Tragedy in Dedham

After the flare-up in 1921, the Sacco-Vanzetti case smoldered obscurely for five years. Occasional sparks were thrown up, as when Ettor and Giovannitti returned to Boston in 1925 to speak for their imprisoned comrades and Eugene Debs visited Vanzetti in Charlestown, but for the most part the issues seemed lost in a lawyer’s maze. Across the Atlantic the case had become overlaid by other events and other conflicts. If the average demonstrator of 1921 had suddenly been asked in 1926 whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, he would probably not have known.

In the United States, except in restricted circles of urban liberals and radicals, the names aroused no more response. The Defense Committee continued its Boston meetings. In December 1925 it published the first number of the Official Bulletin, a four-page booklet containing a message from Debs, a review of the ballistics evidence by Mrs. Evans, and an appeal to Governor Cox signed by George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, James Maxton, and other members of the English Labor Party.

Sacco, in Dedham, resumed his English lessons with Mrs. Jack. In Charlestown, Vanzetti’s literary activities expanded. He contributed articles to the New Jersey anarchist journal, L’Adunata del Refratti, wrote his short autobiography as well as the booklet Background to the Plymouth Trial, began to translate Proudhon’s The War and the Peace into English, and completed a novelette, Events and Victims, about his experiences in a factory before the United States entered the war. Both men were much heartened by Thompson’s taking over as their counsel. Sacco, in spite of his class-conscious rigidity, trusted the Boston conservative lawyer as he had never trusted Moore, and wrote enthusiastically of the “splendour defense” that Thompson and Hill had made in their first appearance. Vanzetti was even more enthusiastic.

Permit me to express my gratitude and my appreciation to you [he wrote Thompson in February 1926]. I understand that your work in our behalfe is underpaid; the must difficult test of you; the noble sentiments and impulse by which you were decide to take the side of two underdogs; this I understand. And I also hope to understand a little the brave, learned, beautiful fight that you are fighting in our behalfe, paying of it in peace, rest, interest and other universally desired things.

Ha! to have known you 6 year ago! I would never have been a convict.

Thompson, in turn, as the months went on, found himself drawn closer to the two men he had reluctantly elected to defend. In May 1927 he could write:

I went into this case as a Harvard man, a man of old American tradition, to help two aliens who had, I thought, been unjustly treated. I have arrived at a humbler attitude. Not since the martyrdoms of the sixteenth century has such steadfastness to a faith, such self-abnegation as that of these two Italians been seen on this earth.

The Harvard graduate, the man of old American traditions, the established lawyer, is now quite ready to say that nowhere in his soul is there to be found the faith, the splendid gentility, which make the man, Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Thompson later admitted that the case had been something of a catastrophe for his firm: that by taking it he had lost friends, clients, and a great deal of money. But it was a choice he never regretted. He told Felicani that if he had understood the situation better at the beginning, he would not have taken a fee.

While the jail years for Sacco and Vanzetti passed with unrelenting sameness, Rosina moved from the Stoughton bungalow to an old farmhouse near Milford. Here Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Jack aided her, and in addition she received a small monthly allowance from the Defense Committee. Ines was now almost old enough to go to school; Dante had reached the seventh grade. Even before Rosina left Stoughton she had living with her as a companion Susie Valdinoce, the grave, sad-faced sister of the man killed in the dynamiting of Attorney General Palmer’s house.

The rejection of Thompson’s appeal by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on May 12, 1926, marked the second stage of the case. With the court’s decision, affirming the convictions, came the realization that the affair was now moving toward a foreseeable climax. For the prisoners it was as if they had been walking down a long corridor of months and years, and now at last at the far end they could glimpse the door of the execution chamber.

To those familiar with the formalisms of Massachusetts legal procedure the court’s negative decision was expected. According to the statutes of the Commonwealth it was not the function of the higher court to review the facts of a case in an appeal but merely to consider questions of law. That in Madeiros’ first trial Judge Lummus had neglected to mention the presumption of innocence was an error sufficient to overthrow an obviously justified verdict. Judge Thayer had committed no such errors. Whatever his feelings, he had kept the written record straight just as Thompson, at the beginning of the trial, had predicted he would. In regard to the denied motions, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as Judge Thayer had given these consideration according to the prescribed legal forms, there would be no review of his decision. These were matters for his discretion, beyond the compass of any higher court.

The Supreme Court’s decision was like the tolling of a bell. In the next fifteen months the case would become a passionate issue, the linked Italian names a battle cry in all comers of the globe. Millions of men in dozens of countries, most of them with only a hazy and often erroneous notion of the facts, would identify themselves with the condemned Italians with such binding emotion that the fate of the two men would come to seem the very symbol of man’s injustice to man. For many European radicals the case loomed up as the most important occurrence since the Russian Revolution. Stalin, at the 1927 Party Congress, spoke of the recent Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration as evidence that “we are on the threshold of new revolutionary events.” The American Communist Max Shachtman asked rhetorically: “Since the Russian Bolshevik revolution, where has there yet been a cause that has drawn into its wake the people, not of this or that land, but of all countries, millions from every part and corner of the world; the workers in the metropolis, the peasant on the land, the people of the half-forgotten islands of the sea, men and women and children in all walks of life?”

That the renewed European agitation was conceived and directed by the Communist International is beyond dispute—a fact proclaimed with equal stridency by both Communists and their enemies. Moscow gave the signal and the International Red Aid set the well-oiled machinery in motion. But the Communists themselves must have been startled by their own quick success. Their calculated gesture loosed an avalanche, elemental and overwhelming, that spread beyond the bounds of any political party or dogma. Men of good will everywhere rose up to challenge the course of Massachusetts justice. There were protests from the Vatican; from ex-Premier Caillaux of France; from Paul Loebe, the president of the Reichstag; from Count Bernstorff, who had been ambassador to the United States in 1917; from John Galsworthy, Fritz Kreisler, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and scores of other international figures.

Why was it that in the fifteen months between the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision and the executions the case of Sacco and Vanzetti became the most widely known and bitterly felt of its generation? They were not conscious martyrs. Nor, if it be assumed that they were innocent, were they uniquely so. It was already a cruel commonplace of the century for innocent men to die ignominiously and obscurely for their beliefs under red, black, white, or varicolored flags. In an era of bloodshed, violence, and injustice, why should the names of these two obscure Italians stand out, enduring over the years in literature, in art, in the theater, and even in that newest of media, television?[22]

Perhaps it is that when any celebrated or notorious trial becomes encrusted with doubts as to its justice, it becomes a focus for the raging social passions of the moment. Certainly, in the grim weeks before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the hundreds of thousands of militants demonstrating in the world’s cities found their own resentments and anger objectified in these two comrades whom they considered victims of class justice. Frustration and the envy of America’s callous wealth undoubtedly stirred them too, and the hope that through such potent symbols of martyrdom the hated system could be overthrown.

Among many Europeans unswayed by the more primitive emotions of hate and revenge, there was the feeling that, beyond any question of the fairness of the trial, the years under the shadow of death were themselves torture enough to demand the commuting of the death sentences. “We wish to see the lives of these men spared, whether they are innocent or guilty,” said Le Temps in Paris. The London Times felt that it was not the wrongs of the trial that had so stirred the public’s imagination but the fact that any man should be kept so long in suspense. The suspense was particularly aggravated by Massachusetts’ means of execution: Far more than the traditional noose, the electric chair was a horror symbol to the European.

If—regardless of the question of their guilt or innocence—Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed within a few months of their conviction (as would have happened had they been tried in most European countries), their names today would be almost unknown. To non-Americans the pettifogging byways of American justice, the complications and contradictions and the time entailed in appealing from state to federal courts, the to them astonishing fact that even if injustice is being done by the judicial system of an individual state, so long as it is being done within the limits of the Constitution the national government can do nothing—such things were outrageously incomprehensible. And the years of delay seemed to presume doubt. “It is impossible for us on this side to feel that execution would have been so long deferred,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, “if the case were clear enough to justify this infliction.”

Anticipating the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision, the Red Aid’s Central European Headquarters in Berlin began in February 1926, to flood Europe with Sacco-Vanzetti propaganda and plans for a united front of artists, writers, actors, scholars, and teachers.

The anarchists had never ceased their sporadic and individualistic action, but international anarchy no longer rivaled Marxism as a world movement, as it had in Bakunin’s day, and it persisted mostly in the Latin countries. The Sacco-Vanzetti case contained, among many other things, the last gesture of international anarchism. Yet the anarchists by themselves could have accomplished little. It was the executive committee of the Communist International, with its tight organization and intricate networks, that was able to stir the streets. By the autumn of 1926 the groundwork had been laid for the world-wide agitation to come.

The year 1926 brought a belated stirring of interest in the case throughout the United States, partly as a reaction to the renewed agitation overseas as reported in such mass-circulation journals as the Literary Digest, partly because of the Supreme Court’s decision in May, and partly from the labors of the Defense Committee. In Massachusetts there was a quickening of emotions lying dormant since 1921, a xenophobic reaction by the community to criticism from outsiders that would rise to hysteria as world agitation rose.[23]

Robert Lincoln O’Brien, the half-Irish half-old-Yankee editor of the Boston Herald, whose reaction to the Sacco-Vanzetti case remained essentially neutral, observed that “a surprising number of groups and elements of the community came to regard leniency for Sacco and Vanzetti as an assault upon the honor of the Commonwealth.” That feeling, still amorphous in the spring of 1926, hardened under the impact of hostile gestures from overseas and was suddenly exacerbated in June when the house of Samuel Johnson in West Bridgewater was demolished by a bomb. Whoever planted the bomb apparently mistook Johnson’s house for that of his brother Simon, who with his wife had received a reward of several hundred dollars after their court testimony. No one was ever apprehended in this or any other bombings connected with the case, and the Defense Committee at once repudiated the act, but to the community it seemed a confirmation of its worst fears in regard to radicals. Guards were at once placed around the houses of Judge Thayer and of Chief Justice Arthur Rugg. District Attorney Wilbar announced that he would ask for the immediate imposition of the death penalty on Sacco and Vanzetti.

The Commonwealth was coming to feel that reviews enough had been made, the matter had been discussed long enough. Doubts expressed from outside, either in the United States or overseas, merely sharpened the edge of Massachusetts majority opinion. The Boston architect C. Howard Walker, on returning from Europe at the height of the agitation, declared himself “enough of a Machiavellian to rejoice in the electrocutions whether the accused are innocent or guilty.”

Stubbornly the Massachusetts community, the articulate, rooted middle-class community, closed ranks. Granville Hicks, teaching at Smith College, helped organize a clemency meeting in Northampton in the spring of 1927. So strong was the feeling of the townspeople against Sacco and Vanzetti that it broke up in bedlam. It was not, Hicks had to admit, just the rich and powerful who were against the two Italians: “It was also the doctors, the lawyers, the shopkeepers, the farmers, the workers. It was practically all my neighbors in Northampton except for the other members of the college faculty. The battle was between the intellectuals and everybody else.”

There was, however, a thoughtful minority made uneasy by the slow steamroller of Massachusetts justice. Liberals like Edward Filene, John Moors of the brokerage house of Moors & Cabot, and Professor Felix Frankfurter joined with conservatives like Joseph Walker, a former Republican speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador to Italy, in questioning the legal proceedings. Names old and distinguished were added to the list of protesters—the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, the philosopher William Hocking, William Allan Neilson, the president of Smith College, and the Harvard economist Frank Taussig.

In June 1925 the American branch of the International Red Aid was set up in Chicago as the International Labor Defense. For the Communists the Sacco-Vanzetti case was an issue ripe for manipulation. By exploiting it, the Party hoped to confirm its pose as the champion of the oppressed and for the first time develop into an American mass movement. After his expulsion from the Party, James Cannon, the International Labor Defense’s executive secretary, was to admit privately—much as Moore did—that he felt Sacco was guilty. But to the Communists guilt or innocence was immaterial. What mattered was the inflammability of the cause.

For Cannon and his lieutenant Max Shachtman, editor of the monthly Labor Defender, the efforts of the Boston Defense Committee were naïve, self-defeating, contaminated by “the slow poison of middle-class treachery.” Thompson, the aloof upper-class lawyer, had announced that he would not tolerate “pressure from the outside,” meaning in Shachtman’s view “the mass movement of labor that could surround Sacco and Vanzetti with a wall of iron against the attacks of their enemies.” That the Defense Committee could replace a class fighter like Moore with a reactionary like Thompson was merely another demonstration of the liberal fallacy—belief in the law, in justice above class, in all the paraphernalia that concealed the claws of capitalist society. Abstract justice could play no role, in Shachtman’s pronouncement as echoed by the Daily Worker, since “Sacco and Vanzetti were being legally assassinated because of their political and economic views and activities.”

Johnnies-come-lately though they might be, the Communists took the attitude that it was they who were the organizers of the protest movement. The Sacco-Vanzetti case was now theirs by right of Marxist eminent domain. And, here as abroad, they were able to bring about immediate sensational results. The International Labor Defense poured out posters and buttons and press releases, organized meetings all across the country, and collected large sums for what Cannon called “the protection” of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Of the millions collected by the Red Aid in various parts of the world for the defense of the convicted men, less than six thousand dollars ever found its way to the Defense Committee. There was no accounting for the balance. Felicani, who had so scrupulously recorded each dollar he received, was outraged. In July the Defense Committee warned in its Official Bulletin: “We are absolutely opposed to the collection of funds and the use of this cause to further special political or economic interests.” The Daily Worker and the International Labor Defense replied by calling the Defense Committee and its counsel ineffectual liberals who relied on bourgeois legal proceedings rather than the direct action of the workers.

Yet, whatever the Communists might claim, whatever self-advertising actions they might take, the shabby two-room headquarters at Hanover Street still remained the center of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. The yeast of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision worked as actively there as outside. Fabbri was succeeded as secretary by Joseph Moro, an Italian shoe-worker with a family, who gave up a job at forty dollars a week to work full time for the committee at ten dollars less. Eugene Lyons had left Boston at the end of 1922 to work for the New York branch of Tass, the Soviet news agency. Until 1926 no one took his place. As long as Moore remained in charge of the defense, Lyons continued to contribute articles and support, but Thompson’s advent was too much for him. Still wearing his Communist heart on his sleeve, still at the beginning of his long arc from left to right, he held to his opinion that the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti should be a class defense.

Through the quiescent years the members of the Defense Committee, working doggedly, had kept both the case and the defendants alive. As the tempo rose in 1926, so did the activity in Hanover Street. The headquarters developed into a small publishing house. Tables and typewriters and filing cabinets were wedged in by bales of pamphlets that served as seats for volunteer workers and visitors.

The moody, indefatigable Mary Donovan seemed always to be at her desk. Mrs. Evans appeared regularly, bringing with her such friends as Mrs. William James, the widow of the philosopher. Professor Frankfurter often trudged up the dark stairway accompanied by one or two of his sympathetic Harvard colleagues. In June a young Globe reporter, Gardner Jackson, gave up his newspaper job to take over where Lyons had left off. With the publicity under his enthusiastic control, the Official Bulletin—only one issue of which had appeared before this—now came out monthly.

Except for their energetic youth and their devotion to the same cause, the wealthy liberal “Pat” Jackson and the East Side Marxist Morris Gebelow, who wrote under the name of Eugene Lyons, had little in common. Jackson’s mother was the third wife of William Jackson, a Colorado banker and railroad owner whose second wife had been Helen Hunt Jackson, the author of Ramona. Starting at Amherst College, Pat joined the Army in 1917. After the war he studied at Columbia, took a turn at selling bonds, then worked in a Denver enterprise of his father’s before becoming cub reporter on the Globe, the paper that was reputed to print the name of every inhabitant of Greater Boston, and, if possible, his picture, at least twice a year.

Jackson had been gathering such neighborhood news for the Globe during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. At the end of many an afternoon he would see Frank Sibley stalking into the city room on his return from Dedham. Sibley’s indignation expanded by the day, the more so since he was confined to factual reporting and unable to write his personal reaction to the Dedham goings-on. Sometimes he would stop by the tall, shock-haired young reporter to let off steam.

It was through Sibley that Jackson met Felicani. Never before had the tweedy, rather elegant young man met anyone like this philosophical anarchist. Evening after evening now found Jackson working in the upstairs rooms on Hanover Street. Then, in the summer of 1926, Felicani persuaded him to give his full time to directing the Sacco-Vanzetti publicity.

As it would for many others in the year to come, the cause brought Jackson’s being into focus. Independent financially, vaguely liberal, he had never really known what he wanted to do until he found his goal in the struggle for the two Italians’ lives. Though later he would become a minor New Deal administrator and a friend of Franklin Roosevelt’s, this was to be the high spot of his life. Journalistic talent, energy, honesty, and dedication—these he brought to the cause with the fervency of a convert.

By August 1926 it was clear to James Cannon that the Defense Committee could be neither dislodged nor superseded and that the only other possibility was infiltration. To mark this change in tack the International Labor Defense sent two thousand dollars to the Hanover Street headquarters while the Labor Defender announced in conciliatory tones that it was no longer making a general appeal for funds: All future donations for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti should be sent direct to the Boston committee. In addition, Cannon sent Charles Cline to Boston to try to arrange an amalgamation of the committee with the International Labor Defense.

Cline, one of the Party’s so-called Texas martyrs, had just been released from prison after serving thirteen years of a life sentence for murder. In 1911 he had been the sole American among a band of Mexicans who had organized an expedition in Texas to join the Mexican revolutionaries in their fight against the government of Porfirio Díaz. When Texas Rangers found a dead Mexican spy tied to a tree, they pursued and captured Cline and a dozen of the expedition. Cline maintained that he was innocent of the spy’s death, and the American Federation of Labor had frequently demanded his liberation. He was finally freed by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson.

Cline’s long imprisonment for a revolutionary cause was expected to make him attractive to Sacco and Vanzetti. The real object of his visit was to persuade them to let the International Labor Defense take charge of their fight. Cline explained persuasively that the Boston Defense Committee was run by amateurs who were unable to grasp the class significance of the case. Even so, Cannon would be willing to form a united front organization with certain members of the Defense Committee on condition that the headquarters was moved to Chicago. There the Communist International would be able to bring an overwhelming force into operation that would compel the Massachusetts reactionaries to stay their hand. As a final glittering attraction Cline promised Sacco and Vanzetti that Clarence Darrow would take over from Thompson as their chief counsel.

Running through the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, unaltered in the alterations of their moods, is their sense of outraged bewilderment at their predicament. What had brought them behind bars? What had taken Sacco from his neat Stoughton bungalow, his red-haired wife, the light-long summer evenings in his vegetable garden? What had taken Vanzetti from the Plymouth streets overlooking the harbor? What had ended the brightness of their years of freedom?

To each man the insistent answer was that they had been radicals, that however small they may have seemed to the men of state, the latter had nevertheless banded together to crush them. The owners of the Cordage works, of the Lawrence mills, those who lived in the big houses on the hill, who controlled the government and the police, who lived at the expense of the workers, this gross capitalistic world, this dying order would kill to preserve its insecure position. District Attorney Katzmann’s taunting phrases, the dry words that rustled from Judge Thayer’s set lips—these were the voices of executioners.

After the Supreme Court’s rejection of Thompson’s appeal on May 12, Vanzetti wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:

Yesterday we got the last struck. It end all. We are doomed beyond any kind of doubts. I am sorry for myself. It is creuil to be insulted, umiliated, wronged, imprisoned, doomned, under infamous charges, for crimes of which I am utterly innocent in the whole sense of the word. But more for myself, I am sorry for my father, my sisters and my brothers, and for poor Rosi and her two children.

Both prisoners had been heartened by the renewed demonstrations in Europe and felt uncritically grateful to the International Labor Defense for its belligerent propaganda. Both felt at times that—as the Communists had said all along—only direct revolutionary action by the masses could save them. Both were divided between the class-struggle interpretation of their dilemma and their attachment to bourgeois partisans like Mrs. Evans. Both were inconsistent in their attitudes—as who might well not be after seven years in the shadow of the electric chair.

Sacco, in particular, with his more dogmatic mentality and limited outlook, tended to distort the possibilities of justice that could transcend class.

Let us tell you sincerely, dear comrade [he wrote a member of the International Labor Defense], that for hereafter I will never fall into another new delusion again, if I don’t see first the day of my freedom. Even when Mrs. Elizabeth G. Evans—that through all these struggle years she has been kind to me as kind as good mother can be, come to tell me “Nick! you again.” No! No! Six long torment years gives me enough experience because it is a great masterpiece for me and to anybody else not to be disappointed any more. Poor mother! She is so sincere and faithful to the law of the man that she has forgot very early that the history of all the government it were always and everytime the martyrdom of the proletariat. But, however, we will stick like a good Communard soldier to the end of the battle and looking into the eyes of our enemy, face to face, to tell them our last breath—which I had always faith—that you, the comrades and all the workers of the world solidarity, would free Sacco and Vanzetti tomorrow.

Yet in spite of such sentiments he would continue to prefer the conservative Thompson to the radicals.

Vanzetti, in his enthusiasm for the éclat of the International Labor Defense activities, could write to Cannon in an almost similar tone:

The echo of your campaign in our behalf has reached my heart. I repeat, I will repeat to the last, only the people, our comrades, our friends, the world revolutionary proletariat can save us from the powers of the capitalist reactionary hyenas, or vindicate our names and our blood before history.

Nevertheless, Vanzetti was as harsh in his judgments of the new Russia as he was of the old America. To his mind all governments were oppressive, whether they ruled in the name of proletariat, king, or constitution. His frequently expressed disbelief in the progress of the Russian Revolution, his contrary belief that “the Bolsheviki leaders’ dictatorship is an increased perfectioned exploitation of the proletariat,” constantly embarrassed the editors of the Daily Worker and the Labor Defender. The anti-revolutionary, anti-Marxist individualistic anarchist, Proudhon, remained his ideal, and the Frenchman’s ringing words: “Liberty of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of labor, of commerce, and of teaching, the free disposal of the products of labor and industry—liberty, infinite, absolute, everywhere and forever,” are often echoed in Vanzetti’s letters.

The first reaction of Sacco and Vanzetti to Cline’s proposal was to accept it and let the International Labor Defense see what it could do. However they might differ theoretically from the Communists, such potent help was not to be spurned. And for all the Defense Committee’s efforts, they were still in jail after six years. Clarence Darrow—the untidy colossus who had slipped the noose from so many necks—appeared as a sudden new hope, a more certain guide than Thompson out of their legal labyrinth. Even though their trust and confidence in the Boston lawyer remained intact, they felt that they had nothing to lose by the change and much to gain.

Felicani, with whom they talked it over, felt otherwise. His distrust of the Communists was innate, and he, as the organizer of the Defense Committee, had a much clearer view of the Party’s reasons for taking up the case than did his two comrades. Darrow himself, in Felicani’s opinion, could do no more than Thompson had done and would do.[24]

Sacco and Vanzetti finally agreed to reject Cannon’s offer. When Cline reported this to Chicago, the Labor Defender struck back at the Defense Committee savagely, accusing it of “trying to represent the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’ way.” When Shachtman claimed that it was the Communists’ “campaign for international solidarity that has so far saved Sacco and Vanzetti from the death chair,” Jackson’s Bulletin announced angrily that “the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee has no official relationship with the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party, or the Sacco-Vanzetti Conferences, which we understand were organized through the ILD.”

During the summer and autumn of 1926 a whole new aspect of the case was opened up by the defense’s belated discovery that Pinkerton Detective Agency reports had been filed on both the South Braintree and the Bridgewater holdups. The existence of these primal documents became known largely through the efforts of Tom O’Connor, a State House News Service reporter who had first become interested in the case in 1920 after reading about it in the New Republic.

O’Connor kept in touch with developments after the trial, dropping in from time to time at Moore’s office and at the Hanover Street headquarters. Making his own investigations in Providence and elsewhere, he finally became so engrossed in the case that he gave up his State House job to work for Thompson without pay.

O’Connor was aware—it was common newspaper knowledge—that the Travelers Insurance Company had insured the South Braintree payroll. Searching the back numbers of Protection, the Travelers publication, he found what he had assumed—an account of the South Braintree crime and a statement that the company had hired the Pinkerton Agency to investigate it. O’Connor realized that the agents must have made day-by-day reports of what they found, but what interested him even more was the obvious fact that these reports, which would have been submitted long before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, would be uncolored by preconceptions. If they could be located, O’Connor was certain they would prove to be the raw material of the case.

A week after the May Supreme Court decision O’Connor went to Thompson, then preoccupied with the Madeiros confession. Just what had occurred, he asked—well aware that Thompson did not have the answer—between the evening the Buick was stolen in Needham and the evening almost six months later when Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up on the streetcar? How did it happen they were arrested? All Thompson could do was to gesture helplessly and answer that he did not know. O’Connor then told him about the South Braintree Pinkerton report. Thompson, who had not heard of it before, banged his desk in his excitement.

Some days later, following Thompson’s request, a copy of the report arrived at the Travelers Boston office. Thompson was then away, but O’Connor managed to borrow the report and copy it. As he had hoped, it gave a picture of the case as it appeared before and just after Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up. O’Connor was particularly struck by Henry Hellyer’s notes on the fair brown-haired man Jenny Novelli had seen in the murder car who, by the time Hellyer testified at Dedham, had become black-haired with a dark complexion.

After this report came to light, O’Connor, while going through the files of the Bridgewater Independent, discovered references to a Pinkerton report on the Bridgewater holdup. But this second report, with its even more glaring discrepancies between the immediate impressions of witnesses and the evidence subsequently offered at the Plymouth trial, was not to come to light until 1927.

It had been common knowledge at the Dedham trial that the United States Department of Justice and District Attorney Katzmann’s office had cooperated in getting evidence for the prosecution. What was still not known was the degree of cooperation, for when Thompson raised the issue, the Bureau of Investigation followed its customary policy of refusing to open its files. Thompson increasingly came to feel that there might be evidence in the files indicating that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, and in any case he was outraged when he learned that the Bureau had placed spies in the Dedham jail and on the Defense Committee and had even planned to introduce one into Rosina Sacco’s house. He wrote to United States Attorney General John Sargent requesting that William West of the Boston office show him whatever documents and correspondence he had covering the investigations made before, during, and after the trial. In indirect answer to this, Thompson received a call from the Boston Bureau asking what information he was after. When he said that he wanted to go through whatever files the department had on Sacco and Vanzetti, West informed him that this would not be allowed.

If one can judge by a memorandum now in the National Archives and prepared by the Department of Justice at the request of the State Department on October 17, 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti, before their trial, were known merely as subscribers to Galleani’s Cronaca Sovversiva and a New Jersey anarchist paper, La Jacquerie. In the files Thompson particularly wanted to see there were of course the reports of the agents attending the trial, as well as the reports of Harold Zorian, who had infiltrated the committee, and Anthony Carbone, who had been planted in the Dedham jail.

Although he was unable to see the files, Thompson discovered that two former Bureau agents, Lawrence Letherman and Fred Weyand, were willing to sign affidavits as to what had taken place in the Boston office in regard to Sacco and Vanzetti during 1920 and 1921. Weyand explained quite frankly that the purpose of the Boston agents in going to the trial was to obtain enough evidence there to deport the accused as anarchists in case they were not convicted of murder.

Letherman, in his affidavit, corroborated Weyand:

The Department of Justice in Boston was anxious to get sufficient evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti to deport them, but never succeeded in getting the kind and amount of evidence required for that purpose. It was the opinion of Department agents here that a conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti for murder would be one way of disposing of these two men. It was also the opinion of such of the agents in Boston as had any actual knowledge of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that Sacco and Vanzetti, although anarchists and agitators, were not highway robbers, and had nothing to do with the South Braintree crime. My opinion, and the opinion of most of the older men in the Government service, has always been that the South Braintree crime was the work of professionals.

The words are ambiguous. Thompson took them to mean that the Department of Justice, if it could not get Sacco and Vanzetti deported as radicals, would cooperate in getting them executed for a crime they had not committed. As a matter of fact, Sacco and Vanzetti, if they had been acquitted at Dedham, would through their own courtroom testimony have then been subject to deportation as anarchists. West’s attitude in cooperating with Katzmann, may have been a callous one, but it seems clear that there was nothing in the Bureau of Investigation files tending to prove either the guilt or the innocence of the two Italians.

On September 13 Thompson again appeared before Judge Thayer in the Dedham courthouse to argue that the verdict against Sacco and Vanzetti should be set aside because of the Madeiros confession and the Weyand and Letherman affidavits. Thayer denied Thompson’s request to have Madeiros examined and cross-examined in open court, but aside from this the judge’s manner was courteous if impassive. From time to time he would even unbend enough to come out with a small witticism. For five days affidavits were read and Thompson argued for, while Assistant District Attorney Ranney argued against, the motion. Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the courtroom. Rosina was there with Mrs. Evans as well as Mrs. Rantoul, Jerry McAnarney, and Professor Frankfurter.

Thompson maintained that if Sacco and Vanzetti had never come into the case, the evidence he had assembled in Providence would have been sufficient to indict the Morellis. Under these circumstances he felt that Judge Thayer should order a new trial. Thompson’s attack on the Department of Justice and his interpretation of its role caused much more of a sensation in Boston than did the twice-told tale of the Madeiros confession. One of his incidental revelations was that a Bureau agent named Shaughnessy who had investigated Sacco and Vanzetti had subsequently been sent to prison for highway robbery.

Assistant District Attorney Ranney admitted that if Madeiros had participated in the South Braintree holdup, Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but he considered Madeiros’ confession worthless. The district attorney’s office would “answer, but not investigate, because we know or believe that the truth has been found.” As for Letherman and Weyand, Ranney took the position that the two ex-agents were traitors. “In all police departments, in all detective departments,” he told the court, “secrecy is a watchword, a byword—‘Do not betray the secrets of your departments.’ And if the secrets were broadcast, what would be the result? There would be no crime detected and punished. And yet Letherman and Weyand give their affidavits to these defendants and betray the secrecy of their department. We say on the face of it that there is a breach of loyalty, and we wonder if we cannot conscientiously and logically find that these men, not now in the department, did not leave there with honor but dishonor.”

Thompson flared up at Ranney’s mention of secrets: “I will say to your Honor that a government which has come to value its own secrets more than it does the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny, whether you call it a republic, a monarchy, or anything else. Secrets! Secrets! And he says you should abstain from touching this verdict of your jury because it is so sacred. Would they not have liked to know something about secrets? The case is admitted by that inadvertent concession. There are then secrets to be admitted!”

After studying the documents and affidavits for five weeks Judge Thayer, on October 23, rejected the motion. He could have done so without giving his reasons, but apparently feeling the need for self-justification, he issued a twenty-five-thousand-word opinion.

Being controlled only by judgment, reason and conscience [he wrote], and after giving as favorable consideration to these defendants as may be consistent with a due regard for the rights of the public and sound principles of law, I am forced to the conclusion that the affidavit of Madeiros is unreliable, untrustworthy and untrue. To set aside a verdict of a jury affirmed by the Supreme Judicial Court of this Commonwealth on such an affidavit would be a mockery upon truth and justice. Therefore, exercising every right vested in this Court in the granting of motions for new trials by the law of the Commonwealth, this motion for a new trial is hereby denied.

In his years on the bench Thayer must have told hundreds of juries that it was for them to determine the facts. Yet here, where his function was merely to determine whether the Madeiros evidence was weighty enough to warrant presentation to a jury, he had taken over the jury’s function of determining its truth. But beneath his formalism on the bench and his outward courtesy to Thompson, Judge Thayer was nettled. Why any respectable lawyer should attempt to stretch the law for two properly convicted anarchists was beyond him. He concluded:

Since the trial before the Jury of these cases, a new type of disease would seem to have developed. It might be called “legopsychic neurosis” or “hysteria” which means: “a belief in the existence of something which in fact and truth has no such existence.”

This disease would seem to have reached a very dangerous condition, from the argument of counsel, upon the present Motion, when he charges Mr. Sargent, Attorney-General of the United States and his subordinates, and subordinates of former Attorney-General of the United States Mr. Palmer and Mr. Katzmann and the District Attorney of Norfolk County, with being in a conspiracy to send these two defendants to the electric chair, not because they are murderers but because they are radicals.... In these cases, from all the developed symptoms, the Court is rather of the opinion that the disease is absolutely without cure.

Until Thayer’s decision was published, the only Massachusetts newspaper to take the side of Sacco and Vanzetti was the Springfield Republican, a paper that, though conservative in outlook, never altered its outraged opinion that “a dog ought not to be shot on the weight of the evidence brought out in the Dedham Trial.” As the waning months of 1926 whetted the issue, the Boston newspapers at first reacted predictably. The independent Globe kept to its traditional wary policy of not taking sides on divisive issues. Frank Sibley, in spite of his standing, was taken off the case, and on the day of the executions found himself covering a flower show. Federalist pre-immigrant Boston spoke with two voices: the McKinley-minded Herald, the breakfast voice of State Street; and the genealogical Transcript, the teacup voice of Beacon Hill. The Transcript held and would continue to hold that Sacco and Vanzetti had been given a fair trial, that the verdict was just, the defendants had been given every opportunity of appeal, and any further delay was an unworthy concession to foreign radicals, long-haired men, and short-haired women. But doubts had begun to creep into the editorial rooms of the Herald. They crystallized in the editorial “We Submit” that appeared three days after Judge Thayer denied the Madeiros motion. It was written by the chief editorial writer, F. Lauriston Bullard, with editor-publisher O’Brien neither suggesting nor objecting, and it is indicative of the national interest the case was now arousing that it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The paragraphs that appeared on October 26 must have goggled eyes at many a Back Bay breakfast table:

In our opinion Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti ought not to be executed on the warrant of the verdict returned by a jury on July 14, 1921. We do not know whether these men are guilty or not. We have no sympathy with the half-baked views which they profess. But as months have merged into years and the great debate over this case has continued, our doubts have solidified slowly into convictions, and reluctantly we have found ourselves compelled to reverse our original judgment. We hope the supreme judicial court will grant a new trial on the basis of new evidence not yet examined in open court. We hope the Governor will grant another reprieve to Celestino Madeiros so that his confession may be canvassed in open court. We hope, in case our supreme bench finds itself unable legally to authorize a new trial, that our Governor will call to his aid a commission of disinterested men of the highest intelligence and character to make an independent investigation in his behalf, and that the Governor himself at first hand will participate in that examination, if, as a last resort, it shall be undertaken. We have read the full decision in which Judge Webster Thayer, who presided at the original trial, renders his decision against the application for a new trial, and we submit that it carries the tone of the advocate rather than the arbitrator. At the outset he refers to “the verdict of a jury approved by the supreme court of this commonwealth” and later he repeats that sentence. We respectfully submit that the supreme court never approved that verdict. What the court did is stated in its own words thus: “We have examined carefully all the exceptions in so far as argued, and finding no error the verdicts are to stand.” The court certified that, whether the verdict was right or wrong, the trial judge performed his duty under the law in a legal manner. The supreme court overruled a bill of exceptions but expressed no judgment whatever as to the validity of the verdict or the guilt of the defendants, Judge Thayer knows this.

Bullard went on to object to Thayer’s innuendoes, to say that the files of the Department of Justice should be opened, and to charge that Captain Proctor’s affidavit stood as a condemnation of the Dedham verdict. He concluded:

If on a new trial the defendants shall again be found guilty we shall be infinitely better off than if we proceed to execution on the basis of the trial already held; the shadow of doubt, which abides in the minds of large numbers of patient investigators of this whole case, will have been removed. And if on second trial Sacco and Vanzetti should be declared guiltless, everybody would rejoice that no monstrous injustice shall have been done. We submit these views with no reference whatever to the personality of the defendants, and without allusion now to that atmosphere of radicalism of which we heard so much in 1921.

Here was the first breach in the Commonwealth’s fortifications. The defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti now pressed forward in the paper war that thundered through the correspondence columns of the Herald and the Transcript.

Bullard’s attack received formidable support. Dr. Morton Prince, the internationally famous Harvard professor of psychiatry, wrote to the Herald that, after reading the evidence, he “had come to the conclusion that the trial was a miscarriage of justice, that the government had not proved its case and probably Sacco and Vanzetti had not committed the murder charged.” Dr. Prince particularly questioned a verdict to which Mary Splaine’s evidence had substantially contributed:

I do not hesitate to say that the star witness for the government testified, honestly enough, no doubt, to what was psychologically impossible. Miss Splaine testified, though she had only seen Sacco at the time of the shooting from a distance of about 60 feet for from 1½ to three seconds in a motor car going at an increasing rate of speed at about 15 to 18 miles an hour; that she saw and at the end of a year she remembered and described 16 different details of his person, even to the size of his hand, the length of his hair as being between two and 2½ inches long and the shade of his eyebrows! Such perception and memory under such conditions can easily be proved to be psychologically impossible. Every psychologist knows that—so does Houdini. And what shall we think of the animus and honesty of the state that introduces such testimony to convict, knowing that the jury is too ignorant to disbelieve?

How came Miss Splaine to become acquainted with these personal characteristics of Sacco?

The answer is simple. Sacco had been shown to her on several occasions. She had had an opportunity to study him carefully. More than this, he sat before her in court. At the preliminary hearing in the police court she was not asked to pick Sacco from among a group of other men. Sacco was shown to her alone. Everyone knows that under such circumstances the image of a person later develops, or may develop, in an observer’s mind and becomes a false memory. Such a memory is produced by suggestion. Every lawyer knows the unconscious falsification of memory due to later acquired knowledge, though ignorant of the psychology of the phenomenon. And yet Miss Splaine’s testimony was offered by the state to the Jury.

Why was not Miss Splaine asked to pick out Sacco from among a group of men? If this had been done, this unconscious falsification of memory would have been avoided.

In Morton Prince the genealogy of the Back Bay combined with the intellectualism of Cambridge across the river, and while the Herald editorial might jar Boston, his letter would cause the greater explosion. Even if the Supreme Judicial Court should rule against Thompson’s appeal from Thayer’s last decision, it was now clear to the more knowing Bostonians that the matter would not rest there. Many felt that Governor Fuller would commute the death sentence to life imprisonment.

When Judge Thayer brushed aside the Madeiros evidence, Sacco felt that nothing could now save him from his fate, neither lawyers nor appeals nor—hardest of all to face—the embattled proletariat. “I don’t care how it all ends, if it only ends,” he told one of his visitors.

At Christmas Mrs. Jack’s daughter Elizabeth brought Sacco apples and candy and—what moved him much—a present for his “dear darling Ines.” He wrote to Mrs. Jack in an afterglow of optimism that he hoped from the bottom of his heart “that the new year would bring us a freedom and in the embrace of mine and in the grant human family.” But it was something he had given up believing, and he had already requested Thompson to take no more legal steps on his behalf. The two prisoners’ joint Christmas message to their supporters sounded much more like Sacco than Vanzetti:

We are convinced that our murderors are determined to burn us within this, 1927, and that it is most probable that they will succeed. And our hearts move is that the new year may give us liberty or death—but menwhile we are ready to bear our cross to the last.

Vanzetti’s moods alternated. There was a black period in the autumn when he considered going on a hunger strike. Close to his cell he could hear workmen constructing a new prison electric plant, following the Boston Edison Company’s refusal to provide the Commonwealth with current for executions. But even in his darkest moods, when he thought of himself as a vanquished man, the shadow would in a few days be overcome by his basic optimism, just as he could forget the jangle of the electric-plant construction when he learned that Mrs. Corl, the wife of the Plymouth boatbuilder, had kept a vigil lamp lighted before the statue of the Virgin for the last six years for the grace of his liberation. Something in her naïve faith gave strength to his disbelieving heart. At times he would attend the prison’s Christian Science services, not out of any belief but merely to be able to sit in the spacious, almost empty chapel and glimpse the sky again through the barred windows and the sunshine reflecting on the gilt dome of the State House. To the chaplains he remained generally hostile. Unlike Sacco, he could still be hopeful of the higher court and of Governor Fuller as an independent-minded man. Even so, he refused to apply for a pardon. “Why should I,” he said, “when I am innocent?” Nevertheless he was still willing to cooperate with his lawyers and the Defense Committee. He began to translate Thompson’s brief into Italian for distribution in Europe.

In one and the same letter Vanzetti could announce that he was doomed, and then turn with lyric nostalgia to his father’s garden at Villafalletto:

It takes a poet of first magnitude to worthly speak of it, so beautiful, unspeakably beautiful it is ... the singing birds there; black merles of the golden bick, and ever more golden troath; the golden oriols, the gold-finches, the green finches, the chaf-finches, the neck-crooking, the green ficks; the unmachable nightingales, the nightingales over-all. Yet, I think that the wonder of my garden’s wonders is the banks of its path. Hundreds of grass, leaves of wild flowors witness there the almighty genios of the universal architecture—reflecting the sky, the Sun, the moon, the stars, all of its lights and colors. The forgetmenot are nations there, and nation are the wild daisies.

Christmas—his seventh behind bars—brought a cold snap, etching the jail windows with frost. Among Vanzetti’s letters and Christmas cards were a number of books—The Life of Debs, Jack London’s Essays on Revolt, and, accompanied by a necktie from Mrs. Evans, Emerson’s Essays. Emerson he found “so exquisitely anarchist,” delighting “at the lecture of Politics, Nature and New England Reformers.”

Just after Christmas he wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:

I know perfectly well that within four month the Massachusetts will be ready to burn me....

So every hope to get reparation and freedom having been killed in me by each and all the words and deeds of Massachusettes black gowned, puritanic, cold-blood murderors, on the first day of the 1927, I formulated the wish, the wove, that I am get out within this year, no matter if alive or death. And I hope with all my force that this will come true. By it, I do not mean suicide.

As the short and frigid days moved toward the final year, the clamor from overseas echoed more loudly within the United States. The obscure foreigners who had stood up in court that sultry summer evening of 1921 to hear the foreman, Ripley, pronounce the verdict against them could at least console themselves that their names had been blazoned round the world. They who had traveled on the swaying Brockton trolley talking of a Sunday meeting of a few dozen immigrants, now could conjure up hundreds of meetings in dozens of countries. Proudly they accepted the fact that they had become symbols.