Facing the chair

Listen to the appeal of an old man of the old world who is not a foreigner, for he is the fellow citizen of all mankind.

In one of your states two men, Sacco and Vanzetti, have been convicted for a crime of opinion.

It is horrible to think that human beings should pay with their lives for the exercise of that most sacred right which, no matter what party we belong to, we must all defend.

Don’t let this most iniquitous sentence be carried out.

The death of Sacco and Vanzetti will make martyrs of them and cover you with shame.

You are a great people. You ought to be a just people. There are crowds of intelligent men among you, men who think. I prefer to appeal to them. I say to them beware of making martyrs. That is the unforgivable crime that nothing can wipe out and that weighs on generation after generation.

Save Sacco and Vanzetti.

Save them for your honor, for the honor of your children, and for the generations yet unborn.

ANATOLE FRANCE.

EUGENE V. DEBS TO THE WORKERS OF AMERICA

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.