Those who (in that jagged term that had emerged with the Russian Revolution) considered themselves the intelligentsia accepted the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti and the guilt of Massachusetts as a matter of faith. It became a shibboleth of the liberal academic mind, just as within Boston their guilt had become a conservative shibboleth—in both cases a hotly held nonrational belief. Academic conformity, which—though usually opposed to—is even more rigid than middle-class conformity, belatedly took up the Sacco-Vanzetti cause, in part with sincere deliberateness but more often as a fervent avant-garde gesture. The 381 protesting petitioners from Mount Holyoke, the 326 from Bryn Mawr, the 203 from Wellesley, the faculty and 650 students from the University of California, the 36 Amherst faculty members, the hundreds of bloc names from so many other American colleges and universities, knowing only a smattering of the case, were making a reflex response to an appeal to themselves as an elite. In May, 61, members of assorted law faculties that included Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and the Universities of Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Alabama, and Texas, petitioned Governor Fuller for a commutation on grounds of reasonable doubt. Dean Robert Hutchins of the Yale Law School, one of the minority who had read the record, wrote an open appeal in which he castigated Katzmann’s cross-examination of Sacco. Three-quarters of the graduating class of the Harvard Law School, in defiant contrast to the State Street alumni majority just across the river, signed a request for a new trial. Professor Glenn Frank of Wisconsin, Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, Mount Holyoke’s Professor of English Jeannette Marks, and President Ellen Fitz Pendleton of Wellesley added their academic pleas.
As the New England spring slipped into summer, the roster of those opposing the impending execution and demanding a new trial added names as diverse as Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Alfred Landon, Senator Robert La Follette, the Right Reverend Chauncey Brewster of Washington Cathedral, Sherwood Eddy, John Dewey, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton, H. L. Mencken and Dean Edward Devine of the American Catholic University. Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn announced that he would introduce a measure in the next session of Congress to compel the attorney general to open the Department of Justice files concerned with Sacco and Vanzetti. On June 22 Joseph Moro, Gardner Jackson, and Mary Donovan appeared at the State House on behalf of the Defense Committee with a giant rolled petition for a public investigation, containing 474,842 names from all countries. Two weeks later the committee forwarded 153,000 additional names collected by the Swiss Union of Workers.
Within Massachusetts the reaction of the general public to such high-placed outside criticism was one of embittered, unreasoning hostility. A former district attorney said that it would be better even for two innocent men to be electrocuted than for public confidence in the established order of judicial procedure to be broken down. John C. Hull, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, received prolonged applause when he announced at a banquet that the Commonwealth’s demand of outsiders was this: “We would respectfully ask you to mind your own business.”
Such was the reaction of the well-born and the well-to-do. The reaction of what William Butler Yeats called “the little streets” was even more savage. In the massed streets of South Boston and Charlestown and Brighton and Ashmont there was a virulent hatred of Sacco and Vanzetti, coupled with a social jealousy of the better-known colleges and universities, a smoldering distrust of the professorial stance, a suspicion of academic attainments as being tainted with subversion. If the wiser-than-thou professors from Harvard and Yale were now taking it on themselves to proclaim that Sacco and Vanzetti should be freed—then so much the worse for Sacco and Vanzetti!
Sans-culotte anti-intellectualism echoed in a speech of Registrar of Motor Vehicles Frank Goodwin to the Lawrence Kiwanis Club:
It is impressive fact that the nearer we get to the scene of this murder the more convinced are the people that these men are guilty.... The citizens of Norfolk County know these men are guilty. On the other hand, in those domains where foreign and un-American principles are in vogue, such as Russia, Harvard, Argentine, Wellesley, China and Smith, they are sure these men are innocent.... The leader of the movement to set these two murderers free is Felix Frankfurter.
Professor Hocking might announce with urbane indignation from the platform of Boston’s Community Church that he believed Sacco and Vanzetti “as innocent of that murder as you or I.” Bishop Lawrence and the Dean of Washington Cathedral might entertain refined Episcopal doubts. But for the Reverend Billy Sunday—the preacher of the little streets—hoarsely saving the city from the fate of Sodom at Tremont Temple, no doubts existed. “Give ’em the juice,” he rapped out from the pulpit. “Burn them, if they’re guilty. That’s the way to handle it. I’m tired of hearing these foreigners, these radicals, coming over here and telling us what we should do.”
For five weeks after their sentencing Sacco and Vanzetti occupied adjoining cells in the Dedham jail. It was the first time since their arrest that they had been together for any length of time. Those shadowed weeks turned out to be the most serene of their imprisonment. Everyone who met Vanzetti remarked on his composure. Sacco, having decided not to struggle further against the fate he considered inevitable, attained a tranquillity that gave the surface appearance of cheerfulness. “As you know,” he wrote with wry unaccustomed humor to Mrs. Henderson, “I am still living at the same hotel, the same room, and also at the same old number 14—but on the first of July probably, they will bring us to the death house, and from there to the—eternity.”
A friend had brought Sacco a boccie set, and the two prisoners were allowed to bowl in the yard each afternoon for an hour and a half. Vanzetti began to take morning exercises and wrote Mrs. Winslow that he felt a new man. His cell was always filled with flowers from Mrs. Evans and other friends. As he described it: