Facing the chair

by John Dos Passos

Photographs of Mr. Hamilton showed that the shell which the Commonwealth claimed had been fired from Sacco’s pistol had a dent in the exact centre where the firing pin struck it. The test shells, it was said, had dents 23 degrees off centre. The prosecution urged that both were so nearly in the middle as to make it certain that all had been fired from the same pistol.

There followed the appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court in January 1926. Despite a masterly argument by counsel for the defense the appeal was unanimously denied.

Meanwhile new evidence had been discovered, the affidavits of Letherman and Weyand tended to prove the contention of the defense that their radicalism had been a deciding factor in these men’s conviction. The confession of Madeiros and the circumstantial case erected by the defense tending to prove that the South Braintree crime had been committed by the Morelli gang of Providence (a case that though circumstantial seems to a layman infinitely better founded than the state’s case against Sacco and Vanzetti) gave the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti fresh hope that at last a new trial would be granted. The motions were denied.

Now there is only the growing force of public opinion between Sacco and Vanzetti and the electric chair. A new appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court is being prepared, but it seems hardly likely that the court will reverse its firmly-entrenched decision. There remains the faint hope of an appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States on the plea that the men were convicted without due process of law.

Will the people of this country and the citizens of Massachusetts stand by and see two men murdered by the dead weight of legal technicalities? Madeiros, murderer and gunman, was granted a second trial, on the plea that the judge had neglected to inform the jury that they should deem a man innocent until he was proven guilty. It is hard for anyone not versed in subtleties of the law to see why the same thing should not apply to Sacco and Vanzetti. The words were probably pronounced solemnly enough, but can anyone who has read over the account of the trial solemnly affirm that the spirit was there?

“So you left Plymouth to dodge the draft, did you?” was Katzmann’s first question to Vanzetti on the stand. “Did you love your country in the last week of May, 1917? Is your love for the United States commensurate with the amount of money you can get in this country per week? Did you intend to condemn Harvard College?” were some of the questions put to Sacco—many of them really invitations to an argument. And Sacco was induced, and allowed by the judge, to make a long speech on his offensive political opinions. Katzmann’s address to the jury ended with the words “stand together, you men of Norfolk County!” And Judge Thayer’s charge opened as follows: “Gentlemen of the Jury, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most important service. Although you knew that such service would be arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier, responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty.” After three pages of this, he proceeds: “Having cleared away any mist of sympathy or prejudice from your minds and having substituted there trust, a purer atmosphere of unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness, let us take up some of the rights granted by law to the defendants....”

The men of Norfolk County stood together as best they knew, to defend their institutions against reds, slackers, foreign agitators. Twelve doughboys trying a German spy would have brought the same verdict. “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway” was the foreman’s opinion.

That was the history of the case from the outside. What was happening to the two men in jail? Hope and despair in sickening alternations, and then at last a sort of numbness. They, each of them, had moments of breakdown. At one time Vanzetti was put in a cell near the heating plant in Charlestown jail from which he could hear the hammering of men getting the electric chair ready for an execution. It wore on his nerves until the prison authorities became alarmed and sent him to the State Asylum for observation. There he was found to be perfectly sane.

But Vanzetti serving out his sentence at Charlestown, at least has work to keep him busy. In Dedham jail there is no provision for giving work to prisoners awaiting sentence. Except for the daily hour of exercise, Sacco has spent the whole six years shut up in a cell. At first he used to go through all sorts of exercises to keep himself fit; but inevitably the hopelessness of it got to him. He went on a hunger strike. After thirtyone days he was removed, a wreck, to the State Farm at Bridgewater. There he was allowed to do outside work. Once he was well he was moved back to Dedham again for more days and weeks and months of waiting. The thing that keeps these two men alive and sane is their faith in themselves as champions, martyrs of the working class. Vanzetti is very fond of the phrase of St. Augustine. The blood of martyrs is the seed of liberty.

For through the bars and walls of their jails these men must have felt an inkling of the great heroic shadows they throw on the minds of working men all over the world. In Russia, in Germany, in France, in the Argentine, people have been profoundly moved by every step in the case. There have been meetings, parades, bombs thrown, heads broken for Sacco and Vanzetti, among men whose languages they may never know, the names of whose towns they never heard. History is made up of these sudden searchlights that for a moment make gigantic the drama of a single humble man.