arouse a great deal of hostility in State Street legal circles, and
he persuaded his friend of many years, Arthur Dehon Hill, to come
in with him so that, as he explained, he would have an associate
he could talk with more frankly than he could with Moore. Hill, a
lawyer who had once been corporation counsel of the City of Boston,
was a more integral State Street figure than Thompson, who—like
Judge Thayer—had been brought up in Worcester and was a Bostonian
merely by attrition. Although fortuitously born in Paris, Hill was
an inbred Bostonian whose perspective was limited by the familiar
triangle of Beacon Hill, the Harvard Yard, and the North Shore. Like
so many Boston lawyers who moved securely in their dimly lit world
of irrevocable trusts, he was cadaverous—as if his blood stream had
by some subtle osmosis absorbed the dried leather of a century’s
_Massachusetts Reports_. Even as a Harvard undergraduate he looked
as if he had never been young. Yet this secure, aloof lawyer who
appeared so typical of his caste was not wholly typical. There was
something more to him, a quality of _fiat justitia_ that went beyond
Beacon Hill. In the 1912 Bull Moose campaign he had come out for
Theodore Roosevelt, a rejection of the Boston norm. When Thompson
first asked him to enter the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he was reluctant.
Although he had a poor opinion of the garrulous Thayer he thought
well of Katzmann, whom he had known for a number of years.
Hill joined the defense on March 15 feeling, as he later explained,
“What do I care about these draft-dodgers who were skulking in Mexico
when their countrymen were fighting for the very life of the land?
But I do care for the honor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
Thompson would in time come to consider the cause of Sacco and
Vanzetti as his own. For Hill, who would appear as counsel in the
last tumultuous weeks, it was a case and not a cause, and he the
advocate rather than the partisan.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
POST-TRIAL: II
Just before Thompson and Hill entered the case Sacco went on a hunger
strike. A year and a half had elapsed since his conviction, and he
announced that he would continue to fast until the court ruled on his
fate. Much of the delay during 1922 had resulted from the additional
time granted Moore to follow up clues that he hoped might lead to the
real criminals. In the autumn Judge Thayer underwent an operation,
causing a further delay.
Sacco chafed under his barred restraint. He was not one to find
escape in reading or thinking his thoughts. Even the anarchism that
was so fundamental to him attracted him more by its unrelenting code
than by its philosophy. He was a man of abounding physical energy
for whom work and love were necessary releases. Jail was an exercise
in patience that he could never learn. Several times in the course
of his years at Dedham he approached and even crossed the borderline
of sanity. From his cell, with its rolled blanket and wooden water
bucket and tin mug and enamel slop pail, he watched the flaring
twilights diminish, the approach of morning along the empty streets,
the orbit of the sun as it shifted across the upper windows. Days and
weeks and months passed meaninglessly.
In November 1921, Sacco had written to Vanzetti in the grimmer
confinement of Charlestown: “I am very sorry that no one comes and
see you, no one comes to see me neither, but Rosie.” The week before,
his wife had brought little Ines to the jail for the first time.
Sacco was delighted to hold the plump crowing baby in his arms. Mrs.
Evans became a staunch periodic visitor. Sacco, in spite of his
theoretical rejection of bourgeois society, developed an intense
filial affection for her. From Mrs. Glendower Evans, separated from
him by the whole range of the sociological spectrum, she became
Auntie Bee. In 1925 he wrote her: “From since the day I have meet
you, you have occupied in my heart my mother her place, and so like I
been respect you and I been loved you.” It was a curious transition
from the brown peasant woman of Torremaggiore to the self-contained
Bostonian, but Mrs. Evans was only one of the elderly women who were
to take an increasingly maternal interest in the Dedham prisoner.
Among the earliest was kindly, mousy Mrs. Cerise Carman Jack in
her squeaky high-button boots; for a while she took Rosina and the
children to her farm in Sharon. There was Mrs. Jessica Henderson,
matron of good causes and pillar of the Anti-Vivisection Society. And
there were Mrs. Gertrude Winslow and Mrs. Codman, the latter a cousin
by marriage of the head of the Civil Liberties Committee. Sacco
always took a more trusting attitude toward women than toward men.
Evenings were the most difficult for “thes sad reclus,” as he
whimsically termed himself. He kept thinking of the bungalow in South
Stoughton, how he would sometimes visit friends after supper and
come back with the sleeping Dante in his arms and Rosina beside him.
“Those day,” he wrote Mrs. Jack, “they was a some happy day.”
The jail rule that unsentenced prisoners might not work kept Sacco
in idleness, intensifying the feelings of persecution that he had
developed after the trial. On February 14, 1923, he began his hunger
strike. Sheriff Capen made no attempt to force him to eat, and by
the middle of March he had grown noticeably weaker. On the afternoon
of the sixteenth, at Judge Thayer’s request, he was examined by
Charles Cahoon, superintendent of the Medfield State Hospital; Albert
Thomas, superintendent of the Foxboro State Hospital; and a Boston
psychiatrist, Abraham Meyerson.
Sacco, lying on his cot, calmly explained to the doctors that the
state was trying to kill him. Poison was being put into his food—even
into the food his wife brought him; poisonous vapors were being blown
into his cell and electric currents circulated under his bed. His
suffering had become so intense, he explained, that he could not
permit it to go much further. When Dr. Cahoon asked him why he drank
water, which would prolong his life, he “stated that he did not want
to die too quickly because, on account of a hearing for a new trial
he felt that he should allow his counsel some opportunity to plead.
He had no confidence, however, that he would get a new trial; he did
not expect any justice from the state or the government.”
The doctors found that Sacco was mentally disturbed, and Judge
Thayer ordered him to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital for
observation. On his arrival he was warned by Dr. Meyerson, “Nick,
they have sent you here to eat, and if you don’t, we will feed you
with a tube.” According to the newspaper reports he was then forcibly
fed by an attendant in the doctor’s presence, although Sacco later
claimed that he broke his strike voluntarily. “You know,” he told
another doctor some months afterward, “I have read in an Italian
magazine that you can live a long time if they feed you with a tube;
I knew this, and then I was too weak and could not fight them, so
I said, I go ahead and eat. I was against going because I wanted
justice.”
For the first two days in the hospital he lay on his cot and was
fed broth and gruel every hour. Then he began to eat regularly,
gaining ten pounds within a week. His Dedham delusions vanished and
he spoke of them as “all a mistake” and “prejudices.” Although he
identified the hospital with the state that was persecuting him, he
was friendly with the doctors, sometimes speaking of his love for his
wife and children and his feeling for the out-of-doors, joking about
his hairiness that “proved the correctness of Darwin’s theory,” or
talking about his work as sole-trimmer.
On March 22, a few hours after Sacco had gone to bed, he complained
of a headache and asked the ward attendant for a wet towel to place
across his forehead. When the attendant left, Sacco sprang out of
bed and struck his head several times against a chair, lacerating
his scalp. Wardmen rushed in and seized him, and as they struggled
he cried out, “I am innocent! There is no justice!” It took four men
to restrain him and put him in a dry pack. Next morning he was again
calm and cooperative, and when the director, Dr. C. MacFie Campbell
arrived, he said with some embarrassment, “I am ashamed of what I
done.” He told the director that he was tired of life and wished to
kill himself. Dr. Campbell considered the incident “a transitory
condition of emotional tension which was intelligible in view of the
emotional strain to which the patient has been subject.” There was
no recurrence of any such episode or of the Dedham delusions. At the
end of the observation period Dr. Campbell wrote to Judge Thayer
that with the exception of that one night Sacco’s “behavior has been
that of the ordinary hospital patient. There has been no difficulty
in caring for him ... his mood has, on the whole, been equable.”
He concluded: “The result of the observation of the patient in the
Boston Psychopathic Hospital has been that we have found no evidence
of insanity of any type.”
Nevertheless, Thayer extended Sacco’s observation period for another
month, and the early days of April presented quite a different
picture. Mrs. Evans, visiting Sacco on April 2, was much disturbed
by his mental state. She told the doctor in charge “that she knew
nothing about medicine but that in her opinion [the] patient was
talking like a crazy man.”
_She said_ [the hospital report continued] _that the patient insisted
he would kill himself.... He said that he had suffered long enough,
that he wanted it over with one way or another, that when he went
back to jail he would give the judge twenty-four hours to decide the
case and that if he did not set him free patient would “take things
in my own hands.”_
Five days later when Rosina was visiting, Sacco told her that he was
going crazy. After she left, according to the report, he
_suddenly jumped out of his bed and rushed toward the edge of the
open door, with his head lowered in a blind, impulsive manner....
Thereafter, he became excited, somewhat noisy, and struck out
violently, requiring considerable restraint. He was given treatment
in the form of a dry pack with cold compresses to his head. He was
talking and shouting in an excited tone, maintaining that his wife
was confined in the ward above him, whence he had been hearing (as a
matter of fact), the voices and cries of the women patients, which he
believed were those of his wife._
By evening he had calmed down and now said “that he must be going
crazy in this place, that his ideas about his wife were all a
mistake.” Early next morning he spoke of voices telling him that a
bunch of roses had been left for him in the hospital lobby.
On the morning of April 12 he suddenly lunged forward as if he were
going to dart out of the room. To Dr. Campbell he later explained
that he had thought he heard his wife’s voice call “D-a-a-n-t-e.”
For about a week he seemed calm. Then, on April 19, he became
unmanageable. Seven times in the next four days he had to be placed
in wet packs.
_During these attacks [the ward doctor reported] he shouts and
screams that he wants his freedom; he wants to go home to his family.
Between the attacks and often during the attack, when he can for
a moment be made to control himself, he is rational, clear and
oriented, knows the time and the date and the place, and clearly
recognizes those about him. During the attacks he at times strikes
viciously at those about him, or those who attempt to restrain him,
and also hurls all manner of abusive and profane imprecations upon
others._
According to Dr. Ralph Colp, in a psychiatric study published in
1958, Sacco was suffering
_sensory deprivation, which in its strictest sense, involves the
isolation of an individual from everyday sights, sounds and actions.
Nick Sacco had been exposed to a somewhat analogous situation for
nearly thirty-six months. Although he had contact with people,
he had been deprived of the three most important things in his
life: wife and children, job, and his exercise and contact with
nature. The daily visits of Rosina—in Dedham she had not visited as
frequently—aggravated the patient instead of assuaging him, and were
the direct cause of his most powerful delusions and hallucinations.
It was as if every visit—however much her husband desired it—could
only be unbearable to him. No one understood this better than the
bachelor Vanzetti, who later wrote: “Has Nick a wife? Yes, and a good
one; but, not being free, he most either thinks that she is consoling
herself with somebody else, or that she is suffering the unspeakable
agony of a loving woman compelled to mourn is living lover.”_
Sacco was diagnosed as suffering from psychosis of a paranoid
character. The court committed him on April 23 to the Bridgewater
State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Moore was greatly troubled by Sacco’s suicide attempts. As one way of
saving his client he had agreed to Sacco’s examination by alienists
and—even though he objected to the Bridgewater institution—signed the
commitment papers. Sacco and his wife never forgave him for it, and
the differences of opinion that had troubled the two men now began to
harden into enmity.
Sacco spent five months at Bridgewater. His mood on entering seemed
cooperative. He was not isolated but given a bed in a ward; within
two days he began chatting with the other prisoners. Soon he was
at work polishing floors and before long he had a chance to work
mornings on the prison farm, where he tended a small vegetable
garden. His appetite was good—in a month he gained twenty-six pounds.
Throughout his stay he remained quiet, cautious, but agreeable. When
a doctor asked him whether he was insane, he replied, “I am not one
of that kind. My mind is clear. I am not crazy.” Although Sacco was
at times hopeful about his chances for a new trial, Dr. Mountford,
the Bridgewater physician, noted that he occasionally presented a
worried look “which he explains by saying that it is all caused by
the long procedure of the court which keeps his case from being
settled one way or the other.” Thought of suicide still ran through
his mind. On July 9 Dr. Mountford noted that Sacco
_says he has not given the suicide idea up, and regrets that he did
not die in his former attempt. In explaining this statement, says
he does not wish to commit suicide now, but says he wants to get
justice, and insists if ever confronted by similar conditions of
those before he came here, he would not hesitate to commit suicide._
After saying this, Sacco looked out the window into the prison yard,
and with great interest watched some prisoners playing baseball.
On September 29 he was discharged from Bridgewater with the diagnosis
“not insane” and returned to Dedham in time for the arguments on the
five supplementary motions, postponed because of his condition.
* * * * *
Some time during the previous summer Elias Field, a lawyer of the
modest firm of Brown, Field and McCarthy, and the defending counsel
in a Middlesex County murder case, learned that the famous Dr.
Hamilton was in Boston. Hamilton seemed to him just the man to
examine some bullets, then in the custody of the State Police, that
were to be introduced as evidence. Hamilton was willing. On August
7 he and Field went to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House
to find out about the bullets. Proctor told them that they happened
to be at his house in Swampscott, twelve miles away. However, if
Field wanted to drive him there, they could look at them. Field
agreed. While he drove, Hamilton and Proctor began to discuss the
Sacco-Vanzetti case.
“I suppose you know” Hamilton said, “that I have been retained by the
defense to study some of the exhibits in connection with the pending
motion for a new trial.”
“I don’t care,” Proctor told the other two. “I have been too long in
the game, and I’m getting to be too old to want to see a couple of
fellows go to the chair for something I don’t think they did.”
Hamilton asked Proctor why he had not said more in his testimony
about whether Bullet III had gone through Sacco’s gun. “If the
defense had asked me any more particularly,” Proctor replied, “then
I should have told them I didn’t think it went through that gun, and
I did tell the district attorney before the trial I thought it was
consistent with going through that kind of a gun, but I don’t think
it went through that gun.”
Hamilton wondered why the defense had not taken up “consistent with.”
“I wondered too,” Proctor said. “I suppose they were afraid to.” The
conversation made such an impression on Field that he noted it in
his diary. Some weeks later he talked the matter over with his old
Harvard classmate and partner, H. LaRue Brown. Brown, a Kentuckian
whose liberalism had become in Boston almost a second career, knew
all about the Sacco-Vanzetti case through his connection with the New
England Civil Liberties Committee. He relayed the conversation to
Thompson.
Thompson felt that this story—if it could be confirmed—would shatter
the prosecution’s case. But whether Captain Proctor would be as
frank with a defense lawyer as he had been on that casual ride to
Swampscott was doubtful. However, when Thompson visited him at the
State House, Proctor was surprisingly open. He admitted that before
he testified in Dedham Katzmann and Williams had repeatedly asked him
if Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, and each time he told
them he had found no convincing evidence in the tests. The captain
was obviously distressed in this interview with Thompson, his mind
haunted by the role he had played at Dedham. When Thompson asked him
if he would sign an affidavit, he at once agreed.
In the affidavit, dated October 20, 1923, he stated that
_at the trial the District Attorney did not ask me whether I had
found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet passed through
Sacco’s pistol, nor was I asked that question on cross-examination.
The District Attorney desired to ask me that question, but I had
repeatedly told him that if he did I should be obliged to answer in
the negative.... Bullet Number III, in my judgment, passed through
some Colt automatic pistol, but I do not intend to imply that I
had found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet had passed
through this particular Colt automatic pistol and the District
Attorney well knew that I did not so intend and framed his question
accordingly. Had I been asked the direct question: whether I had
found any affirmative evidence whatever that this so-called mortal
bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should
have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative._
Although this affidavit stood as an entity in itself, Thompson filed
it as a subsection of the Hamilton motion. In a counteraffidavit,
Katzmann swore that he had not “repeatedly” asked Proctor “whether he
had found any evidence that the mortal bullet had passed through the
Sacco pistol,” but he did not deny having asked the question, nor did
he deny Proctor’s answer. Proctor died in March 1924, before Judge
Thayer could rule on any of the supplementary motions.
* * * * *
Early in September 1923 Thompson had picked up a story about Ripley,
the jury foreman, that he considered important enough, even though it
was hearsay, to include in the first motion. William Daley, a Quincy
contractor who said he had known Ripley intimately for thirty-eight
years, willingly signed an affidavit about an occurrence at the Adams
railroad station during the last week of May 1921. Daley had met
Ripley on the platform there while waiting for a train, and Ripley
had told him that he was going away for a couple of weeks to be a
juror in the case of the two South Braintree Guineas.
Daley said he did not believe the Guineas were guilty, and that it
was not reasonable to suppose a man would go and rob a factory where
he had worked and was well known, and in broad daylight.
“Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!” Ripley had replied.
Of course there could be no corroboration of Daley’s statement, for
Ripley had been dead now for over two years.
* * * * *
On October 1 Thompson, Hill, Moore, and the McAnarney brothers
appeared in an almost empty courtroom to argue the supplementary
motions. Again the defendants were brought in and placed in the cage.
Sacco was still tanned from his outdoor work at the Bridgewater
hospital. Vanzetti looked waxen, his eyes more deeply sunk than ever.
Rosina was there with Ines, as was the indefatigable Mrs. Evans. Ines
had on a pink dress and bonnet, and both defendants’ faces lighted
up as Sacco held her for a moment in the cage. When Rosina started
to walk away toward Mrs. Evans, Ines became frightened at being left
alone with two strangers. She howled until her mother took her away.
Judge Thayer’s step lacked none of its briskness as he strode into
the room, and his face had lost none of its masklike quality, even
though this prolonged case impinged on him now like a recurring bad
dream. “There seems to be no justification or excuse for the delays
in filing affidavits,” he announced in pettish protest. “The court
has several times set dates for the completion of filing affidavits
on both sides. Apparently no attention has been paid to these orders.”
When the report that Sacco was not insane was read to the court,
Sacco smiled ironically. Thompson, his self-assurance unruffled,
urbanely at home where Moore had appeared the bumptious stranger,
nevertheless seemed to feel it necessary to explain his presence
in the radical galley. “It is supposed that these defendants have
radical opinions,” he announced, in opening the argument for the
Ripley motion. “Mr. Hill and I do not hold such opinions,” he
went on, refraining from glancing at Moore, “and we are not here
supporting such opinions. I think I shall be believed also when I say
that we are not here for pecuniary reasons. We think we are rendering
humble service to the institutions of law and order by coming here to
argue that an error has been committed.
“I have no reason to believe that either one of these two defendants
has ever endeavored by threats or in any other improper way to obtain
undue influence in the court. Some of their enthusiastic friends may
have done so, but this fact ought not to weigh against the defendants.
“That’s why Mr. Hill and I are here,” he concluded. “It’s because
some of our friends have talked in the way Daley says Ripley talked.”
Thompson then spent the morning arguing the Ripley motion. In
the afternoon Hill took over. “From the time I had been in the
courtroom fifteen minutes,” he later told the Lowell Committee,
“and had my first talk with the judge I did not have any doubt as
to what the result of the case would be, independent of its actual
merit, and that was not because I felt that there was anybody
who was consciously trying to do wrong, but I thought everybody
connected with the case had got themselves into a state of mind, a
mental condition where reason had practically ceased to operate and
prejudice and emotion had taken its place.”
The session saw a prolonged altercation between Judge Thayer and the
usually quiet-spoken Thomas McAnarney.
“I understand Your Honor to say that after a night of discussion we
decided not to open up the issue of radicalism,” Judge McAnarney
challenged Judge Thayer, his voice hard. “That is not so.”
“It is so,” Thayer announced bluntly, a tawnier shade creeping into
his parchment cheeks.
McAnarney struck back. “All I ever said to my client was to tell the
truth and tell all the truth at all times. It didn’t take me five
minutes to decide that.” He turned away from the bench and walked
toward his chair, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.
Thayer’s voice pursued him. “Mr. McAnarney! Three times you opened up
this subject, and three times it was stricken out.”
McAnarney’s voice trembled a little. “Three times it had to be opened
up. There was no safe course for the defendants to pursue excepting
to tell the truth and all the truth.”
“I know what took place here,” Thayer insisted.
At the end of the session he reluctantly postponed the hearing until
October 25 to allow both sides to file additional affidavits. On that
day the Andrews and Pelser affidavits and counteraffidavits were
read. The next day Moore took over with his old vitality and argued
all day on the Goodridge motion, insisting again and again that the
district attorney had intimidated the man and shaped his evidence by
the threat of revoking his Massachusetts probation.
* * * * *
Judge Thayer was once more living at the University Club. Each
morning he and a group of reporters took the same train from the Back
Bay Station. Among them was a pretty young woman, Mrs. Elizabeth
Bernkopf, from the International News Service, to whom the senescent
but still gallant judge took a particular fancy. At first he merely
waited until she had taken her place in the car and then asked if
he might sit with her. Later he took to joining her on the platform
before the train arrived.
Sitting beside her in the train, he would unburden himself of his
incubus case while she kept inviolably silent. As the city slums
receded, replaced beyond Forest Hills by the trim rectangles of the
suburbs and the autumn outline of Great Blue Hill, he talked on
and on, boasting that he “could not be intimidated by anybody or
anything.” The defense “would find that they could not hoodwink him.”
He represented the integrity of the courts of Massachusetts, he told
her, and he was going to maintain that integrity.