With the executions only three days off, the Defense Committee now appealed for a hundred thousand Americans to march on Boston and take part in a death watch at the State House and at the State Prison:
We call the leaders of American letters, science, art, education and social reform to lead the peaceful demonstration at the Charlestown jail. Come by train and boat, come on foot or in your car! Come to Boston! Let all the roads of the nation converge on Beacon Hill! Come armed with a black band on your sleeve, come armed with inextinguishable faith that Sacco and Vanzetti must and shall live.
Few people in Massachusetts failed to read the Lowell Report the Sunday of its appearance. The Defense Committee denounced it at once, the Communists derided it, but its effect—with the potency of the Lowell name behind it—was to settle the matter for a large number of Back Bay and Cambridge middle-of-the-roaders. “Most of the serious and earnest-minded people who had misgivings as to the original verdict in Judge Thayer’s court,” the Herald editorialized, “have had these dissipated by the calm and dispassionate recital of the evidence by President Lowell and his associates.” Dr. Morton Prince said he could see no escape from the report’s conclusions. Bishop Lawrence, who was not bashful about treading with angels, wrote to Fuller:
You will, I am sure, allow me to express to you my admiration of the way in which you have done your duty in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
You have been wise, patient, dignified and courageous, worthy of the highest traditions of the Commonwealth.
Medical Examiner Magrath announced that he was now “morally certain” of the two men’s guilt, an opinion he had undoubtedly held from the beginning.[31]
Chief Justice of the United States William Howard Taft, whose knowledge of the case was slight but whose Wigmorish opinion was that the propaganda “had been created by large contributions of female and male fools and had been circulated through all the communistic and criminal classes the world over,” sent congratulatory notes to Lowell and Grant later in the year, writing to the latter:
Now that all is over I can properly ... thank you for accepting the task of serving on the Governor’s committee of advisors in that case. It was a thankless task and required courage and sacrifice to do it. You and your colleagues did it and did it well. It concerned the welfare of society and the world in an unusual way. It is remarkable how Frankfürter with his article was able to present to so large a body of readers a perverted view of the facts and then through the world-wide conspiracy of communism spread it to so many, many countries. Our law schools lent themselves to the vicious propaganda. The utter lack of substance in it all is shown by the event. It was a bubble and was burst by the courage of the Governor and his advisors.
Robert Lincoln O’Brien regarded the Lowell report in the light of an umpire’s decision at a Longwood Cricket Club tennis match:
To those of us who felt that the need of some further inquiry existed, even after the Supreme Judicial Court had ruled that the case had been properly concluded, it seemed the part of good sportsmanship to accept the findings of Mr. Lowell and his associates, particularly since we could find no three men in all the world—were we to select them ourselves—in whose findings we would have more complete confidence.