How hurt Moore was by this he showed only indirectly in the courtesy of his reply:
Dear Mr. Sacco
Enclosed you will find a copy of my Withdrawal as your counsel, filed today.
I wish you every possible success in your battle for justice.
Very truly, yours,
Fred. H. Moore
Although Moore continued officially as counsel until November, he took no further part in the defense. On November 8 he left Boston for good in the old Dodge touring car that was his sole permanent acquisition from the case, alone, in his frayed suit and cracked boots, and with three hundred borrowed dollars in his pocket. His immediate wish was to get back to California, to that land of brighter sunshine and wider horizons, three thousand good miles away from the mongrel English city where even the anarchists seemed affected by the constrictions of the Puritan heritage. Stacked behind him in the Dodge were several dozen packages of little tin signs, for attaching to rear license plates, that read: IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE TOO DAMN CLOSE. By selling these at filling stations and garages he hoped to cover his expenses on the way back.
As he drove down the slum side of Beacon Hill on a lowering afternoon with the taste of winter in the air, he could see the obelisk of the Bunker Hill Monument and squat beyond it the granite pile of the prison that held Vanzetti. “Chill and dreary, the three-hilled city of the Puritans,” Francis Parkman had described an earlier Boston. For Moore it was the dreary three-hilled city of his failure. He had failed as a lawyer, as a propagandist, as a husband, as a man, even as a money-changer. Most of all, he had failed himself. For his last glimpse of Boston left him with the racking uncertainty of his own cause, the nebulous doubt that would feed on disappointment until he could reveal to his friend Upton Sinclair three years later that he no longer believed in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Sinclair was aghast. A quarter of a century later he recorded his conversation with Moore:
I questioned Fred for many hours, deep into the night. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, and Fred told me that some of the anarchists were then raising funds for their movement by robbery. It was strictly honest from the group’s point of view—that is to say, they kept none of the money for themselves.... I pressed him with questions: “Did Sacco or Vanzetti ever admit to you by the slightest hint that they were guilty?” He answered, “No.” I asked him: “Did any of their friends ever admit it?” Again he answered, “No.”... I went home with my mind in confusion. The first person I went to see was Fred’s former wife, who had divorced him and was employed in Hollywood. Lola Moore said, “I am astounded that Fred should have made such a statement. I worked on the case with him all through the years, and I knew about it as intimately as he did. He never gave me a hint of such an idea, and neither did anyone else. I feel Fred is embittered because he was dropped from the case, and it has poisoned his mind.”
Where Sacco’s sense of outrage at being imprisoned so permeated him that it could at times cloud his mind, Vanzetti endured his imprisonment in Charlestown with a stoic objectivity. Sacco saw himself as the predestined victim of a predatory class; Vanzetti remained hopeful, willing to admit that he might be wrong in his judgments. His relations with Moore remained amiable, even though he instinctively had more confidence in the caste-formed Thompson than in the class-conscious Westerner.