The day wore on. All the public buildings were garrisoned by police. A squad even occupied the roof of Fuller’s Packard salesroom. Yet except for the State House picketing and the unusual numbers crowding the Common there were no incidents in the city. None of the anticipated bombs went off.
With Hill delayed in Maine, the last-minute legal efforts became a confusion of volunteer lawyers. Field appealed for a stay to Judge Sisk—most liberal of the Superior Court judges. Sisk, for all his obvious sympathy, maintained that he lacked jurisdiction. Surrounded by the clicking typewriters of Parlor D, Tom O’Connor worked with John Finerty on a new inclusive habeas corpus motion. Finerty, former assistant general counsel for the United States Railroad Administration, was probably the ablest lawyer to take part in the final proceedings. This thin, long-jawed man in a white linen suit, who resembled Woodrow Wilson, had dropped in at Parlor D on his way to spend two weeks by the sea at Cohasset. O’Connor managed to arouse his interest so that he never went on. He and O’Connor were convinced the new motion stood its best chance with Federal Judge Anderson. Unfortunately, Anderson was at Williamstown, in the Berkshires. O’Connor arranged to have a plane waiting at the East Boston airport, and all the afternoon he kept trying vainly to get to Anderson by telephone.
At 2:30 Musmanno brought a copy of the completed Finerty motion to Charlestown. Vanzetti signed it. Sacco again refused. Both condemned men were now convinced that nothing could save them. Vanzetti gave a message to Musmanno for Thompson, whom he asked to see once more. Thompson, worn out physically and mentally, had left Boston shortly after the August 10 reprieve for his summer place in South Tamworth, New Hampshire, but as soon as he received the message he set out at once for Charlestown.
It was six o’clock before he arrived at the prison. As he entered the death house, Vanzetti, who had been sitting at his table writing, stood up at once as if he had been expecting him, smiled warmly, and reached through the bars to shake hands. Then Thompson took a chair from one of the guards and sat down just behind the painted warning line.
They talked tentatively at first. Thompson had heard a rumor that Vahey and Graham knew Vanzetti was guilty of both crimes and could prove it if only they were released from their lawyers’ obligation of secrecy. Vanzetti emphatically and without anger said he had never told Graham or Vahey anything that would link him to either crime. Thompson beckoned to a guard to be a witness to their conversation.
For both men it was the most solemn moment of their lives. There was the quality of a Socratic dialogue to their questions and answers. The American lawyer’s low, controlled tones were a counterpoint to the more musical voice of the Italian. As Thompson recalled the scene afterward it struck him in its more humble way as a recreation of the Phaedo.
I told Vanzetti that although my belief in his innocence had all the time been strengthened, both by my study of the evidence and by my increasing knowledge of his personality, yet there was a chance, however remote, that I might be mistaken; and that I thought he ought for my sake, in this closing hour of his life when nothing could save him, to give me his most solemn reassurance, both with respect to himself and with respect to Sacco. Vanzetti then told me quietly and calmly, and with a sincerity which I could not doubt, that I need have no anxiety about this matter; that both he and Sacco were absolutely innocent of the South Braintree crime, and that he was equally innocent of the Bridgewater crime; that while, looking back, he now realized more clearly than he ever had the grounds of the suspicion against him and Sacco, he felt that no allowance had been made for his ignorance of American points of view and habits of thought, or for his fear as a radical and almost as an outlaw, and that in reality he was convicted on evidence which would not have convicted him had he not been an anarchist, so that he was in a very real sense dying for his cause. He said it was the cause for which he was prepared to die. He said it was the cause of the upward progress of humanity, and the elimination of force from the world. He spoke with calmness, knowledge, and deep feeling. He said he was grateful to me for what I had done for him. He asked to be remembered to my wife and son. He spoke with emotion of his sister and of his family. He asked me to do what I could to clear his name, using the words “clear my name.”
Vanzetti, after bringing up the cruelty of his seven years in prison, spoke of the history of movements for human betterment, among them early Christianity. Thompson remarked that the essence of the appeal of Christianity was the supreme confidence shown by Jesus in the truth of his own views by forgiving, even when on the cross, his persecutors and slanderers. Many times in his letters Vanzetti had made comparisons between his own fate and that of Jesus. It was at these words of Thompson’s that their dialogue, as he recorded it, reached its climax:
Now, for the first and only time in the conversation, Vanzetti showed a feeling of personal resentment against his enemies. He spoke with eloquence of his sufferings, and asked me whether I thought it possible that he could forgive those who had persecuted and tortured him through seven years of inexpressible misery. I told him he knew how deeply I sympathized with him, and that I had asked him to reflect upon the career of One infinitely superior to myself and to him, and upon a force infinitely greater than the force of hate and revenge. I said that in the long run, the force to which the world would respond was the force of love and not of hate, and that I was suggesting to him to forgive his enemies, not for their sakes, but for his own peace of mind, and also because an example of such forgiveness would in the end be more powerful to win adherence to his cause or to a belief in his innocence than anything else that could be done.