FOOTNOTES:
[22] In June 1960 the National Broadcasting Company presented Reginald Rose’s television play, The Sacco-Vanzetti Story. For those unfamiliar with the case it may have seemed an entertaining melodrama. As a balanced presentation of facts it was a failure. Eugene Lyons turned off his television set in disgust. Harry King, one of the four surviving jurors, and the only one who saw the presentation, commented: “Well, I laughed. Quite a show. My only reaction is that it is hard to reconcile anything I saw with the actual trial.”
[23] G. B. Shaw understood this xenophobia well. “Americans must decide for themselves” he wrote to Upton Sinclair, “whether they will slaughter their Saccos and Vanzettis and Mooneys; for the moment a foreigner interferes, to yield to him would be an unbearable humiliation; perish a thousand Saccos first.”
[24] This was also Darrow’s own opinion when some time later he came to Boston and talked with Thompson and Felicani.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1927
The state prison’s new electric plant went into use five days after New Year’s, when three young men known as the Carbarn Bandits were executed. Following executions the warden customarily served a buffet supper to the witnesses and the press, so when on January 4 Vanzetti noticed three hams being cooked in the kitchen for the warden’s house, he knew it was the bandits’ turn.
The three—Edward Heinlein, John Devereaux, and John McLaughlin—had held up the night cashier at the Waltham carbarn on October 4, 1925; while escaping, Devereaux had shot and killed an elderly night watchman who tried to stop them. They were caught the same night, and by next day the press had already labeled them the Carbarn Bandits. At their trial Devereaux admitted that he had fired the fatal shot but said he had meant to fire at the ground. He told the court that he did not see why his two friends should suffer for what he had done. Nevertheless, all three were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. As faithful if erring Catholics they walked to the chair accompanied by a priest, and their last look was at a crucifix held before their eyes.
In the six months between their conviction and their execution, their fate caused more of a stir locally than did the postponed fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. All three had served in the Army during the war, and Devereaux had been wounded. They were Irish by descent, and whatever their faults, they had remained true to their church. The mothers of the three organized a Massachusetts Clemency Committee and presented the governor, Alvan Fuller, a petition of 120,000 names that included those of three ex-governors. Protest meetings were held all summer and autumn. In a desperate last appeal the mothers visited Fuller in his office and got down on their knees in front of him to pray for their sons’ lives. But the governor was adamant. As he had often publicly stated, he believed in the death penalty as a deterrent, in less sentimentality about murders, in modernization of the law, and more religion in life.
If Fuller had been a politician rather than a businessman he would not have hesitated about commuting the sentences, for no Massachusetts politician in his senses would have let three Irish-Catholic ex-servicemen go to the chair. To the astute it had long been clear that the descendants of the Famine immigrants, who had taken over Boston in 1902 with the election of Mayor John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald, would before long take over the Commonwealth. That Fuller’s belief in the salutary effects of capital punishment could overrule his concern for this powerful voting bloc would make it that much more difficult for him later to consider clemency for two anarchist atheist alien slackers. The execution of the Carbarn Bandits filled the Boston Irish with resentments that were transferred with accrued bitterness to Sacco and Vanzetti.
Fuller prided himself on not being a politician. His favorite maxim was Calvin Coolidge’s “More business in government, less government in business,” and he had forty million dollars to prove his point. Never had he bothered to conceal his contempt for the Republican bosses of Massachusetts with their well-established escalator system of advancement that he was rich enough to disregard. In fact, his contempt for them and his successful defiance of their candidates had made him seem outside the Commonwealth something of a La Guardia-type liberal. In 1912 he had broken with the Republican State Committee to support Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party. In 1916, again in disregard of the state committee, he had run for Congress as an independent, defeating the regular Republican candidate.
During two terms in Congress he distinguished himself chiefly by attacking abuses of the franking privilege and the mileage allowance. However, he did not hesitate to defy Massachusetts’ senior senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, by supporting the League of Nations. In 1920 he again frustrated the state Republican bosses by taking the nomination for lieutenant governor away from their designated candidate. He served the conventional two terms as lieutenant governor before defeating James Michael Curley for the governorship in 1924. In 1926 he was easily re-elected.
As he approached his fiftieth birthday he could take satisfaction in being both the leader of his state and the richest man in Massachusetts. His granite-faced neo-Renaissance mansion on the water side of Beacon Street occupied the site of two brownstone town houses that had belonged to Mrs. Jack Gardner. Old ladies might shrug their shoulders and whisper behind his back at the Longwood Cricket Club, but no one could deny him entree anywhere. The lean bicycle mechanic had become portly in middle age, his confident asymmetrical face plumping over his stiff collar. His lobeless ears clung close to his head, his thinning hair clung to his scalp, and he had curiously amber-tinted eyes that many found disconcerting. His mouth looked like a dollar sign set sideways. On the stubby little finger of his left hand with its moonless nail he wore a gold signet ring with the resurrected Fuller crest. When in an affable mood he used to say he would like to run a newspaper and teach Sunday school.
The unspoken image that fluttered in his mind during his final term as governor was the Republican National Convention of 1928 with its shimmering prospect of the Vice-Presidential nomination. It was not an impossible thought after all, for mousy Calvin Coolidge had managed it eight years before from the same governor’s chair on the strength of one of his copybook maxims pronounced during the Boston police strike: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
On January 27 and 28, 1927, in Boston’s Pemberton Square Courthouse, Thompson, assisted by Ehrmann, appeared before the Massachusetts Supreme Court to argue against Judge Thayer’s denial of the Madeiros motion. It was the coldest weather in two years, with a high wind curling up State Street and the fringes of the harbor beginning to freeze. The courtroom was almost empty as Thompson developed his thesis. Not until he mentioned Judge Thayer could one sense the restrained passion behind the quiet voice:
“I must refer to a thing I am almost ashamed to mention. The judge, having spent a page and a half of his decision in vituperation of myself, suggested that my belief in the innocence of these defendants was due to a mental disease. He also suggested that there had been fraud and deceit in the methods used in procuring this evidence.”
Thompson then pointed out various misstatements in Thayer’s decision—such as that the Supreme Court had approved the jury’s verdict, when it had done nothing of the kind—and accused him of being so overwrought by the case that he was not capable of reasoning “with a calm mind free from impartiality.” Beyond all the renewed arguments about Madeiros, the Department of Justice, and other points, Thompson’s chief contention was that the defendants were entitled to a new trial because there had been an abuse of judicial discretion.
In the thin winter light of the musty echoing courtroom the stiff faces of the five justices looked like Copley portraits of a century and a half earlier. Chief Justice Arthur Prentice Rugg presided, flanked by Henry King Braley, William Cushing Wait, John Crawford Crosby, and Edward Peter Pierce—New England names, bloodless New England features. To Thompson they seemed as chill as the city streets outside.
Vanzetti was pessimistic about the appeal:
We know that in a case of such nature as ours, legallity alone is insufficient. Mr. Thompson has known to place the case in such perfect manner before the Supreme Court, that if the justices wish, they can give us justice now.... Therefore, if they are going to a refusal, it would unmistakably prove that they have prostituted their consciences, their intellect, and will to a categoric order of an invisible and trascendental master or class.
The appearance of Felix Frankfurter’s article, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly initiated the final world-shaking stage of the case. The Atlantic still remained the voice of conservative intellectual America. For seventy years its staid ocher cover with the oval intaglio cut of Poseidon and his sea horse had borne the names of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Hale, Holmes, James, and Howells. That it should now feature an article by a Harvard Law School professor attacking the trial, the jury, the witnesses, the verdict, and the Massachusetts judiciary, gave the affair at once a national significance. The stirrings in Europe, the mutterings in New England had now become articulate. Frankfurter’s article was like a lighted fuse leading to a powder magazine. Sacco and Vanzetti became familiar names in all the forty-eight states, not just among the urban left-liberals but in the suburbs and the small towns and the women’s clubs and the little brick Carnegie libraries.
For most of those who read it, Frankfurter’s attack was their factual introduction to the background of a case they had heard about only vaguely. Deftly and concisely the law-school professor explained how the two men had come to be arrested, described the method of selecting the jury, Katzmann’s harrying cross-examination of Sacco, Judge Thayer’s patriotic rhetoric, and the later discrediting of various witnesses. Accepting the hypothesis that the Morelli gang committed the South Braintree murders, he asserted “with deep regret” that Thayer’s ruling on the Madeiros motion was “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions and mutilations.”
The weakness in Frankfurter’s article was that basically the prosecution had a more formidable case against the two men than readers of the Atlantic would have gathered. Of the expanded book version that appeared the same month, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to Harold Laski:
My prejudices were all with Felix’s book. But after all, it’s simply showing, if it was right, that the case was tried in a hostile atmosphere. I doubt if anyone would say there was no evidence warranting a conviction.
With the appearance of the Atlantic article, Frankfurter became the moving spirit of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. Even Thompson turned to him. His were the final decisions as to tactics and action. Lithe, dark, youthful in manner but obviously the professor, the forty-five-year-old Frankfurter was as intense as he was opinionated, the picture of academic intellectualism without its self-deprecatory pose. Whenever he appeared at the Hanover Street headquarters he always managed to look as brisk as if he had just walked over from Cambridge—as he sometimes had. He and Governor Fuller shared a common start from nothing and were both driven by the same fierce will to succeed, but the governor saw success as the power of money while the professor saw it as the power of the mind.
Felix Frankfurter had been sure of himself from the day he arrived in New York from Vienna as a twelve-year-old immigrant, bookish and eager, speaking no English yet shortly afterward leading his classes in the Lower East Side’s Public School 25. At the Harvard Law School, which he entered more or less by chance in 1903, he stood for three years first in his class, receiving the highest honor of becoming an editor of the Law Review. After graduation he served as assistant to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in the Taft administration, continuing briefly into Wilson’s first term. Just ten years after the unknown Frankfurter had entered the Harvard Law School, Professor Edward Warren enticed him back with an invitation to join the faculty.
Frankfurter had not concerned himself with the Sacco-Vanzetti case during the trial or immediately following it. Only when he saw the headlines in the autumn of 1923 that Thompson had accused the prosecution of a frame-up in regard to Captain Proctor’s testimony did he begin to take an interest. After he read that Proctor had sworn that when he said “consistent with” he did not really think the bullet had gone through the gun, his neutrality evaporated. And when Katzmann, in reply to Proctor, said he had not “repeatedly” asked the question, that settled it. Frankfurter wrote his Atlantic article with, as he himself boasted, the intention of jolting minds.
On April 5, in the Pemberton Square courthouse, the Supreme Court handed down its decision. Guards took their places all through the cavernous building; deputy sheriffs and court officers patrolled the corridors. Guards were also placed in front of the railings of Governor Fuller’s Beacon Street mansion and sent to Judge Thayer’s home in Worcester.
The decision upheld Judge Thayer at every point. Through the late afternoon the news, first chalked up on the bulletin boards of Newspaper Row on Washington Street, spread through the business district like wildfire. Everyone wanted to know just one thing: What could the two Italians do now?
According to Massachusetts law the court was limited to determining whether the trial judge had committed any errors of law or abuses of discretion. These were the limitations rigidly held to by Justice Wait in his opinion. Could Thayer conscientiously, intelligently, and honestly have reached the result he has reached? the court asked itself collectively, and answered, through Justice Wait, that he could have.
The granting or the denial of a motion for a new trial of an indictment for murder rests in the judicial discretion of the trial judge, and his decision will not be disturbed unless it is vitiated by errors of law or abuse of discretion.
The question of the guilt or innocence of the defendants was not a matter for consideration. Citing a civil case, Davis v. Boston Elevated Railway, as precedent, the court ruled:
It is not imperative that a motion for a new trial of an indictment for murder based on newly discovered evidence be granted, even though the evidence is newly discovered, and, if presented to a jury, would justify a different verdict.
The Massachusetts tradition, sternly enforced by Chief Justice Rugg, was that Supreme Judicial Court decisions were unanimous, but that behind the ruling of April 5 there may have been some suppressed stirrings of doubt was indicated by an incident related by Herbert Ehrmann. In 1938, as he was addressing a Boston Bar Association memorial meeting in honor of Thompson, he noticed Justice Pierce in the audience. Pierce had been a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Court during the entire period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and Ehrmann felt uneasy over the critical remarks he was about to make. When, however, the meeting was over, the justice came forward with tears pouring down his cheeks, grasped Ehrmann’s hand, and said in a broken voice, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
Following the Supreme Court’s decision, District Attorney Wilbar asked for imposition of sentence, and a special session was called at the Dedham courthouse for Saturday, April 9. In Charlestown, meanwhile, Warden Hendry transferred Vanzetti to the state prison’s grim and ancient Cherry Hill section “to protect him from the unwelcome attention of curious visitors.”
Outside Massachusetts the protests were immediate. A Committee for the Defense of Victims of Fascism and the White Terror sent a wire from France to President Coolidge, signed by Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Albert Einstein, requesting the liberation of Sacco and Vanzetti. From Berlin the International Red Aid cabled Governor Fuller demanding “pardon and release in the name of half a million members.” The Regional Federation of Labor in Buenos Aires called a forty-eight-hour strike to protest the court’s decision. Letters, telegrams, and cables poured in on Governor Fuller, at whose ornate wrought-iron gate the problem had now been left. Privately, Fuller considered that the court’s word should be the last word, but publicly he announced that the evidence in the case had never been presented to him and that consequently he had not formed any opinion. On April 7, as if to emphasize his detachment, he bought another Gainsborough portrait, “Master Heathcote,” from Sir Joseph Duveen.
The day of the sentencing broke cold and damp and gray. At Charlestown, Vanzetti was waked at five o’clock. He ate his breakfast of frankfurts, baked potatoes, bread, and coffee, then—since he would not be returning immediately to the state prison—wrapped his belongings in brown paper. After he had finished he went to the rotunda where he sat calmly smoking his pipe until the car came to take him to Dedham. As he left he waved a friendly good-by to Warden Hendry.
He rejoined Sacco in the library of the Dedham jail. Again they embraced gravely. Shortly before ten a bus took them to court. They left surrounded by a dozen deputies and three policemen with shotguns.
The courthouse was again surrounded by police with rifles. Admission was by ticket, obtainable only by those connected with the defense or the prosecution, plus the curious-minded with political pull. Felicani, Mary Donovan, and Mrs. Evans’ secretary Anna Bloom arrived at the courthouse a little after nine only to find the iron gates locked. A janitor refused to let them in until ordered to by a state trooper. Mrs. Evans, who had broken her ankle recently, limped up the steps in the company of Sarah Ehrmann and Mrs. Gertrude Winslow, the secretary of the Community Church. Rosina Sacco did not appear. The prosecution was represented by Albert Brouillard and state detectives Fleming and Ferrari.
When Sacco and Vanzetti stepped from the bus they were handcuffed together, and Vanzetti was handcuffed to Deputy Sheriff Caldwell. Both prisoners wore shabby overcoats with velvet collars. Sacco had on a dark suit, a dark necktie, and a felt hat. Vanzetti was wearing a bow tie and a full light-brown cap that seemed to exaggerate the droop of his mustache. They stood for a few minutes by the granite steps, smiling and self-possessed in spite of the guards. At the request of the photographers and newsreel men they took off their hats and faced in various directions. The two men had aged much in six years.
After several minutes they were marched through the iron gate and upstairs. At the door to the courtroom the jail chaplain, William Beal, chatted with them briefly. Just as their handcuffs were being removed before they entered the cage, Mrs. Evans caught their eye and tried to get to her feet. A deputy ordered her to sit down. The quiet in the waiting courtroom was broken only by the ticking of the marble-faced clock. One of the reporters had the feeling that everyone present was holding his breath.
Judge Thayer got out of his car just as the clock of the First Church across Court Street was striking ten. He was wearing a derby, as was the ham-faced state detective who accompanied him, and though he skipped up the steps briskly enough he looked frail. The years, culminating in this moment, had brought about a curious transposition that was sensed by everybody in the waiting room. For it was as if somehow the defendants had become the prosecutors and the judge the defendant. Thayer himself seemed to sense it as he strode into the courtroom, preceded by a deputy and Clerk Worthington’s warning cry. He sat down, smoothed his gown, but did not look at the men in the cage thirty feet in front of him. The preliminaries were so brief that they were over before they could make an impression. District Attorney Wilbar in an almost inaudible voice asked that sentence now be imposed on the two defendants convicted of murder in the first degree, the sentence to be executed during the week of July 10. Clerk Worthington then asked: “Nicola Sacco, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed on you?”
Sacco stood up, stared at Judge Thayer, then began slowly to speak:
“Yes, sir. I am not an orator. It is not very familiar with me the English language, and as I know, as my friend has told me, my comrade Vanzetti will speak more long, so I thought to give him the chance.”
After the halting beginning his words began to flow more freely as he felt himself stirred by the impassioned moment. He held a small piece of paper in one hand, and every now and then he slapped the railing of the cage with the other.
“I never know, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this Court. After seven years prosecuting they still consider us guilty. And these gentle people are arrayed with us in this court today.
“I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize over them and kill them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed class. Well, you are the oppressor.
“You know it, Judge Thayer—you know all my life, you know why I have been here, and after seven years that you have been persecuting me and my poor wife, you still today sentence us to death. I would like to tell all my life, but what is the use? You know all about what I say before, and my friend—that is, my comrade—will be talking, because he is more familiar with the language, and I will give him a chance. My comrade, the man kind, the kind man to all children, you sentence him two times, in the Bridgewater case and the Dedham case, connected with me, and you know he is innocent. You forget all the population that has been with us for seven years, to sympathize and give us all their energy and all their kindness. You do not care for them. Among that peoples and the comrades and the working class there is a big legion of intellectual people which have been with us for seven years, but to not commit the iniquitous sentence, but still the Court goes ahead. And I think I thank you all, you peoples, my comrades who have been with me for seven years, with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and I will give my friend a chance.
“I forgot one thing which my comrade remember me. As I said before, Judge Thayer know all my life, and he know I am never been guilty, never—not yesterday nor today nor forever.”
In five minutes it was over, and for an instant the atmosphere of the courtroom loosened with a rustling and shuffle of feet and a few coughs, then tightened as Clerk Worthington called on Vanzetti.
As he stood up, Vanzetti appeared calm, almost cheerful, and his voice at the beginning was deceptively gentle. He held a few penciled notes.
“Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stole and I have never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.
“Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not need to go in between the street and kill a man to take money. I can live with my two arms and live well....
“Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in all my life—though some sins but not crimes—not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the official moral condemns, but also the crime that the official moral and the official law sanctions and sanctifies—the exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes can doom me, it is this reason and none else.”
Judge Thayer stared at his bench as if he were unaware of the man addressing him. The judge’s impassivity nettled Vanzetti and as he continued his voice showed it. His eyes seemed to flash at the bent figure whom he had once called a black-gowned cobra.
“Is it possible that only a few on the jury, only two or three men, who would condemn their mother for worldly honor and for earthly fortune; is it possible that they are right against what the world, the whole world has say it is wrong and that I know that it is wrong? If there is one that I should know it, if it is right or if it is wrong, it is I and this man. You see it is seven years that we are in jail. What we have suffered during these seven years no human tongue can say, and yet you see me before you, not trembling, you see me looking you in your eyes straight, not blushing, not changing color, not ashamed or in fear.
“Eugene Debs say that not even a dog—something like that—not even a dog that kill chickens would have been found guilty by American jury with the evidence that the Commonwealth have produced against us. I say that not even a leprous dog would have his appeal refused two times by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts—not even a leprous dog....
“We know that you have spoke yourself and have spoke your hostility against us, and your despisement against us with friends of yours on the train, at the University Club of Boston, on the Golf Club of Worcester, Massachusetts. I am sure that if the people who know all what you say against us would have the civil courage to take the stand, maybe your Honor—I am sorry to say this because you are an old man, and I have an old father—but maybe you would be beside us in good justice at this time.”
The record of Vanzetti’s first trial is incomplete, and though the phrase does not appear in the transcript or in the newspaper accounts, Thayer was said by members of the Defense Committee who were in the courtroom to have instructed the jury that the defendant’s beliefs were “cognate with the crime.” Vanzetti now threw that in Thayer’s face, as well as the fact that his sentence for attempted robbery was double that of other prisoners in Charlestown convicted of actual robbery. At the recollection he struck angrily against the rail of the cage with his notes.
“You know if we would have Mr. Thompson, or even the brother McAnarney in the first trial in Plymouth, you know that no jury would have found me guilty. My first lawyer has been a partner of Mr. Katzmann, as he is still now. My first lawyer of the defense, Mr. Vahey, has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ. If that man has not told to you or to Mr. Katzmann that he know I was guilty, it is because he know that I was not guilty. That man has done everything indirectly to hurt us. He has made long speech with the jury about things that do matter nothing, and on the point of essence to the trial he has passed over with few words or with complete silence. This was a premeditation in order to give the jury the impression that my own defender has nothing good to say, has nothing good to urge in defense of myself, and therefore go around the bush on little things that amount to nothing and let pass the essential points either in silence or with a very weakly resistance.
“We were tried during a time that has now passed into history. I mean by that, a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate against the people of our principles, against the foreigner, against slackers, and it seems to me—rather, I am positive of it, that both you and Mr. Katzmann has done all what it were in your power in order to work out, in order to agitate still more the passion of the juror, the prejudice of the juror, against us.... But the jury were hating us because we were against the war, and the jury don’t know that it makes any difference between a man that is against the war because he believes that the war is unjust, because he hate no country, because he is a cosmopolitan, and a man that is against the war because he is in favor of the other country that fights against the country in which he is, and therefore a spy, and he commits any crime in the country in which he is in behalf of the other country in order to serve the other country. We are not men of that kind. Katzmann know very well that. Katzmann know that we were against the war because we did not believe in the purpose for which they say that the war was done. We believe it that the war is wrong, and we believe this more now after ten years that we understood it day by day—the consequences and the result of the after war. We believe more now than ever that the war was wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind: ‘Look out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. For what? All that they say to you, all that they have promised to you—it was a lie, it was an illusion, it was a cheat, it was a fraud, it was a crime. They promised you liberty. Where is liberty? They promised you prosperity. Where is prosperity? They have promised you elevation. Where is elevation?’”
He accused Katzmann of breaking the agreement not to mention the Plymouth trial, he accused the Commonwealth of being more responsible than the defense for the delays, he accused Thayer of deliberately handing down his Plymouth decision on Christmas Eve “to poison the heart of our family and of our beloved,” for even though they did not believe in “the fable of the evening of Christmas,” nevertheless “we are human, and Christmas is sweet to the heart of every man.”
The marble-faced clock had ticked off forty minutes. Vanzetti disregarded his notes now. In his long-deliberated conclusion he had no need of them. His deep-set eyes took on the searing quality that Chief Stewart had remarked on seven years before.
“Well, I have already say that I not only am not guilty of these two crimes, but I never commit a crime in my life—I have never steal and I have never kill and I have never spilt blood, and I have fought against the crime, and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate and sanctify.
“This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty of. 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 if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn again two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.
“I have finished. Thank you.”
He stood there, a spare, slightly stooped figure, his face pale behind the screen of the swooping mustache, eyes still glittering with suppressed emotion. Judge Thayer’s precise arctic voice broke the silence, moving on in a few phrases to the sentencing. There was a hushed tenseness as everyone leaned forward to catch the ritual words:
“First the Court pronounces sentence of Nicola Sacco. It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven.”
Except for Thayer’s voice there was only the muffled sound of a few women sobbing.
“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo Vanzetti—”
Vanzetti’s interrupting voice was like a stone shattering thin ice. “Wait a minute, please, your Honor,” he called out. “May I speak with my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?”
Thompson, within the bar enclosure, was so taken aback that all he could do was to mutter to the court, “I do not know what he wants to say.”
Judge Thayer brushed aside the interruption. “I think I should pronounce the sentence. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of death—”
Sacco broke in, shrill and furious, and as he stood he stretched his arm and pointed at Judge Thayer. “You know I am innocent!” he shouted, his facial muscles bunched in fury. “That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago! You condemn two innocent men!”
For a moment it seemed as if the long sustained decorum of the neoclassic room was dissolving, but Thayer’s impervious voice continued with the regularity of the ticking clock—“by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.” He paused, gathering his gown about him in a preliminary gesture before he announced: “We will now take a recess.” Without a glance at the men he had sentenced he stood up and walked slowly down from the bench and out into the corridor that led to his chambers.
As Sacco and Vanzetti were again being handcuffed, their friends, Italian and American, crowded round them trying to touch them, to clasp their hands. Mrs. Evans hobbled up close enough to call out cheerfully, “There’s lots to hope for yet.” There were tears in Vanzetti’s eyes. Mary Donovan pushed forward, her cheeks wet. “Do not cry, Mary,” he told her. “Keep a brave front.” Then the guards and deputies intervened.
Vanzetti, brooding in his cell, thought less of the sentence than of the words he had not been allowed to speak. Next day, with the eloquence of death on him, he wrote out his eulogy of Sacco, telling Thompson that it was “the most important thing” he had to say, and that “I would have given half my blood to be allowed to speak again.”
I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker, lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of Liberty, and to his love for mankind; money, rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate. He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today—which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows. Never. His people also are in good position and of good reputation.
Oh yes, I may be more witfull as some have put it. I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism I felt small, small at the presence of his greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him—this man called thief and assasin and doomed. But Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katzmann’s and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name, his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a deem rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.
Over the week end Thompson told reporters that he felt Sacco and Vanzetti could derive no benefit from further proceedings in the Massachusetts courts, and that he was not prepared to take steps designed merely to delay their execution. Moore would have acted very differently, would in fact have taken any steps, scrupulous or otherwise, and two at a time, that he thought might prolong the men’s lives. But to Moore justice was a class shell game that he was ready to operate as trickily as his opponents. “At least I have kept them alive,” he was able to say as he left Boston. Thompson still kept his faith in the traditional impartiality of the law. He would not play tricks with it.
Anticipating the adverse decision of April 5, Thompson, a few days earlier, accompanied by John Moors, Dr. Morton Prince, and Professor Frank Taussig, had called on the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, William Lawrence, to ask his help in persuading Governor Fuller to appoint a commission to review the whole proceedings. It struck none of these Boston-bred men as strange to turn to a bishop in a matter of law. On the contrary, it seemed to them the most obvious step to take, for during a third of a century the voice of Bishop Lawrence had become the ethical voice of Massachusetts.
Bishop Lawrence combined uniquely in his person the dominant strands of the community. Descended from the founders of the Bay Colony, he could walk through Boston along streets named for his ancestors. As successor to Phillips Brooks, who had preached before Queen Victoria, he concluded the reconciliation of upper-class Boston to Episcopalianism after the disestablishment of the Revolution. His income came from the textile industry that his relatives the Lawrences, the Lowells, and the Abbotts had established. Though he was a second-generation Episcopalian, the blood of ancestral Calvinism still coursed in his veins. By and large, he observed to his acquaintances, it had been his experience that the more godly members of the community were the more financially successful. As a young curate in industrial Lawrence he would cheerfully give up an afternoon to visit a crippled spinner of his congregation, yet not think it strange that the man was earning eighty cents a day. As a bishop and member of the Corporation of Harvard University he would undertake to raise five million dollars for the new Harvard Business School and also not think it strange.
A stocky man with a glowing face, Bishop Lawrence looked a cherubic Puritan. He eschewed rings, miter and crozier, pectoral crosses, black suits, and clerical collars, preferring English tweeds and gray felt hats. He received Thompson’s delegation, representative of the law, medicine, State Street, and the academy, as a matter of course. He knew at once what his duty was.
Sent to Governor [he noted in his diary] a letter saying that in Sacco-Vanzetti sentence thousands of citizens felt that they had not had a fair trial and asking the Governor to call leading and trusted men to his advice.
As both the sender and the recipient were aware, the letter, dated April 11, was more nearly a command:
Your Excellency,—
Two men, having been tried by the Courts of Massachusetts for murder, have now been sentenced to death. Upon you falls the heavy and responsible duty of carrying out the sentence unless you are moved to take other action. Confidence in the Courts of Massachusetts, which has justified itself for generations, leads its citizens to assume the sentence given is just and should be carried out.
There are, however, we believe, thousands of citizens of the Commonwealth who, having read or studied such parts of the proceedings in the Superior Court as have appeared in the public press, have serious doubts as to whether these two men have had a fair trial.
They were, as the law requires, tried by a judge and jury and found guilty. Motions for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered evidence were heard by the same judge and denied. Exceptions on points of law were taken to the Supreme Court and unanimously overruled. But the Supreme Court could not under our law reconsider and revise the findings of fact of the trial court or the exercise of the trial judge’s discretion. Hence have arisen the doubts of the citizens for whom we venture to speak.
Knowing well your sense of justice, your integrity of purpose, and your courage when assured of the rightness of your position, we ask with great earnestness that you call to your aid several citizens of well known character, experience, ability, and sense of justice to make a study of the trial and advise you. We believe that it is due to the exceptional conditions of the case, to yourself, and to the State that these doubts be allayed and that it be made evident to all citizens that the Commonwealth has done full justice to herself as well as to these men, and also that you may have strong and intelligent support in whatever decision you may make.
Rt. Rev. William A. Lawrence
Additional signatures were superfluous. Nevertheless, as if to underline his position, the Bishop took care to have his letter signed by three most proper Bostonians—fellow Harvard Corporation member Charles Curtis, Jr.; Hernan Burr, as well known in the city as a lawyer and financier as he was unknown elsewhere; and Roland Boyden of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins, a law firm whose name was said to have such magic force that it was seldom mentioned; one only thought it.
The letter was not immediately made public. Meanwhile, on April 12, Representative Roland Sawyer, a Congregational minister who for fourteen years had represented Ware and several other small western Massachusetts towns in the state legislature, drew up a resolution which he presented in the House of Representatives to provide for a special commission “to examine and review the proceedings of the Commonwealth against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” Sawyer realized that the measure had no chance of passing but he felt that a public hearing on it would be the informal equivalent of a trial, and that additional evidence there presented would undermine the prosecution’s case to such an extent that it would make the carrying out of the death sentences impossible. Thompson favored Sawyer’s plan, but Frankfurter, after meeting with the Defense Committee in a downtown law office, decided against it. He told Sawyer that he had confidence in Fuller. Sawyer’s resolution was rejected in the legislature by a rising vote of 146-6.
The next move was Governor Fuller’s. He who a few weeks before had announced that he had not formed an opinion had now become the court of last appeal. In a few more weeks a stroke of his pen would have to decide whether it would be freedom for the two men, commutation of their sentences to life imprisonment, or death. To Thompson, who visited him privately, he announced that he could make no investigation unless he was requested to do so by Sacco and Vanzetti. Thompson promised to see that such a request was made.
The written and telegraphed appeals, requests, and suggestions now reaching the governor by the hundreds were signed with such nationally known names as Rabbi Stephen Wise, novelist Gertrude Atherton, President Emeritus David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, and biographer Ida Tarbell. A Massachusetts communication was signed by author and doctor Richard Cabot; John Hays Hammond, the North Shore millionaire industrialist; Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking; Harvard teacher and essayist Bliss Perry; and historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Arthur Schlesinger. The name of Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School headed a petition signed by Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson.
The tone of most of these appeals was conciliatory, not to say flattering. That most tirelessly—some thought tiresomely—liberal of clergymen, John Haynes Holmes of New York’s Community Church, expressed his strong faith in Governor Fuller’s fairness. Fiorello La Guardia, who had served with Fuller in Congress, wrote optimistically to the New York World that the governor was “free from bigotry and prejudice and will investigate fairly and fully.” The Nation believed, in an open letter, that the governor would fearlessly face the great issue that had aroused not only masses of Americans but millions all over the world. Only the Communists, seeing no advantage from their point of view in conciliating anybody, kept up a counterpoint of invective, the Daily Worker denouncing Fuller as “that toothless troglodyte and flunky of the mill owners.”
Cardinal O’Connell, as urbane and adept a weigher of words as could be found in the Commonwealth, suggested an investigating commission indirectly when he urged that the governor reach his decision “by making use of every human aid that he can possibly gather.” Fuller himself, in an unexpected interview with Joseph Lilly of the Brooklyn Eagle, said that he did not know whether to appoint a commission or go over the case himself.
There were rumors that Charles Evans Hughes would soon head a Sacco-Vanzetti commission, then contrary rumors that there would be no commission after all. The Transcript continued to denounce the substitution of “public opinion in place of judicial conclusions.” Nine out of ten of the city’s lawyers were agreed that when the courts had spoken, contrary voices should become mute. Robert Goodwin and Joseph Proctor, Jr., of the august firm of Goodwin, Proctor, Field and Hoar, felt it their civic duty to try to offset the unaccountable aberration of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins by declaring that for Fuller to appoint a fact-finding commission would be an abdication of the powers of his office.
Although the Massachusetts Supreme Court could not reply directly to its critics, it managed to find a semiofficial defense in the pamphlet “Sacco and Vanzetti in the Scales of Justice,” written and published by its Reporter of Decisions, Ethelbert Vincent Grabill. For the reporter, the Massachusetts legal structure was a parthenon inherited from the Puritans, and he claimed that he had been moved by the spirit of his ancestors to attempt to “bring a wandering citizenry back to confidence in our courts, in their proceedings, and in our Governor, and fortify and strengthen those who have not wandered.” Grabill was untroubled by the proceedings at Dedham. For him it was “doubtful if Judge Thayer’s charge was ever equalled for clearness, completeness and fairness.” He considered it presumptuous for anyone to ask the governor to appoint a review commission, and complained that “having persons passing around ... petitions on the subject tends to stir up opposition to our Constitution and laws.”
Not until two weeks after the sentencing did Fuller finally ask District Attorney Ranney for the Sacco-Vanzetti records. On May 4 Thompson brought the governor a formal petition in which Vanzetti asked to be set free from his sentence. Carefully Vanzetti avoided the word pardon with its connotation of admitted guilt; he emphasized that he was asking for justice, not mercy. He pointed out to the governor that it would be unlikely for robbers to linger near the scene of a crime “in order to address public meetings in behalf of persecuted radicals.” Beyond this, the lengthy presentation was mostly a recapitulation of points that had been made in the various motions—Proctor’s equivocations, the dubious character of the chief witnesses, Judge Thayer’s prejudice, and the issue of radicalism.
The petition came from Vanzetti alone. True to his resolve to take no further part in the defense, Sacco refused to sign it. As a result, he was again examined to determine whether he should be considered mentally responsible. Dr. Abraham Meyerson, who conducted the examination, reported that:
There is no question that the seven years of his incarceration, mainly without employment and entirely preoccupied by his situation, have helped bring about an abnormal state in which his fanaticism has been intensified to an obsession. Though he is not insane, his inaccessibility to all reasoning and his emotional reactions are pathological. His mind has lost the flexibility which enables a man to adjust normally to situations.
Governor Fuller received the petition without comment. On May 8 he tripped going upstairs and tore a tendon in his left leg. While he was confined to his Beacon Street house, reporters noted that among his visitors were the McAnarney brothers and ex-District Attorney Katzmann.
The first real inkling of what was going on behind the wrought iron gates of 150 Beacon Street was provided on May 12 when Will Rogers, the gum-chewing lariat-swinging comedian-philosopher, appeared in Boston for a one-night benefit at the Opera House. Before the performance he had visited Governor Fuller. “I don’t know anything about this murder case that is interesting you in Massachusetts,” Rogers told his Opera House audience, “but I want to tell you that your governor is working on it. I stopped in on my way here to sit with him for a few moments and I found him in his room with crutches by his side. He had three or four pistols, and he had a big pile of books, the record of the case, and he is working away at it. I don’t know what he is going to decide, of course, but I do know that he isn’t going to be skeered into deciding it, and I do know that when he makes his decision, it’s going to be a decision he believes right down through him. He’s terribly anxious about it, but he is going to get all the facts.”
It was clear at last that Governor Fuller was going to do his own investigating. Day after day now the newspapers recorded the appearance of witnesses old and new, first at 150 Beacon Street and then at the executive chambers in the State House. Through the late spring weeks the governor interviewed the eleven surviving Dedham jurors and the twelve from Plymouth, Judge Thayer, and as many of the original witnesses as could be located, as well as the “suppressed” witness, Roy Gould. One day it was observed that he took Beltrando Brini to lunch. Another day he spent several hours with Lola Andrews’ son, now Corporal Hassam of the U.S. Marine Corps. Assisting him were his sharp, bald, thin-lipped private counsel, Joseph Wiggin, his confidential secretary, Herman MacDonald, and Lieutenant Governor Frank Allen. Reporters could get no information from the gruff MacDonald, whose function was to act as a buffer between the governor and the external world. This function he exercised with a gusto that earned him the nickname of Hard-boiled Herman and the dislike of newspapermen and State House employees generally.
When the Defense Committee protested against the secrecy of the governor’s hearings, Fuller began consulting with Thompson and Ehrmann. He refused, however, to allow representatives of the defense to confront witnesses in his presence.
Vanzetti was convinced that the governor must have had him and Sacco in mind when he wrote his article “Why I Believe in Capital Punishment,” for the December 1926 issue of Success Magazine. He wrote Mrs. Evans not “to expect that Fuller will stand against the judiciary, the middle class, the big money in behalf of two damned dagos and anarchists.”
Nevertheless, as the weeks wore away with their succession of witnesses, Fuller appeared uneasy and uncertain. Robert Lincoln O’Brien, sitting next to him at a Boston University commencement dinner, hesitantly brought up the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti. Far from objecting, Fuller seemed eager to talk about it. He said he felt it was abhorrent that one man should have the decision in a capital case, that O’Brien would be surprised at the way much of the trial testimony had collapsed. According to O’Brien’s later account, Fuller then told him he was going to settle the case in such a way that he could live with his conscience.
As in Elizabethan tragic drama, there now occurred a clown’s interlude, furnished by Edward Holton James, the bearded pipe-smoking son of William and Henry James’ black-sheep alcoholic brother, Robertson. James was a dilettante with a town house on Mount Vernon Street and a country estate in Concord that had two houses, one for his wife and one for himself, where he built and repaired musical instruments. He described himself variously as a musician and as a lawyer—though whether he practiced either law or the violin was questionable. “The millionaire pacifist,” as the newspapers tagged him, had written a shrill pamphlet on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, a counterblast to Grabill’s effort, in which he announced:
You had a crazy judge and jury in Plymouth. You had the same crazy judge with another crazy jury in Dedham. You had a crazy Supreme Court of Massachusetts, sitting in the Court House in Boston, saying it was all right. The whole lot of them ought to be sitting in the insane asylum.
On April 15 James drove to South Braintree to re-enact the crime and demonstrate the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. He had planned to recruit his cast from members of the Harvard Liberal Club but at the last minute found himself speeding through the Blue Hills with only a solitary lawyer friend, Abraham Wirin, to play a bandit’s part. At South Braintree their efforts to pick up local volunteer actors drew a blank, and Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent, refused to let them into the factory. They glimpsed a moment of martyrdom when the chairman of the board of selectmen, Edward Avery, tried to stop their two-man show, but the new police chief, John Heaney, waved Avery back and told them to go ahead. A few days later James returned alone to make some pencil sketches and this time, while heads gawked from all the factory windows, Avery gave him fifteen minutes to leave town. After telling Avery to go to hell, James at last had the satisfaction of being arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. He left twenty dollars as bail money—which he later forfeited—and returned triumphantly to Boston in time for lunch.
The pigmy sparrings of Grabill and James were succeeded by a battle of giants when on April 25 Dean John Wigmore of the Northwestern University Law School commandeered the front page of the Transcript to answer Frankfurter’s Atlantic article. Wigmore was one of the great scholars of his day, and his monumental treatise The Law of Evidence remains one of the classics of Anglo-American law. A Harvard graduate of the class of 1883, he was furious that Frankfurter should have so influenced intellectual and university opinion. He did not once mention Frankfurter by name but referred to him with surly pedantry as the “plausible pundit.”
“To vindicate Massachusetts Justice, I crave the opportunity of your pages to address the lawyers of the Commonwealth,” he wrote the Transcript, and that paper obliged by giving his article the largest headlines since those announcing the 1918 armistice. Calling the Frankfurter article “neither fair nor accurate nor complete,” Wigmore protested that the “insinuation of a ‘picked’ jury was baseless and worthy only of unscrupulous yellow journalism.” He drummed on the fact that it was the defendants who had first brought up the subject of radicalism at the trial, asked why Frankfurter had not mentioned Sacco’s cap, accused him of saying nothing about the passport found on Sacco’s person the night of his arrest, proof in itself that the latter did not need to lie from fear of deportation. He asserted that if the Supreme Court had had any doubts of the defendants’ guilt it would have been “astute enough to lay hold of some point of pure law as a ground for ordering a new trial,” and pointed out that the defense at the time had taken no exception to Judge Thayer’s charge. Finally, he set off a series of rhetorical questions that streaked like red rockets across the Transcript’s staid pages:
Is Massachusetts subject to dictates of international terrorists? Where has the like ever been known in modern history? The thugs of India, the Camorra of Naples, the Black Hand of Sicily, the anarchists of czardom—when did their attempts to impose their will by violence ever equal in range of operations and vicious directness, the organized efficiency of this cabal to which Sacco and Vanzetti belong?
Frankfurter received a copy of the Transcript in the early afternoon and sat down at once to write his answer. Frank Buxton, the Herald’s editor, held up the presses so that his reply could appear in the next morning’s edition. In spite of the speed at which he had to write, Frankfurter had the advantages of a controlled temper and a deeper knowledge of the case. With mock mildness he began by suggesting that Wigmore could not have read the record or the opinions of Judge Thayer with care. He pointed out that the prosecution knew all about Sacco’s radicalism before the trial began—that the prosecution’s excuse for the cross-examination did not hold. In his Atlantic article he had challenged Judge Thayer’s statement that the Supreme Court had “approved” the verdict. Wigmore having denied that Thayer had used the word, Frankfurter now pointed to the passage where it occurred in the decision on the Madeiros motion. He also showed that Wigmore had accepted as genuine an erroneous passage about Sacco’s passport. He admitted not having mentioned Sacco’s cap in his article, adding that he had dealt with it in his book.
Two weeks later Wigmore came charging back with another piece for the Transcript in which he accused his opponent—this time referred to as the “contra-canonical critic”—of violating Canon 20 of the American Bar Association’s Code of Professional Ethics, which condemns “newspaper publication by a lawyer as to pending or anticipated legislation,” and of being behind-the-scenes counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti. He had also determined that while Judge Thayer used the word approved once, he had on eight other occasions used affirmed or some similar neutral word. Insisting that the real issue was whether the trial had been unfair—“a riot of political passion” through the misconduct of the district attorney and the judge—Wigmore held that it had not been. “If the Bar of Massachusetts should take this body-blow lying down,” he concluded, “they would deserve to suffer their profession polluted and their bench bolshevized by agitators financed and led as this case has been.”
In writing to William Howard Taft some months after the executions, President Lowell of Harvard commented that “Wigmore’s ridiculous article looked as if there was nothing serious to be said on the side of the courts.”
Frankfurter was not to be drawn out by Wigmore’s name-calling. His second reply in the Herald was as detached and temperate as before. He observed that Wigmore had answered nothing at all about Judge Thayer’s mistaken interpolation about Sacco’s passport. And it was still a fact, however Wigmore might feel about it, that Thayer had used the word approved. Frankfurter denied that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had the power the Northwestern dean attributed to it, and he concluded with the statement that “in no sense in which lawyers responsibly use the term have I ever been of counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti.”
Through May Governor Fuller continued his investigation to the exclusion of all other state business, sometimes spending twelve to fourteen hours a day interviewing witnesses and reading documents. Since the imposition of the death sentences he had received over 17,000 protesting letters and telegrams. Whatever he decided, he knew there would be an uproar. It was too much for one man.
On June 1, when rumor had all but settled the matter the other way, Secretary MacDonald announced that the governor had named a three-man advisory committee to go over all the aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The three were President Lowell; Robert Grant, a retired probate judge; and President Samuel Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Several weeks before this appointment Lowell—possibly at the suggestion of his cousin, Bishop Lawrence—had written Fuller to the effect that men with no sympathy for anarchists were troubled by the charges that the Sacco-Vanzetti trial had been unfair and the verdict unwarranted by the evidence. But even if the president of Harvard had not so written, he would have seemed to the governor the logical first choice for any such committee. Lowell incarnated to Fuller what he most admired: status, family, academic learning, inherited assurance—the things his Packard money could not buy.
Abbott Lawrence Lowell—the Massachusetts spindle cities of Lowell and Lawrence were named for his forbears—was the tenth-generation descendant of the Bristol merchant-trader Percival Lowle who in 1639 at the age of sixty-seven had protested against the ship-money tax by sailing for America with his family of fifteen. Second of the two armigerous families in early New England, the Lowells became one of the few truly dynastic families in America. Abbott Lawrence was a worthy if not extraordinarily distinguished member of his clan. Although in his early middle years he had written the solid, pedestrian The Government of England and been appointed Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, without the prestige of his family name he would never have succeeded Charles W. Eliot in 1907 to the presidency of America’s oldest university.
He was born in 1856, but his mind was a throwback to a decade earlier than that—before the Irish invasion—when Boston was still a mellow self-contained brick town to which he and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts belonged, and which in turn belonged to them. To Lowell the mass newcomers—the Famine Irish and the later Italians and Jews—were an intrusion on the Athens of America that Boston might have been. Dismayed at the appearance among his undergraduates of increasing numbers of Polish-born Jewish day students, he at one time planned to limit their admission to Harvard to a small fixed quota.
Yet Lowell, whatever the limitations of his outlook and sympathies, inherited a rectitude impervious to external pressures. When, during the Boston police strike of 1919, Harold Laski—then a temporary lecturer in political science at Harvard—spoke out in favor of the strikers, many local Harvard graduates denounced him as a traitor and a Bolshevik and demanded his dismissal. Lowell himself had opposed the policemen and even helped furnish strikebreakers from the undergraduates, but at the hint that the governing boards were considering getting rid of Laski he announced that if they exercised this undoubted legal right his own resignation would immediately and irrevocably follow. In that same year he took the side of United States entry into the League of Nations in a debate at Boston’s Symphony Hall with the irreconcilable Henry Cabot Lodge.
When Lowell agreed to serve on Fuller’s committee he did so reluctantly. From what he had read of the case in Frankfurter’s Atlantic article, he told Judge Grant, he rather expected to find that injustice had been done.
Whatever the criticisms that dogged Lowell afterward, he would always feel that he had done his duty. No man would ever be able to accuse him of temporizing with what he thought was right. The only question centered in that qualifying word thought. Ferris Greenslet, the well-disposed chronicler of the Lowell generations, remarked that although President Lowell had shown all his life an open mind, “it was perhaps closed at one point only, against any action or consideration tending to show a flaw in the administration of justice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” John Moors, Lowell’s Harvard classmate, was blunter; he told Frankfurter that Lowell was “incapable of seeing that two wops could be right and the Yankee judiciary wrong.”
At the time Lowell acceded to the governor’s request he was in his seventy-second year, still briskly vigorous in walk and manner, although his Lowell features had begun to droop. It has been said that people as they grow older tend to resemble their dogs. Lowell, with his paunched and brooding face, seemed more and more to take on the look of the sad-eyed cocker spaniel that was the companion of his walks.
At the outset of the committee deliberations he assumed, as did everyone else except Judge Grant, that his was to be the controlling voice, and indeed the officially designated Governor’s Advisory Committee became known almost at once as the Lowell Committee. Each day when the three men returned together to the State House after lunch, Grant and Stratton would head for the basement elevator while Lowell would spring up the forty-one granite steps leading to the porticoed entrance to the executive chambers. By the time the other two arrived they would find him already seated at the head of the table preparing the agenda.
Grant and Lowell had played together as children on Beacon Hill, and Grant for all his self-effacing manner resented the automatic assumption of authority by his younger playmate. Alphabetically his name had come first on the governor’s list and he had, he felt, more right than Abbott Lawrence to head the committee even if the latter had suggested his name to the governor. For thirty years Grant had been Judge of the Suffolk Court of Probate and Insolvency. From the cut of his mustache to the cut of his voice he was a wispy man, with shoe-button eyes and an English accent once removed, part of the genteel desiccated Boston that after its brief literary flowering had been withering away for two generations under the cloud of immigrants. A light versifier and wit, in hours filched from his not-too-arduous judicial duties he had written unreadable novels about Boston that were at one time much read in the city. In 1908, while he was traveling in Italy, some of his luggage was stolen, whereupon he sent outraged appeals not only to the American ambassador but to the State Department in Washington; several years later in his autobiographical The Convictions of a Grandfather he was still spluttering about Italian thievery. Before accepting his place on the committee he did have the common sense to ask Fuller what he would do if he got a divided report. The governor replied that he would then consider that there was ground for doubt.
Stratton, chosen by Fuller at Lowell’s suggestion so that the committee would not seem too much of a Back Bay family affair, was an Illinois farm boy who had made himself into a mathematician, physicist, and engineer. As president of one of the country’s great scientific schools he inhabited a Cambridge divorced from the old literary associations. It was predicted that he would be of great help in evaluating the ballistics evidence and other technical points. So far as can be determined he never opened his mouth during the sixteen days that the committee met.
When it turned to the ballistics evidence, the Lowell Committee was undoubtedly greatly influenced by the findings of Major Calvin Goddard, a New York expert who came to Boston at the end of May on his own initiative, bringing with him a comparison microscope and offering to make what he maintained would be conclusive tests on the shells and bullets offered in evidence at Dedham. He was accompanied by William Crawford, a reporter from the New York World, who called on Thompson to ask if he would cooperate in the holding of the tests. Resentful of Crawford’s contemptuous remarks about Dr. Hamilton, Thompson declined but said he would put no obstacles in Goddard’s way. Ranney, for the district attorney’s office, had no objections.
When, in preparation, Goddard demonstrated his double-image microscope to Hamilton’s supporting expert, Professor Gill, the latter was so taken with “the simplicity and accuracy of its findings” that he not only recommended its use to the governor but announced that he himself would abide by the results.
With Gill, Ranney, and Ehrmann present, as well as a stenographer and Frank Buxton and Thomas Carens of the Herald, Goddard examined the evidence in the clerk of courts’ office at Dedham on the afternoon of June 3. Comparing Bullet III with a test bullet fired from Sacco’s pistol, he suggested that Gill make the same comparison. “Well, what do you know about that?” Gill muttered to himself as he looked into the microscope. Goddard’s conclusion was that the mortal bullet taken from Berardelli’s body had been fired through Sacco’s pistol and could have been fired through no other. Gill, too, now became convinced of this, despite his earlier findings to the contrary. Ehrmann, examining the identifying scratches on the base of Bullet III, remarked that they were irregular and almost indecipherable compared with the scratches on Bullets I, II, and IV.
Looking at the shells through his microscope, Goddard concluded that Shell W had been fired in Sacco’s pistol and could have been fired in no other. Ehrmann, Buxton, and Carens did not find the comparison of the shells conclusive.
Soon after these tests, Gill told Thompson that he now doubted his original findings and wished to sever all connection with the case. His disavowal was followed by one from James Burns, another of the defense experts, who had recently become convinced, after studying certain microphotographs made earlier for Captain Van Amburgh, that the Fraher shell had been fired in Sacco’s gun.
Goddard’s report was forwarded without comment to Governor Fuller and to the Lowell Committee. Goddard claimed afterward that his tests would have been even more satisfactory if a sticky substance coating the bullets could have been removed. Ranney had been willing to have the bullets cleaned but Thompson refused to approve of this under any circumstances, adding that he believed there had been trickery and that the prosecution had made a substitution of bullets and shells among the exhibits. Goddard in turn said he had no opinion as to the genuineness of the exhibits, although he agreed that the scratches on Bullet III were less clear than on the others.
Before leaving Boston, in a deflating interview with Thompson, Goddard admitted that he had come to town with an adverse opinion about Sacco already formed, the result of studying Van Amburgh’s microphotographs. When he went on to express doubts about Hamilton, Thompson produced a letter that the aspiring Goddard had written the druggist-expert in 1924, asking his advice about starting a career in ballistics identification. Goddard’s reply was that he knew more about Hamilton now than he had known in 1924, and the interview ended with Thompson angrily defending Hamilton as a man of honor.
The uncertainty that eventually clouded the reputations of all the ballistics experts in the case enveloped Goddard three months after he left Boston. In Cleveland, several weeks after a bootlegger, Ernest Yorkell, was shot to death, the police arrested a Frank Milazzo with a revolver in his possession similar to the murder weapon. Two bullets from Yorkell’s body and several test bullets from Milazzo’s gun were submitted to Major Goddard in New York. When Goddard reported that one of the murder bullets and one of the test bullets had been fired from the same gun, Milazzo was charged with the murder. Unfortunately for Major Goddard, though not for his comparison microscope, Milazzo was able to prove that he had bought the revolver new a month after the shooting. Goddard attributed his mistake to a bullet mixup by the Cleveland police. Although it was never determined whether the fault was his, he had apparently compared the two murder bullets.
In the unconfessed course of events, Madeiros, following his second trial, would have been electrocuted during the week of September 5, 1926, but the motion and appeal based on his confession brought him a series of reprieves. Not until late in Governor Fuller’s Sacco-Vanzetti investigation did he see Madeiros personally and then for only fifteen minutes.
In his testimony to me [the governor reported] he could not recall the details or describe the neighborhood. He furthermore stated that the Government had double crossed him and he proposed to double cross the Government. He feels that the District Attorney’s office has treated him unfairly because his two confederates who were associated with him in the commission of the murder for which he was convicted were given life sentences, whereas he was sentenced to death. He confessed the crime for which he was convicted. I am not impressed with his knowledge of the South Braintree murders.
Madeiros gave a different interpretation of the interview to Thompson when the lawyer next visited him. Over a year later in connection with another case Thompson related on the witness stand what Madeiros had told him:
“Madeiros said that Governor Fuller began the interview by saying that he understood that Madeiros said that he thought he had been given—I think the expression was, ‘a raw deal,’ or something indicating double-dealing or improper dealing by the Government, and that Madeiros said that Officer Ferrari of the State Police had given him a promise of second-degree murder if he confessed the murder.... The Governor said if he was satisfied that any such promise had been made he would do something for Madeiros. The Governor then said, before waiting for any reply from Madeiros, according to Madeiros’ statement to me, ‘You do not know anything about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, do you?’ And Madeiros said he did, and the Governor asked him if he was in the car with the other men who committed the murder in South Braintree, the South Braintree murder, and Madeiros said that he was, and the Governor then said, ‘So you are a double murderer; I will do nothing for you.’”
Fuller unquestionably said something of the kind to Madeiros, although the meaning remains double-edged. Defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti have interpreted it as an offer to trade Madeiros a commutation for a recantation of his South Braintree confession. Others have maintained that the governor would not have been foolish enough to risk his reputation by making any such offer to an admitted liar like Madeiros.
But there is still another possible explanation. From the governor’s attitude to the later witnesses appearing at his investigation, it seems fairly certain that at this stage he had come to believe Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. And if he felt they were guilty, Madeiros’ confession could only have seemed a fraud. When Fuller talked with Madeiros and the latter still stuck to his story, the governor might well have snapped back that he would do nothing for him. If so, it was a remark spoken in anger rather than a premeditated offer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PUBLIC AND THE
LOWELL COMMITTEE
Not only in Europe but around the world—in Shanghai, Tokyo, Melbourne, Calcutta, Buenos Aires—the names Sacco and Vanzetti were by now familiar syllables and the image had become fixed of two dissenters from the American way of life being done to death for their dissent. Where scores and then hundreds had demonstrated in isolated groups, now in the approaching climax thousands thronged to vast and passionate assemblies that somehow, the participants felt, by their very vastness and passion might force the Massachusetts executioners to stay their hands. There was a fierce joy, too, in such protests, a tensing of muscles, a sense of unity and a feeling among the urban masses that in their increasingly turbulent protests against the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti they were protesting against their own isolation and their own fate.
To Continental intellectuals disillusioned by the collapse of Wilsonian idealism, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was one more devastating example from postwar America, to be set beside Prohibition, Chicago gangsters, the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan, and the Tennessee monkey trial. The fate of the two men was what one might expect from the heartless materialism of the transatlantic republic that had won a war with its money and the blood of others and now wanted the money back.
In July, Mussolini wrote to the American ambassador in Rome “not as the head of the Italian Government but as a man who is sincerely your friend,” asking for a commutation of sentence as an “act of humanity so much more noble as it is less delayed.” Shrewdly the Duce pointed out that
The agitation of the elements of the left throughout the world is increasing in intensity, in these last days, as is shown by the bombs thrown in Buenos Aires against the Ford establishment and the statue of Washington.
Now if the act of clemency is held back still longer it may give the impression that the American authority may have yielded to the pressure of this world-wide subversive activity and this impression can injure the prestige of the United States.
I hope that His Excellency Governor Fuller may give an example of humanity. The example will brilliantly demonstrate the difference between the methods of Bolshevism and those of the great American republic as well as strike from the hands of the subversive elements an instrument of agitation.
In the last pitched months conservatives determined to show that they, no less than the radicals, were concerned with human rights as exemplified by the fate of the two Italians. The royalist Action Française now protested the course of Massachusetts justice in as shrill a tone as the Communist L’Humanité. The conservative Frankfurter Zeitung spoke out with the vehemence of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Even the shadowy Alfred Dreyfus emerged from his seclusion to announce that he was willing to go to America to plead for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Communist propaganda continued, bizarre and embracing. The day after Judge Thayer pronounced sentence, Pravda—remembering Edgar Allan Poe but apparently confusing Charlestown with Charleston—reported that Sacco and Vanzetti had been held for several years in a torture prison in South Carolina where they had been confined “in a specially constructed padded room having a mirrored ceiling on which appeared at intervals a spot which gradually took the form of a terrifying open-jawed creature. Meanwhile, a human voice shouted: ‘Tell the names of your accomplices!’”
H. G. Wells, after reading Frankfurter’s Atlantic article, became so indignant that he proposed the word Thayerism to describe “the self-righteous unrighteousness of established people.” Millions read his angry statement in the London Sunday Express for June 5, 1927:
I do not see how any clear-headed man, after reading the professor’s summary, can have any other conviction than that Sacco and Vanzetti are as innocent of the Braintree murder, for which they are now awaiting death, as Julius Caesar, or—a better name in this connection—Karl Marx.
Within the United States Italians generally were behind the two prisoners because they were paisani. Their anarchism did not matter. The same North Enders who first came to support the Defense Committee would a few years later support Mussolini’s African campaign and fill the windows of Hanover Street shops with photographs of Ethiopian atrocities. Other foreign groups, like the Jewish enclaves in New York and Boston, would find themselves drawn sympathetically to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti out of their socialist tradition and their own bitter experiences of race hate.
American union members never came to identify themselves with the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as did their counterparts in Europe. Moore had had enough contacts to engineer resolutions asking for a new trial through the American Federation of Labor conventions of 1922 and 1924, but such resolutions would not be presented again until the winter of 1926-1927. In the last months of the case President William Green of the American Federation of Labor added his protest against the impending executions, but in the Indian summer of the Coolidge prosperity the rank and file union members were at best lethargically sympathetic. When, the week before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Defense Committee sent out an appeal for a hundred thousand trade-union members to come to Boston in protest, less than two hundred showed up. Elsewhere than in the big cities with their heavy foreign populations the American worker was not class-conscious enough to see Sacco and Vanzetti as his representatives. He found the erotic enticements of the New York trial of Ruth Snyder, a suburban housewife, and her corset-salesman lover Henry Judd Gray for the murder of Ruth’s husband more enticing than the brief final scene in the Dedham courtroom. He took Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic on May 20, 1927, much more to heart than the erosive progress of Sacco and Vanzetti toward the electric chair. He was more concerned with the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, scheduled for September, than with the Massachusetts executions scheduled for July.
In the six years since John Codman, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and other members of the New England Civil Liberties Committee had appealed for defense funds, the New England Committee and the parent American Civil Liberties Union in New York had remained steadfast in their support. Frankfurter’s article was in a sense a culmination of their efforts. They had by their prolonged and reiterative publicity made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti intellectually fashionable. Those whose names rang the changes in the last months of the case, now made their rather flamboyant appearance. Officially the civil-liberties groups kept their distance.
When Moore was in charge of the defense, publicity was oriented toward the radicals, but with the coming of Thompson and Gardner Jackson the appeal was directed much more to what the class-conscious Lyons would have considered “handwringing” liberals. Thompson disapproved of pamphlet wars, of the case being tried in the streets. Both he and Frankfurter wanted to avoid further antagonizing the Massachusetts community. Sometime in July 1927, when the Defense Committee had arranged to hold a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall, Frankfurter discreetly vetoed the idea.
Those who (in that jagged term that had emerged with the Russian Revolution) considered themselves the intelligentsia accepted the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti and the guilt of Massachusetts as a matter of faith. It became a shibboleth of the liberal academic mind, just as within Boston their guilt had become a conservative shibboleth—in both cases a hotly held nonrational belief. Academic conformity, which—though usually opposed to—is even more rigid than middle-class conformity, belatedly took up the Sacco-Vanzetti cause, in part with sincere deliberateness but more often as a fervent avant-garde gesture. The 381 protesting petitioners from Mount Holyoke, the 326 from Bryn Mawr, the 203 from Wellesley, the faculty and 650 students from the University of California, the 36 Amherst faculty members, the hundreds of bloc names from so many other American colleges and universities, knowing only a smattering of the case, were making a reflex response to an appeal to themselves as an elite. In May, 61, members of assorted law faculties that included Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and the Universities of Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Alabama, and Texas, petitioned Governor Fuller for a commutation on grounds of reasonable doubt. Dean Robert Hutchins of the Yale Law School, one of the minority who had read the record, wrote an open appeal in which he castigated Katzmann’s cross-examination of Sacco. Three-quarters of the graduating class of the Harvard Law School, in defiant contrast to the State Street alumni majority just across the river, signed a request for a new trial. Professor Glenn Frank of Wisconsin, Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, Mount Holyoke’s Professor of English Jeannette Marks, and President Ellen Fitz Pendleton of Wellesley added their academic pleas.
As the New England spring slipped into summer, the roster of those opposing the impending execution and demanding a new trial added names as diverse as Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Alfred Landon, Senator Robert La Follette, the Right Reverend Chauncey Brewster of Washington Cathedral, Sherwood Eddy, John Dewey, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton, H. L. Mencken and Dean Edward Devine of the American Catholic University. Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn announced that he would introduce a measure in the next session of Congress to compel the attorney general to open the Department of Justice files concerned with Sacco and Vanzetti. On June 22 Joseph Moro, Gardner Jackson, and Mary Donovan appeared at the State House on behalf of the Defense Committee with a giant rolled petition for a public investigation, containing 474,842 names from all countries. Two weeks later the committee forwarded 153,000 additional names collected by the Swiss Union of Workers.
Within Massachusetts the reaction of the general public to such high-placed outside criticism was one of embittered, unreasoning hostility. A former district attorney said that it would be better even for two innocent men to be electrocuted than for public confidence in the established order of judicial procedure to be broken down. John C. Hull, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, received prolonged applause when he announced at a banquet that the Commonwealth’s demand of outsiders was this: “We would respectfully ask you to mind your own business.”
Such was the reaction of the well-born and the well-to-do. The reaction of what William Butler Yeats called “the little streets” was even more savage. In the massed streets of South Boston and Charlestown and Brighton and Ashmont there was a virulent hatred of Sacco and Vanzetti, coupled with a social jealousy of the better-known colleges and universities, a smoldering distrust of the professorial stance, a suspicion of academic attainments as being tainted with subversion. If the wiser-than-thou professors from Harvard and Yale were now taking it on themselves to proclaim that Sacco and Vanzetti should be freed—then so much the worse for Sacco and Vanzetti!
Sans-culotte anti-intellectualism echoed in a speech of Registrar of Motor Vehicles Frank Goodwin to the Lawrence Kiwanis Club:
It is impressive fact that the nearer we get to the scene of this murder the more convinced are the people that these men are guilty.... The citizens of Norfolk County know these men are guilty. On the other hand, in those domains where foreign and un-American principles are in vogue, such as Russia, Harvard, Argentine, Wellesley, China and Smith, they are sure these men are innocent.... The leader of the movement to set these two murderers free is Felix Frankfurter.
Professor Hocking might announce with urbane indignation from the platform of Boston’s Community Church that he believed Sacco and Vanzetti “as innocent of that murder as you or I.” Bishop Lawrence and the Dean of Washington Cathedral might entertain refined Episcopal doubts. But for the Reverend Billy Sunday—the preacher of the little streets—hoarsely saving the city from the fate of Sodom at Tremont Temple, no doubts existed. “Give ’em the juice,” he rapped out from the pulpit. “Burn them, if they’re guilty. That’s the way to handle it. I’m tired of hearing these foreigners, these radicals, coming over here and telling us what we should do.”
For five weeks after their sentencing Sacco and Vanzetti occupied adjoining cells in the Dedham jail. It was the first time since their arrest that they had been together for any length of time. Those shadowed weeks turned out to be the most serene of their imprisonment. Everyone who met Vanzetti remarked on his composure. Sacco, having decided not to struggle further against the fate he considered inevitable, attained a tranquillity that gave the surface appearance of cheerfulness. “As you know,” he wrote with wry unaccustomed humor to Mrs. Henderson, “I am still living at the same hotel, the same room, and also at the same old number 14—but on the first of July probably, they will bring us to the death house, and from there to the—eternity.”
A friend had brought Sacco a boccie set, and the two prisoners were allowed to bowl in the yard each afternoon for an hour and a half. Vanzetti began to take morning exercises and wrote Mrs. Winslow that he felt a new man. His cell was always filled with flowers from Mrs. Evans and other friends. As he described it:
My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing colors and beauties forms: a giranium plants a tulipan plant from Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches, buds, and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a boquet of May flowers from Mrs. Winslow.
Flowers he asked for instead of sweets, though as for tobacco—as he himself admitted—he smoked like a Turk. Being under sentence of death, and so exempt from prison work, he now had much more time to read and write. For Mrs. Jack he translated the last stanza of Gori’s revolutionary hymn, “May First”:
Give flowers to the rebels failed
With glances revealed to the aurora
To the gayard that struggles and works,
To the vagrant poet that dies.
Even the free jail days were too short for him. After nine when the lights went out he would prop himself up with a pillow against the wall, a blanket over his shoulders, using the corridor light coming through the bars to read some book that Mrs. Evans had just given him.
During the visiting periods Rosa came daily with the children for the allowed half-hour, and Sacco noticed lovingly how big Ines was growing and that Dante’s face was burned from the spring sun. Mrs. Evans came almost as regularly to see Vanzetti.
On June 11, Vanzetti’s thirty-ninth birthday, the two were visited by Georg Branting, a well-known lawyer and son of a former Swedish prime minister, who had crossed the Atlantic to make his own investigation. The Defense Committee had planned a parade to welcome Branting, and even though the police refused permission some fifteen hundred sympathizers met him at the South Station and escorted him to Boston Common. After ten days of on-the-scene study Branting announced that he was persuaded the two men were innocent, and sent a telegram to Sweden informing the press that “according to my best judgment, no conviction would have been pronounced if case tried under normal judicial conditions.”
Phil Stong, a young reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance, was another outsider who came to Boston to develop his opinion of the case. One afternoon he visited the prisoners in the jail library, later writing:
Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face.... A ferocious mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence has made an anchorite.
It was at the conclusion of this visit that Vanzetti casually made his utterance that has been so often quoted in anthologies. They sat there with Vanzetti doing most of the talking, Sacco breaking in only occasionally. Yet as these Italians talked in their imperfect English, even joked at times, the effect of their personalities gave Stong an overwhelming conviction of their innocence. He had brought a newspaper with him containing an account of some college students’ suicides, a sensational topic of the last few days. “I think Dr. Frood wrong,” Vanzetti remarked on glancing at it, “when he says student kill himself to make someone sorry. It is when he cannot make someone sorry, he kills himself in anger at world which pays him not attention—in despair—” Sacco disagreed, maintaining that if he himself were dead it would be the best way to free his wife and children. Vanzetti observed that “only sick mind kill himself.” Then he spoke of a Charlestown inmate who had murdered his wife when he had caught her with another man. “You know what he says to me once? ‘Vanzetti, you know what I think of all night? My wife—my home. Every night—all time. Now—all gone.’”
A bell rang, a gray line of prisoners began to file past on the way from the workshops to the cells, blank-faced men, their arms folded. Seeing them, Sacco grew bitter about his own enforced idleness. “We’re capitalists,” Vanzetti jollied him. “We have home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re nonproducers—live off other men’s work; when Libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.”
Sacco’s mood changed and he seemed amused. Then a deputy approached as a sign that Stong’s time was up. He had managed so far to cover his feelings by a forced cheerfulness but, as he rose to go, Vanzetti spotted the lurking dismay in the other’s feature. He then began to speak very quietly and simply as if to comfort the young man, and as he spoke Stong jotted down the words in shorthand on the margin of a newspaper:
If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life talking at street comers to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all!
That last moment belong to us—that agony is our triumph.[25]
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had expected Fuller to appoint his review commission. “That would impose freedom,” Vanzetti told Mrs. Winslow, “and the men of the judiciary and of the executive want save America by dooming us.” As for Governor Fuller’s own private investigation, Vanzetti’s conclusion was: “He may give us justice—I expect nothing.”
At times, when he was temporarily overcome by a mood of obsessive frustration, Vanzetti would crudely appropriate the symbolism of the Passion to express his dilemma. In such a mood he first learned of Fuller’s appointment of the Lowell Committee. “His this double investigation,” he wrote Mrs. Evans, “going to be another mockery? spitting on our face? sponge of vinager and bitterness on the top of a lance? the last stubbing between our ribles?” As the sun moved higher in the sky, as the elms again arched their spring greenery over the High Street, the two Italians behind the jail walls sensed their lost freedom in all its urgency. “Oh! that Sea, that sky,” Vanzetti wrote, “those freed and full of life winds of Cape Cod! Maybe I will never see, never breath, never be at one with them again.”
On June 29 Governor Fuller gave Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros a stay until August 10, to allow his Advisory Committee time to review the evidence and examine Madeiros’ confession. The Dedham interlude ended abruptly and finally at midnight on July 1 when the prisoners were waked, manacled to deputies, packed in a car followed by a second car with armed guards, and driven along the empty Dedham streets and across the drab brick outskirts of Boston to Cherry Hill. In this midnight scurrying Vanzetti lost some of his books and papers. Both men saw the hurried transfer as another example of deliberate spitefulness on the part of the authorities. Actually it was a strict following of the rule that a condemned man must be sent to Cherry Hill ten days before the date set for his execution. Sheriff Capen, anxious to get rid of his notorious prisoners, interpreted the rule to the letter. Even though the executions had been deferred, their official date as set by the court was still July 10.
Sacco accepted the transfer with shoulder-shrugging indifference as no more than he had expected. Vanzetti could not get over his depression at the ominous change from the casual Dedham jail with “some air, light, a slice of land and of sky to contemplate, and a daily blass of an hour of sunshine and free air in the yard” to the “windowless, airless, lightless ... malebolgic of the State Prison.”
The Defense Committee took a more optimistic view of the Lowell Committee than did Sacco and Vanzetti. They were content with Lowell, neutral about Stratton, and objected only to Grant. Not only were the petulant paragraphs of The Convictions of a Grandfather exhumed, but Grant was accused of having told John Moors and Samuel Eliot Morison that he disapproved of anyone’s taking issue with the trial, the verdict, and the subsequent decisions.
When Fuller questioned him about this, Grant explained with characteristic prissiness that he had not read the evidence in the case and knew nothing of the merits of the subsequent proceedings, but thought it “indecorous and contrary to the bonos mores for a professor at the Harvard Law School to rush into print while the case was sub judice.”
The Herald and that section of State Street less intransigent than the Transcript were pleased by the appointment of Fuller’s committee. Privately the more sedate Boston legal circles had always been dubious about Webster Thayer, and with the recent disbarment of the district attorneys of Suffolk and Middlesex counties, Democratic Joseph Pelletier and Republican Nathan Tufts, who could say what might not have been going on in neighboring Norfolk? Bishop Lawrence was another who had long been troubled by the thought, but now he too was satisfied. With Cousin Abbott in the State House, all would be well with the world!
Although the Advisory Committee appointment had been announced at the beginning of June, President Lowell was too occupied with his Harvard commencement activities to take any action until the end of the month. Finally, on the thirtieth, the three members met briefly in the governor’s council chamber to discuss procedure and to receive typewritten transcripts of the trial record. Two days later they drove to South Braintree to inspect the murder scene. On July 8 they opened their hearings by examining seven of the Dedham jurors. The next day they spent two hours talking with Sacco and Vanzetti. Of that meeting Vanzetti wrote Mrs. Henderson:
From the Commission interview of us I got the impression that President Lowell and President Stratton are honestly intentioned and not hostile to us by predetermination. Yet it seemed to me that in spite of their great scholarship, they had not understood certain most vicious actions of the prosecution and the iniquity of Thayer’s conduct. As for Judge Grant he is but another Thayer.
Meanwhile Governor Fuller was continuing his own daily sessions in his high-ceilinged office with the portraits of Sam Adams and John Hancock staring down from the walls. Secretary MacDonald kept his watchdog position at the Governor’s right, while the bald quizzical Wiggin sat at his left. In spite of repeated objections by the defense, Fuller insisted on complete secrecy for whatever the witnesses might wish to tell him. Otherwise, he explained, his office would be turned into a bear den. Day by day the reporters noted the parade of faces up the State House steps—the ballistics experts, including the disillusioned Professor Gill; the star witnesses from both trials. There was no way that either the governor or the Lowell Committee could compel anyone to testify. Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Goodridge did not appear, either because they refused to or because they had disappeared.
Philip Cox, the brother of Alfred Cox, the Bridgewater paymaster, wrote to Fuller that his brother “alone had an opportunity to see the man who held him up, and he declined to identify his assailant as Vanzetti.” This, it seemed to Philip Cox, “should have afforded good reason for hesitating to accept the verdict of guilty.” But what the Bridgewater paymaster had come to think in 1927, and what he said in the private interview he had with the governor, remained a tight secret.
Yet, in spite of the imposed secrecy, signs here and there made it apparent that Fuller’s mind was hardening against the two Italians. When John Richards, who, as marshal, had arrested the Morellis for their freight-yard thefts, talked with the governor, he was amazed to hear him say he discounted Madeiros’ confession. “I am convinced it was a fair trial,” he told Richards finally. When Robert Benchley came from New York to tell of his conversation with Loring Coes in which Coes—according to Benchley—had repeated Thayer’s clubhouse remark that he would “get those bastards good and proper,” Fuller asked Benchley to point out a single place in the record that indicated the trial was not fair.
“Why didn’t Vanzetti take the stand at Plymouth?” It was a question that the governor threw at defense witnesses with increasing frequency. “Why didn’t Sacco testify at Plymouth for his friend Vanzetti?” Fuller demanded of Tom O’Connor, who was trying to explain how the case originated in Chief Stewart’s mind. Each point that O’Connor made, whether it concerned Proctor’s ambiguous testimony or the Department of Justice files, Fuller and his counsel Wiggin brushed aside. O’Connor in a flash-tempered parry accused the governor of prejudging the investigation, and the two men shouted at each other until their voices reached the newspapermen in the corridor. Fuller, red-faced and furious, stood up to indicate the interview was over. Stalking from the room, he snapped at O’Connor, “Why did Boda skip?” Later O’Connor told a friend, “His hand is on the switch.”
A new volunteer defense lawyer now arrived from Pittsburgh, young Michael Angelo Musmanno, bringing a petition in behalf of the two men from the half million members of the Sons of Italy. Dramatic, impulsive, abounding in cheerful energy, with a bronze ex-serviceman’s pin in his buttonhole and wearing a poet’s brown tie, Musmanno had quit the promising beginnings of his law practice to offer all his talents to the Defense Committee. Sometimes his zeal would trip him, as when he drove down to the New Haven slum where Berardelli’s widow was living. She would not talk about the events at South Braintree and refused to sign an appeal. The most Musmanno could bring her to say was that she did not want to see innocent men punished. That was enough, however, for the poetic-minded Musmanno, who dashed to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to Fuller that echoed across Europe as far as Moscow:
I am one of the two who suffered most from the Braintree murders. I lost my husband and the father of my two children, but I would be sorry to have two innocent men put to death. I have always doubted that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and I hope that you will free them and let them go home to their families.
Several days later Sarah Berardelli denied that she had ever written or sent such a telegram. Musmanno had hoped that an appeal by Berardelli’s widow would help counteract the recent news that Parmenter’s fourteen-year-old son had been caught in South Easton, breaking and entering the railroad station. The newspapers had blamed the poverty and lack of direction of young Parmenter’s fatherless household.
Thompson forwarded to the governor a thirty-three-page analysis of the discrepancies between the newly discovered Bridgewater Pinkerton report and the Plymouth trial record. When this was not acknowledged, John Moors finally went to ask Fuller about it. Apparently nothing concerned with either the South Braintree or the Bridgewater Pinkerton reports had ever reached the governor’s desk, for he at once turned blankly to MacDonald. The secretary shrugged off Thompson’s analysis as “just a lot of stuff about a cropped mustache.”
Hard-boiled Herman’s job was to cull the governor’s Sacco-Vanzetti mail, most of which he threw away. In 1926 the Defense Committee had forwarded a protest signed by a group of English M.P.’s. When no reply came back, Gardner Jackson stormed up to the State House. His complaint got no farther than the anteroom obstacle of the secretary’s broad-topped desk. “Oh, those goddam crooks!” MacDonald told him. “Do you think we pay any attention to this stuff? It comes in here by the barrelful and we shoot it right into the fire!”
Rosina, when she appeared at Fuller’s office on July 11, quickly sensed the hostility behind his superficial politeness. He told her that Vanzetti had been asked by his lawyers to take the stand at the Plymouth trial but had refused. Young Brini, as the chief defense witness, had, he felt, merely learned an alibi by heart. After Rosina left the governor she spent some time with the Lowell Committee in the council chamber next door, then went on to Charlestown where, much troubled, she repeated Fuller’s remarks. Only she and Thompson were allowed to see the prisoners now, since according to regulations condemned men in Cherry Hill could have visits only from close relations and counsel.
Sacco brooded over what Rosina told him. On July 17, after deliberating for several days, he began a hunger strike in protest against what the Defense Committee called the “veil of secrecy that encourages the bias—economic, racial, political and religious—which has been shown all through this case.” Vanzetti joined with him to protest “the whispers of nameless informers,” explaining to Mrs. Evans:
But my hungry strike is progressing because I knew that both the Governor and the commission have ill-treated our witnesses, wrongly, and that they believe nothing of what our witnesses say. They believe, and treat well those handful of criminals, harlots, and degenerated who perjured against us.
His stomach, he complained after a few days, affected his mind and heart. He found difficulty even in writing letters. As he saw his end drawing closer he felt a longing for his own blood, for that far-off family in Villafalletto he had not seen in almost twenty years. The day after he began his strike he asked Felicani to send a telegram to his sister Luigia. Even though it might be too late now, he wanted above all to see her again before he died.
Sacco could at least see his wife, who came daily with Ines and Dante, now grown taller than his mother. The children were not allowed to see their father but waited in the warden’s office. Seven-year-old Ines wrote her first large-scrawled letter to her father, and he was so moved that even in the lassitude of his hunger strike he sat down at once to reply:
I will bring with me your little and so dearest letter and carry it right under my heart to the last day of my life. When I die, it will be buried with your father who loves you so much, as I do also your brother Dante and holy dear mother.... It is the most golden present that you could have given to me or that I could have wished for in these sad days.
As he wrote he found himself caught up in an imagined idyll:
It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and singing through the verdent fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to your mother’s embrace.
The same I have wished to see for other poor girls, and their brothers, happy with their mother and father as I dreamed for us—but it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes saddened very badly your father’s soul.[26]
When Fuller came for the first time to Charlestown to interview the three condemned men he talked only briefly with the sullen Madeiros and not at all with Sacco, who shook hands but told him courteously that they had nothing to say to each other. With Vanzetti Fuller spent over an hour and a half, breaking off only to dash back to a State House reception for Lindbergh, who had arrived in Boston that afternoon on his triumphal tour of the country. Vanzetti and Fuller were open with each other. Fuller pointed out what he considered the most damaging facts against Vanzetti: his failure to take the stand at Plymouth, the revolver found on him, his quick convictions by two juries. Vanzetti gave his interpretations of these things and then quite typically began to talk of other matters unrelated to himself. As they sat together in the warden’s office the two men found each other curiously sympathetic. When Fuller broke off the interview he promised to return later. “What an attractive man!” he observed to Warden Hendry as he hurried away. Reporters noticed that the governor appeared nervous as he headed down the walk to his waiting Packard. His nervousness was probably not so much because of the interrupted interview as at the thought of keeping America’s hero waiting. Getting into the car he knocked his hat off.
Thompson wanted Vanzetti to break his fast so that he would be better able to talk with Fuller on his next visit. Vanzetti finally agreed to drink a cup of tea, and later took some coffee and milk. Fuller spent most of July 26 in South Braintree inspecting the scene of the shootings and driving over the escape route with Chief Stewart. In the evening he again interviewed Vanzetti, arriving at Charlestown just after nine and staying two hours. It was not time enough for Vanzetti. He asked if he might write Fuller at length, and Fuller, with salesman’s affability, agreed. In this second interview Vanzetti felt a growing confidence in the governor that he showed in his letter next day to Alice Stone Blackwell:
He make me the impression of being just as you say of him; an honest man, as he understand it, and sincere, courageous, stubborn man but well intentioned at bottom and in a way, clever. And I like to tell you that he gave me a good heartfull sake hand, as I lef. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe that a man like that is going to burn us on a case like ours.
A heat wave seared the city. Through two weeks the Lowell Committee interviewed its witnesses. Thompson again and in vain asked for public hearings. The committee agreed, however, that with the exception of Judge Thayer, Chief Justice Hall, the district attorney, and the jurors, all of whom would be examined privately, counsel for both sides might suggest witnesses and be present to question them.
Most of the witnesses the committee examined had already been interviewed by the governor. Sometimes, as Rosina had, they merely stepped from the governor’s office to the council chamber.
Day after day the three old men in coats and stiff collars sat at their wedge-shaped mahogany desks while the witnesses filed damply by and Thompson and Assistant District Attorney Ranney struck sparks from each other. Lowell dominated the sessions, with Stratton silent and Grant fretting at his subordination. In the city four people died of the heat. The grass on the Common where the derelicts sprawled in alcoholic stupor—impervious to Prohibition—had turned to cocoa matting. Through the open windows of the council chamber came the summer hum of the city, broken faintly by the yelps of urchins in the Frog Pond. Within that Federalist room dominated by the spaniel-featured autocrat it was hard to realize that the matter of debate was two men’s lives.
Katzmann, after testifying privately, voluntarily submitted to being cross-examined by Thompson. Thompson accused the district attorney of having arranged the Plymouth trial first so that Vanzetti would appear in Dedham as a convicted felon. Katzmann said it was merely the chance that there happened to be a June term in Plymouth and none in Dedham. In the matter of Captain Proctor he would not positively deny that the captain thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but doubted he ever said so.
Katzmann was followed—at Lowell’s request—by Professor Guadagni and Bosco, the editor of La Notizia. Lowell particularly wanted to ask them about their Dedham testimony that they, along with Dentamore, had met Sacco in Giordani’s Café on the day of the crime and had remembered the date afterward because a banquet had been given at the Franciscan Priory for the editor of the Transcript that same day. In reading over the trial record Lowell had noticed that although Dentamore had said he had just come from the banquet, Guadagni said it was to be held in the evening. Struck by the discrepancy, Lowell had gone through the files of the Transcript and discovered that a group of Italians had given a dinner for Editor Williams at Frascati’s on May 13, eight days after Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. Thinking that there might possibly have been two banquets, Lowell telegraphed Williams, who happened to be in Washington. Williams replied that there had been only one.
With this information concealed like a time bomb, Lowell faced Guadagni while Bosco waited outside. Guadagni now appeared uncertain whether the banquet had been held before or after the talk in Giordani’s Café. When Lowell showed him the account of the banquet in the Transcript, he concluded that it must have taken place the night before and added ruefully, “I was so sure of that day.” Then Lowell set off his bomb, pointing out that the paper was dated May 14. The banquet had taken place May 13! How, then, could Guadagni have discussed it a month before? Lowell felt he had the proof in his hand that the story was a fraud, concocted by Guadagni, Bosco, and Dentamore to create an alibi for a fellow anarchist.
Thompson was shattered in his dismay. Guadagni’s lie seemed too flagrant, too utterly exposed. “If it was deliberate I do not think you would see me around here very much longer,” he told Lowell. “If I did not think these men were innocent I should not be fooling away my time. And I would not resort to any means to justify an end, just because I was convinced these men were innocent, any more than if I thought they were guilty.”
“Of course not, Mr. Thompson,” the other assured him urbanely. Guadagni stood there, beaten down, admitting now that the banquet had had nothing to do with his meeting Sacco, that he had accepted the idea from Dentamore, that it was a mistake.
Bosco was of sterner fiber. When he appeared, not only did he insist to the aroused and hostile committee that there had been a banquet for Commandante Williams on April 15 but that he had printed an account of it on the sixteenth in La Notizia. Lowell stared at him with contempt. “It is perfectly obvious that is not so,” he remarked coldly. Thompson could scarcely control himself as he turned on the still-defiant Italian:
“You can trust Mr. Lowell for that. He has investigated it. He knows there was no banquet on the fifteenth.”
When Bosco remained adamant, Lowell ordered him to bring in the files of La Notizia for April and May 1920. Next morning Bosco and a revived Guadagni appeared with the paper of April 16, 1920. There on the front page was the vindicating notice:
Yesterday the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street gave a luncheon in honor of the new Commandante Williams, editor of the Boston Evening Transcript.
Lowell sent the Italians out of the room and put a telephone call through to Williams. This time the Transcript editor recalled the earlier luncheon. Lowell turned to the stenographer, who had begun to record the conversation, and told him not to take down “colloquies.” He summoned Bosco and Guadagni back, shook hands with them, told them he believed them to be honest, and that he regretted his mistake.[27]
Thompson tried to impress on the committee that since the alibi had been reestablished, it must again be taken seriously. Lowell did not reply. Grant remarked that “You are just back where you were before.”
Lottie Tatillo, though presented to the committee a few days later as a new witness, could scarcely be considered new by either side. Both prosecution and defense had been aware of her and her story since the summer of 1920, when she made a statement to Brouillard and Stewart that on the morning of April 15 she had seen Sacco and Vanzetti in South Braintree.
Everyone in South Braintree knew Lottie by her maiden name of Packard. In 1901, when she was fourteen, she had gone to work in the stitching room of Rice & Hutchins. Pretty and wayward, full of wild stories, she would take the path down behind the millpond evenings with any good-looking young fellow from the factory. “Twelve ounces to the pound,” Frank Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, described her. “A nut. She is crazy and has been for years,” was Police Chief Gallivan’s opinion.
After Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Lottie told Jackson that she had seen Sacco in South Braintree the day of the murders and remembered he used to work in Rice & Hutchins. Later she elaborated on this story to John Shea, the local policeman, who passed her on to Stewart and Brouillard. She claimed she had recognized Sacco’s picture in the paper after his arrest because she had known him in 1915; when he was working in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins. On the morning of April 15 on her way to lunch she had passed him on Pearl Street standing near a shiny Buick touring car. She noticed him bite his lip and then all of a sudden it came back to her that he was the fellow named Sacco who used to work in the factory as a laster. She would never forget him because once in a temper he had thrown a last across the room at a boy and it had struck her in the foot.
If Lottie’s story was true, she would stand out as the most important witness of the murder day, the only one who had known Sacco previously and had then seen him at the scene of the crime. And if she had told her story to Jackson or Shea the day after the holdup, when no one in South Braintree had even suspected Sacco, that would indeed have made an almost watertight case for the prosecution. But Lottie had said nothing, nothing to Carlos Goodridge or anyone else, until after Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and their pictures had appeared in the paper. Stewart could find no record of Sacco’s ever having worked at Rice & Hutchins. It is of course possible that Lottie had seen Sacco during the week or so he worked in the factory under the name of Mosmacotelli in October 1917, and if before the arrests she had identified the man she had seen in the stitching room then with the man she claimed she saw standing by the Buick on April 15, 1920, this would have come close to being conclusive. Even after the arrests such an identification from a more stable person might have carried weight. But, as LaBrecque, the Quincy reporter, later explained to the committee, Lottie would tell one story one night and another the next and make so many irresponsible statements there was no use believing her. Stewart and Brouillard had long ago made the same discovery. Whenever they tried to check up on her account, she would take each question as an insult, denouncing both them and Sacco and Vanzetti incoherently. Finally Stewart gave up. “A blister,” he decided, as he struck her off his list of witnesses.
In the autumn of 1920 Moore had got wind of Lottie’s potentially dangerous testimony and sent down a Joseph Mina from East Boston to see what he could find out about her. Mirra, under the name of Joseph Meyers, got himself a job as a vamper in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins and found it easy enough to strike up an acquaintance with the accommodating Lottie. He made several dates with her, taking her to the pictures at Gordon’s Olympia in Boston and to the amusement park at Revere Beach. Each time he took her out he tried to pump her about Sacco and Vanzetti. One night when he took her to his house in East Boston for supper and felt he had broken the ice sufficiently, he asked her if she would tell what she knew to a lawyer friend of his. She agreed, and the two of them went to Moore’s Tremont Row office.
Moore and several others were waiting with a stenographer when Lottie and Mirra arrived. Lottie was voluble. She again said that she had known Sacco in 1915. The morning of the murders when she passed him on Pearl Street he was standing near the Buick wearing a derby,[28] and looking as if he were in a hurry. Vanzetti, whom she had never seen before, was standing on the other side of the street and called across to Sacco as she passed: “I wish you would hurry up and get this over. I have an appointment at 3:30 this afternoon in Providence to dig clams.” After Sacco was arrested she said she had seen his picture and asked the other girls in the factory: “What has Sacco done?” They told her he was being held for murder.
Lottie told Moore she had informed Shea, the day after the crime, that one of the men by the car was the one who had thrown the last at her. But, she told Moore, she did not want to testify in court. She had not come to ask him for money, but she saw no way of avoiding going on the stand except to leave the state for a while. She continued, according to the stenographic record, “I am pretty sure that Mr. Sacco was the man who done the murder. It is his wife that holds me back. I think she needs him.... I’ll tell you the truth. I am not a girl crazy for money or anything like that.”
“How much are you willing to suggest that you want?” Moore asked her finally.
“I don’t know,” she told him calculatingly. “I just came to help you on the defense case.”
Lottie’s story as she presented it to the Lowell Committee had altered singularly since that November evening, seven years earlier, at Tremont Row. Whenever Thompson challenged her, she stormed at him until her voice rang down the corridors. “I don’t remember,” she replied at one point to a question of Lowell’s, “my head is too full of music and things like that, to remember.” She now insisted that Sacco had worked for Rice & Hutchins in 1908 at the time of a strike—it was then and only then she had known him. That was the time when he had struck her with the last, and she had thought to herself: “That man will do something before he dies.” She denied ever having told Moore she had known Sacco in 1915, or that when she saw him on the street in 1920 he was wearing a derby. He was, she told Lowell, bareheaded. When Lowell first asked her whether she had seen Sacco on April 15 she replied: “I don’t say I saw him. I will never say I saw him, and I don’t think it was him now.” A few minutes later, however, she revived her story of seeing him by the car with Vanzetti across the street talking about clams, this time with Parmenter, the paymaster, standing in the background. After she came back from lunch she had told Frank Jackson she had seen Sacco. She did not tell Shea about this until after the men’s arrest.
When Thompson produced her 1920 statement that she had told Shea about Sacco the day after the crime, she raged: “No, I did not tell it to John Shea. How many times do you want me to answer that question? I will tell the truth at the Divine bar of Justice, and that has got more power than you have got. You have got a witness here that you cannot make waver.”
Judge Grant, trying to calm her, brought her a glass of water and accidentally spilled some down her back. Still trying to be helpful, he suggested she might have lunch now. “I don’t want any lunch,” she snapped, glaring at Thompson. “I have got enough lunch listening to this man here, he’s good enough lunch for anybody.”
When Thompson remarked that she had gone to Moore voluntarily, her voice rose to a shriek: “Who came to Moore voluntarily? You lie, I did not; I was brought to Moore, for Sacco and Vanzetti to do a dirty, rotten, nasty thing! I will make you prove your statement.”
She now insisted that Moore had offered her five hundred dollars to leave the state, an offer she had indignantly refused. Thompson sent her into another tantrum when he suggested she was trying to get money from Moore. When Lowell finally dismissed her, she left the room still spluttering.
A few days later Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, made his appearance in the council chamber. He admitted that Lottie had told him of seeing Sacco, but only after Sacco was in jail. Before his arrest she had never mentioned Sacco to anyone. Only afterward had she come out with her story of talking with him on the street the morning of April 15. Jackson had no memory of Sacco’s working in the factory, and there was no record of his having worked there.
Lottie, following her turbulent session with Thompson, swung round again a few hours later and told a sympathetic Post reporter that she was now convinced that the man she had seen was not Sacco and that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
One of the new discoveries claimed by the defense concerned the cap found by Berardelli’s body—the cap that the prosecution had tried to prove belonged to Sacco. Williams had pointed out the tear in the lining, implying that Sacco had made it by hanging his cap on a nail at the factory. It was a corroborative point mentioned several times during the trial and later by Judge Thayer in his ruling on the Madeiros motion.
Not until shortly before the Lowell Committee began its meetings was the point again raised. Then Tom O’Connor, combing South Braintree for new evidence, had the thought that he might pick up something from the now-retired Chief Gallivan. He found him weeding in his garden and quite willing to talk. The first thing they talked about was the cap Loring had picked up.
Gallivan said that the Saturday after the murder Fraher called him from Rice & Hutchins to say he had a cap found on the street after the murders. That evening Gallivan went to pick it up. The autumn before, he had been able to identify the remains of a man who had hanged himself in the Braintree woods by the name inked into the lining of the man’s cap. With that identification in mind, he ripped a hole in the lining of the cap Fraher gave him. Finding neither name nor marks, he tossed the cap under the seat of his car. There it stayed for a week or two until John Scott of the State Police asked him for it.
For O’Connor the tear in the cap seemed a tear in the very fabric of the prosecution’s case. He gave his information to Thompson, and Gallivan was summoned before the Lowell Committee. The ex-chief readily admitted that there was no hole in the cap’s lining before he got his hands on it, and said he told Scott he himself had made the tear. Tampering with evidence was a concept alien to his naïve mind; he still could see nothing wrong in what he had done. Katzmann, when the tear in the cap was brought to his attention, insisted that this was the first time he had ever heard of it—that if he had known about it during the trial, he would have explained it to the jury. Although Thompson argued that an important piece of evidence relied on by the prosecution had now turned out to be false, and that this alone should be sufficient grounds for a new trial or for clemency, the committee members did not appear impressed.
The confidentially verbose Dr. Hamilton again came from Auburn to defend his ballistics theses before the committee and to repeat his conversation with the conscience-stricken Proctor. Whether or not the committee had read the Dedham file on Hamilton, Ranney obviously had, for he ticked off the ex-druggist’s extraordinary expertise and ended with a reference to the Stielow case that made Hamilton jump. Major Goddard’s apparently definitive report had been read, and the committee was also much more aware than the jury had been that the six obsolete Winchester bullets found on Sacco were similar to Bullet III.
Thompson now produced Wilbur Turner, a self-designated criminologist, who had just examined the four Berardelli bullets at Dedham and found “a tremendous difference” between the markings on the base of Bullet III and the others, “as though they were made with a different tool or scratched with a different instrument.” And Thompson spelled out for the record his bitter conviction that Captain Proctor had substituted a fake bullet test-fired from Sacco’s gun for the genuine bullet taken by Dr. Magrath from Berardelli’s body.
The hot days slipped by, the old autocrat met his two colleagues with austere condescension each morning, and the parade of witnesses continued. Lowell felt—he would feel this way for the rest of his life—that he was performing a disagreeable civic duty because such was the obligation of a Lowell. In essence the committee bearing his name was conducting a second trial, but it had without his conscious awareness become a trial in which the Commonwealth was the defendant. What the Lowell Committee was taking on itself to decide was not whether Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial and were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but whether the presumably innocent Commonwealth had beyond a reasonable doubt erred. In the beginning Thompson and Ehrmann, as Harvard graduates, had pinned their hopes on Lowell, but after the Guadagni-Bosco episode Lowell began to seem more the challenger than the judge. The two lawyers had the uneasy feeling that evidence and argument were becoming useless, and even considered whether or not they should boycott the hearings.
The doom of our clients seemed as inevitable as that of Socrates [Ehrmann wrote afterward], and we were unwilling to continue in the farce of fair treatment. We were diverted from this course, however, by two outstanding jurists [Dean Pound and Professor Frankfurter], who inspired us with some semblance of hope. Theirs was perhaps the greater wisdom, since, had we withdrawn, it would have been said that we had lost faith in the cause of our clients.
By Saturday, July 23, the committee members had run through their witnesses, from Cox the paymaster to Rosen the peddler, Gould, the Hayes and Kennedy girls—everyone they thought might add anything new to the case. Lincoln Wadsworth, still working for Iver Johnson, and afraid that his Dedham testimony had been misinterpreted, told the committee that although the revolver found on Vanzetti might have been Berardelli’s, “there are thousands of times more chances that it was not than that it was.”
Lowell spent the week end writing a report of the proceedings, which in token deference to his colleagues he referred to as an abstract. Monday the committee spent listening to the closing arguments of Thompson and Ehrmann, followed by Ranney for the Commonwealth. Then, when the humid council chamber was at last empty, Lowell handed typewritten copies of his abstract to his colleagues, saying off-handedly that it was just a suggestion, of course, but would they look it over?
The next day the three met privately in the Faculty Room of Harvard’s University Hall. The autocrat of the faculty table having made up his mind in writing, all he wanted from the silent physicist and the garrulous poetaster was confirmation. They spent that day and the next discussing minor details of the abstract. “So fully did we find ourselves in agreement,” Grant admitted later, “that though many alterations were made in it, they were chiefly of phraseology and shades of expression rather than the substantive point of view.”
On the afternoon of July 27 at ten minutes past five Lowell, Stratton, and Grant, sphinx-faced, entered the executive offices of the State House, each carrying a brown manila folder with a signed copy of the revised abstract-report.