Tragedy in Dedham

The state prison’s new electric plant went into use five days after New Year’s, when three young men known as the Carbarn Bandits were executed. Following executions the warden customarily served a buffet supper to the witnesses and the press, so when on January 4 Vanzetti noticed three hams being cooked in the kitchen for the warden’s house, he knew it was the bandits’ turn.

The three—Edward Heinlein, John Devereaux, and John McLaughlin—had held up the night cashier at the Waltham carbarn on October 4, 1925; while escaping, Devereaux had shot and killed an elderly night watchman who tried to stop them. They were caught the same night, and by next day the press had already labeled them the Carbarn Bandits. At their trial Devereaux admitted that he had fired the fatal shot but said he had meant to fire at the ground. He told the court that he did not see why his two friends should suffer for what he had done. Nevertheless, all three were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. As faithful if erring Catholics they walked to the chair accompanied by a priest, and their last look was at a crucifix held before their eyes.

In the six months between their conviction and their execution, their fate caused more of a stir locally than did the postponed fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. All three had served in the Army during the war, and Devereaux had been wounded. They were Irish by descent, and whatever their faults, they had remained true to their church. The mothers of the three organized a Massachusetts Clemency Committee and presented the governor, Alvan Fuller, a petition of 120,000 names that included those of three ex-governors. Protest meetings were held all summer and autumn. In a desperate last appeal the mothers visited Fuller in his office and got down on their knees in front of him to pray for their sons’ lives. But the governor was adamant. As he had often publicly stated, he believed in the death penalty as a deterrent, in less sentimentality about murders, in modernization of the law, and more religion in life.

If Fuller had been a politician rather than a businessman he would not have hesitated about commuting the sentences, for no Massachusetts politician in his senses would have let three Irish-Catholic ex-servicemen go to the chair. To the astute it had long been clear that the descendants of the Famine immigrants, who had taken over Boston in 1902 with the election of Mayor John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald, would before long take over the Commonwealth. That Fuller’s belief in the salutary effects of capital punishment could overrule his concern for this powerful voting bloc would make it that much more difficult for him later to consider clemency for two anarchist atheist alien slackers. The execution of the Carbarn Bandits filled the Boston Irish with resentments that were transferred with accrued bitterness to Sacco and Vanzetti.

Fuller prided himself on not being a politician. His favorite maxim was Calvin Coolidge’s “More business in government, less government in business,” and he had forty million dollars to prove his point. Never had he bothered to conceal his contempt for the Republican bosses of Massachusetts with their well-established escalator system of advancement that he was rich enough to disregard. In fact, his contempt for them and his successful defiance of their candidates had made him seem outside the Commonwealth something of a La Guardia-type liberal. In 1912 he had broken with the Republican State Committee to support Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party. In 1916, again in disregard of the state committee, he had run for Congress as an independent, defeating the regular Republican candidate.

During two terms in Congress he distinguished himself chiefly by attacking abuses of the franking privilege and the mileage allowance. However, he did not hesitate to defy Massachusetts’ senior senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, by supporting the League of Nations. In 1920 he again frustrated the state Republican bosses by taking the nomination for lieutenant governor away from their designated candidate. He served the conventional two terms as lieutenant governor before defeating James Michael Curley for the governorship in 1924. In 1926 he was easily re-elected.

As he approached his fiftieth birthday he could take satisfaction in being both the leader of his state and the richest man in Massachusetts. His granite-faced neo-Renaissance mansion on the water side of Beacon Street occupied the site of two brownstone town houses that had belonged to Mrs. Jack Gardner. Old ladies might shrug their shoulders and whisper behind his back at the Longwood Cricket Club, but no one could deny him entree anywhere. The lean bicycle mechanic had become portly in middle age, his confident asymmetrical face plumping over his stiff collar. His lobeless ears clung close to his head, his thinning hair clung to his scalp, and he had curiously amber-tinted eyes that many found disconcerting. His mouth looked like a dollar sign set sideways. On the stubby little finger of his left hand with its moonless nail he wore a gold signet ring with the resurrected Fuller crest. When in an affable mood he used to say he would like to run a newspaper and teach Sunday school.

The unspoken image that fluttered in his mind during his final term as governor was the Republican National Convention of 1928 with its shimmering prospect of the Vice-Presidential nomination. It was not an impossible thought after all, for mousy Calvin Coolidge had managed it eight years before from the same governor’s chair on the strength of one of his copybook maxims pronounced during the Boston police strike: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”

On January 27 and 28, 1927, in Boston’s Pemberton Square Courthouse, Thompson, assisted by Ehrmann, appeared before the Massachusetts Supreme Court to argue against Judge Thayer’s denial of the Madeiros motion. It was the coldest weather in two years, with a high wind curling up State Street and the fringes of the harbor beginning to freeze. The courtroom was almost empty as Thompson developed his thesis. Not until he mentioned Judge Thayer could one sense the restrained passion behind the quiet voice:

“I must refer to a thing I am almost ashamed to mention. The judge, having spent a page and a half of his decision in vituperation of myself, suggested that my belief in the innocence of these defendants was due to a mental disease. He also suggested that there had been fraud and deceit in the methods used in procuring this evidence.”

Thompson then pointed out various misstatements in Thayer’s decision—such as that the Supreme Court had approved the jury’s verdict, when it had done nothing of the kind—and accused him of being so overwrought by the case that he was not capable of reasoning “with a calm mind free from impartiality.” Beyond all the renewed arguments about Madeiros, the Department of Justice, and other points, Thompson’s chief contention was that the defendants were entitled to a new trial because there had been an abuse of judicial discretion.

In the thin winter light of the musty echoing courtroom the stiff faces of the five justices looked like Copley portraits of a century and a half earlier. Chief Justice Arthur Prentice Rugg presided, flanked by Henry King Braley, William Cushing Wait, John Crawford Crosby, and Edward Peter Pierce—New England names, bloodless New England features. To Thompson they seemed as chill as the city streets outside.

Vanzetti was pessimistic about the appeal:

We know that in a case of such nature as ours, legallity alone is insufficient. Mr. Thompson has known to place the case in such perfect manner before the Supreme Court, that if the justices wish, they can give us justice now.... Therefore, if they are going to a refusal, it would unmistakably prove that they have prostituted their consciences, their intellect, and will to a categoric order of an invisible and trascendental master or class.

The appearance of Felix Frankfurter’s article, “The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly initiated the final world-shaking stage of the case. The Atlantic still remained the voice of conservative intellectual America. For seventy years its staid ocher cover with the oval intaglio cut of Poseidon and his sea horse had borne the names of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Hale, Holmes, James, and Howells. That it should now feature an article by a Harvard Law School professor attacking the trial, the jury, the witnesses, the verdict, and the Massachusetts judiciary, gave the affair at once a national significance. The stirrings in Europe, the mutterings in New England had now become articulate. Frankfurter’s article was like a lighted fuse leading to a powder magazine. Sacco and Vanzetti became familiar names in all the forty-eight states, not just among the urban left-liberals but in the suburbs and the small towns and the women’s clubs and the little brick Carnegie libraries.

For most of those who read it, Frankfurter’s attack was their factual introduction to the background of a case they had heard about only vaguely. Deftly and concisely the law-school professor explained how the two men had come to be arrested, described the method of selecting the jury, Katzmann’s harrying cross-examination of Sacco, Judge Thayer’s patriotic rhetoric, and the later discrediting of various witnesses. Accepting the hypothesis that the Morelli gang committed the South Braintree murders, he asserted “with deep regret” that Thayer’s ruling on the Madeiros motion was “a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions and mutilations.”

The weakness in Frankfurter’s article was that basically the prosecution had a more formidable case against the two men than readers of the Atlantic would have gathered. Of the expanded book version that appeared the same month, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to Harold Laski:

My prejudices were all with Felix’s book. But after all, it’s simply showing, if it was right, that the case was tried in a hostile atmosphere. I doubt if anyone would say there was no evidence warranting a conviction.

With the appearance of the Atlantic article, Frankfurter became the moving spirit of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. Even Thompson turned to him. His were the final decisions as to tactics and action. Lithe, dark, youthful in manner but obviously the professor, the forty-five-year-old Frankfurter was as intense as he was opinionated, the picture of academic intellectualism without its self-deprecatory pose. Whenever he appeared at the Hanover Street headquarters he always managed to look as brisk as if he had just walked over from Cambridge—as he sometimes had. He and Governor Fuller shared a common start from nothing and were both driven by the same fierce will to succeed, but the governor saw success as the power of money while the professor saw it as the power of the mind.

Felix Frankfurter had been sure of himself from the day he arrived in New York from Vienna as a twelve-year-old immigrant, bookish and eager, speaking no English yet shortly afterward leading his classes in the Lower East Side’s Public School 25. At the Harvard Law School, which he entered more or less by chance in 1903, he stood for three years first in his class, receiving the highest honor of becoming an editor of the Law Review. After graduation he served as assistant to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in the Taft administration, continuing briefly into Wilson’s first term. Just ten years after the unknown Frankfurter had entered the Harvard Law School, Professor Edward Warren enticed him back with an invitation to join the faculty.

Frankfurter had not concerned himself with the Sacco-Vanzetti case during the trial or immediately following it. Only when he saw the headlines in the autumn of 1923 that Thompson had accused the prosecution of a frame-up in regard to Captain Proctor’s testimony did he begin to take an interest. After he read that Proctor had sworn that when he said “consistent with” he did not really think the bullet had gone through the gun, his neutrality evaporated. And when Katzmann, in reply to Proctor, said he had not “repeatedly” asked the question, that settled it. Frankfurter wrote his Atlantic article with, as he himself boasted, the intention of jolting minds.

On April 5, in the Pemberton Square courthouse, the Supreme Court handed down its decision. Guards took their places all through the cavernous building; deputy sheriffs and court officers patrolled the corridors. Guards were also placed in front of the railings of Governor Fuller’s Beacon Street mansion and sent to Judge Thayer’s home in Worcester.

The decision upheld Judge Thayer at every point. Through the late afternoon the news, first chalked up on the bulletin boards of Newspaper Row on Washington Street, spread through the business district like wildfire. Everyone wanted to know just one thing: What could the two Italians do now?

According to Massachusetts law the court was limited to determining whether the trial judge had committed any errors of law or abuses of discretion. These were the limitations rigidly held to by Justice Wait in his opinion. Could Thayer conscientiously, intelligently, and honestly have reached the result he has reached? the court asked itself collectively, and answered, through Justice Wait, that he could have.

The granting or the denial of a motion for a new trial of an indictment for murder rests in the judicial discretion of the trial judge, and his decision will not be disturbed unless it is vitiated by errors of law or abuse of discretion.

The question of the guilt or innocence of the defendants was not a matter for consideration. Citing a civil case, Davis v. Boston Elevated Railway, as precedent, the court ruled:

It is not imperative that a motion for a new trial of an indictment for murder based on newly discovered evidence be granted, even though the evidence is newly discovered, and, if presented to a jury, would justify a different verdict.

The Massachusetts tradition, sternly enforced by Chief Justice Rugg, was that Supreme Judicial Court decisions were unanimous, but that behind the ruling of April 5 there may have been some suppressed stirrings of doubt was indicated by an incident related by Herbert Ehrmann. In 1938, as he was addressing a Boston Bar Association memorial meeting in honor of Thompson, he noticed Justice Pierce in the audience. Pierce had been a member of the Massachusetts Supreme Court during the entire period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and Ehrmann felt uneasy over the critical remarks he was about to make. When, however, the meeting was over, the justice came forward with tears pouring down his cheeks, grasped Ehrmann’s hand, and said in a broken voice, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, District Attorney Wilbar asked for imposition of sentence, and a special session was called at the Dedham courthouse for Saturday, April 9. In Charlestown, meanwhile, Warden Hendry transferred Vanzetti to the state prison’s grim and ancient Cherry Hill section “to protect him from the unwelcome attention of curious visitors.”

Outside Massachusetts the protests were immediate. A Committee for the Defense of Victims of Fascism and the White Terror sent a wire from France to President Coolidge, signed by Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Albert Einstein, requesting the liberation of Sacco and Vanzetti. From Berlin the International Red Aid cabled Governor Fuller demanding “pardon and release in the name of half a million members.” The Regional Federation of Labor in Buenos Aires called a forty-eight-hour strike to protest the court’s decision. Letters, telegrams, and cables poured in on Governor Fuller, at whose ornate wrought-iron gate the problem had now been left. Privately, Fuller considered that the court’s word should be the last word, but publicly he announced that the evidence in the case had never been presented to him and that consequently he had not formed any opinion. On April 7, as if to emphasize his detachment, he bought another Gainsborough portrait, “Master Heathcote,” from Sir Joseph Duveen.

The day of the sentencing broke cold and damp and gray. At Charlestown, Vanzetti was waked at five o’clock. He ate his breakfast of frankfurts, baked potatoes, bread, and coffee, then—since he would not be returning immediately to the state prison—wrapped his belongings in brown paper. After he had finished he went to the rotunda where he sat calmly smoking his pipe until the car came to take him to Dedham. As he left he waved a friendly good-by to Warden Hendry.

He rejoined Sacco in the library of the Dedham jail. Again they embraced gravely. Shortly before ten a bus took them to court. They left surrounded by a dozen deputies and three policemen with shotguns.

The courthouse was again surrounded by police with rifles. Admission was by ticket, obtainable only by those connected with the defense or the prosecution, plus the curious-minded with political pull. Felicani, Mary Donovan, and Mrs. Evans’ secretary Anna Bloom arrived at the courthouse a little after nine only to find the iron gates locked. A janitor refused to let them in until ordered to by a state trooper. Mrs. Evans, who had broken her ankle recently, limped up the steps in the company of Sarah Ehrmann and Mrs. Gertrude Winslow, the secretary of the Community Church. Rosina Sacco did not appear. The prosecution was represented by Albert Brouillard and state detectives Fleming and Ferrari.

When Sacco and Vanzetti stepped from the bus they were handcuffed together, and Vanzetti was handcuffed to Deputy Sheriff Caldwell. Both prisoners wore shabby overcoats with velvet collars. Sacco had on a dark suit, a dark necktie, and a felt hat. Vanzetti was wearing a bow tie and a full light-brown cap that seemed to exaggerate the droop of his mustache. They stood for a few minutes by the granite steps, smiling and self-possessed in spite of the guards. At the request of the photographers and newsreel men they took off their hats and faced in various directions. The two men had aged much in six years.

After several minutes they were marched through the iron gate and upstairs. At the door to the courtroom the jail chaplain, William Beal, chatted with them briefly. Just as their handcuffs were being removed before they entered the cage, Mrs. Evans caught their eye and tried to get to her feet. A deputy ordered her to sit down. The quiet in the waiting courtroom was broken only by the ticking of the marble-faced clock. One of the reporters had the feeling that everyone present was holding his breath.

Judge Thayer got out of his car just as the clock of the First Church across Court Street was striking ten. He was wearing a derby, as was the ham-faced state detective who accompanied him, and though he skipped up the steps briskly enough he looked frail. The years, culminating in this moment, had brought about a curious transposition that was sensed by everybody in the waiting room. For it was as if somehow the defendants had become the prosecutors and the judge the defendant. Thayer himself seemed to sense it as he strode into the courtroom, preceded by a deputy and Clerk Worthington’s warning cry. He sat down, smoothed his gown, but did not look at the men in the cage thirty feet in front of him. The preliminaries were so brief that they were over before they could make an impression. District Attorney Wilbar in an almost inaudible voice asked that sentence now be imposed on the two defendants convicted of murder in the first degree, the sentence to be executed during the week of July 10. Clerk Worthington then asked: “Nicola Sacco, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed on you?”

Sacco stood up, stared at Judge Thayer, then began slowly to speak:

“Yes, sir. I am not an orator. It is not very familiar with me the English language, and as I know, as my friend has told me, my comrade Vanzetti will speak more long, so I thought to give him the chance.”

After the halting beginning his words began to flow more freely as he felt himself stirred by the impassioned moment. He held a small piece of paper in one hand, and every now and then he slapped the railing of the cage with the other.

“I never know, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel as this Court. After seven years prosecuting they still consider us guilty. And these gentle people are arrayed with us in this court today.

“I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize over them and kill them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed class. Well, you are the oppressor.

“You know it, Judge Thayer—you know all my life, you know why I have been here, and after seven years that you have been persecuting me and my poor wife, you still today sentence us to death. I would like to tell all my life, but what is the use? You know all about what I say before, and my friend—that is, my comrade—will be talking, because he is more familiar with the language, and I will give him a chance. My comrade, the man kind, the kind man to all children, you sentence him two times, in the Bridgewater case and the Dedham case, connected with me, and you know he is innocent. You forget all the population that has been with us for seven years, to sympathize and give us all their energy and all their kindness. You do not care for them. Among that peoples and the comrades and the working class there is a big legion of intellectual people which have been with us for seven years, but to not commit the iniquitous sentence, but still the Court goes ahead. And I think I thank you all, you peoples, my comrades who have been with me for seven years, with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and I will give my friend a chance.

“I forgot one thing which my comrade remember me. As I said before, Judge Thayer know all my life, and he know I am never been guilty, never—not yesterday nor today nor forever.”

In five minutes it was over, and for an instant the atmosphere of the courtroom loosened with a rustling and shuffle of feet and a few coughs, then tightened as Clerk Worthington called on Vanzetti.

As he stood up, Vanzetti appeared calm, almost cheerful, and his voice at the beginning was deceptively gentle. He held a few penciled notes.

“Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stole and I have never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes, not only in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.

“Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not need to go in between the street and kill a man to take money. I can live with my two arms and live well....

“Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things, not only have I never committed a real crime in all my life—though some sins but not crimes—not only have I struggled all my life to eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the official moral condemns, but also the crime that the official moral and the official law sanctions and sanctifies—the exploitation and the oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes can doom me, it is this reason and none else.”

Judge Thayer stared at his bench as if he were unaware of the man addressing him. The judge’s impassivity nettled Vanzetti and as he continued his voice showed it. His eyes seemed to flash at the bent figure whom he had once called a black-gowned cobra.

“Is it possible that only a few on the jury, only two or three men, who would condemn their mother for worldly honor and for earthly fortune; is it possible that they are right against what the world, the whole world has say it is wrong and that I know that it is wrong? If there is one that I should know it, if it is right or if it is wrong, it is I and this man. You see it is seven years that we are in jail. What we have suffered during these seven years no human tongue can say, and yet you see me before you, not trembling, you see me looking you in your eyes straight, not blushing, not changing color, not ashamed or in fear.

“Eugene Debs say that not even a dog—something like that—not even a dog that kill chickens would have been found guilty by American jury with the evidence that the Commonwealth have produced against us. I say that not even a leprous dog would have his appeal refused two times by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts—not even a leprous dog....

“We know that you have spoke yourself and have spoke your hostility against us, and your despisement against us with friends of yours on the train, at the University Club of Boston, on the Golf Club of Worcester, Massachusetts. I am sure that if the people who know all what you say against us would have the civil courage to take the stand, maybe your Honor—I am sorry to say this because you are an old man, and I have an old father—but maybe you would be beside us in good justice at this time.”

The record of Vanzetti’s first trial is incomplete, and though the phrase does not appear in the transcript or in the newspaper accounts, Thayer was said by members of the Defense Committee who were in the courtroom to have instructed the jury that the defendant’s beliefs were “cognate with the crime.” Vanzetti now threw that in Thayer’s face, as well as the fact that his sentence for attempted robbery was double that of other prisoners in Charlestown convicted of actual robbery. At the recollection he struck angrily against the rail of the cage with his notes.

“You know if we would have Mr. Thompson, or even the brother McAnarney in the first trial in Plymouth, you know that no jury would have found me guilty. My first lawyer has been a partner of Mr. Katzmann, as he is still now. My first lawyer of the defense, Mr. Vahey, has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money like Judas sold Jesus Christ. If that man has not told to you or to Mr. Katzmann that he know I was guilty, it is because he know that I was not guilty. That man has done everything indirectly to hurt us. He has made long speech with the jury about things that do matter nothing, and on the point of essence to the trial he has passed over with few words or with complete silence. This was a premeditation in order to give the jury the impression that my own defender has nothing good to say, has nothing good to urge in defense of myself, and therefore go around the bush on little things that amount to nothing and let pass the essential points either in silence or with a very weakly resistance.

“We were tried during a time that has now passed into history. I mean by that, a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate against the people of our principles, against the foreigner, against slackers, and it seems to me—rather, I am positive of it, that both you and Mr. Katzmann has done all what it were in your power in order to work out, in order to agitate still more the passion of the juror, the prejudice of the juror, against us.... But the jury were hating us because we were against the war, and the jury don’t know that it makes any difference between a man that is against the war because he believes that the war is unjust, because he hate no country, because he is a cosmopolitan, and a man that is against the war because he is in favor of the other country that fights against the country in which he is, and therefore a spy, and he commits any crime in the country in which he is in behalf of the other country in order to serve the other country. We are not men of that kind. Katzmann know very well that. Katzmann know that we were against the war because we did not believe in the purpose for which they say that the war was done. We believe it that the war is wrong, and we believe this more now after ten years that we understood it day by day—the consequences and the result of the after war. We believe more now than ever that the war was wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind: ‘Look out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. For what? All that they say to you, all that they have promised to you—it was a lie, it was an illusion, it was a cheat, it was a fraud, it was a crime. They promised you liberty. Where is liberty? They promised you prosperity. Where is prosperity? They have promised you elevation. Where is elevation?’”

He accused Katzmann of breaking the agreement not to mention the Plymouth trial, he accused the Commonwealth of being more responsible than the defense for the delays, he accused Thayer of deliberately handing down his Plymouth decision on Christmas Eve “to poison the heart of our family and of our beloved,” for even though they did not believe in “the fable of the evening of Christmas,” nevertheless “we are human, and Christmas is sweet to the heart of every man.”

The marble-faced clock had ticked off forty minutes. Vanzetti disregarded his notes now. In his long-deliberated conclusion he had no need of them. His deep-set eyes took on the searing quality that Chief Stewart had remarked on seven years before.

“Well, I have already say that I not only am not guilty of these two crimes, but I never commit a crime in my life—I have never steal and I have never kill and I have never spilt blood, and I have fought against the crime, and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate and sanctify.

“This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn again two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.

“I have finished. Thank you.”

He stood there, a spare, slightly stooped figure, his face pale behind the screen of the swooping mustache, eyes still glittering with suppressed emotion. Judge Thayer’s precise arctic voice broke the silence, moving on in a few phrases to the sentencing. There was a hushed tenseness as everyone leaned forward to catch the ritual words:

“First the Court pronounces sentence of Nicola Sacco. It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven.”

Except for Thayer’s voice there was only the muffled sound of a few women sobbing.

“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo Vanzetti—”

Vanzetti’s interrupting voice was like a stone shattering thin ice. “Wait a minute, please, your Honor,” he called out. “May I speak with my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?”

Thompson, within the bar enclosure, was so taken aback that all he could do was to mutter to the court, “I do not know what he wants to say.”

Judge Thayer brushed aside the interruption. “I think I should pronounce the sentence. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of death—”

Sacco broke in, shrill and furious, and as he stood he stretched his arm and pointed at Judge Thayer. “You know I am innocent!” he shouted, his facial muscles bunched in fury. “That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago! You condemn two innocent men!”

For a moment it seemed as if the long sustained decorum of the neoclassic room was dissolving, but Thayer’s impervious voice continued with the regularity of the ticking clock—“by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven. This is the sentence of the law.” He paused, gathering his gown about him in a preliminary gesture before he announced: “We will now take a recess.” Without a glance at the men he had sentenced he stood up and walked slowly down from the bench and out into the corridor that led to his chambers.

As Sacco and Vanzetti were again being handcuffed, their friends, Italian and American, crowded round them trying to touch them, to clasp their hands. Mrs. Evans hobbled up close enough to call out cheerfully, “There’s lots to hope for yet.” There were tears in Vanzetti’s eyes. Mary Donovan pushed forward, her cheeks wet. “Do not cry, Mary,” he told her. “Keep a brave front.” Then the guards and deputies intervened.

Vanzetti, brooding in his cell, thought less of the sentence than of the words he had not been allowed to speak. Next day, with the eloquence of death on him, he wrote out his eulogy of Sacco, telling Thompson that it was “the most important thing” he had to say, and that “I would have given half my blood to be allowed to speak again.”

I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco. Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker, lover of work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice all to the cause of Liberty, and to his love for mankind; money, rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate. He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from our childhood to today—which has not been gained by the sweat of our brows. Never. His people also are in good position and of good reputation.

Oh yes, I may be more witfull as some have put it. I am a better babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice, remembering his heroism I felt small, small at the presence of his greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before him—this man called thief and assasin and doomed. But Sacco’s name will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when Katzmann’s and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name, his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a deem rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man.

Over the week end Thompson told reporters that he felt Sacco and Vanzetti could derive no benefit from further proceedings in the Massachusetts courts, and that he was not prepared to take steps designed merely to delay their execution. Moore would have acted very differently, would in fact have taken any steps, scrupulous or otherwise, and two at a time, that he thought might prolong the men’s lives. But to Moore justice was a class shell game that he was ready to operate as trickily as his opponents. “At least I have kept them alive,” he was able to say as he left Boston. Thompson still kept his faith in the traditional impartiality of the law. He would not play tricks with it.

Anticipating the adverse decision of April 5, Thompson, a few days earlier, accompanied by John Moors, Dr. Morton Prince, and Professor Frank Taussig, had called on the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, William Lawrence, to ask his help in persuading Governor Fuller to appoint a commission to review the whole proceedings. It struck none of these Boston-bred men as strange to turn to a bishop in a matter of law. On the contrary, it seemed to them the most obvious step to take, for during a third of a century the voice of Bishop Lawrence had become the ethical voice of Massachusetts.

Bishop Lawrence combined uniquely in his person the dominant strands of the community. Descended from the founders of the Bay Colony, he could walk through Boston along streets named for his ancestors. As successor to Phillips Brooks, who had preached before Queen Victoria, he concluded the reconciliation of upper-class Boston to Episcopalianism after the disestablishment of the Revolution. His income came from the textile industry that his relatives the Lawrences, the Lowells, and the Abbotts had established. Though he was a second-generation Episcopalian, the blood of ancestral Calvinism still coursed in his veins. By and large, he observed to his acquaintances, it had been his experience that the more godly members of the community were the more financially successful. As a young curate in industrial Lawrence he would cheerfully give up an afternoon to visit a crippled spinner of his congregation, yet not think it strange that the man was earning eighty cents a day. As a bishop and member of the Corporation of Harvard University he would undertake to raise five million dollars for the new Harvard Business School and also not think it strange.

A stocky man with a glowing face, Bishop Lawrence looked a cherubic Puritan. He eschewed rings, miter and crozier, pectoral crosses, black suits, and clerical collars, preferring English tweeds and gray felt hats. He received Thompson’s delegation, representative of the law, medicine, State Street, and the academy, as a matter of course. He knew at once what his duty was.

Sent to Governor [he noted in his diary] a letter saying that in Sacco-Vanzetti sentence thousands of citizens felt that they had not had a fair trial and asking the Governor to call leading and trusted men to his advice.

As both the sender and the recipient were aware, the letter, dated April 11, was more nearly a command:

Your Excellency,—

Two men, having been tried by the Courts of Massachusetts for murder, have now been sentenced to death. Upon you falls the heavy and responsible duty of carrying out the sentence unless you are moved to take other action. Confidence in the Courts of Massachusetts, which has justified itself for generations, leads its citizens to assume the sentence given is just and should be carried out.

There are, however, we believe, thousands of citizens of the Commonwealth who, having read or studied such parts of the proceedings in the Superior Court as have appeared in the public press, have serious doubts as to whether these two men have had a fair trial.

They were, as the law requires, tried by a judge and jury and found guilty. Motions for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered evidence were heard by the same judge and denied. Exceptions on points of law were taken to the Supreme Court and unanimously overruled. But the Supreme Court could not under our law reconsider and revise the findings of fact of the trial court or the exercise of the trial judge’s discretion. Hence have arisen the doubts of the citizens for whom we venture to speak.

Knowing well your sense of justice, your integrity of purpose, and your courage when assured of the rightness of your position, we ask with great earnestness that you call to your aid several citizens of well known character, experience, ability, and sense of justice to make a study of the trial and advise you. We believe that it is due to the exceptional conditions of the case, to yourself, and to the State that these doubts be allayed and that it be made evident to all citizens that the Commonwealth has done full justice to herself as well as to these men, and also that you may have strong and intelligent support in whatever decision you may make.

Rt. Rev. William A. Lawrence

Additional signatures were superfluous. Nevertheless, as if to underline his position, the Bishop took care to have his letter signed by three most proper Bostonians—fellow Harvard Corporation member Charles Curtis, Jr.; Hernan Burr, as well known in the city as a lawyer and financier as he was unknown elsewhere; and Roland Boyden of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins, a law firm whose name was said to have such magic force that it was seldom mentioned; one only thought it.

The letter was not immediately made public. Meanwhile, on April 12, Representative Roland Sawyer, a Congregational minister who for fourteen years had represented Ware and several other small western Massachusetts towns in the state legislature, drew up a resolution which he presented in the House of Representatives to provide for a special commission “to examine and review the proceedings of the Commonwealth against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” Sawyer realized that the measure had no chance of passing but he felt that a public hearing on it would be the informal equivalent of a trial, and that additional evidence there presented would undermine the prosecution’s case to such an extent that it would make the carrying out of the death sentences impossible. Thompson favored Sawyer’s plan, but Frankfurter, after meeting with the Defense Committee in a downtown law office, decided against it. He told Sawyer that he had confidence in Fuller. Sawyer’s resolution was rejected in the legislature by a rising vote of 146-6.

The next move was Governor Fuller’s. He who a few weeks before had announced that he had not formed an opinion had now become the court of last appeal. In a few more weeks a stroke of his pen would have to decide whether it would be freedom for the two men, commutation of their sentences to life imprisonment, or death. To Thompson, who visited him privately, he announced that he could make no investigation unless he was requested to do so by Sacco and Vanzetti. Thompson promised to see that such a request was made.

The written and telegraphed appeals, requests, and suggestions now reaching the governor by the hundreds were signed with such nationally known names as Rabbi Stephen Wise, novelist Gertrude Atherton, President Emeritus David Starr Jordan of Stanford University, and biographer Ida Tarbell. A Massachusetts communication was signed by author and doctor Richard Cabot; John Hays Hammond, the North Shore millionaire industrialist; Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking; Harvard teacher and essayist Bliss Perry; and historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Arthur Schlesinger. The name of Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School headed a petition signed by Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson.

The tone of most of these appeals was conciliatory, not to say flattering. That most tirelessly—some thought tiresomely—liberal of clergymen, John Haynes Holmes of New York’s Community Church, expressed his strong faith in Governor Fuller’s fairness. Fiorello La Guardia, who had served with Fuller in Congress, wrote optimistically to the New York World that the governor was “free from bigotry and prejudice and will investigate fairly and fully.” The Nation believed, in an open letter, that the governor would fearlessly face the great issue that had aroused not only masses of Americans but millions all over the world. Only the Communists, seeing no advantage from their point of view in conciliating anybody, kept up a counterpoint of invective, the Daily Worker denouncing Fuller as “that toothless troglodyte and flunky of the mill owners.”

Cardinal O’Connell, as urbane and adept a weigher of words as could be found in the Commonwealth, suggested an investigating commission indirectly when he urged that the governor reach his decision “by making use of every human aid that he can possibly gather.” Fuller himself, in an unexpected interview with Joseph Lilly of the Brooklyn Eagle, said that he did not know whether to appoint a commission or go over the case himself.

There were rumors that Charles Evans Hughes would soon head a Sacco-Vanzetti commission, then contrary rumors that there would be no commission after all. The Transcript continued to denounce the substitution of “public opinion in place of judicial conclusions.” Nine out of ten of the city’s lawyers were agreed that when the courts had spoken, contrary voices should become mute. Robert Goodwin and Joseph Proctor, Jr., of the august firm of Goodwin, Proctor, Field and Hoar, felt it their civic duty to try to offset the unaccountable aberration of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins by declaring that for Fuller to appoint a fact-finding commission would be an abdication of the powers of his office.

Although the Massachusetts Supreme Court could not reply directly to its critics, it managed to find a semiofficial defense in the pamphlet “Sacco and Vanzetti in the Scales of Justice,” written and published by its Reporter of Decisions, Ethelbert Vincent Grabill. For the reporter, the Massachusetts legal structure was a parthenon inherited from the Puritans, and he claimed that he had been moved by the spirit of his ancestors to attempt to “bring a wandering citizenry back to confidence in our courts, in their proceedings, and in our Governor, and fortify and strengthen those who have not wandered.” Grabill was untroubled by the proceedings at Dedham. For him it was “doubtful if Judge Thayer’s charge was ever equalled for clearness, completeness and fairness.” He considered it presumptuous for anyone to ask the governor to appoint a review commission, and complained that “having persons passing around ... petitions on the subject tends to stir up opposition to our Constitution and laws.”

Not until two weeks after the sentencing did Fuller finally ask District Attorney Ranney for the Sacco-Vanzetti records. On May 4 Thompson brought the governor a formal petition in which Vanzetti asked to be set free from his sentence. Carefully Vanzetti avoided the word pardon with its connotation of admitted guilt; he emphasized that he was asking for justice, not mercy. He pointed out to the governor that it would be unlikely for robbers to linger near the scene of a crime “in order to address public meetings in behalf of persecuted radicals.” Beyond this, the lengthy presentation was mostly a recapitulation of points that had been made in the various motions—Proctor’s equivocations, the dubious character of the chief witnesses, Judge Thayer’s prejudice, and the issue of radicalism.

The petition came from Vanzetti alone. True to his resolve to take no further part in the defense, Sacco refused to sign it. As a result, he was again examined to determine whether he should be considered mentally responsible. Dr. Abraham Meyerson, who conducted the examination, reported that:

There is no question that the seven years of his incarceration, mainly without employment and entirely preoccupied by his situation, have helped bring about an abnormal state in which his fanaticism has been intensified to an obsession. Though he is not insane, his inaccessibility to all reasoning and his emotional reactions are pathological. His mind has lost the flexibility which enables a man to adjust normally to situations.

Governor Fuller received the petition without comment. On May 8 he tripped going upstairs and tore a tendon in his left leg. While he was confined to his Beacon Street house, reporters noted that among his visitors were the McAnarney brothers and ex-District Attorney Katzmann.

The first real inkling of what was going on behind the wrought iron gates of 150 Beacon Street was provided on May 12 when Will Rogers, the gum-chewing lariat-swinging comedian-philosopher, appeared in Boston for a one-night benefit at the Opera House. Before the performance he had visited Governor Fuller. “I don’t know anything about this murder case that is interesting you in Massachusetts,” Rogers told his Opera House audience, “but I want to tell you that your governor is working on it. I stopped in on my way here to sit with him for a few moments and I found him in his room with crutches by his side. He had three or four pistols, and he had a big pile of books, the record of the case, and he is working away at it. I don’t know what he is going to decide, of course, but I do know that he isn’t going to be skeered into deciding it, and I do know that when he makes his decision, it’s going to be a decision he believes right down through him. He’s terribly anxious about it, but he is going to get all the facts.”

It was clear at last that Governor Fuller was going to do his own investigating. Day after day now the newspapers recorded the appearance of witnesses old and new, first at 150 Beacon Street and then at the executive chambers in the State House. Through the late spring weeks the governor interviewed the eleven surviving Dedham jurors and the twelve from Plymouth, Judge Thayer, and as many of the original witnesses as could be located, as well as the “suppressed” witness, Roy Gould. One day it was observed that he took Beltrando Brini to lunch. Another day he spent several hours with Lola Andrews’ son, now Corporal Hassam of the U.S. Marine Corps. Assisting him were his sharp, bald, thin-lipped private counsel, Joseph Wiggin, his confidential secretary, Herman MacDonald, and Lieutenant Governor Frank Allen. Reporters could get no information from the gruff MacDonald, whose function was to act as a buffer between the governor and the external world. This function he exercised with a gusto that earned him the nickname of Hard-boiled Herman and the dislike of newspapermen and State House employees generally.

When the Defense Committee protested against the secrecy of the governor’s hearings, Fuller began consulting with Thompson and Ehrmann. He refused, however, to allow representatives of the defense to confront witnesses in his presence.

Vanzetti was convinced that the governor must have had him and Sacco in mind when he wrote his article “Why I Believe in Capital Punishment,” for the December 1926 issue of Success Magazine. He wrote Mrs. Evans not “to expect that Fuller will stand against the judiciary, the middle class, the big money in behalf of two damned dagos and anarchists.”

Nevertheless, as the weeks wore away with their succession of witnesses, Fuller appeared uneasy and uncertain. Robert Lincoln O’Brien, sitting next to him at a Boston University commencement dinner, hesitantly brought up the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti. Far from objecting, Fuller seemed eager to talk about it. He said he felt it was abhorrent that one man should have the decision in a capital case, that O’Brien would be surprised at the way much of the trial testimony had collapsed. According to O’Brien’s later account, Fuller then told him he was going to settle the case in such a way that he could live with his conscience.

As in Elizabethan tragic drama, there now occurred a clown’s interlude, furnished by Edward Holton James, the bearded pipe-smoking son of William and Henry James’ black-sheep alcoholic brother, Robertson. James was a dilettante with a town house on Mount Vernon Street and a country estate in Concord that had two houses, one for his wife and one for himself, where he built and repaired musical instruments. He described himself variously as a musician and as a lawyer—though whether he practiced either law or the violin was questionable. “The millionaire pacifist,” as the newspapers tagged him, had written a shrill pamphlet on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, a counterblast to Grabill’s effort, in which he announced:

You had a crazy judge and jury in Plymouth. You had the same crazy judge with another crazy jury in Dedham. You had a crazy Supreme Court of Massachusetts, sitting in the Court House in Boston, saying it was all right. The whole lot of them ought to be sitting in the insane asylum.

On April 15 James drove to South Braintree to re-enact the crime and demonstrate the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. He had planned to recruit his cast from members of the Harvard Liberal Club but at the last minute found himself speeding through the Blue Hills with only a solitary lawyer friend, Abraham Wirin, to play a bandit’s part. At South Braintree their efforts to pick up local volunteer actors drew a blank, and Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent, refused to let them into the factory. They glimpsed a moment of martyrdom when the chairman of the board of selectmen, Edward Avery, tried to stop their two-man show, but the new police chief, John Heaney, waved Avery back and told them to go ahead. A few days later James returned alone to make some pencil sketches and this time, while heads gawked from all the factory windows, Avery gave him fifteen minutes to leave town. After telling Avery to go to hell, James at last had the satisfaction of being arrested and charged with disturbing the peace. He left twenty dollars as bail money—which he later forfeited—and returned triumphantly to Boston in time for lunch.

The pigmy sparrings of Grabill and James were succeeded by a battle of giants when on April 25 Dean John Wigmore of the Northwestern University Law School commandeered the front page of the Transcript to answer Frankfurter’s Atlantic article. Wigmore was one of the great scholars of his day, and his monumental treatise The Law of Evidence remains one of the classics of Anglo-American law. A Harvard graduate of the class of 1883, he was furious that Frankfurter should have so influenced intellectual and university opinion. He did not once mention Frankfurter by name but referred to him with surly pedantry as the “plausible pundit.”

“To vindicate Massachusetts Justice, I crave the opportunity of your pages to address the lawyers of the Commonwealth,” he wrote the Transcript, and that paper obliged by giving his article the largest headlines since those announcing the 1918 armistice. Calling the Frankfurter article “neither fair nor accurate nor complete,” Wigmore protested that the “insinuation of a ‘picked’ jury was baseless and worthy only of unscrupulous yellow journalism.” He drummed on the fact that it was the defendants who had first brought up the subject of radicalism at the trial, asked why Frankfurter had not mentioned Sacco’s cap, accused him of saying nothing about the passport found on Sacco’s person the night of his arrest, proof in itself that the latter did not need to lie from fear of deportation. He asserted that if the Supreme Court had had any doubts of the defendants’ guilt it would have been “astute enough to lay hold of some point of pure law as a ground for ordering a new trial,” and pointed out that the defense at the time had taken no exception to Judge Thayer’s charge. Finally, he set off a series of rhetorical questions that streaked like red rockets across the Transcript’s staid pages:

Is Massachusetts subject to dictates of international terrorists? Where has the like ever been known in modern history? The thugs of India, the Camorra of Naples, the Black Hand of Sicily, the anarchists of czardom—when did their attempts to impose their will by violence ever equal in range of operations and vicious directness, the organized efficiency of this cabal to which Sacco and Vanzetti belong?

Frankfurter received a copy of the Transcript in the early afternoon and sat down at once to write his answer. Frank Buxton, the Herald’s editor, held up the presses so that his reply could appear in the next morning’s edition. In spite of the speed at which he had to write, Frankfurter had the advantages of a controlled temper and a deeper knowledge of the case. With mock mildness he began by suggesting that Wigmore could not have read the record or the opinions of Judge Thayer with care. He pointed out that the prosecution knew all about Sacco’s radicalism before the trial began—that the prosecution’s excuse for the cross-examination did not hold. In his Atlantic article he had challenged Judge Thayer’s statement that the Supreme Court had “approved” the verdict. Wigmore having denied that Thayer had used the word, Frankfurter now pointed to the passage where it occurred in the decision on the Madeiros motion. He also showed that Wigmore had accepted as genuine an erroneous passage about Sacco’s passport. He admitted not having mentioned Sacco’s cap in his article, adding that he had dealt with it in his book.

Two weeks later Wigmore came charging back with another piece for the Transcript in which he accused his opponent—this time referred to as the “contra-canonical critic”—of violating Canon 20 of the American Bar Association’s Code of Professional Ethics, which condemns “newspaper publication by a lawyer as to pending or anticipated legislation,” and of being behind-the-scenes counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti. He had also determined that while Judge Thayer used the word approved once, he had on eight other occasions used affirmed or some similar neutral word. Insisting that the real issue was whether the trial had been unfair—“a riot of political passion” through the misconduct of the district attorney and the judge—Wigmore held that it had not been. “If the Bar of Massachusetts should take this body-blow lying down,” he concluded, “they would deserve to suffer their profession polluted and their bench bolshevized by agitators financed and led as this case has been.”

In writing to William Howard Taft some months after the executions, President Lowell of Harvard commented that “Wigmore’s ridiculous article looked as if there was nothing serious to be said on the side of the courts.”

Frankfurter was not to be drawn out by Wigmore’s name-calling. His second reply in the Herald was as detached and temperate as before. He observed that Wigmore had answered nothing at all about Judge Thayer’s mistaken interpolation about Sacco’s passport. And it was still a fact, however Wigmore might feel about it, that Thayer had used the word approved. Frankfurter denied that the Massachusetts Supreme Court had the power the Northwestern dean attributed to it, and he concluded with the statement that “in no sense in which lawyers responsibly use the term have I ever been of counsel for Sacco and Vanzetti.”

Through May Governor Fuller continued his investigation to the exclusion of all other state business, sometimes spending twelve to fourteen hours a day interviewing witnesses and reading documents. Since the imposition of the death sentences he had received over 17,000 protesting letters and telegrams. Whatever he decided, he knew there would be an uproar. It was too much for one man.

On June 1, when rumor had all but settled the matter the other way, Secretary MacDonald announced that the governor had named a three-man advisory committee to go over all the aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The three were President Lowell; Robert Grant, a retired probate judge; and President Samuel Stratton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Several weeks before this appointment Lowell—possibly at the suggestion of his cousin, Bishop Lawrence—had written Fuller to the effect that men with no sympathy for anarchists were troubled by the charges that the Sacco-Vanzetti trial had been unfair and the verdict unwarranted by the evidence. But even if the president of Harvard had not so written, he would have seemed to the governor the logical first choice for any such committee. Lowell incarnated to Fuller what he most admired: status, family, academic learning, inherited assurance—the things his Packard money could not buy.

Abbott Lawrence Lowell—the Massachusetts spindle cities of Lowell and Lawrence were named for his forbears—was the tenth-generation descendant of the Bristol merchant-trader Percival Lowle who in 1639 at the age of sixty-seven had protested against the ship-money tax by sailing for America with his family of fifteen. Second of the two armigerous families in early New England, the Lowells became one of the few truly dynastic families in America. Abbott Lawrence was a worthy if not extraordinarily distinguished member of his clan. Although in his early middle years he had written the solid, pedestrian The Government of England and been appointed Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard, without the prestige of his family name he would never have succeeded Charles W. Eliot in 1907 to the presidency of America’s oldest university.

He was born in 1856, but his mind was a throwback to a decade earlier than that—before the Irish invasion—when Boston was still a mellow self-contained brick town to which he and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts belonged, and which in turn belonged to them. To Lowell the mass newcomers—the Famine Irish and the later Italians and Jews—were an intrusion on the Athens of America that Boston might have been. Dismayed at the appearance among his undergraduates of increasing numbers of Polish-born Jewish day students, he at one time planned to limit their admission to Harvard to a small fixed quota.

Yet Lowell, whatever the limitations of his outlook and sympathies, inherited a rectitude impervious to external pressures. When, during the Boston police strike of 1919, Harold Laski—then a temporary lecturer in political science at Harvard—spoke out in favor of the strikers, many local Harvard graduates denounced him as a traitor and a Bolshevik and demanded his dismissal. Lowell himself had opposed the policemen and even helped furnish strikebreakers from the undergraduates, but at the hint that the governing boards were considering getting rid of Laski he announced that if they exercised this undoubted legal right his own resignation would immediately and irrevocably follow. In that same year he took the side of United States entry into the League of Nations in a debate at Boston’s Symphony Hall with the irreconcilable Henry Cabot Lodge.

When Lowell agreed to serve on Fuller’s committee he did so reluctantly. From what he had read of the case in Frankfurter’s Atlantic article, he told Judge Grant, he rather expected to find that injustice had been done.

Whatever the criticisms that dogged Lowell afterward, he would always feel that he had done his duty. No man would ever be able to accuse him of temporizing with what he thought was right. The only question centered in that qualifying word thought. Ferris Greenslet, the well-disposed chronicler of the Lowell generations, remarked that although President Lowell had shown all his life an open mind, “it was perhaps closed at one point only, against any action or consideration tending to show a flaw in the administration of justice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” John Moors, Lowell’s Harvard classmate, was blunter; he told Frankfurter that Lowell was “incapable of seeing that two wops could be right and the Yankee judiciary wrong.”

At the time Lowell acceded to the governor’s request he was in his seventy-second year, still briskly vigorous in walk and manner, although his Lowell features had begun to droop. It has been said that people as they grow older tend to resemble their dogs. Lowell, with his paunched and brooding face, seemed more and more to take on the look of the sad-eyed cocker spaniel that was the companion of his walks.

At the outset of the committee deliberations he assumed, as did everyone else except Judge Grant, that his was to be the controlling voice, and indeed the officially designated Governor’s Advisory Committee became known almost at once as the Lowell Committee. Each day when the three men returned together to the State House after lunch, Grant and Stratton would head for the basement elevator while Lowell would spring up the forty-one granite steps leading to the porticoed entrance to the executive chambers. By the time the other two arrived they would find him already seated at the head of the table preparing the agenda.

Grant and Lowell had played together as children on Beacon Hill, and Grant for all his self-effacing manner resented the automatic assumption of authority by his younger playmate. Alphabetically his name had come first on the governor’s list and he had, he felt, more right than Abbott Lawrence to head the committee even if the latter had suggested his name to the governor. For thirty years Grant had been Judge of the Suffolk Court of Probate and Insolvency. From the cut of his mustache to the cut of his voice he was a wispy man, with shoe-button eyes and an English accent once removed, part of the genteel desiccated Boston that after its brief literary flowering had been withering away for two generations under the cloud of immigrants. A light versifier and wit, in hours filched from his not-too-arduous judicial duties he had written unreadable novels about Boston that were at one time much read in the city. In 1908, while he was traveling in Italy, some of his luggage was stolen, whereupon he sent outraged appeals not only to the American ambassador but to the State Department in Washington; several years later in his autobiographical The Convictions of a Grandfather he was still spluttering about Italian thievery. Before accepting his place on the committee he did have the common sense to ask Fuller what he would do if he got a divided report. The governor replied that he would then consider that there was ground for doubt.

Stratton, chosen by Fuller at Lowell’s suggestion so that the committee would not seem too much of a Back Bay family affair, was an Illinois farm boy who had made himself into a mathematician, physicist, and engineer. As president of one of the country’s great scientific schools he inhabited a Cambridge divorced from the old literary associations. It was predicted that he would be of great help in evaluating the ballistics evidence and other technical points. So far as can be determined he never opened his mouth during the sixteen days that the committee met.

When it turned to the ballistics evidence, the Lowell Committee was undoubtedly greatly influenced by the findings of Major Calvin Goddard, a New York expert who came to Boston at the end of May on his own initiative, bringing with him a comparison microscope and offering to make what he maintained would be conclusive tests on the shells and bullets offered in evidence at Dedham. He was accompanied by William Crawford, a reporter from the New York World, who called on Thompson to ask if he would cooperate in the holding of the tests. Resentful of Crawford’s contemptuous remarks about Dr. Hamilton, Thompson declined but said he would put no obstacles in Goddard’s way. Ranney, for the district attorney’s office, had no objections.

When, in preparation, Goddard demonstrated his double-image microscope to Hamilton’s supporting expert, Professor Gill, the latter was so taken with “the simplicity and accuracy of its findings” that he not only recommended its use to the governor but announced that he himself would abide by the results.

With Gill, Ranney, and Ehrmann present, as well as a stenographer and Frank Buxton and Thomas Carens of the Herald, Goddard examined the evidence in the clerk of courts’ office at Dedham on the afternoon of June 3. Comparing Bullet III with a test bullet fired from Sacco’s pistol, he suggested that Gill make the same comparison. “Well, what do you know about that?” Gill muttered to himself as he looked into the microscope. Goddard’s conclusion was that the mortal bullet taken from Berardelli’s body had been fired through Sacco’s pistol and could have been fired through no other. Gill, too, now became convinced of this, despite his earlier findings to the contrary. Ehrmann, examining the identifying scratches on the base of Bullet III, remarked that they were irregular and almost indecipherable compared with the scratches on Bullets I, II, and IV.

Looking at the shells through his microscope, Goddard concluded that Shell W had been fired in Sacco’s pistol and could have been fired in no other. Ehrmann, Buxton, and Carens did not find the comparison of the shells conclusive.

Soon after these tests, Gill told Thompson that he now doubted his original findings and wished to sever all connection with the case. His disavowal was followed by one from James Burns, another of the defense experts, who had recently become convinced, after studying certain microphotographs made earlier for Captain Van Amburgh, that the Fraher shell had been fired in Sacco’s gun.

Goddard’s report was forwarded without comment to Governor Fuller and to the Lowell Committee. Goddard claimed afterward that his tests would have been even more satisfactory if a sticky substance coating the bullets could have been removed. Ranney had been willing to have the bullets cleaned but Thompson refused to approve of this under any circumstances, adding that he believed there had been trickery and that the prosecution had made a substitution of bullets and shells among the exhibits. Goddard in turn said he had no opinion as to the genuineness of the exhibits, although he agreed that the scratches on Bullet III were less clear than on the others.

Before leaving Boston, in a deflating interview with Thompson, Goddard admitted that he had come to town with an adverse opinion about Sacco already formed, the result of studying Van Amburgh’s microphotographs. When he went on to express doubts about Hamilton, Thompson produced a letter that the aspiring Goddard had written the druggist-expert in 1924, asking his advice about starting a career in ballistics identification. Goddard’s reply was that he knew more about Hamilton now than he had known in 1924, and the interview ended with Thompson angrily defending Hamilton as a man of honor.

The uncertainty that eventually clouded the reputations of all the ballistics experts in the case enveloped Goddard three months after he left Boston. In Cleveland, several weeks after a bootlegger, Ernest Yorkell, was shot to death, the police arrested a Frank Milazzo with a revolver in his possession similar to the murder weapon. Two bullets from Yorkell’s body and several test bullets from Milazzo’s gun were submitted to Major Goddard in New York. When Goddard reported that one of the murder bullets and one of the test bullets had been fired from the same gun, Milazzo was charged with the murder. Unfortunately for Major Goddard, though not for his comparison microscope, Milazzo was able to prove that he had bought the revolver new a month after the shooting. Goddard attributed his mistake to a bullet mixup by the Cleveland police. Although it was never determined whether the fault was his, he had apparently compared the two murder bullets.

In the unconfessed course of events, Madeiros, following his second trial, would have been electrocuted during the week of September 5, 1926, but the motion and appeal based on his confession brought him a series of reprieves. Not until late in Governor Fuller’s Sacco-Vanzetti investigation did he see Madeiros personally and then for only fifteen minutes.

In his testimony to me [the governor reported] he could not recall the details or describe the neighborhood. He furthermore stated that the Government had double crossed him and he proposed to double cross the Government. He feels that the District Attorney’s office has treated him unfairly because his two confederates who were associated with him in the commission of the murder for which he was convicted were given life sentences, whereas he was sentenced to death. He confessed the crime for which he was convicted. I am not impressed with his knowledge of the South Braintree murders.