The callous illegalities of the raiding procedures caused much
indignation among native Americans. In Boston, Federal Judge George
Anderson spoke out sharply against the mob actions of government
agents. Twelve nationally known lawyers, among them Zechariah Chafee,
Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter, all of the Harvard Law School,
collaborated on a report condemning the illegal practices of the
Justice Department.
If the raids caused indignation among the native-born, among the
alien radicals they caused terror. No one seemed safe from the
midnight knock on the door, the hard-faced men with clubs, the
blinding lights and the hammering questions of the night-long
interrogation. Rumor exaggerated the Palmer proceedings to outright
murder as they were discussed by Sacco and his friends in Stoughton
and by Vanzetti and his comrades on Sunday afternoons in the Italian
Independent Naturalization Club of East Boston.
* * * * *
After months of following each clue, even to tracing the polka-dot
tie to the store that sold it, Department of Justice agents concluded
that the man blown to pieces in the bombing of Attorney General
Palmer’s house was an Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoce, a member
of the dynamite-minded group in Paterson, New Jersey. Valdinoce had
been associated there with Galleani in the printing of the _Cronaca
Sovversiva_. In addition, Flynn, the new Bureau of Investigation
director, had collected enough evidence to convince him that an
explosion of the same date in Paterson was the work of another local
anarchist, Ruggero Baccini, who had since been deported. There were
no clues in the other eleven bombings, though Flynn was certain that
they were all the work of anarchists and that the dynamite had come
from Paterson. Efforts to determine the origin of the PLAIN WORDS
flyer failed.
Then, in February 1920, Flynn received a tip from an ostensible
direct-action anarchist named Ravarini. Recently, in Boston,
Ravarini had sold subscriptions to Malatesta’s _Umanita Nuova_ to
Sacco, Vanzetti, Boda, and Orciani, among others. He told a federal
agent that a Roberto Elia, a printer at Canzani’s Printing Shop in
Brooklyn, New York, was engaged in publishing anarchist literature,
including flyers. On the night of February 25, Bureau agents picked
up Elia in his lodgings. At the print shop the agents turned up pink
paper similar to that of the flyer and unearthed from the Canzani
fonts the peculiar S that had not matched the typeface used for the
first nine letters of the title PLAIN WORDS. Canzani’s typesetter
turned out to be Galleani’s old associate, Andrea Salsedo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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