This selection is taken from the chapter titled, “A speech for Sacco and Vanzetti.”

Notebook of an Agitator contains articles by Cannon spanning four decades of working-class battles—defending Industrial Workers of the World frame-up victims, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, battles on the San Francisco waterfront, and labor’s fight against the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the 1950s.

Cannon, a founding leader of the Communist Party in the United States, served from 1925 to 1928 as executive secretary of the ILD. The ILD defended working-class militants from various political tendencies who were victimized by the capitalists’ courts and cops. It raised money for their defense, organized speaking tours, and published the monthly magazine Labor Defender.

In 1938 Cannon was a founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party. He served as the party’s national secretary from its founding until 1953. Copyright © 1958 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

But they did none of this. Despite the hundreds of interminable nights and days of imprisonment, with the ghastly thought of execution constantly in their minds, they have remained as simply true to the workers’ cause as they were before this infamous frame-up was conceived in the minds of the Massachusetts reaction. Yes, their persecution has even steeled their convictions, and has already bound them inseparably with the history of the American labor movement.

After seven years they came to court for sentence. I wish every worker in America could read the speech that Vanzetti made there. After seven years of torture, with the death sentence hanging over him, this man stood up in court, not as one guilty, not as one afraid. He turned to the judge on the bench and said to him:

“You are the one that is afraid. You are the one that is shrinking with fear, because you are the one that is guilty of attempt to murder.”

Vanzetti called his witnesses there, and not merely legal witnesses. He marshaled before Judge Thayer’s attention the thousands who have decided to hold mass meetings such as ours; and public men of our period like Anatole France, Maxim Gorki, Bernard Shaw, Henri Barbusse, Albert Einstein. He pointed to the many millions who have protested against the frame-up.

He turned to Eugene Victor Debs and other men in America. Let us not forget that we should measure guilt and innocence not by formal evidence in court alone, but by higher values than that. Let us not forget that the last thing that Eugene Debs wrote publicly was an appeal to the workers of America for Sacco and Vanzetti, an appeal whose stirring language aroused with renewed vigor the protest of hundreds of thousands in this country, and brought again the million-voiced demand for life and freedom for these two valiant fighters, and condemnation of their persecutors.

It is hard to speak with restraint. I, like Comrade Chaplin, also had the honor of talking with Vanzetti. Everyone that has seen and talked with him comes away with the feeling that he has stood in the presence of one of the greatest spirits of our time.

It is hard to speak with restraint when one is pressed by the thought that the vengeful executioners of Massachusetts are consummating their hideous plan to press the switch that will forever remove from our ranks the persons of these two men who we feel are so much a part of labor and its cause. Our impassioned determination to mobilize all of our strength and power to rescue Sacco and Vanzetti from their blood-lusting jailers must be communicated throughout the land, if we are to save them from the fate that has been prepared for them.

While I agree with the statements of Fitzpatrick that our meeting should dissociate itself from irresponsible people, let us not forget the year 1915 when Joe Hill was killed in Utah. We must remember that when the wave of working-class protest began to rise in protection of Joe Hill, gangs of detectives began to fake threatening letters. After the heart of Joe Hill had been pierced by the bullets of the death squad, it was exposed that frame-up letters had been used. This must be a lesson for us and for those who are the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti.

There is no need to threaten the governor or anyone else because the protection of Sacco and Vanzetti is far stronger than any personal act. The protection of Sacco and Vanzetti is the job of the working class of the world, which is knocking on the door, not with the hands of irresponsible individuals, but with the titanic fist of the workers of the wide world, because they believe in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. We say to you, our friends and our chairman, before they turn on the switch, that the real aim is not only to burn Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair but to burn the labor movement in America.  
 
 
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