II

On Dec. 24, 1919, at 8.20 A.M. a robbery was attempted in Bridgewater, Mass.

In every minutes of the 24 hours of that day I was in Plymouth, Mass., about 30 miles from the place where the above cited attempt to robb occured. Furthermore, I had been never in such place before my arrest on May 5th, 1920. In the very moment I was in the bakery shop of Luigi Bastoni in Plymouth.

On April 15, 1920, at 3 P.M. and highway robbery was commetted in South Braintree and two men were killed.

In every minute of that day’s hours I have been in Plymouth, Mass., about 35 mile from the place of the crime; I have not yet been there, that I know, and in the very minute of the crime I was speaking with Mr. Corl, who was preparing his motorboat, on the Plymouth shore, to be put in the water for the new fishing season (1920).

The above said is true and there is nothing that can makes it untrue.

III

At the Plymouth trial my counselor, Joe Vahey has betrayed me like Iscariat betrayed Christ. He not even went to the place of the crime to see how it happened what it was; what people were saying and knowing. Out of hundreds of the eyes-witnesses of the crime who came to look upon me for several consecutive days, on my arrest, in Brockton police station, and all of them, safe one or two posetively denied I was one of the bandit they saw. Mr. Vahey even failed to produce a single one of those eyes-witnesses.

Chief Steward, Katzmann, Judge Thayer succeeded to form a jury out of a dozen hating, prejudiced, jelous, fearing, narrow-minded, vain, excited and ferociouse provincial bigits, real lyncher in vest of jurors.

These our jurors may believe or feign to believe the most apparently false Governament witnesses; they can disbelieve or feingn so, the truthful 18 defence; witnesses and they can bring out a verdict of guiltness against me.

Judge Thayer can injoy in given me the most severe and cruel sentence that I knew for such offense as the one of which I was framed. He can insult me. All this may be a great sadisfaction for the Plymouth Cordage Company, for Joe Vahey, Steward, Katzmann, & Thayer.

But I tell you that I am innocent of that crime and there is nothing that can make me guilty of it.

IV

Dedham trial.... Again Chief Steward, Persecutor Frederick Katzmann, William, Judge Webster Thayer, Cheriff Copan, a Joshef Ross, Lola Andrew, a Pelzner, twelf Linchers in vest of Jurors, a double verdict of murder in first degree against us....

I tell you that I am innocent of such crime, and no State tools, no perjuring harlots, crooks, criminals, venals, deficients, no Steward, no Copan, no black-guards, no thief as Ross, no Katzmann, no Williams, no sadism of jurors who had been ready to hang us before the beginning of the trial, no verdict of guiltness, no death sentence, no Webster Thayer, no Massachusetts, none of them nothing of this, not even all of this can change an innocent man in a guilty one.

And I tell you that Nicola Sacco is neither a thief nor a highway murderors and not even all of our enemies and of our case can make this truth untrue.

V

Judge Webster Thayer can denies us as many unrefutable and undenyable appeals and doom us at his heart content.

The Judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judiciary Court can uphold Thayer’s “decision” at their heart content.

The Judges of the Supreme Court of the United State can uphold at their heart content both Thayer and the Massachusetts Justice: we will remain innocent.

Although Sacco had been able to walk from the death house to Cherry Hill, his sturdy peasant body was beginning to give way. On the thirtieth day of his strike Dr. McLaughlin, the prison physician, told him flatly that the time had come when he must eat. To emphasize this McLaughlin showed him a rubber tube three feet long, greased at one end for insertion in the nose and with a rubber bulb for pumping at the other end. Two guards had brought the men to the prison barber shop, where Vanzetti, Musmanno, and Rosina were waiting. Rosina, as she had done all along, begged her husband to eat. The others kept urging him. Sliding the tube between his fingers, Dr. McLaughlin told him: “You must eat. I can make you. I am stronger than you are.” Sacco smiled, took a mug of soup that one of the guards had poured out, lifted it, and said ironically, “Good health to all of you.”

The day after McHardy’s house was bombed, Hill appeared at the heavily guarded Pemberton Square Courthouse to argue the exceptions before the four available members of the Supreme Court. Impassively the justices listened to the familiar argument that Judge Thayer himself had become a defendant and that to allow him to hear any question concerning Sacco and Vanzetti was to make him a judge in his own case. Attorney General Reading countered that even if Thayer had been privately prejudiced, that would not disqualify him unless his prejudice had been communicated to the jury. The justices reserved their decision.

Three mornings later Court Reporter Grabill walked down the inner steps of the still-guarded courthouse with a copy of the Supreme Court decision. He handed it to Musmanno and Hill, at the same time informing the reporters: “Gentlemen, the exceptions in both cases have been overruled.”

The Supreme Court had in effect reaffirmed that it had no jurisdiction, that once sentence had been passed, a motion for a new trial came too late. And a motion for revocation was the same thing as a motion for a new trial. As for the prejudice of Judge Thayer:

The judicial conduct of the trial judge in hearing and deciding the motion based on his own alleged bias or prejudice need not be discussed because neither the judge nor any of his associates had jurisdiction to entertain the motion.

In brief there was nothing more to be expected from the courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When Hill and Evarts asked Chief Justice Hall for a stay of execution until the United States Supreme Court might decide whether the law of the land had been observed in the case, he coldly refused.

Musmanno went at once to Charlestown to tell the prisoners. Sacco merely said it was what he expected, and continued the letter he was writing to Dante.[34] But when Vanzetti heard the news the discipline of his mind suddenly snapped. “Get the million men!” he shouted. He demanded a radio transmitter in his cell so that he could tell the whole world his story. All that morning he remained standing behind the bars, calling out for the million men. That night he wrote a letter to Thompson dating it “New Era year I”:

My enemies make me to aim their cannons, shoting at me every night to kill me.

Please, send this instruction to the Boston Defense Committee—as quickly as possible.

Dear Friends of the Committee.

I hope you have radiocasted at once my order of mobilization to all the nations of the world. Big corps of men are in march, if I perceived well last night. Take all the protective measure to the crossing of Rio Grande and Panamal Canal; lent me the coasts most you can. Renew my notes to the King of Italy and the Pope. I want all my witnesses as well. Informe me by wireless, and immediately, of each move and particular. I wait for you and Mr. Thompson as soon as possible for a general council. Recur to Mr. Thompson for legal matters.

In spite of Vanzetti’s seizure, the prisoners were taken back to the death house that afternoon.

At almost the same time Luigia Vanzetti arrived in New York on the Aquitania. She was met on the dock by Felicani, Rosina, Carlo Tresca, Mrs. Henderson, Dorothy Parker, Ruth Hale—Heywood Broun’s wife—a corps of newsmen, and several hundred supporters carrying signs and banners. Rosina embraced her solemnly as a sister in sorrow, then the reporters pressed in. The crowd made Luigia shrink. She was a frail, plain, dark woman, plainly dressed, who even at the age of thirty-six had the withered appearance of an autumn leaf. Her large eyes were shadowed by a helmet hat, her mouth permanently sad, her chin receding. She was of that Latin type, sexless and compassionate, ordained from adolescence either to be a maiden aunt or a nun. As she talked through an interpreter to reporters, she fingered a gold medallion of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin. What she said was embarrassing to all but Rosina. “I am here,” she told them, “to guide my brother back to the religion from which he has fallen, so that he may be prepared to meet his Maker. He was brought up in the church and he used to be a good Catholic. I have prayed continually that he return to the church and see a priest.”

In the last seventeen days before the executions, Hill and the other defense lawyers appealed to fourteen justices of four courts. The evening of Vanzetti’s seizure Musmanno took the train for Washington to file writs of certiorari with the clerk of the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that the actions of the Massachusetts courts were a denial of the rights of Sacco and Vanzetti under the Constitution’s fourteenth amendment, providing that “no State shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Once these writs were filed, once the case had officially reached the Supreme Court, the young lawyer, boundlessly confident, was certain that one justice could be found from among the nine who would grant a stay of execution.

After finding that he could not yet file his papers because he had not brought the record of the proceedings, he went on to the Justice Department to see the acting attorney general, George Farnum, who had once served in Massachusetts as Assistant United States Attorney under Katzmann’s former aide, Harold Williams. Musmanno and Farnum afterward gave conflicting versions of what occurred in their interview. To Musmanno’s question, Farnum replied there was nothing in the files linking Sacco and Vanzetti with the South Braintree crime but added that there was matter in the files unfavorable to them. What this was he refused to disclose unless Musmanno would agree to keep it secret, and when the latter refused the conversation came to an end. Next day Jackson, Hays, Kane, and Walsh, representing the Citizens’ Committee, spent the morning with Farnum, to whom they had been shunted by Attorney General Sargent, then on vacation in Vermont. Farnum, repeating the Department’s refusal to make the files available to representatives of unofficial organizations, declared that they “contained no evidence tending to establish the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, or either of them, of the crime for which they were convicted in the Massachusetts courts, nor any evidence whatever of any collusion whatsoever between the State and Federal authorities prior to the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti or prior, during or subsequent to the trial of these two men.”

Meanwhile, the contest of the courtrooms accelerated. At the same time that Musmanno was walking up the steps of the Capitol, Field, in Massachusetts, was presenting another petition for a writ of habeas corpus to Judge James Morton, Jr., of the United States District Court. Morton brusquely denied the petition and refused to allow any appeal. At 2:15 Hill and Evarts conferred with Justice Holmes in Beverly. Holmes listened to them with grave courtesy but said that he did not have the authority to meddle in the affairs of state courts, and that he would not feel justified in granting a stay of execution unless he felt that there was a reasonable chance that the Supreme Court would ultimately reverse the judgment against Sacco and Vanzetti. This he could not bring himself to believe, but he added that another of his fellow justices might see the matter in a different light.

With each rebuff the defense lawyers frantically sought out another judge, each time to receive again the inevitable answer.

While Hill was arguing vainly with Holmes in Beverly, Luigia, accompanied by Rosina, Felicani, and Mrs. Henderson, went to the prison. Warden Hendry met her at the gate. Although it was quite unprecedented, he had Vanzetti let outside his cell to meet his sister.

Vanzetti had recovered from his seizure of the day before. He was standing a few feet from the door as Luigia, followed by the others, walked down the corridor. Then he stepped forward and took her in his arms. In that moment the stooped, sallow prisoner in the convict’s gray shirt and trousers and the fading spinster with her tightly-drawn hair were as they had been in Villafalletto nineteen years before—he the curly-haired young man, she the shy sprouting girl of sixteen. During the hour allotted them they sat in the corner clasping each other’s hands as they talked about the old days and of their relatives and friends. Luigia said later that they had not spoken of her brother’s predicament nor of religion. At the hour’s end they embraced again and Vanzetti returned to his cell. Despondently Luigia walked back along the corridor.

From Charlestown Mrs. Henderson drove her to Marblehead to see Cardinal O’Connell at his summer home. The Cardinal, although surprised by the visit, invited them to tea on the lawn. William Cardinal O’Connell—who wintered in Nassau and was known as Gang-plank Bill by some of the less reverent faithful—modeled himself after a Renaissance prelate. Although a friend of Governor Fuller’s, he knew better than to take secular sides as had Bishop Lawrence. Men’s ways were not God’s way, he assured Luigia over the teacups. Later in the day he amplified his remarks in a neatly ambiguous statement to the Defense Committee:

Human judgment is fallible always at best, but it is the only human method of government which civilized life has developed. But the justice of God is perfect, and in the end He and His way, mysterious as they are, are our hope and our salvation.

Vanzetti had at least had the consolation of seeing his sister once more. But, as he wrote in a note of thanks to Mrs. Henderson,

Since I saw her my heart lost a little of its steadyness. The thought that she will have to take my death to our mother’s grave, it is horrible to me—to think of what she will soon have to stand and to bear revolts all my being and upsets my mind.

Sunday the twenty-first broke grayly in a tentative drizzle. Early in the morning Evarts and Hill reached Justice Louis Brandeis at his summer home on Cape Cod, to ask for a stay of execution. Brandeis was sympathetic but felt he was too close to the case personally to take any action, since during the trial his wife had lent Rosina their empty Dedham house and since he had talked the matter over many times with his friend Frankfurter. Hill had counted most on Holmes and Brandeis, the two liberals on the Supreme Court. The only other New England justice, Harlan Stone, was spending the summer at Isle au Haut, Maine, in the middle of Penobscot Bay. With Brandeis’ refusal ringing politely in his ears Hill started immediately on the 275-mile drive north.

Musmanno arrived back in Boston on the night train at about the time Hill and Evarts were leaving Chatham. Still undaunted, he telegraphed the Summer White House in South Dakota demanding that President Coolidge intervene. When he received no reply, he telephoned and managed to get hold of a presidential secretary who refused to give his name. The President, the anonymous secretary informed Musmanno, could not be disturbed; there could be no federal action in any case since no federal question was involved. Musmanno offered to fly out to South Dakota in a chartered plane. The secretary told him sharply that if he did he would not be received. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson had asked the governor of California to commute the Billings and Mooney death sentences, but Cautious Cal was—as Musmanno discovered—no Wilson.

Bouncing back from each rebuff, Musmanno telephoned Chief Justice Taft, summering at Point-au-Pic, Quebec, and asked if he might fly to meet him. Taft’s rotund voice came over the wire in such distortion that Musmanno could barely make out the irritated reply. Taft said he was outside the jurisdiction of the United States and it was too far for him to cross the border. Finally he told Musmanno to send a telegram explaining just what he wanted. To this telegram, which Musmanno sent off at once, Taft replied at such length that the collect charges came to $19.20. For all its length it merely said “No.” Taft referred Musmanno to Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone, all within the First Judicial Circuit. He saw no reason to think that his own opinion would differ from that of Holmes. “The absence of jurisdiction in our court to grant the writ of certiorari in the case seems to me apparent,” he concluded.

The numbers of those who heeded the call of the Defense Committee to come to Boston were disappointing, but the individuals who flocked there in the last days gave the case and the cause a permanent coloration. There were the dedicated, the troubled, the bohemian, the self-seeking and the selfless, the lovers of justice and strikers of poses, each wrapped in his own individuality. There was Powers Hapgood, six years out of Harvard and still looking like an undergraduate, from whose lips the word comrade tripped more frequently than any other and whose compulsion was to clash with the police. Hapgood had been a fashionable young clubman at Harvard but after graduating turned to romanticizing himself as a proletarian. He had worked in coal mines in Wales, Germany, France, and the Soviet Union; later he was to become Socialist candidate for Vice-President of the United States. In December 1927, his proletarian zeal took the form of marrying Mary Donovan.

There were John Howard Lawson and the young William Patterson, president of the American Negro Labor Conference, whose reaction to the futility of the last efforts would confirm them as Communists. There was the elderly, leather-tongued Ella Reeve Bloor, recipient of the Communist accolade of “Mother,” who had hitchhiked from California. There was Paula Holladay, with boyish bob and red slicker, who had trudged a mere 117 miles from Provincetown wearing a sandwich board reading AMERICA CANNOT LOOK THE WORLD IN THE FACE IF SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE MURDERED, subject to the jeering suggestions of passing motorists that she go home and wash the dishes. There was Captain Paxton Hibben, a dapper, martial little man with a clipped imperial, who still clung to his military rank acquired overseas with the 391st Field Artillery of New York. There was Wellesley College’s retired professor of astronomy and mathematics, the seventy-six-year-old Ellen Hayes, with white bobbed hair, flat hat, flat heels, and invisible blue stockings. There was the mysterious Louis Bernheimer, a Yale graduate, an aviator in France during the war, a student of philosophy, and a hermit who had already circulated more than thirty thousand pamphlets about the case to clergymen all over the country.

Then of course there was Edward Holton James, now engaged in running daily sightseeing tours to South Braintree for newly arrived sympathizers. Outstanding among the characters drawn to the scene was Zara du Pont, aunt of most of the living du Pont dynasty. Her singularly squashed hats, tweed suits that never wore out, and brass ear trumpet identified her a hundred yards away. She had come from Cambridge to indulge in her passion for picketing, for she made it her habit to join any line she saw, often with no idea of what or why she was picketing and—because of her deafness—with no way of finding out. Less well connected if no less obvious was William Obey of New York, who arrived at Parlor D with a certificate of release from a mental hospital. When his individualism became too flagrant and Tom O’Connor at last had to ask him to leave, he seated himself on the curb at Bowdoin Street with his portable typewriter in his lap, pecking away and telling the bystanders that the rush was so great at headquarters that he had to do his work outside.

On that final Sunday, August 21, Police Superintendent Crowley was taking no chances. For the first time anyone could remember, no permits were given out and no meetings on the Common were allowed. The Defense Committee had held its final meeting the night before at the Scenic Auditorium. By the middle of the overcast afternoon there were about twenty thousand people scattered over the forty-eight acres of Boston Common. Some watched the baseball games being played in the diamonds beyond the old Central Burying-Ground. Others listened to Stone’s Band at the Parkman Bandstand playing excerpts from The Bohemian Girl. Still others—the flotsam of the city—lay asleep on the grass. Perhaps a third of those wandering on the Common had come there out of a sense of curiosity, a feeling that something exciting was going to happen. For most of the afternoon nothing happened. Then shortly after four o’clock Paula Holladay in her red slicker walked up from Charles Street and across the Common toward the bandstand. On the back of the slicker was lettered: SAVE SACCO AND VANZETTI. IS JUSTICE DEAD? As she walked along the mall a crowd began to fall in behind her. Most of those following her were indifferent if not hostile, but a few sympathizers produced Sacco-Vanzetti placards from under their coats. She continued her Pied Piper walk, gathering several thousand in her wake by the time she reached Tremont Street. The police did not interfere until the crowd spilled over into the roadway and blocked traffic. Then a squad of bluecoats surrounded her and carried her off, along with William Patterson and several other placard-wielders, to the Joy Street Station. Here she was told she might go free if she would promise to take off the slicker and not to return to the Common. Superintendent Crowley came in person to the station to warn her paternally that Boston was “full of Irish Catholic boys, young hoodlums, who will be sure to try to do you harm if you go on the streets wearing that slicker.”

Within the Charlestown prison the customary Sunday afternoon bustle of visits continued, even though the whole area was cordoned off by the police. The prison band played its limited selections in the octagon anteroom, and prisoners sat in their usual rows at the oak tables facing their visitors. So damp was the air that drops of moisture kept dripping from the skylight struts. Because of the humidity Warden Hendry allowed the door of the death house to be left open. Luigia and Rosina came and stayed their hour. Rosina had not brought the children; she did not want them to see their father in his death cell. Sacco had been for some time occupied with a letter to Dante and spent the day, except for the visiting hour, working on it. He told Vanzetti that he did not want it made public for five years. Although Sacco had planned to have its contents kept secret, the Defense Committee persuaded him to allow them to release it immediately for its propaganda effect, to sway every ounce of opinion possible in the last hours.

Facing extinction, Sacco achieved the slow-moving dignity that came, as a rule, more easily to Vanzetti:

Much have we suffered during this long Calvary. We protest today as we protested yesterday. We protest always for our freedom.

If I stopped hunger strike the other day, it was because there was no more sign of life in me. Because I protested with my hunger strike yesterday as today I protest for life and not for death.

I sacrificed because I wanted to come back to the embrace of your dear little sister Ines and your mother and all the beloved friends and comrades of life and not death. So Son, today life begins to revive slow and calm, but yet without horizon and always with sadness and visions of death....

But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because that are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved....

Much have I thought of you when I was lying in the death house—the singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground, where there was all the life and the joy of liberty—just one step from the wall which contains the buried agony of three buried souls. It would remind me so often of you and your sisters Ines, and I wish I could see you every moment. But I feel better that you did not come to the death-house so that you could not see the horrible picture of three lying in agony waiting to be electrocuted, because I do not know what effect it would have on your young age....

Dante, I say once more to love and be nearest to your mother and the beloved ones in these sad days, and I am sure that with your brave heart and kind goodness they will feel less discomfort. And you will also not forget to love me a little for I do—O, Sonny! thinking so much and so often of you.

Best fraternal greetings to all the beloved ones, love and kisses to your little Ines and mother. Most hearty affectionate embrace.[35]

Vanzetti also wrote a long letter to Dante. Like Sacco’s, it was more a testament than a farewell to a thirteen-year-old boy. Even more explicitly than Sacco, Vanzetti reaffirmed his revolutionary faith:

I still hope, and we will fight until the last moment, to rivendicate our right to live and be free, but all the forces of the State and of the Money and reaction are deadly against us because we are libertarian or anarchist.

I write little of this because you are now a yet to little-boy to understand this things and other things of which I would like to reason with you.

But if you do well, you will grow and understand your father’s and my case and your father’s and my principles, for which we will soon be put to death.

I tell you that for and of all I know of your father, he is not a criminal, but one of the bravest men I ever knew. One day you will understand what I am about to tell you: That your father has sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for his fate in liberty and justice for all. That day you will be proud of your father; and if you come brave enough, you will take his place in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and you will vindicate his (our) names and our blood.

If we have to die now, you shall know, when you will be able to understand this tragedy in its fullness, how good and brave your mother has been with you, your father and I, during these eight years of struggle, sorrow, passion, anguish and agony.

Even from now you shall be good, brave with your mother, with Ines, and with Suzy[36]—brave, good Suzy—and do all you can to console and help them.

I would like you will also remember me as a comrade and friend of your father, your mother, Ines, Suzy and you, and I secure you that neither I have been a criminal, that I have committed no robbery and no murder, but only fought modestily to abolish crimes from among mankind and for the liberty of all.

Remember Dante, each one who will say otherwise of your father and I, is a lier, insulting innocent death men who have been brave in their life.

Remember and know also, Dante, that of your father and I would have been cowards and hypocrits and rinnegetors of our faith, we would have not have been put to death. They would not even have convicted a lebbrous dogs; not even executed a deadly poisoned scorpion on such evidence as that they framed against us. They would have given a new trial to a matricide and abitual felon on the evidence we presented for a new trial.

Remember, Dante, remember always these things; we are not criminals; they convicted us on a frame-up; they denied us a new trial; and if we will be executed after seven years, four months and 17 days of unspeakable tortures and wrongs, it is for what I have already told you; because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and oppression of the man by the man.

The documents of our case, which you and other ones will collect and preserve, will proof you that your father, your mother, yourself, Inez, I and my family are sacrificed by and to a State Reason of the American Plutocratic reaction.

The day will come when you will understand the atrocious sense of the above-written words, in all its fullness. Then you will honor us.

Now Dante, be brave and good always. I embrace you.

Not until Monday morning did Hill reach Rockland, Maine, and board the leisurely excursion steamer that finally brought him through the shredding fog to the granite-edged Isle au Haut. Justice Stone, sitting on his front porch in his shirtsleeves, received him curtly. He said he would listen to Hill’s arguments but he could grant no stay. Another justice might perhaps feel differently.

In Boston, Monday broke sallow and heavy. The still-empty Common looked frayed and untidy. By nine o’clock the first busloads of sympathizers began to arrive from New York. The air was lighter by the time Governor Fuller arrived at his office from Rye Beach a little before eleven. “A beautiful day,” he said, smiling and nodding affably to the reporters. One of his first visitors was Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” had appeared in the New York Times that very morning. Fiorello La Guardia had come by chartered plane from New York to make a last appeal to his old congressional colleague, but when he emerged from the executive chambers he shook his head and told reporters that there was only one chance in a thousand.

On this last day the governor was willing to keep open house for any delegation that chose to visit him. To nearly all who so chose he listened with stiff politeness. Just before lunch the newly installed state commander of the American Legion appeared to assure the governor that the Legion stood four-square behind him. Almost a thousand letters and telegrams arrived at the executive offices during the day, two thirds of them asking for suspension of the death sentence.

Late in the morning Luigia and Rosina arrived at Charlestown for a tear-blurred hour in the death house. Sacco talked to his wife about Ines and Dante; Vanzetti again recalled the old days in Villafalletto. Madeiros, who had been lying indifferently on his cot, chain-smoking, received an unexpected visit from his sister Consuelo. When she told him that their mother was too overcome to make the trip, he for the first time showed emotion.

On Saturday there had been a tentative attempt to renew the State House picketing, and Captain Hibben, Powers Hapgood, James Rorty, and Katherine Anne Porter had been arrested. Now, as the morning advanced, pickets with armbands and banners appeared again. The Scenic Temple served as a supply depot; there pickets assembled, were grouped in dozens, and sent on to the State House with their signs, JUSTICE IS CRUCIFIED TODAY, JUSTICE IS DEAD IN MASSACHUSETTS. All afternoon the line grew, the pickets forming fours as their ranks increased. The line became an endless chain, its links made up of girls and sweaty shirtsleeved men from the garment district, self-conscious intellectuals, a scattering of adolescents welcoming the chance to challenge authority, and a rank and file of friends and sympathizers of every class and description. Mrs. Evans was there. She had aged much since the trial, but with her solid figure and rimless glasses she still looked the transcendental grandmother. One of the younger policemen on duty complained that there was not a good-looking girl in the bunch.

During the course of the afternoon and evening 156 pickets were arrested. Isaac Don Levine and Mrs. Evans bustled about raising bail money. Edward Holton James showed up at the Joy Street Station with his pockets full and bailed away for several hours until he ran out of both funds and patience, then found himself booed when he returned to the Scenic Temple to announce that he would bail no more.

The garment workers in the station’s close-packed guardroom sang the “Internationale,” and afterward everyone joined in the more singable “Solidarity Forever.” Police Captain McDevitt had long had his eye on Powers Hapgood. The other pickets might with luck be out on bail in an hour or so, but McDevitt made a point of turning Powers over to the State Police, who, instead of arresting him, hurried him off to the Psychopathic Hospital where he was held for four days.

Crowds formed on the Common side of Beacon Street to stare at the picket parade. Occasionally someone would dart across the street to join the line. Superintendent Crowley, with memories of the mob rising in the police strike of 1919, was determined there would be no rising today. Halfway down the mall a police company with rifles was drawn up like a detachment of infantry. Mounted police wove their horses in and out of the gathering throngs. There were more blue uniforms on Boston Common than there had been since the Civil War encampments.

The day wore on. All the public buildings were garrisoned by police. A squad even occupied the roof of Fuller’s Packard salesroom. Yet except for the State House picketing and the unusual numbers crowding the Common there were no incidents in the city. None of the anticipated bombs went off.

With Hill delayed in Maine, the last-minute legal efforts became a confusion of volunteer lawyers. Field appealed for a stay to Judge Sisk—most liberal of the Superior Court judges. Sisk, for all his obvious sympathy, maintained that he lacked jurisdiction. Surrounded by the clicking typewriters of Parlor D, Tom O’Connor worked with John Finerty on a new inclusive habeas corpus motion. Finerty, former assistant general counsel for the United States Railroad Administration, was probably the ablest lawyer to take part in the final proceedings. This thin, long-jawed man in a white linen suit, who resembled Woodrow Wilson, had dropped in at Parlor D on his way to spend two weeks by the sea at Cohasset. O’Connor managed to arouse his interest so that he never went on. He and O’Connor were convinced the new motion stood its best chance with Federal Judge Anderson. Unfortunately, Anderson was at Williamstown, in the Berkshires. O’Connor arranged to have a plane waiting at the East Boston airport, and all the afternoon he kept trying vainly to get to Anderson by telephone.

At 2:30 Musmanno brought a copy of the completed Finerty motion to Charlestown. Vanzetti signed it. Sacco again refused. Both condemned men were now convinced that nothing could save them. Vanzetti gave a message to Musmanno for Thompson, whom he asked to see once more. Thompson, worn out physically and mentally, had left Boston shortly after the August 10 reprieve for his summer place in South Tamworth, New Hampshire, but as soon as he received the message he set out at once for Charlestown.

It was six o’clock before he arrived at the prison. As he entered the death house, Vanzetti, who had been sitting at his table writing, stood up at once as if he had been expecting him, smiled warmly, and reached through the bars to shake hands. Then Thompson took a chair from one of the guards and sat down just behind the painted warning line.

They talked tentatively at first. Thompson had heard a rumor that Vahey and Graham knew Vanzetti was guilty of both crimes and could prove it if only they were released from their lawyers’ obligation of secrecy. Vanzetti emphatically and without anger said he had never told Graham or Vahey anything that would link him to either crime. Thompson beckoned to a guard to be a witness to their conversation.

For both men it was the most solemn moment of their lives. There was the quality of a Socratic dialogue to their questions and answers. The American lawyer’s low, controlled tones were a counterpoint to the more musical voice of the Italian. As Thompson recalled the scene afterward it struck him in its more humble way as a recreation of the Phaedo.

I told Vanzetti that although my belief in his innocence had all the time been strengthened, both by my study of the evidence and by my increasing knowledge of his personality, yet there was a chance, however remote, that I might be mistaken; and that I thought he ought for my sake, in this closing hour of his life when nothing could save him, to give me his most solemn reassurance, both with respect to himself and with respect to Sacco. Vanzetti then told me quietly and calmly, and with a sincerity which I could not doubt, that I need have no anxiety about this matter; that both he and Sacco were absolutely innocent of the South Braintree crime, and that he was equally innocent of the Bridgewater crime; that while, looking back, he now realized more clearly than he ever had the grounds of the suspicion against him and Sacco, he felt that no allowance had been made for his ignorance of American points of view and habits of thought, or for his fear as a radical and almost as an outlaw, and that in reality he was convicted on evidence which would not have convicted him had he not been an anarchist, so that he was in a very real sense dying for his cause. He said it was the cause for which he was prepared to die. He said it was the cause of the upward progress of humanity, and the elimination of force from the world. He spoke with calmness, knowledge, and deep feeling. He said he was grateful to me for what I had done for him. He asked to be remembered to my wife and son. He spoke with emotion of his sister and of his family. He asked me to do what I could to clear his name, using the words “clear my name.”

Vanzetti, after bringing up the cruelty of his seven years in prison, spoke of the history of movements for human betterment, among them early Christianity. Thompson remarked that the essence of the appeal of Christianity was the supreme confidence shown by Jesus in the truth of his own views by forgiving, even when on the cross, his persecutors and slanderers. Many times in his letters Vanzetti had made comparisons between his own fate and that of Jesus. It was at these words of Thompson’s that their dialogue, as he recorded it, reached its climax:

Now, for the first and only time in the conversation, Vanzetti showed a feeling of personal resentment against his enemies. He spoke with eloquence of his sufferings, and asked me whether I thought it possible that he could forgive those who had persecuted and tortured him through seven years of inexpressible misery. I told him he knew how deeply I sympathized with him, and that I had asked him to reflect upon the career of One infinitely superior to myself and to him, and upon a force infinitely greater than the force of hate and revenge. I said that in the long run, the force to which the world would respond was the force of love and not of hate, and that I was suggesting to him to forgive his enemies, not for their sakes, but for his own peace of mind, and also because an example of such forgiveness would in the end be more powerful to win adherence to his cause or to a belief in his innocence than anything else that could be done.

There was another pause in our conversation. I arose and we stood gazing at each other for a minute or two in silence. Vanzetti finally said that he would think of what I had said.

Thompson, the believer, then referred to the possibility of immortality, saying that he understood the difficulties of such a belief, yet that if there was personal immortality Vanzetti might hope to share it. The other did not reply, but spoke briefly of the evils of present-day society—and the two men parted.

In this closing scene [Thompson wrote] the impression ... which had been gaining in my mind for three years, was deepened and confirmed—that he was a man of powerful mind, and unselfish disposition, of seasoned character, and of devotion to high ideals. There was no sign of breaking down or of terror at approaching death. At parting he gave me a firm clasp of the hand, and a steady glance, which revealed unmistakably the depth of his feeling and the firmness of his self-control.

As he was about to leave, Thompson exchanged a few words with Sacco, who shook hands firmly through the bars, thanked the lawyer for what he had done, and said he hoped their differences of opinion had not affected their personal feelings. Like Vanzetti, he showed no sign of fear.

However darkly anticipated by public officials across the United States, the day passed off lightly with scarcely more than a few token strikes. The underlying fear was of another series of bombings. Police blanketed all the larger cities. In Washington guards with riot guns patrolled the Capitol. Police used clubs to break up a meeting of three thousand sympathizers in Philadelphia. The Communist Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee in New York had called for a general strike and a mass meeting in the afternoon at Union Square. Other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, the Central Trades and Labor Council, and the Defense Committee, refused to participate, and only a few hundred responded to the strike appeal. Late in the afternoon a crowd of ten thousand gathered in Union Square under the eyes of five hundred police, some of whom manned machine guns on the rooftops.

The afternoon and early evening were marked by a frenetic dashing about of volunteer lawyers. Shortly before three Musmanno filed the Finerty motion in the Federal Building, and at five o’clock Judge James Lowell of the United States District Court held a hearing on it. After listening for over an hour to Finerty, William Schuyler Jackson, and Benjamin Spellman, a New York lawyer who had aided in the defense of Harry Thaw, Judge Lowell ruled that nothing had been brought out to justify his issuing a writ or stay of execution. “The only question before this court is whether these men were deprived of their constitutional rights,” the judge snapped at Spellman, who seemed to irritate him. “Don’t tell me about the public. Stick to the law. I am sorry to see these two men executed, but it is a question of law, and it doesn’t make any difference whether ten persons or ten thousand persons are sorry for them.”

On leaving the courthouse, Finerty drove at once with Jackson for a third appeal to Justice Holmes. It was twilight by the time they reached Beverly. The old man listened to them for two hours, said he appreciated the force of their arguments, but felt—as he had before—that he had no right to intervene. With this rebuff the legal side of the case ended. From Beverly, Finerty and Jackson drove to East Boston in a last attempt to reach Judge Anderson, only to be told at the airport that the chartered plane could not take off after dark.

Luigia and Rosina had visited the death house again in the afternoon. At seven the warden allowed them a farewell visit of five minutes. Luigia walked up the prison steps, supported by Rosina. The two women had exhausted their tears. Dry-eyed, they kissed the prisoners for the last time through the bars.

Meanwhile the indefatigable Musmanno made his way to the executive chambers where he again argued the case from beginning to end before the unwilling ears of Fuller and Wiggin. Finally the governor put him off by telling him to see Attorney General Reading, promising to accept any recommendations Reading might make. While Musmanno was concluding his arguments Luigia and Rosina arrived and he remained as their interpreter. Luigia, her rosary in her hand, knelt on the floor, imploring the governor to save her innocent brother. Rosina begged passionately for the life of her children’s father. Fuller listened to the wildly pleading women for over an hour, his professional courtesy fitting like a mask. “It cannot be expected,” he told them finally, in dismissal, “that you would know the case as the lawyers and judges know it, and I can understand the sorrow that overwhelms you. I wish I could do something to lighten that sorrow, but I can do nothing.”

Musmanno, after leaving the governor, went down the corridor to the attorney general’s office. Reading listened to him with apparent interest while he explained that there were still five United States Supreme Court justices—any one of whom might grant a habeas corpus petition—whom they had not been able to reach. Another respite was necessary to allow the defense the necessary time. Reading said he would let Musmanno know his decision within the hour.

Just before eleven o’clock, the waiting Musmanno was called into the governor’s office. Fuller told him that the attorney general had decided not to recommend a stay of execution. Musmanno, his voice trembling, asked the governor if he would stand for all time on that decision. Fuller replied that he would.

Charlestown prison, with eight hundred police surrounding it, was quiet. Mounted troopers, cap straps under their chins, and supplied with gas masks and tear gas, flanked the arched granite entrance. Fire-department squads had connected their hoses. Marine patrol boats chugged up and down the Miller River adjoining the freight yards.

Again the slum streets about the prison had become a dead zone, roped off for a distance of half a mile. Those who lived within the area were told to stay indoors.

The prison walls and catwalks were lined with machine guns and searchlights. As the darkness came on, the purple-white rays began to crisscross the whole moldering Charlestown area—the Boston and Maine freight yards, the tenements, the slime-banked river. On the far side of Rutherford Avenue, beyond the rows of junk shops, the light bands swept across the forgotten cemetery where John Harvard lay buried, flashing beyond to the Bunker Hill obelisk and the spire of the St. Francis de Sales Church. Then, as if in reply, searchlights on the roof of the State House began to probe the darkness. In the middle distance the elevated cars moved across the Charlestown Bridge like illuminated beetles.

Within the dead zone the quiet was broken only by the clip-clop of horse hoofs on the granite paving blocks and by passing motorcycle patrols. Only as the silence resumed did one become aware of the steady cricketlike tapping of a cobbler’s hammer from a shop on Rutherford Avenue.

As the twilight faded, the tenseness in the city was so pervading that it seemed to go beyond action. Crowds gathered on the Common across from the State House to gaze up silently at the lighted windows of the executive wing. At ten o’clock the pickets reappeared. Again the police hustled them away. Hundreds stood impassively in Newspaper Row to watch the bulletin boards. The radio stations announced that they would stay on the air until after midnight. In City Square, Charlestown, several thousand men and women milled about beyond the barriers, curious rather than partisan, making no attempt at any sort of demonstration.

From the second-floor headquarters of the Hod Carriers’ Union, Mother Bloor, flanked by Fred Beal, attempted to harangue a crowd of several hundred in the street below and was promptly arrested. Beal then set out with a group of fifty militants for Charlestown, placards and banners concealed under their shirts, resolved to break through the barricades and demonstrate in front of the prison itself. As the marchers reached City Square, they brought out their placards and banners, and at once there were cries of “The Reds are coming!” A shot rang out. At the sound the bluecoats stampeded out of the precinct station. The mounted police charged the crowd. A number of people were hurt. Beal and nine others were arrested. “The crowd didn’t beat you up,” the patrolman who had Beal by the collar told him, “But, O boy, wait until you get to the station!”

Inside the prison walls everything was darkened and quiet except for the smoke-filled press room with its clicking typewriters and clattering telegraph keys. As on all execution nights, few of the prisoners were asleep. At ten the electricians arrived to make a final test of the chair. Shortly after eleven Musmanno arrived, his panama hat flopping as he dashed up the steps, tears streaming down his cheeks. The warden would not allow him to see the condemned men.

At 11:15 Warden Hendry, bearing himself with all the official gravity he could muster, walked up the iron stairs into the death house. Vanzetti had been pacing up and down in his cell. At the warden’s approach he stopped. “I am sorry,” Hendry informed him in the customary stereotyped phraseology, “but it is my painful duty to inform you that you have to die tonight.” Vanzetti stood staring at the floor for a moment, then flung his arms out, his eyes glittering. “We must bow to the inevitable,” he whispered.

Sacco was at his desk writing a letter when Hendry repeated the formula. He slumped down in his chair, then in a thin voice asked the warden if he would see that the letter he was writing was mailed to his father in Italy. Hendry promised to mail it himself. In the last cell Madeiros lay on his back with his shoes off and a blanket over him, as if asleep. At the warden’s announcement he neither moved nor spoke. Father Michael Murphy followed the warden into the room and asked hopefully if the prisoners would receive the rites of the church. Vanzetti and Sacco refused. Madeiros did not reply. Sacco thanked Father Murphy and told him he had enjoyed his talks with him. The priest looked dejected when he left. “Well, I guess they don’t want me now,” he told the newspapermen in the press room. The three were the first condemned men in Charlestown’s history to refuse a clergyman.

Shortly before midnight Executioner Elliott, with Warden Hendry and Deputy Warden Hoggsett and the official witnesses, entered the death chamber from a side door. The witnesses were Surgeon General Frank Williams of the Massachusetts State Guard, Medical Examiner Magrath, Dr. McLaughlin, Sheriff Capen, Dr. William Faxon from the Dedham jail, and Dr. Howard Lothrop, a surgeon at the Boston City Hospital. Warden Hendry would allow only one reporter to be present. Lots were drawn in the press room and the choice fell to William Playfair of the Associated Press.

The witnesses ranged themselves along the wall, stony-faced, their voices held to a whisper. In the center of the room the chair stood with its unfastened straps hanging down, under the glare of the overhead lights. Executioner Elliott took his place behind the screen that hid the switch but not his head. Another screen concealed three litters.

Somewhere in the middle distance a clock struck midnight. At 12:03 two guards brought Madeiros into the bright silent room. Supported by a guard on each side he shuffled as if he were walking in his sleep. They guided him to the chair and he sat down and waited like an automaton while they strapped his arms and legs in place, adjusted the electrodes and the headpiece that covered the upper part of his skull, and finally placed a black mask over his eyes. At a nod from Warden Hendry, Elliott pulled the switch. The masked body stiffened, the mouth grimaced, and in a few seconds the witnesses noticed the odor of burning hair. Three times Elliott switched on the current, then Dr. McLaughlin stepped forward, applied his stethoscope, and pronounced Madeiros dead. Deftly the guards placed the body on one of the litters.

At 12:11 Sacco was brought in. Although the guards flanked him, he walked the seventeen steps from his cell to the chair unaided. As they began to adjust the straps he sat bolt upright, casting about wildly with his eyes. Then in the iron tradition of his belief, like so many of his comrades on the gallows before him, he called out in Italian: “Long live anarchy!” With that he grew calmer, and added more quietly in English: “Farewell my wife and child and all my friends.” Only then did he seem to become aware of the witnesses. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. The guards had finished with the straps and the headpiece and the electrodes, and one of them now slipped on the mask. In that last second Sacco found himself beyond wife, children, friends, anarchy, bared to the last basic verity. “Farewell!” he cried out in English as Warden Hendry nodded and the executioner’s hand moved behind the screen, and then in Italian: “Mother!” Elliott increased the current by 300 volts for that sinewy peasant body.

When the guards came to Vanzetti’s cell, he knew that the other two were already dead. With the guards beside him he entered the death chamber, his step firm, his head erect, his gray denim prison trousers flapping slightly from the slits in the sides. Just inside the door he paused near Warden Hendry and said with great precision:

“I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of all, of all. I am an innocent man.”

With that he shook hands with Hendry, Deputy Warden Hoggsett, Dr. McLaughlin, and two of the four guards, then took his place in the chair.

There was still something more. As the guard on his right knelt to adjust the contact pad to his bare leg Vanzetti spoke again, his eyes covered. “I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me,” he said gently. Warden Hendry’s eyes were filled with tears as he gave the signal. Afterward he was scarcely able to pronounce the required formula: “Under the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been carried out.”