I felt the presence in 1953, thirty-two years after the trial, when I was called on to serve for a month as a juror in the same paneled room where Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and found guilty and, after all the exceptions and delays, were sentenced to death six years later. Scarcely a day of that month passed but there was some reference to the case.
Sometimes during the lunch hour one of us would ask the old sheriff about the trial. In his blue serge cutaway he had served the Dedham court for forty years. For him the law revealed there was majestically certain. I do not think he ever entertained the idea that it might err or that the Sacco-Vanzetti decision might have been unjust. To think this would have been to challenge the things that had become part of him—his engraved brass buttons, his white mace with the blue state seal on it. His office did not, however, keep him from having his personal feelings. He had come to like Sacco and Vanzetti. “They were good boys,” he told us. “I knew Nick best, but they were both good boys. Never any trouble.”
At the end of the afternoon session he occasionally took a few of us through the jail, two streets away, and—after showing us the reception hall and the dining room and the laundry—he would point out the cells Sacco and Vanzetti had occupied. “I was in the court,” he told us one afternoon, “that day when Judge Thayer sentenced them. Vanzetti made his speech first, that long speech—maybe you heard about it. And all the time he was talking Judge Thayer just sat there with his chin in his hand looking down at his desk. Never moved. But when Vanzetti finished, then he let him have it.”
On our way into the courtroom we would pass the prisoners’ cage, used in all Dedham murder trials. In this cage Sacco and Vanzetti had sat. The cage is often mentioned in the literature of the case, as if the men had been exhibited in court like monkeys in a zoo. But in spite of its name the cage is no cage at all. It is a topless enclosure of metal lattice about three feet high in front, rising to five feet in the back. Except for its symbolism there is nothing very formidable about it.
I was on a civil jury. Most of our cases concerned personal injuries. One of our last, involving a woman who had cut her leg in the door of a car, made the courtroom buzz as the lawyer for the plaintiff appeared. The clerk came over to the rail and muttered something to our foreman.
The lawyer was a portly man in his seventies, with a manner so assured that it was almost contemptuous. He was nearly bald, his face florid, with the flesh sagging under the cheeks. Behind his rimless spectacles his pale blue eyes watered. He was dressed with the conservatism of a Boston banker, wearing a hard-woven worsted suit cut in characteristic pear-shaped style. Two points of a linen handkerchief projected sharply from his breast pocket. His shoes were of Scotch grain. His voice was upper-class Bostonian—with that elastic prolongation of the vowel sounds that has come to be known as the Harvard accent. As soon as he opened his argument he lapsed into Victorian rhetoric.
The clerk’s remark was passed along the jury box. The man next to me nudged my elbow. “That’s Katzmann,” he said, “the fellow that got Sacco and Vanzetti.”
He seemed a culmination of the ghosts of the month. There he was again, in Judge Webster Thayer’s old courtroom, at the scene of his triumph of a generation before. As he faced us, spinning polysyllabic phrases out of nothing, I tried to form an impression of him divorced altogether from the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If I had seen him only at that moment, I should have thought him empty and pompous, but I should also have admitted his basic honesty.
He died the following autumn. Some months later I talked with a judge who had known Katzmann. When I told about seeing him at Dedham he asked me my opinion of the man. I said he was verbose, third-rate, not wholly grammatical. He laughed. “That describes most of us lawyers,” he said. “As for Katzmann, he was average—an average district attorney, a little tricky like most of them, but no worse than most out to get a conviction. He thought Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. I’m sure he never changed his mind.”
Four decades have passed since the trial. Judge Thayer, Katzmann, President Lowell, Governor Fuller, and most of the jurors and witnesses are dead. What remains out of this shadowed past? Beyond all else, doubt. Refusing to face this doubt, the two sides became irreconcilable. One side felt, as did the court reporter in his pamphlet, that anything less than the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti would undermine the Massachusetts judiciary. The other side demanded that the whole proceedings of Judge Thayer’s court be repudiated. There should have been some middle way out, some face-saving formula that would at least have pacified if not contented the reporter and his kind and yet given the men their lives. Whatever the defense’s private opinion of Judge Thayer, it would have been better to have said less about him and to have concentrated on the evidence discovered after the trial. That this evidence changed nothing was preeminently the responsibility of President Lowell. Working as he did in private with his committee, unhampered by the strict rules of legal evidence, he had the opportunity to examine all the facts. A word from him, an indirect indication, and Governor Fuller would have stayed the death sentences and ordered a new trial.