The mighty roar of protest from the Soviet Union, together with the voice of the working classes the world over, forced even the plutocratic American bourgeoisie to hesitate and maneuver.
In Berlin, Die Rote Fahne announced triumphantly:
The working millions and only they in the forefront of the battle against class injustice have won the first victory. Sacco and Vanzetti are provisionally rescued.
L’Humanité rallied its readers with militant confidence:
Now let us exact the liberty of the two martyrs.
In the United States there was a feeling that Fuller would now commute the death sentences to life imprisonment, a course recommended by the Springfield Republican. The New York Times shared this opinion, observing four days after the respite:
Honest and fair-minded people are still disputing about certain aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but on our part there is virtual unanimity of opinion. This is that the long delay in determining the fate of the two men is a reproach to American justice. It is something that is almost impossible to explain to foreigners.
Outside opposition and criticism had long since contracted the mood of the Massachusetts community beyond reason. With each external attack the community ranks closed in an emotional need—masquerading as justice—to see Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This feeling was reinforced by the bombing on August 15 of the East Milton home of Dedham juror Lewis McHardy. The charge placed on the porch of his two-story frame house at 463 Pleasant Street, exploded at 3:30 in the morning. So great was the blast that little was left of the house but the frame. Windows were shattered a quarter of a mile away. McHardy, his wife, and three grown children were asleep on the second floor. They were hurled out of bed and covered with debris, but somehow managed to escape with only minor bruises.
If before the blowing up of the McHardy house there had been the slightest chance of a commutation of sentence for Sacco and Vanzetti, afterward there was none.[32]
The twelve days of respite were marked by dramatic defense efforts that filled the world’s headlines. The author and journalist Isaac Don Levine came on to Boston, convinced that a legal case could be built around the issue of the Department of Justice files. Perhaps Thompson might have inspected them in 1926 if he had been more tactful in dealing with the tentative offer of the Bureau of Investigation’s Boston branch. Since then Attorney General Sargent had refused the defense any access to them. However, he offered to forward them on request to Governor Fuller, the members of the Lowell Committee, or the Commonwealth’s attorney general. Such a request was never made. Fuller told reporters that the files would be no use to him in forming his opinion inasmuch as he did not know what an anarchist was.[33]