Tragedy in Dedham

Governor Fuller continued hearing witnesses until the end of July. Obviously he was not going to draw his own conclusions or even appear to have drawn them before taking his cue from the Lowell Committee. In an interview with Jackson and Felicani he asked them flatly how he could be expected to believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling eels on December 24. “I am a businessman,” he told them. “I am used to proof before I decide anything. There isn’t a single document in the case proving that Vanzetti sold eels. There’s only the word of his Italian friends.”

Spurred by the governor’s disbelief and furnished with a sketch map by Vanzetti, Felicani and Ehrmann made the rounds of the waterfront wholesale fish dealers. Finally, at 112 Atlantic Avenue, they found that one of the partners of Corso & Gambino remembered shipping fish to Vanzetti in 1919. The firm had then been Corso & Cannizzo. Ehrmann and Felicani dug away for hours among Corso’s dusty account books until at last they uncovered what they had almost given up hope of finding, an American Express Company receipt showing that on Saturday, December 20, 1919, a forty-pound barrel of eels had been shipped with C.O.D. charges of $21.79 to B. Vanzetti, Plymouth.

The eels must have been delivered either on Monday or Tuesday. Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, had testified they arrived “either the twenty-second or the twenty-third, I do not remember exactly.” She said the expressman had brought the barrel at about half-past nine in the morning, when Vanzetti was out, and as she had no money to pay him he had taken it away and come back later. “After one Monday Vanzetti and the express came back” was the awkward way the interpreter translated her explanation. Ehrmann took “after one Monday” to mean “the following day.” Vanzetti would have received his eels on Tuesday, spent Tuesday night cleaning them, and on Wednesday—the morning of the Bridgewater holdup attempt—he would have been busy making his deliveries. Ehrmann thought at last he had found the key to unlock the doors of the state prison. He and Felicani took the yellowed express receipt to Thompson who, in Fuller’s absence, handed it over to the governor’s secretary—and that was the last they heard of it.

Sunday, the last day of July, the heat wave broke in drizzling rain. A crowd of three thousand, divided between sympathizers and the usual Sunday afternoon floaters, attended a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting on the Charles Street Mall of Boston Common. Alfred Baker Lewis, the wealthy pince-nezed perennial Socialist candidate for governor, introduced the speakers: Gardner Jackson, Harry Canter, Mary Donovan, and Professor Guadagni. Canter called for a general strike, and Mary Donovan shouted in a trembling voice that if they executed those two innocent men they could execute her too. The fiery words spluttered out damply in the rain; the crowd remained inert.

Fuller spent the week end at his summer estate at Little Boar’s Head, Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Two days before, his son Alvan, Jr., had to be operated on suddenly for appendicitis, and for a day or so the governor thought he might have to delay his decision. However, just before leaving the city he promised reporters that he would make it known Wednesday evening. The feeling in the corridors of the State House, in State Street, on Newspaper Row, among those in the know was that the governor would end up by granting a new trial. Louis Stark’s dispatch to the New York Times concluded:

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the chair on the date set. Neither will they be pardoned. Further reprieve pending steps by the Massachusetts Legislature looking to a new trial was indicated as the solution which Governor Fuller will place before the Executive Council when it meets tomorrow night.

Whatever the rumors of a reprieve, there was no sign of it as August began. Imperturbably the clockwork mechanism of the law advanced another notch as, on the night of August 2, Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros were moved to the isolation of the death house. The day before that move, Vanzetti had tried to persuade Sacco to give up his hunger strike, but the other refused, saying there was no use in making himself fat to be killed.

The transfer was made secretly, the guards waiting until ten minutes after lights out before coming to the cells to take the condemned men away. Down the short flight of iron stairs guards and prisoners clattered to the darkness of the outer yard and then diagonally across the inlaid brick to the narrow passage between the north wing extension and the license-plate shop. “In coming, I got a glance to the nighty, starry sky,” Vanzetti wrote. “Hit was so long I did seen it before—and thought it was my last glance to the stars.”

There were only three cells in the blank-walled death house. The white-tiled floors had a black line painted six feet in front of each cell beyond which no visitor might step. Sacco and Vanzetti, locked up there, could not see each other, but they could talk back and forth. Each cell was lit by a lamp outside the bars and contained a cot, a chair, a table, and a toilet. The perspective of the antiseptic room concluded in a small gray door leading to the execution chamber.

Sacco’s reaction to the death house was to pace up and down, his energy undiminished even though he had not eaten for over two weeks. Vanzetti, who again refused food, tried to immerse himself in The Rise of American Civilization. Only Madeiros seemed unaffected by the change. Torpid, outwardly indifferent, he ate enormously but gave scarcely any other sign of life. When Warden Hendry offered to pay his mother’s way to Boston, he said he did not want to see her.

Sunday’s rain continued into Monday, leaving the city and the State House streaked with fog. Fuller returned from New Hampshire early in the morning and again told the waiting reporters his decision would be ready on Wednesday. During the morning he talked with Jackson, Moro, and other members of the Defense Committee. In the afternoon he spent several hours with the Brockton policemen, Connolly and Vaughn, and after they left he conferred with John McAnarney. During the day he sent for Judge Thayer, who was spending his vacation at Ogunquit, Maine. Thayer arrived at the State House a little after six. The reporters noted that the governor’s mood seemed genial. They thought it a good omen for the prisoners.

Tuesday morning the governor was closeted with Assistant District Attorney Ranney. At lunch time he informed reporters that he had seen 102 witnesses besides those from the Plymouth trial. That day, however, the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti was overshadowed by the noontime news from the Summer White House in the Black Hills of South Dakota where Calvin Coolidge had just announced: “I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” Boston political gossips at once recalled how the vacillating governor had made himself nationally known as Law and Order Coolidge by what seemed, at least outside Massachusetts, to have been his firmness in handling the 1919 police strike. Perhaps there would be a Law and Order Fuller now, another President from the Bay State.[29]

The week between the submission of the Lowell Committee’s report and the governor’s decision was one of vexing suspense that added to the growth of Sacco-Vanzetti militancy all over the world. Even the apolitical sports-minded newspaper readers in America, who had remained so far indifferent, could no longer restrain their curiosity as to the outcome of this mortal contest. Life and death, the seven-year issue with all its implications, now lay in the stubby hands of the ex-bicycle mechanic.

Correspondents from the various newspaper services had come to Boston and set up their headquarters in the State House press gallery next to the balcony entrance of the House of Representatives. For the first time in Massachusetts history permission was given to run in telegraph wires from outside. The news for the first three days, however, was scant: the names of a few last witnesses, the rare glimpse of the governor, a brush-off remark from Hard-boiled Herman. Time seemed out of focus. The newsmen waited in the corridor outside the executive chambers, wandered through the Hall of Flags, made notes in the House balcony under the suspended Sacred Cod totem.

Wednesday, August 3, broke fair in Boston, with the fog bank receding along the line of harbor islands. Fuller put in a brief appearance at the State House, told the reporters he would give them the news at 8:30 that night, then announced he was leaving town to put the last touches on his decision. Actually he went no farther than a suite at the Ritz-Carlton at the other end of the Public Gardens, where he shut himself up with a Boston newspaperman, Edward Whiting, who did the actual writing, since the self-made governor was not capable of such sustained literary effort.

Just after dusk a crowd of several hundred gathered across the street from the State House, looking up at the five lighted windows in the left wing of the otherwise darkened building until dispersed by the police. At the Hanover Street defense headquarters the two littered rooms were filled with tense silent figures. Mary Donovan sat by the telephone to answer calls in English, Moro took over when the caller was Italian. Frankfurter, in his shirtsleeves, squatted on a bale of papers. Gardner Jackson kept dashing to and from the State House. Most of the others were Italians from the North End. The thin light from an unshaded fixture drew out the lettering on the wall posters in bas-relief: JUSTICE IS DEAD in German; CALVARY OF SACCO AND VANZETTI in Italian; a Mexican poster demanding LIBERTY AND JUSTICE.

At the State House a score of reporters were waiting at the double-doored entrance to the executive chambers when Fuller finally reappeared at 8:26, his plump face set and unsmiling above his starched collar. He brushed past, impervious to questions. At 8:50 he reappeared, and read out a statement he had scribbled on the back of an envelope:

“I am very sorry not to oblige you with an interview. I can truthfully say that I am very tired and I trust the report will speak for itself. I would prefer not to indulge in any supplementary statement at this time.” He promised that copies of the decision would be distributed at 9:30.

Nine-thirty passed into ten, with still no sign from behind the closed doors. There was the same impersonal sense of tension as when a jury is out, the same unreality of the immediate moment. The reporters walked up and down the darkened echoing corridors, talking and smoking. Most of the crowd driven away from the State House had drifted downtown to Newspaper Row. Hundreds gathered in front of the Globe and Post buildings to watch the blackboard bulletins. It was a strangely quiet crowd. A Globe reporter looking down from the second floor at the upturned heads wondered how anyone could tell what they were thinking. The director of Station WEEI had held an announcer ready all evening to go on the air with a special bulletin; now that the closing hour of eleven was approaching, he debated whether he should shut down. Mary Donovan and Moro at defense headquarters kept repeating over the telephone, “No news, Nothing yet.” Louis Stark, pacing the State House corridor, began to doubt whether he would be able to meet the Times’ 11:30 deadline.

Finally at 11:25 the double doors opened and Hard-boiled Herman appeared with several clerks who carried copies of the decision in sealed envelopes, each addressed with the name of a newspaper. Stark sprinted for the marble stairs, ripping open his envelope and flipping through the pages:

I believe ... Sacco and Vanzetti ... had a fair trial.

The telegraph operator was still holding the wire open to the Times city room. “Bulletin,” Stark shouted as he reached the door of the press gallery. “They die!”

The words flashed across the world from the ten telegraph wires. Within minutes they were chalked up on the Globe bulletin board, broadcast to New England by the waiting WEEI announcer, headlined on the morning editions that would shortly whip off the presses.

The morning papers carried the full text of the decision. Fuller announced that he had set himself three tasks: to see whether the jury trial was fair, whether the accused were entitled to a new trial, and whether they were guilty or not guilty. Of Thayer he wrote:

I see no evidence of prejudice in his conduct of the trial. That he had an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused after hearing the evidence is natural and inevitable.

The governor did not consider that any of the supplementary motions presented valid reasons for granting a new trial. He gave no weight to Madeiros’ confession, nor was he impressed with the latter’s knowledge of the South Braintree crime. His conclusion and, he added, the unanimous conclusion of his advisory committee was that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty.

Warden Hendry kept the news from the prisoners until the next morning when Thompson arrived with Rosina and Felicani. While the other two stood behind him with bent heads, Thompson quietly told the prisoners that they must die. Sacco appeared unruffled. “I told you so,” he called to Vanzetti in the next cell. Vanzetti seemed stunned. “I just can’t believe it,” was all he said. Madeiros said nothing at all.

After Rosina had left, Sacco sat down and wrote an open letter to his “Friends and Comrades.” Over the years his neat script had become increasingly stylized, and in this moment the copperplate regularity of his lines could have served for a formal invitation:

From the death cell we are just inform from the defense committee that the governor Fuller he has desede to kill us Ag. the 10th we our not suprised for this news because we know the capitalist class hard without any mercy the good soldiers of the rivolutions. We are proud for death and fall as all the good anarchist can fall. It is up to you know o, brothers comrades! as I have tell you yesterday that your only that can save us because we have never had faith at the governor for we have always know that the gov. Fuller—Thayer and Katzmann are the murders.

Vanzetti’s blasting reaction found its outlet in a scarcely legible scrawl, the direct opposite of Sacco’s passive acceptance:

Governor Alvan T. Fuller is a murderor as Thayer, Katzmann, the State perjurors and all the other. He sake hand with me like a brother, make me believe he was honestly intentioned and that he had not sent the three carbarn-boy to have no escuse to save us.

Now, igoring and denia all the proofs of or innocence and insult us and murder us we are innocent.

This is the way of plutocracy against liberty, against the people. Revenge our blood. We die for Anarcy. Long life Anarcy.

Yet by afternoon Vanzetti had so recovered himself that he was able to give Mrs. Evans a remarkably detached view of Fuller.

We are his opposite all at all and all in all, while our enemies are affines to him in all-most everything. Consciousely, subconsciousely and unconsciousely he cannot escape to be tremendously influenced and predisposed against us. But he gave me the impression he is sincere; had made great efforts to learn the truth and was not settled, at least deliberately, against us, before to begin his inquiry.

If he is sending us to death, it does not matter how honestly the Governor can be convinced of our guiltiness, his conviction will not make us guilty—we are and will remain innocent.

Fuller’s adverse decision was for Thompson the end of the road. There might be hasty appeals to the state and federal supreme courts, all the delaying paraphernalia of certiorari and habeas corpus, with at best the addition of a few extra weeks to lives he was convinced were forfeit. Thompson felt a profounder sense of failure than Moore’s, for his world had failed—that pleasantly circumscribed world of Boston into which he had fitted so easily. He had believed that the venerable institutions of Massachusetts to which he gave his allegiance would render justice even to two obscure foreigners, would rectify the aberrations of a prejudiced trial and the blind partisanship of a bigoted judge. Instead, the institutions had savaged these men, and now were preparing to annihilate them. In these institutions and in the comfortable society they guarded he could no longer believe. A Harvard class day would never seem the same to him again, a Sunday sermon at the sedately familiar Church of the Redeemer would never sound the same. The brick fronts of Beacon Hill would have lost their mellowness. A traditionalist still, in the years that followed he faced Boston and complained of the lack of a responsible aristocracy that could restrain what he called “the shopkeeper’s mentality.” He tried to compensate for his disbelief in his class by participating in liberal causes, taking the stump at elections, speaking at legislative hearings and in the Massachusetts Judicial Council. But the gesture had lost its meaning, the spark had gone from his life.

He had already told Frankfurter that he would not continue. On receiving the news of the governor’s decision, he and Ehrmann sent the Defense Committee their formal resignation, explaining:

We feel that the defendants are now entitled to have the benefit of the judgment of counsel who can take up the case untrammelled by the commitments of the past and less disturbed than we are by a sense of injustice.

Frankfurter at once telephoned Arthur Hill to say that he had a most serious matter to discuss with him. They lunched at the Somerset Club, then crossed Beacon Street and sat on a bench on the Common overlooking the Frog Pond. Frankfurter asked Hill if he would undertake the final appeal of the Sacco-Vanzetti case to the Supreme Court. Hill did not share Thompson’s belief in the men’s innocence, but he did believe they had not had a fair trial. He felt he could not refuse to make the effort on their behalf.

First of all he persuaded Elias Field and Richard Evarts to join him as junior counsel. Then on the morning of August 5 he called a conference in his office of Frankfurter, Ehrmann, and Musmanno. It was a conference of desperation, as Hill, beneath his assured, impervious exterior, was well aware. So it was felt by everyone present except for the buoyant Musmanno. There were only a few legal maneuvers left, and time was running out like quicksilver from a broken thermometer. Hastily they evolved a program. They would file a motion in Dedham for a new trial and revocation of sentence on the grounds of Judge Thayer’s prejudice. They would request Chief Justice Hall of the Superior Court to assign a judge other than Thayer to hear the motion. They would petition Governor Fuller for a stay of execution. They would file a motion in the Supreme Court for a writ of error, a writ of habeas corpus, and a stay of execution.

Musmanno arrived next morning at the clerk of court’s office with a sheaf of affidavits from Mrs. Bernkopf, Mrs. Rantoul, Frank Sibley, George Crocker, Robert Benchley, Professor Richardson, and Chief Gallivan. He had also dug up a new witness of the South Braintree crime, Candido Di Bona, whose peculiar version of the event was that the driver of the Buick had been a gray-haired man, the two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence had been about eighteen years old, and that there had been a fourth man wearing a soldier’s uniform and carrying a rifle. Hill and Field, arguing on Thayer’s unsuitability, got nowhere at all with Chief Justice Hall, who retired into legal phraseology to observe that “precedent and established practice require that the said motions in the said cause should be heard by the judge who had presided at the original trial thereof.” He then directed that the motions should be heard before Judge Thayer on Monday, August 8.

Musmanno had more to think of than his affidavits as he drove to Dedham on that August Saturday, for the morning papers were splashed with accounts of a series of bombings that had wrecked four New York subway and elevated stations the night before. Between 11:17 and 11:37 tremendous explosions had occurred at Times Square, and on Fourth Avenue at Thirty-third, at Twenty-eighth and at Twenty-third streets, destroying surface kiosks, blowing sidewalks into the air, and shattering windows a hundred yards away. Only one person was killed, but numbers were injured. The same night the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was bombed, as was the house of the mayor of Baltimore. None of the bombers was ever discovered—in that respect the police kept their record unblemished.

Two days later bombs did heavy damage in Utica, New York. News came—undoubtedly exaggerated—of a wave of bombing overseas. Whether or not the bombings were the result of Governor Fuller’s decision, a renewal of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, most Americans thought that they were. That week Massachusetts businessmen took out two hundred million dollars’ worth of bomb and riot insurance. Boston police were placed on a bomb alert, all leaves and vacations were canceled, and the police commissioner ordered three hundred rapid-fire guns for the riot squad. Filene’s sent John Dever away on an indefinite paid vacation.

The full text of the Lowell Committee report was published in the Sunday papers of August 7. Those concerned with the case spent the better part of the day analyzing it. It was a curiously ambiguous document. In regard to Sacco it concluded:

The Committee are of the opinion that Sacco was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In reaching this conclusion they are aware that it involves a disbelief in the evidence of his alibi at Boston, but in view of all the evidence they do not believe he was there that day.

As for Vanzetti:

The alibi ... is decidedly weak. One of the witnesses, Rosen, seems to the Committee to have been shown by the cross-examination to be lying at the trial; another, Mrs. Brini, had sworn to an alibi for him in the Bridgewater case, and two more witnesses did not seem certain of the date until they had talked it over.... Four persons testified that they had seen him.... His face is much more unusual and more easily remembered, than that of Sacco. On the whole, we are of the opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

What had the Committee meant by the phrase “on the whole” which seemed in itself to imply reservations about “reasonable doubt”? Did the Committee still feel some residual doubt in regard to Vanzetti? That was just one of the enigmas of the report. As for Madeiros:

His ignorance of what happened is extraordinary, and much of it cannot be attributed to a desire to shield his associates, for it had no connection therewith.... Indeed, in his whole testimony there is only one fact that can be checked ... his statement that after the murder the car stopped to ask the way at the house of Mrs. Hewins. As this house was not far from ... where Madeiros subsequently lived, he might very well have heard the fact mentioned.

With Grant a judge and Lowell a historian, the committee’s ignorance of the law was at times astonishing:

The impression has gone abroad that Madeiros confessed committing the murder at South Braintree. Strangely enough, this is not really the case. He confesses to being present, but not to being guilty of murder.... If he were tried, his own confession, if wholly believed, would not be sufficient for a verdict of murder in the first degree.

According to the law, of course, an accessory to a murder is equally guilty.

As for the trial:

The Committee have seen no evidence sufficient to make them believe that the trial was unfair. On the contrary, they are of the opinion that the Judge endeavored, and endeavored successfully, to secure for the defendants a fair trial; that the District Attorney was not in any way guilty of unprofessional behavior, that he conducted the prosecution vigorously but not improperly; and that the jury, a capable, impartial and unprejudiced body, did, as they were instructed, “well and truly try and true deliverance make.”

However, in a measured way, the committee censured Judge Thayer:

From all that has come to us we are forced to conclude that the Judge was indiscreet in conversation with outsiders during the trial. He ought not to have talked about the case off the bench, and doing so was a grave break of official decorum. But we do not believe that he used some of the expressions attributed to him, and we think that there is exaggeration in what the persons to whom he spoke remember. Furthermore, we believe that such indiscretions in conversation did not affect his conduct at the trial or the opinions of the jury, who indeed, so stated to the Committee.

Judge Grant felt more troubled than his colleagues, as he indicated later in his autobiography:

It had fallen to me, at the request of my two associates, to examine Judge Webster Thayer when he appeared before us at the State House. The evidence that he had been grossly indiscreet in his remarks off the bench was cumulative. I was amazed and incensed that any Massachusetts Judge could have been so garrulous. That he had talked he did not deny, but he declared under oath with convincing emotion that several of the accusations against him—notably that of having rehearsed a part of his charge to the jury—were untrue. When we came to consider the language of our Report, I was asked, as the one who ought to know how a judge should conduct himself, to suggest the words of censure. They were used, and if my associates felt a shade less outraged than I by his unseemly conduct, it was from a due sense of perspective.

Most of the new evidence that the defense had unearthed appeared to the committee inconsequential. The cap with the lining Gallivan had torn was dismissed as a trivial matter. Gould’s evidence added nothing new. Whatever affidavits Proctor may have signed later, “It must be assumed that the jury understood the meaning of plain English words, that if Captain Proctor was of the opinion that the bullet had been fired through Sacco’s pistol he would have said so, instead of using the language which meant that it might have been fired through that pistol.” This, of course, was an assumption Judge Thayer himself failed to make in his charge to the jury.

The committee did not mention Major Goddard’s report, but from an inspection of the Van Amburgh parallel photographs they were “inclined to believe” that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol. They were impressed by its similarity to the obsolete cartridges found on Sacco. Thompson’s contention that this bullet was a substitute they considered preposterous:

Such an accusation, devoid of proof, may be dismissed without further comment, save that the case of the defendants must be rather desperate on its merits when counsel feel it necessary to resort to a charge of this kind.

They found it a telling fact that the two men were armed when they were arrested. “Carrying fully loaded firearms, where they can be most quickly drawn,” they observed, “can hardly be common among people whose views are pacifist and opposed to all violence.” That Sacco could have put his pistol in his belt and forgotten about it they found incredible.[30] Nor did they feel that the defendants’ radicalism explained all their lies. Lottie Packard’s whirlwind remarks, for all their flights, impressed them. “The woman is eccentric, not unimpeachable in conduct,” they concluded, “but the Committee believe that in this case her testimony is well worth consideration.”

To the militants in Europe the reports of Governor Fuller and of the Lowell Committee set the official seal on what even the Frankfurter Zeitung now referred to as a “political judicial murder.” Letters and cables to Fuller, to the Secretary of State, to the White House, poured in from overseas, a certain lack of information and spontaneity apparent in the fact that some of them were addressed to President Harding, four years dead. The Vatican expressed its hope that an appeal to the United States Supreme Court “may open the way to justice or clemency.” Former French Premier Edouard Herriot asked for a “measure of clemency.” Le Soir reacted to the decisions “with a sentiment of profound horror.” A past era echoed dimly when the Veterans of the Commune forwarded their protest. In Paris the police had forbidden all meetings, but in the Bois de Vincennes just outside the city a group of five thousand bannered militants paraded with linked arms behind Luigia Vanzetti. Luigia, passing through on her way to America, carried a banner reading: PARISIAN PEOPLE, SAVE MY BROTHER AND SACCO. THANKS.

The new wave of explosions caused alarm all over the United States. Extra guards were dispatched to the Summer White House in the Dakota hills. Federal buildings were placed under guard. The Army announced plans to move troops from Fort Meyer, Virginia, to Washington. Machine guns were posted around Fuller’s summer home at Little Boar’s Head. Harvard’s buildings were guarded. Yet Boston, on the Sunday the Lowell Report was made public, seemed calm, almost indifferent. Alfred Baker Lewis for the Defense Committee and Harry Canter for the Communists had each obtained a permit to hold a meeting at designated trees on the Charles Street Mall. On the Tremont Street side a band in the Parkman Bandstand offered rival attractions. Between five and ten thousand persons gathered on the Common that afternoon, no great number for a city with a surrounding population of over two million. Some were there who made a habit of sauntering on a summer Sunday afternoon, others came from curiosity or to listen to the band. The genuine sympathizers, mostly from the North End, were probably in a minority. Nevertheless Superintendent of Police Michael Crowley disapproved of any such meetings, and his feelings were reinforced by the bombings of two days before. A plump set-faced man in a panama with a turned-down brim, he waddled up the Mall to warn both Baker and Canter that if any disparaging remarks were made about Governor Fuller or the Lowell Committee, that would end the meetings.

In no time at all, Mary Donovan, standing on a platform with a banner reading “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS?”—JUDGE THAYER, proclaimed that Governor Fuller was a murderer. Crowley, raising his fat hand, announced that the meeting was suspended. Four mounted police edged their horses in and began scattering the crowd. Mary Donovan protested wildly: “This meeting must go on. I will speak for Sacco and Vanzetti. They are innocent men! They must not be murdered!” Crowley, in an attempt to be fatherly to a fellow Celt, observed that bastard was no word for a lady to use. It was no word for a judge to use either, Mary Donovan snapped.

As the core of the crowd began to mill about the speakers’ stands, while the others moved away, the bearded Edward James bobbed up, scarlet with indignation, to stutter: “Down with the police! Get at them, men!” After a scuffle four men were arrested, including Canter and a bloody-nosed James. Next day in police court James, in the true revolutionary tradition, refused to recognize the judge or reply to charges. He was fined seventy-five dollars, which he refused to pay until the judge offered him the alternative of ninety days on Deer Island. At first James announced that he was going to be a martyr. Then, as the glow of the barricades faded, he paid up.

With the executions only three days off, the Defense Committee now appealed for a hundred thousand Americans to march on Boston and take part in a death watch at the State House and at the State Prison:

We call the leaders of American letters, science, art, education and social reform to lead the peaceful demonstration at the Charlestown jail. Come by train and boat, come on foot or in your car! Come to Boston! Let all the roads of the nation converge on Beacon Hill! Come armed with a black band on your sleeve, come armed with inextinguishable faith that Sacco and Vanzetti must and shall live.

Few people in Massachusetts failed to read the Lowell Report the Sunday of its appearance. The Defense Committee denounced it at once, the Communists derided it, but its effect—with the potency of the Lowell name behind it—was to settle the matter for a large number of Back Bay and Cambridge middle-of-the-roaders. “Most of the serious and earnest-minded people who had misgivings as to the original verdict in Judge Thayer’s court,” the Herald editorialized, “have had these dissipated by the calm and dispassionate recital of the evidence by President Lowell and his associates.” Dr. Morton Prince said he could see no escape from the report’s conclusions. Bishop Lawrence, who was not bashful about treading with angels, wrote to Fuller:

You will, I am sure, allow me to express to you my admiration of the way in which you have done your duty in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

You have been wise, patient, dignified and courageous, worthy of the highest traditions of the Commonwealth.

Medical Examiner Magrath announced that he was now “morally certain” of the two men’s guilt, an opinion he had undoubtedly held from the beginning.[31]

Chief Justice of the United States William Howard Taft, whose knowledge of the case was slight but whose Wigmorish opinion was that the propaganda “had been created by large contributions of female and male fools and had been circulated through all the communistic and criminal classes the world over,” sent congratulatory notes to Lowell and Grant later in the year, writing to the latter:

Now that all is over I can properly ... thank you for accepting the task of serving on the Governor’s committee of advisors in that case. It was a thankless task and required courage and sacrifice to do it. You and your colleagues did it and did it well. It concerned the welfare of society and the world in an unusual way. It is remarkable how Frankfürter with his article was able to present to so large a body of readers a perverted view of the facts and then through the world-wide conspiracy of communism spread it to so many, many countries. Our law schools lent themselves to the vicious propaganda. The utter lack of substance in it all is shown by the event. It was a bubble and was burst by the courage of the Governor and his advisors.

Robert Lincoln O’Brien regarded the Lowell report in the light of an umpire’s decision at a Longwood Cricket Club tennis match:

To those of us who felt that the need of some further inquiry existed, even after the Supreme Judicial Court had ruled that the case had been properly concluded, it seemed the part of good sportsmanship to accept the findings of Mr. Lowell and his associates, particularly since we could find no three men in all the world—were we to select them ourselves—in whose findings we would have more complete confidence.

But there were others, conservatives like Waldo Cook, the editor of the Springfield Republican, who found the report staggering. Speaking of its mention of Thayer’s grave breach of judicial decorum, Cook wrote: “If it was grave, it must taint irretrievably in the record the Sacco-Vanzetti case for all time.” The New York Times questioned the phrase “on the whole” and wondered “whether the ends of justice could not better have been obtained in some other way.” Pulitzer’s New York World, which under its chief editorial writer, Walter Lippmann, had consistently taken the side of Sacco and Vanzetti, gave its entire editorial page to an editorial “Doubts That Will Not Down.” Heywood Broun, as columnist for the World, announced bitterly that “if all the venerable college presidents in the country tottered forward and pronounced the men guilty they would still be innocent.” Broun—reacting to what he considered the general apathy about the case in the United States—became so violent in his comments on President Lowell’s throwing the switch and Harvard as Hangman’s House that Pulitzer finally suspended his columns.

On opinion overseas, even conservative opinion, the Lowell Report had almost no effect.

On Monday morning, August 8, in the Pemberton Square Courthouse, Supreme Court Justice Sanderson listened to Thompson—now merely a witness—testify that the right of the defendants had been violated by Judge Thayer’s prejudice. The justice denied the application for a writ of error and stay of execution. At Dedham in the afternoon, when Judge Thayer opened his special session he found himself in the anomalous position of ruling on his own prejudice. The courthouse was again heavily guarded and the public barred from the courtroom, although Sheriff Capen made no difficulties about admitting Rosina, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Henderson, and other friends. The prisoners themselves were not present.

Thayer remained stubbornly vulnerable and Hill did not spare him. To the latter’s passionate request that he step down from the bench he observed impassively that the chief justice had assigned him and he was there to hear the motion.

Hill’s anger vibrated through the open-windowed courtroom: “Do you think you can sit on the case and consider the issues? It is beyond human power to do. No man is so wise, clear-headed and dispassionate that he can sit on the question whether he was actuated by prejudice, and it is not fair to ask him. It should be before some other man, not only because of the welfare of the defendants, the welfare of the bench, the welfare of the administration of justice, but the welfare of Your Honor himself.”

In answer to the motions for a new trial, Thayer ruled that according to Massachusetts law he had no jurisdiction to grant one, once sentence had been passed. As to the motion for a revocation of sentence and stay of execution, he agreed to accept Hill’s affidavits and listen to his arguments. With chill and condescending politeness Hill, enumerating the affidavits, pointed out that Judge Thayer’s state of mind at the trial and afterward disqualified him from acting as a judge. Hill insisted that in all the judge’s rulings as well as in his actions off the bench he had shown prejudice.

Thayer stared fixedly at Hill, his eyes hard and bright, a thin glow behind his waxen pallor. When the lawyer had finished he began to speak, his voice more charged with feeling than ever it had been before in that familiar room:

“I agreed and always insisted with the full force of my nature that no matter what race or religion, conservative or radical, conformist or nonconformist was entitled to a fair and impartial trial and as my mind goes back over seven years of lawyers contesting every point, I recall that the case was taken on two occasions to the Supreme Court and the court dealt with two hundred sixty exceptions and ... did not leave one exception.

“That I am willing to be judged by—but prejudice—there isn’t any now and there wasn’t at any time. I do this now as it is the only way a judge can plead his own case. For seven years I have been in a position where I could not say a word. This is the only time I could say anything.”

The arguments were brief. Attorney General Arthur Reading for the Commonwealth characterized Hill’s as “the most preposterous ever heard from a learned lawyer.” Thayer at the end of the afternoon announced that he would reserve his decision on the second motion. Then, early Tuesday morning, he telephoned in from his home in Worcester that the revocation of sentence and stay of sentence were denied. From this and from Justice Sanderson’s ruling, Hill at once filed exceptions. Privately, however, he admitted he had given up hope. Only the young inexperienced Musmanno could find any encouragement in the further manipulation of the bastard Latin legal phrases. Certiorari, coram nobis—they were like the last moves in a chess game when a player has only a pawn to interpose between his king and his opponent’s queen.

That afternoon for the first time pickets appeared before the State House, a half-dozen at the start, men in shirtsleeves and women in work dresses, wearing black armbands and carrying placards denouncing the imminent executions. Defiantly they marched back and forth, their numbers growing to a dozen, a score, and finally to over a hundred, watched with jeering curiosity by a much larger crowd from the other side of the street near the Shaw Memorial. News of the picketing spread through the State House. Governor Fuller stepped into the council chamber briefly to look down from the oval-topped window on the sweaty marchers. The picketing was the beginning of the legend that in the last days of the case the Massachusetts State House was zoned by a constantly replenished line of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Some such did find their places in the line—John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others—and were arrested and taken to the Joy Street Station on the other side of Beacon Hill, but most of the picketers were foreign-born men and women from the garment district.

Harry Canter led the pickets the first day, encouraged by Alfred Baker Lewis. The Defense Committee, increasingly angry at the Communists’ infiltrating efforts, held aloof. Fred Beal, a young and dedicated Communist whose radicalism dated from the Lawrence strike, was astonished at the coldness of his reception when he turned up at Hanover Street. “Why can’t you leave Sacco and Vanzetti alone?” Secretary Moro asked him bitterly. “Why can’t you let them die in peace? You people don’t care for Sacco and Vanzetti. Let them burn; it will be better for the cause.”

As the picketing continued and the watching crowds increased, Police Captain James McDevitt was sent down from the Joy Street station. In the pattern that would be followed in dealing with the subsequent picketings of the State House, he approached the marchers and gave them seven minutes to disperse. When they did not, he carted off thirty-nine of them to the station. Thirty-one of those arrested were named in the Boston papers. So far as their names are any indication, twenty were Jews and three Italians.

The general strike called for that afternoon brought out only a few hundred men and women in Boston, most of whom found their way to the line in front of the State House. In New York almost 100,000 walked out, the majority of them garment workers. Overseas there was an almost hushed expectancy. Sacco and Vanzetti dominated the European headlines. The Atlantic cables continued to be weighted with protests that included such noted names as that of Lafayette’s great-grandson. At the Charlestown prison Western Union and Postal Telegraph installed eighteen wires, four for direct communication overseas. The area within half a mile of the prison was declared a dead zone. The streets were barred and Prison Point Bridge closed.

Early in the evening Vanzetti sent for Thompson, who spent two hours in the death house talking with the prisoners. Sacco was now in the twenty-third day of his hunger strike. Vanzetti had not eaten for five days. Thompson, on leaving, met a group of reporters at the prison gate and told them that the prisoners “continue to assert their innocence, do not express any hope, remain courageous, and feel they are dying for a principle.”

Would Governor Fuller grant the prisoners an additional respite to give Justice Sanderson and Thayer time to decide on Hill’s exceptions? That was the question on the morning of August 10. Fuller reached his State House office at 9:30 and at once summoned the members of his council.

At almost the same time the executioner for New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Robert Elliott, arrived with his famous black bag at the South Station. When Musmanno went to the prison later in the morning with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, he noticed guards setting up machine guns on the brick ramp running along the top of the prison wall. As he reached the death cells and began to talk to the men through the bars, he could hear the workmen tinkering with the electric chair in the next room, and he sensed the sudden vibration of the floor as they switched on the current. Vanzetti told him not to mind, that the men had been working on it since the day before. Sacco again refused to sign any petition, telling Musmanno: “They are going to crucify me, crucify both of us. They have been driving nails into us for seven years. Let’s have it over.” Vanzetti signed willingly enough, then inscribed his copy of The Rise of American Civilization and offered it to Musmanno, who refused it, saying he would wait until Vanzetti got out. From Charlestown Musmanno drove with Hill—as did Thompson and a Washington lawyer, John Finerty, later in the day—thirty miles north to Beverly where United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had his summer home. All four men knew that if Fuller failed to act, the only other hope for Sacco and Vanzetti was in an appeal to the federal courts. Holmes met his visitors on the porch, listened to them gravely, even regretfully, but held that he had not the legal right to intervene in the internal judicial processes of Massachusetts. “You don’t have to convince me that the atmosphere in which these men were tried precluded a fair trial,” he told them, “but that is not enough to give me as a Federal judge jurisdiction. If I listened to you any more I would do it,” he continued. “I must not do it.” With that the old justice turned on his heel and went into the house.

Hill, following his rebuff, went on to hunt out Judge George Anderson of the United States Circuit Court. After the 1920 Palmer raids Judge Anderson had released the Boston aliens rounded up by the Bureau of Investigation and had castigated the Department of Justice. But this time Judge Anderson, like Holmes, held that he could not interfere in state affairs.

Fuller, determined to expand the collective responsibility for his decision, sent for all the Commonwealth’s former attorneys general. Seven of them arrived before midday at his office for consultation. His council began its own deliberations after lunch and continued all afternoon. Meanwhile the pickets with their black armbands and placards, chanting their slogans, again marched in front of the State House. Captain McDevitt gave his dispersal warning, and after seven minutes the police moved in. Those pickets who did not scatter were taken to the Joy Street Station. This time the watching crowd showed itself much more hostile. There were mocking shouts of “Hang ’em!” as the pickets were hustled up Joy Street. They were booked at the station, and those who did not have the twenty-five dollars bail money were bailed out by Mrs. Evans and her friends.

A solid blue line of police extended along the cobbled paving in front of the Charlestown prison. Prison police, State Police, Metropolitan Police, Boston and Cambridge police, had all been called out—the largest force ever assembled in Boston’s history. On Prison Point Bridge a platoon of firemen uncoiled hoses and stood ready to water down any mob trying to force the barriers. Below the bridge, in the slimy tidal inlet known as the Miller River, the police launch Argus chugged up and down with a machine gun at its bow.

Inside the blank-walled death house Madeiros and Sacco lay on their cots in listless inanition. Some days earlier Sacco had begun a letter to his son, but he no longer felt the strength to continue with it. Vanzetti wrote brief farewell notes to Mrs. Winslow, Mrs. Codman, Mrs. Henderson, and Mrs. Evans, whom he now addressed as “Comrade.” His one enduring regret as the hours slipped away was that he would not be able to see his sister Luigia again. Late in the afternoon Madeiros’ mother and sister arrived from Providence, but he received them indifferently. The old Portuguese woman collapsed on the threshold of the death house and had to be helped from the building.

At the cluttered Hanover Street rooms there was the same penumbral atmosphere that there had been the night of Fuller’s decision, but with the tenseness giving way by almost imperceptible degrees to lassitude. Mary Donovan answered the telephone, the shaggy Jackson scribbled notes, Felicani bent forward under the poster proclaiming JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE, Rosina Sacco sat in a corner, silent except for an occasional dry cough while from time to time she abstractedly crumpled bits of paper. During the evening Frankfurter bustled in and out on obscure errands, his eyes deep and compassionate behind his rimless oval pince-nez. Hill and Joseph Moro appeared briefly and spoke a few encouraging words.

After spending the afternoon with his council, Fuller broke off for a meal, then resumed the sitting at 7:30. An hour later Hill appeared in the Council Chamber and pleaded and argued for two hours, begging the councilors and the governor not to destroy the subject matter of litigation while it was still in the hands of the courts. After he left, the councilors buzzed among themselves. Still the governor could not make up his mind.

Meanwhile the slim, gray-haired, twisted-mouthed executioner arrived at the prison with the official witnesses. As usual, refreshments had been prepared. The prison officers’ clubroom now held the largest group of reporters ever assembled in Massachusetts for an execution. By ten o’clock the three prisoners had been notified that they were to die at midnight.

At defense headquarters Rosina suddenly fell forward in a faint. Mary Donovan picked her up, took her away in a taxi, and left her at a friend’s house in the neighborhood. When she returned she sat down again by the telephone, and, as if she were thinking aloud, suddenly said: “What if the finger of God should stay this execution tonight!” Then she picked up the receiver and in a broken voice called Thompson to ask what steps should be taken to claim the two men’s bodies.

It was 11:24 before Fuller finally made up his official mind. With the concurrence of his council he decided to grant the prisoners a twelve-day respite “to afford the courts an opportunity to complete the consideration of the proceedings.” Captain Charles Beaupré of the State Police gave the word to the reporters outside the council chamber. Secretary William Reed telephoned the news to Warden Hendry. Hendry was pleased, and showed it. Despite his meaty butcher’s face, he was a good-hearted man who hated executions. With the copied reprieve in his hand he hurried down the long cement corridor to the death house, calling out as he reached the threshold: “It’s all off, boys!” The three men rose from their cots. Vanzetti gripped the bars of the cell until his knuckles turned white. “I’m damn glad of that,” he said shakily. “I’d like to see my sister before I die.”

Back at his office Hendry passed around cigars to the reporters and witnesses while an unheeded assistant read out the formal wording of the respite with all its whereases and know-ye-alls.

Not until a few minutes before midnight was the news of the respite telephoned into the Hanover Street offices, yet when the announcement came it caused no tremor, no babble of voices, only a relieving quiet. Mary Donovan left without saying a word to go to Rosina. Someone, who seemed to speak for everyone in the room, remarked: “We have until the twenty-second. Well, that is something.”

Across the ocean it seemed for a moment as if the protesting voices had won. Pravda proclaimed:

The mighty roar of protest from the Soviet Union, together with the voice of the working classes the world over, forced even the plutocratic American bourgeoisie to hesitate and maneuver.

In Berlin, Die Rote Fahne announced triumphantly:

The working millions and only they in the forefront of the battle against class injustice have won the first victory. Sacco and Vanzetti are provisionally rescued.

L’Humanité rallied its readers with militant confidence:

Now let us exact the liberty of the two martyrs.

In the United States there was a feeling that Fuller would now commute the death sentences to life imprisonment, a course recommended by the Springfield Republican. The New York Times shared this opinion, observing four days after the respite:

Honest and fair-minded people are still disputing about certain aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but on our part there is virtual unanimity of opinion. This is that the long delay in determining the fate of the two men is a reproach to American justice. It is something that is almost impossible to explain to foreigners.

Outside opposition and criticism had long since contracted the mood of the Massachusetts community beyond reason. With each external attack the community ranks closed in an emotional need—masquerading as justice—to see Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This feeling was reinforced by the bombing on August 15 of the East Milton home of Dedham juror Lewis McHardy. The charge placed on the porch of his two-story frame house at 463 Pleasant Street, exploded at 3:30 in the morning. So great was the blast that little was left of the house but the frame. Windows were shattered a quarter of a mile away. McHardy, his wife, and three grown children were asleep on the second floor. They were hurled out of bed and covered with debris, but somehow managed to escape with only minor bruises.

If before the blowing up of the McHardy house there had been the slightest chance of a commutation of sentence for Sacco and Vanzetti, afterward there was none.[32]

The twelve days of respite were marked by dramatic defense efforts that filled the world’s headlines. The author and journalist Isaac Don Levine came on to Boston, convinced that a legal case could be built around the issue of the Department of Justice files. Perhaps Thompson might have inspected them in 1926 if he had been more tactful in dealing with the tentative offer of the Bureau of Investigation’s Boston branch. Since then Attorney General Sargent had refused the defense any access to them. However, he offered to forward them on request to Governor Fuller, the members of the Lowell Committee, or the Commonwealth’s attorney general. Such a request was never made. Fuller told reporters that the files would be no use to him in forming his opinion inasmuch as he did not know what an anarchist was.[33]

On August 10 the Defense Committee had sent a long telegram to United States Attorney General Sargent claiming that “evidence exists in the files of the Department of Justice, of the most competent character which would clear Sacco and Vanzetti of the charge of payroll robbery” and demanding that Sargent persuade President Coolidge to intervene. The committee also repeated Thompson’s charge of “a conspiracy between the employees of the Department of Justice and Katzmann and Williams to wrongfully convict.” For Levine these claims and charges were all very well, but in the unskilled hands of Gardner Jackson and Mary Donovan and the Italians on the committee they would lead to nothing. What was needed was a professional touch, “a fresh corps of attorneys of national reputation,” publicity directed like an arrow to the Department of Justice, names that carried weight. For this purpose, and to the impotent fury of Mary Donovan, Levine organized the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti. He himself kept in the background—the figurehead chairman was the New Republic’s editor, Robert Morss Lovett—but he brought to the new organization his own energy and the names of noted acquaintances. Glenn Frank, Zona Gale, Ida Tarbell, David Starr Jordan, Paul Kellogg of the Survey, John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Garrison Villard, Alexander Meiklejohn, Katharine Anne Porter, Jane Addams, William Hocking, Waldo Cook, John Moors, Mary Woolley, and John Dewey were among those endorsing the new committee.

In an open letter the committee announced its purpose, “to induce the Federal Government to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case because of the grave charges which have been made against the Department of Justice and because of the serious international situation which has arisen.” During the last feverish week it raked Washington with drumfire demands that the Department of Justice open its files. The committee set up quarters in the Hotel Bellevue just below the State House. There, in a long room on the second floor known as Parlor D, a swarm of volunteer workers moved in with desks and typewriters. For twenty hours a day letters and releases poured out across the United States. Paul Kellogg sent over five hundred telegrams to Americans of note. Almost everyone who arrived in Boston, from Michael Gold to Edna St. Vincent Millay, now stopped off at Parlor D rather than at the Hanover Street rooms. A new cluster of lawyers gathered there: John Finerty of New York, who drew up the final habeas corpus motion; former New York attorney general William Schuyler Jackson; Arthur Garfield Hays, Francis Fisher Kane, and Frank Walsh, who together would take up the matter of the Justice Department files directly with Attorney General Sargent. The new committee, unlike the Communists, managed to remain on speaking terms with the old. Relations remained, in Levine’s words, “correct but remote.”

The morning after the midnight respite, the three prisoners were taken from the death house back to Cherry Hill. In spite of having gone twenty-six days without food, Sacco was able to walk unaided across the prison yard and up the iron staircase. When Musmanno visited Sacco and Vanzetti in the barber shop later in the morning to tell them that Justice Sanderson had allowed the exceptions to his ruling to be taken to the full bench of the state supreme court, he found them in a cheerful mood. Both seemed to absorb something of the young Italian lawyer’s optimism. Although Sacco still refused to eat, Vanzetti broke his five-day fast with a cup of coffee.

During the day the New England manager of the United Press, Henry Minott, visited the prison and asked Vanzetti to write an open letter explaining his side of the case. In his renewed optimism, Vanzetti spent the next two days setting down what he well realized might be his final thoughts. On August 12 his two-page letter to “Friends and Comrades” was sent—in somewhat altered form—all over the world through the wires of the United Press:

There is nowhere, neither in earth nor in heavens, anything that can makes the true untrue and the untrue true. By true I mean the truths which altogether form the Universal truth. By truths I mean the real conditions, faculties, essence of each one of those unnumerable, relative things, all related and all evolving, which total sum forms the Universal truth—which is what it is in itself and not at all what anyone or ones—I, you, or all—believe or may think to know what it is....