“Why didn’t Vanzetti take the stand at Plymouth?” It was a question that the governor threw at defense witnesses with increasing frequency. “Why didn’t Sacco testify at Plymouth for his friend Vanzetti?” Fuller demanded of Tom O’Connor, who was trying to explain how the case originated in Chief Stewart’s mind. Each point that O’Connor made, whether it concerned Proctor’s ambiguous testimony or the Department of Justice files, Fuller and his counsel Wiggin brushed aside. O’Connor in a flash-tempered parry accused the governor of prejudging the investigation, and the two men shouted at each other until their voices reached the newspapermen in the corridor. Fuller, red-faced and furious, stood up to indicate the interview was over. Stalking from the room, he snapped at O’Connor, “Why did Boda skip?” Later O’Connor told a friend, “His hand is on the switch.”
A new volunteer defense lawyer now arrived from Pittsburgh, young Michael Angelo Musmanno, bringing a petition in behalf of the two men from the half million members of the Sons of Italy. Dramatic, impulsive, abounding in cheerful energy, with a bronze ex-serviceman’s pin in his buttonhole and wearing a poet’s brown tie, Musmanno had quit the promising beginnings of his law practice to offer all his talents to the Defense Committee. Sometimes his zeal would trip him, as when he drove down to the New Haven slum where Berardelli’s widow was living. She would not talk about the events at South Braintree and refused to sign an appeal. The most Musmanno could bring her to say was that she did not want to see innocent men punished. That was enough, however, for the poetic-minded Musmanno, who dashed to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to Fuller that echoed across Europe as far as Moscow:
I am one of the two who suffered most from the Braintree murders. I lost my husband and the father of my two children, but I would be sorry to have two innocent men put to death. I have always doubted that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and I hope that you will free them and let them go home to their families.
Several days later Sarah Berardelli denied that she had ever written or sent such a telegram. Musmanno had hoped that an appeal by Berardelli’s widow would help counteract the recent news that Parmenter’s fourteen-year-old son had been caught in South Easton, breaking and entering the railroad station. The newspapers had blamed the poverty and lack of direction of young Parmenter’s fatherless household.
Thompson forwarded to the governor a thirty-three-page analysis of the discrepancies between the newly discovered Bridgewater Pinkerton report and the Plymouth trial record. When this was not acknowledged, John Moors finally went to ask Fuller about it. Apparently nothing concerned with either the South Braintree or the Bridgewater Pinkerton reports had ever reached the governor’s desk, for he at once turned blankly to MacDonald. The secretary shrugged off Thompson’s analysis as “just a lot of stuff about a cropped mustache.”
Hard-boiled Herman’s job was to cull the governor’s Sacco-Vanzetti mail, most of which he threw away. In 1926 the Defense Committee had forwarded a protest signed by a group of English M.P.’s. When no reply came back, Gardner Jackson stormed up to the State House. His complaint got no farther than the anteroom obstacle of the secretary’s broad-topped desk. “Oh, those goddam crooks!” MacDonald told him. “Do you think we pay any attention to this stuff? It comes in here by the barrelful and we shoot it right into the fire!”
Rosina, when she appeared at Fuller’s office on July 11, quickly sensed the hostility behind his superficial politeness. He told her that Vanzetti had been asked by his lawyers to take the stand at the Plymouth trial but had refused. Young Brini, as the chief defense witness, had, he felt, merely learned an alibi by heart. After Rosina left the governor she spent some time with the Lowell Committee in the council chamber next door, then went on to Charlestown where, much troubled, she repeated Fuller’s remarks. Only she and Thompson were allowed to see the prisoners now, since according to regulations condemned men in Cherry Hill could have visits only from close relations and counsel.
Sacco brooded over what Rosina told him. On July 17, after deliberating for several days, he began a hunger strike in protest against what the Defense Committee called the “veil of secrecy that encourages the bias—economic, racial, political and religious—which has been shown all through this case.” Vanzetti joined with him to protest “the whispers of nameless informers,” explaining to Mrs. Evans: