This disease would seem to have reached a very dangerous condition, from the argument of counsel, upon the present Motion, when he charges Mr. Sargent, Attorney-General of the United States and his subordinates, and subordinates of former Attorney-General of the United States Mr. Palmer and Mr. Katzmann and the District Attorney of Norfolk County, with being in a conspiracy to send these two defendants to the electric chair, not because they are murderers but because they are radicals.... In these cases, from all the developed symptoms, the Court is rather of the opinion that the disease is absolutely without cure.
Until Thayer’s decision was published, the only Massachusetts newspaper to take the side of Sacco and Vanzetti was the Springfield Republican, a paper that, though conservative in outlook, never altered its outraged opinion that “a dog ought not to be shot on the weight of the evidence brought out in the Dedham Trial.” As the waning months of 1926 whetted the issue, the Boston newspapers at first reacted predictably. The independent Globe kept to its traditional wary policy of not taking sides on divisive issues. Frank Sibley, in spite of his standing, was taken off the case, and on the day of the executions found himself covering a flower show. Federalist pre-immigrant Boston spoke with two voices: the McKinley-minded Herald, the breakfast voice of State Street; and the genealogical Transcript, the teacup voice of Beacon Hill. The Transcript held and would continue to hold that Sacco and Vanzetti had been given a fair trial, that the verdict was just, the defendants had been given every opportunity of appeal, and any further delay was an unworthy concession to foreign radicals, long-haired men, and short-haired women. But doubts had begun to creep into the editorial rooms of the Herald. They crystallized in the editorial “We Submit” that appeared three days after Judge Thayer denied the Madeiros motion. It was written by the chief editorial writer, F. Lauriston Bullard, with editor-publisher O’Brien neither suggesting nor objecting, and it is indicative of the national interest the case was now arousing that it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The paragraphs that appeared on October 26 must have goggled eyes at many a Back Bay breakfast table:
In our opinion Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti ought not to be executed on the warrant of the verdict returned by a jury on July 14, 1921. We do not know whether these men are guilty or not. We have no sympathy with the half-baked views which they profess. But as months have merged into years and the great debate over this case has continued, our doubts have solidified slowly into convictions, and reluctantly we have found ourselves compelled to reverse our original judgment. We hope the supreme judicial court will grant a new trial on the basis of new evidence not yet examined in open court. We hope the Governor will grant another reprieve to Celestino Madeiros so that his confession may be canvassed in open court. We hope, in case our supreme bench finds itself unable legally to authorize a new trial, that our Governor will call to his aid a commission of disinterested men of the highest intelligence and character to make an independent investigation in his behalf, and that the Governor himself at first hand will participate in that examination, if, as a last resort, it shall be undertaken. We have read the full decision in which Judge Webster Thayer, who presided at the original trial, renders his decision against the application for a new trial, and we submit that it carries the tone of the advocate rather than the arbitrator. At the outset he refers to “the verdict of a jury approved by the supreme court of this commonwealth” and later he repeats that sentence. We respectfully submit that the supreme court never approved that verdict. What the court did is stated in its own words thus: “We have examined carefully all the exceptions in so far as argued, and finding no error the verdicts are to stand.” The court certified that, whether the verdict was right or wrong, the trial judge performed his duty under the law in a legal manner. The supreme court overruled a bill of exceptions but expressed no judgment whatever as to the validity of the verdict or the guilt of the defendants, Judge Thayer knows this.
Bullard went on to object to Thayer’s innuendoes, to say that the files of the Department of Justice should be opened, and to charge that Captain Proctor’s affidavit stood as a condemnation of the Dedham verdict. He concluded:
If on a new trial the defendants shall again be found guilty we shall be infinitely better off than if we proceed to execution on the basis of the trial already held; the shadow of doubt, which abides in the minds of large numbers of patient investigators of this whole case, will have been removed. And if on second trial Sacco and Vanzetti should be declared guiltless, everybody would rejoice that no monstrous injustice shall have been done. We submit these views with no reference whatever to the personality of the defendants, and without allusion now to that atmosphere of radicalism of which we heard so much in 1921.
Here was the first breach in the Commonwealth’s fortifications. The defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti now pressed forward in the paper war that thundered through the correspondence columns of the Herald and the Transcript.
Bullard’s attack received formidable support. Dr. Morton Prince, the internationally famous Harvard professor of psychiatry, wrote to the Herald that, after reading the evidence, he “had come to the conclusion that the trial was a miscarriage of justice, that the government had not proved its case and probably Sacco and Vanzetti had not committed the murder charged.” Dr. Prince particularly questioned a verdict to which Mary Splaine’s evidence had substantially contributed:
I do not hesitate to say that the star witness for the government testified, honestly enough, no doubt, to what was psychologically impossible. Miss Splaine testified, though she had only seen Sacco at the time of the shooting from a distance of about 60 feet for from 1½ to three seconds in a motor car going at an increasing rate of speed at about 15 to 18 miles an hour; that she saw and at the end of a year she remembered and described 16 different details of his person, even to the size of his hand, the length of his hair as being between two and 2½ inches long and the shade of his eyebrows! Such perception and memory under such conditions can easily be proved to be psychologically impossible. Every psychologist knows that—so does Houdini. And what shall we think of the animus and honesty of the state that introduces such testimony to convict, knowing that the jury is too ignorant to disbelieve?
How came Miss Splaine to become acquainted with these personal characteristics of Sacco?
The answer is simple. Sacco had been shown to her on several occasions. She had had an opportunity to study him carefully. More than this, he sat before her in court. At the preliminary hearing in the police court she was not asked to pick Sacco from among a group of other men. Sacco was shown to her alone. Everyone knows that under such circumstances the image of a person later develops, or may develop, in an observer’s mind and becomes a false memory. Such a memory is produced by suggestion. Every lawyer knows the unconscious falsification of memory due to later acquired knowledge, though ignorant of the psychology of the phenomenon. And yet Miss Splaine’s testimony was offered by the state to the Jury.