Tragedy in Dedham

Just before Thompson and Hill entered the case Sacco went on a hunger strike. A year and a half had elapsed since his conviction, and he announced that he would continue to fast until the court ruled on his fate. Much of the delay during 1922 had resulted from the additional time granted Moore to follow up clues that he hoped might lead to the real criminals. In the autumn Judge Thayer underwent an operation, causing a further delay.

Sacco chafed under his barred restraint. He was not one to find escape in reading or thinking his thoughts. Even the anarchism that was so fundamental to him attracted him more by its unrelenting code than by its philosophy. He was a man of abounding physical energy for whom work and love were necessary releases. Jail was an exercise in patience that he could never learn. Several times in the course of his years at Dedham he approached and even crossed the borderline of sanity. From his cell, with its rolled blanket and wooden water bucket and tin mug and enamel slop pail, he watched the flaring twilights diminish, the approach of morning along the empty streets, the orbit of the sun as it shifted across the upper windows. Days and weeks and months passed meaninglessly.

In November 1921, Sacco had written to Vanzetti in the grimmer confinement of Charlestown: “I am very sorry that no one comes and see you, no one comes to see me neither, but Rosie.” The week before, his wife had brought little Ines to the jail for the first time. Sacco was delighted to hold the plump crowing baby in his arms. Mrs. Evans became a staunch periodic visitor. Sacco, in spite of his theoretical rejection of bourgeois society, developed an intense filial affection for her. From Mrs. Glendower Evans, separated from him by the whole range of the sociological spectrum, she became Auntie Bee. In 1925 he wrote her: “From since the day I have meet you, you have occupied in my heart my mother her place, and so like I been respect you and I been loved you.” It was a curious transition from the brown peasant woman of Torremaggiore to the self-contained Bostonian, but Mrs. Evans was only one of the elderly women who were to take an increasingly maternal interest in the Dedham prisoner. Among the earliest was kindly, mousy Mrs. Cerise Carman Jack in her squeaky high-button boots; for a while she took Rosina and the children to her farm in Sharon. There was Mrs. Jessica Henderson, matron of good causes and pillar of the Anti-Vivisection Society. And there were Mrs. Gertrude Winslow and Mrs. Codman, the latter a cousin by marriage of the head of the Civil Liberties Committee. Sacco always took a more trusting attitude toward women than toward men.

Evenings were the most difficult for “thes sad reclus,” as he whimsically termed himself. He kept thinking of the bungalow in South Stoughton, how he would sometimes visit friends after supper and come back with the sleeping Dante in his arms and Rosina beside him. “Those day,” he wrote Mrs. Jack, “they was a some happy day.”

The jail rule that unsentenced prisoners might not work kept Sacco in idleness, intensifying the feelings of persecution that he had developed after the trial. On February 14, 1923, he began his hunger strike. Sheriff Capen made no attempt to force him to eat, and by the middle of March he had grown noticeably weaker. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, at Judge Thayer’s request, he was examined by Charles Cahoon, superintendent of the Medfield State Hospital; Albert Thomas, superintendent of the Foxboro State Hospital; and a Boston psychiatrist, Abraham Meyerson.

Sacco, lying on his cot, calmly explained to the doctors that the state was trying to kill him. Poison was being put into his food—even into the food his wife brought him; poisonous vapors were being blown into his cell and electric currents circulated under his bed. His suffering had become so intense, he explained, that he could not permit it to go much further. When Dr. Cahoon asked him why he drank water, which would prolong his life, he “stated that he did not want to die too quickly because, on account of a hearing for a new trial he felt that he should allow his counsel some opportunity to plead. He had no confidence, however, that he would get a new trial; he did not expect any justice from the state or the government.”

The doctors found that Sacco was mentally disturbed, and Judge Thayer ordered him to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital for observation. On his arrival he was warned by Dr. Meyerson, “Nick, they have sent you here to eat, and if you don’t, we will feed you with a tube.” According to the newspaper reports he was then forcibly fed by an attendant in the doctor’s presence, although Sacco later claimed that he broke his strike voluntarily. “You know,” he told another doctor some months afterward, “I have read in an Italian magazine that you can live a long time if they feed you with a tube; I knew this, and then I was too weak and could not fight them, so I said, I go ahead and eat. I was against going because I wanted justice.”

For the first two days in the hospital he lay on his cot and was fed broth and gruel every hour. Then he began to eat regularly, gaining ten pounds within a week. His Dedham delusions vanished and he spoke of them as “all a mistake” and “prejudices.” Although he identified the hospital with the state that was persecuting him, he was friendly with the doctors, sometimes speaking of his love for his wife and children and his feeling for the out-of-doors, joking about his hairiness that “proved the correctness of Darwin’s theory,” or talking about his work as sole-trimmer.

On March 22, a few hours after Sacco had gone to bed, he complained of a headache and asked the ward attendant for a wet towel to place across his forehead. When the attendant left, Sacco sprang out of bed and struck his head several times against a chair, lacerating his scalp. Wardmen rushed in and seized him, and as they struggled he cried out, “I am innocent! There is no justice!” It took four men to restrain him and put him in a dry pack. Next morning he was again calm and cooperative, and when the director, Dr. C. MacFie Campbell arrived, he said with some embarrassment, “I am ashamed of what I done.” He told the director that he was tired of life and wished to kill himself. Dr. Campbell considered the incident “a transitory condition of emotional tension which was intelligible in view of the emotional strain to which the patient has been subject.” There was no recurrence of any such episode or of the Dedham delusions. At the end of the observation period Dr. Campbell wrote to Judge Thayer that with the exception of that one night Sacco’s “behavior has been that of the ordinary hospital patient. There has been no difficulty in caring for him ... his mood has, on the whole, been equable.” He concluded: “The result of the observation of the patient in the Boston Psychopathic Hospital has been that we have found no evidence of insanity of any type.”

Nevertheless, Thayer extended Sacco’s observation period for another month, and the early days of April presented quite a different picture. Mrs. Evans, visiting Sacco on April 2, was much disturbed by his mental state. She told the doctor in charge “that she knew nothing about medicine but that in her opinion [the] patient was talking like a crazy man.”

She said [the hospital report continued] that the patient insisted he would kill himself.... He said that he had suffered long enough, that he wanted it over with one way or another, that when he went back to jail he would give the judge twenty-four hours to decide the case and that if he did not set him free patient would “take things in my own hands.”

Five days later when Rosina was visiting, Sacco told her that he was going crazy. After she left, according to the report, he

suddenly jumped out of his bed and rushed toward the edge of the open door, with his head lowered in a blind, impulsive manner.... Thereafter, he became excited, somewhat noisy, and struck out violently, requiring considerable restraint. He was given treatment in the form of a dry pack with cold compresses to his head. He was talking and shouting in an excited tone, maintaining that his wife was confined in the ward above him, whence he had been hearing (as a matter of fact), the voices and cries of the women patients, which he believed were those of his wife.

By evening he had calmed down and now said “that he must be going crazy in this place, that his ideas about his wife were all a mistake.” Early next morning he spoke of voices telling him that a bunch of roses had been left for him in the hospital lobby.

On the morning of April 12 he suddenly lunged forward as if he were going to dart out of the room. To Dr. Campbell he later explained that he had thought he heard his wife’s voice call “D-a-a-n-t-e.”

For about a week he seemed calm. Then, on April 19, he became unmanageable. Seven times in the next four days he had to be placed in wet packs.

During these attacks [the ward doctor reported] he shouts and screams that he wants his freedom; he wants to go home to his family. Between the attacks and often during the attack, when he can for a moment be made to control himself, he is rational, clear and oriented, knows the time and the date and the place, and clearly recognizes those about him. During the attacks he at times strikes viciously at those about him, or those who attempt to restrain him, and also hurls all manner of abusive and profane imprecations upon others.

According to Dr. Ralph Colp, in a psychiatric study published in 1958, Sacco was suffering

sensory deprivation, which in its strictest sense, involves the isolation of an individual from everyday sights, sounds and actions. Nick Sacco had been exposed to a somewhat analogous situation for nearly thirty-six months. Although he had contact with people, he had been deprived of the three most important things in his life: wife and children, job, and his exercise and contact with nature. The daily visits of Rosina—in Dedham she had not visited as frequently—aggravated the patient instead of assuaging him, and were the direct cause of his most powerful delusions and hallucinations. It was as if every visit—however much her husband desired it—could only be unbearable to him. No one understood this better than the bachelor Vanzetti, who later wrote: “Has Nick a wife? Yes, and a good one; but, not being free, he most either thinks that she is consoling herself with somebody else, or that she is suffering the unspeakable agony of a loving woman compelled to mourn is living lover.”

Sacco was diagnosed as suffering from psychosis of a paranoid character. The court committed him on April 23 to the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Moore was greatly troubled by Sacco’s suicide attempts. As one way of saving his client he had agreed to Sacco’s examination by alienists and—even though he objected to the Bridgewater institution—signed the commitment papers. Sacco and his wife never forgave him for it, and the differences of opinion that had troubled the two men now began to harden into enmity.

Sacco spent five months at Bridgewater. His mood on entering seemed cooperative. He was not isolated but given a bed in a ward; within two days he began chatting with the other prisoners. Soon he was at work polishing floors and before long he had a chance to work mornings on the prison farm, where he tended a small vegetable garden. His appetite was good—in a month he gained twenty-six pounds. Throughout his stay he remained quiet, cautious, but agreeable. When a doctor asked him whether he was insane, he replied, “I am not one of that kind. My mind is clear. I am not crazy.” Although Sacco was at times hopeful about his chances for a new trial, Dr. Mountford, the Bridgewater physician, noted that he occasionally presented a worried look “which he explains by saying that it is all caused by the long procedure of the court which keeps his case from being settled one way or the other.” Thought of suicide still ran through his mind. On July 9 Dr. Mountford noted that Sacco

says he has not given the suicide idea up, and regrets that he did not die in his former attempt. In explaining this statement, says he does not wish to commit suicide now, but says he wants to get justice, and insists if ever confronted by similar conditions of those before he came here, he would not hesitate to commit suicide.

After saying this, Sacco looked out the window into the prison yard, and with great interest watched some prisoners playing baseball.

On September 29 he was discharged from Bridgewater with the diagnosis “not insane” and returned to Dedham in time for the arguments on the five supplementary motions, postponed because of his condition.

Some time during the previous summer Elias Field, a lawyer of the modest firm of Brown, Field and McCarthy, and the defending counsel in a Middlesex County murder case, learned that the famous Dr. Hamilton was in Boston. Hamilton seemed to him just the man to examine some bullets, then in the custody of the State Police, that were to be introduced as evidence. Hamilton was willing. On August 7 he and Field went to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House to find out about the bullets. Proctor told them that they happened to be at his house in Swampscott, twelve miles away. However, if Field wanted to drive him there, they could look at them. Field agreed. While he drove, Hamilton and Proctor began to discuss the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

“I suppose you know” Hamilton said, “that I have been retained by the defense to study some of the exhibits in connection with the pending motion for a new trial.”

“I don’t care,” Proctor told the other two. “I have been too long in the game, and I’m getting to be too old to want to see a couple of fellows go to the chair for something I don’t think they did.”

Hamilton asked Proctor why he had not said more in his testimony about whether Bullet III had gone through Sacco’s gun. “If the defense had asked me any more particularly,” Proctor replied, “then I should have told them I didn’t think it went through that gun, and I did tell the district attorney before the trial I thought it was consistent with going through that kind of a gun, but I don’t think it went through that gun.”

Hamilton wondered why the defense had not taken up “consistent with.”

“I wondered too,” Proctor said. “I suppose they were afraid to.” The conversation made such an impression on Field that he noted it in his diary. Some weeks later he talked the matter over with his old Harvard classmate and partner, H. LaRue Brown. Brown, a Kentuckian whose liberalism had become in Boston almost a second career, knew all about the Sacco-Vanzetti case through his connection with the New England Civil Liberties Committee. He relayed the conversation to Thompson.

Thompson felt that this story—if it could be confirmed—would shatter the prosecution’s case. But whether Captain Proctor would be as frank with a defense lawyer as he had been on that casual ride to Swampscott was doubtful. However, when Thompson visited him at the State House, Proctor was surprisingly open. He admitted that before he testified in Dedham Katzmann and Williams had repeatedly asked him if Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, and each time he told them he had found no convincing evidence in the tests. The captain was obviously distressed in this interview with Thompson, his mind haunted by the role he had played at Dedham. When Thompson asked him if he would sign an affidavit, he at once agreed.

In the affidavit, dated October 20, 1923, he stated that

at the trial the District Attorney did not ask me whether I had found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet passed through Sacco’s pistol, nor was I asked that question on cross-examination. The District Attorney desired to ask me that question, but I had repeatedly told him that if he did I should be obliged to answer in the negative.... Bullet Number III, in my judgment, passed through some Colt automatic pistol, but I do not intend to imply that I had found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet had passed through this particular Colt automatic pistol and the District Attorney well knew that I did not so intend and framed his question accordingly. Had I been asked the direct question: whether I had found any affirmative evidence whatever that this so-called mortal bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative.

Although this affidavit stood as an entity in itself, Thompson filed it as a subsection of the Hamilton motion. In a counteraffidavit, Katzmann swore that he had not “repeatedly” asked Proctor “whether he had found any evidence that the mortal bullet had passed through the Sacco pistol,” but he did not deny having asked the question, nor did he deny Proctor’s answer. Proctor died in March 1924, before Judge Thayer could rule on any of the supplementary motions.

Early in September 1923 Thompson had picked up a story about Ripley, the jury foreman, that he considered important enough, even though it was hearsay, to include in the first motion. William Daley, a Quincy contractor who said he had known Ripley intimately for thirty-eight years, willingly signed an affidavit about an occurrence at the Adams railroad station during the last week of May 1921. Daley had met Ripley on the platform there while waiting for a train, and Ripley had told him that he was going away for a couple of weeks to be a juror in the case of the two South Braintree Guineas.

Daley said he did not believe the Guineas were guilty, and that it was not reasonable to suppose a man would go and rob a factory where he had worked and was well known, and in broad daylight.

“Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!” Ripley had replied.

Of course there could be no corroboration of Daley’s statement, for Ripley had been dead now for over two years.

On October 1 Thompson, Hill, Moore, and the McAnarney brothers appeared in an almost empty courtroom to argue the supplementary motions. Again the defendants were brought in and placed in the cage. Sacco was still tanned from his outdoor work at the Bridgewater hospital. Vanzetti looked waxen, his eyes more deeply sunk than ever. Rosina was there with Ines, as was the indefatigable Mrs. Evans. Ines had on a pink dress and bonnet, and both defendants’ faces lighted up as Sacco held her for a moment in the cage. When Rosina started to walk away toward Mrs. Evans, Ines became frightened at being left alone with two strangers. She howled until her mother took her away.

Judge Thayer’s step lacked none of its briskness as he strode into the room, and his face had lost none of its masklike quality, even though this prolonged case impinged on him now like a recurring bad dream. “There seems to be no justification or excuse for the delays in filing affidavits,” he announced in pettish protest. “The court has several times set dates for the completion of filing affidavits on both sides. Apparently no attention has been paid to these orders.”

When the report that Sacco was not insane was read to the court, Sacco smiled ironically. Thompson, his self-assurance unruffled, urbanely at home where Moore had appeared the bumptious stranger, nevertheless seemed to feel it necessary to explain his presence in the radical galley. “It is supposed that these defendants have radical opinions,” he announced, in opening the argument for the Ripley motion. “Mr. Hill and I do not hold such opinions,” he went on, refraining from glancing at Moore, “and we are not here supporting such opinions. I think I shall be believed also when I say that we are not here for pecuniary reasons. We think we are rendering humble service to the institutions of law and order by coming here to argue that an error has been committed.

“I have no reason to believe that either one of these two defendants has ever endeavored by threats or in any other improper way to obtain undue influence in the court. Some of their enthusiastic friends may have done so, but this fact ought not to weigh against the defendants.

“That’s why Mr. Hill and I are here,” he concluded. “It’s because some of our friends have talked in the way Daley says Ripley talked.”

Thompson then spent the morning arguing the Ripley motion. In the afternoon Hill took over. “From the time I had been in the courtroom fifteen minutes,” he later told the Lowell Committee, “and had my first talk with the judge I did not have any doubt as to what the result of the case would be, independent of its actual merit, and that was not because I felt that there was anybody who was consciously trying to do wrong, but I thought everybody connected with the case had got themselves into a state of mind, a mental condition where reason had practically ceased to operate and prejudice and emotion had taken its place.”

The session saw a prolonged altercation between Judge Thayer and the usually quiet-spoken Thomas McAnarney.

“I understand Your Honor to say that after a night of discussion we decided not to open up the issue of radicalism,” Judge McAnarney challenged Judge Thayer, his voice hard. “That is not so.”

“It is so,” Thayer announced bluntly, a tawnier shade creeping into his parchment cheeks.

McAnarney struck back. “All I ever said to my client was to tell the truth and tell all the truth at all times. It didn’t take me five minutes to decide that.” He turned away from the bench and walked toward his chair, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

Thayer’s voice pursued him. “Mr. McAnarney! Three times you opened up this subject, and three times it was stricken out.”

McAnarney’s voice trembled a little. “Three times it had to be opened up. There was no safe course for the defendants to pursue excepting to tell the truth and all the truth.”

“I know what took place here,” Thayer insisted.

At the end of the session he reluctantly postponed the hearing until October 25 to allow both sides to file additional affidavits. On that day the Andrews and Pelser affidavits and counteraffidavits were read. The next day Moore took over with his old vitality and argued all day on the Goodridge motion, insisting again and again that the district attorney had intimidated the man and shaped his evidence by the threat of revoking his Massachusetts probation.

Judge Thayer was once more living at the University Club. Each morning he and a group of reporters took the same train from the Back Bay Station. Among them was a pretty young woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Bernkopf, from the International News Service, to whom the senescent but still gallant judge took a particular fancy. At first he merely waited until she had taken her place in the car and then asked if he might sit with her. Later he took to joining her on the platform before the train arrived.

Sitting beside her in the train, he would unburden himself of his incubus case while she kept inviolably silent. As the city slums receded, replaced beyond Forest Hills by the trim rectangles of the suburbs and the autumn outline of Great Blue Hill, he talked on and on, boasting that he “could not be intimidated by anybody or anything.” The defense “would find that they could not hoodwink him.” He represented the integrity of the courts of Massachusetts, he told her, and he was going to maintain that integrity.

One morning Judge Thayer gave Mrs. Bernkopf his autographed picture. Occasionally she would get a knowing look from the other reporters as they passed down the aisle. The judge said he had long been put out by the kind of people who were supporting the defense, but what really stirred him so that even the recollection stepped up his pulse was “that long-haired anarchist lawyer from California.” The old man would lean forward confidentially, assuring the young woman that if Moore thought he could outwit the courts of Massachusetts he had another think coming. Maybe Moore could play that game successfully in California, but those tricks and threats just would not work in Dedham. He, Judge Thayer, was not going to be imposed on!

As the train pulled into the Dedham Station, Thayer with avuncular gallantry would guide Mrs. Bernkopf’s elbow down the aisle, tip his hat to her on the platform, and say that he hoped he would have the pleasure of her company again. Three years later she recorded the substance of his conversations in an affidavit.

The hearings seemed to fall into the pattern of being argued for a day and postponed for a week. Not until November 8 were they concluded. When Thompson argued the Hamilton-Proctor motion and mentioned the police captain, sparks flew between him and District Attorney Harold Williams.[14] The district attorney insinuated that the reason Proctor had turned on the Commonwealth was that Katzmann had refused to approve his claim of five hundred dollars for his expert testimony, although it had later been approved by the court and paid.

“I don’t want to make this a personal matter,” Thompson reminded Williams after the gust of angry words had died down. “I don’t want to go off on an attack upon any person. But here are these men, assured by the State of fair treatment here if nowhere else—and then a prearranged question and answer made to appear the exact opposite of what the witness really thought.”

“Are you sure there was a prearranged question?” Thayer interrupted.

“They knew and don’t deny it that Captain Proctor didn’t believe that bullet went through that gun,” Thompson replied. In a passionate summing up he asked Thayer if the court could really say that Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial in the face of the failure of the government attorneys to bring out Proctor’s real opinion.

Toward the close of the hearing Thompson reserved the right to be heard in a request to fire one hundred cartridges through Sacco’s pistol with a view of making further ballistic comparisons. At this point there began one of the equivocal episodes in the post-trial proceedings. Dr. Hamilton appeared with two new 32-caliber Colt automatics and offered to compare them with Sacco’s pistol. Before Judge Thayer and the lawyers for both sides he disassembled all three pistols and placed the parts in three piles on a table. Then, picking up various parts one by one, he explained their function and pointed out their interchangeability. After reassembling the pistols, he slipped his two in his pocket and handed Sacco’s to the assistant clerk. Hill and Thompson were already leaving the courtroom when Hamilton started after them. “Just a minute, gentlemen!” Thayer called out as they reached the door.

Years afterward, not long before his death, Thayer related the sequel to Captain Van Amburgh: “They stopped, turned and looked at me. I said, ‘Come here, Mr. Hamilton.’ Hamilton advanced towards me. I said: ‘Hand me your pistols.’ He did so and I said: ‘They shall be impounded.’ I don’t know why I impounded those pistols. It merely seemed like the proper and thorough thing to do. I have thanked God many times since that I did so. And then the astounding discovery made later that the original barrel in the Sacco pistol was missing and an entirely different barrel substituted for it!”

On November 2, at Judge Thayer’s request, District Attorney Williams borrowed from Van Amburgh a plug gauge, a device for measuring the diameter of a gun barrel. He found Sacco’s pistol barrel to measure .3045 inches. Hamilton’s measurement had given the diameter as .2924 inches, but Williams thought little of the discrepancy since he himself had never seen a plug gauge before and felt he might easily have made a mistake. However, when Hamilton, on December 4, in the presence of the clerk of court, checked Sacco’s pistol with the gauge, he confirmed Williams’ measurement. Hamilton now observed that the fouled rusty barrel was shiny and, according to his later testimony in a special hearing before Judge Thayer, his first thought was that the court had been cleaning it. “I could not conceive in my mind why you would do it,” he told Thayer, “but I said to myself no one else could have done it.... I immediately dispelled it because I said, no court would alter an exhibit.”

Whatever Hamilton’s opinion of the altered condition of the barrel and the variations in his first and second measurements, he afterward maintained that when he examined Sacco’s automatic on December 4 it never occurred to him that the barrel was anything but the original.

Acting on Thompson’s request to make fresh firing tests, Judge Thayer on February 11 called in Van Amburgh to inspect Sacco’s Colt and determine its condition. With the district attorney present, Van Amburgh took the gun from the clerk of court and prepared to disassemble it. No sooner had he drawn back the slide than he saw that the barrel was not the barrel he had last examined. It looked brand-new. There was even a film of cosmoline on it.

“Someone has switched barrels,” he at once told Williams.

The two hurried to Judge Thayer. Thayer, after listening to them, announced that he would hold an investigation.

Two days later he began hearings in his chambers with only Moore, Williams, Hamilton, Van Amburgh, and a stenographer present. Press and public were barred, unaware even that such hearings were taking place. They lasted just over three weeks. At the opening Clerk Worthington brought in the three pistols. The briefest examination made it clear to everyone that Sacco’s Colt had acquired a new barrel. Hamilton, not at all abashed that every finger seemed to point to him, admitted that the new barrel must have come from one of his pistols, but insisted that he had not made the switch. In his opinion this had been done by someone connected with the prosecution. After examining the fouled barrel in one of his own new guns under a microscope, Hamilton stated that he was unqualifiedly of the opinion it was not the Sacco barrel.

Williams accused Hamilton of working the substitution with the idea of later making the discovery himself so that he could then demand a new trial. Repetitious and acrimonious, the arguments went on each day until five o’clock, but no one in the closed chambers had any real doubt as to who had switched the barrels. Even Moore, arguing bravely that this was more dirty work on the part of the district attorney’s staff, knew that Hamilton’s deft fingers had done it.

At the conclusion of the hearings Thayer reserved judgment as to who had made the substitution and whether or not it had been accidental. He ruled merely that the barrel in the new pistol had come from Sacco’s Colt and he ordered the fouled barrel replaced and the three pistols delivered into the clerk’s custody “without prejudice to either side.” The prejudice, however, was not so easily obliterated. Hamilton’s chicanery had undermined his value as a witness, past or future. Although he was to continue his association with the defense almost to the end, he would prove only a detriment—expensive, untrustworthy, and untrusted.

Almost at the very time Hamilton was discrediting himself in Dedham, Van Amburgh, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was demolishing his own ethical and technical reputation in the Harold Israel case. Israel was a young ex-soldier of small intelligence who had been charged with the murder of Father Hubert Dahme, pastor of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. On the evening of February 4, 1924, Father Dahme was strolling along Bridgeport’s Main Street when a man approached him from the rear, placed the muzzle of a revolver close to his head, and fired. Several witnesses saw the murderer run from the scene.

A week later the police of Norwalk, a dozen miles away, picked up a man who was wandering the streets at midnight in a suspicious manner. He was found to have a 32-caliber revolver in his pocket with four of the five chambers loaded and the other empty. He said his name was Harold Israel, that he had just come from Bridgeport, and that he was on his way to see his father in Philadelphia. Next morning he was given thirty days in the Bridgeport county jail for carrying a concealed weapon. Once there he was interrogated about the priest’s death, and several witnesses of the shooting were brought in to look him over.

The crucial evidence against Israel was the 32-caliber bullet removed from Father Dahme’s brain. Captain Van Amburgh, called in from the Remington Company, compared it with a test bullet fired through Israel’s gun and announced that both had been fired from the same weapon. This he said he had determined not only by his measurements but by the similarity of the bullets after he had made a strip photograph of each and superimposed one upon the other.

After a prolonged interrogation, Israel tangled himself in a web of conflicting statements and confessed that he had killed Father Dahme. When a detective asked what had become of the cartridge of the mortal bullet, Israel said it was in the toilet of his boarding house. The police found it there. With this evidence added to the confession, Israel’s trial and conviction seemed only a formality.

Homer S. Cummings, later Attorney General of the United States and then state’s attorney for Fairfield County, at first had no doubt of Israel’s guilt but gradually noticed flaws in the state’s case. First of all, Israel soon repudiated his confession, claiming that when he made it he had been questioned for so long that he was willing to confess anything to get a rest. Then Cummings discovered that after the police had left the boarding house, the landlady had found still another empty cartridge in the toilet. Both shells had been exploded by a dull firing pin. The pin of Israel’s revolver was sharp, and it turned out that a friend of his had sharpened it at his shop several weeks before the murder.

Cummings now spent some time with Van Amburgh examining the strip photographs of the bullets. As he testified at the preliminary hearing, Van Amburgh, in order to develop his argument, cut a slit in the photograph of the Dahme bullet. “Then,” said Cummings, “he inserts through that slit the strip picture of the recovered bullet, and pushing this up and down, finally reaches a place where he says the lines coincide. Well, I worked at that for two hours one day, and yesterday, in the presence of Captain Van Amburgh worked on it for more than an hour. It took Captain Van Amburgh fifteen minutes to find the point of juncture himself—well, say five minutes, it will be more conservative. Then a peculiar thing developed. I called his attention to it, and he had absolutely, so far as I could see, no answer to it. I asked him to put the photographs in the position which he claimed demonstrated his point, and he got them into that position. Then I said, ‘Now, lift up the flap and look and see what is under it,’ and I thought, somewhat reluctantly, the flap was lifted and on the under picture we saw a scene totally different from that which we saw on the upper picture. I asked him whether it was not perfectly logical to assume that if the two pictures had been superimposed—that is, if the other picture was transparent and placed over the other—that there ought not to be a continuous similarity in the surface appearance. He admitted that was logical, and I never could get a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy.”

Cummings turned over the bullets and the photographs to five other experts from the Remington Company plus another from the New York Police Department. Their unanimous opinion was that there was no continuous similarity, that the mortal bullet had perceptible land and groove marks lacking in the test bullets, and that it could not have been fired through Israel’s gun. Following this testimony, Israel was released.

Van Amburgh’s Connecticut record apparently did not follow him north, for not long afterward he was appointed head of the newly formed ballistics laboratory of the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety.

Thompson had a way of striding into a courtroom with a confident ring of leather heels, as if he were taking over command on a parade square. That was how he struck Moore during the arguments on the supplementary motions. Moore, underneath his class-angled exterior, retained a sensitive—at times almost a sentimental—nature. He was hurt by being thrust aside by this corporation lawyer and by the supercilious Hill, who, even as he prided himself on doing his duty to his native state by defending two unpopular radicals, could remark “I do not like these people.”

In fact, Moore felt put upon. From his arrival in Boston he had transformed the case. At least a third of the defense money had come from sources he had tapped. He had brought in the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Labor Defense, the phalanx of Back Bay women headed by Mrs. Evans. Thanks to him the Cincinnati convention of the American Federation of Labor had passed a resolution demanding a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, “convicted by a biased jury under the instructions of a prejudiced judge.” And before the convention the delegates had never heard of the two Italians! At the next convention he would take care that they passed a stronger resolution. These things were his doing. If he had not managed to free the two men, he had at least managed to keep them alive for almost three years. He had brought them visitors, arranged for their English lessons, and encouraged them by letters and by visits, disregarding and excusing Sacco’s latent hostility. The reward for his efforts had been the sullen suspicions of the doctrinaire anarchists. They were always a problem to him. “The practical difficulty with such men as Felicani, Lopez and some of the others,” he complained in a letter, “is not that they do not want to help, but that in many cases they do not know how to help. They are not affiliated with either the American organized labor nor with the Italian labor movement.”

To Moore the Defense Committee seemed to have become more and more impotent. For lack of funds he had had to give up his Pemberton Square office and work from the crowded confusion of Rollins Place. He, who liked good clothes, was now too hard up to buy a suit off the gaspipe racks at Raymond’s. His cuffs had frayed, the seat of his trousers showed patches. If he was to continue with the case, his case—nd the “if” was beginning to take shape in his mind—he did not want to have his efforts diverted any longer by fund-raising and publicity and stubborn anarchists. Now was the time for him to bring his own friends together—those he had personally interested in the fate of the two obscure Italians—in a common unimpeded effort.

Early in April 1924, Moore arranged a meeting at Tremont Temple to organize the New Trial League, with the support of Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Anna Hallowell Davis (who directed the Garland Fund’s legal assistance for radicals), John Van Vaerenewyck of the Cigar Makers’ Union, and Alice Stone Blackwell. Alice Blackwell, who was to become Vanzetti’s most frequent and voluminous correspondent, whom he would address as Comrade, was the daughter of Lucy Stone, the pioneer women’s-rights crusader. Old beyond her sixty-seven years, wrinkled and determined, she followed in the tradition of the previous century’s indomitable female eccentrics. She belonged to the International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women’s Municipal League, and would later lend her name to the Communist-directed International Labor Defense. A member of the belligerently liberal Twentieth Century Club, she used to carry her lunch there in a brown paper bag and eat it in the library, holding the bag close to her face to avoid spilling any crumbs. It was understood that she was to nap undisturbed in a corner afterward.

Moore chose to remain in the background of the new organization. John Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee was appointed treasurer. Professor Guadagni, Albert Carpenter, and Harry Canter, secretary of the Communist Party of Boston, accepted appointment on the editorial board. The board got out its one bulletin in May and published a pamphlet containing Eugene Lyons’ translation of Vanzetti’s “The Story of a Proletarian Life.”

From the New Trial League’s office Moore proceeded to raise money and make plans independently of the Defense Committee. Felicani questioned Moore’s judgment rather than his honesty, but other members of the Defense Committee were unyielding in their resentment of this independent step. Lola Darroch, no doubt glad to escape the ambivalences of Rollins Place, went to New York to raise funds. Much to the resentment of the anarchists, more money began to flow into the New Trial League’s Tremont Street office than to the Hanover Street headquarters. But the league was only an expedient, without roots. Even the conciliatory Felicani realized the impossibility of the dual situation. Scarcely had the league been formed than it began to disintegrate. With the intransigent Lopez gone—he had been deported at last in February 1924—Codman and Mrs. Evans were willing to discuss merging with the committee. Only Moore remained purblind in his good intentions.

Since his return to the Dedham jail Sacco had grown increasingly bitter, and though his sanity was no longer in question he became so dominated by feelings of resentment and persecution that he refused to see Mrs. Evans and his other American visitors. He even turned his back on Mrs. Jack, who had been coming weekly during the winter to give him English lessons. Vanzetti, in Charlestown, was much distressed by the news and sent Mrs. Jack a letter of apology assuring her that Sacco’s action was caused not by “adverse feelings, sentiments or thought” but by his misfortune. “And, oh, how worth of sympathy and forgiveness the poor Nick is, even in his herrors,” he wrote commiseratingly.

Sacco found the ultimate outlet to his anger in Moore and the New Trial League. The latter had sent him several pamphlets and flyers from the new organization. Reading them, Sacco—as on that July day in court three years before—erupted. He had never liked the Westerner, but this was the last straw. On August 18 he spent the afternoon in his cell penning a letter that was a distillation of his bitterness.

Sir:—Saturday I received your letter with enclose the post card that Mrs. Mateola Robbins sent to me—and the little pamphlet that you use to send to me it just to insult my soul. Yes, it is true, because you would not forget when you came here two or three times between last month with a groups people—that you know that I did not like to see them any more; but you broad them just seem to make my soul feel just sad as it could be. And I can see how clever and cynic you are, because after all my protest, after I have been chase you and all yours philanthropist Friends, you are still continue the infamous speculation on the shoulder of Sacco-Vanzetti case. So this morning before these things going any more long, I thought to send you these few line to advise you and all yours philanthropist Friends of the “New Trial League Committee” not to print any more these letters with my picture and name on, and to be sure to take my name out if they should print any more of these little pamphlets, because you and yours philanthropist has been use it from last three years like a instrument of infamous speculation. It is Sim thing to carry any man insane or tuberculous when I thing that after all my protest to have my case finish you and all yours legione of friends still play the infame game. But, I would like to know if yours all are the boss of my life! I would like to know who his this men that ar abuse to take all the authority to do every thing that he does feel like without my responsiblity, and carry my case always more long, against all my wish. I would like to know who his this—generous—man!! Mr.—Moore—! I am telling you that you goin to stop this dirty game! Your heare me? I mean every them word I said here, because I do not want have anything to do any more with “New Trail League Committee,” because it does repugnant my coscience.

Maney time you have been deluder and abuse on weakness of my comrades good faith, but I want you to stop no and if you please get out of my case, because you know that you are the obstacle of the case; and say! I been told you that from last May twenty fifth—that was the last time you came see me, and with you came comrade Felicani and the Proffess Guadagni. Do you remember? Well, from that day I told you to get out of my case, and you promised me that you was goin to get out, but my—dear—Mr. Moore! I see that you are still in my case, and you are still continued to play your famous gam. Of course it is pretty hard to refuse a such sweet pay that as been come to you right long—in—this big—game. It is no true what I said? If it is not the truth, why did you not finish my case then? Another word, if this was not the truth you would quit this job for long time. It has been past one year last June when you and Mr. Grilla from New York came to see me into Bridgewater Hospital and that day between you and I we had another fight—and you will remember when I told you this Mr. Moore! I want you to finish my case and I do not want to have anything to do with this politics in my case because it does repugnant my conscience—and you answer to me was this: Nick, if you don’t want, Vanzetti does want! Do you remember when you said that? Well, do you think I believe you when you said that to me? No, because I know that you are the one that brings in always in these mud in Sacco-Vanzetti case. Otherwise, how I could believe you when you been deluder me maney times with your false promise? Well—I anyhow, wherever you do if you do not intent to get out of my case, remember this, that per September I want my case finish. But remember that we are right near September now and I don’t see anything and any move yet. So tell me please, why you waiting now for? Do you wait till I hang myself. That’s what you wish? Lett me tai you right now don’t be illuse yourself because I would not be suprise if somebody will find you some morning hang on lamp-post.

Your implacable enemy, now and forever,
Nick Sacco

How hurt Moore was by this he showed only indirectly in the courtesy of his reply:

Dear Mr. Sacco

Enclosed you will find a copy of my Withdrawal as your counsel, filed today.

I wish you every possible success in your battle for justice.

Very truly, yours,
Fred. H. Moore

Although Moore continued officially as counsel until November, he took no further part in the defense. On November 8 he left Boston for good in the old Dodge touring car that was his sole permanent acquisition from the case, alone, in his frayed suit and cracked boots, and with three hundred borrowed dollars in his pocket. His immediate wish was to get back to California, to that land of brighter sunshine and wider horizons, three thousand good miles away from the mongrel English city where even the anarchists seemed affected by the constrictions of the Puritan heritage. Stacked behind him in the Dodge were several dozen packages of little tin signs, for attaching to rear license plates, that read: IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU’RE TOO DAMN CLOSE. By selling these at filling stations and garages he hoped to cover his expenses on the way back.

As he drove down the slum side of Beacon Hill on a lowering afternoon with the taste of winter in the air, he could see the obelisk of the Bunker Hill Monument and squat beyond it the granite pile of the prison that held Vanzetti. “Chill and dreary, the three-hilled city of the Puritans,” Francis Parkman had described an earlier Boston. For Moore it was the dreary three-hilled city of his failure. He had failed as a lawyer, as a propagandist, as a husband, as a man, even as a money-changer. Most of all, he had failed himself. For his last glimpse of Boston left him with the racking uncertainty of his own cause, the nebulous doubt that would feed on disappointment until he could reveal to his friend Upton Sinclair three years later that he no longer believed in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Sinclair was aghast. A quarter of a century later he recorded his conversation with Moore:

I questioned Fred for many hours, deep into the night. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists, and Fred told me that some of the anarchists were then raising funds for their movement by robbery. It was strictly honest from the group’s point of view—that is to say, they kept none of the money for themselves.... I pressed him with questions: “Did Sacco or Vanzetti ever admit to you by the slightest hint that they were guilty?” He answered, “No.” I asked him: “Did any of their friends ever admit it?” Again he answered, “No.”... I went home with my mind in confusion. The first person I went to see was Fred’s former wife, who had divorced him and was employed in Hollywood. Lola Moore said, “I am astounded that Fred should have made such a statement. I worked on the case with him all through the years, and I knew about it as intimately as he did. He never gave me a hint of such an idea, and neither did anyone else. I feel Fred is embittered because he was dropped from the case, and it has poisoned his mind.”

Where Sacco’s sense of outrage at being imprisoned so permeated him that it could at times cloud his mind, Vanzetti endured his imprisonment in Charlestown with a stoic objectivity. Sacco saw himself as the predestined victim of a predatory class; Vanzetti remained hopeful, willing to admit that he might be wrong in his judgments. His relations with Moore remained amiable, even though he instinctively had more confidence in the caste-formed Thompson than in the class-conscious Westerner.

Yet, although his studious celibate nature was more adaptable to constraint, in his own way he found jail as constraining as did Sacco. He, too, would face a period when his mind failed him. Unlike Sacco, he had never experienced an emotional outlet in his work. Sacco was the good shoe-worker, he the poor fish peddler. It was not a garden or a wife or the starting hum of a factory at eight in the morning that he missed, but the days of sun and wind when he ambled along the lanes of Plymouth with his cart, the salt odor of the flats where he dug clams.

To Mrs. Evans he expressed his longing for the earth in phrases that suggest Whitman:

O the blissing green of the wilderness and of the open land—O the blue vastness of the Oceans—the fragrances of the flowers and the sweetness of the fruits—The sky reflecting lakes—the singing turrents—the telling brooks—O the valleys, the hills—the awful Alps! O the mistic dawn—the roses of the Aurora, the glory of the moon—O the sunset—the twilight—O the supreme extasies and mistery of the starry nights, heavenly creature of the eternity.

Yes, Yes, all this is real actuallity but not to us, not to us chained—and just and simple because we, being chained, have not the freedom to use our natural faculty of locomotion to carry us from our cells to the open orizon—under the Sun at daytime—under the visible stars, at night.

During his first year in Charlestown, preoccupied with the approaching Dedham trial and learning to accustom himself to the regimen of prison life, Vanzetti came for the first time in his thirteen years in the United States to know Americans—the various assorted liberals and radicals whose interests and emotions drew them to the case. Moore, through his contacts with the New England Civil Liberties Committee, had brought Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and a number of other Back Bay women as visitors to Charlestown. With Vanzetti, if not so directly as with Sacco, they developed a maternal relationship as engrossing to them as to him. He for the first time in his life discovered people with whom he could share his profounder feelings.

The week after the Dedham trial, writing to Mrs. Evans, he composed his first letter in English, struggling with the language.

I was just thinking what I would do for past the long days jail. I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you write something now? It will be useful to you now when you will be free. Just at that time I received your letter.

Tank to you from the bottom of my earth for your confidence in my innocence; I am so. I did not splittel a drop of blood, or still a cent in all my life. A little knowlege of the past; a sorrowful experience of the life itself had given to me some ideas very different from those of many other umane beings. But I wish to convince my fellow men that only with virtue and honesty is possible for us to find a little happyness in this world. I preached; I worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social whealth should belong to every umane cretures, so well as it was the fruit of the work of all. But this do not mean robbery for insurrection.

During his prison years Vanzetti studied English with Mrs. Virginia MacMechan, a friend of Mrs. Jack. About his uneven progress he could write wryly to Mrs. Evans, “One Friend tells me that my English is not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why not say horrible?” Vanzetti always had this capacity for laughing at himself, for seeing the humorous side of even the jail world—a quality lacking in Sacco. His difficulties in English, as he explained, did not come from the big words derived from Latin and Greek and familiar to Italian, but from the tricky monosyllables of Nordic origin. In the solitude of Charlestown he felt the renewed lust for learning that had enveloped him so long ago when he had read Dante, Renan, and Malatesta in his squalid room by the flickering gaslight until the stars faded. Now, however, he would read Longfellow and Franklin and Paine and Jefferson. By 1923 he was reading James Harvey Robinson’s The Mind in the Making; William James’ Psychology; books by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair; and such periodicals as the Survey Graphic, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Daily Worker. He felt himself carried away by a Faustian longing to know mathematics, physics, history.

For all its galling restraints, imprisonment was to provide the key that would unlock his personality. His tragedy was to be, as he said himself, his triumph. Earlier than Sacco he sensed that the two of them had become symbols such as Moore had foreseen at the very beginning. The week before the Dedham trial he had written to Alice Blackwell:

What has been done for us by the people of the world, the laborers (I mean workers) and the greatest minds and hearts proves beyond any possible doubt that a new conception of justice is planing its way in the soul of mankind: a justice centered on man as man. For as I have already said, you, they are doing for us what once could only have been done for saints and kings.

Somehow in the years at Charlestown, Vanzetti—the misfit, the wanderer—became the master of language. Even in his early fumblings with grammar he was always eloquent. As early as December 1921, after a brief glimpse of the close-ranged Roxbury streets on the way to his Dedham hearing he could write: “O, funny, humble, old, little houses that I love; little house always big enough for the greatest loves, and most saint affects.”

In his letters, in his speech to the court, one can trace the developing cadences of English, the tone-giving rhythm of the Anglo-Saxon that runs below the surface of the modern tongue. This moving eloquence—where did it come from? It was as if the man grew as his prospect of life shortened. After raging to Alice Blackwell against those he considered his persecutors, he could apologize in his next letter: “I am yet man enough to look streight in to the eyes, the black gastly reality and the tragedy of my life.”

As he came face to face with that reality, he had no room for accretions and superficialities. What was left to him was acceptance. “I neither boast nor exalt, nor pity myself,” he wrote Mrs. MacMechan. “I followed my call, I have my conscience serene.” He understood that the most one could hope for was “the little knowledge of the enormous mystery surrounding us and from which we sprang.” His freedom taken from him, he became a free man.

Anarchism remained the core of his beliefs: a vision of the peaceable kingdom where the wolves and the lambs of the industrial world would attain their ultimate reconciliation. “Oh, friend,” he wrote to his teacher, “the anarchism is as beauty as a women for me, perhaps even more since it include all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene, honest, natural, vivid, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic, fearless, fatal, generous and implacable—all these and more it is.” He defined the anarchist’s creed as

All what is help to me without hurt the others is good; all what help the others without hurting me is good also, all the rest is evil. He look for his liberty in the liberty of all, for his happiness in the happiness of all, for his welfare in the universal welfare.

If the golden age could only come about through violence, he would accept violence—though with deep personal regret:

I would my blood to prevent the sheeding of blood, but neither the abyss nor the heaven’s, have a law who condamns the self-defence.... The champion of life and of the liberty should not yield before the death.

Sacco’s nature had a darker turbulence. The now obsolete term anarchist-communist would have applied to him as it would never have applied to Vanzetti. Anarchist though he called himself, he saw life in terms of the Marxist class struggle, in which “as long as this sistem of things, the exploitation of man on other man reign, will remain always the fight between those two opposite class.” Unlike Vanzetti, he did not concern himself with anarchism as the rejection of government, but with the immediacy of conflict. In a dream he had at Dedham he described how he found himself in the middle of a strike in a Pennsylvania mining town and how soldiers with guns and bayonets came to put it down:

And so the fite it was to beginning, and while the fite was begin I jump upon a little hill in meddle of the crowd and I begin to say, Friend and comrade and brotherhood, now one of us as going to move a step, and who will try to move it will be vile and coward, here the fite as go to finish. So I turn over towards to the soldiers and I said, Brothers you will not fire on your own brothers just because their tell you to fire, no brothers remember that everyone of us we have mother and child, and you know that we fite for freedom wich is your freedom. We want one of the fatherland, one sole, one house, and better bread. So while I was finish to say that last work one of the soldiers fire towards me and the ball past throught my heart, and while I was fall on ground with my right hand close to my heart I awake up with sweet dream!

On a secondary level the dream was Sacco’s acceptance of his execution, which he saw as predetermined, inevitable. Vanzetti, on the other hand, was optimistic until almost the end. Even Webster Thayer, in whom all the forces inimical to him and to Sacco seemed concentrated, he could view with the dispassionateness of his note to the Brinis just after the arguments on the supplementary motions: “I dislike to vilify humane being and would be more than glad, happy—if he by one just act, would comples me to change my opinion—but there are no reasons till now.”

A few months later, discouraged from any such fugitive hopes, Vanzetti reverted to a more somber picture of the judge:

I have never expected, nor I expect from him other than some then thousand volts divided in a few times; some meters of cheap bord and 4 x 7 x 8 feet hol in the ground.

No matter how much of sympathy I try to bestow upon him, or with how much of understanding I try to judge his actions; I only and alone can see him a self-conceit nerroved mind little tyrent, beliving himself to be just, and beliving his utterly unjust and unnecessary social office to be a necessity and a good. He is a bigot and, therefore, cruel. At the time of our arrest and trials, his peers were sawing red all around, and he was sawing more red than his peers.

Nineteen twenty-four was the year of indecision when, after Hamilton’s discomfiture over the pistol barrels, the legal clockwork seemed to have run down, when Judge Thayer—who alone might have rewound it—was again ailing, when no one could even guess the date of his decisions on the supplementary motions. Vanzetti, at the time Sacco was turning his back on visitors, became so frustrated by the suspense that for a while he considered going on a hunger strike. “I am tired—tired—tired!” he wrote early in the autumn. “I asked if to live like now for love of life is not, rather than wisdom or heroism, mere cowardness.”

From July until September the courts closed for the long recess. In the yard of the Dedham jail during the exercise period the prisoners hung about languidly under the shadow of the wall. At Charlestown the sun beating down on the slate roofs set the air smoldering. In such weather the excremental smell of drains seemed to ooze from the very stones of the old building. Vanzetti noted that it must be equally fetid in the narrow streets of the North End.

Those who could get away fled the heat. Judge Thayer had gone to his cottage at Falmouth, on Cape Cod where, with the breeze cutting in from across Buzzards Bay, he spent the mornings working on his decisions on the five supplementary motions. The close of summer did not see his task at an end. Not until the first of October did he at last file his findings in the clerk’s office at Dedham.

The news flashed across the Boston papers in blacker headlines than any that had appeared since the conviction. Thayer had denied all five motions!

With regard to the Ripley motion Thayer found “that said Ripley brought with him innocently and thoughtlessly the said three cartridges ... that whatever Ripley said or did in relation to said three cartridges, he never intended to prejudice in any manner the rights of the defendants.” Hamilton had made an affidavit claiming that the Ripley shells showed signs of having been pushed into Vanzetti’s revolver. Thayer pointed out that the other jurors had sworn that Ripley had not exhibited the bullets in the jury room, and there would have been no other opportunity. He considered that any comparison Ripley made between his own cartridges and the exhibits must have been a mental one, since, although jurors had seen the Ripley bullets in the dormitory downstairs, no one had seen them elsewhere.

The basic claim of the defense was that there had been an improper exhibit in the jury room. Certainly Ripley’s three bullets were improperly, if accidentally, there. But Thayer’s finding seems reasonable: “The mere production of the Ripley cartridges and the talk or discussion about them did not create such disturbing or prejudicial influence that might in any way affect the verdict.

“At any rate,” he concluded, in one of the rhetorical flourishes of which he was so proud, “I am not willing to blacken the memory of Mr. Ripley and to pronounce those eleven surviving jurors as falsifiers under oath by claims of counsel that are so weak, so fragile, and so unsatisfactory. If this motion for a new trial based upon hearsay statements made by a deceased juror to a counsel for the defendants under such circumstances as are herein disclosed [were granted], it would result in smirching the honor, integrity, and good name of twelve honorable jurors, by a decision that never could be justified by the simplest rules of sound judgment, reason, truth, and common sense.”

As for Daley’s affidavit charging Ripley with the remark, “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!” Thayer ruled that he “was not bound to believe him,” nor was he “required to give the reasons for his action. Furthermore, before being sworn as a juror, it must be assumed that Ripley had answered in the negative ... whether he had expressed or formed an opinion or was sensible of any bias or prejudice.” Even if Daley had no reason for lying, it was still hearsay evidence—and Ripley was long since dead.

In denying the second motion Thayer expressed doubt that the itinerant Gould could “have carried a correct mental photograph in his mind of Sacco for practically eighteen months, when he had only a glance in which to take this photograph on the day of the murder.” Gould, however, had merely claimed that the man who had put a bullet through his lapel, the man he had seen in that frozen instant of terror when the gun flashed in his face, was not the stocky Italian he had seen eighteen months later in the Dedham jail.

Thayer held that Gould was just one more witness in the crowd, and that his evidence, if presented, would have had no effect on the jury—“For the evidence that convicted these men was circumstantial and was evidence that is known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt.’” For a dozen pages Thayer continued this theme with variations, coming back again to the question of whether the defendants had lied because of their consciousness of being radicals or their consciousness of being murderers. This, Thayer maintained, was a matter of fact that had been settled once and for all by the jurors. In passing, he could not resist an aside at those bothersome dissenters “who ever stand ready, through sympathy, prejudice, or some other unaccountable reason, to criticize and assail the verdicts of juries when, in fact, they never have heard a single word of evidence, nor observed a single witness on the stand.”

As far as Louis Pelser was concerned, he had admittedly been drinking on the day he signed Moore’s affidavit, and a few days later, when sober, he had retracted it. Thayer accepted the counteraffidavits of Katzmann and Williams that they had not tried to influence Pelser, and ruled that Pelser’s statement provided no justification for a new trial.

Often while Judge Thayer sat on his porch at Falmouth preparing his findings he found himself thinking of Moore, and the thought of that “damned anarchist” lawyer was enough to cloud the brightest summer day. There, for example, was the whole Goodridge business. Goodridge had been discredited at the trial. That was obvious to anyone. Yet here was Moore chasing him all over Maine, locking him up in jail, blackmailing him with indictments ten years old. “It is perfectly manifest,” Thayer wrote, with a cloud-dispersing mental picture of Moore’s discomfort, “that here was another bold and cruel attempt to sandbag Goodridge by threatening actual arrest, to blacken the name of the district attorney’s office of Norfolk County, by compelling Goodridge to testify as he did on account of the influence of said district attorney’s office. He did not succeed simply because Goodridge would not be intimidated. Was this conduct on the part of Mr. Moore performed in furtherance of public justice, or was it a cruel and unjustifiable attempt to scare Goodridge into swearing to something that was false against the District Attorney’s office?” For Thayer the question was rhetorical. “I have tried to look at this conduct of Mr. Moore with a view of finding some justification or excuse of it,” he concluded. “I can find none.”

He was equally severe with Moore in denying the Andrews motion. Perhaps smiling to himself, he wrote, “My relationship with [Moore] has been very pleasant, although at times it would seem, as was very natural, that he was quite unfamiliar with our trial evidence and practice in this state.” Then he let the Californian have both barrels: “Mr. Moore, judging him by his conduct as disclosed under his own motion, signed by him, seems to be laboring under the view that an enthusiastic belief in the innocence of his clients justifies any means in order to accomplish the ends desired.” He accused Moore of a “more intense desire to procure a confession of perjury from Mrs. Andrews than a profound desire to seek the truth.”

When Thayer came to the Hamilton motion, he was undoubtedly convinced by the episode of the switched gun-barrels that the self-styled doctor from Auburn was a sharper. He did not elaborate, but in each instance he ruled that Hamilton’s claim was not sustained.

Captain Proctor’s affidavit was more of a problem, for there were no two ways about it. Proctor had signed his name to his own impeachment, and Katzmann and Williams had never denied the substance of it. Nevertheless, it was Thayer’s opinion that Proctor had meant what he said in court, and that the jury had so understood it. “If Captain Proctor found no facts to believe that the mortal bullet passed through the Sacco pistol, why, when he had a perfect opportunity so to do, did he not say that his opinion was then, as it is now, that it was not consistent with it?” Thayer did not feel there had been any conniving by Katzmann and Williams to shape the question in advance. He did not try to explain why Proctor had afterward made the refuting statement.

“If I have erred in my judgment (and I fully realize I am human),” Thayer concluded with a sense of relief at freeing himself from the burden, “let me express the assurance that the supreme judicial court of this Commonwealth in due time will correct such error.”

Neither Moore nor Thompson had expected any other outcome, but the motions had served their purpose. They had postponed the defendants’ execution, and they had provided questions of law to be ruled on by a higher court. With the Goodridge, Pelser, Andrews, and Daley affidavits Thompson felt there was nothing more to be gained, that these were to a degree liabilities, but he appealed the denials of the Ripley, Gould, and Hamilton-Proctor motions.

After he had filed his findings with the clerk of court, Thayer felt he deserved a holiday, and for him a holiday in the autumn meant Hanover, New Hampshire. The Dartmouth-McGill football game that Saturday was only an excuse for the trip, since the Big Green was the odds-on favorite. But to get back to Dartmouth gave Thayer a sense of renewing himself, as if when he walked across the campus he was again for one miraculous moment Bobby Thayer, the baseball captain who could not quite make up his mind whether he wanted to be a big-league player or a lawyer. He felt that he belonged in Hanover. There was his familiar table by the window in the dining room of the Hanover Inn, the waiter who knew him, the faces of old friends as they came through the doorway. Much had changed, much had been added, but there were still the white buildings of Dartmouth Row, the Senior Fence where he had carved his initials over forty years ago, the arching elms, still looking just as they had when he arrived as a freshman. Each autumn brought him back, almost as if he had never left.