Just after Christmas he wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
I know perfectly well that within four month the Massachusetts will be ready to burn me....
So every hope to get reparation and freedom having been killed in me by each and all the words and deeds of Massachusettes black gowned, puritanic, cold-blood murderors, on the first day of the 1927, I formulated the wish, the wove, that I am get out within this year, no matter if alive or death. And I hope with all my force that this will come true. By it, I do not mean suicide.
As the short and frigid days moved toward the final year, the clamor from overseas echoed more loudly within the United States. The obscure foreigners who had stood up in court that sultry summer evening of 1921 to hear the foreman, Ripley, pronounce the verdict against them could at least console themselves that their names had been blazoned round the world. They who had traveled on the swaying Brockton trolley talking of a Sunday meeting of a few dozen immigrants, now could conjure up hundreds of meetings in dozens of countries. Proudly they accepted the fact that they had become symbols.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] In June 1960 the National Broadcasting Company presented Reginald Rose’s television play, The Sacco-Vanzetti Story. For those unfamiliar with the case it may have seemed an entertaining melodrama. As a balanced presentation of facts it was a failure. Eugene Lyons turned off his television set in disgust. Harry King, one of the four surviving jurors, and the only one who saw the presentation, commented: “Well, I laughed. Quite a show. My only reaction is that it is hard to reconcile anything I saw with the actual trial.”
[23] G. B. Shaw understood this xenophobia well. “Americans must decide for themselves” he wrote to Upton Sinclair, “whether they will slaughter their Saccos and Vanzettis and Mooneys; for the moment a foreigner interferes, to yield to him would be an unbearable humiliation; perish a thousand Saccos first.”
[24] This was also Darrow’s own opinion when some time later he came to Boston and talked with Thompson and Felicani.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1927
The state prison’s new electric plant went into use five days after New Year’s, when three young men known as the Carbarn Bandits were executed. Following executions the warden customarily served a buffet supper to the witnesses and the press, so when on January 4 Vanzetti noticed three hams being cooked in the kitchen for the warden’s house, he knew it was the bandits’ turn.