At the opening of the trial Judge Thayer was within two weeks of being sixty-three, although the leathery texture of his face made him seem a decade older. He was about five feet two inches tall, with the edgy vanity of many short men, and a voice that easily turned petulant. On the bench he looked the part of a judge. He had a high forehead, a sudden little hawk nose bridged by pince-nez, thin gray hair and mustache, dark-circled eyes, and a narrow Yankee line of mouth. Governor Samuel McCall, a fellow graduate of Dartmouth, had appointed him to the bench in 1917.
Thayer was born in Blackstone, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles south of Worcester, the son of the local slaughterer and provisions dealer. After going through the local public schools and Worcester Academy, he entered Dartmouth with the class of 1880. Known there as Bobby, he was more noted as an athlete than a scholar. While a sophomore he organized the first college baseball nine and was its captain for three years. Once he was suspended for a half-year as the result of a rowdy prank, but he returned to graduate with his class. His undergraduate pictures show a fair-haired young man with a sprouting mustache, a quizzical expression, and eyes so deep-set that they seem almost hooded.
On graduation he briefly considered going in for big-league baseball, but instead returned to Worcester, where for two years he read law on his own. He was admitted to the bar in 1882. For the next thirty-five years he remained in that small city, rising higher in its restricted social world than might have been expected of a butcher’s son. He married early and well. He became an Odd Fellow, chairman of the Worcester Athletic Association, and a member of the Dartmouth Alumni Council. Indicative of his popularity, he was elected a Democratic alderman in Republican Worcester, the youngest alderman the city ever had. Later he conformed more strictly to his social group and became a Republican. His greatest regret, for which his appointment as Superior Court Justice was only partial solace, was that he had not been young enough to join the Army in 1917.
Webster Thayer—the Anglo-Saxon coupling had a bell-like resonance in which were blended the Mayflower tradition and that of the young federal republic. Yet there was a hollowness to the ring, as the butcher’s son well knew. Thayer, even as a justice of the Superior Court, was haunted by an inner sense of doubt that made him seek the approbation of other men, constantly, uncritically. In his three years on the bench he appeared a run-of-the-mill justice, causing no particular attention adversely or otherwise. The court attendants noted his irascibility, and his vanity came out in a fondness for buttonholing lawyers in the corridor to tell them about the charge he had just written. As an old-line Yankee, he had no great sympathy with foreigners, but no one had ever questioned his fairness.
Other than Vanzetti’s Italian neighbors and a couple of cub reporters from the Boston papers, there were scarcely any spectators at the trial. The routine was the same each morning. Vanzetti was brought in handcuffed and taken to the prisoner’s box in the center of the room, where his handcuffs were unfastened. Then Vahey and Graham conferred with him, and the set melancholy face with the drooping mustache would take on a momentary animation. Katzmann and Kane always nodded affably to the defense lawyers as they came in. Then there was a wait of several minutes until Judge Thayer appeared, consciously delaying the daily drama of his entry, sweeping over the threshold in his black robe, inwardly satisfied that the room was standing for his presence and would remain standing until he took his seat. The crier intoned: “Hear ye, hear ye. All persons having anything to do before the Honorable Justices of the Superior Court now sitting at Plymouth within and for the County of Plymouth, draw near, give your attendance and you shall be heard. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”
With his intoning, the ritual of the court took over. The actuality of the outside world, the muted summer noises of the town entering with the sea air through the open oval-topped windows, became less real than this legal world where all action had been reduced to verbalizations. Symbolic in more than one sense was the statue of Justice in a niche of the courthouse, holding up her gilded scales and covered by a protective layer of chicken-wire.
During none of the trial sessions was there discussion of Vanzetti’s political beliefs. The prosecution’s case was merely an elaboration of the preliminary hearing. The district attorney relied chiefly on the primary identification witnesses—Bowles, Cox, Harding, and Mrs. Brooks—reinforcing them with corroborative evidence that would in itself have been insufficient even to indict. Bowles still maintained that Vanzetti was the man with the shotgun, but the mustache he had earlier described as close-cropped now became merely trimmed. Cox denied that he had said, on seeing Vanzetti in Brockton, “I think there is doubt.” Even now, though he had become much more certain, he was not wholly sure of his identification, and the best that Katzmann could get out of him was “I am not positive but I feel certain he is the man.”
All three men had been shown the car found in the Manley Woods. Harding, disregarding his first statement about a Hudson, again described the Bridgewater car as a seven-passenger Buick. The “croppy” mustache of the bandit that he “did not get much of a look at” was now “a heavy dark mustache that had been trimmed.” On December 24 he had described the shotgun bandit to a Pinkerton investigator as “slim, five feet ten inches, wore a long black overcoat and a derby hat.” Now he described him: “Long coat, no hat, high forehead, hair was short, dark complected man, I should say, high cheekbones, rather hard, broad face and the head, perhaps, more a round head, bullet shaped.”
Mrs. Brooks repeated her story of crossing in front of the parked car and looking through the windshield at the driver. She had picked Vanzetti out of a lineup of four men in the Brockton police station as that driver. Facing him in the courtroom, she was still certain he had been the driver. After she had entered the railway station, she testified she heard shots and, looking out the window, saw the flashes from two gun barrels as the L. Q. White truck lurched down Broad Street. In cross-examining her Vahey questioned whether it was possible (as indeed it was not) to have an unimpeded view of the street from the station, and whether in fact she had seen the shooting at all. Mrs. Brooks became confused and hesitant, but Vahey did not press the point. Neither did he bring out the fact that Vanzetti did not know how to drive.
The only other witness to identify Vanzetti in court was Maynard Shaw, a schoolboy who had been delivering papers at the time of the attempt. From one hundred fifty feet away on Broad Street he had seen a dark-mustached man with a shotgun get out of a touring car on the corner and fire at the payroll truck. “He is the one I saw,” the boy said, pointing at Vanzetti. He added that even at a distance he knew the man was a foreigner “by the way he ran.” Vahey made much of this remark, asking Shaw whether Italians and Russians ran differently from Swedes or Norwegians and how anybody could tell the difference. Shaw had not paid much attention to the bandits’ car, thinking it a Hudson or a Buick. Later, though he did not explain why, he concluded it was a Buick.