On August 10 the Defense Committee had sent a long telegram to United States Attorney General Sargent claiming that “evidence exists in the files of the Department of Justice, of the most competent character which would clear Sacco and Vanzetti of the charge of payroll robbery” and demanding that Sargent persuade President Coolidge to intervene. The committee also repeated Thompson’s charge of “a conspiracy between the employees of the Department of Justice and Katzmann and Williams to wrongfully convict.” For Levine these claims and charges were all very well, but in the unskilled hands of Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan and the Italians on the committee they would lead to nothing. What was needed was a professional touch, “a fresh corps of attorneys of national reputation,” publicity directed like an arrow to the Department of Justice, names that carried weight. For this purpose, and to the impotent fury of Mary Donovan, Levine organized the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti. He himself kept in the background—the figurehead chairman was the New Republic’s editor, Robert Morss Lovett—but he brought to the new organization his own energy and the names of noted acquaintances. Glenn Frank, Zona Gale, Ida Tarbell, David Starr Jordan, Paul Kellogg of the Survey, John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Garrison Villard, Alexander Meiklejohn, Katharine Anne Porter, Jane Addams, William Hocking, Waldo Cook, John Moors, Mary Woolley, and John Dewey were among those endorsing the new committee.
In an open letter the committee announced its purpose, “to induce the Federal Government to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case because of the grave charges which have been made against the Department of Justice and because of the serious international situation which has arisen.” During the last feverish week it raked Washington with drumfire demands that the Department of Justice open its files. The committee set up quarters in the Hotel Bellevue just below the State House. There, in a long room on the second floor known as Parlor D, a swarm of volunteer workers moved in with desks and typewriters. For twenty hours a day letters and releases poured out across the United States. Paul Kellogg sent over five hundred telegrams to Americans of note. Almost everyone who arrived in Boston, from Michael Gold to Edna St. Vincent Millay, now stopped off at Parlor D rather than at the Hanover Street rooms. A new cluster of lawyers gathered there: John Finerty of New York, who drew up the final habeas corpus motion; former New York attorney general William Schuyler Jackson; Arthur Garfield Hays, Francis Fisher Kane, and Frank Walsh, who together would take up the matter of the Justice Department files directly with Attorney General Sargent. The new committee, unlike the Communists, managed to remain on speaking terms with the old. Relations remained, in Levine’s words, “correct but remote.”
The morning after the midnight respite, the three prisoners were taken from the death house back to Cherry Hill. In spite of having gone twenty-six days without food, Sacco was able to walk unaided across the prison yard and up the iron staircase. When Musmanno visited Sacco and Vanzetti in the barber shop later in the morning to tell them that Justice Sanderson had allowed the exceptions to his ruling to be taken to the full bench of the state supreme court, he found them in a cheerful mood. Both seemed to absorb something of the young Italian lawyer’s optimism. Although Sacco still refused to eat, Vanzetti broke his five-day fast with a cup of coffee.
During the day the New England manager of the United Press, Henry Minott, visited the prison and asked Vanzetti to write an open letter explaining his side of the case. In his renewed optimism, Vanzetti spent the next two days setting down what he well realized might be his final thoughts. On August 12 his two-page letter to “Friends and Comrades” was sent—in somewhat altered form—all over the world through the wires of the United Press:
There is nowhere, neither in earth nor in heavens, anything that can makes the true untrue and the untrue true. By true I mean the truths which altogether form the Universal truth. By truths I mean the real conditions, faculties, essence of each one of those unnumerable, relative things, all related and all evolving, which total sum forms the Universal truth—which is what it is in itself and not at all what anyone or ones—I, you, or all—believe or may think to know what it is....
II
On Dec. 24, 1919, at 8.20 A.M. a robbery was attempted in Bridgewater, Mass.
In every minutes of the 24 hours of that day I was in Plymouth, Mass., about 30 miles from the place where the above cited attempt to robb occured. Furthermore, I had been never in such place before my arrest on May 5th, 1920. In the very moment I was in the bakery shop of Luigi Bastoni in Plymouth.
On April 15, 1920, at 3 P.M. and highway robbery was commetted in South Braintree and two men were killed.