Entering the courtroom, the brothers glimpsed the backs of the defendants in the waist-high prisoners’ cage. Rosina Sacco, with seven-month-old Ines in her arms, sat close behind her husband, the only ordinary spectator allowed in the courtroom that day. The others present were either reporters or deputies. Fred Katzmann, tanned and glowing from a long week end at golf, spotted the McAnarneys in the doorway and waved to them with casual friendliness. Moore was behind the bar talking with Judge Thayer. The judge’s face seemed frozen. Just before the McAnarneys went in, a deputy sheriff said under his breath: “Tom, I like to see you boys win your cases, but I hope to God you lose this case. These men are no good.”
At the opening Moore filed a motion for severance and a separate trial for Sacco on the grounds that his association with Vanzetti would be prejudiced because of the latter’s conviction for the Bridgewater crime. Similarly, the McAnarneys requested a separate trial for Vanzetti, since his defense was to be “separate and distinct.” Both motions were denied.
During the whole morning not a single juror was picked. By lunchtime it was obvious that the Yankee judge was taking a poor view of the Western lawyer. The McAnarneys could tell that merely by the way Thayer glared at Moore, the lines at each side of his mouth etching into his cheeks before he replied to one of Moore’s objections. Even Rosina Sacco, with her imperfect knowledge of English, sensed it. Moore kept on needling Thayer, objecting to each triviality, challenging each likely juror. The class-conscious Westerner demanded that prospective jurors be asked if they were opposed to organized labor, if they belonged to a union, or if they hired union help. These questions Judge Thayer disallowed. At the noon recess he remarked angrily and audibly as he left the courthouse that no long-haired radical from California was going to tell him how to run his court.
It was midafternoon before the first juror, Wallace Hersey, a real estate dealer from Weymouth, was picked. By the end of the afternoon only two more had been selected: John Ganley, a grocer, and a machinist, Frank Waugh. Each defendant was allowed forty-four challenges, and that day the defense used up twenty-one. Judge Thayer, exasperated by the delays, held an evening session until ten, when he had to leave to catch the last train back to Boston. It took ten hours and 175 veniremen to get the initial three jurymen.
There was, as there usually is in even the most ponderously sustained trial, an occasional lighter moment. At one point a plump sugar dealer from Braintree had the idea of getting himself excused by pretending he was deaf. The courtroom echoed with laughter as Judge Thayer pounced on him. Sacco laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks. Then the courtroom settled down again, the hivelike humming broken only by the squeak of Sheriff Capen’s boots as he walked gingerly across the floor to the upright mace. Behind the judge’s dais the triple-cylindered pendulum of the marble-faced clock ticked away the formal minutes.
From time to time the sallow-faced defendants in the cage whispered to one another. Sacco had aged in the year of his arrest. His hair was thinning. That morning was the first time he and Vanzetti had seen each other in eight months. When they met before court opened, they had kissed each other gravely on the cheek.
The McAnarney brothers, seated inside the bar enclosure, saw the unhappy pattern of the morning repeated all through the afternoon and evening. It was clear by now to Jerry McAnarney that Moore, for all his reputation, was doing nobody any good, least of all the men in the cage. Jerry was as convinced as ever that the two men were innocent. He had even brought his wife to the jail after the Decoration Day parade to let her talk with Sacco and get her opinion, and she had felt the same way he did. But now, even before the jury had been picked, he had the feeling of the sands slipping from under his feet, of being beyond his depth. The Italians were never going to get a square deal with Moore running things. Jerry could hear Thayer’s edged voice: “Mr. Moore, that may be the way they practice law out West, but not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”
At the close of the evening session the brothers drove to John McAnarney’s house in Quincy and told him of what was blowing up between Moore and Judge Thayer. They wanted John to get rid of Moore and take charge. John thought it over, and then, even though it was midnight, telephoned William G. Thompson. Thompson was an old Yankee, a lawyer’s lawyer, a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and whatever he said carried weight in Massachusetts.
In his Chestnut Hill home, Thompson listened to John McAnarney explain the difficulties his brothers were facing at the beginning of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. John begged him to come to Dedham in the morning, insisting that the lives of two men were at stake, and that in his opinion the men were innocent. Thompson agreed to look in.
As Thompson got off the train in Dedham and walked up from the station past the spent lilac hedges of the High Street, the brim of his Panama flopping with each step, the Phi Beta Kappa key and the Institute of 1770 charm jingling on his heavy watchchain, he looked the very model of a proper Boston lawyer. Even the loose way he held his pipe in his mouth reinforced his assurance. He found John McAnarney, much upset, waiting for him in front of the closed courthouse gates.