While the jail years for Sacco and Vanzetti passed with unrelenting sameness, Rosina moved from the Stoughton bungalow to an old farmhouse near Milford. Here Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Jack aided her, and in addition she received a small monthly allowance from the Defense Committee. Ines was now almost old enough to go to school; Dante had reached the seventh grade. Even before Rosina left Stoughton she had living with her as a companion Susie Valdinoce, the grave, sad-faced sister of the man killed in the dynamiting of Attorney General Palmer’s house.
The rejection of Thompson’s appeal by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on May 12, 1926, marked the second stage of the case. With the court’s decision, affirming the convictions, came the realization that the affair was now moving toward a foreseeable climax. For the prisoners it was as if they had been walking down a long corridor of months and years, and now at last at the far end they could glimpse the door of the execution chamber.
To those familiar with the formalisms of Massachusetts legal procedure the court’s negative decision was expected. According to the statutes of the Commonwealth it was not the function of the higher court to review the facts of a case in an appeal but merely to consider questions of law. That in Madeiros’ first trial Judge Lummus had neglected to mention the presumption of innocence was an error sufficient to overthrow an obviously justified verdict. Judge Thayer had committed no such errors. Whatever his feelings, he had kept the written record straight just as Thompson, at the beginning of the trial, had predicted he would. In regard to the denied motions, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as Judge Thayer had given these consideration according to the prescribed legal forms, there would be no review of his decision. These were matters for his discretion, beyond the compass of any higher court.
The Supreme Court’s decision was like the tolling of a bell. In the next fifteen months the case would become a passionate issue, the linked Italian names a battle cry in all comers of the globe. Millions of men in dozens of countries, most of them with only a hazy and often erroneous notion of the facts, would identify themselves with the condemned Italians with such binding emotion that the fate of the two men would come to seem the very symbol of man’s injustice to man. For many European radicals the case loomed up as the most important occurrence since the Russian Revolution. Stalin, at the 1927 Party Congress, spoke of the recent Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration as evidence that “we are on the threshold of new revolutionary events.” The American Communist Max Shachtman asked rhetorically: “Since the Russian Bolshevik revolution, where has there yet been a cause that has drawn into its wake the people, not of this or that land, but of all countries, millions from every part and corner of the world; the workers in the metropolis, the peasant on the land, the people of the half-forgotten islands of the sea, men and women and children in all walks of life?”
That the renewed European agitation was conceived and directed by the Communist International is beyond dispute—a fact proclaimed with equal stridency by both Communists and their enemies. Moscow gave the signal and the International Red Aid set the well-oiled machinery in motion. But the Communists themselves must have been startled by their own quick success. Their calculated gesture loosed an avalanche, elemental and overwhelming, that spread beyond the bounds of any political party or dogma. Men of good will everywhere rose up to challenge the course of Massachusetts justice. There were protests from the Vatican; from ex-Premier Caillaux of France; from Paul Loebe, the president of the Reichstag; from Count Bernstorff, who had been ambassador to the United States in 1917; from John Galsworthy, Fritz Kreisler, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and scores of other international figures.
Why was it that in the fifteen months between the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision and the executions the case of Sacco and Vanzetti became the most widely known and bitterly felt of its generation? They were not conscious martyrs. Nor, if it be assumed that they were innocent, were they uniquely so. It was already a cruel commonplace of the century for innocent men to die ignominiously and obscurely for their beliefs under red, black, white, or varicolored flags. In an era of bloodshed, violence, and injustice, why should the names of these two obscure Italians stand out, enduring over the years in literature, in art, in the theater, and even in that newest of media, television?[22]
Perhaps it is that when any celebrated or notorious trial becomes encrusted with doubts as to its justice, it becomes a focus for the raging social passions of the moment. Certainly, in the grim weeks before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the hundreds of thousands of militants demonstrating in the world’s cities found their own resentments and anger objectified in these two comrades whom they considered victims of class justice. Frustration and the envy of America’s callous wealth undoubtedly stirred them too, and the hope that through such potent symbols of martyrdom the hated system could be overthrown.
Among many Europeans unswayed by the more primitive emotions of hate and revenge, there was the feeling that, beyond any question of the fairness of the trial, the years under the shadow of death were themselves torture enough to demand the commuting of the death sentences. “We wish to see the lives of these men spared, whether they are innocent or guilty,” said Le Temps in Paris. The London Times felt that it was not the wrongs of the trial that had so stirred the public’s imagination but the fact that any man should be kept so long in suspense. The suspense was particularly aggravated by Massachusetts’ means of execution: Far more than the traditional noose, the electric chair was a horror symbol to the European.
If—regardless of the question of their guilt or innocence—Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed within a few months of their conviction (as would have happened had they been tried in most European countries), their names today would be almost unknown. To non-Americans the pettifogging byways of American justice, the complications and contradictions and the time entailed in appealing from state to federal courts, the to them astonishing fact that even if injustice is being done by the judicial system of an individual state, so long as it is being done within the limits of the Constitution the national government can do nothing—such things were outrageously incomprehensible. And the years of delay seemed to presume doubt. “It is impossible for us on this side to feel that execution would have been so long deferred,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “if the case were clear enough to justify this infliction.”