Since I saw her my heart lost a little of its steadyness. The thought that she will have to take my death to our mother’s grave, it is horrible to me—to think of what she will soon have to stand and to bear revolts all my being and upsets my mind.
Sunday the twenty-first broke grayly in a tentative drizzle. Early in the morning Evarts and Hill reached Justice Louis Brandeis at his summer home on Cape Cod, to ask for a stay of execution. Brandeis was sympathetic but felt he was too close to the case personally to take any action, since during the trial his wife had lent Rosina their empty Dedham house and since he had talked the matter over many times with his friend Frankfurter. Hill had counted most on Holmes and Brandeis, the two liberals on the Supreme Court. The only other New England justice, Harlan Stone, was spending the summer at Isle au Haut, Maine, in the middle of Penobscot Bay. With Brandeis’ refusal ringing politely in his ears Hill started immediately on the 275-mile drive north.
Musmanno arrived back in Boston on the night train at about the time Hill and Evarts were leaving Chatham. Still undaunted, he telegraphed the Summer White House in South Dakota demanding that President Coolidge intervene. When he received no reply, he telephoned and managed to get hold of a presidential secretary who refused to give his name. The President, the anonymous secretary informed Musmanno, could not be disturbed; there could be no federal action in any case since no federal question was involved. Musmanno offered to fly out to South Dakota in a chartered plane. The secretary told him sharply that if he did he would not be received. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson had asked the governor of California to commute the Billings and Mooney death sentences, but Cautious Cal was—as Musmanno discovered—no Wilson.
Bouncing back from each rebuff, Musmanno telephoned Chief Justice Taft, summering at Point-au-Pic, Quebec, and asked if he might fly to meet him. Taft’s rotund voice came over the wire in such distortion that Musmanno could barely make out the irritated reply. Taft said he was outside the jurisdiction of the United States and it was too far for him to cross the border. Finally he told Musmanno to send a telegram explaining just what he wanted. To this telegram, which Musmanno sent off at once, Taft replied at such length that the collect charges came to $19.20. For all its length it merely said “No.” Taft referred Musmanno to Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone, all within the First Judicial Circuit. He saw no reason to think that his own opinion would differ from that of Holmes. “The absence of jurisdiction in our court to grant the writ of certiorari in the case seems to me apparent,” he concluded.
The numbers of those who heeded the call of the Defense Committee to come to Boston were disappointing, but the individuals who flocked there in the last days gave the case and the cause a permanent coloration. There were the dedicated, the troubled, the bohemian, the self-seeking and the selfless, the lovers of justice and strikers of poses, each wrapped in his own individuality. There was Powers Hapgood, six years out of Harvard and still looking like an undergraduate, from whose lips the word comrade tripped more frequently than any other and whose compulsion was to clash with the police. Hapgood had been a fashionable young clubman at Harvard but after graduating turned to romanticizing himself as a proletarian. He had worked in coal mines in Wales, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union; later he was to become Socialist candidate for Vice-President of the United States. In December 1927, his proletarian zeal took the form of marrying Mary Donovan.
There were John Howard Lawson and the young William Patterson, president of the American Negro Labor Conference, whose reaction to the futility of the last efforts would confirm them as Communists. There was the elderly, leather-tongued Ella Reeve Bloor, recipient of the Communist accolade of “Mother,” who had hitchhiked from California. There was Paula Holladay, with boyish bob and red slicker, who had trudged a mere 117 miles from Provincetown wearing a sandwich board reading AMERICA CANNOT LOOK THE WORLD IN THE FACE IF SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE MURDERED, subject to the jeering suggestions of passing motorists that she go home and wash the dishes. There was Captain Paxton Hibben, a dapper, martial little man with a clipped imperial, who still clung to his military rank acquired overseas with the 391st Field Artillery of New York. There was Wellesley College’s retired professor of astronomy and mathematics, the seventy-six-year-old Ellen Hayes, with white bobbed hair, flat hat, flat heels, and invisible blue stockings. There was the mysterious Louis Bernheimer, a Yale graduate, an aviator in France during the war, a student of philosophy, and a hermit who had already circulated more than thirty thousand pamphlets about the case to clergymen all over the country.
Then of course there was Edward Holton James, now engaged in running daily sightseeing tours to South Braintree for newly arrived sympathizers. Outstanding among the characters drawn to the scene was Zara du Pont, aunt of most of the living du Pont dynasty. Her singularly squashed hats, tweed suits that never wore out, and brass ear trumpet identified her a hundred yards away. She had come from Cambridge to indulge in her passion for picketing, for she made it her habit to join any line she saw, often with no idea of what or why she was picketing and—because of her deafness—with no way of finding out. Less well connected if no less obvious was William Obey of New York, who arrived at Parlor D with a certificate of release from a mental hospital. When his individualism became too flagrant and Tom O’Connor at last had to ask him to leave, he seated himself on the curb at Bowdoin Street with his portable typewriter in his lap, pecking away and telling the bystanders that the rush was so great at headquarters that he had to do his work outside.
On that final Sunday, August 21, Police Superintendent Crowley was taking no chances. For the first time anyone could remember, no permits were given out and no meetings on the Common were allowed. The Defense Committee had held its final meeting the night before at the Scenic Auditorium. By the middle of the overcast afternoon there were about twenty thousand people scattered over the forty-eight acres of Boston Common. Some watched the baseball games being played in the diamonds beyond the old Central Burying-Ground. Others listened to Stone’s Band at the Parkman Bandstand playing excerpts from The Bohemian Girl. Still others—the flotsam of the city—lay asleep on the grass. Perhaps a third of those wandering on the Common had come there out of a sense of curiosity, a feeling that something exciting was going to happen. For most of the afternoon nothing happened. Then shortly after four o’clock Paula Holladay in her red slicker walked up from Charles Street and across the Common toward the bandstand. On the back of the slicker was lettered: SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI. IS JUSTICE DEAD? As she walked along the mall a crowd began to fall in behind her. Most of those following her were indifferent if not hostile, but a few sympathizers produced Sacco-Vanzetti placards from under their coats. She continued her Pied Piper walk, gathering several thousand in her wake by the time she reached Tremont Street. The police did not interfere until the crowd spilled over into the roadway and blocked traffic. Then a squad of bluecoats surrounded her and carried her off, along with William Patterson and several other placard-wielders, to the Joy Street Station. Here she was told she might go free if she would promise to take off the slicker and not to return to the Common. Superintendent Crowley came in person to the station to warn her paternally that Boston was “full of Irish Catholic boys, young hoodlums, who will be sure to try to do you harm if you go on the streets wearing that slicker.”
Within the Charlestown prison the customary Sunday afternoon bustle of visits continued, even though the whole area was cordoned off by the police. The prison band played its limited selections in the octagon anteroom, and prisoners sat in their usual rows at the oak tables facing their visitors. So damp was the air that drops of moisture kept dripping from the skylight struts. Because of the humidity Warden Hendry allowed the door of the death house to be left open. Luigia and Rosina came and stayed their hour. Rosina had not brought the children; she did not want them to see their father in his death cell. Sacco had been for some time occupied with a letter to Dante and spent the day, except for the visiting hour, working on it. He told Vanzetti that he did not want it made public for five years. Although Sacco had planned to have its contents kept secret, the Defense Committee persuaded him to allow them to release it immediately for its propaganda effect, to sway every ounce of opinion possible in the last hours.