Sacco accepted the transfer with shoulder-shrugging indifference as no more than he had expected. Vanzetti could not get over his depression at the ominous change from the casual Dedham jail with “some air, light, a slice of land and of sky to contemplate, and a daily blass of an hour of sunshine and free air in the yard” to the “windowless, airless, lightless ... malebolgic of the State Prison.”
The Defense Committee took a more optimistic view of the Lowell Committee than did Sacco and Vanzetti. They were content with Lowell, neutral about Stratton, and objected only to Grant. Not only were the petulant paragraphs of The Convictions of a Grandfather exhumed, but Grant was accused of having told John Moors and Samuel Eliot Morison that he disapproved of anyone’s taking issue with the trial, the verdict, and the subsequent decisions.
When Fuller questioned him about this, Grant explained with characteristic prissiness that he had not read the evidence in the case and knew nothing of the merits of the subsequent proceedings, but thought it “indecorous and contrary to the bonos mores for a professor at the Harvard Law School to rush into print while the case was sub judice.”
The Herald and that section of State Street less intransigent than the Transcript were pleased by the appointment of Fuller’s committee. Privately the more sedate Boston legal circles had always been dubious about Webster Thayer, and with the recent disbarment of the district attorneys of Suffolk and Middlesex counties, Democratic Joseph Pelletier and Republican Nathan Tufts, who could say what might not have been going on in neighboring Norfolk? Bishop Lawrence was another who had long been troubled by the thought, but now he too was satisfied. With Cousin Abbott in the State House, all would be well with the world!
Although the Advisory Committee appointment had been announced at the beginning of June, President Lowell was too occupied with his Harvard commencement activities to take any action until the end of the month. Finally, on the thirtieth, the three members met briefly in the governor’s council chamber to discuss procedure and to receive typewritten transcripts of the trial record. Two days later they drove to South Braintree to inspect the murder scene. On July 8 they opened their hearings by examining seven of the Dedham jurors. The next day they spent two hours talking with Sacco and Vanzetti. Of that meeting Vanzetti wrote Mrs. Henderson:
From the Commission interview of us I got the impression that President Lowell and President Stratton are honestly intentioned and not hostile to us by predetermination. Yet it seemed to me that in spite of their great scholarship, they had not understood certain most vicious actions of the prosecution and the iniquity of Thayer’s conduct. As for Judge Grant he is but another Thayer.
Meanwhile Governor Fuller was continuing his own daily sessions in his high-ceilinged office with the portraits of Sam Adams and John Hancock staring down from the walls. Secretary MacDonald kept his watchdog position at the Governor’s right, while the bald quizzical Wiggin sat at his left. In spite of repeated objections by the defense, Fuller insisted on complete secrecy for whatever the witnesses might wish to tell him. Otherwise, he explained, his office would be turned into a bear den. Day by day the reporters noted the parade of faces up the State House steps—the ballistics experts, including the disillusioned Professor Gill; the star witnesses from both trials. There was no way that either the governor or the Lowell Committee could compel anyone to testify. Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Goodridge did not appear, either because they refused to or because they had disappeared.
Philip Cox, the brother of Alfred Cox, the Bridgewater paymaster, wrote to Fuller that his brother “alone had an opportunity to see the man who held him up, and he declined to identify his assailant as Vanzetti.” This, it seemed to Philip Cox, “should have afforded good reason for hesitating to accept the verdict of guilty.” But what the Bridgewater paymaster had come to think in 1927, and what he said in the private interview he had with the governor, remained a tight secret.
Yet, in spite of the imposed secrecy, signs here and there made it apparent that Fuller’s mind was hardening against the two Italians. When John Richards, who, as marshal, had arrested the Morellis for their freight-yard thefts, talked with the governor, he was amazed to hear him say he discounted Madeiros’ confession. “I am convinced it was a fair trial,” he told Richards finally. When Robert Benchley came from New York to tell of his conversation with Loring Coes in which Coes—according to Benchley—had repeated Thayer’s clubhouse remark that he would “get those bastards good and proper,” Fuller asked Benchley to point out a single place in the record that indicated the trial was not fair.