with the taste of winter in the air, he could see the obelisk of the
Bunker Hill Monument and squat beyond it the granite pile of the
prison that held Vanzetti. “Chill and dreary, the three-hilled city
of the Puritans,” Francis Parkman had described an earlier Boston.
For Moore it was the dreary three-hilled city of his failure. He had
failed as a lawyer, as a propagandist, as a husband, as a man, even
as a money-changer. Most of all, he had failed himself. For his last
glimpse of Boston left him with the racking uncertainty of his own
cause, the nebulous doubt that would feed on disappointment until he
could reveal to his friend Upton Sinclair three years later that he
no longer believed in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Sinclair was aghast. A quarter of a century later he recorded his
conversation with Moore:
_I questioned Fred for many hours, deep into the night. Sacco
and Vanzetti were anarchists, and Fred told me that some of the
anarchists were then raising funds for their movement by robbery. It
was strictly honest from the group’s point of view—that is to say,
they kept none of the money for themselves.... I pressed him with
questions: “Did Sacco or Vanzetti ever admit to you by the slightest
hint that they were guilty?” He answered, “No.” I asked him: “Did
any of their friends ever admit it?” Again he answered, “No.”... I
went home with my mind in confusion. The first person I went to see
was Fred’s former wife, who had divorced him and was employed in
Hollywood. Lola Moore said, “I am astounded that Fred should have
made such a statement. I worked on the case with him all through the
years, and I knew about it as intimately as he did. He never gave me
a hint of such an idea, and neither did anyone else. I feel Fred is
embittered because he was dropped from the case, and it has poisoned
his mind.”_
Where Sacco’s sense of outrage at being imprisoned so permeated
him that it could at times cloud his mind, Vanzetti endured his
imprisonment in Charlestown with a stoic objectivity. Sacco saw
himself as the predestined victim of a predatory class; Vanzetti
remained hopeful, willing to admit that he might be wrong in his
judgments. His relations with Moore remained amiable, even though he
instinctively had more confidence in the caste-formed Thompson than
in the class-conscious Westerner.
Yet, although his studious celibate nature was more adaptable to
constraint, in his own way he found jail as constraining as did
Sacco. He, too, would face a period when his mind failed him. Unlike
Sacco, he had never experienced an emotional outlet in his work.
Sacco was the good shoe-worker, he the _poor_ fish peddler. It was
not a garden or a wife or the starting hum of a factory at eight in
the morning that he missed, but the days of sun and wind when he
ambled along the lanes of Plymouth with his cart, the salt odor of
the flats where he dug clams.
To Mrs. Evans he expressed his longing for the earth in phrases that
suggest Whitman:
_O the blissing green of the wilderness and of the open land—O
the blue vastness of the Oceans—the fragrances of the flowers and
the sweetness of the fruits—The sky reflecting lakes—the singing
turrents—the telling brooks—O the valleys, the hills—the awful Alps!
O the mistic dawn—the roses of the Aurora, the glory of the moon—O
the sunset—the twilight—O the supreme extasies and mistery of the
starry nights, heavenly creature of the eternity._
_Yes, Yes, all this is real actuallity but not to us, not to us
chained—and just and simple because we, being chained, have not the
freedom to use our natural faculty of locomotion to carry us from our
cells to the open orizon—under the Sun at daytime—under the visible
stars, at night._
During his first year in Charlestown, preoccupied with the
approaching Dedham trial and learning to accustom himself to the
regimen of prison life, Vanzetti came for the first time in his
thirteen years in the United States to know Americans—the various
assorted liberals and radicals whose interests and emotions drew them
to the case. Moore, through his contacts with the New England Civil
Liberties Committee, had brought Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and a number
of other Back Bay women as visitors to Charlestown. With Vanzetti, if
not so directly as with Sacco, they developed a maternal relationship
as engrossing to them as to him. He for the first time in his life
discovered people with whom he could share his profounder feelings.
The week after the Dedham trial, writing to Mrs. Evans, he composed
his first letter in English, struggling with the language.
_I was just thinking what I would do for past the long days jail.
I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle
motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you
write something now? It will be useful to you now when you will be
free. Just at that time I received your letter._
_Tank to you from the bottom of my earth for your confidence in my
innocence; I am so. I did not splittel a drop of blood, or still
a cent in all my life. A little knowlege of the past; a sorrowful
experience of the life itself had given to me some ideas very
different from those of many other umane beings. But I wish to
convince my fellow men that only with virtue and honesty is possible
for us to find a little happyness in this world. I preached; I
worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social whealth should
belong to every umane cretures, so well as it was the fruit of the
work of all. But this do not mean robbery for insurrection._
During his prison years Vanzetti studied English with Mrs. Virginia
MacMechan, a friend of Mrs. Jack. About his uneven progress he could
write wryly to Mrs. Evans, “One Friend tells me that my English is
not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why
not say horrible?” Vanzetti always had this capacity for laughing
at himself, for seeing the humorous side of even the jail world—a
quality lacking in Sacco. His difficulties in English, as he
explained, did not come from the big words derived from Latin and
Greek and familiar to Italian, but from the tricky monosyllables of
Nordic origin. In the solitude of Charlestown he felt the renewed
lust for learning that had enveloped him so long ago when he had
read Dante, Renan, and Malatesta in his squalid room by the
flickering gaslight until the stars faded. Now, however, he would
read Longfellow and Franklin and Paine and Jefferson. By 1923 he was
reading James Harvey Robinson’s _The Mind in the Making_; William
James’ _Psychology_; books by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton
Sinclair; and such periodicals as the _Survey Graphic_, the _New
Republic_, the _Nation_, and the _Daily Worker_. He felt himself
carried away by a Faustian longing to know mathematics, physics,
history.
For all its galling restraints, imprisonment was to provide the key
that would unlock his personality. His tragedy was to be, as he said
himself, his triumph. Earlier than Sacco he sensed that the two
of them had become symbols such as Moore had foreseen at the very
beginning. The week before the Dedham trial he had written to Alice
Blackwell:
_What has been done for us by the people of the world, the laborers
(I mean workers) and the greatest minds and hearts proves beyond any
possible doubt that a new conception of justice is planing its way in
the soul of mankind: a justice centered on man as man. For as I have
already said, you, they are doing for us what once could only have
been done for saints and kings._
Somehow in the years at Charlestown, Vanzetti—the misfit, the
wanderer—became the master of language. Even in his early fumblings
with grammar he was always eloquent. As early as December 1921, after
a brief glimpse of the close-ranged Roxbury streets on the way to his
Dedham hearing he could write: “O, funny, humble, old, little houses
that I love; little house always big enough for the greatest loves,
and most saint affects.”
In his letters, in his speech to the court, one can trace the
developing cadences of English, the tone-giving rhythm of the
Anglo-Saxon that runs below the surface of the modern tongue. This
moving eloquence—where did it come from? It was as if the man grew
as his prospect of life shortened. After raging to Alice Blackwell
against those he considered his persecutors, he could apologize in
his next letter: “I am yet man enough to look streight in to the
eyes, the black gastly reality and the tragedy of my life.”
As he came face to face with that reality, he had no room for
accretions and superficialities. What was left to him was
acceptance. “I neither boast nor exalt, nor pity myself,” he wrote
Mrs. MacMechan. “I followed my call, I have my conscience serene.”
He understood that the most one could hope for was “the little
knowledge of the enormous mystery surrounding us and from which we
sprang.” His freedom taken from him, he became a free man.
Anarchism remained the core of his beliefs: a vision of the peaceable
kingdom where the wolves and the lambs of the industrial world would
attain their ultimate reconciliation. “Oh, friend,” he wrote to his
teacher, “the anarchism is as beauty as a women for me, perhaps even
more since it include all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene,
honest, natural, vivid, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic,
fearless, fatal, generous and implacable—all these and more it is.”
He defined the anarchist’s creed as
_All what is help to me without hurt the others is good; all what
help the others without hurting me is good also, all the rest
is evil. He look for his liberty in the liberty of all, for his
happiness in the happiness of all, for his welfare in the universal
welfare._
If the golden age could only come about through violence, he would
accept violence—though with deep personal regret:
_I would my blood to prevent the sheeding of blood, but neither the
abyss nor the heaven’s, have a law who condamns the self-defence....
The champion of life and of the liberty should not yield before the
death._
Sacco’s nature had a darker turbulence. The now obsolete term
_anarchist-communist_ would have applied to him as it would never
have applied to Vanzetti. Anarchist though he called himself, he saw
life in terms of the Marxist class struggle, in which “as long as
this sistem of things, the exploitation of man on other man reign,
will remain always the fight between those two opposite class.”
Unlike Vanzetti, he did not concern himself with anarchism as the
rejection of government, but with the immediacy of conflict. In a
dream he had at Dedham he described how he found himself in the
middle of a strike in a Pennsylvania mining town and how soldiers
with guns and bayonets came to put it down:
_And so the fite it was to beginning, and while the fite was begin I
jump upon a little hill in meddle of the crowd and I begin to say,
Friend and comrade and brotherhood, now one of us as going to move a
step, and who will try to move it will be vile and coward, here the
fite as go to finish. So I turn over towards to the soldiers and I
said, Brothers you will not fire on your own brothers just because
their tell you to fire, no brothers remember that everyone of us we
have mother and child, and you know that we fite for freedom wich is
your freedom. We want one of the fatherland, one sole, one house, and
better bread. So while I was finish to say that last work one of the
soldiers fire towards me and the ball past throught my heart, and
while I was fall on ground with my right hand close to my heart I
awake up with sweet dream!_
On a secondary level the dream was Sacco’s acceptance of his
execution, which he saw as predetermined, inevitable. Vanzetti, on
the other hand, was optimistic until almost the end. Even Webster
Thayer, in whom all the forces inimical to him and to Sacco seemed
concentrated, he could view with the dispassionateness of his note to
the Brinis just after the arguments on the supplementary motions: “I
dislike to vilify humane being and would be more than glad, happy—if
he by one just act, would comples me to change my opinion—but there
are no reasons till now.”
A few months later, discouraged from any such fugitive hopes,
Vanzetti reverted to a more somber picture of the judge:
_I have never expected, nor I expect from him other than some then
thousand volts divided in a few times; some meters of cheap bord and
4 x 7 x 8 feet hol in the ground._
_No matter how much of sympathy I try to bestow upon him, or with how
much of understanding I try to judge his actions; I only and alone
can see him a self-conceit nerroved mind little tyrent, beliving
himself to be just, and beliving his utterly unjust and unnecessary
social office to be a necessity and a good. He is a bigot and,
therefore, cruel. At the time of our arrest and trials, his peers
were sawing red all around, and he was sawing more red than his
peers._
Nineteen twenty-four was the year of indecision when, after
Hamilton’s discomfiture over the pistol barrels, the legal clockwork
seemed to have run down, when Judge Thayer—who alone might have
rewound it—was again ailing, when no one could even guess the date
of his decisions on the supplementary motions. Vanzetti, at the time
Sacco was turning his back on visitors, became so frustrated by the
suspense that for a while he considered going on a hunger strike. “I
am tired—tired—tired!” he wrote early in the autumn. “I asked if to
live like now for love of life is not, rather than wisdom or heroism,
mere cowardness.”
From July until September the courts closed for the long recess. In
the yard of the Dedham jail during the exercise period the prisoners
hung about languidly under the shadow of the wall. At Charlestown the
sun beating down on the slate roofs set the air smoldering. In such
weather the excremental smell of drains seemed to ooze from the very
stones of the old building. Vanzetti noted that it must be equally
fetid in the narrow streets of the North End.
Those who could get away fled the heat. Judge Thayer had gone to
his cottage at Falmouth, on Cape Cod where, with the breeze cutting
in from across Buzzards Bay, he spent the mornings working on his
decisions on the five supplementary motions. The close of summer did
not see his task at an end. Not until the first of October did he at
last file his findings in the clerk’s office at Dedham.
The news flashed across the Boston papers in blacker headlines than
any that had appeared since the conviction. Thayer had denied all
five motions!
With regard to the Ripley motion Thayer found “that said Ripley
brought with him innocently and thoughtlessly the said three
cartridges ... that whatever Ripley said or did in relation to said
three cartridges, he never intended to prejudice in any manner the
rights of the defendants.” Hamilton had made an affidavit claiming
that the Ripley shells showed signs of having been pushed into
Vanzetti’s revolver. Thayer pointed out that the other jurors had
sworn that Ripley had not exhibited the bullets in the jury room, and
there would have been no other opportunity. He considered that any
comparison Ripley made between his own cartridges and the exhibits
must have been a mental one, since, although jurors had seen the
Ripley bullets in the dormitory downstairs, no one had seen them
elsewhere.
The basic claim of the defense was that there had been an improper
exhibit in the jury room. Certainly Ripley’s three bullets were
improperly, if accidentally, there. But Thayer’s finding seems
reasonable: “The mere production of the Ripley cartridges and the
talk or discussion about them did not create such disturbing or
prejudicial influence that might in any way affect the verdict.
“At any rate,” he concluded, in one of the rhetorical flourishes of
which he was so proud, “I am not willing to blacken the memory of Mr.
Ripley and to pronounce those eleven surviving jurors as falsifiers
under oath by claims of counsel that are so weak, so fragile, and so
unsatisfactory. If this motion for a new trial based upon hearsay
statements made by a deceased juror to a counsel for the defendants
under such circumstances as are herein disclosed [were granted], it
would result in smirching the honor, integrity, and good name of
twelve honorable jurors, by a decision that never could be justified
by the simplest rules of sound judgment, reason, truth, and common
sense.”
As for Daley’s affidavit charging Ripley with the remark, “Damn
them, they ought to hang them anyway!” Thayer ruled that he “was
not bound to believe him,” nor was he “required to give the reasons
for his action. Furthermore, before being sworn as a juror, it must
be assumed that Ripley had answered in the negative ... whether he
had expressed or formed an opinion or was sensible of any bias or
prejudice.” Even if Daley had no reason for lying, it was still
hearsay evidence—and Ripley was long since dead.
In denying the second motion Thayer expressed doubt that the
itinerant Gould could “have carried a correct mental photograph in
his mind of Sacco for practically eighteen months, when he had only
a glance in which to take this photograph on the day of the murder.”
Gould, however, had merely claimed that the man who had put a bullet
through his lapel, the man he had seen in that frozen instant of
terror when the gun flashed in his face, was not the stocky Italian
he had seen eighteen months later in the Dedham jail.
Thayer held that Gould was just one more witness in the crowd, and
that his evidence, if presented, would have had no effect on the
jury—“For the evidence that convicted these men was circumstantial
and was evidence that is known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt.’”
For a dozen pages Thayer continued this theme with variations, coming
back again to the question of whether the defendants had lied because
of their consciousness of being radicals or their consciousness of
being murderers. This, Thayer maintained, was a matter of fact that
had been settled once and for all by the jurors. In passing, he could
not resist an aside at those bothersome dissenters “who ever stand
ready, through sympathy, prejudice, or some other unaccountable
reason, to criticize and assail the verdicts of juries when, in fact,
they never have heard a single word of evidence, nor observed a
single witness on the stand.”
As far as Louis Pelser was concerned, he had admittedly been drinking
on the day he signed Moore’s affidavit, and a few days later, when
sober, he had retracted it. Thayer accepted the counteraffidavits of
Katzmann and Williams that they had not tried to influence Pelser,
and ruled that Pelser’s statement provided no justification for a new
trial.
Often while Judge Thayer sat on his porch at Falmouth preparing his
findings he found himself thinking of Moore, and the thought of that
“damned anarchist” lawyer was enough to cloud the brightest summer
day. There, for example, was the whole Goodridge business. Goodridge
had been discredited at the trial. That was obvious to anyone. Yet
here was Moore chasing him all over Maine, locking him up in jail,
blackmailing him with indictments ten years old. “It is perfectly
manifest,” Thayer wrote, with a cloud-dispersing mental picture of
Moore’s discomfort, “that here was another bold and cruel attempt to
sandbag Goodridge by threatening actual arrest, to blacken the name
of the district attorney’s office of Norfolk County, by compelling
Goodridge to testify as he did on account of the influence of said
district attorney’s office. He did not succeed simply because
Goodridge would not be intimidated. Was this conduct on the part of
Mr. Moore performed in furtherance of public justice, or was it a
cruel and unjustifiable attempt to scare Goodridge into swearing to
something that was false against the District Attorney’s office?” For
Thayer the question was rhetorical. “I have tried to look at this
conduct of Mr. Moore with a view of finding some justification or
excuse of it,” he concluded. “I can find none.”
He was equally severe with Moore in denying the Andrews motion.
Perhaps smiling to himself, he wrote, “My relationship with [Moore]
has been very pleasant, although at times it would seem, as was
very natural, that he was quite unfamiliar with our trial evidence
and practice in this state.” Then he let the Californian have both
barrels: “Mr. Moore, judging him by his conduct as disclosed under
his own motion, signed by him, seems to be laboring under the view
that an enthusiastic belief in the innocence of his clients justifies
any means in order to accomplish the ends desired.” He accused Moore
of a “more intense desire to procure a confession of perjury from
Mrs. Andrews than a profound desire to seek the truth.”
When Thayer came to the Hamilton motion, he was undoubtedly convinced
by the episode of the switched gun-barrels that the self-styled
doctor from Auburn was a sharper. He did not elaborate, but in each
instance he ruled that Hamilton’s claim was not sustained.
Captain Proctor’s affidavit was more of a problem, for there were
no two ways about it. Proctor had signed his name to his own
impeachment, and Katzmann and Williams had never denied the substance
of it. Nevertheless, it was Thayer’s opinion that Proctor had
meant what he said in court, and that the jury had so understood
it. “If Captain Proctor found no facts to believe that the mortal
bullet passed through the Sacco pistol, why, when he had a perfect
opportunity so to do, did he not say that his opinion was then, as
it is now, that it was not _consistent_ with it?” Thayer did not
feel there had been any conniving by Katzmann and Williams to shape
the question in advance. He did not try to explain why Proctor had
afterward made the refuting statement.
“If I have erred in my judgment (and I fully realize I am human),”
Thayer concluded with a sense of relief at freeing himself from the
burden, “let me express the assurance that the supreme judicial court
of this Commonwealth in due time will correct such error.”
Neither Moore nor Thompson had expected any other outcome, but the
motions had served their purpose. They had postponed the defendants’
execution, and they had provided questions of law to be ruled on
by a higher court. With the Goodridge, Pelser, Andrews, and Daley
affidavits Thompson felt there was nothing more to be gained, that
these were to a degree liabilities, but he appealed the denials of
the Ripley, Gould, and Hamilton-Proctor motions.
After he had filed his findings with the clerk of court, Thayer felt
he deserved a holiday, and for him a holiday in the autumn meant
Hanover, New Hampshire. The Dartmouth-McGill football game that
Saturday was only an excuse for the trip, since the Big Green was the
odds-on favorite. But to get back to Dartmouth gave Thayer a sense of
renewing himself, as if when he walked across the campus he was again
for one miraculous moment Bobby Thayer, the baseball captain who
could not quite make up his mind whether he wanted to be a big-league
player or a lawyer. He felt that he belonged in Hanover. There was
his familiar table by the window in the dining room of the Hanover
Inn, the waiter who knew him, the faces of old friends as they came
through the doorway. Much had changed, much had been added, but there
were still the white buildings of Dartmouth Row, the Senior Fence
where he had carved his initials over forty years ago, the arching
elms, still looking just as they had when he arrived as a freshman.
Each autumn brought him back, almost as if he had never left.
Thayer was cutting across the College Green in the long-edged
sunlight after the game when he saw James Richardson, Dartmouth’s
Professor of Law and Political Science, walking just ahead of him.
Jim Richardson was Class of 1900, twenty years after Thayer, but the
two men often met at alumni gatherings. As the judge drew abreast of
the professor he nodded and they continued together toward the Inn.
“Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other
day?” Thayer asked affably, by way of conversation. He did not notice
the shocked look on the other’s face as he continued, “I guess that
will hold them for a while. Let them go to the Supreme Court now and
see what they can get out of them!”
* * * * *
The denial of the supplementary motions was no more than Sacco had
expected, but the decision left Vanzetti sunk in discouragement.
“While hope is still alive in me,” he wrote, “disperation is growing
powerful.” His fantasies of violence expanded: