The arguments were brief. Attorney General Arthur Reading for the Commonwealth characterized Hill’s as “the most preposterous ever heard from a learned lawyer.” Thayer at the end of the afternoon announced that he would reserve his decision on the second motion. Then, early Tuesday morning, he telephoned in from his home in Worcester that the revocation of sentence and stay of sentence were denied. From this and from Justice Sanderson’s ruling, Hill at once filed exceptions. Privately, however, he admitted he had given up hope. Only the young inexperienced Musmanno could find any encouragement in the further manipulation of the bastard Latin legal phrases. Certiorari, coram nobis—they were like the last moves in a chess game when a player has only a pawn to interpose between his king and his opponent’s queen.
That afternoon for the first time pickets appeared before the State House, a half-dozen at the start, men in shirtsleeves and women in work dresses, wearing black armbands and carrying placards denouncing the imminent executions. Defiantly they marched back and forth, their numbers growing to a dozen, a score, and finally to over a hundred, watched with jeering curiosity by a much larger crowd from the other side of the street near the Shaw Memorial. News of the picketing spread through the State House. Governor Fuller stepped into the council chamber briefly to look down from the oval-topped window on the sweaty marchers. The picketing was the beginning of the legend that in the last days of the case the Massachusetts State House was zoned by a constantly replenished line of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Some such did find their places in the line—John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others—and were arrested and taken to the Joy Street Station on the other side of Beacon Hill, but most of the picketers were foreign-born men and women from the garment district.
Harry Canter led the pickets the first day, encouraged by Alfred Baker Lewis. The Defense Committee, increasingly angry at the Communists’ infiltrating efforts, held aloof. Fred Beal, a young and dedicated Communist whose radicalism dated from the Lawrence strike, was astonished at the coldness of his reception when he turned up at Hanover Street. “Why can’t you leave Sacco and Vanzetti alone?” Secretary Moro asked him bitterly. “Why can’t you let them die in peace? You people don’t care for Sacco and Vanzetti. Let them burn; it will be better for the cause.”
As the picketing continued and the watching crowds increased, Police Captain James McDevitt was sent down from the Joy Street station. In the pattern that would be followed in dealing with the subsequent picketings of the State House, he approached the marchers and gave them seven minutes to disperse. When they did not, he carted off thirty-nine of them to the station. Thirty-one of those arrested were named in the Boston papers. So far as their names are any indication, twenty were Jews and three Italians.
The general strike called for that afternoon brought out only a few hundred men and women in Boston, most of whom found their way to the line in front of the State House. In New York almost 100,000 walked out, the majority of them garment workers. Overseas there was an almost hushed expectancy. Sacco and Vanzetti dominated the European headlines. The Atlantic cables continued to be weighted with protests that included such noted names as that of Lafayette’s great-grandson. At the Charlestown prison Western Union and Postal Telegraph installed eighteen wires, four for direct communication overseas. The area within half a mile of the prison was declared a dead zone. The streets were barred and Prison Point Bridge closed.
Early in the evening Vanzetti sent for Thompson, who spent two hours in the death house talking with the prisoners. Sacco was now in the twenty-third day of his hunger strike. Vanzetti had not eaten for five days. Thompson, on leaving, met a group of reporters at the prison gate and told them that the prisoners “continue to assert their innocence, do not express any hope, remain courageous, and feel they are dying for a principle.”
Would Governor Fuller grant the prisoners an additional respite to give Justice Sanderson and Thayer time to decide on Hill’s exceptions? That was the question on the morning of August 10. Fuller reached his State House office at 9:30 and at once summoned the members of his council.
At almost the same time the executioner for New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Robert Elliott, arrived with his famous black bag at the South Station. When Musmanno went to the prison later in the morning with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, he noticed guards setting up machine guns on the brick ramp running along the top of the prison wall. As he reached the death cells and began to talk to the men through the bars, he could hear the workmen tinkering with the electric chair in the next room, and he sensed the sudden vibration of the floor as they switched on the current. Vanzetti told him not to mind, that the men had been working on it since the day before. Sacco again refused to sign any petition, telling Musmanno: “They are going to crucify me, crucify both of us. They have been driving nails into us for seven years. Let’s have it over.” Vanzetti signed willingly enough, then inscribed his copy of The Rise of American Civilization and offered it to Musmanno, who refused it, saying he would wait until Vanzetti got out. From Charlestown Musmanno drove with Hill—as did Thompson and a Washington lawyer, John Finerty, later in the day—thirty miles north to Beverly where United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had his summer home. All four men knew that if Fuller failed to act, the only other hope for Sacco and Vanzetti was in an appeal to the federal courts. Holmes met his visitors on the porch, listened to them gravely, even regretfully, but held that he had not the legal right to intervene in the internal judicial processes of Massachusetts. “You don’t have to convince me that the atmosphere in which these men were tried precluded a fair trial,” he told them, “but that is not enough to give me as a Federal judge jurisdiction. If I listened to you any more I would do it,” he continued. “I must not do it.” With that the old justice turned on his heel and went into the house.
Hill, following his rebuff, went on to hunt out Judge George Anderson of the United States Circuit Court. After the 1920 Palmer raids Judge Anderson had released the Boston aliens rounded up by the Bureau of Investigation and had castigated the Department of Justice. But this time Judge Anderson, like Holmes, held that he could not interfere in state affairs.
Fuller, determined to expand the collective responsibility for his decision, sent for all the Commonwealth’s former attorneys general. Seven of them arrived before midday at his office for consultation. His council began its own deliberations after lunch and continued all afternoon. Meanwhile the pickets with their black armbands and placards, chanting their slogans, again marched in front of the State House. Captain McDevitt gave his dispersal warning, and after seven minutes the police moved in. Those pickets who did not scatter were taken to the Joy Street Station. This time the watching crowd showed itself much more hostile. There were mocking shouts of “Hang ’em!” as the pickets were hustled up Joy Street. They were booked at the station, and those who did not have the twenty-five dollars bail money were bailed out by Mrs. Evans and her friends.