannot ignore this duty to ourselves, to our martyr comrades, to our cause, to justice and humanity without being guilty of treason to our own manhood and outraging our own souls.
Arouse ye toiling millions of the nation and swear by all you hold sacred in the cause of labor and in the cause of truth and justice and all things of good report, that Sacco and Vanzetti, your brothers and mine, innocent as we are, shall not be foully murdered to glut the vengeance of a gang of plutocratic slave drivers!
“WHEN KATZMANN ASKED ME WHAT I THOUGHT OF SACCO AS A PARTICIPANT IN THE BRAINTREE HOLDUP, I EXPLAINED TO HIM THAT ANARCHISTS DO NOT COMMIT CRIMES FOR MONEY BUT FOR A PRINCIPLE, AND THAT BANDITRY WAS NOT IN THEIR CODE”.
—from a letter dated Chicago, Ill. September 29th written by Feri Felix Weiss to the editor of the Boston Globe, published with an accompanying affidavit in the New York World, October 13, 1926.