a man came along who looked educated or respectable, as if he might
be somebody, Moore seemed bound to challenge him. That was the way it
struck Jerry McAnarney. If Jerry had been going on trial for murder
he knew he would rather take his chances with a businessman than
with some fellow who dug sewers. But not Fred Moore; he wanted the
sewer-digger every time. There was a young fellow Jerry had spotted
in the line, a good clean-cut college type; as soon as Moore found
out he worked for Page & Company, that finished him. Then there was
someone McAnarney recognized from the New England Trust Company, the
sort of man any defense lawyer ought to get down on his knees to
have on a jury. He told Moore so, but Moore would not have him.
For thirty years Jerry McAnarney had been going in and out of the
Dedham courthouse, but he had never seen anything like this morning.
State troopers in khaki, some mounted, were deployed all around the
courthouse. Other troopers with motorcycles and sidecars swept up
and down the High Street, the pop of their exhausts sounding like
machine-gun fire. And inside there were police and deputies at the
doors, parading up and down the corridors, on the stairs.
When Jerry and Tom arrived at the courthouse just before ten they
found the front door locked. The side door was also locked. When they
knocked, a guard looked through the glass and waved them off. Finally
a court officer recognized them and let them in. Inside, a trooper
patted them over for weapons. Then a flashy policeman stopped them at
the foot of the stairs, and on the landing they were stopped again.
The way the place was guarded, Jerry told his brother, it looked as
if Sheriff Capen was getting ready to try the Kaiser.
Entering the courtroom, the brothers glimpsed the backs of the
defendants in the waist-high prisoners’ cage. Rosina Sacco, with
seven-month-old Ines in her arms, sat close behind her husband, the
only ordinary spectator allowed in the courtroom that day. The others
present were either reporters or deputies. Fred Katzmann, tanned and
glowing from a long week end at golf, spotted the McAnarneys in the
doorway and waved to them with casual friendliness. Moore was behind
the bar talking with Judge Thayer. The judge’s face seemed frozen.
Just before the McAnarneys went in, a deputy sheriff said under his
breath: “Tom, I like to see you boys win your cases, but I hope to
God you lose this case. These men are no good.”
At the opening Moore filed a motion for severance and a separate
trial for Sacco on the grounds that his association with Vanzetti
would be prejudiced because of the latter’s conviction for the
Bridgewater crime. Similarly, the McAnarneys requested a separate
trial for Vanzetti, since his defense was to be “separate and
distinct.” Both motions were denied.
During the whole morning not a single juror was picked. By lunchtime
it was obvious that the Yankee judge was taking a poor view of the
Western lawyer. The McAnarneys could tell that merely by the way
Thayer glared at Moore, the lines at each side of his mouth etching
into his cheeks before he replied to one of Moore’s objections.
Even Rosina Sacco, with her imperfect knowledge of English, sensed
it. Moore kept on needling Thayer, objecting to each triviality,
challenging each likely juror. The class-conscious Westerner
demanded that prospective jurors be asked if they were opposed to
organized labor, if they belonged to a union, or if they hired union
help. These questions Judge Thayer disallowed. At the noon recess
he remarked angrily and audibly as he left the courthouse that no
long-haired radical from California was going to tell him how to run
his court.
It was midafternoon before the first juror, Wallace Hersey, a
real estate dealer from Weymouth, was picked. By the end of the
afternoon only two more had been selected: John Ganley, a grocer,
and a machinist, Frank Waugh. Each defendant was allowed forty-four
challenges, and that day the defense used up twenty-one. Judge
Thayer, exasperated by the delays, held an evening session until ten,
when he had to leave to catch the last train back to Boston. It took
ten hours and 175 veniremen to get the initial three jurymen.
There was, as there usually is in even the most ponderously sustained
trial, an occasional lighter moment. At one point a plump sugar
dealer from Braintree had the idea of getting himself excused by
pretending he was deaf. The courtroom echoed with laughter as Judge
Thayer pounced on him. Sacco laughed so hard that tears rolled down
his cheeks. Then the courtroom settled down again, the hivelike
humming broken only by the squeak of Sheriff Capen’s boots as he
walked gingerly across the floor to the upright mace. Behind the
judge’s dais the triple-cylindered pendulum of the marble-faced clock
ticked away the formal minutes.
From time to time the sallow-faced defendants in the cage whispered
to one another. Sacco had aged in the year of his arrest. His hair
was thinning. That morning was the first time he and Vanzetti had
seen each other in eight months. When they met before court opened,
they had kissed each other gravely on the cheek.
The McAnarney brothers, seated inside the bar enclosure, saw the
unhappy pattern of the morning repeated all through the afternoon
and evening. It was clear by now to Jerry McAnarney that Moore, for
all his reputation, was doing nobody any good, least of all the
men in the cage. Jerry was as convinced as ever that the two men
were innocent. He had even brought his wife to the jail after the
Decoration Day parade to let her talk with Sacco and get her opinion,
and she had felt the same way he did. But now, even before the jury
had been picked, he had the feeling of the sands slipping from under
his feet, of being beyond his depth. The Italians were never going
to get a square deal with Moore running things. Jerry could hear
Thayer’s edged voice: “Mr. Moore, that may be the way they practice
law out West, but not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”
At the close of the evening session the brothers drove to John
McAnarney’s house in Quincy and told him of what was blowing up
between Moore and Judge Thayer. They wanted John to get rid of Moore
and take charge. John thought it over, and then, even though it was
midnight, telephoned William G. Thompson. Thompson was an old Yankee,
a lawyer’s lawyer, a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and whatever
he said carried weight in Massachusetts.
In his Chestnut Hill home, Thompson listened to John McAnarney
explain the difficulties his brothers were facing at the beginning of
the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. John begged him to come to Dedham in the
morning, insisting that the lives of two men were at stake, and that
in his opinion the men were innocent. Thompson agreed to look in.
As Thompson got off the train in Dedham and walked up from the
station past the spent lilac hedges of the High Street, the brim
of his Panama flopping with each step, the Phi Beta Kappa key and
the Institute of 1770 charm jingling on his heavy watchchain, he
looked the very model of a proper Boston lawyer. Even the loose way
he held his pipe in his mouth reinforced his assurance. He found
John McAnarney, much upset, waiting for him in front of the closed
courthouse gates.
They went in through a side door. In the lower corridor the two
lawyers found Moore arguing with Rosina Sacco in the center of a
group of gesticulating Italians. Thompson could hear Rosina’s voice
shrill to the edge of breaking, demanding of Moore by what right he
represented her husband. She didn’t want him, she shouted, she didn’t
believe in him. She wanted a good lawyer.
Rosina’s outburst was the culmination of months of bitterness.
She had neither liked nor approved of Moore from the beginning.
Her thrifty peasant nature was affronted by his manner of life,
his Beacon Hill house and car with chauffeur—all paid for by poor
Italians. Now she was telling him in effect: Get out! And he was
refusing.
Thompson and John and Jerry McAnarney talked the matter over in one
of the anterooms. “I want either you or John to replace Moore,” Jerry
told Thompson. Thompson said it was too late. The next day at latest
the jury would be empaneled. “You have got to make the best of it,”
he told the brothers.
When Moore joined them in the anteroom, Jerry McAnarney offered to
turn back his first payment of two thousand dollars and go on with
the case for nothing if Moore would only retire. Moore refused to
consider it. He had hired the McAnarneys as subordinates, not to
give him orders. With their narrow conservatism, he considered them
incapable of the larger view the case demanded.
During the rest of the morning Thompson sat with the McAnarneys
watching the resumed parade of prospective jurors. A new lot of 160
veniremen had been brought in, but the selection was going no faster
than it had the day before. Moore was again needling Judge Thayer.
He could not seem to help it, even though he must have sensed the
tensing of the atmosphere. It was a morning Thompson was to remember
in all its immediacy years later. “Katzmann would say something,” he
recalled to the Lowell Committee in 1927, “and Moore would object to
it. He was jumping up all the time. He would make objection after
objection. Judge Thayer would sit there and look at Moore with the
fiercest expression on his face, moving his head a little. Moore
would say ‘I object to that’ and Judge Thayer ... would sit back in
his chair and say ‘Objection overruled.’ It wasn’t what he said, it
was his manner of saying it. It looked perfectly straight on the
record; he was too clever to do otherwise. I sat there for a while
and I told John McAnarney ‘Your goose is cooked. You will never in
this world get these men acquitted. The judge is going to convict
these two men and see that nothing gets into the record; he is going
to keep his records straight and you have no chance.’”
* * * * *
When John Dever, a Filene’s clothing salesman, received a post card
ordering him to report at the Norfolk county courthouse for jury
duty, he had expected he might serve on some civil case. Not until
the Decoration Day week end did he learn that his summons might be
for the South Braintree murder case. Of that case he had only a
blurred recollection, something he had read in the papers the year
before. It gave him a queer feeling to think he might find himself on
a murder jury. His supervisor at Filene’s told him he was lucky—it
would be like having time off, with Filene’s paying his salary.
Although Dever was twenty-seven, he could have passed for twenty-one.
He had been a poor Irish-Catholic boy brought up on the wrong side
of the tracks in the quarry city of Barre, Vermont. As he grew up
he had played with many of the children of the Italian immigrant
stoneworkers. Some of these workers had been anarchists, or at least
radicals. Dever, though a pious adolescent, had had no particular
feeling against the local anarchists in their clapboard hall. He was
used to them.
At fifteen he had left Barre for Boston, where he first worked as
a bellboy in the Parker House. He had volunteered for the Army in
1917 but had not been sent overseas. In 1919 he had gone to work
at Filene’s. Unmarried, he lived in a brick rooming house on upper
Beacon Street, Brookline.
Inconspicuous as this slight, fair-haired young man may have seemed
when he was shepherded into the courtroom with the other veniremen,
he was in one respect unique. In the course of the day he would
be one of three accepted for the jury, and of the final twelve he
alone would write about the trial. His memoirs, although fragmentary
and redundant, remain the sole record of the case as seen from the
jury box. As a result of the trial Dever became so interested in
the judicial process that he enrolled in an evening course at the
Suffolk Law School and eventually passed his bar examinations.
During the last ten years of his life he prepared his _Memoirs of
the Sacco-Vanzetti Case_ and at his death in 1956 the manuscript
had reached several thousand pages. Interspersed among the tedious
legalities are telling casual incidents, still bright over the years:
how the jurors were picked, where they slept, where and what they
ate, what they did in their spare time, and how they felt about the
case.
This was the first time Dever had ever been to Dedham. As he walked
from the railroad station through the square he kept thinking what
a pleasant town it was. Above the masking elms he could see a white
dome with round windows in it like portholes. That, he supposed, was
the courthouse. He wandered up and down several of the side streets
before heading for the domed building.
Never before had he been inside a court, and the neoclassic building
with its marble-tiled floors and marble stairs and marble-paneled
walls awed him. With the other veniremen he was taken to the
courthouse, where Judge Thayer first explained the procedure and then
exhorted them to perform their disagreeable duties as patriotically
as the American soldier boy in France.
“What, gentlemen, does the law seek to accomplish?” he concluded.
“It seeks to select twelve jurors who will stand between these
parties, the Commonwealth on the one hand and these defendants on
the other, with an unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness and
unflinching courage in order that truth and justice shall prevail,
for, gentlemen, verdicts must rest upon truth and justice in order
that the life, the liberties, and the properties of the people of
the Commonwealth, including the defendants, shall be secure and
protected.”
John Dever was impressed not only by the rhetoric but by the whole
formalized proceedings. To him Judge Thayer seemed “a sincere,
honest, absolutely fair and impartial man.” Dever was not called
during the morning. At one o’clock he ate a sandwich and a piece of
pie at Gilbert’s Lunch, a one-arm in the square. When he returned to
the courthouse it was still too early for the afternoon session. He
sat on the back grass plot with some of the other men. Dever said he
hoped he would not be picked, because he might lose his two weeks’
vacation. “Don’t worry,” a man wearing a Red Men’s badge told him.
“You’ll be challenged. You’re too young. Besides they don’t want any
of you fellows on this jury.” He pointed to the ex-serviceman’s pin
in Dever’s buttonhole. “They’ll show you right out the front door,”
he concluded.
Afterward Dever could not remember much about the afternoon. One by
one the names were called, one by one the veniremen disappeared. No
jurymen had been picked during the morning and only two after lunch:
Frank Marden, a mason from Weymouth; and a slightly deaf, slightly
senile retired farmer with a handlebar mustache, Walter Ripley,
who raised bulldogs and called himself a stockkeeper. For all his
challenging, Moore did not spot the fact that Ripley had once been
chief of the police and fire departments in Quincy. It was not until
eight o’clock that Dever’s name was finally called. He was led into
the courtroom. Thayer asked him a few questions and then announced,
“The juror stands indifferent.”
_I looked in front of me [Dever recalled] and saw a whole battery
of attorneys, eight or nine in all, I should say. Before I had a
chance to orient myself a man whom I was to know as District Attorney
Katzmann stood on his feet and said “the Commonwealth accepts the
juror.” Well, I thought to myself, the defense will now challenge me.
I looked at the defense table and saw four attorneys looking at a
very large book. They would look in the book, then look hard at me;
and then whisper to each other. That went on for what seemed to be
six or seven minutes. I began to feel I was on trial. I turned in the
witness stand getting ready to leave, Judge Thayer glanced at me and
said, “Stay right where you are, young man, we are waiting for these
gentlemen,” and looked at the defense table. After about two more
looks at me, Mr. Jeremiah McAnarney stood up and said, “If your Honor
please, both defendants accept the juror.”_
Dever was the sixth juror accepted. A few minutes later the court
adjourned. The six jurors were taken to the ground floor room of the
Court of Probate and Insolvency, where twelve iron cots from the
county jail had been set up. There they were locked in for the night.
When Dever woke the next morning, he thought at first he was in a
lecture hall. Then he remembered. He got up, washed, and fixed his
hair with the brush and comb the sheriff had given each juror. He was
not given a razor. At eight o’clock a deputy appeared and took them
to breakfast.
Almost at the beginning of the morning session the seventh juror,
Lewis McHardy, an elderly quiet-mannered mill worker from Milton,
was selected. Seventeen more veniremen filed past the bench. Then
the sheriff informed the judge that his list of five hundred was
exhausted.
According to the General Laws of Massachusetts, if such a situation
occurs in a murder case after seven jurors have been chosen, “the
Court shall cause jurors to be returned from the bystanders or from
the county at large to complete the panel.” Judge Thayer cited the
statute and ordered Sheriff Capen to have two hundred more men
present by ten the next morning. The sheriff was doubtful. “They will
jump,” he remarked, “when they see me coming.” He was right. The
news got round, and almost before the afternoon session closed, the
streets of Dedham and the adjoining towns were deserted.
Capen spread his deputies that evening through Brookline, Needham,
Dedham, Norwood, Millis, Medway, Stoughton, and Quincy. They struck
at random, ringing doorbells when they saw lights in windows,
sometimes summonsing luckless veniremen from their beds. They
consulted assessors’ lists, voting lists, any list they could get
their hands on. In Needham nine unsuspecting men were picked up
coming out of a Masonic meeting. Deputy Allen Loring broke up a band
concert at Hollis Field, Braintree. Norman Gardenier of Quincy was
whisked away from his wedding supper. In spite of all this, Capen
managed to seine in only 175 indignant additions. He hoped they would
suffice. The defense still had twenty-nine challenges left.
Judge Thayer decided to remain in session until the jury was finally
chosen, no matter what the hour. Not until after midnight was the
selection finished. The five additional jurors were Harry King of
Millis, a shoemaker; George Gerard, a Stoughton photographer; Alfred
Atwood, a Norwood real estate dealer; Frank McNamara, a Stoughton
farmer; and Seward Parker, a Quincy machinist. By the time Parker’s
name was called the defense had used up all its challenges. Katzmann
affably offered to challenge Parker if Moore had any objection to
him, but Moore declined.
No sooner had the left-over veniremen been excused than Moore
objected to the five new jurors of the completed panel on the
grounds that none of them were bystanders, according to the meaning
of the statute. In the clammy courtroom the attendants and deputies
yawned and the district attorney fiddled with a blotter while Moore
developed his lengthy quibble. Judge Thayer overruled Moore on every
point. At 1:20 A.M. he ordered the jurymen brought in and sworn. “The
jury is in bed,” a deputy sheriff told him.
Thayer’s voice rose two notes. “Who allowed them to go to bed? Bring
them in!”
A few minutes later, bleary-eyed and bristly, the twelve trudged in
to take their seats in the box. Several of them were collarless,
their shirts open. Two wore felt slippers. Thayer gave them the
conventional warning. He also advised them to get plenty of exercise.
In conclusion he told them that they must “see to it that a trial
is held according to American law and according to American justice
and nothing must be done by anybody to mar or impair a fair, honest
trial.” The jurors then took their oath and the court adjourned until
Monday morning at ten o’clock.
* * * * *
The jurors slept late on Saturday, June 4, took a walk by the Charles
River in the afternoon accompanied by a squad of deputies, and in the
evening read the Boston papers. All references to the trial had been
snipped out, and they made the unhappy discovery that most of the
sports news had been on the back of what was cut.
The twelve soon formed their habit patterns. Dever found himself
going to bed at nine and waking at five. He spent a lot of time
reading old _National Geographics_. The older jurors usually played
cards; Dever preferred listening to the Victrola. There were a
lot of records that he liked: Van and Schenk, and the All-Star
Trio; songs like “Dardenella,” “Whispering,” “I’m Forever Blowing
Bubbles.” After he had cranked the Victrola a few times, though, the
card-players would begin to look over at him as if to say “Don’t you
think you’ve played enough for tonight?” Then he would go back to the
_Geographics_.
On their first Sunday they just sat around their made-over courtroom.
Since they all had to stay together and could go only to one church,
they decided not to go to any. They had breakfast at the Dedham Inn
on Court Street beyond the Episcopal church and dinner at the Haven
House just across the way; in the afternoon they went for a bus ride.
Monday was hot, a blue clear prelude to summer. The jury, after
being polled in the courtroom, spent the rest of the day viewing
the various locations connected with the South Braintree crime. A
cavalcade of eight cars drove from place to place, carrying not only
the jury but also the judge, the district attorney, and two carloads
of newspaper reporters.
The jurors arrived at their first stop, South Braintree, just as the
noon whistles were blowing, and at once the cars were surrounded by
curious factory workers. Katzmann had to order a retreat to Braintree
for lunch. When the cavalcade returned, the factory windows were
filled with faces but Pearl Street itself was free. From the railroad
crossing the procession followed the route of the bandit car along
the side roads through Randolph and Stoughton and Brockton to West
Bridgewater. The dust churned, covering the men in the cars, coating
their faces like masks. The jurors were shown Simon Johnson’s house,
the Elm Square Garage, the house where Coacci and Boda had lived,
and then the Manley Woods. A motorcycle was parked beside the bridle
path, and as the assorted jurors, lawyers, police, and newspapermen
made their way to where the Buick had been found, they surprised the
cyclist and his girl making love under a bush. Their last stop was
the gate-tender’s shanty at the Matfield crossing. At the end of the
day they had covered ninety-one miles, and Dever thought each of them
had absorbed about a pint of dust. There was no place for the jurors
to get a bath, either—he noted ruefully—after they got back to the
courthouse.
* * * * *
Tuesday morning, June 7, when Assistant District Attorney Williams
made the opening statement for the Commonwealth, set the pattern for
the month to follow. Sacco and Vanzetti, handcuffed to each other
and to a deputy, with three blue-uniformed policemen in front, three
to the rear, and two on either side, were marched from the jail
down Village Street past the cemetery, then up Court Street to the
courthouse. A trooper, with a bandolier of a hundred rounds slung
across his shoulder and a rifle in his saddle boot, rode sternly
ahead of them, while a second mounted trooper followed as a rear
guard. At the midday recess the prisoners were marched back to the
jail. This martial procession took place four times a day.
Once in the courtroom the defendants were placed in the cage and
their handcuffs removed. Then followed a pause of some minutes until
the diminutive judge in his built-up heels strode through the door,
his black silk gown billowing behind him. At his appearance Clerk
Worthington rapped with his gavel and gave the peremptory command
“_Court!_” Everyone stood up. For the first time the public was
allowed in the courtroom. Among the spectators were Mrs. Glendower
Evans, representing the New League for Democratic Control; Cerise
Carman Jack, the wife of a Harvard professor, representing the New
England Civil Liberties Committee; and Lois Rantoul of the Federated
Churches of Greater Boston, a relative of Harvard’s President Lowell.
Felicani was present, as were most of the members of the Defense
Committee and the Italian consul, the aloof pince-nezed Marquis
Ferrante di Ruffano, on instructions from his government.