FOOTNOTES:
[25] An English writer, Edward Shanks, thought that these paragraphs compared with the Gettysburg Address but doubted that Vanzetti had ever uttered them. Stong defended himself by saying that he could not write that well, that he had supplied only the exclamation marks, and that these would have been better left out. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the internal evidence of that interview is sufficient to convince any honorably disposed person of its authenticity. The change of number in the pronoun was beautifully characteristic of Vanzetti. ‘I’ unmarked, unknown, a failure—but ‘Our’ career, triumph, work for tolerance and justice.” This version that Stong gave in the New York World of May 13, 1927, differs, nevertheless, in several places from the one he printed in 1949 in his essay on the case in The Aspirin Age.
[26] The original of this letter is not available. The published version has undoubtedly been edited.
[27] The transcript of the committee hearings merely states that Bosco appeared as requested on July 15 with editions of La Notizia. The omission from the record of what followed has been much criticized by defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti.
[28] A photograph of Sacco reproduced in the papers after his arrest showed him wearing a derby.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AUGUST 1927
Governor Fuller continued hearing witnesses until the end of July. Obviously he was not going to draw his own conclusions or even appear to have drawn them before taking his cue from the Lowell Committee. In an interview with Jackson and Felicani he asked them flatly how he could be expected to believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling eels on December 24. “I am a businessman,” he told them. “I am used to proof before I decide anything. There isn’t a single document in the case proving that Vanzetti sold eels. There’s only the word of his Italian friends.”
Spurred by the governor’s disbelief and furnished with a sketch map by Vanzetti, Felicani and Ehrmann made the rounds of the waterfront wholesale fish dealers. Finally, at 112 Atlantic Avenue, they found that one of the partners of Corso & Gambino remembered shipping fish to Vanzetti in 1919. The firm had then been Corso & Cannizzo. Ehrmann and Felicani dug away for hours among Corso’s dusty account books until at last they uncovered what they had almost given up hope of finding, an American Express Company receipt showing that on Saturday, December 20, 1919, a forty-pound barrel of eels had been shipped with C.O.D. charges of $21.79 to B. Vanzetti, Plymouth.
The eels must have been delivered either on Monday or Tuesday. Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, had testified they arrived “either the twenty-second or the twenty-third, I do not remember exactly.” She said the expressman had brought the barrel at about half-past nine in the morning, when Vanzetti was out, and as she had no money to pay him he had taken it away and come back later. “After one Monday Vanzetti and the express came back” was the awkward way the interpreter translated her explanation. Ehrmann took “after one Monday” to mean “the following day.” Vanzetti would have received his eels on Tuesday, spent Tuesday night cleaning them, and on Wednesday—the morning of the Bridgewater holdup attempt—he would have been busy making his deliveries. Ehrmann thought at last he had found the key to unlock the doors of the state prison. He and Felicani took the yellowed express receipt to Thompson who, in Fuller’s absence, handed it over to the governor’s secretary—and that was the last they heard of it.
Sunday, the last day of July, the heat wave broke in drizzling rain. A crowd of three thousand, divided between sympathizers and the usual Sunday afternoon floaters, attended a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting on the Charles Street Mall of Boston Common. Alfred Baker Lewis, the wealthy pince-nezed perennial Socialist candidate for governor, introduced the speakers: Gardner Jackson, Harry Canter, Mary Donovan, and Professor Guadagni. Canter called for a general strike, and Mary Donovan shouted in a trembling voice that if they executed those two innocent men they could execute her too. The fiery words spluttered out damply in the rain; the crowd remained inert.
Fuller spent the week end at his summer estate at Little Boar’s Head, Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Two days before, his son Alvan, Jr., had to be operated on suddenly for appendicitis, and for a day or so the governor thought he might have to delay his decision. However, just before leaving the city he promised reporters that he would make it known Wednesday evening. The feeling in the corridors of the State House, in State Street, on Newspaper Row, among those in the know was that the governor would end up by granting a new trial. Louis Stark’s dispatch to the New York Times concluded:
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the chair on the date set. Neither will they be pardoned. Further reprieve pending steps by the Massachusetts Legislature looking to a new trial was indicated as the solution which Governor Fuller will place before the Executive Council when it meets tomorrow night.
Whatever the rumors of a reprieve, there was no sign of it as August began. Imperturbably the clockwork mechanism of the law advanced another notch as, on the night of August 2, Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros were moved to the isolation of the death house. The day before that move, Vanzetti had tried to persuade Sacco to give up his hunger strike, but the other refused, saying there was no use in making himself fat to be killed.
The transfer was made secretly, the guards waiting until ten minutes after lights out before coming to the cells to take the condemned men away. Down the short flight of iron stairs guards and prisoners clattered to the darkness of the outer yard and then diagonally across the inlaid brick to the narrow passage between the north wing extension and the license-plate shop. “In coming, I got a glance to the nighty, starry sky,” Vanzetti wrote. “Hit was so long I did seen it before—and thought it was my last glance to the stars.”
There were only three cells in the blank-walled death house. The white-tiled floors had a black line painted six feet in front of each cell beyond which no visitor might step. Sacco and Vanzetti, locked up there, could not see each other, but they could talk back and forth. Each cell was lit by a lamp outside the bars and contained a cot, a chair, a table, and a toilet. The perspective of the antiseptic room concluded in a small gray door leading to the execution chamber.
Sacco’s reaction to the death house was to pace up and down, his energy undiminished even though he had not eaten for over two weeks. Vanzetti, who again refused food, tried to immerse himself in The Rise of American Civilization. Only Madeiros seemed unaffected by the change. Torpid, outwardly indifferent, he ate enormously but gave scarcely any other sign of life. When Warden Hendry offered to pay his mother’s way to Boston, he said he did not want to see her.
Sunday’s rain continued into Monday, leaving the city and the State House streaked with fog. Fuller returned from New Hampshire early in the morning and again told the waiting reporters his decision would be ready on Wednesday. During the morning he talked with Jackson, Moro, and other members of the Defense Committee. In the afternoon he spent several hours with the Brockton policemen, Connolly and Vaughn, and after they left he conferred with John McAnarney. During the day he sent for Judge Thayer, who was spending his vacation at Ogunquit, Maine. Thayer arrived at the State House a little after six. The reporters noted that the governor’s mood seemed genial. They thought it a good omen for the prisoners.
Tuesday morning the governor was closeted with Assistant District Attorney Ranney. At lunch time he informed reporters that he had seen 102 witnesses besides those from the Plymouth trial. That day, however, the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti was overshadowed by the noontime news from the Summer White House in the Black Hills of South Dakota where Calvin Coolidge had just announced: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” Boston political gossips at once recalled how the vacillating governor had made himself nationally known as Law and Order Coolidge by what seemed, at least outside Massachusetts, to have been his firmness in handling the 1919 police strike. Perhaps there would be a Law and Order Fuller now, another President from the Bay State.[29]
The week between the submission of the Lowell Committee’s report and the governor’s decision was one of vexing suspense that added to the growth of Sacco-Vanzetti militancy all over the world. Even the apolitical sports-minded newspaper readers in America, who had remained so far indifferent, could no longer restrain their curiosity as to the outcome of this mortal contest. Life and death, the seven-year issue with all its implications, now lay in the stubby hands of the ex-bicycle mechanic.
Correspondents from the various newspaper services had come to Boston and set up their headquarters in the State House press gallery next to the balcony entrance of the House of Representatives. For the first time in Massachusetts history permission was given to run in telegraph wires from outside. The news for the first three days, however, was scant: the names of a few last witnesses, the rare glimpse of the governor, a brush-off remark from Hard-boiled Herman. Time seemed out of focus. The newsmen waited in the corridor outside the executive chambers, wandered through the Hall of Flags, made notes in the House balcony under the suspended Sacred Cod totem.
Wednesday, August 3, broke fair in Boston, with the fog bank receding along the line of harbor islands. Fuller put in a brief appearance at the State House, told the reporters he would give them the news at 8:30 that night, then announced he was leaving town to put the last touches on his decision. Actually he went no farther than a suite at the Ritz-Carlton at the other end of the Public Gardens, where he shut himself up with a Boston newspaperman, Edward Whiting, who did the actual writing, since the self-made governor was not capable of such sustained literary effort.
Just after dusk a crowd of several hundred gathered across the street from the State House, looking up at the five lighted windows in the left wing of the otherwise darkened building until dispersed by the police. At the Hanover Street defense headquarters the two littered rooms were filled with tense silent figures. Mary Donovan sat by the telephone to answer calls in English, Moro took over when the caller was Italian. Frankfurter, in his shirtsleeves, squatted on a bale of papers. Gardner Jackson kept dashing to and from the State House. Most of the others were Italians from the North End. The thin light from an unshaded fixture drew out the lettering on the wall posters in bas-relief: JUSTICE IS DEAD in German; CALVARY OF SACCO AND VANZETTI in Italian; a Mexican poster demanding LIBERTY AND JUSTICE.
At the State House a score of reporters were waiting at the double-doored entrance to the executive chambers when Fuller finally reappeared at 8:26, his plump face set and unsmiling above his starched collar. He brushed past, impervious to questions. At 8:50 he reappeared, and read out a statement he had scribbled on the back of an envelope:
“I am very sorry not to oblige you with an interview. I can truthfully say that I am very tired and I trust the report will speak for itself. I would prefer not to indulge in any supplementary statement at this time.” He promised that copies of the decision would be distributed at 9:30.
Nine-thirty passed into ten, with still no sign from behind the closed doors. There was the same impersonal sense of tension as when a jury is out, the same unreality of the immediate moment. The reporters walked up and down the darkened echoing corridors, talking and smoking. Most of the crowd driven away from the State House had drifted downtown to Newspaper Row. Hundreds gathered in front of the Globe and Post buildings to watch the blackboard bulletins. It was a strangely quiet crowd. A Globe reporter looking down from the second floor at the upturned heads wondered how anyone could tell what they were thinking. The director of Station WEEI had held an announcer ready all evening to go on the air with a special bulletin; now that the closing hour of eleven was approaching, he debated whether he should shut down. Mary Donovan and Moro at defense headquarters kept repeating over the telephone, “No news, Nothing yet.” Louis Stark, pacing the State House corridor, began to doubt whether he would be able to meet the Times’ 11:30 deadline.
Finally at 11:25 the double doors opened and Hard-boiled Herman appeared with several clerks who carried copies of the decision in sealed envelopes, each addressed with the name of a newspaper. Stark sprinted for the marble stairs, ripping open his envelope and flipping through the pages:
I believe ... Sacco and Vanzetti ... had a fair trial.
The telegraph operator was still holding the wire open to the Times city room. “Bulletin,” Stark shouted as he reached the door of the press gallery. “They die!”
The words flashed across the world from the ten telegraph wires. Within minutes they were chalked up on the Globe bulletin board, broadcast to New England by the waiting WEEI announcer, headlined on the morning editions that would shortly whip off the presses.
The morning papers carried the full text of the decision. Fuller announced that he had set himself three tasks: to see whether the jury trial was fair, whether the accused were entitled to a new trial, and whether they were guilty or not guilty. Of Thayer he wrote:
I see no evidence of prejudice in his conduct of the trial. That he had an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused after hearing the evidence is natural and inevitable.
The governor did not consider that any of the supplementary motions presented valid reasons for granting a new trial. He gave no weight to Madeiros’ confession, nor was he impressed with the latter’s knowledge of the South Braintree crime. His conclusion and, he added, the unanimous conclusion of his advisory committee was that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.
Warden Hendry kept the news from the prisoners until the next morning when Thompson arrived with Rosina and Felicani. While the other two stood behind him with bent heads, Thompson quietly told the prisoners that they must die. Sacco appeared unruffled. “I told you so,” he called to Vanzetti in the next cell. Vanzetti seemed stunned. “I just can’t believe it,” was all he said. Madeiros said nothing at all.
After Rosina had left, Sacco sat down and wrote an open letter to his “Friends and Comrades.” Over the years his neat script had become increasingly stylized, and in this moment the copperplate regularity of his lines could have served for a formal invitation:
From the death cell we are just inform from the defense committee that the governor Fuller he has desede to kill us Ag. the 10th we our not suprised for this news because we know the capitalist class hard without any mercy the good soldiers of the rivolutions. We are proud for death and fall as all the good anarchist can fall. It is up to you know o, brothers comrades! as I have tell you yesterday that your only that can save us because we have never had faith at the governor for we have always know that the gov. Fuller—Thayer and Katzmann are the murders.
Vanzetti’s blasting reaction found its outlet in a scarcely legible scrawl, the direct opposite of Sacco’s passive acceptance:
Governor Alvan T. Fuller is a murderor as Thayer, Katzmann, the State perjurors and all the other. He sake hand with me like a brother, make me believe he was honestly intentioned and that he had not sent the three carbarn-boy to have no escuse to save us.
Now, igoring and denia all the proofs of or innocence and insult us and murder us we are innocent.
This is the way of plutocracy against liberty, against the people. Revenge our blood. We die for Anarcy. Long life Anarcy.
Yet by afternoon Vanzetti had so recovered himself that he was able to give Mrs. Evans a remarkably detached view of Fuller.
We are his opposite all at all and all in all, while our enemies are affines to him in all-most everything. Consciousely, subconsciousely and unconsciousely he cannot escape to be tremendously influenced and predisposed against us. But he gave me the impression he is sincere; had made great efforts to learn the truth and was not settled, at least deliberately, against us, before to begin his inquiry.
If he is sending us to death, it does not matter how honestly the Governor can be convinced of our guiltiness, his conviction will not make us guilty—we are and will remain innocent.
Fuller’s adverse decision was for Thompson the end of the road. There might be hasty appeals to the state and federal supreme courts, all the delaying paraphernalia of certiorari and habeas corpus, with at best the addition of a few extra weeks to lives he was convinced were forfeit. Thompson felt a profounder sense of failure than Moore’s, for his world had failed—that pleasantly circumscribed world of Boston into which he had fitted so easily. He had believed that the venerable institutions of Massachusetts to which he gave his allegiance would render justice even to two obscure foreigners, would rectify the aberrations of a prejudiced trial and the blind partisanship of a bigoted judge. Instead, the institutions had savaged these men, and now were preparing to annihilate them. In these institutions and in the comfortable society they guarded he could no longer believe. A Harvard class day would never seem the same to him again, a Sunday sermon at the sedately familiar Church of the Redeemer would never sound the same. The brick fronts of Beacon Hill would have lost their mellowness. A traditionalist still, in the years that followed he faced Boston and complained of the lack of a responsible aristocracy that could restrain what he called “the shopkeeper’s mentality.” He tried to compensate for his disbelief in his class by participating in liberal causes, taking the stump at elections, speaking at legislative hearings and in the Massachusetts Judicial Council. But the gesture had lost its meaning, the spark had gone from his life.
He had already told Frankfurter that he would not continue. On receiving the news of the governor’s decision, he and Ehrmann sent the Defense Committee their formal resignation, explaining:
We feel that the defendants are now entitled to have the benefit of the judgment of counsel who can take up the case untrammelled by the commitments of the past and less disturbed than we are by a sense of injustice.
Frankfurter at once telephoned Arthur Hill to say that he had a most serious matter to discuss with him. They lunched at the Somerset Club, then crossed Beacon Street and sat on a bench on the Common overlooking the Frog Pond. Frankfurter asked Hill if he would undertake the final appeal of the Sacco-Vanzetti case to the Supreme Court. Hill did not share Thompson’s belief in the men’s innocence, but he did believe they had not had a fair trial. He felt he could not refuse to make the effort on their behalf.
First of all he persuaded Elias Field and Richard Evarts to join him as junior counsel. Then on the morning of August 5 he called a conference in his office of Frankfurter, Ehrmann, and Musmanno. It was a conference of desperation, as Hill, beneath his assured, impervious exterior, was well aware. So it was felt by everyone present except for the buoyant Musmanno. There were only a few legal maneuvers left, and time was running out like quicksilver from a broken thermometer. Hastily they evolved a program. They would file a motion in Dedham for a new trial and revocation of sentence on the grounds of Judge Thayer’s prejudice. They would request Chief Justice Hall of the Superior Court to assign a judge other than Thayer to hear the motion. They would petition Governor Fuller for a stay of execution. They would file a motion in the Supreme Court for a writ of error, a writ of habeas corpus, and a stay of execution.
Musmanno arrived next morning at the clerk of court’s office with a sheaf of affidavits from Mrs. Bernkopf, Mrs. Rantoul, Frank Sibley, George Crocker, Robert Benchley, Professor Richardson, and Chief Gallivan. He had also dug up a new witness of the South Braintree crime, Candido Di Bona, whose peculiar version of the event was that the driver of the Buick had been a gray-haired man, the two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence had been about eighteen years old, and that there had been a fourth man wearing a soldier’s uniform and carrying a rifle. Hill and Field, arguing on Thayer’s unsuitability, got nowhere at all with Chief Justice Hall, who retired into legal phraseology to observe that “precedent and established practice require that the said motions in the said cause should be heard by the judge who had presided at the original trial thereof.” He then directed that the motions should be heard before Judge Thayer on Monday, August 8.
Musmanno had more to think of than his affidavits as he drove to Dedham on that August Saturday, for the morning papers were splashed with accounts of a series of bombings that had wrecked four New York subway and elevated stations the night before. Between 11:17 and 11:37 tremendous explosions had occurred at Times Square, and on Fourth Avenue at Thirty-third, at Twenty-eighth and at Twenty-third streets, destroying surface kiosks, blowing sidewalks into the air, and shattering windows a hundred yards away. Only one person was killed, but numbers were injured. The same night the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was bombed, as was the house of the mayor of Baltimore. None of the bombers was ever discovered—in that respect the police kept their record unblemished.
Two days later bombs did heavy damage in Utica, New York. News came—undoubtedly exaggerated—of a wave of bombing overseas. Whether or not the bombings were the result of Governor Fuller’s decision, a renewal of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, most Americans thought that they were. That week Massachusetts businessmen took out two hundred million dollars’ worth of bomb and riot insurance. Boston police were placed on a bomb alert, all leaves and vacations were canceled, and the police commissioner ordered three hundred rapid-fire guns for the riot squad. Filene’s sent John Dever away on an indefinite paid vacation.
The full text of the Lowell Committee report was published in the Sunday papers of August 7. Those concerned with the case spent the better part of the day analyzing it. It was a curiously ambiguous document. In regard to Sacco it concluded:
The Committee are of the opinion that Sacco was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In reaching this conclusion they are aware that it involves a disbelief in the evidence of his alibi at Boston, but in view of all the evidence they do not believe he was there that day.
As for Vanzetti:
The alibi ... is decidedly weak. One of the witnesses, Rosen, seems to the Committee to have been shown by the cross-examination to be lying at the trial; another, Mrs. Brini, had sworn to an alibi for him in the Bridgewater case, and two more witnesses did not seem certain of the date until they had talked it over.... Four persons testified that they had seen him.... His face is much more unusual and more easily remembered, than that of Sacco. On the whole, we are of the opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
What had the Committee meant by the phrase “on the whole” which seemed in itself to imply reservations about “reasonable doubt”? Did the Committee still feel some residual doubt in regard to Vanzetti? That was just one of the enigmas of the report. As for Madeiros:
His ignorance of what happened is extraordinary, and much of it cannot be attributed to a desire to shield his associates, for it had no connection therewith.... Indeed, in his whole testimony there is only one fact that can be checked ... his statement that after the murder the car stopped to ask the way at the house of Mrs. Hewins. As this house was not far from ... where Madeiros subsequently lived, he might very well have heard the fact mentioned.
With Grant a judge and Lowell a historian, the committee’s ignorance of the law was at times astonishing:
The impression has gone abroad that Madeiros confessed committing the murder at South Braintree. Strangely enough, this is not really the case. He confesses to being present, but not to being guilty of murder.... If he were tried, his own confession, if wholly believed, would not be sufficient for a verdict of murder in the first degree.
According to the law, of course, an accessory to a murder is equally guilty.
As for the trial:
The Committee have seen no evidence sufficient to make them believe that the trial was unfair. On the contrary, they are of the opinion that the Judge endeavored, and endeavored successfully, to secure for the defendants a fair trial; that the District Attorney was not in any way guilty of unprofessional behavior, that he conducted the prosecution vigorously but not improperly; and that the jury, a capable, impartial and unprejudiced body, did, as they were instructed, “well and truly try and true deliverance make.”
However, in a measured way, the committee censured Judge Thayer:
From all that has come to us we are forced to conclude that the Judge was indiscreet in conversation with outsiders during the trial. He ought not to have talked about the case off the bench, and doing so was a grave break of official decorum. But we do not believe that he used some of the expressions attributed to him, and we think that there is exaggeration in what the persons to whom he spoke remember. Furthermore, we believe that such indiscretions in conversation did not affect his conduct at the trial or the opinions of the jury, who indeed, so stated to the Committee.
Judge Grant felt more troubled than his colleagues, as he indicated later in his autobiography:
It had fallen to me, at the request of my two associates, to examine Judge Webster Thayer when he appeared before us at the State House. The evidence that he had been grossly indiscreet in his remarks off the bench was cumulative. I was amazed and incensed that any Massachusetts Judge could have been so garrulous. That he had talked he did not deny, but he declared under oath with convincing emotion that several of the accusations against him—notably that of having rehearsed a part of his charge to the jury—were untrue. When we came to consider the language of our Report, I was asked, as the one who ought to know how a judge should conduct himself, to suggest the words of censure. They were used, and if my associates felt a shade less outraged than I by his unseemly conduct, it was from a due sense of perspective.
Most of the new evidence that the defense had unearthed appeared to the committee inconsequential. The cap with the lining Gallivan had torn was dismissed as a trivial matter. Gould’s evidence added nothing new. Whatever affidavits Proctor may have signed later, “It must be assumed that the jury understood the meaning of plain English words, that if Captain Proctor was of the opinion that the bullet had been fired through Sacco’s pistol he would have said so, instead of using the language which meant that it might have been fired through that pistol.” This, of course, was an assumption Judge Thayer himself failed to make in his charge to the jury.
The committee did not mention Major Goddard’s report, but from an inspection of the Van Amburgh parallel photographs they were “inclined to believe” that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol. They were impressed by its similarity to the obsolete cartridges found on Sacco. Thompson’s contention that this bullet was a substitute they considered preposterous:
Such an accusation, devoid of proof, may be dismissed without further comment, save that the case of the defendants must be rather desperate on its merits when counsel feel it necessary to resort to a charge of this kind.
They found it a telling fact that the two men were armed when they were arrested. “Carrying fully loaded firearms, where they can be most quickly drawn,” they observed, “can hardly be common among people whose views are pacifist and opposed to all violence.” That Sacco could have put his pistol in his belt and forgotten about it they found incredible.[30] Nor did they feel that the defendants’ radicalism explained all their lies. Lottie Packard’s whirlwind remarks, for all their flights, impressed them. “The woman is eccentric, not unimpeachable in conduct,” they concluded, “but the Committee believe that in this case her testimony is well worth consideration.”
To the militants in Europe the reports of Governor Fuller and of the Lowell Committee set the official seal on what even the Frankfurter Zeitung now referred to as a “political judicial murder.” Letters and cables to Fuller, to the Secretary of State, to the White House, poured in from overseas, a certain lack of information and spontaneity apparent in the fact that some of them were addressed to President Harding, four years dead. The Vatican expressed its hope that an appeal to the United States Supreme Court “may open the way to justice or clemency.” Former French Premier Edouard Herriot asked for a “measure of clemency.” Le Soir reacted to the decisions “with a sentiment of profound horror.” A past era echoed dimly when the Veterans of the Commune forwarded their protest. In Paris the police had forbidden all meetings, but in the Bois de Vincennes just outside the city a group of five thousand bannered militants paraded with linked arms behind Luigia Vanzetti. Luigia, passing through on her way to America, carried a banner reading: PARISIAN PEOPLE, SAVE MY BROTHER AND SACCO. THANKS.
The new wave of explosions caused alarm all over the United States. Extra guards were dispatched to the Summer White House in the Dakota hills. Federal buildings were placed under guard. The Army announced plans to move troops from Fort Meyer, Virginia, to Washington. Machine guns were posted around Fuller’s summer home at Little Boar’s Head. Harvard’s buildings were guarded. Yet Boston, on the Sunday the Lowell Report was made public, seemed calm, almost indifferent. Alfred Baker Lewis for the Defense Committee and Harry Canter for the Communists had each obtained a permit to hold a meeting at designated trees on the Charles Street Mall. On the Tremont Street side a band in the Parkman Bandstand offered rival attractions. Between five and ten thousand persons gathered on the Common that afternoon, no great number for a city with a surrounding population of over two million. Some were there who made a habit of sauntering on a summer Sunday afternoon, others came from curiosity or to listen to the band. The genuine sympathizers, mostly from the North End, were probably in a minority. Nevertheless Superintendent of Police Michael Crowley disapproved of any such meetings, and his feelings were reinforced by the bombings of two days before. A plump set-faced man in a panama with a turned-down brim, he waddled up the Mall to warn both Baker and Canter that if any disparaging remarks were made about Governor Fuller or the Lowell Committee, that would end the meetings.
In no time at all, Mary Donovan, standing on a platform with a banner reading “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS?”—JUDGE THAYER, proclaimed that Governor Fuller was a murderer. Crowley, raising his fat hand, announced that the meeting was suspended. Four mounted police edged their horses in and began scattering the crowd. Mary Donovan protested wildly: “This meeting must go on. I will speak for Sacco and Vanzetti. They are innocent men! They must not be murdered!” Crowley, in an attempt to be fatherly to a fellow Celt, observed that bastard was no word for a lady to use. It was no word for a judge to use either, Mary Donovan snapped.
As the core of the crowd began to mill about the speakers’ stands, while the others moved away, the bearded Edward James bobbed up, scarlet with indignation, to stutter: “Down with the police! Get at them, men!” After a scuffle four men were arrested, including Canter and a bloody-nosed James. Next day in police court James, in the true revolutionary tradition, refused to recognize the judge or reply to charges. He was fined seventy-five dollars, which he refused to pay until the judge offered him the alternative of ninety days on Deer Island. At first James announced that he was going to be a martyr. Then, as the glow of the barricades faded, he paid up.
With the executions only three days off, the Defense Committee now appealed for a hundred thousand Americans to march on Boston and take part in a death watch at the State House and at the State Prison:
We call the leaders of American letters, science, art, education and social reform to lead the peaceful demonstration at the Charlestown jail. Come by train and boat, come on foot or in your car! Come to Boston! Let all the roads of the nation converge on Beacon Hill! Come armed with a black band on your sleeve, come armed with inextinguishable faith that Sacco and Vanzetti must and shall live.
Few people in Massachusetts failed to read the Lowell Report the Sunday of its appearance. The Defense Committee denounced it at once, the Communists derided it, but its effect—with the potency of the Lowell name behind it—was to settle the matter for a large number of Back Bay and Cambridge middle-of-the-roaders. “Most of the serious and earnest-minded people who had misgivings as to the original verdict in Judge Thayer’s court,” the Herald editorialized, “have had these dissipated by the calm and dispassionate recital of the evidence by President Lowell and his associates.” Dr. Morton Prince said he could see no escape from the report’s conclusions. Bishop Lawrence, who was not bashful about treading with angels, wrote to Fuller:
You will, I am sure, allow me to express to you my admiration of the way in which you have done your duty in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
You have been wise, patient, dignified and courageous, worthy of the highest traditions of the Commonwealth.
Medical Examiner Magrath announced that he was now “morally certain” of the two men’s guilt, an opinion he had undoubtedly held from the beginning.[31]
Chief Justice of the United States William Howard Taft, whose knowledge of the case was slight but whose Wigmorish opinion was that the propaganda “had been created by large contributions of female and male fools and had been circulated through all the communistic and criminal classes the world over,” sent congratulatory notes to Lowell and Grant later in the year, writing to the latter:
Now that all is over I can properly ... thank you for accepting the task of serving on the Governor’s committee of advisors in that case. It was a thankless task and required courage and sacrifice to do it. You and your colleagues did it and did it well. It concerned the welfare of society and the world in an unusual way. It is remarkable how Frankfürter with his article was able to present to so large a body of readers a perverted view of the facts and then through the world-wide conspiracy of communism spread it to so many, many countries. Our law schools lent themselves to the vicious propaganda. The utter lack of substance in it all is shown by the event. It was a bubble and was burst by the courage of the Governor and his advisors.
Robert Lincoln O’Brien regarded the Lowell report in the light of an umpire’s decision at a Longwood Cricket Club tennis match:
To those of us who felt that the need of some further inquiry existed, even after the Supreme Judicial Court had ruled that the case had been properly concluded, it seemed the part of good sportsmanship to accept the findings of Mr. Lowell and his associates, particularly since we could find no three men in all the world—were we to select them ourselves—in whose findings we would have more complete confidence.
But there were others, conservatives like Waldo Cook, the editor of the Springfield Republican, who found the report staggering. Speaking of its mention of Thayer’s grave breach of judicial decorum, Cook wrote: “If it was grave, it must taint irretrievably in the record the Sacco-Vanzetti case for all time.” The New York Times questioned the phrase “on the whole” and wondered “whether the ends of justice could not better have been obtained in some other way.” Pulitzer’s New York World, which under its chief editorial writer, Walter Lippmann, had consistently taken the side of Sacco and Vanzetti, gave its entire editorial page to an editorial “Doubts That Will Not Down.” Heywood Broun, as columnist for the World, announced bitterly that “if all the venerable college presidents in the country tottered forward and pronounced the men guilty they would still be innocent.” Broun—reacting to what he considered the general apathy about the case in the United States—became so violent in his comments on President Lowell’s throwing the switch and Harvard as Hangman’s House that Pulitzer finally suspended his columns.
On opinion overseas, even conservative opinion, the Lowell Report had almost no effect.
On Monday morning, August 8, in the Pemberton Square Courthouse, Supreme Court Justice Sanderson listened to Thompson—now merely a witness—testify that the right of the defendants had been violated by Judge Thayer’s prejudice. The justice denied the application for a writ of error and stay of execution. At Dedham in the afternoon, when Judge Thayer opened his special session he found himself in the anomalous position of ruling on his own prejudice. The courthouse was again heavily guarded and the public barred from the courtroom, although Sheriff Capen made no difficulties about admitting Rosina, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Henderson, and other friends. The prisoners themselves were not present.
Thayer remained stubbornly vulnerable and Hill did not spare him. To the latter’s passionate request that he step down from the bench he observed impassively that the chief justice had assigned him and he was there to hear the motion.
Hill’s anger vibrated through the open-windowed courtroom: “Do you think you can sit on the case and consider the issues? It is beyond human power to do. No man is so wise, clear-headed and dispassionate that he can sit on the question whether he was actuated by prejudice, and it is not fair to ask him. It should be before some other man, not only because of the welfare of the defendants, the welfare of the bench, the welfare of the administration of justice, but the welfare of Your Honor himself.”
In answer to the motions for a new trial, Thayer ruled that according to Massachusetts law he had no jurisdiction to grant one, once sentence had been passed. As to the motion for a revocation of sentence and stay of execution, he agreed to accept Hill’s affidavits and listen to his arguments. With chill and condescending politeness Hill, enumerating the affidavits, pointed out that Judge Thayer’s state of mind at the trial and afterward disqualified him from acting as a judge. Hill insisted that in all the judge’s rulings as well as in his actions off the bench he had shown prejudice.
Thayer stared fixedly at Hill, his eyes hard and bright, a thin glow behind his waxen pallor. When the lawyer had finished he began to speak, his voice more charged with feeling than ever it had been before in that familiar room:
“I agreed and always insisted with the full force of my nature that no matter what race or religion, conservative or radical, conformist or nonconformist was entitled to a fair and impartial trial and as my mind goes back over seven years of lawyers contesting every point, I recall that the case was taken on two occasions to the Supreme Court and the court dealt with two hundred sixty exceptions and ... did not leave one exception.
“That I am willing to be judged by—but prejudice—there isn’t any now and there wasn’t at any time. I do this now as it is the only way a judge can plead his own case. For seven years I have been in a position where I could not say a word. This is the only time I could say anything.”
The arguments were brief. Attorney General Arthur Reading for the Commonwealth characterized Hill’s as “the most preposterous ever heard from a learned lawyer.” Thayer at the end of the afternoon announced that he would reserve his decision on the second motion. Then, early Tuesday morning, he telephoned in from his home in Worcester that the revocation of sentence and stay of sentence were denied. From this and from Justice Sanderson’s ruling, Hill at once filed exceptions. Privately, however, he admitted he had given up hope. Only the young inexperienced Musmanno could find any encouragement in the further manipulation of the bastard Latin legal phrases. Certiorari, coram nobis—they were like the last moves in a chess game when a player has only a pawn to interpose between his king and his opponent’s queen.
That afternoon for the first time pickets appeared before the State House, a half-dozen at the start, men in shirtsleeves and women in work dresses, wearing black armbands and carrying placards denouncing the imminent executions. Defiantly they marched back and forth, their numbers growing to a dozen, a score, and finally to over a hundred, watched with jeering curiosity by a much larger crowd from the other side of the street near the Shaw Memorial. News of the picketing spread through the State House. Governor Fuller stepped into the council chamber briefly to look down from the oval-topped window on the sweaty marchers. The picketing was the beginning of the legend that in the last days of the case the Massachusetts State House was zoned by a constantly replenished line of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Some such did find their places in the line—John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others—and were arrested and taken to the Joy Street Station on the other side of Beacon Hill, but most of the picketers were foreign-born men and women from the garment district.
Harry Canter led the pickets the first day, encouraged by Alfred Baker Lewis. The Defense Committee, increasingly angry at the Communists’ infiltrating efforts, held aloof. Fred Beal, a young and dedicated Communist whose radicalism dated from the Lawrence strike, was astonished at the coldness of his reception when he turned up at Hanover Street. “Why can’t you leave Sacco and Vanzetti alone?” Secretary Moro asked him bitterly. “Why can’t you let them die in peace? You people don’t care for Sacco and Vanzetti. Let them burn; it will be better for the cause.”
As the picketing continued and the watching crowds increased, Police Captain James McDevitt was sent down from the Joy Street station. In the pattern that would be followed in dealing with the subsequent picketings of the State House, he approached the marchers and gave them seven minutes to disperse. When they did not, he carted off thirty-nine of them to the station. Thirty-one of those arrested were named in the Boston papers. So far as their names are any indication, twenty were Jews and three Italians.
The general strike called for that afternoon brought out only a few hundred men and women in Boston, most of whom found their way to the line in front of the State House. In New York almost 100,000 walked out, the majority of them garment workers. Overseas there was an almost hushed expectancy. Sacco and Vanzetti dominated the European headlines. The Atlantic cables continued to be weighted with protests that included such noted names as that of Lafayette’s great-grandson. At the Charlestown prison Western Union and Postal Telegraph installed eighteen wires, four for direct communication overseas. The area within half a mile of the prison was declared a dead zone. The streets were barred and Prison Point Bridge closed.
Early in the evening Vanzetti sent for Thompson, who spent two hours in the death house talking with the prisoners. Sacco was now in the twenty-third day of his hunger strike. Vanzetti had not eaten for five days. Thompson, on leaving, met a group of reporters at the prison gate and told them that the prisoners “continue to assert their innocence, do not express any hope, remain courageous, and feel they are dying for a principle.”
Would Governor Fuller grant the prisoners an additional respite to give Justice Sanderson and Thayer time to decide on Hill’s exceptions? That was the question on the morning of August 10. Fuller reached his State House office at 9:30 and at once summoned the members of his council.
At almost the same time the executioner for New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Robert Elliott, arrived with his famous black bag at the South Station. When Musmanno went to the prison later in the morning with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, he noticed guards setting up machine guns on the brick ramp running along the top of the prison wall. As he reached the death cells and began to talk to the men through the bars, he could hear the workmen tinkering with the electric chair in the next room, and he sensed the sudden vibration of the floor as they switched on the current. Vanzetti told him not to mind, that the men had been working on it since the day before. Sacco again refused to sign any petition, telling Musmanno: “They are going to crucify me, crucify both of us. They have been driving nails into us for seven years. Let’s have it over.” Vanzetti signed willingly enough, then inscribed his copy of The Rise of American Civilization and offered it to Musmanno, who refused it, saying he would wait until Vanzetti got out. From Charlestown Musmanno drove with Hill—as did Thompson and a Washington lawyer, John Finerty, later in the day—thirty miles north to Beverly where United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had his summer home. All four men knew that if Fuller failed to act, the only other hope for Sacco and Vanzetti was in an appeal to the federal courts. Holmes met his visitors on the porch, listened to them gravely, even regretfully, but held that he had not the legal right to intervene in the internal judicial processes of Massachusetts. “You don’t have to convince me that the atmosphere in which these men were tried precluded a fair trial,” he told them, “but that is not enough to give me as a Federal judge jurisdiction. If I listened to you any more I would do it,” he continued. “I must not do it.” With that the old justice turned on his heel and went into the house.
Hill, following his rebuff, went on to hunt out Judge George Anderson of the United States Circuit Court. After the 1920 Palmer raids Judge Anderson had released the Boston aliens rounded up by the Bureau of Investigation and had castigated the Department of Justice. But this time Judge Anderson, like Holmes, held that he could not interfere in state affairs.
Fuller, determined to expand the collective responsibility for his decision, sent for all the Commonwealth’s former attorneys general. Seven of them arrived before midday at his office for consultation. His council began its own deliberations after lunch and continued all afternoon. Meanwhile the pickets with their black armbands and placards, chanting their slogans, again marched in front of the State House. Captain McDevitt gave his dispersal warning, and after seven minutes the police moved in. Those pickets who did not scatter were taken to the Joy Street Station. This time the watching crowd showed itself much more hostile. There were mocking shouts of “Hang ’em!” as the pickets were hustled up Joy Street. They were booked at the station, and those who did not have the twenty-five dollars bail money were bailed out by Mrs. Evans and her friends.
A solid blue line of police extended along the cobbled paving in front of the Charlestown prison. Prison police, State Police, Metropolitan Police, Boston and Cambridge police, had all been called out—the largest force ever assembled in Boston’s history. On Prison Point Bridge a platoon of firemen uncoiled hoses and stood ready to water down any mob trying to force the barriers. Below the bridge, in the slimy tidal inlet known as the Miller River, the police launch Argus chugged up and down with a machine gun at its bow.
Inside the blank-walled death house Madeiros and Sacco lay on their cots in listless inanition. Some days earlier Sacco had begun a letter to his son, but he no longer felt the strength to continue with it. Vanzetti wrote brief farewell notes to Mrs. Winslow, Mrs. Codman, Mrs. Henderson, and Mrs. Evans, whom he now addressed as “Comrade.” His one enduring regret as the hours slipped away was that he would not be able to see his sister Luigia again. Late in the afternoon Madeiros’ mother and sister arrived from Providence, but he received them indifferently. The old Portuguese woman collapsed on the threshold of the death house and had to be helped from the building.
At the cluttered Hanover Street rooms there was the same penumbral atmosphere that there had been the night of Fuller’s decision, but with the tenseness giving way by almost imperceptible degrees to lassitude. Mary Donovan answered the telephone, the shaggy Jackson scribbled notes, Felicani bent forward under the poster proclaiming JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE, Rosina Sacco sat in a corner, silent except for an occasional dry cough while from time to time she abstractedly crumpled bits of paper. During the evening Frankfurter bustled in and out on obscure errands, his eyes deep and compassionate behind his rimless oval pince-nez. Hill and Joseph Moro appeared briefly and spoke a few encouraging words.
After spending the afternoon with his council, Fuller broke off for a meal, then resumed the sitting at 7:30. An hour later Hill appeared in the Council Chamber and pleaded and argued for two hours, begging the councilors and the governor not to destroy the subject matter of litigation while it was still in the hands of the courts. After he left, the councilors buzzed among themselves. Still the governor could not make up his mind.
Meanwhile the slim, gray-haired, twisted-mouthed executioner arrived at the prison with the official witnesses. As usual, refreshments had been prepared. The prison officers’ clubroom now held the largest group of reporters ever assembled in Massachusetts for an execution. By ten o’clock the three prisoners had been notified that they were to die at midnight.
At defense headquarters Rosina suddenly fell forward in a faint. Mary Donovan picked her up, took her away in a taxi, and left her at a friend’s house in the neighborhood. When she returned she sat down again by the telephone, and, as if she were thinking aloud, suddenly said: “What if the finger of God should stay this execution tonight!” Then she picked up the receiver and in a broken voice called Thompson to ask what steps should be taken to claim the two men’s bodies.
It was 11:24 before Fuller finally made up his official mind. With the concurrence of his council he decided to grant the prisoners a twelve-day respite “to afford the courts an opportunity to complete the consideration of the proceedings.” Captain Charles Beaupré of the State Police gave the word to the reporters outside the council chamber. Secretary William Reed telephoned the news to Warden Hendry. Hendry was pleased, and showed it. Despite his meaty butcher’s face, he was a good-hearted man who hated executions. With the copied reprieve in his hand he hurried down the long cement corridor to the death house, calling out as he reached the threshold: “It’s all off, boys!” The three men rose from their cots. Vanzetti gripped the bars of the cell until his knuckles turned white. “I’m damn glad of that,” he said shakily. “I’d like to see my sister before I die.”
Back at his office Hendry passed around cigars to the reporters and witnesses while an unheeded assistant read out the formal wording of the respite with all its whereases and know-ye-alls.
Not until a few minutes before midnight was the news of the respite telephoned into the Hanover Street offices, yet when the announcement came it caused no tremor, no babble of voices, only a relieving quiet. Mary Donovan left without saying a word to go to Rosina. Someone, who seemed to speak for everyone in the room, remarked: “We have until the twenty-second. Well, that is something.”
Across the ocean it seemed for a moment as if the protesting voices had won. Pravda proclaimed:
The mighty roar of protest from the Soviet Union, together with the voice of the working classes the world over, forced even the plutocratic American bourgeoisie to hesitate and maneuver.
In Berlin, Die Rote Fahne announced triumphantly:
The working millions and only they in the forefront of the battle against class injustice have won the first victory. Sacco and Vanzetti are provisionally rescued.
L’Humanité rallied its readers with militant confidence:
Now let us exact the liberty of the two martyrs.
In the United States there was a feeling that Fuller would now commute the death sentences to life imprisonment, a course recommended by the Springfield Republican. The New York Times shared this opinion, observing four days after the respite:
Honest and fair-minded people are still disputing about certain aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but on our part there is virtual unanimity of opinion. This is that the long delay in determining the fate of the two men is a reproach to American justice. It is something that is almost impossible to explain to foreigners.
Outside opposition and criticism had long since contracted the mood of the Massachusetts community beyond reason. With each external attack the community ranks closed in an emotional need—masquerading as justice—to see Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This feeling was reinforced by the bombing on August 15 of the East Milton home of Dedham juror Lewis McHardy. The charge placed on the porch of his two-story frame house at 463 Pleasant Street, exploded at 3:30 in the morning. So great was the blast that little was left of the house but the frame. Windows were shattered a quarter of a mile away. McHardy, his wife, and three grown children were asleep on the second floor. They were hurled out of bed and covered with debris, but somehow managed to escape with only minor bruises.
If before the blowing up of the McHardy house there had been the slightest chance of a commutation of sentence for Sacco and Vanzetti, afterward there was none.[32]
The twelve days of respite were marked by dramatic defense efforts that filled the world’s headlines. The author and journalist Isaac Don Levine came on to Boston, convinced that a legal case could be built around the issue of the Department of Justice files. Perhaps Thompson might have inspected them in 1926 if he had been more tactful in dealing with the tentative offer of the Bureau of Investigation’s Boston branch. Since then Attorney General Sargent had refused the defense any access to them. However, he offered to forward them on request to Governor Fuller, the members of the Lowell Committee, or the Commonwealth’s attorney general. Such a request was never made. Fuller told reporters that the files would be no use to him in forming his opinion inasmuch as he did not know what an anarchist was.[33]
On August 10 the Defense Committee had sent a long telegram to United States Attorney General Sargent claiming that “evidence exists in the files of the Department of Justice, of the most competent character which would clear Sacco and Vanzetti of the charge of payroll robbery” and demanding that Sargent persuade President Coolidge to intervene. The committee also repeated Thompson’s charge of “a conspiracy between the employees of the Department of Justice and Katzmann and Williams to wrongfully convict.” For Levine these claims and charges were all very well, but in the unskilled hands of Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan and the Italians on the committee they would lead to nothing. What was needed was a professional touch, “a fresh corps of attorneys of national reputation,” publicity directed like an arrow to the Department of Justice, names that carried weight. For this purpose, and to the impotent fury of Mary Donovan, Levine organized the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti. He himself kept in the background—the figurehead chairman was the New Republic’s editor, Robert Morss Lovett—but he brought to the new organization his own energy and the names of noted acquaintances. Glenn Frank, Zona Gale, Ida Tarbell, David Starr Jordan, Paul Kellogg of the Survey, John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Garrison Villard, Alexander Meiklejohn, Katharine Anne Porter, Jane Addams, William Hocking, Waldo Cook, John Moors, Mary Woolley, and John Dewey were among those endorsing the new committee.
In an open letter the committee announced its purpose, “to induce the Federal Government to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case because of the grave charges which have been made against the Department of Justice and because of the serious international situation which has arisen.” During the last feverish week it raked Washington with drumfire demands that the Department of Justice open its files. The committee set up quarters in the Hotel Bellevue just below the State House. There, in a long room on the second floor known as Parlor D, a swarm of volunteer workers moved in with desks and typewriters. For twenty hours a day letters and releases poured out across the United States. Paul Kellogg sent over five hundred telegrams to Americans of note. Almost everyone who arrived in Boston, from Michael Gold to Edna St. Vincent Millay, now stopped off at Parlor D rather than at the Hanover Street rooms. A new cluster of lawyers gathered there: John Finerty of New York, who drew up the final habeas corpus motion; former New York attorney general William Schuyler Jackson; Arthur Garfield Hays, Francis Fisher Kane, and Frank Walsh, who together would take up the matter of the Justice Department files directly with Attorney General Sargent. The new committee, unlike the Communists, managed to remain on speaking terms with the old. Relations remained, in Levine’s words, “correct but remote.”
The morning after the midnight respite, the three prisoners were taken from the death house back to Cherry Hill. In spite of having gone twenty-six days without food, Sacco was able to walk unaided across the prison yard and up the iron staircase. When Musmanno visited Sacco and Vanzetti in the barber shop later in the morning to tell them that Justice Sanderson had allowed the exceptions to his ruling to be taken to the full bench of the state supreme court, he found them in a cheerful mood. Both seemed to absorb something of the young Italian lawyer’s optimism. Although Sacco still refused to eat, Vanzetti broke his five-day fast with a cup of coffee.
During the day the New England manager of the United Press, Henry Minott, visited the prison and asked Vanzetti to write an open letter explaining his side of the case. In his renewed optimism, Vanzetti spent the next two days setting down what he well realized might be his final thoughts. On August 12 his two-page letter to “Friends and Comrades” was sent—in somewhat altered form—all over the world through the wires of the United Press:
There is nowhere, neither in earth nor in heavens, anything that can makes the true untrue and the untrue true. By true I mean the truths which altogether form the Universal truth. By truths I mean the real conditions, faculties, essence of each one of those unnumerable, relative things, all related and all evolving, which total sum forms the Universal truth—which is what it is in itself and not at all what anyone or ones—I, you, or all—believe or may think to know what it is....
II
On Dec. 24, 1919, at 8.20 A.M. a robbery was attempted in Bridgewater, Mass.
In every minutes of the 24 hours of that day I was in Plymouth, Mass., about 30 miles from the place where the above cited attempt to robb occured. Furthermore, I had been never in such place before my arrest on May 5th, 1920. In the very moment I was in the bakery shop of Luigi Bastoni in Plymouth.
On April 15, 1920, at 3 P.M. and highway robbery was commetted in South Braintree and two men were killed.
In every minute of that day’s hours I have been in Plymouth, Mass., about 35 mile from the place of the crime; I have not yet been there, that I know, and in the very minute of the crime I was speaking with Mr. Corl, who was preparing his motorboat, on the Plymouth shore, to be put in the water for the new fishing season (1920).
The above said is true and there is nothing that can makes it untrue.
III
At the Plymouth trial my counselor, Joe Vahey has betrayed me like Iscariat betrayed Christ. He not even went to the place of the crime to see how it happened what it was; what people were saying and knowing. Out of hundreds of the eyes-witnesses of the crime who came to look upon me for several consecutive days, on my arrest, in Brockton police station, and all of them, safe one or two posetively denied I was one of the bandit they saw. Mr. Vahey even failed to produce a single one of those eyes-witnesses.
Chief Steward, Katzmann, Judge Thayer succeeded to form a jury out of a dozen hating, prejudiced, jelous, fearing, narrow-minded, vain, excited and ferociouse provincial bigits, real lyncher in vest of jurors.
These our jurors may believe or feign to believe the most apparently false Governament witnesses; they can disbelieve or feingn so, the truthful 18 defence; witnesses and they can bring out a verdict of guiltness against me.
Judge Thayer can injoy in given me the most severe and cruel sentence that I knew for such offense as the one of which I was framed. He can insult me. All this may be a great sadisfaction for the Plymouth Cordage Company, for Joe Vahey, Steward, Katzmann, & Thayer.
But I tell you that I am innocent of that crime and there is nothing that can make me guilty of it.
IV
Dedham trial.... Again Chief Steward, Persecutor Frederick Katzmann, William, Judge Webster Thayer, Cheriff Copan, a Joshef Ross, Lola Andrew, a Pelzner, twelf Linchers in vest of Jurors, a double verdict of murder in first degree against us....
I tell you that I am innocent of such crime, and no State tools, no perjuring harlots, crooks, criminals, venals, deficients, no Steward, no Copan, no black-guards, no thief as Ross, no Katzmann, no Williams, no sadism of jurors who had been ready to hang us before the beginning of the trial, no verdict of guiltness, no death sentence, no Webster Thayer, no Massachusetts, none of them nothing of this, not even all of this can change an innocent man in a guilty one.
And I tell you that Nicola Sacco is neither a thief nor a highway murderors and not even all of our enemies and of our case can make this truth untrue.
V
Judge Webster Thayer can denies us as many unrefutable and undenyable appeals and doom us at his heart content.
The Judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judiciary Court can uphold Thayer’s “decision” at their heart content.
The Judges of the Supreme Court of the United State can uphold at their heart content both Thayer and the Massachusetts Justice: we will remain innocent.
Although Sacco had been able to walk from the death house to Cherry Hill, his sturdy peasant body was beginning to give way. On the thirtieth day of his strike Dr. McLaughlin, the prison physician, told him flatly that the time had come when he must eat. To emphasize this McLaughlin showed him a rubber tube three feet long, greased at one end for insertion in the nose and with a rubber bulb for pumping at the other end. Two guards had brought the men to the prison barber shop, where Vanzetti, Musmanno, and Rosina were waiting. Rosina, as she had done all along, begged her husband to eat. The others kept urging him. Sliding the tube between his fingers, Dr. McLaughlin told him: “You must eat. I can make you. I am stronger than you are.” Sacco smiled, took a mug of soup that one of the guards had poured out, lifted it, and said ironically, “Good health to all of you.”
The day after McHardy’s house was bombed, Hill appeared at the heavily guarded Pemberton Square Courthouse to argue the exceptions before the four available members of the Supreme Court. Impassively the justices listened to the familiar argument that Judge Thayer himself had become a defendant and that to allow him to hear any question concerning Sacco and Vanzetti was to make him a judge in his own case. Attorney General Reading countered that even if Thayer had been privately prejudiced, that would not disqualify him unless his prejudice had been communicated to the jury. The justices reserved their decision.
Three mornings later Court Reporter Grabill walked down the inner steps of the still-guarded courthouse with a copy of the Supreme Court decision. He handed it to Musmanno and Hill, at the same time informing the reporters: “Gentlemen, the exceptions in both cases have been overruled.”
The Supreme Court had in effect reaffirmed that it had no jurisdiction, that once sentence had been passed, a motion for a new trial came too late. And a motion for revocation was the same thing as a motion for a new trial. As for the prejudice of Judge Thayer:
The judicial conduct of the trial judge in hearing and deciding the motion based on his own alleged bias or prejudice need not be discussed because neither the judge nor any of his associates had jurisdiction to entertain the motion.
In brief there was nothing more to be expected from the courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When Hill and Evarts asked Chief Justice Hall for a stay of execution until the United States Supreme Court might decide whether the law of the land had been observed in the case, he coldly refused.
Musmanno went at once to Charlestown to tell the prisoners. Sacco merely said it was what he expected, and continued the letter he was writing to Dante.[34] But when Vanzetti heard the news the discipline of his mind suddenly snapped. “Get the million men!” he shouted. He demanded a radio transmitter in his cell so that he could tell the whole world his story. All that morning he remained standing behind the bars, calling out for the million men. That night he wrote a letter to Thompson dating it “New Era year I”:
My enemies make me to aim their cannons, shoting at me every night to kill me.
Please, send this instruction to the Boston Defense Committee—as quickly as possible.
Dear Friends of the Committee.
I hope you have radiocasted at once my order of mobilization to all the nations of the world. Big corps of men are in march, if I perceived well last night. Take all the protective measure to the crossing of Rio Grande and Panamal Canal; lent me the coasts most you can. Renew my notes to the King of Italy and the Pope. I want all my witnesses as well. Informe me by wireless, and immediately, of each move and particular. I wait for you and Mr. Thompson as soon as possible for a general council. Recur to Mr. Thompson for legal matters.
In spite of Vanzetti’s seizure, the prisoners were taken back to the death house that afternoon.
At almost the same time Luigia Vanzetti arrived in New York on the Aquitania. She was met on the dock by Felicani, Rosina, Carlo Tresca, Mrs. Henderson, Dorothy Parker, Ruth Hale—Heywood Broun’s wife—a corps of newsmen, and several hundred supporters carrying signs and banners. Rosina embraced her solemnly as a sister in sorrow, then the reporters pressed in. The crowd made Luigia shrink. She was a frail, plain, dark woman, plainly dressed, who even at the age of thirty-six had the withered appearance of an autumn leaf. Her large eyes were shadowed by a helmet hat, her mouth permanently sad, her chin receding. She was of that Latin type, sexless and compassionate, ordained from adolescence either to be a maiden aunt or a nun. As she talked through an interpreter to reporters, she fingered a gold medallion of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin. What she said was embarrassing to all but Rosina. “I am here,” she told them, “to guide my brother back to the religion from which he has fallen, so that he may be prepared to meet his Maker. He was brought up in the church and he used to be a good Catholic. I have prayed continually that he return to the church and see a priest.”
In the last seventeen days before the executions, Hill and the other defense lawyers appealed to fourteen justices of four courts. The evening of Vanzetti’s seizure Musmanno took the train for Washington to file writs of certiorari with the clerk of the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that the actions of the Massachusetts courts were a denial of the rights of Sacco and Vanzetti under the Constitution’s fourteenth amendment, providing that “no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Once these writs were filed, once the case had officially reached the Supreme Court, the young lawyer, boundlessly confident, was certain that one justice could be found from among the nine who would grant a stay of execution.
After finding that he could not yet file his papers because he had not brought the record of the proceedings, he went on to the Justice Department to see the acting attorney general, George Farnum, who had once served in Massachusetts as Assistant United States Attorney under Katzmann’s former aide, Harold Williams. Musmanno and Farnum afterward gave conflicting versions of what occurred in their interview. To Musmanno’s question, Farnum replied there was nothing in the files linking Sacco and Vanzetti with the South Braintree crime but added that there was matter in the files unfavorable to them. What this was he refused to disclose unless Musmanno would agree to keep it secret, and when the latter refused the conversation came to an end. Next day Jackson, Hays, Kane, and Walsh, representing the Citizens’ Committee, spent the morning with Farnum, to whom they had been shunted by Attorney General Sargent, then on vacation in Vermont. Farnum, repeating the Department’s refusal to make the files available to representatives of unofficial organizations, declared that they “contained no evidence tending to establish the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, or either of them, of the crime for which they were convicted in the Massachusetts courts, nor any evidence whatever of any collusion whatsoever between the State and Federal authorities prior to the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti or prior, during or subsequent to the trial of these two men.”
Meanwhile, the contest of the courtrooms accelerated. At the same time that Musmanno was walking up the steps of the Capitol, Field, in Massachusetts, was presenting another petition for a writ of habeas corpus to Judge James Morton, Jr., of the United States District Court. Morton brusquely denied the petition and refused to allow any appeal. At 2:15 Hill and Evarts conferred with Justice Holmes in Beverly. Holmes listened to them with grave courtesy but said that he did not have the authority to meddle in the affairs of state courts, and that he would not feel justified in granting a stay of execution unless he felt that there was a reasonable chance that the Supreme Court would ultimately reverse the judgment against Sacco and Vanzetti. This he could not bring himself to believe, but he added that another of his fellow justices might see the matter in a different light.
With each rebuff the defense lawyers frantically sought out another judge, each time to receive again the inevitable answer.
While Hill was arguing vainly with Holmes in Beverly, Luigia, accompanied by Rosina, Felicani, and Mrs. Henderson, went to the prison. Warden Hendry met her at the gate. Although it was quite unprecedented, he had Vanzetti let outside his cell to meet his sister.
Vanzetti had recovered from his seizure of the day before. He was standing a few feet from the door as Luigia, followed by the others, walked down the corridor. Then he stepped forward and took her in his arms. In that moment the stooped, sallow prisoner in the convict’s gray shirt and trousers and the fading spinster with her tightly-drawn hair were as they had been in Villafalletto nineteen years before—he the curly-haired young man, she the shy sprouting girl of sixteen. During the hour allotted them they sat in the corner clasping each other’s hands as they talked about the old days and of their relatives and friends. Luigia said later that they had not spoken of her brother’s predicament nor of religion. At the hour’s end they embraced again and Vanzetti returned to his cell. Despondently Luigia walked back along the corridor.
From Charlestown Mrs. Henderson drove her to Marblehead to see Cardinal O’Connell at his summer home. The Cardinal, although surprised by the visit, invited them to tea on the lawn. William Cardinal O’Connell—who wintered in Nassau and was known as Gang-plank Bill by some of the less reverent faithful—modeled himself after a Renaissance prelate. Although a friend of Governor Fuller’s, he knew better than to take secular sides as had Bishop Lawrence. Men’s ways were not God’s way, he assured Luigia over the teacups. Later in the day he amplified his remarks in a neatly ambiguous statement to the Defense Committee:
Human judgment is fallible always at best, but it is the only human method of government which civilized life has developed. But the justice of God is perfect, and in the end He and His way, mysterious as they are, are our hope and our salvation.
Vanzetti had at least had the consolation of seeing his sister once more. But, as he wrote in a note of thanks to Mrs. Henderson,
Since I saw her my heart lost a little of its steadyness. The thought that she will have to take my death to our mother’s grave, it is horrible to me—to think of what she will soon have to stand and to bear revolts all my being and upsets my mind.
Sunday the twenty-first broke grayly in a tentative drizzle. Early in the morning Evarts and Hill reached Justice Louis Brandeis at his summer home on Cape Cod, to ask for a stay of execution. Brandeis was sympathetic but felt he was too close to the case personally to take any action, since during the trial his wife had lent Rosina their empty Dedham house and since he had talked the matter over many times with his friend Frankfurter. Hill had counted most on Holmes and Brandeis, the two liberals on the Supreme Court. The only other New England justice, Harlan Stone, was spending the summer at Isle au Haut, Maine, in the middle of Penobscot Bay. With Brandeis’ refusal ringing politely in his ears Hill started immediately on the 275-mile drive north.
Musmanno arrived back in Boston on the night train at about the time Hill and Evarts were leaving Chatham. Still undaunted, he telegraphed the Summer White House in South Dakota demanding that President Coolidge intervene. When he received no reply, he telephoned and managed to get hold of a presidential secretary who refused to give his name. The President, the anonymous secretary informed Musmanno, could not be disturbed; there could be no federal action in any case since no federal question was involved. Musmanno offered to fly out to South Dakota in a chartered plane. The secretary told him sharply that if he did he would not be received. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson had asked the governor of California to commute the Billings and Mooney death sentences, but Cautious Cal was—as Musmanno discovered—no Wilson.
Bouncing back from each rebuff, Musmanno telephoned Chief Justice Taft, summering at Point-au-Pic, Quebec, and asked if he might fly to meet him. Taft’s rotund voice came over the wire in such distortion that Musmanno could barely make out the irritated reply. Taft said he was outside the jurisdiction of the United States and it was too far for him to cross the border. Finally he told Musmanno to send a telegram explaining just what he wanted. To this telegram, which Musmanno sent off at once, Taft replied at such length that the collect charges came to $19.20. For all its length it merely said “No.” Taft referred Musmanno to Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone, all within the First Judicial Circuit. He saw no reason to think that his own opinion would differ from that of Holmes. “The absence of jurisdiction in our court to grant the writ of certiorari in the case seems to me apparent,” he concluded.
The numbers of those who heeded the call of the Defense Committee to come to Boston were disappointing, but the individuals who flocked there in the last days gave the case and the cause a permanent coloration. There were the dedicated, the troubled, the bohemian, the self-seeking and the selfless, the lovers of justice and strikers of poses, each wrapped in his own individuality. There was Powers Hapgood, six years out of Harvard and still looking like an undergraduate, from whose lips the word comrade tripped more frequently than any other and whose compulsion was to clash with the police. Hapgood had been a fashionable young clubman at Harvard but after graduating turned to romanticizing himself as a proletarian. He had worked in coal mines in Wales, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union; later he was to become Socialist candidate for Vice-President of the United States. In December 1927, his proletarian zeal took the form of marrying Mary Donovan.
There were John Howard Lawson and the young William Patterson, president of the American Negro Labor Conference, whose reaction to the futility of the last efforts would confirm them as Communists. There was the elderly, leather-tongued Ella Reeve Bloor, recipient of the Communist accolade of “Mother,” who had hitchhiked from California. There was Paula Holladay, with boyish bob and red slicker, who had trudged a mere 117 miles from Provincetown wearing a sandwich board reading AMERICA CANNOT LOOK THE WORLD IN THE FACE IF SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE MURDERED, subject to the jeering suggestions of passing motorists that she go home and wash the dishes. There was Captain Paxton Hibben, a dapper, martial little man with a clipped imperial, who still clung to his military rank acquired overseas with the 391st Field Artillery of New York. There was Wellesley College’s retired professor of astronomy and mathematics, the seventy-six-year-old Ellen Hayes, with white bobbed hair, flat hat, flat heels, and invisible blue stockings. There was the mysterious Louis Bernheimer, a Yale graduate, an aviator in France during the war, a student of philosophy, and a hermit who had already circulated more than thirty thousand pamphlets about the case to clergymen all over the country.
Then of course there was Edward Holton James, now engaged in running daily sightseeing tours to South Braintree for newly arrived sympathizers. Outstanding among the characters drawn to the scene was Zara du Pont, aunt of most of the living du Pont dynasty. Her singularly squashed hats, tweed suits that never wore out, and brass ear trumpet identified her a hundred yards away. She had come from Cambridge to indulge in her passion for picketing, for she made it her habit to join any line she saw, often with no idea of what or why she was picketing and—because of her deafness—with no way of finding out. Less well connected if no less obvious was William Obey of New York, who arrived at Parlor D with a certificate of release from a mental hospital. When his individualism became too flagrant and Tom O’Connor at last had to ask him to leave, he seated himself on the curb at Bowdoin Street with his portable typewriter in his lap, pecking away and telling the bystanders that the rush was so great at headquarters that he had to do his work outside.
On that final Sunday, August 21, Police Superintendent Crowley was taking no chances. For the first time anyone could remember, no permits were given out and no meetings on the Common were allowed. The Defense Committee had held its final meeting the night before at the Scenic Auditorium. By the middle of the overcast afternoon there were about twenty thousand people scattered over the forty-eight acres of Boston Common. Some watched the baseball games being played in the diamonds beyond the old Central Burying-Ground. Others listened to Stone’s Band at the Parkman Bandstand playing excerpts from The Bohemian Girl. Still others—the flotsam of the city—lay asleep on the grass. Perhaps a third of those wandering on the Common had come there out of a sense of curiosity, a feeling that something exciting was going to happen. For most of the afternoon nothing happened. Then shortly after four o’clock Paula Holladay in her red slicker walked up from Charles Street and across the Common toward the bandstand. On the back of the slicker was lettered: SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI. IS JUSTICE DEAD? As she walked along the mall a crowd began to fall in behind her. Most of those following her were indifferent if not hostile, but a few sympathizers produced Sacco-Vanzetti placards from under their coats. She continued her Pied Piper walk, gathering several thousand in her wake by the time she reached Tremont Street. The police did not interfere until the crowd spilled over into the roadway and blocked traffic. Then a squad of bluecoats surrounded her and carried her off, along with William Patterson and several other placard-wielders, to the Joy Street Station. Here she was told she might go free if she would promise to take off the slicker and not to return to the Common. Superintendent Crowley came in person to the station to warn her paternally that Boston was “full of Irish Catholic boys, young hoodlums, who will be sure to try to do you harm if you go on the streets wearing that slicker.”
Within the Charlestown prison the customary Sunday afternoon bustle of visits continued, even though the whole area was cordoned off by the police. The prison band played its limited selections in the octagon anteroom, and prisoners sat in their usual rows at the oak tables facing their visitors. So damp was the air that drops of moisture kept dripping from the skylight struts. Because of the humidity Warden Hendry allowed the door of the death house to be left open. Luigia and Rosina came and stayed their hour. Rosina had not brought the children; she did not want them to see their father in his death cell. Sacco had been for some time occupied with a letter to Dante and spent the day, except for the visiting hour, working on it. He told Vanzetti that he did not want it made public for five years. Although Sacco had planned to have its contents kept secret, the Defense Committee persuaded him to allow them to release it immediately for its propaganda effect, to sway every ounce of opinion possible in the last hours.
Facing extinction, Sacco achieved the slow-moving dignity that came, as a rule, more easily to Vanzetti:
Much have we suffered during this long Calvary. We protest today as we protested yesterday. We protest always for our freedom.
If I stopped hunger strike the other day, it was because there was no more sign of life in me. Because I protested with my hunger strike yesterday as today I protest for life and not for death.
I sacrificed because I wanted to come back to the embrace of your dear little sister Ines and your mother and all the beloved friends and comrades of life and not death. So Son, today life begins to revive slow and calm, but yet without horizon and always with sadness and visions of death....
But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because that are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved....
Much have I thought of you when I was lying in the death house—the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground, where there was all the life and the joy of liberty—just one step from the wall which contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and your sisters Ines, and I wish I could see you every moment. But I feel better that you did not come to the death-house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three lying in agony waiting to be electrocuted, because I do not know what effect it would have on your young age....
Dante, I say once more to love and be nearest to your mother and the beloved ones in these sad days, and I am sure that with your brave heart and kind goodness they will feel less discomfort. And you will also not forget to love me a little for I do—O, Sonny! thinking so much and so often of you.
Best fraternal greetings to all the beloved ones, love and kisses to your little Ines and mother. Most hearty affectionate embrace.[35]
Vanzetti also wrote a long letter to Dante. Like Sacco’s, it was more a testament than a farewell to a thirteen-year-old boy. Even more explicitly than Sacco, Vanzetti reaffirmed his revolutionary faith:
I still hope, and we will fight until the last moment, to rivendicate our right to live and be free, but all the forces of the State and of the Money and reaction are deadly against us because we are libertarian or anarchist.
I write little of this because you are now a yet to little-boy to understand this things and other things of which I would like to reason with you.
But if you do well, you will grow and understand your father’s and my case and your father’s and my principles, for which we will soon be put to death.
I tell you that for and of all I know of your father, he is not a criminal, but one of the bravest men I ever knew. One day you will understand what I am about to tell you: That your father has sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for his fate in liberty and justice for all. That day you will be proud of your father; and if you come brave enough, you will take his place in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and you will vindicate his (our) names and our blood.
If we have to die now, you shall know, when you will be able to understand this tragedy in its fullness, how good and brave your mother has been with you, your father and I, during these eight years of struggle, sorrow, passion, anguish and agony.
Even from now you shall be good, brave with your mother, with Ines, and with Suzy[36]—brave, good Suzy—and do all you can to console and help them.
I would like you will also remember me as a comrade and friend of your father, your mother, Ines, Suzy and you, and I secure you that neither I have been a criminal, that I have committed no robbery and no murder, but only fought modestily to abolish crimes from among mankind and for the liberty of all.
Remember Dante, each one who will say otherwise of your father and I, is a lier, insulting innocent death men who have been brave in their life.
Remember and know also, Dante, that of your father and I would have been cowards and hypocrits and rinnegetors of our faith, we would have not have been put to death. They would not even have convicted a lebbrous dogs; not even executed a deadly poisoned scorpion on such evidence as that they framed against us. They would have given a new trial to a matricide and abitual felon on the evidence we presented for a new trial.
Remember, Dante, remember always these things; we are not criminals; they convicted us on a frame-up; they denied us a new trial; and if we will be executed after seven years, four months and 17 days of unspeakable tortures and wrongs, it is for what I have already told you; because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of the man by the man.
The documents of our case, which you and other ones will collect and preserve, will proof you that your father, your mother, yourself, Inez, I and my family are sacrificed by and to a State Reason of the American Plutocratic reaction.
The day will come when you will understand the atrocious sense of the above-written words, in all its fullness. Then you will honor us.
Now Dante, be brave and good always. I embrace you.
Not until Monday morning did Hill reach Rockland, Maine, and board the leisurely excursion steamer that finally brought him through the shredding fog to the granite-edged Isle au Haut. Justice Stone, sitting on his front porch in his shirtsleeves, received him curtly. He said he would listen to Hill’s arguments but he could grant no stay. Another justice might perhaps feel differently.
In Boston, Monday broke sallow and heavy. The still-empty Common looked frayed and untidy. By nine o’clock the first busloads of sympathizers began to arrive from New York. The air was lighter by the time Governor Fuller arrived at his office from Rye Beach a little before eleven. “A beautiful day,” he said, smiling and nodding affably to the reporters. One of his first visitors was Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” had appeared in the New York Times that very morning. Fiorello La Guardia had come by chartered plane from New York to make a last appeal to his old congressional colleague, but when he emerged from the executive chambers he shook his head and told reporters that there was only one chance in a thousand.
On this last day the governor was willing to keep open house for any delegation that chose to visit him. To nearly all who so chose he listened with stiff politeness. Just before lunch the newly installed state commander of the American Legion appeared to assure the governor that the Legion stood four-square behind him. Almost a thousand letters and telegrams arrived at the executive offices during the day, two thirds of them asking for suspension of the death sentence.
Late in the morning Luigia and Rosina arrived at Charlestown for a tear-blurred hour in the death house. Sacco talked to his wife about Ines and Dante; Vanzetti again recalled the old days in Villafalletto. Madeiros, who had been lying indifferently on his cot, chain-smoking, received an unexpected visit from his sister Consuelo. When she told him that their mother was too overcome to make the trip, he for the first time showed emotion.
On Saturday there had been a tentative attempt to renew the State House picketing, and Captain Hibben, Powers Hapgood, James Rorty, and Katherine Anne Porter had been arrested. Now, as the morning advanced, pickets with armbands and banners appeared again. The Scenic Temple served as a supply depot; there pickets assembled, were grouped in dozens, and sent on to the State House with their signs, JUSTICE IS CRUCIFIED TODAY, JUSTICE IS DEAD IN MASSACHUSETTS. All afternoon the line grew, the pickets forming fours as their ranks increased. The line became an endless chain, its links made up of girls and sweaty shirtsleeved men from the garment district, self-conscious intellectuals, a scattering of adolescents welcoming the chance to challenge authority, and a rank and file of friends and sympathizers of every class and description. Mrs. Evans was there. She had aged much since the trial, but with her solid figure and rimless glasses she still looked the transcendental grandmother. One of the younger policemen on duty complained that there was not a good-looking girl in the bunch.
During the course of the afternoon and evening 156 pickets were arrested. Isaac Don Levine and Mrs. Evans bustled about raising bail money. Edward Holton James showed up at the Joy Street Station with his pockets full and bailed away for several hours until he ran out of both funds and patience, then found himself booed when he returned to the Scenic Temple to announce that he would bail no more.
The garment workers in the station’s close-packed guardroom sang the “Internationale,” and afterward everyone joined in the more singable “Solidarity Forever.” Police Captain McDevitt had long had his eye on Powers Hapgood. The other pickets might with luck be out on bail in an hour or so, but McDevitt made a point of turning Powers over to the State Police, who, instead of arresting him, hurried him off to the Psychopathic Hospital where he was held for four days.
Crowds formed on the Common side of Beacon Street to stare at the picket parade. Occasionally someone would dart across the street to join the line. Superintendent Crowley, with memories of the mob rising in the police strike of 1919, was determined there would be no rising today. Halfway down the mall a police company with rifles was drawn up like a detachment of infantry. Mounted police wove their horses in and out of the gathering throngs. There were more blue uniforms on Boston Common than there had been since the Civil War encampments.
The day wore on. All the public buildings were garrisoned by police. A squad even occupied the roof of Fuller’s Packard salesroom. Yet except for the State House picketing and the unusual numbers crowding the Common there were no incidents in the city. None of the anticipated bombs went off.
With Hill delayed in Maine, the last-minute legal efforts became a confusion of volunteer lawyers. Field appealed for a stay to Judge Sisk—most liberal of the Superior Court judges. Sisk, for all his obvious sympathy, maintained that he lacked jurisdiction. Surrounded by the clicking typewriters of Parlor D, Tom O’Connor worked with John Finerty on a new inclusive habeas corpus motion. Finerty, former assistant general counsel for the United States Railroad Administration, was probably the ablest lawyer to take part in the final proceedings. This thin, long-jawed man in a white linen suit, who resembled Woodrow Wilson, had dropped in at Parlor D on his way to spend two weeks by the sea at Cohasset. O’Connor managed to arouse his interest so that he never went on. He and O’Connor were convinced the new motion stood its best chance with Federal Judge Anderson. Unfortunately, Anderson was at Williamstown, in the Berkshires. O’Connor arranged to have a plane waiting at the East Boston airport, and all the afternoon he kept trying vainly to get to Anderson by telephone.
At 2:30 Musmanno brought a copy of the completed Finerty motion to Charlestown. Vanzetti signed it. Sacco again refused. Both condemned men were now convinced that nothing could save them. Vanzetti gave a message to Musmanno for Thompson, whom he asked to see once more. Thompson, worn out physically and mentally, had left Boston shortly after the August 10 reprieve for his summer place in South Tamworth, New Hampshire, but as soon as he received the message he set out at once for Charlestown.
It was six o’clock before he arrived at the prison. As he entered the death house, Vanzetti, who had been sitting at his table writing, stood up at once as if he had been expecting him, smiled warmly, and reached through the bars to shake hands. Then Thompson took a chair from one of the guards and sat down just behind the painted warning line.
They talked tentatively at first. Thompson had heard a rumor that Vahey and Graham knew Vanzetti was guilty of both crimes and could prove it if only they were released from their lawyers’ obligation of secrecy. Vanzetti emphatically and without anger said he had never told Graham or Vahey anything that would link him to either crime. Thompson beckoned to a guard to be a witness to their conversation.
For both men it was the most solemn moment of their lives. There was the quality of a Socratic dialogue to their questions and answers. The American lawyer’s low, controlled tones were a counterpoint to the more musical voice of the Italian. As Thompson recalled the scene afterward it struck him in its more humble way as a recreation of the Phaedo.
I told Vanzetti that although my belief in his innocence had all the time been strengthened, both by my study of the evidence and by my increasing knowledge of his personality, yet there was a chance, however remote, that I might be mistaken; and that I thought he ought for my sake, in this closing hour of his life when nothing could save him, to give me his most solemn reassurance, both with respect to himself and with respect to Sacco. Vanzetti then told me quietly and calmly, and with a sincerity which I could not doubt, that I need have no anxiety about this matter; that both he and Sacco were absolutely innocent of the South Braintree crime, and that he was equally innocent of the Bridgewater crime; that while, looking back, he now realized more clearly than he ever had the grounds of the suspicion against him and Sacco, he felt that no allowance had been made for his ignorance of American points of view and habits of thought, or for his fear as a radical and almost as an outlaw, and that in reality he was convicted on evidence which would not have convicted him had he not been an anarchist, so that he was in a very real sense dying for his cause. He said it was the cause for which he was prepared to die. He said it was the cause of the upward progress of humanity, and the elimination of force from the world. He spoke with calmness, knowledge, and deep feeling. He said he was grateful to me for what I had done for him. He asked to be remembered to my wife and son. He spoke with emotion of his sister and of his family. He asked me to do what I could to clear his name, using the words “clear my name.”
Vanzetti, after bringing up the cruelty of his seven years in prison, spoke of the history of movements for human betterment, among them early Christianity. Thompson remarked that the essence of the appeal of Christianity was the supreme confidence shown by Jesus in the truth of his own views by forgiving, even when on the cross, his persecutors and slanderers. Many times in his letters Vanzetti had made comparisons between his own fate and that of Jesus. It was at these words of Thompson’s that their dialogue, as he recorded it, reached its climax:
Now, for the first and only time in the conversation, Vanzetti showed a feeling of personal resentment against his enemies. He spoke with eloquence of his sufferings, and asked me whether I thought it possible that he could forgive those who had persecuted and tortured him through seven years of inexpressible misery. I told him he knew how deeply I sympathized with him, and that I had asked him to reflect upon the career of One infinitely superior to myself and to him, and upon a force infinitely greater than the force of hate and revenge. I said that in the long run, the force to which the world would respond was the force of love and not of hate, and that I was suggesting to him to forgive his enemies, not for their sakes, but for his own peace of mind, and also because an example of such forgiveness would in the end be more powerful to win adherence to his cause or to a belief in his innocence than anything else that could be done.
There was another pause in our conversation. I arose and we stood gazing at each other for a minute or two in silence. Vanzetti finally said that he would think of what I had said.
Thompson, the believer, then referred to the possibility of immortality, saying that he understood the difficulties of such a belief, yet that if there was personal immortality Vanzetti might hope to share it. The other did not reply, but spoke briefly of the evils of present-day society—and the two men parted.
In this closing scene [Thompson wrote] the impression ... which had been gaining in my mind for three years, was deepened and confirmed—that he was a man of powerful mind, and unselfish disposition, of seasoned character, and of devotion to high ideals. There was no sign of breaking down or of terror at approaching death. At parting he gave me a firm clasp of the hand, and a steady glance, which revealed unmistakably the depth of his feeling and the firmness of his self-control.
As he was about to leave, Thompson exchanged a few words with Sacco, who shook hands firmly through the bars, thanked the lawyer for what he had done, and said he hoped their differences of opinion had not affected their personal feelings. Like Vanzetti, he showed no sign of fear.
However darkly anticipated by public officials across the United States, the day passed off lightly with scarcely more than a few token strikes. The underlying fear was of another series of bombings. Police blanketed all the larger cities. In Washington guards with riot guns patrolled the Capitol. Police used clubs to break up a meeting of three thousand sympathizers in Philadelphia. The Communist Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee in New York had called for a general strike and a mass meeting in the afternoon at Union Square. Other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, the Central Trades and Labor Council, and the Defense Committee, refused to participate, and only a few hundred responded to the strike appeal. Late in the afternoon a crowd of ten thousand gathered in Union Square under the eyes of five hundred police, some of whom manned machine guns on the rooftops.
The afternoon and early evening were marked by a frenetic dashing about of volunteer lawyers. Shortly before three Musmanno filed the Finerty motion in the Federal Building, and at five o’clock Judge James Lowell of the United States District Court held a hearing on it. After listening for over an hour to Finerty, William Schuyler Jackson, and Benjamin Spellman, a New York lawyer who had aided in the defense of Harry Thaw, Judge Lowell ruled that nothing had been brought out to justify his issuing a writ or stay of execution. “The only question before this court is whether these men were deprived of their constitutional rights,” the judge snapped at Spellman, who seemed to irritate him. “Don’t tell me about the public. Stick to the law. I am sorry to see these two men executed, but it is a question of law, and it doesn’t make any difference whether ten persons or ten thousand persons are sorry for them.”
On leaving the courthouse, Finerty drove at once with Jackson for a third appeal to Justice Holmes. It was twilight by the time they reached Beverly. The old man listened to them for two hours, said he appreciated the force of their arguments, but felt—as he had before—that he had no right to intervene. With this rebuff the legal side of the case ended. From Beverly, Finerty and Jackson drove to East Boston in a last attempt to reach Judge Anderson, only to be told at the airport that the chartered plane could not take off after dark.
Luigia and Rosina had visited the death house again in the afternoon. At seven the warden allowed them a farewell visit of five minutes. Luigia walked up the prison steps, supported by Rosina. The two women had exhausted their tears. Dry-eyed, they kissed the prisoners for the last time through the bars.
Meanwhile the indefatigable Musmanno made his way to the executive chambers where he again argued the case from beginning to end before the unwilling ears of Fuller and Wiggin. Finally the governor put him off by telling him to see Attorney General Reading, promising to accept any recommendations Reading might make. While Musmanno was concluding his arguments Luigia and Rosina arrived and he remained as their interpreter. Luigia, her rosary in her hand, knelt on the floor, imploring the governor to save her innocent brother. Rosina begged passionately for the life of her children’s father. Fuller listened to the wildly pleading women for over an hour, his professional courtesy fitting like a mask. “It cannot be expected,” he told them finally, in dismissal, “that you would know the case as the lawyers and judges know it, and I can understand the sorrow that overwhelms you. I wish I could do something to lighten that sorrow, but I can do nothing.”
Musmanno, after leaving the governor, went down the corridor to the attorney general’s office. Reading listened to him with apparent interest while he explained that there were still five United States Supreme Court justices—any one of whom might grant a habeas corpus petition—whom they had not been able to reach. Another respite was necessary to allow the defense the necessary time. Reading said he would let Musmanno know his decision within the hour.
Just before eleven o’clock, the waiting Musmanno was called into the governor’s office. Fuller told him that the attorney general had decided not to recommend a stay of execution. Musmanno, his voice trembling, asked the governor if he would stand for all time on that decision. Fuller replied that he would.
Charlestown prison, with eight hundred police surrounding it, was quiet. Mounted troopers, cap straps under their chins, and supplied with gas masks and tear gas, flanked the arched granite entrance. Fire-department squads had connected their hoses. Marine patrol boats chugged up and down the Miller River adjoining the freight yards.
Again the slum streets about the prison had become a dead zone, roped off for a distance of half a mile. Those who lived within the area were told to stay indoors.
The prison walls and catwalks were lined with machine guns and searchlights. As the darkness came on, the purple-white rays began to crisscross the whole moldering Charlestown area—the Boston and Maine freight yards, the tenements, the slime-banked river. On the far side of Rutherford Avenue, beyond the rows of junk shops, the light bands swept across the forgotten cemetery where John Harvard lay buried, flashing beyond to the Bunker Hill obelisk and the spire of the St. Francis de Sales Church. Then, as if in reply, searchlights on the roof of the State House began to probe the darkness. In the middle distance the elevated cars moved across the Charlestown Bridge like illuminated beetles.
Within the dead zone the quiet was broken only by the clip-clop of horse hoofs on the granite paving blocks and by passing motorcycle patrols. Only as the silence resumed did one become aware of the steady cricketlike tapping of a cobbler’s hammer from a shop on Rutherford Avenue.
As the twilight faded, the tenseness in the city was so pervading that it seemed to go beyond action. Crowds gathered on the Common across from the State House to gaze up silently at the lighted windows of the executive wing. At ten o’clock the pickets reappeared. Again the police hustled them away. Hundreds stood impassively in Newspaper Row to watch the bulletin boards. The radio stations announced that they would stay on the air until after midnight. In City Square, Charlestown, several thousand men and women milled about beyond the barriers, curious rather than partisan, making no attempt at any sort of demonstration.
From the second-floor headquarters of the Hod Carriers’ Union, Mother Bloor, flanked by Fred Beal, attempted to harangue a crowd of several hundred in the street below and was promptly arrested. Beal then set out with a group of fifty militants for Charlestown, placards and banners concealed under their shirts, resolved to break through the barricades and demonstrate in front of the prison itself. As the marchers reached City Square, they brought out their placards and banners, and at once there were cries of “The Reds are coming!” A shot rang out. At the sound the bluecoats stampeded out of the precinct station. The mounted police charged the crowd. A number of people were hurt. Beal and nine others were arrested. “The crowd didn’t beat you up,” the patrolman who had Beal by the collar told him, “But, O boy, wait until you get to the station!”
Inside the prison walls everything was darkened and quiet except for the smoke-filled press room with its clicking typewriters and clattering telegraph keys. As on all execution nights, few of the prisoners were asleep. At ten the electricians arrived to make a final test of the chair. Shortly after eleven Musmanno arrived, his panama hat flopping as he dashed up the steps, tears streaming down his cheeks. The warden would not allow him to see the condemned men.
At 11:15 Warden Hendry, bearing himself with all the official gravity he could muster, walked up the iron stairs into the death house. Vanzetti had been pacing up and down in his cell. At the warden’s approach he stopped. “I am sorry,” Hendry informed him in the customary stereotyped phraseology, “but it is my painful duty to inform you that you have to die tonight.” Vanzetti stood staring at the floor for a moment, then flung his arms out, his eyes glittering. “We must bow to the inevitable,” he whispered.
Sacco was at his desk writing a letter when Hendry repeated the formula. He slumped down in his chair, then in a thin voice asked the warden if he would see that the letter he was writing was mailed to his father in Italy. Hendry promised to mail it himself. In the last cell Madeiros lay on his back with his shoes off and a blanket over him, as if asleep. At the warden’s announcement he neither moved nor spoke. Father Michael Murphy followed the warden into the room and asked hopefully if the prisoners would receive the rites of the church. Vanzetti and Sacco refused. Madeiros did not reply. Sacco thanked Father Murphy and told him he had enjoyed his talks with him. The priest looked dejected when he left. “Well, I guess they don’t want me now,” he told the newspapermen in the press room. The three were the first condemned men in Charlestown’s history to refuse a clergyman.
Shortly before midnight Executioner Elliott, with Warden Hendry and Deputy Warden Hoggsett and the official witnesses, entered the death chamber from a side door. The witnesses were Surgeon General Frank Williams of the Massachusetts State Guard, Medical Examiner Magrath, Dr. McLaughlin, Sheriff Capen, Dr. William Faxon from the Dedham jail, and Dr. Howard Lothrop, a surgeon at the Boston City Hospital. Warden Hendry would allow only one reporter to be present. Lots were drawn in the press room and the choice fell to William Playfair of the Associated Press.
The witnesses ranged themselves along the wall, stony-faced, their voices held to a whisper. In the center of the room the chair stood with its unfastened straps hanging down, under the glare of the overhead lights. Executioner Elliott took his place behind the screen that hid the switch but not his head. Another screen concealed three litters.
Somewhere in the middle distance a clock struck midnight. At 12:03 two guards brought Madeiros into the bright silent room. Supported by a guard on each side he shuffled as if he were walking in his sleep. They guided him to the chair and he sat down and waited like an automaton while they strapped his arms and legs in place, adjusted the electrodes and the headpiece that covered the upper part of his skull, and finally placed a black mask over his eyes. At a nod from Warden Hendry, Elliott pulled the switch. The masked body stiffened, the mouth grimaced, and in a few seconds the witnesses noticed the odor of burning hair. Three times Elliott switched on the current, then Dr. McLaughlin stepped forward, applied his stethoscope, and pronounced Madeiros dead. Deftly the guards placed the body on one of the litters.
At 12:11 Sacco was brought in. Although the guards flanked him, he walked the seventeen steps from his cell to the chair unaided. As they began to adjust the straps he sat bolt upright, casting about wildly with his eyes. Then in the iron tradition of his belief, like so many of his comrades on the gallows before him, he called out in Italian: “Long live anarchy!” With that he grew calmer, and added more quietly in English: “Farewell my wife and child and all my friends.” Only then did he seem to become aware of the witnesses. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. The guards had finished with the straps and the headpiece and the electrodes, and one of them now slipped on the mask. In that last second Sacco found himself beyond wife, children, friends, anarchy, bared to the last basic verity. “Farewell!” he cried out in English as Warden Hendry nodded and the executioner’s hand moved behind the screen, and then in Italian: “Mother!” Elliott increased the current by 300 volts for that sinewy peasant body.
When the guards came to Vanzetti’s cell, he knew that the other two were already dead. With the guards beside him he entered the death chamber, his step firm, his head erect, his gray denim prison trousers flapping slightly from the slits in the sides. Just inside the door he paused near Warden Hendry and said with great precision:
“I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of all, of all. I am an innocent man.”
With that he shook hands with Hendry, Deputy Warden Hoggsett, Dr. McLaughlin, and two of the four guards, then took his place in the chair.
There was still something more. As the guard on his right knelt to adjust the contact pad to his bare leg Vanzetti spoke again, his eyes covered. “I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me,” he said gently. Warden Hendry’s eyes were filled with tears as he gave the signal. Afterward he was scarcely able to pronounce the required formula: “Under the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been carried out.”