Why was not Miss Splaine asked to pick out Sacco from among a group of men? If this had been done, this unconscious falsification of memory would have been avoided.
In Morton Prince the genealogy of the Back Bay combined with the intellectualism of Cambridge across the river, and while the Herald editorial might jar Boston, his letter would cause the greater explosion. Even if the Supreme Judicial Court should rule against Thompson’s appeal from Thayer’s last decision, it was now clear to the more knowing Bostonians that the matter would not rest there. Many felt that Governor Fuller would commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.
When Judge Thayer brushed aside the Madeiros evidence, Sacco felt that nothing could now save him from his fate, neither lawyers nor appeals nor—hardest of all to face—the embattled proletariat. “I don’t care how it all ends, if it only ends,” he told one of his visitors.
At Christmas Mrs. Jack’s daughter Elizabeth brought Sacco apples and candy and—what moved him much—a present for his “dear darling Ines.” He wrote to Mrs. Jack in an afterglow of optimism that he hoped from the bottom of his heart “that the new year would bring us a freedom and in the embrace of mine and in the grant human family.” But it was something he had given up believing, and he had already requested Thompson to take no more legal steps on his behalf. The two prisoners’ joint Christmas message to their supporters sounded much more like Sacco than Vanzetti:
We are convinced that our murderors are determined to burn us within this, 1927, and that it is most probable that they will succeed. And our hearts move is that the new year may give us liberty or death—but menwhile we are ready to bear our cross to the last.
Vanzetti’s moods alternated. There was a black period in the autumn when he considered going on a hunger strike. Close to his cell he could hear workmen constructing a new prison electric plant, following the Boston Edison Company’s refusal to provide the Commonwealth with current for executions. But even in his darkest moods, when he thought of himself as a vanquished man, the shadow would in a few days be overcome by his basic optimism, just as he could forget the jangle of the electric-plant construction when he learned that Mrs. Corl, the wife of the Plymouth boatbuilder, had kept a vigil lamp lighted before the statue of the Virgin for the last six years for the grace of his liberation. Something in her naïve faith gave strength to his disbelieving heart. At times he would attend the prison’s Christian Science services, not out of any belief but merely to be able to sit in the spacious, almost empty chapel and glimpse the sky again through the barred windows and the sunshine reflecting on the gilt dome of the State House. To the chaplains he remained generally hostile. Unlike Sacco, he could still be hopeful of the higher court and of Governor Fuller as an independent-minded man. Even so, he refused to apply for a pardon. “Why should I,” he said, “when I am innocent?” Nevertheless he was still willing to cooperate with his lawyers and the Defense Committee. He began to translate Thompson’s brief into Italian for distribution in Europe.
In one and the same letter Vanzetti could announce that he was doomed, and then turn with lyric nostalgia to his father’s garden at Villafalletto:
It takes a poet of first magnitude to worthly speak of it, so beautiful, unspeakably beautiful it is ... the singing birds there; black merles of the golden bick, and ever more golden troath; the golden oriols, the gold-finches, the green finches, the chaf-finches, the neck-crooking, the green ficks; the unmachable nightingales, the nightingales over-all. Yet, I think that the wonder of my garden’s wonders is the banks of its path. Hundreds of grass, leaves of wild flowors witness there the almighty genios of the universal architecture—reflecting the sky, the Sun, the moon, the stars, all of its lights and colors. The forgetmenot are nations there, and nation are the wild daisies.
Christmas—his seventh behind bars—brought a cold snap, etching the jail windows with frost. Among Vanzetti’s letters and Christmas cards were a number of books—The Life of Debs, Jack London’s Essays on Revolt, and, accompanied by a necktie from Mrs. Evans, Emerson’s Essays. Emerson he found “so exquisitely anarchist,” delighting “at the lecture of Politics, Nature and New England Reformers.”