He and Moore continued their verbal dueling, carrying it over to the concluding arguments on Saturday, November 5. When Moore tried to explain how the issue of radicalism had injured his clients, Judge Thayer pointed out his trial ruling that “No evidence of the defendants’ radical activities or opinions would be allowed until the defense released such matter themselves.” Moore characterized the ruling as a Greek gift, the Virgilian reference escaping Judge Thayer.
Following this formal and predetermined motion the defense filed five supplementary motions for a new trial: the Ripley motion, the Gould-Pelser motion, the Goodridge motion, the Andrews motion, and the Hamilton-Proctor motion.
A month or so after the trial Jerry McAnarney had met the jury foreman, Walter Ripley—whom he had known for years—on the street in Quincy. They stopped on the corner to talk, and Jerry learned for the first time about the three cartridges that Ripley had casually brought to court in his vest pocket and during the trial compared with the five cartridges found in Vanzetti’s revolver. Ripley thought nothing of the matter, but for Jerry it was the first crack in the verdict. He now interviewed nine of the other jurors and obtained affidavits from several of them. Wallace Hersey and Frank McNamara admitted they had seen the Ripley bullets, Frank Marden and Seward Parker that they had heard about them. Ripley himself had died of a heart attack on October 10, before McAnarney could get an affidavit from him. His widow signed an affidavit that her husband had had the bullets with him during the trial. This admitted fact was the basis of the first supplementary motion, a lengthy document that claimed in substance that “if during the trial Ripley made a comparison between these three cartridges and the five cartridges taken from Vanzetti’s revolver, then the defendants are entitled to a new trial as a matter of right.” The Ripley motion with its accompanying affidavits was filed on November 8. Judge Thayer announced that he would set a hearing date satisfactory to both sides.
On the afternoon before Christmas, 1921, exactly two years after the Bridgewater crime, in a gray, nearly empty courtroom, the wintry-faced Thayer denied the October motion for a new trial. “I cannot,” he intoned, “as I must if I disturb these verdicts—announce to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor, judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust reposed in them by the law as well as by the Court. And all for what purpose? To take away the lives of two human beings created by their own God. The human frailties of man, his tender regard and love for human life and his profound sympathy for his fellow-men, when charged with the gravest offence known to the law, repudiates the suggestion.”
Three days after this denial Fred Moore wrote to a friend:
The one hope for these boys now rests in the hope that we may be able to unearth new facts. This means endless investigations. It means that every clue as to the real bandits must be followed up expertly and carefully. As you know this means money.
Thus, briefly, Moore stated his problems for the next three years, and the last problem would always be the most harassing, the one that would seem to be squatting like a dollar sign on the doorstep of Rollins Place each time he returned. For him money was a wretched commodity, something that arrived in the morning and went out in the afternoon, a means merely through which he might obtain more publicity, wider investigations. His restless and inventive mind never stopped thinking of new angles to explore. One week would find him at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on a tip that two inmates there were connected with the gang that, it was rumored, had really pulled off the Bridgewater job. The next week might find him uncovering the bigamous career of a prosecution witness. Pressed constantly for funds, he wrote countless dunning letters, cajoled his old radical friends and associates from coast to coast, unabashedly appealed to prominent strangers, cultivated sympathetic old women. Given enough money, he was sure he could win.
The trial had been over for half a year, the sentencing of the two men lay somewhere in the months ahead. General interest dwindled. Only the most faithful sympathizers still sent in contributions.
The Defense Committee had moved from Battery Street to the more central Hanover Street, where most of the North End Italian shops were located. Eugene Lyons, returned from Italy, now replaced Art Shields. The new headquarters at number 256 was on the third floor, a large garret anteroom leading into a small inner office. Every Thursday night the committee members would climb the warped, narrow stairs to listen to a repetition of what had been said the week before. Three or four times a year there would be a meeting of several hundred sympathizers at Paine Memorial Hall in the South End, most of them Italian comrades, with a sprinkling of Back Bay dissidents, members of the Civil Liberties Committee, and the more radical trade-union officials.
It was [Lyons wrote] a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched company that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were moved by an undiluted urge to save the two innocent men, others were interested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still others got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were hot-headed and desperate Italians distrustful of all law, bitterly sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits, and often refusing in principle to cooperate with their own lawyers. At the other extreme were men and women of old New England stock chiefly concerned with saving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice. I can recall vital meetings in which a snarling, red-headed Italian exponent of direct action argued some question of policy with a benign pacifist like Mrs. Evans. It was Moore’s delicate job to reconcile these people and placate their idiosyncrasies.