In February, at Moore’s request, the trial was postponed from March until May 31 so that he could secure an affidavit in Italy from Giuseppe Adrower, a former consulate clerk who claimed to have seen Sacco in Boston on the day of the crime. The ninety days that followed were a period of rapid polarization. Moore, the artist, had taken two aliens, neither of whom sympathized or cooperated with the organized labor movement, and fashioned them into generic figures of the workingman. He had made ringingly spectacular claims about the fate of accused anarchists in Norfolk County, and now the community responded by accepting his challenge. During Vanzetti’s first trial there had been almost no mention of his social and political beliefs, but long before anarchism became an issue in the Dedham court everyone on the jury, in the courthouse, in the town was aware of it. Moore’s class-angling in troubled waters had stirred the depths. While no one can now say for certain that, solely in the light of the evidence presented, Sacco and Vanzetti would have been acquitted if they had been Elks or members of the American Legion, they would certainly have had a much better chance. It was Moore the artist who painted the affair in broad expressionistic strokes, embellished it and retouched it, spread the panoramic design on a world canvas. But for Moore there would have been no case as it is today remembered, and the Dedham trial—whatever its outcome—would have been as forgotten now as the then-sensational Zimmerman trial. By the time the formal preparations for the trial were being made, Moore had created the situation he wanted. Nick and Bart, the two Italians at first mentioned so casually, had become symbols of man’s injustice to man. No one, whatever his views, could now take the trial casually. If the Defense Committee members already saw the shadow of injustice lying across the path of their imprisoned comrades, the citizens of Dedham had a feeling of sinister forces in the offing. Any morning the mannered inhabitants of the High Street half expected to see the columns of the courthouse collapse under a dynamite charge. Sedate Dedham beside its winding river began to take on the aspect of a besieged town with the courthouse a forward bastion. The blue-coated local police, out in force, were augmented by a detachment of the recently formed paramilitary State Constabulary. The tension was sharp as an east wind.