Occasionally she would get a knowing look from the other reporters
as they passed down the aisle. The judge said he had long been put
out by the kind of people who were supporting the defense, but what
really stirred him so that even the recollection stepped up his pulse
was “that long-haired anarchist lawyer from California.” The old man
would lean forward confidentially, assuring the young woman that if
Moore thought he could outwit the courts of Massachusetts he had
another think coming. Maybe Moore could play that game successfully
in California, but those tricks and threats just would not work in
Dedham. He, Judge Thayer, was not going to be imposed on!
As the train pulled into the Dedham Station, Thayer with avuncular
gallantry would guide Mrs. Bernkopf’s elbow down the aisle, tip his
hat to her on the platform, and say that he hoped he would have the
pleasure of her company again. Three years later she recorded the
substance of his conversations in an affidavit.
* * * * *
The hearings seemed to fall into the pattern of being argued for
a day and postponed for a week. Not until November 8 were they
concluded. When Thompson argued the Hamilton-Proctor motion and
mentioned the police captain, sparks flew between him and District
Attorney Harold Williams.[14] The district attorney insinuated that
the reason Proctor had turned on the Commonwealth was that Katzmann
had refused to approve his claim of five hundred dollars for his
expert testimony, although it had later been approved by the court
and paid.
“I don’t want to make this a personal matter,” Thompson reminded
Williams after the gust of angry words had died down. “I don’t want
to go off on an attack upon any person. But here are these men,
assured by the State of fair treatment here if nowhere else—and then
a prearranged question and answer made to appear the exact opposite
of what the witness really thought.”
“Are you sure there was a prearranged question?” Thayer interrupted.
“They knew and don’t deny it that Captain Proctor didn’t believe that
bullet went through that gun,” Thompson replied. In a passionate
summing up he asked Thayer if the court could really say that Sacco
and Vanzetti had had a fair trial in the face of the failure of the
government attorneys to bring out Proctor’s real opinion.
Toward the close of the hearing Thompson reserved the right to be
heard in a request to fire one hundred cartridges through Sacco’s
pistol with a view of making further ballistic comparisons. At this
point there began one of the equivocal episodes in the post-trial
proceedings. Dr. Hamilton appeared with two new 32-caliber Colt
automatics and offered to compare them with Sacco’s pistol. Before
Judge Thayer and the lawyers for both sides he disassembled all
three pistols and placed the parts in three piles on a table. Then,
picking up various parts one by one, he explained their function
and pointed out their interchangeability. After reassembling the
pistols, he slipped his two in his pocket and handed Sacco’s to the
assistant clerk. Hill and Thompson were already leaving the courtroom
when Hamilton started after them. “Just a minute, gentlemen!” Thayer
called out as they reached the door.
Years afterward, not long before his death, Thayer related the sequel
to Captain Van Amburgh: “They stopped, turned and looked at me. I
said, ‘Come here, Mr. Hamilton.’ Hamilton advanced towards me. I
said: ‘Hand me your pistols.’ He did so and I said: ‘They shall be
impounded.’ I don’t know why I impounded those pistols. It merely
seemed like the proper and thorough thing to do. I have thanked God
many times since that I did so. And then the astounding discovery
made later that the original barrel in the Sacco pistol was missing
and an entirely different barrel substituted for it!”
On November 2, at Judge Thayer’s request, District Attorney Williams
borrowed from Van Amburgh a plug gauge, a device for measuring the
diameter of a gun barrel. He found Sacco’s pistol barrel to measure
.3045 inches. Hamilton’s measurement had given the diameter as .2924
inches, but Williams thought little of the discrepancy since he
himself had never seen a plug gauge before and felt he might easily
have made a mistake. However, when Hamilton, on December 4, in the
presence of the clerk of court, checked Sacco’s pistol with the
gauge, he confirmed Williams’ measurement. Hamilton now observed
that the fouled rusty barrel was shiny and, according to his later
testimony in a special hearing before Judge Thayer, his first thought
was that the court had been cleaning it. “I could not conceive in my
mind why you would do it,” he told Thayer, “but I said to myself no
one else could have done it.... I immediately dispelled it because I
said, no court would alter an exhibit.”
Whatever Hamilton’s opinion of the altered condition of the barrel
and the variations in his first and second measurements, he afterward
maintained that when he examined Sacco’s automatic on December 4 it
never occurred to him that the barrel was anything but the original.
Acting on Thompson’s request to make fresh firing tests, Judge
Thayer on February 11 called in Van Amburgh to inspect Sacco’s Colt
and determine its condition. With the district attorney present,
Van Amburgh took the gun from the clerk of court and prepared to
disassemble it. No sooner had he drawn back the slide than he saw
that the barrel was not the barrel he had last examined. It looked
brand-new. There was even a film of cosmoline on it.
“Someone has switched barrels,” he at once told Williams.
The two hurried to Judge Thayer. Thayer, after listening to them,
announced that he would hold an investigation.
Two days later he began hearings in his chambers with only Moore,
Williams, Hamilton, Van Amburgh, and a stenographer present. Press
and public were barred, unaware even that such hearings were taking
place. They lasted just over three weeks. At the opening Clerk
Worthington brought in the three pistols. The briefest examination
made it clear to everyone that Sacco’s Colt had acquired a new
barrel. Hamilton, not at all abashed that every finger seemed to
point to him, admitted that the new barrel must have come from one
of his pistols, but insisted that he had not made the switch. In his
opinion this had been done by someone connected with the prosecution.
After examining the fouled barrel in one of his own new guns under a
microscope, Hamilton stated that he was unqualifiedly of the opinion
it was not the Sacco barrel.
Williams accused Hamilton of working the substitution with the idea
of later making the discovery himself so that he could then demand a
new trial. Repetitious and acrimonious, the arguments went on each
day until five o’clock, but no one in the closed chambers had any
real doubt as to who had switched the barrels. Even Moore, arguing
bravely that this was more dirty work on the part of the district
attorney’s staff, knew that Hamilton’s deft fingers had done it.
At the conclusion of the hearings Thayer reserved judgment as to who
had made the substitution and whether or not it had been accidental.
He ruled merely that the barrel in the new pistol had come from
Sacco’s Colt and he ordered the fouled barrel replaced and the three
pistols delivered into the clerk’s custody “without prejudice to
either side.” The prejudice, however, was not so easily obliterated.
Hamilton’s chicanery had undermined his value as a witness, past
or future. Although he was to continue his association with the
defense almost to the end, he would prove only a detriment—expensive,
untrustworthy, and untrusted.
* * * * *
Almost at the very time Hamilton was discrediting himself in Dedham,
Van Amburgh, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was demolishing his own
ethical and technical reputation in the Harold Israel case. Israel
was a young ex-soldier of small intelligence who had been charged
with the murder of Father Hubert Dahme, pastor of St. Joseph’s
Catholic Church. On the evening of February 4, 1924, Father Dahme was
strolling along Bridgeport’s Main Street when a man approached him
from the rear, placed the muzzle of a revolver close to his head, and
fired. Several witnesses saw the murderer run from the scene.
A week later the police of Norwalk, a dozen miles away, picked up a
man who was wandering the streets at midnight in a suspicious manner.
He was found to have a 32-caliber revolver in his pocket with four
of the five chambers loaded and the other empty. He said his name
was Harold Israel, that he had just come from Bridgeport, and that
he was on his way to see his father in Philadelphia. Next morning he
was given thirty days in the Bridgeport county jail for carrying a
concealed weapon. Once there he was interrogated about the priest’s
death, and several witnesses of the shooting were brought in to look
him over.
The crucial evidence against Israel was the 32-caliber bullet removed
from Father Dahme’s brain. Captain Van Amburgh, called in from the
Remington Company, compared it with a test bullet fired through
Israel’s gun and announced that both had been fired from the same
weapon. This he said he had determined not only by his measurements
but by the similarity of the bullets after he had made a strip
photograph of each and superimposed one upon the other.
After a prolonged interrogation, Israel tangled himself in a web of
conflicting statements and confessed that he had killed Father Dahme.
When a detective asked what had become of the cartridge of the mortal
bullet, Israel said it was in the toilet of his boarding house. The
police found it there. With this evidence added to the confession,
Israel’s trial and conviction seemed only a formality.
Homer S. Cummings, later Attorney General of the United States and
then state’s attorney for Fairfield County, at first had no doubt of
Israel’s guilt but gradually noticed flaws in the state’s case. First
of all, Israel soon repudiated his confession, claiming that when he
made it he had been questioned for so long that he was willing to
confess anything to get a rest. Then Cummings discovered that after
the police had left the boarding house, the landlady had found still
another empty cartridge in the toilet. Both shells had been exploded
by a dull firing pin. The pin of Israel’s revolver was sharp, and it
turned out that a friend of his had sharpened it at his shop several
weeks before the murder.
Cummings now spent some time with Van Amburgh examining the strip
photographs of the bullets. As he testified at the preliminary
hearing, Van Amburgh, in order to develop his argument, cut a slit
in the photograph of the Dahme bullet. “Then,” said Cummings, “he
inserts through that slit the strip picture of the recovered bullet,
and pushing this up and down, finally reaches a place where he says
the lines coincide. Well, I worked at that for two hours one day,
and yesterday, in the presence of Captain Van Amburgh worked on it
for more than an hour. It took Captain Van Amburgh fifteen minutes
to find the point of juncture himself—well, say five minutes, it
will be more conservative. Then a peculiar thing developed. I called
his attention to it, and he had absolutely, so far as I could see,
no answer to it. I asked him to put the photographs in the position
which he claimed demonstrated his point, and he got them into that
position. Then I said, ‘Now, lift up the flap and look and see what
is under it,’ and I thought, somewhat reluctantly, the flap was
lifted and on the under picture we saw a scene totally different from
that which we saw on the upper picture. I asked him whether it was
not perfectly logical to assume that if the two pictures had been
superimposed—that is, if the other picture was transparent and placed
over the other—that there ought not to be a continuous similarity in
the surface appearance. He admitted that was logical, and I never
could get a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy.”
Cummings turned over the bullets and the photographs to five other
experts from the Remington Company plus another from the New York
Police Department. Their unanimous opinion was that there was no
continuous similarity, that the mortal bullet had perceptible land
and groove marks lacking in the test bullets, and that it could not
have been fired through Israel’s gun. Following this testimony,
Israel was released.
Van Amburgh’s Connecticut record apparently did not follow him north,
for not long afterward he was appointed head of the newly formed
ballistics laboratory of the Massachusetts Department of Public
Safety.
* * * * *
Thompson had a way of striding into a courtroom with a confident
ring of leather heels, as if he were taking over command on a parade
square. That was how he struck Moore during the arguments on the
supplementary motions. Moore, underneath his class-angled exterior,
retained a sensitive—at times almost a sentimental—nature. He was
hurt by being thrust aside by this corporation lawyer and by the
supercilious Hill, who, even as he prided himself on doing his duty
to his native state by defending two unpopular radicals, could remark
“I do not like these people.”
In fact, Moore felt put upon. From his arrival in Boston he had
transformed the case. At least a third of the defense money had come
from sources he had tapped. He had brought in the American Civil
Liberties Union, the International Labor Defense, the phalanx of
Back Bay women headed by Mrs. Evans. Thanks to him the Cincinnati
convention of the American Federation of Labor had passed a
resolution demanding a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, “convicted
by a biased jury under the instructions of a prejudiced judge.”
And before the convention the delegates had never heard of the
two Italians! At the next convention he would take care that they
passed a stronger resolution. These things were his doing. If he had
not managed to free the two men, he had at least managed to keep
them alive for almost three years. He had brought them visitors,
arranged for their English lessons, and encouraged them by letters
and by visits, disregarding and excusing Sacco’s latent hostility.
The reward for his efforts had been the sullen suspicions of the
doctrinaire anarchists. They were always a problem to him. “The
practical difficulty with such men as Felicani, Lopez and some of the
others,” he complained in a letter, “is not that they do not want to
help, but that in many cases they do not know how to help. They are
not affiliated with either the American organized labor nor with the
Italian labor movement.”
To Moore the Defense Committee seemed to have become more and more
impotent. For lack of funds he had had to give up his Pemberton
Square office and work from the crowded confusion of Rollins Place.
He, who liked good clothes, was now too hard up to buy a suit off the
gaspipe racks at Raymond’s. His cuffs had frayed, the seat of his
trousers showed patches. If he was to continue with the case, _his_
case—nd the “if” was beginning to take shape in his mind—he did not
want to have his efforts diverted any longer by fund-raising and
publicity and stubborn anarchists. Now was the time for him to bring
his own friends together—those he had personally interested in the
fate of the two obscure Italians—in a common unimpeded effort.
Early in April 1924, Moore arranged a meeting at Tremont Temple
to organize the New Trial League, with the support of Mrs. Evans,
Mrs. Anna Hallowell Davis (who directed the Garland Fund’s legal
assistance for radicals), John Van Vaerenewyck of the Cigar Makers’
Union, and Alice Stone Blackwell. Alice Blackwell, who was to
become Vanzetti’s most frequent and voluminous correspondent, whom
he would address as Comrade, was the daughter of Lucy Stone, the
pioneer women’s-rights crusader. Old beyond her sixty-seven years,
wrinkled and determined, she followed in the tradition of the
previous century’s indomitable female eccentrics. She belonged to the
International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women’s Municipal
League, and would later lend her name to the Communist-directed
International Labor Defense. A member of the belligerently liberal
Twentieth Century Club, she used to carry her lunch there in a brown
paper bag and eat it in the library, holding the bag close to her
face to avoid spilling any crumbs. It was understood that she was to
nap undisturbed in a corner afterward.
Moore chose to remain in the background of the new organization. John
Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee was appointed
treasurer. Professor Guadagni, Albert Carpenter, and Harry Canter,
secretary of the Communist Party of Boston, accepted appointment
on the editorial board. The board got out its one bulletin in May
and published a pamphlet containing Eugene Lyons’ translation of
Vanzetti’s “The Story of a Proletarian Life.”
From the New Trial League’s office Moore proceeded to raise money
and make plans independently of the Defense Committee. Felicani
questioned Moore’s judgment rather than his honesty, but other
members of the Defense Committee were unyielding in their resentment
of this independent step. Lola Darroch, no doubt glad to escape the
ambivalences of Rollins Place, went to New York to raise funds. Much
to the resentment of the anarchists, more money began to flow into
the New Trial League’s Tremont Street office than to the Hanover
Street headquarters. But the league was only an expedient, without
roots. Even the conciliatory Felicani realized the impossibility
of the dual situation. Scarcely had the league been formed than it
began to disintegrate. With the intransigent Lopez gone—he had been
deported at last in February 1924—Codman and Mrs. Evans were willing
to discuss merging with the committee. Only Moore remained purblind
in his good intentions.
* * * * *
Since his return to the Dedham jail Sacco had grown increasingly
bitter, and though his sanity was no longer in question he became
so dominated by feelings of resentment and persecution that he
refused to see Mrs. Evans and his other American visitors. He even
turned his back on Mrs. Jack, who had been coming weekly during the
winter to give him English lessons. Vanzetti, in Charlestown, was
much distressed by the news and sent Mrs. Jack a letter of apology
assuring her that Sacco’s action was caused not by “adverse feelings,
sentiments or thought” but by his misfortune. “And, oh, how worth of
sympathy and forgiveness the poor Nick is, even in his herrors,” he
wrote commiseratingly.
Sacco found the ultimate outlet to his anger in Moore and the New
Trial League. The latter had sent him several pamphlets and flyers
from the new organization. Reading them, Sacco—as on that July day in
court three years before—erupted. He had never liked the Westerner,
but this was the last straw. On August 18 he spent the afternoon in
his cell penning a letter that was a distillation of his bitterness.
_Sir:—Saturday I received your letter with enclose the post card that
Mrs. Mateola Robbins sent to me—and the little pamphlet that you use
to send to me it just to insult my soul. Yes, it is true, because
you would not forget when you came here two or three times between
last month with a groups people—that you know that I did not like to
see them any more; but you broad them just seem to make my soul feel
just sad as it could be. And I can see how clever and cynic you are,
because after all my protest, after I have been chase you and all
yours philanthropist Friends, you are still continue the infamous
speculation on the shoulder of Sacco-Vanzetti case. So this morning
before these things going any more long, I thought to send you these
few line to advise you and all yours philanthropist Friends of the
“New Trial League Committee” not to print any more these letters with
my picture and name on, and to be sure to take my name out if they
should print any more of these little pamphlets, because you and
yours philanthropist has been use it from last three years like a
instrument of infamous speculation. It is Sim thing to carry any man
insane or tuberculous when I thing that after all my protest to have
my case finish you and all yours legione of friends still play the
infame game. But, I would like to know if yours all are the boss of
my life! I would like to know who his this men that ar abuse to take
all the authority to do every thing that he does feel like without
my responsiblity, and carry my case always more long, against all my
wish. I would like to know who his this—generous—man!! Mr.—Moore—!
I am telling you that you goin to stop this dirty game! Your heare
me? I mean every them word I said here, because I do not want have
anything to do any more with “New Trail League Committee,” because it
does repugnant my coscience._
_Maney time you have been deluder and abuse on weakness of my
comrades good faith, but I want you to stop no and if you please get
out of my case, because you know that you are the obstacle of the
case; and say! I been told you that from last May twenty fifth—that
was the last time you came see me, and with you came comrade Felicani
and the Proffess Guadagni. Do you remember? Well, from that day I
told you to get out of my case, and you promised me that you was
goin to get out, but my—dear—Mr. Moore! I see that you are still in
my case, and you are still continued to play your famous gam. Of
course it is pretty hard to refuse a such sweet pay that as been
come to you right long—in—this big—game. It is no true what I said?
If it is not the truth, why did you not finish my case then? Another
word, if this was not the truth you would quit this job for long
time. It has been past one year last June when you and Mr. Grilla
from New York came to see me into Bridgewater Hospital and that day
between you and I we had another fight—and you will remember when I
told you this Mr. Moore! I want you to finish my case and I do not
want to have anything to do with this politics in my case because it
does repugnant my conscience—and you answer to me was this: Nick, if
you don’t want, Vanzetti does want! Do you remember when you said
that? Well, do you think I believe you when you said that to me? No,
because I know that you are the one that brings in always in these
mud in Sacco-Vanzetti case. Otherwise, how I could believe you when
you been deluder me maney times with your false promise? Well—I
anyhow, wherever you do if you do not intent to get out of my case,
remember this, that per September I want my case finish. But remember
that we are right near September now and I don’t see anything and any
move yet. So tell me please, why you waiting now for? Do you wait
till I hang myself. That’s what you wish? Lett me tai you right now
don’t be illuse yourself because I would not be suprise if somebody
will find you some morning hang on lamp-post._
_Your implacable enemy, now and forever_,
Nick Sacco
How hurt Moore was by this he showed only indirectly in the courtesy
of his reply:
_Dear Mr. Sacco_
_Enclosed you will find a copy of my Withdrawal as your counsel,
filed today._
_I wish you every possible success in your battle for justice._
_Very truly, yours_,
Fred. H. Moore
Although Moore continued officially as counsel until November, he
took no further part in the defense. On November 8 he left Boston
for good in the old Dodge touring car that was his sole permanent
acquisition from the case, alone, in his frayed suit and cracked
boots, and with three hundred borrowed dollars in his pocket. His
immediate wish was to get back to California, to that land of
brighter sunshine and wider horizons, three thousand good miles
away from the mongrel English city where even the anarchists seemed
affected by the constrictions of the Puritan heritage. Stacked behind
him in the Dodge were several dozen packages of little tin signs,
for attaching to rear license plates, that read: IF YOU CAN READ
THIS YOU’RE TOO DAMN CLOSE. By selling these at filling stations and
garages he hoped to cover his expenses on the way back.