together, and Vanzetti was handcuffed to Deputy Sheriff Caldwell.
Both prisoners wore shabby overcoats with velvet collars. Sacco had
on a dark suit, a dark necktie, and a felt hat. Vanzetti was wearing
a bow tie and a full light-brown cap that seemed to exaggerate the
droop of his mustache. They stood for a few minutes by the granite
steps, smiling and self-possessed in spite of the guards. At the
request of the photographers and newsreel men they took off their
hats and faced in various directions. The two men had aged much in
six years.
After several minutes they were marched through the iron gate and
upstairs. At the door to the courtroom the jail chaplain, William
Beal, chatted with them briefly. Just as their handcuffs were being
removed before they entered the cage, Mrs. Evans caught their eye
and tried to get to her feet. A deputy ordered her to sit down. The
quiet in the waiting courtroom was broken only by the ticking of
the marble-faced clock. One of the reporters had the feeling that
everyone present was holding his breath.
Judge Thayer got out of his car just as the clock of the First
Church across Court Street was striking ten. He was wearing a
derby, as was the ham-faced state detective who accompanied him,
and though he skipped up the steps briskly enough he looked frail.
The years, culminating in this moment, had brought about a curious
transposition that was sensed by everybody in the waiting room.
For it was as if somehow the defendants had become the prosecutors
and the judge the defendant. Thayer himself seemed to sense it
as he strode into the courtroom, preceded by a deputy and Clerk
Worthington’s warning cry. He sat down, smoothed his gown, but did
not look at the men in the cage thirty feet in front of him. The
preliminaries were so brief that they were over before they could
make an impression. District Attorney Wilbar in an almost inaudible
voice asked that sentence now be imposed on the two defendants
convicted of murder in the first degree, the sentence to be executed
during the week of July 10. Clerk Worthington then asked: “Nicola
Sacco, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be
passed on you?”
Sacco stood up, stared at Judge Thayer, then began slowly to speak:
“Yes, sir. I am not an orator. It is not very familiar with me the
English language, and as I know, as my friend has told me, my comrade
Vanzetti will speak more long, so I thought to give him the chance.”
After the halting beginning his words began to flow more freely as he
felt himself stirred by the impassioned moment. He held a small piece
of paper in one hand, and every now and then he slapped the railing
of the cage with the other.
“I never know, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel
as this Court. After seven years prosecuting they still consider us
guilty. And these gentle people are arrayed with us in this court
today.
“I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class
and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one
and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the
literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize over them and kill
them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path
between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That
is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed
class. Well, you are the oppressor.
“You know it, Judge Thayer—you know all my life, you know why I have
been here, and after seven years that you have been persecuting me
and my poor wife, you still today sentence us to death. I would like
to tell all my life, but what is the use? You know all about what
I say before, and my friend—that is, my comrade—will be talking,
because he is more familiar with the language, and I will give him
a chance. My comrade, the man kind, the kind man to all children,
you sentence him two times, in the Bridgewater case and the Dedham
case, connected with me, and you know he is innocent. You forget all
the population that has been with us for seven years, to sympathize
and give us all their energy and all their kindness. You do not
care for them. Among that peoples and the comrades and the working
class there is a big legion of intellectual people which have been
with us for seven years, but to not commit the iniquitous sentence,
but still the Court goes ahead. And I think I thank you all, you
peoples, my comrades who have been with me for seven years, with the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, and I will give my friend a chance.
“I forgot one thing which my comrade remember me. As I said before,
Judge Thayer know all my life, and he know I am never been guilty,
never—not yesterday nor today nor forever.”
In five minutes it was over, and for an instant the atmosphere of
the courtroom loosened with a rustling and shuffle of feet and a few
coughs, then tightened as Clerk Worthington called on Vanzetti.
As he stood up, Vanzetti appeared calm, almost cheerful, and his
voice at the beginning was deceptively gentle. He held a few penciled
notes.
“Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree
crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent
of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stole and I have
never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to
say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes,
not only in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never
spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to
reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.
“Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not
need to go in between the street and kill a man to take money. I can
live with my two arms and live well....
“Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things,
not only have I never committed a real crime in all my life—though
some sins but not crimes—not only have I struggled all my life to
eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the official
moral condemns, but also the crime that the official moral and the
official law sanctions and sanctifies—the exploitation and the
oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am
here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes
can doom me, it is this reason and none else.”
Judge Thayer stared at his bench as if he were unaware of the man
addressing him. The judge’s impassivity nettled Vanzetti and as he
continued his voice showed it. His eyes seemed to flash at the bent
figure whom he had once called a black-gowned cobra.
“Is it possible that only a few on the jury, only two or three men,
who would condemn their mother for worldly honor and for earthly
fortune; is it possible that they are right against what the world,
the whole world has say it is wrong and that I know that it is wrong?
If there is one that I should know it, if it is right or if it is
wrong, it is I and this man. You see it is seven years that we are in
jail. What we have suffered during these seven years no human tongue
can say, and yet you see me before you, not trembling, you see me
looking you in your eyes straight, not blushing, not changing color,
not ashamed or in fear.
“Eugene Debs say that not even a dog—something like that—not even a
dog that kill chickens would have been found guilty by American jury
with the evidence that the Commonwealth have produced against us. I
say that not even a leprous dog would have his appeal refused two
times by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts—not even a leprous dog....
“We know that you have spoke yourself and have spoke your hostility
against us, and your despisement against us with friends of yours
on the train, at the University Club of Boston, on the Golf Club of
Worcester, Massachusetts. I am sure that if the people who know all
what you say against us would have the civil courage to take the
stand, maybe your Honor—I am sorry to say this because you are an old
man, and I have an old father—but maybe you would be beside us in
good justice at this time.”
The record of Vanzetti’s first trial is incomplete, and though
the phrase does not appear in the transcript or in the newspaper
accounts, Thayer was said by members of the Defense Committee
who were in the courtroom to have instructed the jury that the
defendant’s beliefs were “cognate with the crime.” Vanzetti now threw
that in Thayer’s face, as well as the fact that his sentence for
attempted robbery was double that of other prisoners in Charlestown
convicted of actual robbery. At the recollection he struck angrily
against the rail of the cage with his notes.
“You know if we would have Mr. Thompson, or even the brother
McAnarney in the first trial in Plymouth, you know that no jury
would have found me guilty. My first lawyer has been a partner of
Mr. Katzmann, as he is still now. My first lawyer of the defense,
Mr. Vahey, has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money
like Judas sold Jesus Christ. If that man has not told to you or to
Mr. Katzmann that he know I was guilty, it is because he know that I
was not guilty. That man has done everything indirectly to hurt us.
He has made long speech with the jury about things that do matter
nothing, and on the point of essence to the trial he has passed over
with few words or with complete silence. This was a premeditation
in order to give the jury the impression that my own defender has
nothing good to say, has nothing good to urge in defense of myself,
and therefore go around the bush on little things that amount to
nothing and let pass the essential points either in silence or with a
very weakly resistance.
“We were tried during a time that has now passed into history. I mean
by that, a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate
against the people of our principles, against the foreigner, against
slackers, and it seems to me—rather, I am positive of it, that both
you and Mr. Katzmann has done all what it were in your power in order
to work out, in order to agitate still more the passion of the juror,
the prejudice of the juror, against us.... But the jury were hating
us because we were against the war, and the jury don’t know that it
makes any difference between a man that is against the war because he
believes that the war is unjust, because he hate no country, because
he is a cosmopolitan, and a man that is against the war because he
is in favor of the other country that fights against the country in
which he is, and therefore a spy, and he commits any crime in the
country in which he is in behalf of the other country in order to
serve the other country. We are not men of that kind. Katzmann know
very well that. Katzmann know that we were against the war because we
did not believe in the purpose for which they say that the war was
done. We believe it that the war is wrong, and we believe this more
now after ten years that we understood it day by day—the consequences
and the result of the after war. We believe more now than ever that
the war was wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I
am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind: ‘Look
out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. For what? All
that they say to you, all that they have promised to you—it was a
lie, it was an illusion, it was a cheat, it was a fraud, it was a
crime. They promised you liberty. Where is liberty? They promised you
prosperity. Where is prosperity? They have promised you elevation.
Where is elevation?’”
He accused Katzmann of breaking the agreement not to mention the
Plymouth trial, he accused the Commonwealth of being more responsible
than the defense for the delays, he accused Thayer of deliberately
handing down his Plymouth decision on Christmas Eve “to poison the
heart of our family and of our beloved,” for even though they did not
believe in “the fable of the evening of Christmas,” nevertheless “we
are human, and Christmas is sweet to the heart of every man.”
The marble-faced clock had ticked off forty minutes. Vanzetti
disregarded his notes now. In his long-deliberated conclusion he had
no need of them. His deep-set eyes took on the searing quality that
Chief Stewart had remarked on seven years before.
“Well, I have already say that I not only am not guilty of these two
crimes, but I never commit a crime in my life—I have never steal and
I have never kill and I have never spilt blood, and I have fought
against the crime, and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself
even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate
and sanctify.
“This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the
most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to
any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty
of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty
of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical;
I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian;
I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for
myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute
me two times, and if I could be reborn again two other times, I would
live again to do what I have done already.
“I have finished. Thank you.”
He stood there, a spare, slightly stooped figure, his face pale
behind the screen of the swooping mustache, eyes still glittering
with suppressed emotion. Judge Thayer’s precise arctic voice broke
the silence, moving on in a few phrases to the sentencing. There was
a hushed tenseness as everyone leaned forward to catch the ritual
words:
“First the Court pronounces sentence of Nicola Sacco. It is
considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, suffer
the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity
through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth
day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand nine hundred and
twenty-seven.”
Except for Thayer’s voice there was only the muffled sound of a few
women sobbing.
“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo
Vanzetti—”
Vanzetti’s interrupting voice was like a stone shattering thin ice.
“Wait a minute, please, your Honor,” he called out. “May I speak with
my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?”
Thompson, within the bar enclosure, was so taken aback that all he
could do was to mutter to the court, “I do not know what he wants to
say.”
Judge Thayer brushed aside the interruption. “I think I should
pronounce the sentence. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of
death—”
Sacco broke in, shrill and furious, and as he stood he stretched
his arm and pointed at Judge Thayer. “You know I am innocent!” he
shouted, his facial muscles bunched in fury. “That is the same words
I pronounced seven years ago! You condemn two innocent men!”
For a moment it seemed as if the long sustained decorum of the
neoclassic room was dissolving, but Thayer’s impervious voice
continued with the regularity of the ticking clock—“by the passage
of a current of electricity through your body within the week
beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord,
one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven. This is the sentence of
the law.” He paused, gathering his gown about him in a preliminary
gesture before he announced: “We will now take a recess.” Without a
glance at the men he had sentenced he stood up and walked slowly down
from the bench and out into the corridor that led to his chambers.
As Sacco and Vanzetti were again being handcuffed, their friends,
Italian and American, crowded round them trying to touch them, to
clasp their hands. Mrs. Evans hobbled up close enough to call out
cheerfully, “There’s lots to hope for yet.” There were tears in
Vanzetti’s eyes. Mary Donovan pushed forward, her cheeks wet. “Do not
cry, Mary,” he told her. “Keep a brave front.” Then the guards and
deputies intervened.
* * * * *
Vanzetti, brooding in his cell, thought less of the sentence than
of the words he had not been allowed to speak. Next day, with the
eloquence of death on him, he wrote out his eulogy of Sacco, telling
Thompson that it was “the most important thing” he had to say, and
that “I would have given half my blood to be allowed to speak again.”
_I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco.
Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker, lover of
work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely
wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a
wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a
man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice
all to the cause of Liberty, and to his love for mankind; money,
rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his
own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate.
He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from
our childhood to today—which has not been gained by the sweat of
our brows. Never. His people also are in good position and of good
reputation._
_Oh yes, I may be more witfull as some have put it. I am a better
babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful
voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice,
remembering his heroism I felt small, small at the presence of his
greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the
tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before
him—this man called thief and assasin and doomed. But Sacco’s name
will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when
Katzmann’s and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name,
his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a deem
rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man._
Over the week end Thompson told reporters that he felt Sacco and
Vanzetti could derive no benefit from further proceedings in the
Massachusetts courts, and that he was not prepared to take steps
designed merely to delay their execution. Moore would have acted
very differently, would in fact have taken any steps, scrupulous or
otherwise, and two at a time, that he thought might prolong the men’s
lives. But to Moore justice was a class shell game that he was ready
to operate as trickily as his opponents. “At least I have kept them
alive,” he was able to say as he left Boston. Thompson still kept his
faith in the traditional impartiality of the law. He would not play
tricks with it.
Anticipating the adverse decision of April 5, Thompson, a few days
earlier, accompanied by John Moors, Dr. Morton Prince, and Professor
Frank Taussig, had called on the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts,
William Lawrence, to ask his help in persuading Governor Fuller to
appoint a commission to review the whole proceedings. It struck none
of these Boston-bred men as strange to turn to a bishop in a matter
of law. On the contrary, it seemed to them the most obvious step to
take, for during a third of a century the voice of Bishop Lawrence
had become the ethical voice of Massachusetts.
Bishop Lawrence combined uniquely in his person the dominant strands
of the community. Descended from the founders of the Bay Colony, he
could walk through Boston along streets named for his ancestors.
As successor to Phillips Brooks, who had preached before Queen
Victoria, he concluded the reconciliation of upper-class Boston
to Episcopalianism after the disestablishment of the Revolution.
His income came from the textile industry that his relatives the
Lawrences, the Lowells, and the Abbotts had established. Though
he was a second-generation Episcopalian, the blood of ancestral
Calvinism still coursed in his veins. By and large, he observed to
his acquaintances, it had been his experience that the more godly
members of the community were the more financially successful. As a
young curate in industrial Lawrence he would cheerfully give up an
afternoon to visit a crippled spinner of his congregation, yet not
think it strange that the man was earning eighty cents a day. As a
bishop and member of the Corporation of Harvard University he would
undertake to raise five million dollars for the new Harvard Business
School and also not think it strange.
A stocky man with a glowing face, Bishop Lawrence looked a cherubic
Puritan. He eschewed rings, miter and crozier, pectoral crosses,
black suits, and clerical collars, preferring English tweeds and gray
felt hats. He received Thompson’s delegation, representative of the
law, medicine, State Street, and the academy, as a matter of course.
He knew at once what his duty was.
_Sent to Governor_ [_he noted in his diary_] _a letter saying that in
Sacco-Vanzetti sentence thousands of citizens felt that they had not
had a fair trial and asking the Governor to call leading and trusted
men to his advice._
As both the sender and the recipient were aware, the letter, dated
April 11, was more nearly a command:
_Your Excellency_,—
_Two men, having been tried by the Courts of Massachusetts for
murder, have now been sentenced to death. Upon you falls the
heavy and responsible duty of carrying out the sentence unless
you are moved to take other action. Confidence in the Courts of
Massachusetts, which has justified itself for generations, leads its
citizens to assume the sentence given is just and should be carried
out._
_There are, however, we believe, thousands of citizens of the
Commonwealth who, having read or studied such parts of the
proceedings in the Superior Court as have appeared in the public
press, have serious doubts as to whether these two men have had a
fair trial._
_They were, as the law requires, tried by a judge and jury and found
guilty. Motions for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered
evidence were heard by the same judge and denied. Exceptions on
points of law were taken to the Supreme Court and unanimously
overruled. But the Supreme Court could not under our law reconsider
and revise the findings of fact of the trial court or the exercise
of the trial judge’s discretion. Hence have arisen the doubts of the
citizens for whom we venture to speak._
_Knowing well your sense of justice, your integrity of purpose, and
your courage when assured of the rightness of your position, we ask
with great earnestness that you call to your aid several citizens of
well known character, experience, ability, and sense of justice to
make a study of the trial and advise you. We believe that it is due
to the exceptional conditions of the case, to yourself, and to the
State that these doubts be allayed and that it be made evident to
all citizens that the Commonwealth has done full justice to herself
as well as to these men, and also that you may have strong and
intelligent support in whatever decision you may make._
_Rt. Rev. William A. Lawrence_
Additional signatures were superfluous. Nevertheless, as if to
underline his position, the Bishop took care to have his letter
signed by three most proper Bostonians—fellow Harvard Corporation
member Charles Curtis, Jr.; Hernan Burr, as well known in the city as
a lawyer and financier as he was unknown elsewhere; and Roland Boyden
of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins, a law firm whose name was said to
have such magic force that it was seldom mentioned; one only thought
it.
The letter was not immediately made public. Meanwhile, on April 12,
Representative Roland Sawyer, a Congregational minister who for
fourteen years had represented Ware and several other small western
Massachusetts towns in the state legislature, drew up a resolution
which he presented in the House of Representatives to provide for a
special commission “to examine and review the proceedings of the
Commonwealth against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” Sawyer
realized that the measure had no chance of passing but he felt that
a public hearing on it would be the informal equivalent of a trial,
and that additional evidence there presented would undermine the
prosecution’s case to such an extent that it would make the carrying
out of the death sentences impossible. Thompson favored Sawyer’s
plan, but Frankfurter, after meeting with the Defense Committee in
a downtown law office, decided against it. He told Sawyer that he
had confidence in Fuller. Sawyer’s resolution was rejected in the
legislature by a rising vote of 146-6.