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Tragedy in Dedham

Chapter 30: FOOTNOTES:
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About This Book

This account traces the arrests, trials, appeals, forensic testing, and political fallout surrounding the prosecution and execution of two men accused of a payroll robbery and murder in Massachusetts. It reconstructs the investigation and courtroom proceedings, examines ballistic evidence and expert testimony, and follows successive motions, committee reviews, demonstrations, and international reactions that transformed the case into a polarizing social symbol. The narrative weighs competing interpretations of the evidence, details post-conviction inquiries and confessions, and situates the controversy within broader debates about due process, political fear, and the role of public opinion in the administration of justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] An English writer, Edward Shanks, thought that these paragraphs compared with the Gettysburg Address but doubted that Vanzetti had ever uttered them. Stong defended himself by saying that he could not write that well, that he had supplied only the exclamation marks, and that these would have been better left out. “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that the internal evidence of that interview is sufficient to convince any honorably disposed person of its authenticity. The change of number in the pronoun was beautifully characteristic of Vanzetti. ‘I’ unmarked, unknown, a failure—but ‘Our’ career, triumph, work for tolerance and justice.” This version that Stong gave in the New York World of May 13, 1927, differs, nevertheless, in several places from the one he printed in 1949 in his essay on the case in The Aspirin Age.

[26] The original of this letter is not available. The published version has undoubtedly been edited.

[27] The transcript of the committee hearings merely states that Bosco appeared as requested on July 15 with editions of La Notizia. The omission from the record of what followed has been much criticized by defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti.

[28] A photograph of Sacco reproduced in the papers after his arrest showed him wearing a derby.