With the leaders in jail the I.W.W.’s Big Bill Haywood, the one-eyed
giant who was already almost a legend, came to Lawrence and took
command. With him he brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. By the time
of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial she had become enormously fat, but in
1912 she was a slim young firebrand with flashing blue eyes and a
lacerating tongue. Theodore Dreiser had called her the East Side Joan
of Arc. An Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee was at once formed,
and Haywood had Fred Moore brought on from California. The strategy
of the committee was to have the indefatigable and ingenious Moore
help in selecting the witnesses and collecting evidence but to have
the case tried by a well-known local conservative. James Sisk, a
staid Lynn lawyer, was chosen to represent Ettor and Giovannitti in
court.
The results of this strategy were highly successful. In spite of the
pressure of moneyed opinion against them, Ettor and Giovannitti,
appearing before the Irish-Catholic Judge Joseph Quinn and a
native-American jury, were acquitted.
It was this pattern that Tresca had in mind when he sent Moore to
Boston in the fall of 1920. Moore was again to be the assiduous and
inspired fact-gatherer. He would again prepare the brief and then
some irreproachable Massachusetts lawyer would try the case. Such,
too, was the intention of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when
it accepted Moore. It was not Moore’s intention at all.
Moore, then in his late thirties, was the barrister bohemian in
looks, dress, and manner. His long hair seemed to flow back from
his forehead, he often wore sandals, and the broad-brimmed Western
hat he brought with him from California became almost his trademark
in Boston. He had started out as a railroad attorney in Seattle,
then moved on to Los Angeles where for a time he seemed a brilliant
young corporation lawyer on the way up. But money and an established
bourgeois existence meant nothing to him. When a casual I.W.W.
acquaintance arrested in a free-speech fight in San Diego telephoned
him for help, Moore picked up his broad-brimmed hat and a revolver,
told his associates he would be back shortly, and walked out of the
promise of his law career. After that he went wherever his underdog
interests took him. He became a labor defense expert, particularly
devoted to serving the I.W.W., drifting from one labor fight to
another, taking on the hopeless, desperate cases that could not
afford better-known lawyers.
When he ran into Tresca in New York in the summer of 1920, he had
just come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had defended “Big Boy”
Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer charged with dynamiting the house of a
Standard Oil official. The charge was a frame-up, a fact cheerfully
accepted by the townspeople, the prosecution, the defense, the
judge, and the jury. Fortunately for Moore, one of the jurymen with
a personal grudge against Standard Oil held out for acquittal. In a
second trial the fraud was too apparent and Krieger was freed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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