CHAPTER TWENTY
AFTERMATH
During the last hour before the executions Mary Donovan, Felicani, Gardner Jackson and his sister Edith, Ruth Hale, Jeannette Marks, and Joseph Moro waited in the inner office of the Hanover Street headquarters. “They must be starting now,” someone remarked at midnight. “Let us be quiet.”
The outer room was full of people, heavy with cigarette smoke, darkly expectant. All evening there had been a constant coming and going, a mixture of North End Italians and strangers from outside Massachusetts. Some minutes before midnight Mother Bloor puffed up the stairs, having been bailed out earlier by Mary Donovan.
The group in the inner office did not move. After twenty minutes the telephone rang twice, the prearranged signal that the executions had taken place. Jackson picked up the receiver, listened, and still holding it to his ear nodded to the others. No one spoke. Felicani’s face was a white mask. Then Mary Donovan cried out, “I can’t believe it!” After several seconds she stood up, opened the door to the anteroom, and said sternly, “It’s all over.” Moro bit at a sheaf of papers he held in his hand, then began to sob. Outside there was a babble of voices rising to shouts. Some of the less-restrained Italians threw themselves down on the floor and howled. The rest began to grope their way down the steep stairs. As Mary Donovan turned back to the little office, the telephone bell tinkled again. “Come,” she told the others, “let us not answer the telephone any more.”
For many, as for those at the defense headquarters, that night was to be the dividing line of their lives. Ferris Greenslet, the biographer of the Lowells, stood with the crowd on Boston Common staring up at the oval windows of the governor’s office, “hoping, doubting, despairing.” From Parlor D at the Bellevue, a few minutes before midnight, Tom O’Connor telephoned John Vahey at Plymouth. “This is Vanzetti,” he announced to the lawyer savagely. “Thanks to you I’ll be dead in twenty minutes!” O’Connor would spend the rest of his life trying to vindicate the two dead men.
Helen Peabody, a young artist who had marched across the Charlestown Bridge with Fred Beal’s group, somehow managed to slip through the police lines to the gates of the prison, where she was arrested and taken inside to the guardroom. Although offered a chair by one of the guards, she insisted on standing at attention until after the executions.
Beal, his lip gashed from a policeman’s blow, was sitting in a cell in the City Square station house when a matronly woman he did not know arrived to post his bail. “They’ve done it,” she told him softly. “Sacco and Vanzetti are dead.” In just two years Beal himself, as a textile workers’ organizer, would be on trial for his own life on a trumped up murder charge in Gastonia, North Carolina.
Noel and Herta Field, sitting beside the radio in their Washington, D.C., apartment, listened to the last-minute efforts with waning hope. The shock of the executions was for them the beginning of a long journey leftward that would lead them to a Communist prison cell in Hungary. Rockwell Kent withdrew a show of his paintings in Worcester and began a life-long boycott of Massachusetts.
Shortly before midnight Mrs. Evans went with Alice Hamilton to the roof of the Women’s City Club on Beacon Street from where they could see the State House dome and across the Charles River basin the illuminated octagon of the prison. While they waited, the Church of the Advent bell tower below them sounded the quarters. At a quarter past twelve Mrs. Evans murmured, “Good-by, Sacco.”
In New York John Haynes Holmes, the pastor of the Community Church, held a watch-night service at which La Guardia and others spoke.