Tragedy in Dedham

Thayer was cutting across the College Green in the long-edged sunlight after the game when he saw James Richardson, Dartmouth’s Professor of Law and Political Science, walking just ahead of him. Jim Richardson was Class of 1900, twenty years after Thayer, but the two men often met at alumni gatherings. As the judge drew abreast of the professor he nodded and they continued together toward the Inn. “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” Thayer asked affably, by way of conversation. He did not notice the shocked look on the other’s face as he continued, “I guess that will hold them for a while. Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!”

The denial of the supplementary motions was no more than Sacco had expected, but the decision left Vanzetti sunk in discouragement. “While hope is still alive in me,” he wrote, “disperation is growing powerful.” His fantasies of violence expanded:

My native me is drearing for what it is becoming. I have cut down trees with a sense of sympathy for them, and almost a sort of remorse; while now thinking of my axe, a lust seizes me to get a mad delight and exaltation by using them on the necks of the men’s eaters; on the necks of those who seem to have the evil in their head and on the trunks of those who seem to have the evil in their breast.

In the weeks before Christmas his mental balance began to waver. He told the guards of having feelings in his head and chest that meant earthquakes were coming. He noticed a sensation of electricity in the air. Each night he barricaded the door of his cell with a table for fear that his enemies might overpower the guards and kill him. The day before Christmas he threatened another prisoner who, he said, was laughing at him. Six days later he smashed a chair. Joseph McLaughlin, the prison physician, and Charles Sullivan, the state expert for insane criminals, spent some time questioning him. He told them that everyone had forsaken him; that at his trial “perjurers, fascists and others” had been “out to get him,” and that he needed to carry a gun for protection. The doctors diagnosed him as in a dangerous hallucinatory and delusional state of mind, and recommended his committal to the Bridgewater Hospital, where Sacco had been sent twenty-one months before.

Vanzetti arrived manacled the day after New Year’s. When the admitting doctor asked him routinely why he was there, he replied, “I don’t know, I am not crazy. Perhaps they think I need a rest.” Although for the next two months he seemed a model prisoner, quiet and controlled, his inner turbulence persisted. He told the doctors of a fascist plot against him being prepared through certain Italian prisoners in Charlestown who could kill him “any time any day they want to.” Even in Bridgewater there were such fascists. “I more than feel it,” he told the doctor.

The records of Vanzetti in Bridgewater are scanter than those of Sacco. On February 23 the attendant noted that he spent the day sitting in a chair pretending to have his eyes closed, but watching the other prisoners. At the evening meal he looked at his food suspiciously, then took potatoes from another prisoner’s plate and ate them, saying nothing. He was kept in his room except for two periods a day that he could play ball in the yard. When Thompson spoke to the doctors about this, they told him they could not give Vanzetti more freedom because he was dangerous. On the arrival of a new Italian prisoner Vanzetti was removed to a more secluded wing of the hospital, a change he resented deeply. Like most patients in mental institutions, he had the feeling that the doctors were working against him. In April his physical symptoms had begun to abate, and by May he could write, “Yes, my heartburn is gone, and I am quite well—so well that I feel to write a treaty on sociology—wich I have not yet begun, because I wish to hear some friends in its regards.” On May 28, 1925, he was certified as not insane and returned to Charlestown.

The disorganization of the Defense Committee that Moore had watched was followed about the time of his departure by a reorganization and an opening up of the membership to non-Italians. Lopez had been inflexible in excluding outsiders, but Amleto Fabbri, the gentle, softspoken shoe-worker who had replaced him as secretary, welcomed them. Many of the new members came over from the dissolved New Trial League, but the influx that really broke through the Latin limitations of the old committee came from the James Connolly Literary Society.

That society was made up of a group of forty or fifty dissidents from the local branch of the Gaelic League. They called themselves a literary society because in Boston they could not say what they really were—Irishmen of the indeterminate left, socialists, associates of the Socialist Labor Party, some of them even Wobblies. Most of them had turned against the church and were anathema to their pious majority compatriots. More concerned with day-to-day problems of economics than with theoretical Marxism, their only literary activity was the distribution of pamphlets. The name Connolly was really a cover—who in such an Irish city could say a word against the martyr of 1916?

The James Connolly Literary Society had become interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case during the Dedham trial. As it now drew closer to the Italian nucleus of the Defense Committee, three of its members became officers, with John Barry, a quiet, conciliatory Irishman taking over as chairman. Barry, a steelworker, would never play a conspicuous role. His retiring nature made him acceptable to everyone, and in fact he was so accepted as a symbol of intergroup unity.

Michael Flaherty, a painter and member of the Boston Labor Union named vice-chairman, took a much more active part. Flaherty and his associates brought a lighter spirit to the ordained seriousness of the anarchists. An Aran Islander, Flaherty possessed an underlying humor that the darkest situation could never quite down. If he had stayed in Ireland he would undoubtedly have played his part in the Easter Uprising. In America he gravitated naturally to the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

Mary Donovan, who came with him from the Society, was both a more practical and a more pugnacious type, a lank, raw-boned, sharp-featured woman in her thirties. Emotional, opinionated, suspicious, generous, and devoted, she was not an easy person to get along with, but she made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti so much her own that she became possessed by it. So much of her time did she spend at the Hanover Street headquarters, where she took charge of correspondence and communications, that she soon became the committee’s recording secretary and lost her State House job as industrial inspector for the Department of Labor.

With Moore gone, the McAnarneys in turn resigned, leaving the defense temporarily without counsel. Most of the committee by now felt that Moore had been an unfortunate choice, that what was needed was an outstanding local lawyer, someone with authority and position. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, after consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Workers’ Defense Union, came on from New York to talk the matter over with the committee. “I then had long conferences,” she wrote with the customary exaggeration of her own role, “in which I interviewed every element—from conservative trade unionists, Socialists, Anarchist, Communists, and Liberals including Professor Frankfurter at Harvard University. The universal opinion was that a new, distinguished local counsel was imperative.”

Frankfurter recommended that the committee try to get William Thompson. That had been John McAnarney’s idea from the beginning, and many of the committee had come to feel the same way after listening to Thompson’s arguments on the supplementary motions. The question was whether he would be willing to take on such an unpopular case.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Donovan, Barry, Felicani, and Mike Flaherty called at the Matthews, Thompson & Spring offices in the Tremont Building to see what they could do. Thompson received them in his austere office, looked at them through his rimless glasses, and listened noncommittally. Finally he told them, in a tone that suggested he expected to hear no more of the matter, that he would take the case for a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars, paid in advance.

In two days they were back with the money. “I thought sure you couldn’t raise it,” Thompson told Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. “I can’t say that I’m glad.” In a quick trip to New York, she had borrowed twenty thousand dollars from the American Fund for Public Service—popularly known as the Garland Fund—on the security of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Felicani, in a stupendous burst of energy, had managed to raise the additional five thousand dollars locally through the harder way of individual contributions.

The moment Thompson received the certified check was, although he did not then know it, the turning point in his life. After that the world of Boston, his incorporated world, would never be the same for him again.