He was right, righter than he knew.  That silence is making itself heard in the auto factories of Michigan, in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and Ohio, on the docks, in the mines, in textile factories.  The eight-hour day is a reality.  The defense of the rights of labor is a reality.  The great movement for industrial unionism and democracy which they dreamed of is a reality—­in the C.I.O.

They did not die in vain.  Taught by the lessons of the Haymarket tragedy, such an organization as the International Labor Defense has been built by the workers and progressive people of America, to stand guard and prevent such legal murders today.  Tom Mooney is still alive, J. B. McNamara and Warren Billings; Angelo Herndon is free, four Scottsboro boys are free—­though all were threatened by the same fate as the victims of the Haymarket martyrs.  Reaction still takes a heavy toll of victims, but it must reckon with the might of organized, united mass defense represented and organized by the I.L.D.  For example, the Nine Old Men who have made the United States Supreme Court the stronghold of reaction with the same callousness as their predecessors, arrogantly refused to review the appeal in the case of Haywood Patterson, one of the innocent Scottsboro boys.  But the fight goes on, until all the remaining five are free.

We are dedicated to the cause—­their cause—­of freedom and democracy, to the struggle for justice and defense of the rights and liberties of the people.

* * * * *

There are two other labor martyrs who must be honored at the same time as the Haymarket heroes.  The tenth anniversary of their death coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the former in this year of 1937.

Again let us listen to the words of one who faced his doom: 

“I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times I would live again to do what I have done already.” (Bartolomeo Vanzetti, just before he was sentenced to death on April 10, 1927.)

To me those words are particularly poignant.  For I am an Italian, and proud to be of the same people that produced such a great spirit as Vanzetti, the descendant of Garibaldi, the forerunner of those heroic anti-fascist brothers who are today fighting Fascism and Mussolini in Italy and in Spain.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were poor Italian workers.  Both came to this country like all our countrymen in search of peace and work and plenty.  Both found only hard work and hard knocks.  Sacco was a shoe-worker.  Vanzetti had followed many trades after his arrival here in the summer of 1908.  He worked in mines, mills, factories.  Finally he landed in a cordage plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  That was the last factory job he held.  For here, as in all the others, he talked union and organization, and organized a successful strike.  After that, he was blacklisted for good and had to make a living peddling fish to his Italian neighbors in the little town known as the cradle of liberty.