Lowell spent the week end writing a report of the proceedings, which in token deference to his colleagues he referred to as an abstract. Monday the committee spent listening to the closing arguments of Thompson and Ehrmann, followed by Ranney for the Commonwealth. Then, when the humid council chamber was at last empty, Lowell handed typewritten copies of his abstract to his colleagues, saying off-handedly that it was just a suggestion, of course, but would they look it over?
The next day the three met privately in the Faculty Room of Harvard’s University Hall. The autocrat of the faculty table having made up his mind in writing, all he wanted from the silent physicist and the garrulous poetaster was confirmation. They spent that day and the next discussing minor details of the abstract. “So fully did we find ourselves in agreement,” Grant admitted later, “that though many alterations were made in it, they were chiefly of phraseology and shades of expression rather than the substantive point of view.”
On the afternoon of July 27 at ten minutes past five Lowell, Stratton, and Grant, sphinx-faced, entered the executive offices of the State House, each carrying a brown manila folder with a signed copy of the revised abstract-report.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] An English writer, Edward Shanks, thought that these paragraphs compared with the Gettysburg Address but doubted that Vanzetti had ever uttered them. Stong defended himself by saying that he could not write that well, that he had supplied only the exclamation marks, and that these would have been better left out. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the internal evidence of that interview is sufficient to convince any honorably disposed person of its authenticity. The change of number in the pronoun was beautifully characteristic of Vanzetti. ‘I’ unmarked, unknown, a failure—but ‘Our’ career, triumph, work for tolerance and justice.” This version that Stong gave in the New York World of May 13, 1927, differs, nevertheless, in several places from the one he printed in 1949 in his essay on the case in The Aspirin Age.
[26] The original of this letter is not available. The published version has undoubtedly been edited.
[27] The transcript of the committee hearings merely states that Bosco appeared as requested on July 15 with editions of La Notizia. The omission from the record of what followed has been much criticized by defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti.
[28] A photograph of Sacco reproduced in the papers after his arrest showed him wearing a derby.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AUGUST 1927
Governor Fuller continued hearing witnesses until the end of July. Obviously he was not going to draw his own conclusions or even appear to have drawn them before taking his cue from the Lowell Committee. In an interview with Jackson and Felicani he asked them flatly how he could be expected to believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling eels on December 24. “I am a businessman,” he told them. “I am used to proof before I decide anything. There isn’t a single document in the case proving that Vanzetti sold eels. There’s only the word of his Italian friends.”