Tragedy in Dedham

by Francis Russell

Governor Fuller, of course, took his cue from the Lowell Report. If he, the parvenu, had not been so in awe of Lowell and the Back Bay ascendancy he represented, perhaps he would have acted otherwise. His jail meetings with Sacco and Vanzetti are said to have been friendly.

Once or twice a year in the decade after World War II, going into the State Street Trust Building, I used to see Fuller. The doorman would see him first and swing the door open with a ringing “Good morning, Governor.” I could slip through in the eddy. The old financial clipper would billow ahead of me under full sail. Self-esteem carried him along like a favoring wind. His was the pride of manner that had reached its goal. An Alger story of the new century. From a Malden bicycle shop to the head of the Packard agency for New England when Packard was the Rolls-Royce of America. A mansion on the water side of Beacon Street hung with Gainsboroughs and Romneys and Raeburns. That was the first stage. Then the governorship. And when Packard slipped in the Depression, the ex-governor sensed the moment of ebb and shifted to Cadillac.

There was a cragginess to his features in age. More and more he came to resemble the Back Bay Brahmins he so much admired. I suppose Sacco and Vanzetti, those men whose hands he had shaken so long ago in the death cells, had become blurred impressions, overlaid by eighteenth-century paintings and the tailfins of Cadillacs. “Our reputation is your protection,” said the governor’s used-car ads. Yet I never saw him sweeping into the State Street Trust but I thought of his role in the case.

Public opinion in Massachusetts was against Sacco and Vanzetti. To the community they were two murderers who had been given a fair trial and every opportunity for appeal afterward. The whole thing had gone on for much too long. Radicals and anarchists and Communists were trying to use the case as a lever to pry apart the foundations of law and order. But Massachusetts was not going to be dictated to by such people. There might be demonstrations in front of American embassies throughout the world, there might be more bombs planted in the houses of those concerned—as had already happened to a witness and one of the jurors. Nothing like that was going to change the course of justice! Conservative opinion more and more adopted the point of view that Sacco and Vanzetti had become a challenge to society that could be answered only by their deaths.

Literary talent was the forte of the other side. That side consisted of the literary left, radicals, liberals, Communists, woolly well-meaning progressives like my Aunt Amy, plus a large scattering of people who could not be labeled politically but whose sense of justice had been outraged. Some of these latter were starched conservatives. The crystallized view of the opposition was that Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a malignant conspiracy. Neither judge nor district attorney had really believed them guilty of murder. The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome agitators.

For the Communists—to whom this case in its later stages gave their first opportunity for an international mass appeal—Sacco and Vanzetti were martyrs of the proletariat, murdered by reactionaries trying to preserve an unjust social order. Seen from this point of view, two alien Reds could expect no justice from a Massachusetts court or a Dedham jury.

During my month in Dedham I used to wonder about that earlier jury. Drawn in much the same way that we were, the jurors could not have been so very different from ourselves. And what were we? Some middle class, some working class, a few of us stupid, a few opinionated, but most of us reasonable enough to weigh an issue. At least we tried to overcome our prejudices. The jury I sat on would have been prejudiced against Reds, but it would not have convicted a Communist on a capital charge because of his political beliefs. It did not seem to me the Sacco-Vanzetti jury could have been otherwise. Granted even that the foreman was prejudiced, some of the others would have stood out against injustice. I felt sure that when the jurors decided that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, it was because they were convinced that they were guilty of murder.

Thinking of the great trial, I found myself wondering how I should have voted, had I been on that jury. As soon as I had the time I read the transcript of the record. Much it could not offer—the atmosphere of the court, with its tensions, the appearance of the witnesses and the defendants, the subtleties that could be gathered from a tone of voice but could not be preserved in black and white. Yet the substance, the prime matter of the trial, endured, each word spoken during that six weeks pressed and dried between the now-yellowing pages. As the inchoate mass gradually took shape for me, I tried to disavow any preconceptions, to imagine myself in the jury box at Dedham occupied solely with the question of whether two men murdered two other men, and knowing no more about it in advance than the evidence offered. How should I have judged?

I knew one thing—that I should have disregarded the testimony of the experts. My month had taught me that. Experts canceled each other out as the paid bias of either side, and a jury then decided on other grounds. The real grounds in this case were the half-dozen or so witnesses who identified Sacco—and to a lesser extent Vanzetti—as being at or near the scene of the murder on that April day. In opposition to them were an equal number of witnesses who testified that these two were not the men. It was a question finally of which group to believe. The weakest part of the Commonwealth’s case was that it never established an adequate motive for the crime.

On the other hand Sacco and Vanzetti were armed the night the police picked them up, Sacco with an automatic of the type that fired the murder bullet, Vanzetti with a revolver that might have been taken from the murdered guard. This was the most damaging evidence against them. Sacco maintained that he had tucked his gun inside his belt that afternoon and forgotten about it. Vanzetti said that he carried his for protection. Both statements may have been true. Often the lame excuse is the truthful one. Yet here were two philosophical anarchists who maintained that the use of force was never justified, not even for the advancement of their beliefs, who boasted that they had never shed blood, but when they were picked up, they had on them weapons of force. If they had not been armed the chances are they would never have been tried.