My next call was to be on Aldino Felicani, the man the lawyer had dismissed as “that Italian anarchist printer fellow.” An extraordinary old man, Felicani. The organizer of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, he seemed so much a part of the past that I could never quite get used to the idea of his still being around. He was an anachronism. Whenever I saw him in public he wore the red shirt, the black Latin Quarter tie, and the wide-brimmed hat that had been the anarchist uniform in Bakunin’s time. So I had seen him last at the legislature’s Judiciary Committee hearing for a posthumous pardon for Sacco and Vanzetti. As I watched him listening to the proceedings I thought of the charge Vanzetti had given him: “Avenge our blood! Clear our names!” I had heard Felicani repeat it many times in his heavy accent. Sacco and Vanzetti had about as much chance of getting a pardon from that legislative committee as Benedict Arnold. The gum-chewing faces behind the oak desks in the State House’s Gardner Auditorium were implacable. When my father had been in the legislature during World War I, the characteristic member had been a lawyer, Republican, middle- to upper-class, interested more in maintaining the _status quo_ than in himself. In 1959 the social revolution of forty years was apparent enough in these lower-middle-class legislators whose interest was mainly in keeping their feet in the trough. Yet from these men representing a new emergent class I should somehow have expected more charity for the two dead Italians. Instead there was entrenched hatred, concentrating in the chairman as he interrogated Judge Musmanno. Justice Michael Musmanno of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, one of Sacco and Vanzetti’s final counsel, was the main speaker in favor of the committee’s bill. Silver-maned and silver-tongued, he unwound reels of words until he was stopped by the chairman’s hard voice. The latter had the features of the ur-Celt: savage blue eyes, gray shaggy hair looped over the back of his collar like an old-time United States senator. “Look, Judge, why did Vanzetti have the loaded revolver on him, and a pocketful of slugs that fit it and why did he go for it when the police grabbed him?” Musmanno tried to explain that carrying revolvers was then a common custom in America, especially among Italians, and that it was a right guaranteed by the Constitution. The chairman’s voice, burred as a cat’s tongue, broke in. “You mean to tell me that the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the governor, the president of Harvard, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States—they’re all wrong and you’re right?”