The day will come when you will understand the atrocious sense of the above-written words, in all its fullness. Then you will honor us.
Now Dante, be brave and good always. I embrace you.
Not until Monday morning did Hill reach Rockland, Maine, and board the leisurely excursion steamer that finally brought him through the shredding fog to the granite-edged Isle au Haut. Justice Stone, sitting on his front porch in his shirtsleeves, received him curtly. He said he would listen to Hill’s arguments but he could grant no stay. Another justice might perhaps feel differently.
In Boston, Monday broke sallow and heavy. The still-empty Common looked frayed and untidy. By nine o’clock the first busloads of sympathizers began to arrive from New York. The air was lighter by the time Governor Fuller arrived at his office from Rye Beach a little before eleven. “A beautiful day,” he said, smiling and nodding affably to the reporters. One of his first visitors was Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” had appeared in the New York Times that very morning. Fiorello La Guardia had come by chartered plane from New York to make a last appeal to his old congressional colleague, but when he emerged from the executive chambers he shook his head and told reporters that there was only one chance in a thousand.
On this last day the governor was willing to keep open house for any delegation that chose to visit him. To nearly all who so chose he listened with stiff politeness. Just before lunch the newly installed state commander of the American Legion appeared to assure the governor that the Legion stood four-square behind him. Almost a thousand letters and telegrams arrived at the executive offices during the day, two thirds of them asking for suspension of the death sentence.
Late in the morning Luigia and Rosina arrived at Charlestown for a tear-blurred hour in the death house. Sacco talked to his wife about Ines and Dante; Vanzetti again recalled the old days in Villafalletto. Madeiros, who had been lying indifferently on his cot, chain-smoking, received an unexpected visit from his sister Consuelo. When she told him that their mother was too overcome to make the trip, he for the first time showed emotion.
On Saturday there had been a tentative attempt to renew the State House picketing, and Captain Hibben, Powers Hapgood, James Rorty, and Katherine Anne Porter had been arrested. Now, as the morning advanced, pickets with armbands and banners appeared again. The Scenic Temple served as a supply depot; there pickets assembled, were grouped in dozens, and sent on to the State House with their signs, JUSTICE IS CRUCIFIED TODAY, JUSTICE IS DEAD IN MASSACHUSETTS. All afternoon the line grew, the pickets forming fours as their ranks increased. The line became an endless chain, its links made up of girls and sweaty shirtsleeved men from the garment district, self-conscious intellectuals, a scattering of adolescents welcoming the chance to challenge authority, and a rank and file of friends and sympathizers of every class and description. Mrs. Evans was there. She had aged much since the trial, but with her solid figure and rimless glasses she still looked the transcendental grandmother. One of the younger policemen on duty complained that there was not a good-looking girl in the bunch.
During the course of the afternoon and evening 156 pickets were arrested. Isaac Don Levine and Mrs. Evans bustled about raising bail money. Edward Holton James showed up at the Joy Street Station with his pockets full and bailed away for several hours until he ran out of both funds and patience, then found himself booed when he returned to the Scenic Temple to announce that he would bail no more.
The garment workers in the station’s close-packed guardroom sang the “Internationale,” and afterward everyone joined in the more singable “Solidarity Forever.” Police Captain McDevitt had long had his eye on Powers Hapgood. The other pickets might with luck be out on bail in an hour or so, but McDevitt made a point of turning Powers over to the State Police, who, instead of arresting him, hurried him off to the Psychopathic Hospital where he was held for four days.
Crowds formed on the Common side of Beacon Street to stare at the picket parade. Occasionally someone would dart across the street to join the line. Superintendent Crowley, with memories of the mob rising in the police strike of 1919, was determined there would be no rising today. Halfway down the mall a police company with rifles was drawn up like a detachment of infantry. Mounted police wove their horses in and out of the gathering throngs. There were more blue uniforms on Boston Common than there had been since the Civil War encampments.