FOOTNOTES:
[9] The six Winchester shells found on Sacco in the police station were of this same obsolete type, a parallel overlooked by the prosecution and barely hinted at by the defense during the trial but emphasized later.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TRIAL: III
On July 5 Jerry McAnamey resumed his place within the bar enclosure. Attendance had fallen off in the last week, but on this Tuesday morning every seat was occupied in anticipation of the defendants’ taking the stand. The first witness was Aldeah Florence of Quincy, with whom Sarah Berardelli had boarded after her husband’s death. Testifying for the defense, she said that Sarah had told her a few days after her husband’s funeral that he might still be alive if only he had not left his revolver in the repair shop. Her examination and cross-examination lasted less than ten minutes. Then came a pause, with Moore and the McAnameys whispering together, while the district attorney stood by, smiling knowingly.
Finally Jerry McAnamey turned toward the cage and asked “Will the defendant Vanzetti be brought forward?” A murmur ran through the courtroom. It was the moment that everyone had been awaiting since the beginning of the trial. A deputy unlocked the metal door. Quietly, Vanzetti stepped forward and raised his hand in oath before Clerk Worthington. The receding hairline of his domed forehead, the wrinkles around his eyes, the slight sag of flesh under his chin, above all his drooping mustache, made him look at least fifteen years older than thirty-three. He was dressed neatly in a dark suit, white shirt, high stiff collar, and black bow tie. On the stand he told his story in an assured manner, using few gestures, answering all questions without hesitation.
Guided by Jerry McAnamey, he told briefly of his early life, then of his years of wandering until he ended up with the Brinis in Plymouth. The rest had by now become a familiar story. On April 15, he said, he had been peddling fish in North Plymouth. Almost at the corner of Castle Street he had met Rosen with his bolt of cloth and they had gone to the Brinis’ together. About one o’clock he had sold all his fish and was going down Ocean Street with his empty pushcart when he saw Mr. Corl painting his boat. He stopped to talk with him and while they were talking Mr. Jesse, the boatbuilder, came along, and also a Mr. Holmes from the lumberyard. They chatted a while, and after he left Mr. Corl he had gone home with his pushcart, changed his clothes, and cooked his evening meal. What he had done that evening he did not now remember. The next morning he went to Marvelli’s store to buy a Boston Post and find out what time the tide would be low so that he could dig clams. He dug clams most of the day and afterward sold them. On April 17 in the morning he tried to get a job at the garage they were building in front of the carbarn. There was no work there, however, so in the afternoon he took the train to Whitman and from there the streetcar to Brockton where he had eaten supper with a friend named Caldera and afterward gone on to Boston.
He stayed overnight with a friend, Vincent Colarossi, and next morning, Sunday, had breakfast with him and Felicani in Scollay Square; later they had dinner at Boni’s with a group of friends. They spent the afternoon at the Naturalization Club in East Boston and at the end of the day Vanzetti had gone back to Plymouth.
On Monday he went around Plymouth looking without success for a job. The next day he tried to get fish from Antonio Carbone down on the pier, but fish seemed as scarce as jobs. He was at Carbone’s house that evening paying a bill for fish and Carbone had just given him two cigars when Chief of Police Armstrong came in to tell them an Italian fisherman named Pacci had drowned. Two days later Vanzetti happened to visit the dock, and there was a dory near the wharf with Pacci’s body in it and the undertaker’s car waiting on the siding. He told the men in the dory it would be easier if they brought the body to the shore and took it up the three cement steps to Water Street.
All that week he could find neither work nor fish. On Saturday he went to Boston, again staying with Colarossi. At their Sunday meeting in the Naturalization Club his friends asked him to go to New York on their affairs and he left that night. Three days later he returned, coming back on the Providence boat.
May Day found him again in Boston with Colarossi, and the next day there was the usual get-together at the Naturalization Club. Monday morning he spent at the fish piers; everywhere he went he found the prices too high. In the afternoon he took the train to Stoughton and stayed overnight at Sacco’s house. Next day he spent around the house while Sacco went to Boston to pick up his passport. In the evening Sacco came back with Orciani on the latter’s motorcycle, and the three of them agreed to meet the following day.
That last day he and Sacco cut wood while Rosina packed. Just by chance he had pocketed four shotgun shells he found on Sacco’s kitchen cabinet.[10] Vanzetti told in detail about the evening of May 5: how Orciani, with Boda, had gone on ahead, and how he had composed a notice for the next Sunday’s meeting. Sacco had thought the notice too long, so he had cut out some of it. Although they had agreed to meet Orciani and Boda at Elm Square, there was no sign of them when they arrived. Only when they were walking over the railroad bridge near Simon Johnson’s house had they seen the motorcycle coming along from Brockton.
After talking about the license plates with Johnson they had given up their project. Boda had then told Vanzetti: “I and Orciani go with the machine and you take a car and you go home. We will look for a new number. When I am ready I will tell you and we will come here some other day. We will come to take the automobile.”
They had needed the automobile “to carry books and newspapers.” As Vanzetti vaguely explained it, they planned to collect this unspecified material “from any house and from any house in five or six places, five or six towns. Three, five or six people have plenty of literature, and we went, we intend to take that out and put that in the proper place ... not subject to policemen go in and call for, see the literature, see the papers, see the books, as in that time they went through in the house of many men who were active in the radical movement and socialist and labor movement, and go then and take letters and take books and take newspapers, and put men in jail and deported many.”
Everyone in the courtroom from Judge Thayer to the defendants themselves knew that this was the great divide. In these few sentences the issue of radicalism, moving so long just below the surface, finally emerged. Katzmann at once objected, and his objection was a warning to the defense. The district attorney was perfectly willing to avoid any reference to the political views of the two anarchists if the defense would agree to do the same. For the latter it was a peculiar dilemma. Moore was aware of the latent syllogism that the jurors no doubt then shared with most native-born Americans. An anarchist is capable of anything; Sacco and Vanzetti are anarchists; Sacco and Vanzetti are capable of anything: Q.E.D. Yet to go along with the district attorney, to gloss over the defendants’ political beliefs, would be to destroy any explanation except that of consciousness of guilt for their actions on the night of their arrest.
Before Vanzetti took the stand, Judge Thayer had advised the McAnameys that they had better consider whether or not they were going to inject the radical issue into the trial. Moore insisted there was no alternative. John McAnamey told his brothers the same thing: that the defendants would have to tell about their connection with the radical movement fully and frankly. Only thus could they account for their equivocal behavior.
When Vanzetti from the stand finally pronounced the words radical movement, John McAnamey was just leaving the courtroom. “As I was passing out,” he testified six years later before the Lowell Committee, “Judge Thayer looking over to me, well in his peculiar way of laughing or smiling, sort of threw back his head as much as to say, ‘Well you see Mr. McAnamey it is coming out.’ That is what he was telling me by his facial gesture. That stands out clearly in my mind. The government would have wanted that kept out of the case I am thoroughly satisfied because how could the men explain the facts?”
Vanzetti admitted he had been in West Bridgewater once, six years before his arrest, but said he had never been there again until May 5. He had never been to East Braintree, had never asked directions of a stranger on the South Shore train, and he had not been in South Braintree on April 15, 1920. When Jerry McAnamey asked him why he had lied to Chief Stewart in the Brockton police station he answered: “Because I was scared to give the names and addresses of my friends as I know that almost all of them have some books and some newspapers in their house by which authority take a reason for arresting them and deport them.”
The direct examination continued until midafternoon. Then the district attorney took over with a cross-examination that was to last through the following morning. For this climax Katzmann pushed Williams aside and took full command. His first question was barbed.
“So you left Plymouth, Mr. Vanzetti, in May 1917, to dodge the draft, did you?” All that Vanzetti could answer was “Yes, sir.” Katzmann made him admit that he had run away so that he would not have to be a soldier.
“If I refused to go to war,” the nettled Vanzetti told his interrogator, “I don’t refuse because I don’t like this country or I don’t like the people of this country. I will refuse even if I was in Italy and you tell me it is a long time I am in this country, and I tell you that in this country as long time I am, that I found plenty good people and some bad people, but that I was always working hard as a man can work, and I have always lived very humble and—” Katzmann, who had allowed him to go on that far, now demanded that the answer be stricken out.
Vanzetti’s story shaped itself awkwardly through the counterpoint of questions and answers. Katzmann hinted that when he was working on the railroad at Springfield he had driven a truck. Vanzetti agreed that there were trucks used, but denied he had ever driven one—he did not know how to drive, still did not know. The district attorney then asked him what he had really intended to do the night he and Sacco had gone to West Bridgewater. To John Dever the answer did not seem very cohesive: “We want to take the automobile, and then my intention is to take the automobile with Boda, because I do not know how to drive the automobile, to go to Bridgewater and if we will be able to find the party, because I do not remember the address of the party. I do not know exactly where he lived. We will tell to Pappi about telling the Italian people of Bridgewater to come in Brockton next Sunday at the speech, and after I found Pappi, and speak to Pappi, go toward Plymouth and speak with my friends if I can find some friends who want to take the responsibility of receiving such books in their house, in his house.”
Vanzetti admitted that he had lied to Katzmann in the Brockton station the morning after his arrest, even after the district attorney had told him he was not compelled to answer questions. He had lied about his revolver, about buying the cartridges and firing them, about knowing Boda, about the motorcycle. “I was scared,” he explained. Admitting that most of these lies would not have helped conceal the names and addresses of his friends, he still insisted that he had lied because he had been frightened about his friends’ safety and because Salsedo’s death in New York had made him afraid of the police.
Katzmann hemmed him in, getting him to say there were half a dozen people in Bridgewater from whom they were planning to collect literature, forcing him to confess he knew none of their names. The district attorney then questioned him about his stay in Mexico, leading quietly up to the thundering demand: “And are you the man, Mr. Vanzetti, that on May ninth was going to advise in public meeting men who had gone to war? Are you that man?”
“Yes, sir,” Vanzetti told him. “I am that man, not the man you want me, but I am that man.”
When Vanzetti had first been questioned in Brockton he could not recall anything specific that he had been doing on April 15. Katzmann now wanted to know how he could recall so much of that day fifteen months later. It was, Vanzetti told him, because in Brockton he had no idea he was going to be charged with murder. But “three or four weeks after my arrest I understand enough to see that I have to be very careful to save my life and my liberty and I have to remember.”
Thinking back, he was able to reconstruct most of the day by checking with what he had been doing on the following Monday, Patriot’s Day, and on other days. As for the night of his arrest, he had planned to go on to Plymouth with Boda in the Overland. Sacco and Orciani were to go back to Stoughton, and he had not expected to see Sacco again. When asked again about the literature they planned to collect, he said there must have been four or five hundred pounds of it, and that he had been told by his friends in New York to get rid of it. In a brief re-examination Vanzetti said again that when he was arrested he had thought it was because of political matters since he was asked “if I am a Socialist, if I am an I.W.W., if I am a Communist, if I am a Radical, if I am a Blackhand.”
Through a day and a half the district attorney flashed questions at Vanzetti so fast that his acquired English collapsed. Still, he managed to keep his calm manner. Such self-control would be beyond Sacco’s capacities. For a year now he had fretted in the Dedham jail, and a month’s submission to the routine of the courtroom had brought him close to the point of explosion—as the experienced Katzmann well realized.
After Vanzetti was released from the stand, Simon Johnson returned to answer a few questions about Boda’s Overland. This ended the morning session. At the beginning of the afternoon session, at a word from Moore, Sacco with one quick backward look at his wife stepped to the stand.
In spite of his jail pallor and his thinning hair, Sacco still kept an appearance of youth. Although born only three years after Vanzetti, he seemed a generation younger. He was dressed in a neat dark suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie. The Post reporter found his appearance “frank and open.” He seemed glad finally to be able to tell his story.
With Moore guiding him, he gave the matter-of-fact details of his childhood in Torremaggiore, then told of his early longing to go to America. “I was crazy to come to this country,” he explained, “because I was liked a free country, call a free country.” It was a fateful remark.
After Sacco’s arrival in America there were the years of odd jobs before he learned a trade, there was his marriage, and finally there was the black-edged letter from his father that made him decide to go back to Italy. Only in passing did Sacco mention that he had left the United States in June 1917 and returned sometime in August. All this was just a preliminary to the history of April 15, 1920. That day, according to his account, he left Stoughton on the 8:56 A.M. train for Boston to go to the Italian consulate and apply for a foglio di via, a one-way passport to Italy. He arrived at the South Station and walked from there along Atlantic Avenue to the North End. On Prince Street he bought a copy of La Notizia and spent some time reading it. Then he walked down Hanover Street, turned the corner, and ran into his friend Angelo Monello. Together they walked to Washington Street; Sacco continued alone, looking in the store windows and pricing the new suits and straw hats. The morning was getting on, and he thought he might as well have lunch and see about his passport afterward.
As he was going in to Boni’s Restaurant he met Professor Guadagni, and they sat down at a table together. Albert Bosco was already there, and later Mr. Williams, the advertising man, joined them. Sacco stayed about an hour and afterward went uptown to the consulate on Berkeley Street. Arriving there at two, he said to the clerk, “I like to get a passport for my whole family. He asked me—he said, ‘You bring picture?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so I gave it to him, see a big picture. He says, ‘Well, I am sorry. This picture is too big.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘can you cut and make him small?’ he said, ‘the picture we cannot use, because it goes too big.’ I says, ‘Can you cut?’ He says, ‘No, no use, because got to make a photograph just for the purpose for the passport, small very small.’”
After a quarter of an hour at the consulate he went back to the North End, dropped in at a café for a cup of coffee, and met Professor Guadagni again with a Professor Dentamore. Then he went over to a store on the other side of North Square to buy some groceries. Some time in the afternoon he met a man named Afa—that was the way he thought the name was spelled—and paid him fifteen dollars he owed him. A little after four he took the train for Stoughton and arrived there about six. On the way home he stopped off at the drugstore and bought some elixir for a physic.
Sacco was interrupted by a wrangle between Moore and Judge Thayer when Moore tried to bring in the details of the April 25 meeting at the Naturalization Club, “to lay a foundation for the explanation of the subsequent acts of the defendants.” Thayer ruled that the subsequent acts must be proved before any explanation could be offered, and the two debated noisily. When Sacco was finally allowed to continue, he told how on May 4 he had gone to Boston for the last time to pick up his passport. He had then taken the elevated to Hyde Park to see Orciani. The two met on River Street, went to Orciani’s house for the motorcycle, and then drove to Sacco’s home.
Sacco was more explicit than Vanzetti about why they had gone to West Bridgewater the following evening. “We decided in the meeting in Boston to get those books and papers,” he told the court, “because in New York there was somebody said they were trying to arrest all the socialists and the radicals and we were afraid to get all the people arrested, so we were advised by some friends and we find out and Vanzetti take the responsibility to go over to the friends to get the books out and get no trouble. The literature, I mean, the socialist literature.”
The dark cap that had been picked up near Berardelli’s body was produced and Sacco tried it on. He said it was too small—and so it seemed in the courtroom sketches made by the Post cartoonist, Norman (W. Norman Ritchie). With regard to the Colt taken from him at the Brockton police station, he explained that his wife had found it in a bureau drawer along with some bullets while she was cleaning up, and asked him what he was going to do with it. “I said, ‘Well, I go to shoot in the woods, me and Vanzetti.’ So I did. I took it in my pocket. I put the revolver over here and the bullets in my pocket, in my pocket back. Well, we started to talk in the afternoon, me and Vanzetti, and half past four Orciani and Boda came over to the house, so we started an argument and I forgot about to go in the woods shooting, so it was still left in my pocket.” The bullets he had bought on Hanover Street in 1917 or 1918.
His story of the trip to West Bridgewater and the subsequent arrest and questioning did not differ greatly from Vanzetti’s, although Sacco told in more detail of the identification witnesses coming to the Brockton station. In the conclusion of his direct examination he maintained that he had not been in South Braintree on April 15, 1920, and that he had never made an attack on anyone or participated in any crime, then or at any other date.
“Did you say you love a free country?” was Katzmann’s first rapier question. And when Sacco answered yes, the district attorney thrust again. “Did you love this country in the month of May 1917?” “I do not say,” Sacco told him, “I don’t want to say I did not love this country.” The other insisted. “Did you love this country in the month of May 1917?” “If you can, Mr. Katzmann, if you give me that—I could explain—” The district attorney had the Italian in the corner. “Do you understand that question? Then you will please answer it.” “I can’t answer it in one word,” Sacco insisted.
Katzmann’s voice was crusty with disbelief. “You can’t say whether you loved the United States of America one week before the day to enlist for the first draft?” “I can’t say in one word, Mr. Katzmann,” Sacco replied.
“Did you,” the district attorney finally asked him, “go away to Mexico to avoid being a soldier for this country that you loved?”
Sacco breathed deeply before he said “Yes.”
“And is that your idea of showing your love for this country?”
The other hesitated. He knew what he wanted to say but there was no way for him to say it, no means to surmount the barrier of this alien tongue. “Is that your idea of showing your love for America?” the contemptuous voice persisted. “Yes,” Sacco said, and again he found himself saying what he had not meant, what he did not want to say, to the courtly, smiling district attorney.
It was question and answer, cat and mouse:
“Do you think it is a brave thing to do what you did?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it would be a brave thing to go away from your own wife when she needed you?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you stay down in Mexico?”
“Well, first thing, I could not get my trade there. I had to do any other job.”
“Why didn’t you stay down there, down in that free country, and work with a pick and shovel?”
“I don’t think I did sacrifice to learn a job to go pick and shovel in Mexico.”
“Is it because—is your love for the United States of America commensurate with the amount of money you can get in this country per week?”
“Better conditions, yes.”
“Better country to make money, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Sacco, that is the extent of your love for this country, isn’t it, measured in dollars and cents?”
Jerry McAnarney kept objecting to such questioning. “You opened up this whole subject,” Judge Thayer told him.
When McAnarney continued his objections, Thayer asked, “Is it not your claim that the defendant wanted the automobile to prevent people from being deported and to get this literature all out of the way? Does he not claim that this was done in the interest of the United States, to prevent violation of the law by the distribution of this literature?”
The amazed McAnarney replied that the defense had taken no such position. All they claimed was “that this man and Vanzetti were of the class called socialists, that riot was running a year ago last April, that men were being deported, that twelve to fifteen hundred were seized in Massachusetts.”
Thayer returned to the theme. “Are you going to claim that what the defendant did was in the interest of the United States to prevent further crimes from being committed by the authorities?”
“Your Honor please,” Jerry McAnarney replied. “I now object to your Honor’s statement as prejudicial to the rights of the defendants and ask that this statement be withdrawn from the jury.”
Thayer denied any such effect. “There is no prejudicial remark made that I know of, and none were intended. I simply asked you, sir, whether you propose to offer evidence as to what you said to me.”
A lengthy dispute ensued, Katzmann defending his cross-examination as “tending to attack the credibility of this man as a witness.” Over Moore’s loudly voiced objections Judge Thayer decided to let the district attorney question Sacco further as to what he meant by loving a free country.
Frank Sibley, writing with the afternoon deadline only a few minutes away, pricked up his ears at the “interest of the United States.” He could scarcely believe it when he heard the judge’s caustic voice ask about preventing crimes from being committed “by the authorities.” Before he had a chance to think twice, the telegraph boy had taken away the yellow sheet of paper with the phrase on it. The phrase appeared in the evening Globe. When Sibley wrote his more extended story for the next morning’s edition he omitted it. “I couldn’t credit my remembrance, and so did not use the vicious sentence,” he wrote Attorney General J. Weston Allen a few months later. His colleague Shea of the Post had also picked up the remark and used it.
The next day Judge Thayer summoned Sibley to his chambers and angrily insisted that he said no such thing. Sibley, having consulted with Shea, refused to back down even when shown that the transcript of the court stenographic notes did not contain the phrase. Just then a bailiff appeared to announce the arrival of the jury, and Thayer huffily broke off the conversation.
As the cross-examination continued, Sacco found himself caught in a web of words of which he could see each strand as it formed, from which he knew he could break out if only they would let him. But always it was the yes or no answer demanded, always the cutting-off of his explanation, that made it seem as if he had come back from Mexico merely to eat better food and to make more money and to be with his wife and speak a more familiar language. “Food, wife, language, industry—that is love of country, is it?” Katzmann asked him, and he found himself answering yes. The rules, the thin threads of questions twisted about him, smothering his replies. He could feel the anger of frustration pulsing through him at the reiterations. Deftly the district attorney led him into the trap.
“What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a free country?”
“First thing I came to this country—”
“No, pardon me. What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a free country?”
“Give me a chance to explain.”
“I am asking you to explain now.”
Suddenly Sacco felt himself clear of the web, standing free at last with his own thoughts. The frustrations of his arrest and imprisonment, the long months in jail, the legal niceties that had sealed his mouth in the courtroom, now found violent relief in a cascade of words. As he talked on, his wiry body seemed to grow tense and his eyes snapped fire. At first some of the jurors smiled, but before he had finished everyone in the courtroom was listening intently.
“When I was in Italy, a boy,” he began, “I was a republican, so I always thinking republicans has more chance to manage education, develop, to build some day his family, to raise the child and education, if you could. But that was my opinion; so when I came here to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before, but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there just as well.... Of course, over here there is good food, because it is bigger country, to any those who got money to spend, not for the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh.... When I been started work here very hard and been work thirteen years, hard worker, I could not put any money in the bank. I could no push my boy some to go to school and other things.... I could see the best men, intelligent, education, they been arrested and sent to prison and died in prison for years and years without getting them out, and Debs, one of the great men in his country, he is in prison, still away in prison, because he is a socialist. He wanted the laboring classes to have better conditions and better living, more education, give a push his son if he could have a chance some day, but they put him in prison. Why? Because the capitalist class, they know, they are against that, because the capitalist class, they don’t want our child to go to high school or to college or Harvard College. There would not be no chance, there would not be no—they don’t want the working class educationed; they want the working class to be a low all the times, be underfoot, and not to be up with the head. So, sometimes, you see, the Rockefellers, Morgans, they give fifty—mean they give five hundred thousand dollars to Harvard College, they give a million dollars for another school. Everybody say, ‘Well, D. Rockefeller is a great man, the best in the country.’ I want ask him who is going to Harvard College? What benefit the working class they will get by those million dollars they give by Rockefeller, D. Rockefellers? They won’t get, the poor class, but I want men to live like men. I like men to get everything that nature will give best, because they belong—we are not the friend of any other place, but we are belong to nations.... So that is why I love people who labor and work and see better conditions every day develop, makes no more war. We no want fight by the gun, and we don’t want to destroy young men. The mother been suffering for building the young man. Some day need a little more bread, so when the time the mother get some bread or profit out that boy, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and some of the peoples, high class, they send to war. Why? What is war? The war is not shoots like Abraham Lincoln’s and Abe Jefferson’s, to fight for the free country, for the better education, to give chance to any other peoples, not the white people but the blacks and the others, because they believe and know they are mens like the rest, but they are war for the great millionaire. No war for the civilization of men. They are war for business, million dollars come on the side. What right have we to kill each other? I been work for the Irish, I have been working with the German fellow, with the French, many other peoples. I love them people just as I could love my wife, and my people for that did receive me. Why should I go kill them men? What he done to me? He never done anything, so I don’t believe in no war. I want to destroy those guns.... I remember in Italy, a long time ago, about sixty years ago, I should say, yes, about sixty years ago, the government they could not control very much these two—devilment went on, and robbery, so one of the government in the cabinet he says, ‘If you want to destroy those devilments, if you want to take off all those criminals, you ought to give a chance to socialist literature, education of people, emancipation.’ That is why I destroy governments, boys. That is why my idea I love socialists. That is why I like people who want education and living, building, who is good, just as much as they could. That is all.”
Norman’s on-the-spot cartoon caught Sacco gesticulating fiercely, his string tie awry, the astonished jurymen leaning forward and Moore and Jerry McAnarney looking blank with dismay, the harassed court stenographer begging for mercy. Katzmann and Judge Thayer were shown with heads spinning. The district attorney’s head, however, was perfectly clear. Making no objections to the passionate outburst, he registered each point in his mind.
When Sacco finally finished and stood there in rumpled exhaustion a ponderous silence followed, broken only by a few muffled coughs among the spectators. Then the district attorney took up the threads of his web again. If, he asked, things were as bad in America as Sacco said, why had he not gone back to Italy where by his own admission the food was better, he could have lived as well, and he would not have had to work as hard? Did he intend to condemn Harvard College? Did he know how many children were being educated free by the city of Boston? Over the solid objections of the defense, Judge Thayer allowed such questions on the grounds that they referred to statements the defendant himself had made. Jerry McAnarney, losing his temper, announced that he objected both to the questions and the answers.
The South Braintree murders had drifted into the background. Gradually the district attorney’s questions led back to them. If Sacco and his friends had been so alarmed by Salsedo’s death, why did they wait three days before doing anything about collecting the incriminating papers? Why had Sacco said they were going out to pick up books and papers on the night of their arrest while Vanzetti had testified they were merely going to make arrangements to pick them up? “Probably I mistake or probably Vanzetti is right,” Sacco replied. Katzmann quietly asked a few irrelevant questions about the mackinaw Orciani was wearing. Then suddenly Sacco felt the knife at his throat: “Did you take that revolver off the person of Alessandro Berardelli when he lay on the sidewalk in front of the Rice and Hutchins factory?”
“No, sir.”
Defendant and prosecutor stared long and silently at each other in the quiet courtroom.
There were, Katzmann reminded Sacco, the lies he had told the night of his arrest. The district attorney led him over them. It was a lie, Sacco admitted, that he had bought his Colt in the North End. He had really bought it at a store in Milford in 1917. He had lied, too, about buying a new box of cartridges. The truth was that cartridges were hard to come by during the war and he had bought an odd lot of them in a partially filled box somewhere on Hanover Street. Katzmann at once wanted to know if the fact that he later learned there were four different kinds of cartridges had anything to do with his changing his story. If he had told the truth about that box, would it have helped to give away the names and addresses of his friends who had radical literature? Following each logical advantage, the district attorney pinned Sacco down to admitting he could give no reason for such lying that had anything to do with the names and addresses of anarchists.
Sacco still insisted that when he had gone out on May 5 with the Colt tucked in his belt he had forgotten about it. He was used to carrying it while on his watchman’s rounds, he said, though it was true he had not been a watchman during the winter of 1920. Sometimes when he went into Boston and came back late on the train he carried it.
“Wasn’t it a pretty unusual thing for you to carry the gun?” Katzmann thrust at him.
“Well,” Sacco parried, “it is, but men have to defend themselves. In the country you don’t know what you need.”[11]
As to his other lies, Sacco had lied when he denied knowing Orciani. He had lied about the time he worked in South Braintree because he was afraid if the police found out he had been working there under the name of Mosmacotelli he would be punished as a slacker and they would find the radical literature in his house. He had lied when he said he had known Vanzetti only a year and a half because he did not want to tell about their going to Mexico. He had known Boda for three years; he had lied when he said he never had heard of him; Boda was a radical and he wanted to protect him. He had had no intention of looking up Pappi that night. That was another lie. As for the day of the crime, he had said in the Brockton station he worked all that day because he really thought he had. Katzmann forced him to admit that he had lied to George Kelley, his friend, in telling him he would be gone only half a day. Next morning he had invented a story for Kelley that there was such a crowd in the consulate that he could not get his passport in the morning and so missed the noon train.
Katzmann questioned Sacco minutely about the evening of May 5. Then after a short recess the district attorney appeared with two caps. Sacco objected that the first, a gray one, was too soiled to be his, but then admitted it belonged to him. The hole or tear in the lining he could not account for, although Katzmann pressed him to agree that it came from the nail in the factory wall on which he used to hang it each morning. The second cap, the dark one found next to Berardelli’s body, Sacco denied was his.
Mrs. Evans enlivened the courtroom Friday and caused some confusion among the courtroom attendants by appearing with binoculars. Thursday, July 7, was Judge Thayer’s sixty-fourth birthday, and he had been sent a bouquet of rambler roses. They now stood in a vase on the great oak desk, nodding cheerfully in the breeze from the electric fan.
When Sacco, his face heavy with fatigue, resumed the stand he asked for an interpreter and Joseph Ross was assigned to him. Katzmann began to hammer at why Sacco had said he was working at the factory the day before he had admittedly read in the paper about the South Braintree murders. Sacco tried to explain that at the time he had not given the date much though. The district attorney insisted. “Why did you tell me a falsehood that on Thursday, the day before you read the account in the paper, you worked all day?”
“Well, I did not remember for certain,” Sacco told him. “I said that I had been out two or three days.” There were two other days, Sacco admitted, that he had gone to the consulate, although he could not even now remember just what days they were. But they were half-days; April 15 was the only whole day he had spent in Boston.
As the cross-examination continued, a dispute arose as to the accuracy of Ross’ interpreting. Sacco accused him of translating inaccurately. Felix Forte, a young, bilingual lawyer brought in by the defense, debated with Ross as to the translation of quanto; Ross had translated it as before whereas Forte held that it meant when. As the argument boiled up, Judge Thayer sent the jury from the room. An arbiter called by Thayer, A. Minini, tried to reconcile his colleagues. A flurry of English and Italian followed. Vanzetti, in the cage, sprang to his feet to object to Ross.[12]
After the jurors had again taken their seats, Sacco denied that in Brockton he had said he was away from the factory at the beginning of April and that this was the only time he was away for a whole day.
The district attorney turned abruptly from the debate on days: “Did you shave this morning?” When Sacco said yes, he continued, “Have you shaved every day since this trial opened?” Scarcely waiting for the affirmative answer, the district attorney announced: “That is all, sir.”
It was Moore’s task in the re-examination that followed to patch up the damage done. He brought out that although Sacco might have admitted in Brockton that there was one whole day in April he had not worked, he had given Katzmann no definite date. He had lied to Michael Kelley about being delayed at the consulate because he was ashamed to admit that the reason he had broken his word about getting back in the afternoon was that he had spent the time talking to his friends. The letter that he had received from his father, after Sabino’s earlier letter announcing the mother’s death, was shown as corroborative evidence to the jury.
Once more Sacco went over the night in the Brockton police station, still maintaining that he thought he had been arrested because he was a radical and a slacker. The first thing Stewart had asked him was whether he was “an anarchist, communist, or socialist.” Again the dispute welled up about Ross’ integrity. As the morning session reached its end Jerry McAnarney asked that the jury be retired. He then presented another motion for a severance, asking for a separate trial for Vanzetti on the grounds of Sacco’s outburst:
“At the beginning of these cases,” he told Thayer, “I was apprehensive and fearful of what might transpire during this case were it tried in conjunction with the indictment against Nicola Sacco, and meeting that situation we filed a motion for a severance and a separate trial. At that time, in informal discussion before your Honor, mention was made that if at any time during the trial things should occur we could renew the motion. It now seems to me peculiarly fitting in view of all the evidence on this record at the present moment that the motion be granted for a severance of these cases, and I now offer the motion.”
Judge Thayer asked if proper instructions to the jury would not take care of the situation. The defense lawyer must have realized that there was no chance of the motion being granted, but he also realized what a damaging effect Sacco’s outburst had had on the jury. He felt he must at least make the gesture of dissociating Vanzetti, with the possibility that this might be allowed later by a higher court.
As Sacco resumed the stand on Saturday morning, the books and pamphlets found in his house were admitted as evidence. Then Jerry McAnarney, taking over the re-examination, asked more details about letters Sacco had received from Italy announcing his mother’s death. The week had been long, and the morning seemed anticlimactic, as if the trial were now coasting downhill to its conclusion. Suddenly, dramatically, McAnarney revealed that Sacco had recently seen a man sitting in the front row of the court who, he was certain, had ridden back on the train from Boston with him on April 15.
To Judge Thayer’s question as to why this was not merely hearsay, McAnarney replied that he proposed to follow the statement by producing the man in question. Sacco said that Moore had often asked if he remembered anyone who had ridden up on the train with him that day. He had never been able to, then all at once he had noticed this man in court and he somehow remembered his face. He did not know his name. He had not spoken to him. The mysterious witness had been subpoenaed by the defense, but with the conclusion of Sacco’s testimony he could not at once be found.
His place was taken by a routine witness, a Stoughton photographer, Edward Maertens, who stated that some time in April he had made a passport photograph of the Sacco family, as well as a much larger one several weeks earlier. Next Walter Nelles, a New York lawyer, testified that he talked with Luigi Quintiliano the last week in April 1920 about disposing of socialistic and radical literature. Two Brockton shoe-workers, Rocco Dalesandro and Michael Columbo, then testified that on Monday, May 3, they had talked with Sacco in Brockton about getting rid of their literature. Later, Columbo had bundled up all such papers and pamphlets that he owned.
The last witness of the week was Felice Guadagni, the comrade who had been first to visit Sacco and Vanzetti at the Brockton police station. He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 alibi, telling how the two of them had met by chance on the steps of Boni’s Restaurant at 11:30 A.M. Sacco, he said, was wearing a derby and a dark suit. They had gone in together and were later joined by Bosco and Williams. Guadagni had come out of Boni’s with Sacco at 1:30. He had then gone back to his office at the Gazzetta del Massachusetts and Sacco had gone uptown to the consulate. About three in the afternoon he had seen Sacco again in Joe Giordano’s café. Guadagni recalled the date of his meeting with Sacco as the fifteenth because on that day he had been invited to a banquet given by the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street in honor of Mr. Williams, the Transcript editor, who had just been made a Commandante.
Four or five days after Sacco’s arrest Guadagni had gone to the consulate with Rosina, taking along a photograph of Sacco. There they had talked with the acting consul and the vice-consul and the clerk Adrower, but by the archaic rule of law—so frustrating to laymen—Guadagni was not allowed to repeat what had been said.
Under cross-examination he admitted that he had seen Sacco in Boston on several other days, always wearing the derby and the dark suit. He could not, however, recall any specific dates. When Sacco came into Giordano’s Café, Guadagni was already there talking about the banquet. He had not attended it, but since it was the only banquet to which he had ever been invited, he could not help but remember it. The invitation had come the week before—he could not fix the date.
Court adjourned just before one o’clock and the jurors were left alone in the marble courthouse to face another Saturday afternoon and Sunday. They were almost certain, however, that this would be the last weekend they would be kept in Dedham.
Judge Thayer spent his weekends in Worcester. There, at the familiar golf club, he could join a foursome and forget the incidents and frustrations of the past week. In the clubhouse after the game, in the protecting company of his friends, he found a cathartic relief in saying just what he really thought about those Bolsheviki who were trying to intimidate him. Nobody, he told his friend Loring Coes, could intimidate Web Thayer. A bunch of parlor radicals were trying to get those Italian bastards off and trying to bring pressure on the bench. He would show them, he told Coes, his face darkening with accumulated anger. He would see them hanged, and he would also like to hang a few dozen of the radicals.
On Monday morning George Kelley was recalled to explain more details about the caps. He maintained that the lighter-colored of the two, the one Sacco had agreed was his, looked much more like Sacco’s. The one found near Berardelli’s body was darker than any Sacco had ever owned. Kelley admitted reluctantly that he might have made some remark about “not wanting to get a bomb up my ass” to Stewart and Brouillard. This morning, while he was waiting in the courthouse library to take the stand, he had seen a pepper-and-salt cap on the table that looked much more like Sacco’s cap than the other two. “The nearest I have seen yet,” Kelley remarked, as the third cap was offered in evidence. When cross-examined by Katzmann, Kelley admitted that he was fond of Sacco. Four or five months before the murders, learning that Sacco’s radical activities were being investigated, he had warned him. It was obvious that Kelley, whatever his own political views, had not changed his friendly feelings.
During the recess Judge Thayer again asked Mrs. Rantoul to come to his chambers. She made notes of the interview immediately afterward. Judge Thayer began by asking her what she now thought of the case.
I answered [she said in an affidavit in 1926], that I thought Kelley’s statement as to Sacco’s character was important. I well remember Judge Thayer’s reply and the manner in which he gave it. He expressed scorn and contempt for my view, and told me that Kelley did not mean what he said because he [Judge Thayer] had heard that on the outside Kelley had said that Sacco was an anarchist and that he couldn’t do anything with him. I told Judge Thayer that I had never before realized that it was fair to judge a case by what witnesses said outside of court, and that I had supposed that the only proper way to judge a case was by what the witnesses said in open court. Judge Thayer’s manner and expression of face expressed dissent from this view, but he made no definite statement of dissent.
The mysterious spectator Sacco claimed to have seen on the Stoughton train now appeared as a witness. He turned out to be James Hayes, for thirty-three years a mason and contractor in Stoneham, and town highway surveyor until March 1920. A defense investigator had brought him to court in regard to some technical information about the Stoughton street layout. Watching the trial, Hayes had become interested in it, and he and his wife had returned on three other days to follow the proceedings. It was while he was sitting there that Sacco caught a glimpse of him.
Hayes agreed that he had indeed gone to Boston on April 15. He was certain of the date because he had gone through his time-books and found that on that day his brother had paid him fifty dollars. He had used part of the money the same afternoon to buy parts for his Ford in Boston.
April 11, Sunday, he remembered because it was the birthday of one of his children. Monday, working at an excavation, he had sprained his instep. Tuesday and Wednesday and part of Thursday morning he had spent at home taking down the rear end of his Ford. Friday he needed parts, and he had gone to Boston on the train that left a little after twelve. He arrived back in Stoughton between five and six. Next day, Friday, he started working again. He did not know Sacco, never had met him, did not know whether Sacco was on that train or not, but he did know he himself was.
Katzmann now took Hayes over the hurdles. What had he been doing on March 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31? Hayes could not say. He thought he had probably gone in to Boston a dozen or fifteen times, but he could not remember any particular date because he had not had any occasion to look it up.
Sacco, recalled, testified that he had seen Hayes that day in the train from Boston. There was another inconclusive dispute with Ross as to whether Sacco had said “in Boston” or “in the train from Boston.” Sacco said he had been sitting in the middle of a coach on the right-hand side, and a man had been sitting opposite him in the aisle seat on the left. There was no particular reason why he should have remembered this man except that they both got off at Stoughton and somehow Sacco was struck by his face.
Hayes corroborated Sacco’s statement that he had been sitting midway in the car on the left next to the aisle. No one had asked him until that moment where he had been sitting. There was a person across the aisle from him, but who it was, a man or woman, he could not say. He had paid no attention.
Following Hayes, Antonio Dentamore of the foreign-exchange department of the Haymarket National Bank took the stand to corroborate Professor Guadagni. On April 15, just before three o’clock, he had been talking with Guadagni in Giordani’s Café when Sacco came in. He had never met Sacco until Guadagni introduced them. They had talked together for about twenty minutes, mostly about passports. The reason Dentamore remembered the day was that he had just come back from the banquet for the Transcript editor, and in fact he and Guadagni were discussing it as Sacco appeared. Katzmann took him over the customary hurdles. Dentamore could not recall what he had been doing at ten minutes to three the day before or the day after the banquet, or twenty days ago, or twenty-one days ago. He could not say where he had had lunch twenty-two days before. “I am not a fortune teller,” he told Katzmann.
The defense tried to get the information into the record that Dentamore and Sacco came from the same district in Italy. Judge Thayer excluded the references. Thwarted at each turn, Moore tried to explain that “through this witness the defense offers to prove that in the conversation that was had between the witness and Mr. Sacco it became known to the witness that Mr. Sacco and himself were both from the same section of Italy, that they were both mutual friends and acquaintances of Mr. Mucci,[13] and that the witness, after learning that Sacco was returning to Italy at an early date ... asked Mr. Sacco to convey to Mr. Mucci his good wishes and the fact that they had met one another in Boston.” At once the district attorney objected and his objection was sustained.
As Monday drifted into afternoon there was a feeling of the wheels running down, of impatience for the hour of decision. Everyone in the court sensed there would be no more surprises, no more climaxes. Half the reporters’ desks were empty. The Post sent its cartoonist over to the Middlesex courthouse to sketch the juicier proceedings in the Mishawum Manor scandal. The remaining witnesses, including the handful to be offered by the Commonwealth in rebuttal, were like odd bits of string, useful only for tying up loose ends. Speaking through an interpreter, Carlos Affe, a grocer whom some of the Italians jokingly called the mayor of East Boston, told of selling $15.67 worth of groceries to Sacco on March 20, 1920. On April 15 he had again seen Sacco, who had paid him $15.50. Affe had made a record of this in his account book and marked the date. That book he now produced.
Luigi Quintiliano appeared briefly to say that he had seen Vanzetti in New York on April 27 and 28 and had talked over the problem of getting rid of radical literature. The Spanish anarchist Frank Lopez refused to take an oath and affirmed instead that he had talked to Vanzetti both before and after his New York trip about getting incriminating literature out of their friends’ houses.
Then Rosina Sacco came forward, glancing at her husband with as much courage as she could muster. She stood there, a slight pathetic, determined figure, her red-gold hair softening her fine, slightly archaic features so that with her sprinkling of freckles she looked almost adolescent. Her story was simple. She told of her husband’s receiving the black-bordered envelope containing the news of his mother’s death one noon just after he had eaten. He had gone back to the factory, but after half an hour came home again. She remembered how on the day of his arrest she had been cleaning out a closet and found the shotgun shells. Vanzetti had picked them up and said he would sell them for fifty cents to a friend. Then, going through the bureau drawers, she had found a pistol and some more shells. These she placed on top of the bureau and asked her husband what he was going to do with them. That same day Orciani and Boda had come to supper. After supper her husband left with Vanzetti to catch the Brockton streetcar. Boda and Orciani started out later after fixing a tire on the motorcycle. When Vanzetti had said good-by to her, he had given her a message to take back to Italy. She did not learn of her husband’s arrest until twelve the next day when officers Connolly and Scott and two or three others arrived at the house. On April 15 a man from Milford named Iacovelli had come to see about taking over Sacco’s job and stayed a quarter of an hour.
Jerry McAnarney showed Rosina the caps that had been exhibited before. The gray cap, she thought, looked like her husband’s, like the cap the police had taken from her house on May 6. As for the dark one with the earflaps, her husband had never owned such a cap “because he never liked it ... he don’t look good in them positively.”
When Katzmann questioned her, she told him that even before the death of Sacco’s mother they had been planning to return to Italy. “That’s why we were saving our money, because we wanted to go across in the old country, but since the mother died, we hurried more because he was sorry about his mother died without seeing him.” Sabino’s letter telling of the mother’s death had arrived March 23 or 24. Thirteen or fourteen days later Sacco had gone in to the consulate with his photograph. Katzmann wanted to know how thirteen or fourteen days after March 24 could make the date April 15. “Well, you count up from the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of March,” she told him, “and going to the fifteenth, I says thirteen or fourteen days, and I don’t think it is much different, because it is over a year he is in prison, and I don’t remember everything.” Katzmann asked her nothing more. Sacco’s savings-bank book, introduced as evidence, showed that from December 9, 1918, he had deposited amounts from $30 to $270 for a total of about $1500.
The Milford shoe-worker Henry Iacovelli was the last defense witness. In April 1920 he received a letter from Michael Kelley telling him there was a job open in the Three-K factory. He had gone to Stoughton on April 15, first seen George Kelley, then gone to Sacco’s bungalow. Rosina told him that Sacco had gone to Boston, but this hearsay evidence Jerry McAnarney could not bring out in court. On this fading note the defense rested.
Among the residual rebuttal witnesses were Angelo Ricci, the foreman of the railroad gang near the crossing; a Mary Gaines, who knew Lola Andrews and Julia Campbell; Henry Hellyer, the Pinkerton agent; Chief Stewart; Lieutenant Guerin; and a belated identification witness by the name of Frank Hawley.
Ricci maintained that when the getaway car went over the tracks he did not see any of his gang at the crossing, but he admitted under cross-examination: “When you got to control twenty-four men, what to hell, one fly away. I could not tie them up with string and hold them all as one. If they went around, sneaked around the pile of dirt or something like that, I could not hold them.”
Mary Gaines of Quincy was brought in to show that “the statement Mrs. Andrews made about making inquiry of the man under the car is not of recent contrivance.” She had visited Julia Campbell and her sister and Lola Andrews in the Alhambra Block the week following the shooting. Lola had then told them “she seen this man underneath the automobile, and she taps this man on the shoulder, she asks him to please direct her to the Rice and Hutchins shoe shop, and he got up and directed her to it.”
Hellyer gave his altered account of what Jenny Novelli had told him. As the existence of his written report was not then known, his statements passed unchallenged. Lieutenant Guerin told of going to Sacco’s house and picking up the gray cap with a rip in the lining from the kitchen table. Moore objected to the cap being admitted as an exhibit on the grounds of unlawful search and seizure. He also objected to the jury’s seeing the Buick and demanded that all references to it be struck out. As usual his objections were overruled.
Hawley, a salesman and a former Brockton special police officer, said that on April 15 he was driving his Ford in Brockton. In starting to turn around on School Street to go to Whitman, he had forced a Buick touring car to come to a stop. It was a dirty car with flapping side-curtains and as it stopped the driver stuck his head out and asked the way to Whitman. The man Hawley had seen sitting next to the unidentified driver was Vanzetti.
Chief Stewart resumed the stand briefly to add a few more passages of the Brockton interrogatory that he had previously omitted. There followed a discussion about the admission as evidence of the books found in Sacco’s house and whether they should be translated. Finally both sides agreed to let them in as they were, Moore remarking that the titles spoke for themselves. Shortly after lunch both sides rested.
There was a pause, a rustle in the courtroom, as the lawyers gathered up their documents and the spectators eyed Judge Thayer. He cleared his throat, looked dryly at Moore, then turned to the jury.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said in his toneless voice, “the book of fate in these cases has been closed. You will undoubtedly get these cases for final determination Thursday forenoon, or Thursday morning. During your absence quite a number of things have been settled between counsel, one of which is that arguments will be made tomorrow, beginning at nine o’clock. It has been agreed that four hours shall be given to each side—that is four hours for the defendants and four hours for the Commonwealth. They may run a little over that time.
“I must again suggest to you to still keep your minds open. The evidence has simply closed now. You have not heard the arguments of both counsel. You have not heard the charge of the Court. You must hear what the law is of the Commonwealth in order that you may apply the law to established facts found by you to be true, and therefore with this request, which is kindly made by the Court, I trust you will do what you can to see to it that it is fully carried into effect.”
Edmund Morgan, in his study of the trial published in 1948, considered it an act of incomprehensible folly for the defense to agree to any such four-hour limitation. But in agreeing to the limitation, Moore and the McAnarneys were from long practical experience aware of the dangers of taxing a jury’s patience. Jurymen who had already sat through thirty uncomfortable days of testimony might react against an argument running several days. Besides, it was common bar knowledge that by the time the summations were reached, a jury, despite any judge’s hortatory injunctions, had pretty well made up its collective mind.
Moore and Jerry McAnarney agreed to divide their allotted morning, with Moore appearing first. But the ingenious and aggressive general counsel of the I.W.W., the victor of so many underdog courtroom battles, was that Wednesday morning like a speaker who has lost rapport with his audience. He rambled. The telling points escaped him. Jerry McAnarney, tripping over his grammar, made a far better follow-up.
Moore opened by remarking wryly that in the six weeks of the trial, he, as a Californian, had felt almost an alien in the Dedham court. He then went on to develop his argument, claiming that the primary—in fact the only—issue was one of identification. Taking the Commonwealth’s witnesses in order, he asked why it was that the expressman Neal, when he felt his life was in danger, had not bothered to look at the number of the threatening car directly in front of his door? How was it that Faulkner, on the train, could remember the man he said was Vanzetti leaning over from the rear seat and yet could not remember the man in the seat beside him? Moore recalled to the jury the Italian railroad worker, Nicola Gatti, the one witness who had known Sacco before the crime, and begged them not to be prejudiced by the fact that the man was an Italian. He pointed out that Mary Splaine’s elaborate identification must have derived from the times she saw Sacco at the police station and not from the fleeting glimpse she had had from the upper window of the Hampton House, and he brought up again her indecisive statements in Quincy, so opposed to her Dedham positiveness. As for Lola Andrews, “even though we had not offered a single witness against her, she killed herself on the witness stand by her own personality, but Campbell, Fay, La Brecque finished her up.” Pelser was unemployed when he told defense investigator Robert Reid that he had seen nothing of the shooting, but a few months after he got a job with Rice & Hutchins he was willing to testify for the Commonwealth. Goodridge, the poolroom man, was in the courtroom for some other purpose when he identified Sacco. Why?
“Gentlemen,” Moore summed up, “there isn’t a single witness called by the government who had an unqualified opportunity of observation who gives an identification. Bostock had the opportunity and wouldn’t. McGlone had the opportunity and wouldn’t. So on down the line. But it is the Lola Andrews, the Goodridges, the Pelsers that made the identification. Miss Splaine and Miss Devlin I reject, because their testimony is utterly unreasonable. They did not have the opportunity. They could not. You know it and I know it.”
Moore asked the jury to consider again whether or not the defendants believed on the night of May 5 they were in fear of deportation or that they believed their lives or liberties were in danger, and whether Stewart’s questions about anarchism had not inflamed Sacco’s suspicions. There were, too, Sacco’s alibi witnesses for April 15—Bosco, Dentamore, Williams, Affe, Kelley, Hayes. Had all these men committed perjury?
Only in passing did Moore mention the guns and bullets. “If,” he said, “the time has come when a microscope must be used to determine whether a human life is going to function or not and when the users of the microscope themselves can’t agree, when experts called by the Commonwealth and experts called by the defense are sharply defined in their disagreements, then I take it that ordinary men such as you and I should well hesitate to take a human life. You are the responsible men,” he concluded. “You are the judges of the facts.” And he stood there a moment staring somberly at the jurors.
“Take a recess of five minutes,” Judge Thayer told the courtroom, then nodding curtly to the Californian, added, “You ran over your time twenty minutes, Mr. Moore.”
Jerry McAnarney, in his two hours, did not confine himself to his ostensible client, Vanzetti, but proceeded to go over the same ground that Moore had just covered. He criticized the Splaine-Devlin contradictions, he asked why Sacco and Vanzetti had not been shown to witnesses in Brockton in a lineup, he speculated as to what Goodridge had been doing in Dedham when he first identified Sacco. Then he asked why Sacco, already recognizable in South Braintree as Mosmacotelli, would have spent a morning standing in front of the drugstore or hanging around the depot or finally leaning on the fence under the window of the very factory where he had once worked.
The testy little lawyer warned the jurors about Katzmann: “He can stand up to this rail and say to you gentlemen ‘What have we been here for six weeks for, for two slackers, for two men who did not think enough of their country but what they would go to Mexico—murderers, slackers, anarchists?’ Ring the changes, gentlemen, and you can play any tune you want to on that. And you have got to be very careful that you don’t vibrate in unison with those words. They are fearful, they are potent, they are laden to the limit.”
McAnarney poked fun at the bravado of the Brockton officer, Connolly, “listening to the sweetest music of his young life, the sound of Connolly’s voice when he was telling you what he did.” But when McAnarney mentioned Levangie, the man he had interviewed and who two weeks later had denied under oath talking with him, his face reddened. Captain Van Amburgh he referred to as the “circles” man, but he had obviously not grasped the implications of his testimony, for he reminded the jury: “Van Amburgh said that that number three shell, the fatal bullet that killed Berardelli, came from ... the Colt revolver that was found on Sacco.” In the question of Berardelli’s revolver McAnarney pointed out that if the defense had planned to falsify evidence, it would not have been too difficult to have the various witnesses memorize the number of Vanzetti’s Harrington & Richardson and afterward recite it on the witness stand.
McAnarney asserted, as had Moore, that the primary fact was in the end identification, and that there was not sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men had been in South Braintree that day. “I want every man on this panel to treat these two defendants as if they were your own individual brother,” he concluded with sincere irrelevance. “Take that as the text, not the other that we feel and what this evidence would make them out, treat them as though, as your brother. He came to this world by the same power that created you, and may he go from this world by the same power that takes you. I thank you, gentlemen.”
After the lunch hour Katzmann approached the jury box for his final argument. As usual his debonair appearance was unaffected by the heat. Confident of the game he was playing, sure of his arguments, he faced the jury in the floridity of his top form. But though his verbiage was lush, his mind was sharp.
He began with provincial urbanity by complimenting the jury, the defending lawyers, and the judge. Then he covered the case point by point, missing none of the discrepancies of the defense witnesses and not neglecting by innuendo to tie in Orciani. There was Burke who had said that Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the car as it passed him, Burke who had ridden to court in Callahan’s Hudson and called it a Buick, who had described the driver of the getaway Buick as a thickset dark man—when both sides now admitted that the driver was pale and fair. There was Chase, on the truck at the Co-operative Society, a man with permanently impaired eyesight. There were Sacco’s alibi witnesses in Boston and Vanzetti’s in Plymouth. Katzmann agreed that Corl had painted his boat, that Williams had taken his advertising orders, that Dentamore had gone to a banquet for the Transcript editor. “But what in logic is the connection between any of these things that they say helps mark the time?”
The district attorney did not miss the fact that Vanzetti claimed that on the night of May 5 they were just going to get the car, whereas Sacco first said they were going to pick up radical literature. In the matter of picking up literature, if it was so urgent to get rid of it, why did Vanzetti do nothing for a week after coming back from New York? Why did he not warn his friends in Plymouth? Why did Sacco, after he heard from Vanzetti, take no steps to get rid of what he himself owned and so protect his home? Why would Sacco be so afraid of deportation when he was leaving the country in two days? What were they afraid of, anyhow, the night of May 5 when they had no incriminating papers with them?
As for the weapons, Katzmann argued: “They had arsenals upon them. Vanzetti had a loaded 38-caliber revolver, this man who ran to Mexico because he did not want to shoot a fellow human being in warfare, a loaded 38-caliber revolver, any one of the cartridges instantly death-dealing. This tender-hearted man who loved this country and who went down to Mexico because he did not believe in shooting a fellow human being, going down to get a decrepit old automobile, had a 38-caliber loaded gun on him.
“And his friend and associate, Nicola Sacco, another lover of peace, another lover of his adopted country who abhorred bloodshed and abhorred it so that he went down to Mexico under the name of Mosmacotelli ... had with him, this lover of peace, thirty-two death-dealing automatic cartridges, nine of them in the gun ready for action and twenty-two more of them in his pocket—carried it where the ordinary citizen carries it there? No, gentlemen, carried where those who have occasion to use it quickly and want to slip it out and use it quickly would be prone to carry it, that death-dealing instrument.
“But more than that, gentlemen, and ammunition enough to kill thirty-seven men if each shot took effect, they had or Vanzetti had four shells—no weapon in which to fire them at the moment that we found, but you will remember, gentlemen, that sticking out of the back of the bandit’s car on April 15 was either a rifle or a shotgun, and in Vanzetti’s pocket were four 12-gauge shells loaded with buckshot that they were going out to shoot little birds with.... Maybe, gentlemen, you think that is the way men would be armed who were going on an innocent trip, innocent so far as death-dealing matters are concerned at night time after closing hours of the garage and when the man who ran it was in bed, going to make a social trip down to see Pappi, the friend of Vanzetti, and he did not know where he lived, save that it was in East Bridgewater, gentlemen.”
The district attorney admitted that Pelser had lied at first both to the defense and the Commonwealth, because he did not want to be a witness, but afterward he was “manly enough to tell you of his prior falsehoods and his reasons for them.” On the subject of Splaine and Devlin, Katzmann became almost lyrical: “Gentlemen, do you think that two young women, presumably endowed with Christian instincts, young ladies who could have no enmity against the defendant Sacco, who could have no reason for committing the most damnable of perjuries, would bespeak evidence against a human being that would take his life away? Gentlemen, that passes the bounds of human credulity. You can’t believe that. You cannot have looked on Mary Splaine, a smart businesswoman, you cannot have looked on the gentle Frances Devlin and have seen the truth shining like stars out of her young womanly eyes and believe for a moment that either or both of them would dare, before a court of justice or before God their Maker, condemn Sacco to his death with a willful lie. You cannot believe that, gentlemen, having seen those women.”
He agreed that Levangie, the gate-tender, was wrong in saying that Vanzetti had driven the car. The probability was that Vanzetti was directly behind the driver, was leaning forward, and Levangie had given just a quick transposing glance. Lola Andrews conjured up a briefer burst of lyricism: “I have been in this office, gentlemen, for now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too long service for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews.” As for Julia Campbell, she was “Aunt Julia, the elderly lady with the cataracts.”
The district attorney underlined the fact that the Buick getaway car was found only a mile or so from Elm Square. “You don’t find the car in Worcester. You don’t find it in Pittsfield. You don’t find it in South Boston, nor do you find it in Fall River. You find it in West Bridgewater, and the night these men were arrested, they were arrested within hailing distance of it. Can you put two and two together?”
In contrast to Moore’s objection to the microscope’s evidence, Katzmann declaimed: “Heaven speed the day when proof in any important case is dependent upon the magnifying glass and the scientist.” He marshaled the evidence of the guns and the bullets carefully in the Commonwealth’s favor. “What is the reason Captain Van Amburgh gives for saying that bullet number three was fired by the Colt of Sacco?” he asked, thus compounding Jerry McAnarney’s error.
It was after six before Katzman, facing a weary jury and a long-since emptying courtroom, made his last points. He asked who knew better about the Harrington & Richardson revolver, the man who had put in a new hammer or an expert who had never seen it before. He questioned the disorder and general lack of dates in Affe’s grocery account books. He wondered why the defense had produced no witnesses from Rice & Hutchins, where Sacco had worked, to say he was not the man. He concluded with a flourish: “You are the consultants here, gentlemen, the twelve of you, and the parties come to you and ask you to find out what the truth is on the two issues of guilt or innocence. Men of the jury, do your duty. Do it like men. Stand together, men of Norfolk!”
Nothing was left but the judge’s charge and the jury’s verdict.
Judge Thayer spent that evening at the University Club in Boston working on his charge. Like most intermediate judges, he tended to make his charges set pieces formed out of the accumulated mosaics of the law, varying in detail according to the particular case, but in general outline the same. The basic function of a charge is to enable the jury to sift the relevant from the irrelevant. In his Sacco-Vanzetti charge of twenty-four pages, only ten were given to the specific aspects of the case. The formula was based on a standard set of legal truisms: that a man is innocent until proved guilty, that reasonable doubt is the doubt of a reasonable man, that no inference of guilt shall be drawn from an indictment, that circumstantial evidence can at times be as weighty as direct evidence, that English common law as adopted by American practice is one of the glories of the world, and so on. Thayer’s first childhood memories were of the boys in blue of the Civil War; he had been appointed to the bench the year that the United States entered the World War, and his attitude toward soldiers was that of a sentimental civilian. Ever since his appointment he had peppered his charges and his less formal addresses with references to “our soldier boys.” It was a habit that still continued three years after the Armistice, and that could have somewhat sinister connotations in the trial of two draft-dodging anarchists.
With the fervor of a poet Thayer worked at his manuscript late into the night. He was proud of his literary efforts. Like most Americans whose school course included the elocution lessons of the post-Civil War period, his taste ran to the flamboyant. Vague metaphorical phrases blossomed under his hand. “Let the star of a sound judgment and profound wisdom guide your footsteps into that beautiful realm where conscience, obedience to law and to God, reigneth supreme.” Such phrases he found reassuring. And his indwelling sense of insecurity made him need assurance, turned him at times garrulous, biased him against foreigners, and drove him to indiscretions that were later to become notorious.
When Judge Thayer went down to breakfast early Thursday morning and looked hopefully around the club’s almost empty dining room, his eye fell on the frosty George Crocker at a table by the window and he walked over and sat down opposite him. Crocker, an elderly codfish Bostonian, greeted Thayer with a noticeable lack of cordiality. Several times during the month the judge had waylaid him in the lounge and filled his unwilling ears with news about the Dedham trial, insisting that Americans must now stand together to protect themselves against anarchists and Reds. Conservative lawyer that he was, Crocker felt offended at Thayer’s violation of the legal proprieties in even mentioning a current case. Oblivious of the other’s disapproval, Thayer would say that it was nonsense that the defendants were being prosecuted as radicals. Just the same, in his opinion, they were anarchists and draft-dodgers, and they had failed to establish alibis.
This morning, before Crocker had finished his grapefruit, Thayer pulled some sheets of paper out of his pocket saying proudly: “I want to read you part of the charge I am going to deliver today.” He talked on, quoting part of Moore’s argument, and then reading more of his charge, smacking his lips at the end with “That will hold them!” Crocker replied sniffily or not at all. On leaving the dining room he warned the steward, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t put me with that man again!”
Court opened late. Judge Thayer had again timed it that way for dramatic effect. Every seat was taken and the bar enclosure was filled with lawyers as Sacco and Vanzetti took their place in the cage, for it had been noised about in State Street that the judge’s charge would make legal history. The opening, however, had more the air of a graduation ceremony than a murder trial. The judge’s desk was buried in flowers—a huge vase of gladioli sent by the sheriff, and large bouquets of pinks from Mrs. Katzmann and the wife of Assistant District Attorney Kane. Among the spectators were the Marquis Ferrante, Rosina Sacco with the boy Dante, and of course Mrs. Evans and her inevitable notebook. In spite of the heat Sheriff Capen had resumed his blue cutaway.
With the clerk’s cry, Judge Thayer rustled in and sat down behind the bank of flowers. For the last time the ritual was intoned, the jury was polled, the defendants answered “Present.” Jerry McAnarney approached the bench with a motion for a directed verdict on the grounds that the district attorney in his argument had disclaimed that Vanzetti was driving the getaway car as it crossed the railroad track. Moore made the conventional request that the court order the jury upon all the evidence to return a not-guilty verdict for Sacco. Neither motion, they knew, would be granted. There were a few more words added to the record about the Berardelli revolver, then the judge’s brittle voice began:
“Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury—you may remain seated—the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most important service. Although you knew that such service would be arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier, responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty. There is no better word in the English language than ‘loyalty.’ For he who is loyal to God, to country, to his state and to his fellow men, represents the highest and noblest type of true American citizenship, than which there is none grander in the entire world. You gentlemen have been put to the real test, and you have proven to the world, and particularly to the people of Norfolk County, that you truly represent such citizenship. For this loyalty, gentlemen, and for this magnificent service that you have rendered to your State and to your fellow men, I desire, however, in behalf of both to extend to each of you their profoundest thanks, gratitude and appreciation.”
It was of course conventional to butter up a jury at the end of a long trial, but Thayer enjoyed the convention. His mind slipped easily among the sententious moralizings, the hortatory appeals to truth, the assurances of equality before the law:
“Let your eyes be blinded to every ray of sympathy or prejudice but let them ever be willing to receive the beautiful sunshine of truth, of reason and sound judgment, and let your ears be deaf to every sound of public opinion or public clamor, if there be any, either in favor of or against these defendants. Let them always be listening for the sweet voices of conscience and of sacred and solemn duty efficiently and fearlessly performed.”
Warning the jury not to be influenced or prejudiced by the fact that the defendants were Italians, he went on to a brief history of murder in common law, the development of degrees of murder, the definition of malice aforethought. He pointed out that there was no vital distinction between circumstantial and other evidence, that the important thing was the degree of proof. He must have puzzled the jurors with his remark that “over-positiveness in identification might under some circumstances and conditions be evidence of weakness in the testimony rather than strength.”
There was the expected truism—none the less true—that “guilt or innocence of crime do not depend upon the place of one’s birth; neither should the place of one’s birth, the proportion of his wealth, his station in life, social or political, or his views on public questions prevent an honest judgment and impartial administration and enforcement of the law, for when the time comes that these conditions exist to an extent that men, because of these conditions, cannot be indicted, tried, acquitted or convicted according to the laws of the Commonwealth in a court of justice, the doors to our courthouses should then be closed and we should announce to the world the impotency of our courts and the utter failure of constitutional or organized government.”
Not until he had passed the halfway mark did Judge Thayer abandon generalities for facts. Then he summed up the case adequately enough: “The Commonwealth claims that these defendants were two of a party of five who killed the deceased. The defendants deny it. What is the fact? As I have told you, the Commonwealth must satisfy you of that fact beyond reasonable doubt. The defendants are under no obligation to satisfy you who did commit the murders, but the Commonwealth must satisfy you beyond reasonable doubt that the defendants did. If the Commonwealth has failed to so satisfy you, that is the end of these cases and you will return verdicts of not guilty. This is so because the identity of the defendants is one of the essential facts to be established by the Commonwealth. On the other hand, if the Commonwealth has so satisfied, you will return a verdict of guilty against both defendants or either of them that you so find to be guilty.”
Dedham, April 9, 1927, just before sentence was passed.
(Top) The shells Bostock gave to Fraher; Shell W third from left.
(Center) The bullets removed from Berardelli’s body. The mortal Bullet III, deformed by impact, is third from left.
(Bottom) The bullets as marked by Dr. Magrath. Note deformation of Bullet III, third from left.
Sacco’s Colt automatic.
Vanzetti’s Harrington & Richardson revolver.
Composite photograph of Shell W (left) and test shell (right), showing continuous breechblock markings above and below firing pin indentation.
AMERICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE
District Attorney Frederick Katzmann.
Judge Webster Thayer.
William Thompson, Herbert Ehrmann, Tom O’Connor.
Fred Moore and Eugene Debs (front) after visiting Vanzetti in Charlestown Prison.
The jury’s Fourth holiday at North Scituate.
Ripley King Marden
Gerard McNamara Parker Dever McHardy
Fales (Sheriff) Capen (Sheriff) Hooper (Sheriff) Ganley Hersey Waugh Atwood
Sacco tries on the cap and addresses the court. Sketches by Norman.
BOSTON HERALD
Rosina Sacco and her children leaving Charlestown Prison, August, 1927.
Governor Alvan Fuller.
Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Rosina and Luigia Vanzetti visiting the death house, August 20.
BOSTON GLOBE
The start of the funeral procession.
In weighing the testimony of the identifying witnesses, the jurors would have to consider the latter’s intelligence, “their opportunity for observations, their reasons for making such observations, the duration of such observations, and the mental or nervous condition of the witness at the time.” Turning to the ballistics testimony, Thayer fell into the crucial error of McAnarney and Katzmann, for he, too, accepted Van Amburgh’s “I am inclined to believe” as a direct assertion that the Berardelli death bullet had come from Sacco’s automatic. “You must determine this question of fact,” he told them. In speaking of the Vanzetti revolver, he first said that it had had a new hammer and spring, then later corrected himself.
The emphasis of the latter part of the charge was on the question of consciousness of guilt, to which Judge Thayer gave much more space than he did to the other testimony. “If the defendants were only consciously guilty of being slackers,” he informed the jurors, “liable to be deported, fearing punishment therefore, and were not consciously guilty of the murder of Berardelli and Parmenter, then there is no consciousness of guilt during the time they were at the Johnson house, because the defendants were solely being tried for the murder of Berardelli and Parmenter, and for nothing else.”
This was a question of fact for the jurors to decide, just as it was for them to decide whether or not the defendants had “the desire and purpose and intention” of drawing their weapons when they were arrested on the streetcar. The court decided questions of law, but only the jury could decide on the facts. Alibis were always questions of fact. “Therefore,” he instructed them finally, “all testimony which tends to show that the defendants were in another place at the time the murders were committed tends also to rebut the evidence that they were present at the time and place the murders were committed. If the evidence of an alibi rebuts evidence of the Commonwealth to such an extent that it leaves reasonable doubt in your minds as to the commission of the murders charged against these defendants then you will return a verdict of not guilty. On the other hand, if you find that the defendants or either of them committed the murders and the Commonwealth has satisfied you of such fact beyond a reasonable doubt from all the evidence in these cases, you will return a verdict of guilty.”
Thayer had been talking for several hours. He shifted a vase of pinks slightly to his right so that he could eye the jury more emphatically before beginning his peroration, his particular pride:
“My duties, gentlemen, have now closed and yours begun. From this mass of testimony introduced you must determine the facts. The law, as I have told you, places the entire responsibility in your hands. I therefore call upon you to constantly bear in mind these parting words of the Court that here, in this temple of justice, before God and man, you made oath that you would ‘well and truly try the issue between the Commonwealth and the defendants according to your evidence. So help you God.’
“I have now finished my charge. My duties are now at an end. I have tried to preside over the trial of these cases in a spirit of absolute fairness and impartiality to both sides. If I have failed in any respect you must not, gentlemen, in any manner fail yours. I therefore now commit into your sacred keeping the decision of these cases. You will therefore take them with you into yonder jury room, the silent sanctuary where may the Great Dispenser of justice, wisdom and sound judgment preside over all your deliberations. Reflect long and well so that when you return, your verdict shall stand forth before the world as your judgment of truth and justice. Gentlemen, be just and fear not. Let all the end thou aimest at be thy country’s, thy God’s and truth’s.”
There was a moment’s silence, then a murmur went through the courtroom like a collective sigh, followed by a shuffle of feet as spectators and jury began to file from the room, while the lawyers worked their way to the back for another consultation. Vanzetti bent over and whispered to Sacco as a deputy with handcuffs opened the cage door.
Moore, observing legal etiquette, remarked formally to the Court that whatever the jury’s verdict no one could say that the defendants had not had a fair trial.
Judge Thayer was in a good mood as he walked briskly to the Dedham Inn for lunch. The trial that had cut so deep into his summer was over. He would no longer have to endure the daily sight of that long-haired California radical. His charge had gone off well.
Inside the dining room he stopped at the reporters’ table where Frank Sibley, with his Windsor tie, sat at the head. “Did you see that jury when I finished my charge?” Thayer asked of no one in particular. “Three of them in tears!” Sibley and the others said nothing. The silence nettled the judge. He looked them up and down and then said pettishly, “I think I am entitled to have a statement printed in the newspapers that this trial was fairly and impartially conducted.” Again there was silence. Sibley looked down at the tablecloth in embarrassment.
Finally Thayer spoke to him directly. “Sibley, you are the oldest. Don’t you think this trial was fairly and impartially conducted?”
Sibley stared at him above his wilted tie. “Well,” he said quietly, “I don’t know whether to express their opinion, but of course we have talked it over, and I think I can say I have never seen anything like it.”
Thayer looked down scornfully, turned on his heel, and walked away.
As the defendants arrived for the afternoon session and the courtroom filled, Rosina and Dante were allowed briefly inside the cage. While Sacco talked to his wife, Vanzetti rumpled the boy’s hair playfully, his deep eyes glowing, a smile wrinkling across his face. The jury was brought in, polled, and then retired. The defendants were again led away. Lawyers, reporters, and most of the spectators went outside. Those wise in the ways of juries did not expect a verdict until after the evening meal. Sheriff Capen predicted five hours. It was then three o’clock.
Much in the preceding weeks had seemed a legal game, but now the verbiage had been swept away, leaving nothing but the bone-bare interlude like time suspended, a feeling somehow intensified by the paper-littered courtroom and the ticking marble-faced clock and the summer brightness filtering through the maple trees.
From the courtroom the sheriff led the jurymen down the corridor to a room on the left with the word jury stenciled on the frosted glass of the door. He closed the door behind them and locked it. They found themselves alone in a room containing nothing but a long table and twelve leather-cushioned chairs. Another door at the side led to the lavatory. John Dever noticed that all the doorknobs had the county seal embossed on them.
In their six weeks of close association the twelve men had developed a sense of camaraderie that would bind them together for the rest of their lives. Over thirty years later, Dever, destitute in a veteran’s hospital, would find himself visited by Atwood and Gerard, and there again they would talk over the case. But in this first moment of being alone no one quite knew how to begin.
Dever finally suggested that first of all they take an informal ballot, nothing binding, just to get an idea how they felt. Sitting around the table, each marked a slip of paper and handed it down to Ripley who, as foreman, occupied the end seat. Dever believed the defendants guilty but he voted for acquittal on the first ballot to open up a discussion. The vote was ten to two for conviction. “Then,” Dever told a reporter long afterward, “we started discussing things, reviewed the very important evidence about the bullets, and everybody had a chance to speak his piece. There never was any argument, though. We just were convinced Sacco and Vanzetti had done what the prosecution had charged them with.” The Winchester bullet taken from Berardelli’s body had, they felt, been fired from Sacco’s pistol. And the same three kinds of shells that Thomas Fraher had picked up in front of Rice & Hutchins had been found in Sacco’s pocket. Seward Parker remarked that you couldn’t depend on the witnesses—“but the bullets, there’s no way of getting round that.” Alfred Atwood agreed with him. John Ganley was impressed by what Reed, the Matfield gate-tender, said about seeing Vanzetti at the crossing. The twelve did not even bother to ballot again. They talked over various aspects of the case but no longer debated guilt or innocence. Someone suggested that they ask for a reading glass to examine the bullets. A deputy brought them one. It would have been possible for them to bring in their verdict at the end of the afternoon. They decided, however, that it would look better if they waited until after supper. Shortly after six Judge Thayer sent them out to eat. By half-past seven they were back.
The shadows of the trees and the buildings were long across the High Street, but the setting sun brought no relief from the heat. A scattering of spectators waited in the courtroom. There were groups of white-shirted figures on the steps, on the grass, on the sidewalk across the street, restless groups that joined together, broke apart, or receded in the direction of Dedham Square. Always there was a corporal’s guard of newspapermen to keep a careful eye on the upper rear window where, behind the plate glass, the overhead light had now been turned on.
At 7:55 Deputy Sheriff Fales heard a triple knock on the jury-room door. It was sharp, final, not the tentative knock meaning that a reading glass or some such thing was wanted. He unlocked the door and Ripley told him the verdict was ready. Fales’ face kept its professional impassivity. He took the message, locked the door again, then went downstairs to telephone the warden at the jail. To the newsmen who looked at him questioningly as he passed, he nodded.
A few minutes before, a slight breeze had sprung up. Harold Williams, the McAnarneys, several state troopers, and deputy sheriffs were standing near the columns enjoying the coolness when someone came out and whispered the news. An invisible telegraph seemed to flash the word through Dedham. The white-shirted groups on the grass dissolved, the loungers vanished, from all directions running figures converged on the courthouse. The High Street echoed with footsteps. Upstairs the courtroom windows suddenly blazed with light.
In the ten minutes that it took to bring the defendants over from the jail the gates had been closed and a guard of troopers thrown around the courthouse. On the steps a crowd that by now stretched across the street forced its way up to the iron barrier. Those who had gone up to the courtroom earlier were allowed to stay, but, except for the lawyers and the newspapermen, no one else was admitted.
Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in through the side entrance, taken up the back stairs, their handcuffs removed, and the door of the cage closed behind them. Sacco looked pale, almost ill. Vanzetti spoke a few words to him, a frown scoring his forehead. Rosina sat close by, making quick birdlike movements, managing to smile each time her husband glanced at her.
The pause before the jury entered the room was so oppressive that it became almost tangible. Inside the bar enclosure the lawyers waited, Moore fiddling with a pencil, his hair dank. The deputies stood at the entrances, the stenographers had their notebooks open, Judge Thayer sat in his place. From time to time everyone in the courtroom glanced at the twelve empty seats flanked by the American flag. Then the door opened.
The jurors filed in, their eyes fixed on the floor. Seeing their mood, Tom McAnarney raised his arm in a gesture of despair. The lines between Vanzetti’s eyes were like cords. Sacco glanced from one face to another as the jury passed.
The jurors settled in their seats. Judge Thayer nodded obliquely at Clerk Worthington who, precise and impersonal, asked them if they had agreed on a verdict. Then, scarcely waiting for the foreman’s reply, he called out “Nicola Sacco.” Sacco rose to his feet as if he were in a trance, and Worthington’s singsong voice continued:
“Hold up your right hand, Mr. Foreman; look upon the prisoner. Prisoner, look upon the foreman. What say you, Mr. Foreman, is the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty?”
Ripley’s voice was like a croak as he spoke the one word. “Guilty.”
“Guilty of murder?” Worthington went on.
“Murder,” Ripley answered him.
“In the first degree?”
“In the first degree.”
While the impact of the verdict was still in transit, Worthington rapidly repeated the formula for Vanzetti.
“What say you, Mr. Foreman; is Bartolomeo Vanzetti guilty or not guilty of murder?”
“Guilty,” Ripley croaked again.
“In the first degree, upon each indictment?”
“In the first degree.”
“Hearken to your verdicts as the Court has recorded them,” Worthington hurried on, his words falling limply in the hush. “You, gentlemen, upon your oath, say that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti is each guilty of murder in the first degree upon each indictment. So say you, Mr. Foreman? So, gentlemen, you all say?”
There were murmurs of “We do, we do,” from the jury box. Vanzetti stood in the cage, his arm still raised in the air. Then suddenly Sacco’s voice rang through the courtroom: “Sono innocente!”
“Sono innocente!” he shouted again, and behind the cage Rosina cried loudly, ran to him breaking through the ring of guards and throwing her arms around his neck. Her hat fell off and her copper-red hair tumbled about her neck. “You bet your life,” she babbled. Then she cried out as if overwhelmed, “What am I going to do? I’ve got two children. Oh, Nick. They kill my man.” She clung to him sobbing, burying her face in his neck, the torrent of her words unintelligible. Sacco stood upright, paler than ever, stroking her head and occasionally whispering to her. Vanzetti, next to them, said nothing, but his face was drawn with sympathy. Moore tried gently to disengage her. Finally a policeman removed her from Sacco’s shoulder and led her away.
Judge Thayer nodded to the clerk for adjournment. No one was even aware of his few words of thanks to the jury.
“They kill an innocent men!” Sacco called out in a shaken voice as judge and jury were leaving. Several of the jurymen looked back at him but none of them paused. “Don’t forget. Two innocent men they kill!” he shouted at them.
Within ten minutes the police and deputies had delivered the defendants back to the jail. On their way there the loiterers on the courthouse steps pushed forward and Sheriff Capen threatened to draw his gun if they came any closer.
Now the darkened streets were as empty as the courtroom. Lawyers, deputies, public, all had gone except Tom McAnarney, who was rummaging among some papers on the oak table. As he closed his brief case he noticed Assistant District Attorney Williams in the doorway, and observing the customary legal etiquette he stepped toward him with extended hand.
“Congratulations,” he said, “on a brilliant victory.” Then he noticed that the other’s face was wet with tears.
“For God’s sake, don’t rub it in,” said Williams, without taking his hand. “This is the saddest thing that ever happened to me in my life.” And with the tears still streaming down his cheeks he walked on through the courtroom.