Hill joined the defense on March 15 feeling, as he later explained, “What do I care about these draft-dodgers who were skulking in Mexico when their countrymen were fighting for the very life of the land? But I do care for the honor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Thompson would in time come to consider the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as his own. For Hill, who would appear as counsel in the last tumultuous weeks, it was a case and not a cause, and he the advocate rather than the partisan.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
POST-TRIAL: II
Just before Thompson and Hill entered the case Sacco went on a hunger strike. A year and a half had elapsed since his conviction, and he announced that he would continue to fast until the court ruled on his fate. Much of the delay during 1922 had resulted from the additional time granted Moore to follow up clues that he hoped might lead to the real criminals. In the autumn Judge Thayer underwent an operation, causing a further delay.
Sacco chafed under his barred restraint. He was not one to find escape in reading or thinking his thoughts. Even the anarchism that was so fundamental to him attracted him more by its unrelenting code than by its philosophy. He was a man of abounding physical energy for whom work and love were necessary releases. Jail was an exercise in patience that he could never learn. Several times in the course of his years at Dedham he approached and even crossed the borderline of sanity. From his cell, with its rolled blanket and wooden water bucket and tin mug and enamel slop pail, he watched the flaring twilights diminish, the approach of morning along the empty streets, the orbit of the sun as it shifted across the upper windows. Days and weeks and months passed meaninglessly.
In November 1921, Sacco had written to Vanzetti in the grimmer confinement of Charlestown: “I am very sorry that no one comes and see you, no one comes to see me neither, but Rosie.” The week before, his wife had brought little Ines to the jail for the first time. Sacco was delighted to hold the plump crowing baby in his arms. Mrs. Evans became a staunch periodic visitor. Sacco, in spite of his theoretical rejection of bourgeois society, developed an intense filial affection for her. From Mrs. Glendower Evans, separated from him by the whole range of the sociological spectrum, she became Auntie Bee. In 1925 he wrote her: “From since the day I have meet you, you have occupied in my heart my mother her place, and so like I been respect you and I been loved you.” It was a curious transition from the brown peasant woman of Torremaggiore to the self-contained Bostonian, but Mrs. Evans was only one of the elderly women who were to take an increasingly maternal interest in the Dedham prisoner. Among the earliest was kindly, mousy Mrs. Cerise Carman Jack in her squeaky high-button boots; for a while she took Rosina and the children to her farm in Sharon. There was Mrs. Jessica Henderson, matron of good causes and pillar of the Anti-Vivisection Society. And there were Mrs. Gertrude Winslow and Mrs. Codman, the latter a cousin by marriage of the head of the Civil Liberties Committee. Sacco always took a more trusting attitude toward women than toward men.
Evenings were the most difficult for “thes sad reclus,” as he whimsically termed himself. He kept thinking of the bungalow in South Stoughton, how he would sometimes visit friends after supper and come back with the sleeping Dante in his arms and Rosina beside him. “Those day,” he wrote Mrs. Jack, “they was a some happy day.”
The jail rule that unsentenced prisoners might not work kept Sacco in idleness, intensifying the feelings of persecution that he had developed after the trial. On February 14, 1923, he began his hunger strike. Sheriff Capen made no attempt to force him to eat, and by the middle of March he had grown noticeably weaker. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, at Judge Thayer’s request, he was examined by Charles Cahoon, superintendent of the Medfield State Hospital; Albert Thomas, superintendent of the Foxboro State Hospital; and a Boston psychiatrist, Abraham Meyerson.
Sacco, lying on his cot, calmly explained to the doctors that the state was trying to kill him. Poison was being put into his food—even into the food his wife brought him; poisonous vapors were being blown into his cell and electric currents circulated under his bed. His suffering had become so intense, he explained, that he could not permit it to go much further. When Dr. Cahoon asked him why he drank water, which would prolong his life, he “stated that he did not want to die too quickly because, on account of a hearing for a new trial he felt that he should allow his counsel some opportunity to plead. He had no confidence, however, that he would get a new trial; he did not expect any justice from the state or the government.”
The doctors found that Sacco was mentally disturbed, and Judge Thayer ordered him to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital for observation. On his arrival he was warned by Dr. Meyerson, “Nick, they have sent you here to eat, and if you don’t, we will feed you with a tube.” According to the newspaper reports he was then forcibly fed by an attendant in the doctor’s presence, although Sacco later claimed that he broke his strike voluntarily. “You know,” he told another doctor some months afterward, “I have read in an Italian magazine that you can live a long time if they feed you with a tube; I knew this, and then I was too weak and could not fight them, so I said, I go ahead and eat. I was against going because I wanted justice.”
For the first two days in the hospital he lay on his cot and was fed broth and gruel every hour. Then he began to eat regularly, gaining ten pounds within a week. His Dedham delusions vanished and he spoke of them as “all a mistake” and “prejudices.” Although he identified the hospital with the state that was persecuting him, he was friendly with the doctors, sometimes speaking of his love for his wife and children and his feeling for the out-of-doors, joking about his hairiness that “proved the correctness of Darwin’s theory,” or talking about his work as sole-trimmer.