For a moment it seemed as if the long sustained decorum of the neoclassic room was dissolving, but Thayer’s impervious voice continued with the regularity of the ticking clock—“by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.” He paused, gathering his gown about him in a preliminary gesture before he announced: “We will now take a recess.” Without a glance at the men he had sentenced he stood up and walked slowly down from the bench and out into the corridor that led to his chambers.
As Sacco and Vanzetti were again being handcuffed, their friends, Italian and American, crowded round them trying to touch them, to clasp their hands. Mrs. Evans hobbled up close enough to call out cheerfully, “There’s lots to hope for yet.” There were tears in Vanzetti’s eyes. Mary Donovan pushed forward, her cheeks wet. “Do not cry, Mary,” he told her. “Keep a brave front.” Then the guards and deputies intervened.
Vanzetti, brooding in his cell, thought less of the sentence than of the words he had not been allowed to speak. Next day, with the eloquence of death on him, he wrote out his eulogy of Sacco, telling Thompson that it was “the most important thing” he had to say, and that “I would have given half my blood to be allowed to speak again.”
I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker, lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of Liberty, and to his love for mankind; money, rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate. He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today—which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows. Never. His people also are in good position and of good reputation.
Oh yes, I may be more witfull as some have put it. I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism I felt small, small at the presence of his greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him—this man called thief and assasin and doomed. But Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katzmann’s and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name, his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a deem rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.
Over the week end Thompson told reporters that he felt Sacco and Vanzetti could derive no benefit from further proceedings in the Massachusetts courts, and that he was not prepared to take steps designed merely to delay their execution. Moore would have acted very differently, would in fact have taken any steps, scrupulous or otherwise, and two at a time, that he thought might prolong the men’s lives. But to Moore justice was a class shell game that he was ready to operate as trickily as his opponents. “At least I have kept them alive,” he was able to say as he left Boston. Thompson still kept his faith in the traditional impartiality of the law. He would not play tricks with it.
Anticipating the adverse decision of April 5, Thompson, a few days earlier, accompanied by John Moors, Dr. Morton Prince, and Professor Frank Taussig, had called on the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, William Lawrence, to ask his help in persuading Governor Fuller to appoint a commission to review the whole proceedings. It struck none of these Boston-bred men as strange to turn to a bishop in a matter of law. On the contrary, it seemed to them the most obvious step to take, for during a third of a century the voice of Bishop Lawrence had become the ethical voice of Massachusetts.
Bishop Lawrence combined uniquely in his person the dominant strands of the community. Descended from the founders of the Bay Colony, he could walk through Boston along streets named for his ancestors. As successor to Phillips Brooks, who had preached before Queen Victoria, he concluded the reconciliation of upper-class Boston to Episcopalianism after the disestablishment of the Revolution. His income came from the textile industry that his relatives the Lawrences, the Lowells, and the Abbotts had established. Though he was a second-generation Episcopalian, the blood of ancestral Calvinism still coursed in his veins. By and large, he observed to his acquaintances, it had been his experience that the more godly members of the community were the more financially successful. As a young curate in industrial Lawrence he would cheerfully give up an afternoon to visit a crippled spinner of his congregation, yet not think it strange that the man was earning eighty cents a day. As a bishop and member of the Corporation of Harvard University he would undertake to raise five million dollars for the new Harvard Business School and also not think it strange.
A stocky man with a glowing face, Bishop Lawrence looked a cherubic Puritan. He eschewed rings, miter and crozier, pectoral crosses, black suits, and clerical collars, preferring English tweeds and gray felt hats. He received Thompson’s delegation, representative of the law, medicine, State Street, and the academy, as a matter of course. He knew at once what his duty was.