Musmanno, after leaving the governor, went down the corridor to the attorney general’s office. Reading listened to him with apparent interest while he explained that there were still five United States Supreme Court justices—any one of whom might grant a habeas corpus petition—whom they had not been able to reach. Another respite was necessary to allow the defense the necessary time. Reading said he would let Musmanno know his decision within the hour.
Just before eleven o’clock, the waiting Musmanno was called into the governor’s office. Fuller told him that the attorney general had decided not to recommend a stay of execution. Musmanno, his voice trembling, asked the governor if he would stand for all time on that decision. Fuller replied that he would.
Charlestown prison, with eight hundred police surrounding it, was quiet. Mounted troopers, cap straps under their chins, and supplied with gas masks and tear gas, flanked the arched granite entrance. Fire-department squads had connected their hoses. Marine patrol boats chugged up and down the Miller River adjoining the freight yards.
Again the slum streets about the prison had become a dead zone, roped off for a distance of half a mile. Those who lived within the area were told to stay indoors.
The prison walls and catwalks were lined with machine guns and searchlights. As the darkness came on, the purple-white rays began to crisscross the whole moldering Charlestown area—the Boston and Maine freight yards, the tenements, the slime-banked river. On the far side of Rutherford Avenue, beyond the rows of junk shops, the light bands swept across the forgotten cemetery where John Harvard lay buried, flashing beyond to the Bunker Hill obelisk and the spire of the St. Francis de Sales Church. Then, as if in reply, searchlights on the roof of the State House began to probe the darkness. In the middle distance the elevated cars moved across the Charlestown Bridge like illuminated beetles.
Within the dead zone the quiet was broken only by the clip-clop of horse hoofs on the granite paving blocks and by passing motorcycle patrols. Only as the silence resumed did one become aware of the steady cricketlike tapping of a cobbler’s hammer from a shop on Rutherford Avenue.
As the twilight faded, the tenseness in the city was so pervading that it seemed to go beyond action. Crowds gathered on the Common across from the State House to gaze up silently at the lighted windows of the executive wing. At ten o’clock the pickets reappeared. Again the police hustled them away. Hundreds stood impassively in Newspaper Row to watch the bulletin boards. The radio stations announced that they would stay on the air until after midnight. In City Square, Charlestown, several thousand men and women milled about beyond the barriers, curious rather than partisan, making no attempt at any sort of demonstration.
From the second-floor headquarters of the Hod Carriers’ Union, Mother Bloor, flanked by Fred Beal, attempted to harangue a crowd of several hundred in the street below and was promptly arrested. Beal then set out with a group of fifty militants for Charlestown, placards and banners concealed under their shirts, resolved to break through the barricades and demonstrate in front of the prison itself. As the marchers reached City Square, they brought out their placards and banners, and at once there were cries of “The Reds are coming!” A shot rang out. At the sound the bluecoats stampeded out of the precinct station. The mounted police charged the crowd. A number of people were hurt. Beal and nine others were arrested. “The crowd didn’t beat you up,” the patrolman who had Beal by the collar told him, “But, O boy, wait until you get to the station!”
Inside the prison walls everything was darkened and quiet except for the smoke-filled press room with its clicking typewriters and clattering telegraph keys. As on all execution nights, few of the prisoners were asleep. At ten the electricians arrived to make a final test of the chair. Shortly after eleven Musmanno arrived, his panama hat flopping as he dashed up the steps, tears streaming down his cheeks. The warden would not allow him to see the condemned men.
At 11:15 Warden Hendry, bearing himself with all the official gravity he could muster, walked up the iron stairs into the death house. Vanzetti had been pacing up and down in his cell. At the warden’s approach he stopped. “I am sorry,” Hendry informed him in the customary stereotyped phraseology, “but it is my painful duty to inform you that you have to die tonight.” Vanzetti stood staring at the floor for a moment, then flung his arms out, his eyes glittering. “We must bow to the inevitable,” he whispered.