The defense committee has agreed to pay the McAnarney brothers who are supposed to be the highest grade porch climbers in the business, $10,000 for their professional ability. They don’t care how we get the money. We don’t particularly care how they get results.
The McAnarneys, John, Thomas, and Jeremiah, had been practicing law together thirty years in the tide-edged granite city of Quincy, five miles south of Boston. John had been for thirteen years city solicitor as well as president of the county bar association. Thomas was associate justice of the district court. Jeremiah, the youngest, was in general practice, and counsel for the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway. Second-generation Irish-Americans, piously Catholic, conservative in attitudes and beliefs, they represented the middle class that had moved away from the proletarian South Boston matrix that had first sheltered the beaten immigrant survivors of the Famine years. So far had the McAnarneys evolved in the more open environment of Quincy that they had even become Republican—still an act of apostasy in South Boston, if rewarding elsewhere. Thomas had been appointed to the bench by Governor Calvin Coolidge.
John McAnarney was the head of the family, partly from being the eldest but mostly because of his assimilated dignity. White-haired, formal in speech and sedate in manner, he had in his late middle age come to resemble the Yankee prototypes that the Irish were replacing. He kept a second office in Boston where, as the years passed, he spent the greater part of his time, concerning himself more with banks and investments than actions and torts. He moved familiarly in the Boston legal world that was so much a postgraduate extension of the Harvard Law School; he numbered his acquaintances from the law firms with the triple-barreled names; he became a recognized figure on the well-beaten path from State Street through Pemberton Square to the State House.
Thomas, the judge, was the family wit. Frail and in failing health, his legal work off the bench had become nominal. Jerry was the trial lawyer of the family. He was Jerry to everybody. The priest who baptized him had been the last to call him Jeremiah. Unlike John, he had not conformed to State Street, and his speech still bore traces of the South Boston flats. Short, short-mustached, ruddy-faced, he had a tendency to trip over his grammar if he became excited. When he hurried down the street, as he always did, he seemed to do a little clog dance. He had a habit of buttonholing people, in the literal sense, emphasizing the point he was making with a jab of an index finger toward his auditor’s chest. He also had the reputation of winning his cases.
When Moore, prodded by the committee, finally decided to use local reinforcement, he consulted James Sisk, with whom he had worked on the Ettor-Giovannitti case in Lawrence. Sisk, who had since been appointed to the superior court, recommended the McAnarney combination. Moore went to John in his Boston office. McAnarney said he no longer took court cases. His brother Jerry, he felt, would be the one to deal with a case like this, with Tom perhaps helping out. He would talk it over with them, but before doing so he wanted to know more about the two Italians. Like everyone else, he had been shocked by the South Braintree murders. Any man, it was true, was entitled to a defense, but if Sacco and Vanzetti had been in any way concerned with this crime his office wanted nothing to do with keeping them from getting the punishment they deserved. Only if the men were innocent would the McAnarneys consider taking part. Moore was convincing.
The three McAnarneys drove over to Dedham and spent the better part of an afternoon in the jail’s reception room talking with Sacco and with his wife, who happened to be there on a visit. Sacco was forthright. The McAnarneys felt satisfied with the answers they received. After leaving the jail John McAnarney met Moore and the two of them walked the back streets of Dedham for an hour, discussing the matter. McAnarney said he had put Sacco through every test he could think of and his answers—in fact everything about him—convinced him that the man was innocent. His brothers felt the same way. His office could work for Sacco’s acquittal with a clear conscience. The McAnarneys would accept the brief.
The measure of Moore’s success in building up the Sacco-Vanzetti case was sensed by the legal profession some time before the rest of Massachusetts became aware of it. Judge Thayer, stimulated by the prospect (and with a blindness to proprieties that would later become increasingly apparent), wrote to his fellow Dartmouth alumnus, Chief Justice John Aiken, requesting that he be appointed presiding judge at the Dedham trial. Thayer apparently saw nothing improper in the request. In fact he may well have visioned himself as a judicial Peter plugging the American dike against the flooding seas of radicalism. Years later at a Dartmouth reunion, he told a friend that if he knew the Reds were outside the door and he could save his country by walking through it to be shot down by them he would be glad to sacrifice his life.
Apparently the impropriety of Thayer’s approach to the chief justice was offset by their Dartmouth kinship. Aiken, too, must have been sniffing the wind when he wrote in reply: “I am assigning you to hear the most important murder case tried in Massachusetts since the last century, if not in all time.”