Now if the act of clemency is held back still longer it may give the impression that the American authority may have yielded to the pressure of this world-wide subversive activity and this impression can injure the prestige of the United States.
I hope that His Excellency Governor Fuller may give an example of humanity. The example will brilliantly demonstrate the difference between the methods of Bolshevism and those of the great American republic as well as strike from the hands of the subversive elements an instrument of agitation.
In the last pitched months conservatives determined to show that they, no less than the radicals, were concerned with human rights as exemplified by the fate of the two Italians. The royalist Action Française now protested the course of Massachusetts justice in as shrill a tone as the Communist L’Humanité. The conservative Frankfurter Zeitung spoke out with the vehemence of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Even the shadowy Alfred Dreyfus emerged from his seclusion to announce that he was willing to go to America to plead for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Communist propaganda continued, bizarre and embracing. The day after Judge Thayer pronounced sentence, Pravda—remembering Edgar Allan Poe but apparently confusing Charlestown with Charleston—reported that Sacco and Vanzetti had been held for several years in a torture prison in South Carolina where they had been confined “in a specially constructed padded room having a mirrored ceiling on which appeared at intervals a spot which gradually took the form of a terrifying open-jawed creature. Meanwhile, a human voice shouted: ‘Tell the names of your accomplices!’”
H. G. Wells, after reading Frankfurter’s Atlantic article, became so indignant that he proposed the word Thayerism to describe “the self-righteous unrighteousness of established people.” Millions read his angry statement in the London Sunday Express for June 5, 1927:
I do not see how any clear-headed man, after reading the professor’s summary, can have any other conviction than that Sacco and Vanzetti are as innocent of the Braintree murder, for which they are now awaiting death, as Julius Caesar, or—a better name in this connection—Karl Marx.
Within the United States Italians generally were behind the two prisoners because they were paisani. Their anarchism did not matter. The same North Enders who first came to support the Defense Committee would a few years later support Mussolini’s African campaign and fill the windows of Hanover Street shops with photographs of Ethiopian atrocities. Other foreign groups, like the Jewish enclaves in New York and Boston, would find themselves drawn sympathetically to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti out of their socialist tradition and their own bitter experiences of race hate.
American union members never came to identify themselves with the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as did their counterparts in Europe. Moore had had enough contacts to engineer resolutions asking for a new trial through the American Federation of Labor conventions of 1922 and 1924, but such resolutions would not be presented again until the winter of 1926-1927. In the last months of the case President William Green of the American Federation of Labor added his protest against the impending executions, but in the Indian summer of the Coolidge prosperity the rank and file union members were at best lethargically sympathetic. When, the week before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Defense Committee sent out an appeal for a hundred thousand trade-union members to come to Boston in protest, less than two hundred showed up. Elsewhere than in the big cities with their heavy foreign populations the American worker was not class-conscious enough to see Sacco and Vanzetti as his representatives. He found the erotic enticements of the New York trial of Ruth Snyder, a suburban housewife, and her corset-salesman lover Henry Judd Gray for the murder of Ruth’s husband more enticing than the brief final scene in the Dedham courtroom. He took Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic on May 20, 1927, much more to heart than the erosive progress of Sacco and Vanzetti toward the electric chair. He was more concerned with the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, scheduled for September, than with the Massachusetts executions scheduled for July.
In the six years since John Codman, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and other members of the New England Civil Liberties Committee had appealed for defense funds, the New England Committee and the parent American Civil Liberties Union in New York had remained steadfast in their support. Frankfurter’s article was in a sense a culmination of their efforts. They had by their prolonged and reiterative publicity made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti intellectually fashionable. Those whose names rang the changes in the last months of the case, now made their rather flamboyant appearance. Officially the civil-liberties groups kept their distance.
When Moore was in charge of the defense, publicity was oriented toward the radicals, but with the coming of Thompson and Gardner Jackson the appeal was directed much more to what the class-conscious Lyons would have considered “handwringing” liberals. Thompson disapproved of pamphlet wars, of the case being tried in the streets. Both he and Frankfurter wanted to avoid further antagonizing the Massachusetts community. Sometime in July 1927, when the Defense Committee had arranged to hold a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall, Frankfurter discreetly vetoed the idea.