Not only in Europe but around the world—in Shanghai, Tokyo, Melbourne, Calcutta, Buenos Aires—the names Sacco and Vanzetti were by now familiar syllables and the image had become fixed of two dissenters from the American way of life being done to death for their dissent. Where scores and then hundreds had demonstrated in isolated groups, now in the approaching climax thousands thronged to vast and passionate assemblies that somehow, the participants felt, by their very vastness and passion might force the Massachusetts executioners to stay their hands. There was a fierce joy, too, in such protests, a tensing of muscles, a sense of unity and a feeling among the urban masses that in their increasingly turbulent protests against the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti they were protesting against their own isolation and their own fate.
To Continental intellectuals disillusioned by the collapse of Wilsonian idealism, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was one more devastating example from postwar America, to be set beside Prohibition, Chicago gangsters, the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan, and the Tennessee monkey trial. The fate of the two men was what one might expect from the heartless materialism of the transatlantic republic that had won a war with its money and the blood of others and now wanted the money back.
In July, Mussolini wrote to the American ambassador in Rome “not as the head of the Italian Government but as a man who is sincerely your friend,” asking for a commutation of sentence as an “act of humanity so much more noble as it is less delayed.” Shrewdly the Duce pointed out that
The agitation of the elements of the left throughout the world is increasing in intensity, in these last days, as is shown by the bombs thrown in Buenos Aires against the Ford establishment and the statue of Washington.
Now if the act of clemency is held back still longer it may give the impression that the American authority may have yielded to the pressure of this world-wide subversive activity and this impression can injure the prestige of the United States.
I hope that His Excellency Governor Fuller may give an example of humanity. The example will brilliantly demonstrate the difference between the methods of Bolshevism and those of the great American republic as well as strike from the hands of the subversive elements an instrument of agitation.
In the last pitched months conservatives determined to show that they, no less than the radicals, were concerned with human rights as exemplified by the fate of the two Italians. The royalist Action Française now protested the course of Massachusetts justice in as shrill a tone as the Communist L’Humanité. The conservative Frankfurter Zeitung spoke out with the vehemence of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Even the shadowy Alfred Dreyfus emerged from his seclusion to announce that he was willing to go to America to plead for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Communist propaganda continued, bizarre and embracing. The day after Judge Thayer pronounced sentence, Pravda—remembering Edgar Allan Poe but apparently confusing Charlestown with Charleston—reported that Sacco and Vanzetti had been held for several years in a torture prison in South Carolina where they had been confined “in a specially constructed padded room having a mirrored ceiling on which appeared at intervals a spot which gradually took the form of a terrifying open-jawed creature. Meanwhile, a human voice shouted: ‘Tell the names of your accomplices!’”
H. G. Wells, after reading Frankfurter’s Atlantic article, became so indignant that he proposed the word Thayerism to describe “the self-righteous unrighteousness of established people.” Millions read his angry statement in the London Sunday Express for June 5, 1927:
I do not see how any clear-headed man, after reading the professor’s summary, can have any other conviction than that Sacco and Vanzetti are as innocent of the Braintree murder, for which they are now awaiting death, as Julius Caesar, or—a better name in this connection—Karl Marx.
Within the United States Italians generally were behind the two prisoners because they were paisani. Their anarchism did not matter. The same North Enders who first came to support the Defense Committee would a few years later support Mussolini’s African campaign and fill the windows of Hanover Street shops with photographs of Ethiopian atrocities. Other foreign groups, like the Jewish enclaves in New York and Boston, would find themselves drawn sympathetically to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti out of their socialist tradition and their own bitter experiences of race hate.
American union members never came to identify themselves with the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as did their counterparts in Europe. Moore had had enough contacts to engineer resolutions asking for a new trial through the American Federation of Labor conventions of 1922 and 1924, but such resolutions would not be presented again until the winter of 1926-1927. In the last months of the case President William Green of the American Federation of Labor added his protest against the impending executions, but in the Indian summer of the Coolidge prosperity the rank and file union members were at best lethargically sympathetic. When, the week before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Defense Committee sent out an appeal for a hundred thousand trade-union members to come to Boston in protest, less than two hundred showed up. Elsewhere than in the big cities with their heavy foreign populations the American worker was not class-conscious enough to see Sacco and Vanzetti as his representatives. He found the erotic enticements of the New York trial of Ruth Snyder, a suburban housewife, and her corset-salesman lover Henry Judd Gray for the murder of Ruth’s husband more enticing than the brief final scene in the Dedham courtroom. He took Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic on May 20, 1927, much more to heart than the erosive progress of Sacco and Vanzetti toward the electric chair. He was more concerned with the second Dempsey-Tunney fight, scheduled for September, than with the Massachusetts executions scheduled for July.
In the six years since John Codman, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and other members of the New England Civil Liberties Committee had appealed for defense funds, the New England Committee and the parent American Civil Liberties Union in New York had remained steadfast in their support. Frankfurter’s article was in a sense a culmination of their efforts. They had by their prolonged and reiterative publicity made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti intellectually fashionable. Those whose names rang the changes in the last months of the case, now made their rather flamboyant appearance. Officially the civil-liberties groups kept their distance.
When Moore was in charge of the defense, publicity was oriented toward the radicals, but with the coming of Thompson and Gardner Jackson the appeal was directed much more to what the class-conscious Lyons would have considered “handwringing” liberals. Thompson disapproved of pamphlet wars, of the case being tried in the streets. Both he and Frankfurter wanted to avoid further antagonizing the Massachusetts community. Sometime in July 1927, when the Defense Committee had arranged to hold a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall, Frankfurter discreetly vetoed the idea.
Those who (in that jagged term that had emerged with the Russian Revolution) considered themselves the intelligentsia accepted the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti and the guilt of Massachusetts as a matter of faith. It became a shibboleth of the liberal academic mind, just as within Boston their guilt had become a conservative shibboleth—in both cases a hotly held nonrational belief. Academic conformity, which—though usually opposed to—is even more rigid than middle-class conformity, belatedly took up the Sacco-Vanzetti cause, in part with sincere deliberateness but more often as a fervent avant-garde gesture. The 381 protesting petitioners from Mount Holyoke, the 326 from Bryn Mawr, the 203 from Wellesley, the faculty and 650 students from the University of California, the 36 Amherst faculty members, the hundreds of bloc names from so many other American colleges and universities, knowing only a smattering of the case, were making a reflex response to an appeal to themselves as an elite. In May, 61, members of assorted law faculties that included Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and the Universities of Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Alabama, and Texas, petitioned Governor Fuller for a commutation on grounds of reasonable doubt. Dean Robert Hutchins of the Yale Law School, one of the minority who had read the record, wrote an open appeal in which he castigated Katzmann’s cross-examination of Sacco. Three-quarters of the graduating class of the Harvard Law School, in defiant contrast to the State Street alumni majority just across the river, signed a request for a new trial. Professor Glenn Frank of Wisconsin, Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, Mount Holyoke’s Professor of English Jeannette Marks, and President Ellen Fitz Pendleton of Wellesley added their academic pleas.
As the New England spring slipped into summer, the roster of those opposing the impending execution and demanding a new trial added names as diverse as Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Alfred Landon, Senator Robert La Follette, the Right Reverend Chauncey Brewster of Washington Cathedral, Sherwood Eddy, John Dewey, the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton, H. L. Mencken and Dean Edward Devine of the American Catholic University. Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn announced that he would introduce a measure in the next session of Congress to compel the attorney general to open the Department of Justice files concerned with Sacco and Vanzetti. On June 22 Joseph Moro, Gardner Jackson, and Mary Donovan appeared at the State House on behalf of the Defense Committee with a giant rolled petition for a public investigation, containing 474,842 names from all countries. Two weeks later the committee forwarded 153,000 additional names collected by the Swiss Union of Workers.
Within Massachusetts the reaction of the general public to such high-placed outside criticism was one of embittered, unreasoning hostility. A former district attorney said that it would be better even for two innocent men to be electrocuted than for public confidence in the established order of judicial procedure to be broken down. John C. Hull, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, received prolonged applause when he announced at a banquet that the Commonwealth’s demand of outsiders was this: “We would respectfully ask you to mind your own business.”
Such was the reaction of the well-born and the well-to-do. The reaction of what William Butler Yeats called “the little streets” was even more savage. In the massed streets of South Boston and Charlestown and Brighton and Ashmont there was a virulent hatred of Sacco and Vanzetti, coupled with a social jealousy of the better-known colleges and universities, a smoldering distrust of the professorial stance, a suspicion of academic attainments as being tainted with subversion. If the wiser-than-thou professors from Harvard and Yale were now taking it on themselves to proclaim that Sacco and Vanzetti should be freed—then so much the worse for Sacco and Vanzetti!
Sans-culotte anti-intellectualism echoed in a speech of Registrar of Motor Vehicles Frank Goodwin to the Lawrence Kiwanis Club:
It is impressive fact that the nearer we get to the scene of this murder the more convinced are the people that these men are guilty.... The citizens of Norfolk County know these men are guilty. On the other hand, in those domains where foreign and un-American principles are in vogue, such as Russia, Harvard, Argentine, Wellesley, China and Smith, they are sure these men are innocent.... The leader of the movement to set these two murderers free is Felix Frankfurter.
Professor Hocking might announce with urbane indignation from the platform of Boston’s Community Church that he believed Sacco and Vanzetti “as innocent of that murder as you or I.” Bishop Lawrence and the Dean of Washington Cathedral might entertain refined Episcopal doubts. But for the Reverend Billy Sunday—the preacher of the little streets—hoarsely saving the city from the fate of Sodom at Tremont Temple, no doubts existed. “Give ’em the juice,” he rapped out from the pulpit. “Burn them, if they’re guilty. That’s the way to handle it. I’m tired of hearing these foreigners, these radicals, coming over here and telling us what we should do.”
For five weeks after their sentencing Sacco and Vanzetti occupied adjoining cells in the Dedham jail. It was the first time since their arrest that they had been together for any length of time. Those shadowed weeks turned out to be the most serene of their imprisonment. Everyone who met Vanzetti remarked on his composure. Sacco, having decided not to struggle further against the fate he considered inevitable, attained a tranquillity that gave the surface appearance of cheerfulness. “As you know,” he wrote with wry unaccustomed humor to Mrs. Henderson, “I am still living at the same hotel, the same room, and also at the same old number 14—but on the first of July probably, they will bring us to the death house, and from there to the—eternity.”
A friend had brought Sacco a boccie set, and the two prisoners were allowed to bowl in the yard each afternoon for an hour and a half. Vanzetti began to take morning exercises and wrote Mrs. Winslow that he felt a new man. His cell was always filled with flowers from Mrs. Evans and other friends. As he described it:
My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing colors and beauties forms: a giranium plants a tulipan plant from Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches, buds, and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a boquet of May flowers from Mrs. Winslow.
Flowers he asked for instead of sweets, though as for tobacco—as he himself admitted—he smoked like a Turk. Being under sentence of death, and so exempt from prison work, he now had much more time to read and write. For Mrs. Jack he translated the last stanza of Gori’s revolutionary hymn, “May First”:
Even the free jail days were too short for him. After nine when the lights went out he would prop himself up with a pillow against the wall, a blanket over his shoulders, using the corridor light coming through the bars to read some book that Mrs. Evans had just given him.
During the visiting periods Rosa came daily with the children for the allowed half-hour, and Sacco noticed lovingly how big Ines was growing and that Dante’s face was burned from the spring sun. Mrs. Evans came almost as regularly to see Vanzetti.
On June 11, Vanzetti’s thirty-ninth birthday, the two were visited by Georg Branting, a well-known lawyer and son of a former Swedish prime minister, who had crossed the Atlantic to make his own investigation. The Defense Committee had planned a parade to welcome Branting, and even though the police refused permission some fifteen hundred sympathizers met him at the South Station and escorted him to Boston Common. After ten days of on-the-scene study Branting announced that he was persuaded the two men were innocent, and sent a telegram to Sweden informing the press that “according to my best judgment, no conviction would have been pronounced if case tried under normal judicial conditions.”
Phil Stong, a young reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance, was another outsider who came to Boston to develop his opinion of the case. One afternoon he visited the prisoners in the jail library, later writing:
Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face.... A ferocious mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence has made an anchorite.
It was at the conclusion of this visit that Vanzetti casually made his utterance that has been so often quoted in anthologies. They sat there with Vanzetti doing most of the talking, Sacco breaking in only occasionally. Yet as these Italians talked in their imperfect English, even joked at times, the effect of their personalities gave Stong an overwhelming conviction of their innocence. He had brought a newspaper with him containing an account of some college students’ suicides, a sensational topic of the last few days. “I think Dr. Frood wrong,” Vanzetti remarked on glancing at it, “when he says student kill himself to make someone sorry. It is when he cannot make someone sorry, he kills himself in anger at world which pays him not attention—in despair—” Sacco disagreed, maintaining that if he himself were dead it would be the best way to free his wife and children. Vanzetti observed that “only sick mind kill himself.” Then he spoke of a Charlestown inmate who had murdered his wife when he had caught her with another man. “You know what he says to me once? ‘Vanzetti, you know what I think of all night? My wife—my home. Every night—all time. Now—all gone.’”
A bell rang, a gray line of prisoners began to file past on the way from the workshops to the cells, blank-faced men, their arms folded. Seeing them, Sacco grew bitter about his own enforced idleness. “We’re capitalists,” Vanzetti jollied him. “We have home, we eat, don’t do no work. We’re nonproducers—live off other men’s work; when Libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.”
Sacco’s mood changed and he seemed amused. Then a deputy approached as a sign that Stong’s time was up. He had managed so far to cover his feelings by a forced cheerfulness but, as he rose to go, Vanzetti spotted the lurking dismay in the other’s feature. He then began to speak very quietly and simply as if to comfort the young man, and as he spoke Stong jotted down the words in shorthand on the margin of a newspaper:
If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life talking at street comers to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all!
That last moment belong to us—that agony is our triumph.[25]
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had expected Fuller to appoint his review commission. “That would impose freedom,” Vanzetti told Mrs. Winslow, “and the men of the judiciary and of the executive want save America by dooming us.” As for Governor Fuller’s own private investigation, Vanzetti’s conclusion was: “He may give us justice—I expect nothing.”
At times, when he was temporarily overcome by a mood of obsessive frustration, Vanzetti would crudely appropriate the symbolism of the Passion to express his dilemma. In such a mood he first learned of Fuller’s appointment of the Lowell Committee. “His this double investigation,” he wrote Mrs. Evans, “going to be another mockery? spitting on our face? sponge of vinager and bitterness on the top of a lance? the last stubbing between our ribles?” As the sun moved higher in the sky, as the elms again arched their spring greenery over the High Street, the two Italians behind the jail walls sensed their lost freedom in all its urgency. “Oh! that Sea, that sky,” Vanzetti wrote, “those freed and full of life winds of Cape Cod! Maybe I will never see, never breath, never be at one with them again.”
On June 29 Governor Fuller gave Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros a stay until August 10, to allow his Advisory Committee time to review the evidence and examine Madeiros’ confession. The Dedham interlude ended abruptly and finally at midnight on July 1 when the prisoners were waked, manacled to deputies, packed in a car followed by a second car with armed guards, and driven along the empty Dedham streets and across the drab brick outskirts of Boston to Cherry Hill. In this midnight scurrying Vanzetti lost some of his books and papers. Both men saw the hurried transfer as another example of deliberate spitefulness on the part of the authorities. Actually it was a strict following of the rule that a condemned man must be sent to Cherry Hill ten days before the date set for his execution. Sheriff Capen, anxious to get rid of his notorious prisoners, interpreted the rule to the letter. Even though the executions had been deferred, their official date as set by the court was still July 10.
Sacco accepted the transfer with shoulder-shrugging indifference as no more than he had expected. Vanzetti could not get over his depression at the ominous change from the casual Dedham jail with “some air, light, a slice of land and of sky to contemplate, and a daily blass of an hour of sunshine and free air in the yard” to the “windowless, airless, lightless ... malebolgic of the State Prison.”
The Defense Committee took a more optimistic view of the Lowell Committee than did Sacco and Vanzetti. They were content with Lowell, neutral about Stratton, and objected only to Grant. Not only were the petulant paragraphs of The Convictions of a Grandfather exhumed, but Grant was accused of having told John Moors and Samuel Eliot Morison that he disapproved of anyone’s taking issue with the trial, the verdict, and the subsequent decisions.
When Fuller questioned him about this, Grant explained with characteristic prissiness that he had not read the evidence in the case and knew nothing of the merits of the subsequent proceedings, but thought it “indecorous and contrary to the bonos mores for a professor at the Harvard Law School to rush into print while the case was sub judice.”
The Herald and that section of State Street less intransigent than the Transcript were pleased by the appointment of Fuller’s committee. Privately the more sedate Boston legal circles had always been dubious about Webster Thayer, and with the recent disbarment of the district attorneys of Suffolk and Middlesex counties, Democratic Joseph Pelletier and Republican Nathan Tufts, who could say what might not have been going on in neighboring Norfolk? Bishop Lawrence was another who had long been troubled by the thought, but now he too was satisfied. With Cousin Abbott in the State House, all would be well with the world!
Although the Advisory Committee appointment had been announced at the beginning of June, President Lowell was too occupied with his Harvard commencement activities to take any action until the end of the month. Finally, on the thirtieth, the three members met briefly in the governor’s council chamber to discuss procedure and to receive typewritten transcripts of the trial record. Two days later they drove to South Braintree to inspect the murder scene. On July 8 they opened their hearings by examining seven of the Dedham jurors. The next day they spent two hours talking with Sacco and Vanzetti. Of that meeting Vanzetti wrote Mrs. Henderson:
From the Commission interview of us I got the impression that President Lowell and President Stratton are honestly intentioned and not hostile to us by predetermination. Yet it seemed to me that in spite of their great scholarship, they had not understood certain most vicious actions of the prosecution and the iniquity of Thayer’s conduct. As for Judge Grant he is but another Thayer.
Meanwhile Governor Fuller was continuing his own daily sessions in his high-ceilinged office with the portraits of Sam Adams and John Hancock staring down from the walls. Secretary MacDonald kept his watchdog position at the Governor’s right, while the bald quizzical Wiggin sat at his left. In spite of repeated objections by the defense, Fuller insisted on complete secrecy for whatever the witnesses might wish to tell him. Otherwise, he explained, his office would be turned into a bear den. Day by day the reporters noted the parade of faces up the State House steps—the ballistics experts, including the disillusioned Professor Gill; the star witnesses from both trials. There was no way that either the governor or the Lowell Committee could compel anyone to testify. Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Goodridge did not appear, either because they refused to or because they had disappeared.
Philip Cox, the brother of Alfred Cox, the Bridgewater paymaster, wrote to Fuller that his brother “alone had an opportunity to see the man who held him up, and he declined to identify his assailant as Vanzetti.” This, it seemed to Philip Cox, “should have afforded good reason for hesitating to accept the verdict of guilty.” But what the Bridgewater paymaster had come to think in 1927, and what he said in the private interview he had with the governor, remained a tight secret.
Yet, in spite of the imposed secrecy, signs here and there made it apparent that Fuller’s mind was hardening against the two Italians. When John Richards, who, as marshal, had arrested the Morellis for their freight-yard thefts, talked with the governor, he was amazed to hear him say he discounted Madeiros’ confession. “I am convinced it was a fair trial,” he told Richards finally. When Robert Benchley came from New York to tell of his conversation with Loring Coes in which Coes—according to Benchley—had repeated Thayer’s clubhouse remark that he would “get those bastards good and proper,” Fuller asked Benchley to point out a single place in the record that indicated the trial was not fair.
“Why didn’t Vanzetti take the stand at Plymouth?” It was a question that the governor threw at defense witnesses with increasing frequency. “Why didn’t Sacco testify at Plymouth for his friend Vanzetti?” Fuller demanded of Tom O’Connor, who was trying to explain how the case originated in Chief Stewart’s mind. Each point that O’Connor made, whether it concerned Proctor’s ambiguous testimony or the Department of Justice files, Fuller and his counsel Wiggin brushed aside. O’Connor in a flash-tempered parry accused the governor of prejudging the investigation, and the two men shouted at each other until their voices reached the newspapermen in the corridor. Fuller, red-faced and furious, stood up to indicate the interview was over. Stalking from the room, he snapped at O’Connor, “Why did Boda skip?” Later O’Connor told a friend, “His hand is on the switch.”
A new volunteer defense lawyer now arrived from Pittsburgh, young Michael Angelo Musmanno, bringing a petition in behalf of the two men from the half million members of the Sons of Italy. Dramatic, impulsive, abounding in cheerful energy, with a bronze ex-serviceman’s pin in his buttonhole and wearing a poet’s brown tie, Musmanno had quit the promising beginnings of his law practice to offer all his talents to the Defense Committee. Sometimes his zeal would trip him, as when he drove down to the New Haven slum where Berardelli’s widow was living. She would not talk about the events at South Braintree and refused to sign an appeal. The most Musmanno could bring her to say was that she did not want to see innocent men punished. That was enough, however, for the poetic-minded Musmanno, who dashed to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to Fuller that echoed across Europe as far as Moscow:
I am one of the two who suffered most from the Braintree murders. I lost my husband and the father of my two children, but I would be sorry to have two innocent men put to death. I have always doubted that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and I hope that you will free them and let them go home to their families.
Several days later Sarah Berardelli denied that she had ever written or sent such a telegram. Musmanno had hoped that an appeal by Berardelli’s widow would help counteract the recent news that Parmenter’s fourteen-year-old son had been caught in South Easton, breaking and entering the railroad station. The newspapers had blamed the poverty and lack of direction of young Parmenter’s fatherless household.
Thompson forwarded to the governor a thirty-three-page analysis of the discrepancies between the newly discovered Bridgewater Pinkerton report and the Plymouth trial record. When this was not acknowledged, John Moors finally went to ask Fuller about it. Apparently nothing concerned with either the South Braintree or the Bridgewater Pinkerton reports had ever reached the governor’s desk, for he at once turned blankly to MacDonald. The secretary shrugged off Thompson’s analysis as “just a lot of stuff about a cropped mustache.”
Hard-boiled Herman’s job was to cull the governor’s Sacco-Vanzetti mail, most of which he threw away. In 1926 the Defense Committee had forwarded a protest signed by a group of English M.P.’s. When no reply came back, Gardner Jackson stormed up to the State House. His complaint got no farther than the anteroom obstacle of the secretary’s broad-topped desk. “Oh, those goddam crooks!” MacDonald told him. “Do you think we pay any attention to this stuff? It comes in here by the barrelful and we shoot it right into the fire!”
Rosina, when she appeared at Fuller’s office on July 11, quickly sensed the hostility behind his superficial politeness. He told her that Vanzetti had been asked by his lawyers to take the stand at the Plymouth trial but had refused. Young Brini, as the chief defense witness, had, he felt, merely learned an alibi by heart. After Rosina left the governor she spent some time with the Lowell Committee in the council chamber next door, then went on to Charlestown where, much troubled, she repeated Fuller’s remarks. Only she and Thompson were allowed to see the prisoners now, since according to regulations condemned men in Cherry Hill could have visits only from close relations and counsel.
Sacco brooded over what Rosina told him. On July 17, after deliberating for several days, he began a hunger strike in protest against what the Defense Committee called the “veil of secrecy that encourages the bias—economic, racial, political and religious—which has been shown all through this case.” Vanzetti joined with him to protest “the whispers of nameless informers,” explaining to Mrs. Evans:
But my hungry strike is progressing because I knew that both the Governor and the commission have ill-treated our witnesses, wrongly, and that they believe nothing of what our witnesses say. They believe, and treat well those handful of criminals, harlots, and degenerated who perjured against us.
His stomach, he complained after a few days, affected his mind and heart. He found difficulty even in writing letters. As he saw his end drawing closer he felt a longing for his own blood, for that far-off family in Villafalletto he had not seen in almost twenty years. The day after he began his strike he asked Felicani to send a telegram to his sister Luigia. Even though it might be too late now, he wanted above all to see her again before he died.
Sacco could at least see his wife, who came daily with Ines and Dante, now grown taller than his mother. The children were not allowed to see their father but waited in the warden’s office. Seven-year-old Ines wrote her first large-scrawled letter to her father, and he was so moved that even in the lassitude of his hunger strike he sat down at once to reply:
I will bring with me your little and so dearest letter and carry it right under my heart to the last day of my life. When I die, it will be buried with your father who loves you so much, as I do also your brother Dante and holy dear mother.... It is the most golden present that you could have given to me or that I could have wished for in these sad days.
As he wrote he found himself caught up in an imagined idyll:
It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and singing through the verdent fields picking the wild flowers here and there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to your mother’s embrace.
The same I have wished to see for other poor girls, and their brothers, happy with their mother and father as I dreamed for us—but it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes saddened very badly your father’s soul.[26]
When Fuller came for the first time to Charlestown to interview the three condemned men he talked only briefly with the sullen Madeiros and not at all with Sacco, who shook hands but told him courteously that they had nothing to say to each other. With Vanzetti Fuller spent over an hour and a half, breaking off only to dash back to a State House reception for Lindbergh, who had arrived in Boston that afternoon on his triumphal tour of the country. Vanzetti and Fuller were open with each other. Fuller pointed out what he considered the most damaging facts against Vanzetti: his failure to take the stand at Plymouth, the revolver found on him, his quick convictions by two juries. Vanzetti gave his interpretations of these things and then quite typically began to talk of other matters unrelated to himself. As they sat together in the warden’s office the two men found each other curiously sympathetic. When Fuller broke off the interview he promised to return later. “What an attractive man!” he observed to Warden Hendry as he hurried away. Reporters noticed that the governor appeared nervous as he headed down the walk to his waiting Packard. His nervousness was probably not so much because of the interrupted interview as at the thought of keeping America’s hero waiting. Getting into the car he knocked his hat off.
Thompson wanted Vanzetti to break his fast so that he would be better able to talk with Fuller on his next visit. Vanzetti finally agreed to drink a cup of tea, and later took some coffee and milk. Fuller spent most of July 26 in South Braintree inspecting the scene of the shootings and driving over the escape route with Chief Stewart. In the evening he again interviewed Vanzetti, arriving at Charlestown just after nine and staying two hours. It was not time enough for Vanzetti. He asked if he might write Fuller at length, and Fuller, with salesman’s affability, agreed. In this second interview Vanzetti felt a growing confidence in the governor that he showed in his letter next day to Alice Stone Blackwell:
He make me the impression of being just as you say of him; an honest man, as he understand it, and sincere, courageous, stubborn man but well intentioned at bottom and in a way, clever. And I like to tell you that he gave me a good heartfull sake hand, as I lef. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe that a man like that is going to burn us on a case like ours.
A heat wave seared the city. Through two weeks the Lowell Committee interviewed its witnesses. Thompson again and in vain asked for public hearings. The committee agreed, however, that with the exception of Judge Thayer, Chief Justice Hall, the district attorney, and the jurors, all of whom would be examined privately, counsel for both sides might suggest witnesses and be present to question them.
Most of the witnesses the committee examined had already been interviewed by the governor. Sometimes, as Rosina had, they merely stepped from the governor’s office to the council chamber.
Day after day the three old men in coats and stiff collars sat at their wedge-shaped mahogany desks while the witnesses filed damply by and Thompson and Assistant District Attorney Ranney struck sparks from each other. Lowell dominated the sessions, with Stratton silent and Grant fretting at his subordination. In the city four people died of the heat. The grass on the Common where the derelicts sprawled in alcoholic stupor—impervious to Prohibition—had turned to cocoa matting. Through the open windows of the council chamber came the summer hum of the city, broken faintly by the yelps of urchins in the Frog Pond. Within that Federalist room dominated by the spaniel-featured autocrat it was hard to realize that the matter of debate was two men’s lives.
Katzmann, after testifying privately, voluntarily submitted to being cross-examined by Thompson. Thompson accused the district attorney of having arranged the Plymouth trial first so that Vanzetti would appear in Dedham as a convicted felon. Katzmann said it was merely the chance that there happened to be a June term in Plymouth and none in Dedham. In the matter of Captain Proctor he would not positively deny that the captain thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but doubted he ever said so.
Katzmann was followed—at Lowell’s request—by Professor Guadagni and Bosco, the editor of La Notizia. Lowell particularly wanted to ask them about their Dedham testimony that they, along with Dentamore, had met Sacco in Giordani’s Café on the day of the crime and had remembered the date afterward because a banquet had been given at the Franciscan Priory for the editor of the Transcript that same day. In reading over the trial record Lowell had noticed that although Dentamore had said he had just come from the banquet, Guadagni said it was to be held in the evening. Struck by the discrepancy, Lowell had gone through the files of the Transcript and discovered that a group of Italians had given a dinner for Editor Williams at Frascati’s on May 13, eight days after Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. Thinking that there might possibly have been two banquets, Lowell telegraphed Williams, who happened to be in Washington. Williams replied that there had been only one.
With this information concealed like a time bomb, Lowell faced Guadagni while Bosco waited outside. Guadagni now appeared uncertain whether the banquet had been held before or after the talk in Giordani’s Café. When Lowell showed him the account of the banquet in the Transcript, he concluded that it must have taken place the night before and added ruefully, “I was so sure of that day.” Then Lowell set off his bomb, pointing out that the paper was dated May 14. The banquet had taken place May 13! How, then, could Guadagni have discussed it a month before? Lowell felt he had the proof in his hand that the story was a fraud, concocted by Guadagni, Bosco, and Dentamore to create an alibi for a fellow anarchist.
Thompson was shattered in his dismay. Guadagni’s lie seemed too flagrant, too utterly exposed. “If it was deliberate I do not think you would see me around here very much longer,” he told Lowell. “If I did not think these men were innocent I should not be fooling away my time. And I would not resort to any means to justify an end, just because I was convinced these men were innocent, any more than if I thought they were guilty.”
“Of course not, Mr. Thompson,” the other assured him urbanely. Guadagni stood there, beaten down, admitting now that the banquet had had nothing to do with his meeting Sacco, that he had accepted the idea from Dentamore, that it was a mistake.
Bosco was of sterner fiber. When he appeared, not only did he insist to the aroused and hostile committee that there had been a banquet for Commandante Williams on April 15 but that he had printed an account of it on the sixteenth in La Notizia. Lowell stared at him with contempt. “It is perfectly obvious that is not so,” he remarked coldly. Thompson could scarcely control himself as he turned on the still-defiant Italian:
“You can trust Mr. Lowell for that. He has investigated it. He knows there was no banquet on the fifteenth.”
When Bosco remained adamant, Lowell ordered him to bring in the files of La Notizia for April and May 1920. Next morning Bosco and a revived Guadagni appeared with the paper of April 16, 1920. There on the front page was the vindicating notice:
Yesterday the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street gave a luncheon in honor of the new Commandante Williams, editor of the Boston Evening Transcript.
Lowell sent the Italians out of the room and put a telephone call through to Williams. This time the Transcript editor recalled the earlier luncheon. Lowell turned to the stenographer, who had begun to record the conversation, and told him not to take down “colloquies.” He summoned Bosco and Guadagni back, shook hands with them, told them he believed them to be honest, and that he regretted his mistake.[27]
Thompson tried to impress on the committee that since the alibi had been reestablished, it must again be taken seriously. Lowell did not reply. Grant remarked that “You are just back where you were before.”
Lottie Tatillo, though presented to the committee a few days later as a new witness, could scarcely be considered new by either side. Both prosecution and defense had been aware of her and her story since the summer of 1920, when she made a statement to Brouillard and Stewart that on the morning of April 15 she had seen Sacco and Vanzetti in South Braintree.
Everyone in South Braintree knew Lottie by her maiden name of Packard. In 1901, when she was fourteen, she had gone to work in the stitching room of Rice & Hutchins. Pretty and wayward, full of wild stories, she would take the path down behind the millpond evenings with any good-looking young fellow from the factory. “Twelve ounces to the pound,” Frank Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, described her. “A nut. She is crazy and has been for years,” was Police Chief Gallivan’s opinion.
After Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Lottie told Jackson that she had seen Sacco in South Braintree the day of the murders and remembered he used to work in Rice & Hutchins. Later she elaborated on this story to John Shea, the local policeman, who passed her on to Stewart and Brouillard. She claimed she had recognized Sacco’s picture in the paper after his arrest because she had known him in 1915; when he was working in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins. On the morning of April 15 on her way to lunch she had passed him on Pearl Street standing near a shiny Buick touring car. She noticed him bite his lip and then all of a sudden it came back to her that he was the fellow named Sacco who used to work in the factory as a laster. She would never forget him because once in a temper he had thrown a last across the room at a boy and it had struck her in the foot.
If Lottie’s story was true, she would stand out as the most important witness of the murder day, the only one who had known Sacco previously and had then seen him at the scene of the crime. And if she had told her story to Jackson or Shea the day after the holdup, when no one in South Braintree had even suspected Sacco, that would indeed have made an almost watertight case for the prosecution. But Lottie had said nothing, nothing to Carlos Goodridge or anyone else, until after Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and their pictures had appeared in the paper. Stewart could find no record of Sacco’s ever having worked at Rice & Hutchins. It is of course possible that Lottie had seen Sacco during the week or so he worked in the factory under the name of Mosmacotelli in October 1917, and if before the arrests she had identified the man she had seen in the stitching room then with the man she claimed she saw standing by the Buick on April 15, 1920, this would have come close to being conclusive. Even after the arrests such an identification from a more stable person might have carried weight. But, as LaBrecque, the Quincy reporter, later explained to the committee, Lottie would tell one story one night and another the next and make so many irresponsible statements there was no use believing her. Stewart and Brouillard had long ago made the same discovery. Whenever they tried to check up on her account, she would take each question as an insult, denouncing both them and Sacco and Vanzetti incoherently. Finally Stewart gave up. “A blister,” he decided, as he struck her off his list of witnesses.
In the autumn of 1920 Moore had got wind of Lottie’s potentially dangerous testimony and sent down a Joseph Mina from East Boston to see what he could find out about her. Mirra, under the name of Joseph Meyers, got himself a job as a vamper in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins and found it easy enough to strike up an acquaintance with the accommodating Lottie. He made several dates with her, taking her to the pictures at Gordon’s Olympia in Boston and to the amusement park at Revere Beach. Each time he took her out he tried to pump her about Sacco and Vanzetti. One night when he took her to his house in East Boston for supper and felt he had broken the ice sufficiently, he asked her if she would tell what she knew to a lawyer friend of his. She agreed, and the two of them went to Moore’s Tremont Row office.
Moore and several others were waiting with a stenographer when Lottie and Mirra arrived. Lottie was voluble. She again said that she had known Sacco in 1915. The morning of the murders when she passed him on Pearl Street he was standing near the Buick wearing a derby,[28] and looking as if he were in a hurry. Vanzetti, whom she had never seen before, was standing on the other side of the street and called across to Sacco as she passed: “I wish you would hurry up and get this over. I have an appointment at 3:30 this afternoon in Providence to dig clams.” After Sacco was arrested she said she had seen his picture and asked the other girls in the factory: “What has Sacco done?” They told her he was being held for murder.
Lottie told Moore she had informed Shea, the day after the crime, that one of the men by the car was the one who had thrown the last at her. But, she told Moore, she did not want to testify in court. She had not come to ask him for money, but she saw no way of avoiding going on the stand except to leave the state for a while. She continued, according to the stenographic record, “I am pretty sure that Mr. Sacco was the man who done the murder. It is his wife that holds me back. I think she needs him.... I’ll tell you the truth. I am not a girl crazy for money or anything like that.”
“How much are you willing to suggest that you want?” Moore asked her finally.
“I don’t know,” she told him calculatingly. “I just came to help you on the defense case.”
Lottie’s story as she presented it to the Lowell Committee had altered singularly since that November evening, seven years earlier, at Tremont Row. Whenever Thompson challenged her, she stormed at him until her voice rang down the corridors. “I don’t remember,” she replied at one point to a question of Lowell’s, “my head is too full of music and things like that, to remember.” She now insisted that Sacco had worked for Rice & Hutchins in 1908 at the time of a strike—it was then and only then she had known him. That was the time when he had struck her with the last, and she had thought to herself: “That man will do something before he dies.” She denied ever having told Moore she had known Sacco in 1915, or that when she saw him on the street in 1920 he was wearing a derby. He was, she told Lowell, bareheaded. When Lowell first asked her whether she had seen Sacco on April 15 she replied: “I don’t say I saw him. I will never say I saw him, and I don’t think it was him now.” A few minutes later, however, she revived her story of seeing him by the car with Vanzetti across the street talking about clams, this time with Parmenter, the paymaster, standing in the background. After she came back from lunch she had told Frank Jackson she had seen Sacco. She did not tell Shea about this until after the men’s arrest.
When Thompson produced her 1920 statement that she had told Shea about Sacco the day after the crime, she raged: “No, I did not tell it to John Shea. How many times do you want me to answer that question? I will tell the truth at the Divine bar of Justice, and that has got more power than you have got. You have got a witness here that you cannot make waver.”
Judge Grant, trying to calm her, brought her a glass of water and accidentally spilled some down her back. Still trying to be helpful, he suggested she might have lunch now. “I don’t want any lunch,” she snapped, glaring at Thompson. “I have got enough lunch listening to this man here, he’s good enough lunch for anybody.”
When Thompson remarked that she had gone to Moore voluntarily, her voice rose to a shriek: “Who came to Moore voluntarily? You lie, I did not; I was brought to Moore, for Sacco and Vanzetti to do a dirty, rotten, nasty thing! I will make you prove your statement.”
She now insisted that Moore had offered her five hundred dollars to leave the state, an offer she had indignantly refused. Thompson sent her into another tantrum when he suggested she was trying to get money from Moore. When Lowell finally dismissed her, she left the room still spluttering.
A few days later Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, made his appearance in the council chamber. He admitted that Lottie had told him of seeing Sacco, but only after Sacco was in jail. Before his arrest she had never mentioned Sacco to anyone. Only afterward had she come out with her story of talking with him on the street the morning of April 15. Jackson had no memory of Sacco’s working in the factory, and there was no record of his having worked there.
Lottie, following her turbulent session with Thompson, swung round again a few hours later and told a sympathetic Post reporter that she was now convinced that the man she had seen was not Sacco and that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
One of the new discoveries claimed by the defense concerned the cap found by Berardelli’s body—the cap that the prosecution had tried to prove belonged to Sacco. Williams had pointed out the tear in the lining, implying that Sacco had made it by hanging his cap on a nail at the factory. It was a corroborative point mentioned several times during the trial and later by Judge Thayer in his ruling on the Madeiros motion.
Not until shortly before the Lowell Committee began its meetings was the point again raised. Then Tom O’Connor, combing South Braintree for new evidence, had the thought that he might pick up something from the now-retired Chief Gallivan. He found him weeding in his garden and quite willing to talk. The first thing they talked about was the cap Loring had picked up.
Gallivan said that the Saturday after the murder Fraher called him from Rice & Hutchins to say he had a cap found on the street after the murders. That evening Gallivan went to pick it up. The autumn before, he had been able to identify the remains of a man who had hanged himself in the Braintree woods by the name inked into the lining of the man’s cap. With that identification in mind, he ripped a hole in the lining of the cap Fraher gave him. Finding neither name nor marks, he tossed the cap under the seat of his car. There it stayed for a week or two until John Scott of the State Police asked him for it.
For O’Connor the tear in the cap seemed a tear in the very fabric of the prosecution’s case. He gave his information to Thompson, and Gallivan was summoned before the Lowell Committee. The ex-chief readily admitted that there was no hole in the cap’s lining before he got his hands on it, and said he told Scott he himself had made the tear. Tampering with evidence was a concept alien to his naïve mind; he still could see nothing wrong in what he had done. Katzmann, when the tear in the cap was brought to his attention, insisted that this was the first time he had ever heard of it—that if he had known about it during the trial, he would have explained it to the jury. Although Thompson argued that an important piece of evidence relied on by the prosecution had now turned out to be false, and that this alone should be sufficient grounds for a new trial or for clemency, the committee members did not appear impressed.
The confidentially verbose Dr. Hamilton again came from Auburn to defend his ballistics theses before the committee and to repeat his conversation with the conscience-stricken Proctor. Whether or not the committee had read the Dedham file on Hamilton, Ranney obviously had, for he ticked off the ex-druggist’s extraordinary expertise and ended with a reference to the Stielow case that made Hamilton jump. Major Goddard’s apparently definitive report had been read, and the committee was also much more aware than the jury had been that the six obsolete Winchester bullets found on Sacco were similar to Bullet III.
Thompson now produced Wilbur Turner, a self-designated criminologist, who had just examined the four Berardelli bullets at Dedham and found “a tremendous difference” between the markings on the base of Bullet III and the others, “as though they were made with a different tool or scratched with a different instrument.” And Thompson spelled out for the record his bitter conviction that Captain Proctor had substituted a fake bullet test-fired from Sacco’s gun for the genuine bullet taken by Dr. Magrath from Berardelli’s body.
The hot days slipped by, the old autocrat met his two colleagues with austere condescension each morning, and the parade of witnesses continued. Lowell felt—he would feel this way for the rest of his life—that he was performing a disagreeable civic duty because such was the obligation of a Lowell. In essence the committee bearing his name was conducting a second trial, but it had without his conscious awareness become a trial in which the Commonwealth was the defendant. What the Lowell Committee was taking on itself to decide was not whether Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial and were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but whether the presumably innocent Commonwealth had beyond a reasonable doubt erred. In the beginning Thompson and Ehrmann, as Harvard graduates, had pinned their hopes on Lowell, but after the Guadagni-Bosco episode Lowell began to seem more the challenger than the judge. The two lawyers had the uneasy feeling that evidence and argument were becoming useless, and even considered whether or not they should boycott the hearings.
The doom of our clients seemed as inevitable as that of Socrates [Ehrmann wrote afterward], and we were unwilling to continue in the farce of fair treatment. We were diverted from this course, however, by two outstanding jurists [Dean Pound and Professor Frankfurter], who inspired us with some semblance of hope. Theirs was perhaps the greater wisdom, since, had we withdrawn, it would have been said that we had lost faith in the cause of our clients.
By Saturday, July 23, the committee members had run through their witnesses, from Cox the paymaster to Rosen the peddler, Gould, the Hayes and Kennedy girls—everyone they thought might add anything new to the case. Lincoln Wadsworth, still working for Iver Johnson, and afraid that his Dedham testimony had been misinterpreted, told the committee that although the revolver found on Vanzetti might have been Berardelli’s, “there are thousands of times more chances that it was not than that it was.”
Lowell spent the week end writing a report of the proceedings, which in token deference to his colleagues he referred to as an abstract. Monday the committee spent listening to the closing arguments of Thompson and Ehrmann, followed by Ranney for the Commonwealth. Then, when the humid council chamber was at last empty, Lowell handed typewritten copies of his abstract to his colleagues, saying off-handedly that it was just a suggestion, of course, but would they look it over?
The next day the three met privately in the Faculty Room of Harvard’s University Hall. The autocrat of the faculty table having made up his mind in writing, all he wanted from the silent physicist and the garrulous poetaster was confirmation. They spent that day and the next discussing minor details of the abstract. “So fully did we find ourselves in agreement,” Grant admitted later, “that though many alterations were made in it, they were chiefly of phraseology and shades of expression rather than the substantive point of view.”
On the afternoon of July 27 at ten minutes past five Lowell, Stratton, and Grant, sphinx-faced, entered the executive offices of the State House, each carrying a brown manila folder with a signed copy of the revised abstract-report.