In Search of Sacco and Vanzetti: Double Lives, Troubled Times, and the Massachusetts Murder Case That Shook the World

4 | “Organize! O Toilers”

There is pow’r, there is pow’r, in a band of workingmen. •Joe Hill, “There Is Power in a Union” 4|“Organize! O Toilers” Nicola Sacco’s seventeenth birthday was unlike any he had celebrated before. For the first sixteen years of his life he had lived in Torremaggiore, his hometown in Italy’s Foggia province. But as he turned seventeen on April 22, 1908, he was living in a kind of Little Foggia�Milford, Massachusetts, some forty miles outside Boston. Along with brother Sabino, Nick had been in the United States for all of ten days. Most immigrants arriving at the port of Boston disembarked and immediately encountered “hopeless confusion.” Bewildered and gullible, they were easy marks for hustlers hawking the services of banks, hotels, and railroads. Later, when they went to find work, they were often victimized by employment agency scams. But Nick and Sabino were luckier than most. Their father ’s friend, Antonio Calzone, took the brothers under his wing. He brought them home to live with his family in Milford, where most of the neighbors also hailed from Foggia.1 The brothers arrived in the midst of a recession in America, but they found work quickly, in Nick’s case with Calzone’s help. Nick, in fact, worked three jobs during his first year in America. He started out in the spring as water boy on a construction project in Milford. By summer he moved up to pick-and-shovel man, and his earnings rose to $1.75 a day. When winter blew in, he took the third job, cleaning castings for the Draper Company, a textile machinery manufacturer in nearby Hopedale. Calzone himself worked here, as did many of Milford’s Italians.2 Sabino also worked a variety of jobs during that first year. The brothers reacted differently to their similar experiences. America, Sabino decided, was not for him. He returned to Torremaggiore in 1909 and remained there for the rest of his life. He hoped his younger brother would return with him, but Nick wanted to stay. “The last thing I told [him before I left],” Sabino said, “was to learn a trade at any cost.”3 Nick liked his new home. In a photograph taken about this time, he appears self-assured and comfortable in a well-cut suit (borrowed, perhaps?), a handkerchief poking jauntily out of his jacket pocket. He faces the camera head-on “Organize! O Toilers” | 35 and strikes a casual pose. With his handsome features, thick mop of dark hair, and forthright gaze, he is the image of a young man content with the present and confident about the future. Nick followed Sabino’s advice about getting ahead. Through Milford’s Italian grapevine he heard about a shoe manufacturing training program for immigrants . Michael Kelley, then superintendent of the Milford Shoe Company, was offering the three-month course for a fee of fifty dollars. That wasn’t cheap. Nick would have to withdraw the money from his small savings, and forgo earning more money while studying. His future, he decided, was worth the investment, and he signed up.4 When he finished, early in 1910�an eighteenSacco at about age 17, soon after coming to the United States. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library/ Rare Books. 36 | in search of sacco & vanzetti year-old brimming with ambition and enthusiasm�he left the world of heavy labor behind and became a skilled worker in the shoe industry, one of the oldest industries in Massachusetts. • Legend has it that shoemakers were so prized by the earliest English settlers in Massachusetts that when, in 1622, an able-bodied cobbler was sentenced to hang for stealing corn, a “bed-ridden weaver” was assigned to take his place on the gallows. The next year, a leather tanner with the confidence-inspiring name of Experience Miller sailed to Plymouth to ply his trade, and in 1635 two English shoemakers in Lynn began teaching their craft to anyone who wanted to learn. By 1700 the Massachusetts Bay Colony was exporting leather shoes and saddles to the rest of the colonies. By 1930 Massachusetts boasted seventy shoemaking towns, including Boston, which, with its thousand-plus factories, was touted as “the world’s greatest shoe and leather city.”5 Early cordwainers, or cobblers, had worked together at home, fashioning shoes by hand. Mechanization transformed the craft, and by 1910, when Nicola Sacco...