The first real inkling of what was going on behind the wrought iron gates of 150 Beacon Street was provided on May 12 when Will Rogers, the gum-chewing lariat-swinging comedian-philosopher, appeared in Boston for a one-night benefit at the Opera House. Before the performance he had visited Governor Fuller. “I don’t know anything about this murder case that is interesting you in Massachusetts,” Rogers told his Opera House audience, “but I want to tell you that your governor is working on it. I stopped in on my way here to sit with him for a few moments and I found him in his room with crutches by his side. He had three or four pistols, and he had a big pile of books, the record of the case, and he is working away at it. I don’t know what he is going to decide, of course, but I do know that he isn’t going to be skeered into deciding it, and I do know that when he makes his decision, it’s going to be a decision he believes right down through him. He’s terribly anxious about it, but he is going to get all the facts.”
It was clear at last that Governor Fuller was going to do his own investigating. Day after day now the newspapers recorded the appearance of witnesses old and new, first at 150 Beacon Street and then at the executive chambers in the State House. Through the late spring weeks the governor interviewed the eleven surviving Dedham jurors and the twelve from Plymouth, Judge Thayer, and as many of the original witnesses as could be located, as well as the “suppressed” witness, Roy Gould. One day it was observed that he took Beltrando Brini to lunch. Another day he spent several hours with Lola Andrews’ son, now Corporal Hassam of the U.S. Marine Corps. Assisting him were his sharp, bald, thin-lipped private counsel, Joseph Wiggin, his confidential secretary, Herman MacDonald, and Lieutenant Governor Frank Allen. Reporters could get no information from the gruff MacDonald, whose function was to act as a buffer between the governor and the external world. This function he exercised with a gusto that earned him the nickname of Hard-boiled Herman and the dislike of newspapermen and State House employees generally.
When the Defense Committee protested against the secrecy of the governor’s hearings, Fuller began consulting with Thompson and Ehrmann. He refused, however, to allow representatives of the defense to confront witnesses in his presence.
Vanzetti was convinced that the governor must have had him and Sacco in mind when he wrote his article “Why I Believe in Capital Punishment,” for the December 1926 issue of Success Magazine. He wrote Mrs. Evans not “to expect that Fuller will stand against the judiciary, the middle class, the big money in behalf of two damned dagos and anarchists.”
Nevertheless, as the weeks wore away with their succession of witnesses, Fuller appeared uneasy and uncertain. Robert Lincoln O’Brien, sitting next to him at a Boston University commencement dinner, hesitantly brought up the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti. Far from objecting, Fuller seemed eager to talk about it. He said he felt it was abhorrent that one man should have the decision in a capital case, that O’Brien would be surprised at the way much of the trial testimony had collapsed. According to O’Brien’s later account, Fuller then told him he was going to settle the case in such a way that he could live with his conscience.
As in Elizabethan tragic drama, there now occurred a clown’s interlude, furnished by Edward Holton James, the bearded pipe-smoking son of William and Henry James’ black-sheep alcoholic brother, Robertson. James was a dilettante with a town house on Mount Vernon Street and a country estate in Concord that had two houses, one for his wife and one for himself, where he built and repaired musical instruments. He described himself variously as a musician and as a lawyer—though whether he practiced either law or the violin was questionable. “The millionaire pacifist,” as the newspapers tagged him, had written a shrill pamphlet on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, a counterblast to Grabill’s effort, in which he announced:
You had a crazy judge and jury in Plymouth. You had the same crazy judge with another crazy jury in Dedham. You had a crazy Supreme Court of Massachusetts, sitting in the Court House in Boston, saying it was all right. The whole lot of them ought to be sitting in the insane asylum.
On April 15 James drove to South Braintree to re-enact the crime and demonstrate the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. He had planned to recruit his cast from members of the Harvard Liberal Club but at the last minute found himself speeding through the Blue Hills with only a solitary lawyer friend, Abraham Wirin, to play a bandit’s part. At South Braintree their efforts to pick up local volunteer actors drew a blank, and Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent, refused to let them into the factory. They glimpsed a moment of martyrdom when the chairman of the board of selectmen, Edward Avery, tried to stop their two-man show, but the new police chief, John Heaney, waved Avery back and told them to go ahead. A few days later James returned alone to make some pencil sketches and this time, while heads gawked from all the factory windows, Avery gave him fifteen minutes to leave town. After telling Avery to go to hell, James at last had the satisfaction of being arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. He left twenty dollars as bail money—which he later forfeited—and returned triumphantly to Boston in time for lunch.
The pigmy sparrings of Grabill and James were succeeded by a battle of giants when on April 25 Dean John Wigmore of the Northwestern University Law School commandeered the front page of the Transcript to answer Frankfurter’s Atlantic article. Wigmore was one of the great scholars of his day, and his monumental treatise The Law of Evidence remains one of the classics of Anglo-American law. A Harvard graduate of the class of 1883, he was furious that Frankfurter should have so influenced intellectual and university opinion. He did not once mention Frankfurter by name but referred to him with surly pedantry as the “plausible pundit.”