Neither Moore nor Thompson had expected any other outcome, but the motions had served their purpose. They had postponed the defendants’ execution, and they had provided questions of law to be ruled on by a higher court. With the Goodridge, Pelser, Andrews, and Daley affidavits Thompson felt there was nothing more to be gained, that these were to a degree liabilities, but he appealed the denials of the Ripley, Gould, and Hamilton-Proctor motions.
After he had filed his findings with the clerk of court, Thayer felt he deserved a holiday, and for him a holiday in the autumn meant Hanover, New Hampshire. The Dartmouth-McGill football game that Saturday was only an excuse for the trip, since the Big Green was the odds-on favorite. But to get back to Dartmouth gave Thayer a sense of renewing himself, as if when he walked across the campus he was again for one miraculous moment Bobby Thayer, the baseball captain who could not quite make up his mind whether he wanted to be a big-league player or a lawyer. He felt that he belonged in Hanover. There was his familiar table by the window in the dining room of the Hanover Inn, the waiter who knew him, the faces of old friends as they came through the doorway. Much had changed, much had been added, but there were still the white buildings of Dartmouth Row, the Senior Fence where he had carved his initials over forty years ago, the arching elms, still looking just as they had when he arrived as a freshman. Each autumn brought him back, almost as if he had never left.
Thayer was cutting across the College Green in the long-edged sunlight after the game when he saw James Richardson, Dartmouth’s Professor of Law and Political Science, walking just ahead of him. Jim Richardson was Class of 1900, twenty years after Thayer, but the two men often met at alumni gatherings. As the judge drew abreast of the professor he nodded and they continued together toward the Inn. “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” Thayer asked affably, by way of conversation. He did not notice the shocked look on the other’s face as he continued, “I guess that will hold them for a while. Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!”
The denial of the supplementary motions was no more than Sacco had expected, but the decision left Vanzetti sunk in discouragement. “While hope is still alive in me,” he wrote, “disperation is growing powerful.” His fantasies of violence expanded:
My native me is drearing for what it is becoming. I have cut down trees with a sense of sympathy for them, and almost a sort of remorse; while now thinking of my axe, a lust seizes me to get a mad delight and exaltation by using them on the necks of the men’s eaters; on the necks of those who seem to have the evil in their head and on the trunks of those who seem to have the evil in their breast.
In the weeks before Christmas his mental balance began to waver. He told the guards of having feelings in his head and chest that meant earthquakes were coming. He noticed a sensation of electricity in the air. Each night he barricaded the door of his cell with a table for fear that his enemies might overpower the guards and kill him. The day before Christmas he threatened another prisoner who, he said, was laughing at him. Six days later he smashed a chair. Joseph McLaughlin, the prison physician, and Charles Sullivan, the state expert for insane criminals, spent some time questioning him. He told them that everyone had forsaken him; that at his trial “perjurers, fascists and others” had been “out to get him,” and that he needed to carry a gun for protection. The doctors diagnosed him as in a dangerous hallucinatory and delusional state of mind, and recommended his committal to the Bridgewater Hospital, where Sacco had been sent twenty-one months before.
Vanzetti arrived manacled the day after New Year’s. When the admitting doctor asked him routinely why he was there, he replied, “I don’t know, I am not crazy. Perhaps they think I need a rest.” Although for the next two months he seemed a model prisoner, quiet and controlled, his inner turbulence persisted. He told the doctors of a fascist plot against him being prepared through certain Italian prisoners in Charlestown who could kill him “any time any day they want to.” Even in Bridgewater there were such fascists. “I more than feel it,” he told the doctor.
The records of Vanzetti in Bridgewater are scanter than those of Sacco. On February 23 the attendant noted that he spent the day sitting in a chair pretending to have his eyes closed, but watching the other prisoners. At the evening meal he looked at his food suspiciously, then took potatoes from another prisoner’s plate and ate them, saying nothing. He was kept in his room except for two periods a day that he could play ball in the yard. When Thompson spoke to the doctors about this, they told him they could not give Vanzetti more freedom because he was dangerous. On the arrival of a new Italian prisoner Vanzetti was removed to a more secluded wing of the hospital, a change he resented deeply. Like most patients in mental institutions, he had the feeling that the doctors were working against him. In April his physical symptoms had begun to abate, and by May he could write, “Yes, my heartburn is gone, and I am quite well—so well that I feel to write a treaty on sociology—wich I have not yet begun, because I wish to hear some friends in its regards.” On May 28, 1925, he was certified as not insane and returned to Charlestown.