In his testimony to me [the governor reported] he could not recall the details or describe the neighborhood. He furthermore stated that the Government had double crossed him and he proposed to double cross the Government. He feels that the District Attorney’s office has treated him unfairly because his two confederates who were associated with him in the commission of the murder for which he was convicted were given life sentences, whereas he was sentenced to death. He confessed the crime for which he was convicted. I am not impressed with his knowledge of the South Braintree murders.
Madeiros gave a different interpretation of the interview to Thompson when the lawyer next visited him. Over a year later in connection with another case Thompson related on the witness stand what Madeiros had told him:
“Madeiros said that Governor Fuller began the interview by saying that he understood that Madeiros said that he thought he had been given—I think the expression was, ‘a raw deal,’ or something indicating double-dealing or improper dealing by the Government, and that Madeiros said that Officer Ferrari of the State Police had given him a promise of second-degree murder if he confessed the murder.... The Governor said if he was satisfied that any such promise had been made he would do something for Madeiros. The Governor then said, before waiting for any reply from Madeiros, according to Madeiros’ statement to me, ‘You do not know anything about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, do you?’ And Madeiros said he did, and the Governor asked him if he was in the car with the other men who committed the murder in South Braintree, the South Braintree murder, and Madeiros said that he was, and the Governor then said, ‘So you are a double murderer; I will do nothing for you.’”
Fuller unquestionably said something of the kind to Madeiros, although the meaning remains double-edged. Defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti have interpreted it as an offer to trade Madeiros a commutation for a recantation of his South Braintree confession. Others have maintained that the governor would not have been foolish enough to risk his reputation by making any such offer to an admitted liar like Madeiros.
But there is still another possible explanation. From the governor’s attitude to the later witnesses appearing at his investigation, it seems fairly certain that at this stage he had come to believe Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. And if he felt they were guilty, Madeiros’ confession could only have seemed a fraud. When Fuller talked with Madeiros and the latter still stuck to his story, the governor might well have snapped back that he would do nothing for him. If so, it was a remark spoken in anger rather than a premeditated offer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PUBLIC AND THE
LOWELL COMMITTEE
Not only in Europe but around the world—in Shanghai, Tokyo, Melbourne, Calcutta, Buenos Aires—the names Sacco and Vanzetti were by now familiar syllables and the image had become fixed of two dissenters from the American way of life being done to death for their dissent. Where scores and then hundreds had demonstrated in isolated groups, now in the approaching climax thousands thronged to vast and passionate assemblies that somehow, the participants felt, by their very vastness and passion might force the Massachusetts executioners to stay their hands. There was a fierce joy, too, in such protests, a tensing of muscles, a sense of unity and a feeling among the urban masses that in their increasingly turbulent protests against the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti they were protesting against their own isolation and their own fate.
To Continental intellectuals disillusioned by the collapse of Wilsonian idealism, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was one more devastating example from postwar America, to be set beside Prohibition, Chicago gangsters, the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan, and the Tennessee monkey trial. The fate of the two men was what one might expect from the heartless materialism of the transatlantic republic that had won a war with its money and the blood of others and now wanted the money back.
In July, Mussolini wrote to the American ambassador in Rome “not as the head of the Italian Government but as a man who is sincerely your friend,” asking for a commutation of sentence as an “act of humanity so much more noble as it is less delayed.” Shrewdly the Duce pointed out that
The agitation of the elements of the left throughout the world is increasing in intensity, in these last days, as is shown by the bombs thrown in Buenos Aires against the Ford establishment and the statue of Washington.