The disorganization of the Defense Committee that Moore had watched was followed about the time of his departure by a reorganization and an opening up of the membership to non-Italians. Lopez had been inflexible in excluding outsiders, but Amleto Fabbri, the gentle, softspoken shoe-worker who had replaced him as secretary, welcomed them. Many of the new members came over from the dissolved New Trial League, but the influx that really broke through the Latin limitations of the old committee came from the James Connolly Literary Society.
That society was made up of a group of forty or fifty dissidents from the local branch of the Gaelic League. They called themselves a literary society because in Boston they could not say what they really were—Irishmen of the indeterminate left, socialists, associates of the Socialist Labor Party, some of them even Wobblies. Most of them had turned against the church and were anathema to their pious majority compatriots. More concerned with day-to-day problems of economics than with theoretical Marxism, their only literary activity was the distribution of pamphlets. The name Connolly was really a cover—who in such an Irish city could say a word against the martyr of 1916?
The James Connolly Literary Society had become interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case during the Dedham trial. As it now drew closer to the Italian nucleus of the Defense Committee, three of its members became officers, with John Barry, a quiet, conciliatory Irishman taking over as chairman. Barry, a steelworker, would never play a conspicuous role. His retiring nature made him acceptable to everyone, and in fact he was so accepted as a symbol of intergroup unity.
Michael Flaherty, a painter and member of the Boston Labor Union named vice-chairman, took a much more active part. Flaherty and his associates brought a lighter spirit to the ordained seriousness of the anarchists. An Aran Islander, Flaherty possessed an underlying humor that the darkest situation could never quite down. If he had stayed in Ireland he would undoubtedly have played his part in the Easter Uprising. In America he gravitated naturally to the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
Mary Donovan, who came with him from the Society, was both a more practical and a more pugnacious type, a lank, raw-boned, sharp-featured woman in her thirties. Emotional, opinionated, suspicious, generous, and devoted, she was not an easy person to get along with, but she made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti so much her own that she became possessed by it. So much of her time did she spend at the Hanover Street headquarters, where she took charge of correspondence and communications, that she soon became the committee’s recording secretary and lost her State House job as industrial inspector for the Department of Labor.
With Moore gone, the McAnarneys in turn resigned, leaving the defense temporarily without counsel. Most of the committee by now felt that Moore had been an unfortunate choice, that what was needed was an outstanding local lawyer, someone with authority and position. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, after consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Workers’ Defense Union, came on from New York to talk the matter over with the committee. “I then had long conferences,” she wrote with the customary exaggeration of her own role, “in which I interviewed every element—from conservative trade unionists, Socialists, Anarchist, Communists, and Liberals including Professor Frankfurter at Harvard University. The universal opinion was that a new, distinguished local counsel was imperative.”
Frankfurter recommended that the committee try to get William Thompson. That had been John McAnarney’s idea from the beginning, and many of the committee had come to feel the same way after listening to Thompson’s arguments on the supplementary motions. The question was whether he would be willing to take on such an unpopular case.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Donovan, Barry, Felicani, and Mike Flaherty called at the Matthews, Thompson & Spring offices in the Tremont Building to see what they could do. Thompson received them in his austere office, looked at them through his rimless glasses, and listened noncommittally. Finally he told them, in a tone that suggested he expected to hear no more of the matter, that he would take the case for a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars, paid in advance.
In two days they were back with the money. “I thought sure you couldn’t raise it,” Thompson told Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. “I can’t say that I’m glad.” In a quick trip to New York, she had borrowed twenty thousand dollars from the American Fund for Public Service—popularly known as the Garland Fund—on the security of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Felicani, in a stupendous burst of energy, had managed to raise the additional five thousand dollars locally through the harder way of individual contributions.
The moment Thompson received the certified check was, although he did not then know it, the turning point in his life. After that the world of Boston, his incorporated world, would never be the same for him again.