Governor Alvan T. Fuller is a murderor as Thayer, Katzmann, the State perjurors and all the other. He sake hand with me like a brother, make me believe he was honestly intentioned and that he had not sent the three carbarn-boy to have no escuse to save us.
Now, igoring and denia all the proofs of or innocence and insult us and murder us we are innocent.
This is the way of plutocracy against liberty, against the people. Revenge our blood. We die for Anarcy. Long life Anarcy.
Yet by afternoon Vanzetti had so recovered himself that he was able to give Mrs. Evans a remarkably detached view of Fuller.
We are his opposite all at all and all in all, while our enemies are affines to him in all-most everything. Consciousely, subconsciousely and unconsciousely he cannot escape to be tremendously influenced and predisposed against us. But he gave me the impression he is sincere; had made great efforts to learn the truth and was not settled, at least deliberately, against us, before to begin his inquiry.
If he is sending us to death, it does not matter how honestly the Governor can be convinced of our guiltiness, his conviction will not make us guilty—we are and will remain innocent.
Fuller’s adverse decision was for Thompson the end of the road. There might be hasty appeals to the state and federal supreme courts, all the delaying paraphernalia of certiorari and habeas corpus, with at best the addition of a few extra weeks to lives he was convinced were forfeit. Thompson felt a profounder sense of failure than Moore’s, for his world had failed—that pleasantly circumscribed world of Boston into which he had fitted so easily. He had believed that the venerable institutions of Massachusetts to which he gave his allegiance would render justice even to two obscure foreigners, would rectify the aberrations of a prejudiced trial and the blind partisanship of a bigoted judge. Instead, the institutions had savaged these men, and now were preparing to annihilate them. In these institutions and in the comfortable society they guarded he could no longer believe. A Harvard class day would never seem the same to him again, a Sunday sermon at the sedately familiar Church of the Redeemer would never sound the same. The brick fronts of Beacon Hill would have lost their mellowness. A traditionalist still, in the years that followed he faced Boston and complained of the lack of a responsible aristocracy that could restrain what he called “the shopkeeper’s mentality.” He tried to compensate for his disbelief in his class by participating in liberal causes, taking the stump at elections, speaking at legislative hearings and in the Massachusetts Judicial Council. But the gesture had lost its meaning, the spark had gone from his life.
He had already told Frankfurter that he would not continue. On receiving the news of the governor’s decision, he and Ehrmann sent the Defense Committee their formal resignation, explaining:
We feel that the defendants are now entitled to have the benefit of the judgment of counsel who can take up the case untrammelled by the commitments of the past and less disturbed than we are by a sense of injustice.
Frankfurter at once telephoned Arthur Hill to say that he had a most serious matter to discuss with him. They lunched at the Somerset Club, then crossed Beacon Street and sat on a bench on the Common overlooking the Frog Pond. Frankfurter asked Hill if he would undertake the final appeal of the Sacco-Vanzetti case to the Supreme Court. Hill did not share Thompson’s belief in the men’s innocence, but he did believe they had not had a fair trial. He felt he could not refuse to make the effort on their behalf.