committee would not seem too much of a Back Bay family affair, was
an Illinois farm boy who had made himself into a mathematician,
physicist, and engineer. As president of one of the country’s great
scientific schools he inhabited a Cambridge divorced from the old
literary associations. It was predicted that he would be of great
help in evaluating the ballistics evidence and other technical
points. So far as can be determined he never opened his mouth during
the sixteen days that the committee met.
* * * * *
When it turned to the ballistics evidence, the Lowell Committee
was undoubtedly greatly influenced by the findings of Major Calvin
Goddard, a New York expert who came to Boston at the end of May on
his own initiative, bringing with him a comparison microscope and
offering to make what he maintained would be conclusive tests on the
shells and bullets offered in evidence at Dedham. He was accompanied
by William Crawford, a reporter from the New York _World_, who called
on Thompson to ask if he would cooperate in the holding of the tests.
Resentful of Crawford’s contemptuous remarks about Dr. Hamilton,
Thompson declined but said he would put no obstacles in Goddard’s
way. Ranney, for the district attorney’s office, had no objections.
When, in preparation, Goddard demonstrated his double-image
microscope to Hamilton’s supporting expert, Professor Gill, the
latter was so taken with “the simplicity and accuracy of its
findings” that he not only recommended its use to the governor but
announced that he himself would abide by the results.
With Gill, Ranney, and Ehrmann present, as well as a stenographer and
Frank Buxton and Thomas Carens of the _Herald_, Goddard examined the
evidence in the clerk of courts’ office at Dedham on the afternoon of
June 3. Comparing Bullet III with a test bullet fired from Sacco’s
pistol, he suggested that Gill make the same comparison. “Well, what
do you know about that?” Gill muttered to himself as he looked into
the microscope. Goddard’s conclusion was that the mortal bullet
taken from Berardelli’s body had been fired through Sacco’s pistol
and could have been fired through no other. Gill, too, now became
convinced of this, despite his earlier findings to the contrary.
Ehrmann, examining the identifying scratches on the base of Bullet
III, remarked that they were irregular and almost indecipherable
compared with the scratches on Bullets I, II, and IV.
Looking at the shells through his microscope, Goddard concluded that
Shell W had been fired in Sacco’s pistol and could have been fired in
no other. Ehrmann, Buxton, and Carens did not find the comparison of
the shells conclusive.
Soon after these tests, Gill told Thompson that he now doubted his
original findings and wished to sever all connection with the case.
His disavowal was followed by one from James Burns, another of the
defense experts, who had recently become convinced, after studying
certain microphotographs made earlier for Captain Van Amburgh, that
the Fraher shell had been fired in Sacco’s gun.
Goddard’s report was forwarded without comment to Governor Fuller and
to the Lowell Committee. Goddard claimed afterward that his tests
would have been even more satisfactory if a sticky substance coating
the bullets could have been removed. Ranney had been willing to have
the bullets cleaned but Thompson refused to approve of this under any
circumstances, adding that he believed there had been trickery and
that the prosecution had made a substitution of bullets and shells
among the exhibits. Goddard in turn said he had no opinion as to the
genuineness of the exhibits, although he agreed that the scratches on
Bullet III were less clear than on the others.
Before leaving Boston, in a deflating interview with Thompson,
Goddard admitted that he had come to town with an adverse opinion
about Sacco already formed, the result of studying Van Amburgh’s
microphotographs. When he went on to express doubts about Hamilton,
Thompson produced a letter that the aspiring Goddard had written the
druggist-expert in 1924, asking his advice about starting a career
in ballistics identification. Goddard’s reply was that he knew more
about Hamilton now than he had known in 1924, and the interview ended
with Thompson angrily defending Hamilton as a man of honor.
The uncertainty that eventually clouded the reputations of all the
ballistics experts in the case enveloped Goddard three months after
he left Boston. In Cleveland, several weeks after a bootlegger,
Ernest Yorkell, was shot to death, the police arrested a Frank
Milazzo with a revolver in his possession similar to the murder
weapon. Two bullets from Yorkell’s body and several test bullets
from Milazzo’s gun were submitted to Major Goddard in New York. When
Goddard reported that one of the murder bullets and one of the test
bullets had been fired from the same gun, Milazzo was charged with
the murder. Unfortunately for Major Goddard, though not for his
comparison microscope, Milazzo was able to prove that he had bought
the revolver new a month after the shooting. Goddard attributed
his mistake to a bullet mixup by the Cleveland police. Although it
was never determined whether the fault was his, he had apparently
compared the two murder bullets.
* * * * *
In the unconfessed course of events, Madeiros, following his second
trial, would have been electrocuted during the week of September
5, 1926, but the motion and appeal based on his confession brought
him a series of reprieves. Not until late in Governor Fuller’s
Sacco-Vanzetti investigation did he see Madeiros personally and then
for only fifteen minutes.
_In his testimony to me_ [_the governor reported_] _he could not
recall the details or describe the neighborhood. He furthermore
stated that the Government had double crossed him and he proposed to
double cross the Government. He feels that the District Attorney’s
office has treated him unfairly because his two confederates who were
associated with him in the commission of the murder for which he was
convicted were given life sentences, whereas he was sentenced to
death. He confessed the crime for which he was convicted. I am not
impressed with his knowledge of the South Braintree murders._
Madeiros gave a different interpretation of the interview to Thompson
when the lawyer next visited him. Over a year later in connection
with another case Thompson related on the witness stand what Madeiros
had told him:
“Madeiros said that Governor Fuller began the interview by saying
that he understood that Madeiros said that he thought he had been
given—I think the expression was, ‘a raw deal,’ or something
indicating double-dealing or improper dealing by the Government, and
that Madeiros said that Officer Ferrari of the State Police had given
him a promise of second-degree murder if he confessed the murder....
The Governor said if he was satisfied that any such promise had been
made he would do something for Madeiros. The Governor then said,
before waiting for any reply from Madeiros, according to Madeiros’
statement to me, ‘You do not know anything about the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, do you?’ And Madeiros said he did, and the Governor asked him
if he was in the car with the other men who committed the murder in
South Braintree, the South Braintree murder, and Madeiros said that
he was, and the Governor then said, ‘So you are a double murderer; I
will do nothing for you.’”
Fuller unquestionably said something of the kind to Madeiros,
although the meaning remains double-edged. Defenders of Sacco
and Vanzetti have interpreted it as an offer to trade Madeiros a
commutation for a recantation of his South Braintree confession.
Others have maintained that the governor would not have been foolish
enough to risk his reputation by making any such offer to an admitted
liar like Madeiros.
But there is still another possible explanation. From the governor’s
attitude to the later witnesses appearing at his investigation, it
seems fairly certain that at this stage he had come to believe Sacco
and Vanzetti were guilty. And if he felt they were guilty, Madeiros’
confession could only have seemed a fraud. When Fuller talked with
Madeiros and the latter still stuck to his story, the governor might
well have snapped back that he would do nothing for him. If so, it
was a remark spoken in anger rather than a premeditated offer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PUBLIC AND THE LOWELL COMMITTEE
Not only in Europe but around the world—in Shanghai, Tokyo,
Melbourne, Calcutta, Buenos Aires—the names Sacco and Vanzetti were
by now familiar syllables and the image had become fixed of two
dissenters from the American way of life being done to death for
their dissent. Where scores and then hundreds had demonstrated in
isolated groups, now in the approaching climax thousands thronged to
vast and passionate assemblies that somehow, the participants felt,
by their very vastness and passion might force the Massachusetts
executioners to stay their hands. There was a fierce joy, too, in
such protests, a tensing of muscles, a sense of unity and a feeling
among the urban masses that in their increasingly turbulent protests
against the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti they were protesting against
their own isolation and their own fate.
To Continental intellectuals disillusioned by the collapse of
Wilsonian idealism, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was one more devastating
example from postwar America, to be set beside Prohibition, Chicago
gangsters, the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan, and the Tennessee monkey
trial. The fate of the two men was what one might expect from the
heartless materialism of the transatlantic republic that had won a
war with its money and the blood of others and now wanted the money
back.
In July, Mussolini wrote to the American ambassador in Rome “not as
the head of the Italian Government but as a man who is sincerely your
friend,” asking for a commutation of sentence as an “act of humanity
so much more noble as it is less delayed.” Shrewdly the Duce pointed
out that
_The agitation of the elements of the left throughout the world is
increasing in intensity, in these last days, as is shown by the bombs
thrown in Buenos Aires against the Ford establishment and the statue
of Washington._
_Now if the act of clemency is held back still longer it may give
the impression that the American authority may have yielded to the
pressure of this world-wide subversive activity and this impression
can injure the prestige of the United States._
_I hope that His Excellency Governor Fuller may give an example of
humanity. The example will brilliantly demonstrate the difference
between the methods of Bolshevism and those of the great American
republic as well as strike from the hands of the subversive elements
an instrument of agitation._
In the last pitched months conservatives determined to show that
they, no less than the radicals, were concerned with human rights as
exemplified by the fate of the two Italians. The royalist _Action
Française_ now protested the course of Massachusetts justice in
as shrill a tone as the Communist _L’Humanité_. The conservative
_Frankfurter Zeitung_ spoke out with the vehemence of the liberal
_Berliner Tageblatt_. Even the shadowy Alfred Dreyfus emerged from
his seclusion to announce that he was willing to go to America to
plead for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Communist propaganda continued, bizarre and embracing. The day after
Judge Thayer pronounced sentence, _Pravda_—remembering Edgar Allan
Poe but apparently confusing Charlestown with Charleston—reported
that Sacco and Vanzetti had been held for several years in a torture
prison in South Carolina where they had been confined “in a specially
constructed padded room having a mirrored ceiling on which appeared
at intervals a spot which gradually took the form of a terrifying
open-jawed creature. Meanwhile, a human voice shouted: ‘Tell the
names of your accomplices!’”
H. G. Wells, after reading Frankfurter’s _Atlantic_ article, became
so indignant that he proposed the word _Thayerism_ to describe “the
self-righteous unrighteousness of established people.” Millions read
his angry statement in the London _Sunday Express_ for June 5, 1927:
_I do not see how any clear-headed man, after reading the professor’s
summary, can have any other conviction than that Sacco and
Vanzetti are as innocent of the Braintree murder, for which they
are now awaiting death, as Julius Caesar, or—a better name in this
connection—Karl Marx._
Within the United States Italians generally were behind the two
prisoners because they were _paisani_. Their anarchism did not
matter. The same North Enders who first came to support the
Defense Committee would a few years later support Mussolini’s
African campaign and fill the windows of Hanover Street shops with
photographs of Ethiopian atrocities. Other foreign groups, like the
Jewish enclaves in New York and Boston, would find themselves drawn
sympathetically to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti out of their
socialist tradition and their own bitter experiences of race hate.
American union members never came to identify themselves with the
cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as did their counterparts in Europe.
Moore had had enough contacts to engineer resolutions asking for a
new trial through the American Federation of Labor conventions of
1922 and 1924, but such resolutions would not be presented again
until the winter of 1926-1927. In the last months of the case
President William Green of the American Federation of Labor added
his protest against the impending executions, but in the Indian
summer of the Coolidge prosperity the rank and file union members
were at best lethargically sympathetic. When, the week before
the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Defense Committee sent
out an appeal for a hundred thousand trade-union members to come
to Boston in protest, less than two hundred showed up. Elsewhere
than in the big cities with their heavy foreign populations the
American worker was not class-conscious enough to see Sacco and
Vanzetti as his representatives. He found the erotic enticements
of the New York trial of Ruth Snyder, a suburban housewife, and
her corset-salesman lover Henry Judd Gray for the murder of Ruth’s
husband more enticing than the brief final scene in the Dedham
courtroom. He took Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic on May
20, 1927, much more to heart than the erosive progress of Sacco and
Vanzetti toward the electric chair. He was more concerned with the
second Dempsey-Tunney fight, scheduled for September, than with the
Massachusetts executions scheduled for July.
In the six years since John Codman, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and other
members of the New England Civil Liberties Committee had appealed
for defense funds, the New England Committee and the parent American
Civil Liberties Union in New York had remained steadfast in their
support. Frankfurter’s article was in a sense a culmination of their
efforts. They had by their prolonged and reiterative publicity made
the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti intellectually fashionable. Those
whose names rang the changes in the last months of the case, now made
their rather flamboyant appearance. Officially the civil-liberties
groups kept their distance.
When Moore was in charge of the defense, publicity was oriented
toward the radicals, but with the coming of Thompson and Gardner
Jackson the appeal was directed much more to what the class-conscious
Lyons would have considered “handwringing” liberals. Thompson
disapproved of pamphlet wars, of the case being tried in the streets.
Both he and Frankfurter wanted to avoid further antagonizing the
Massachusetts community. Sometime in July 1927, when the Defense
Committee had arranged to hold a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall,
Frankfurter discreetly vetoed the idea.
Those who (in that jagged term that had emerged with the Russian
Revolution) considered themselves the intelligentsia accepted the
innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti and the guilt of Massachusetts as
a matter of faith. It became a shibboleth of the liberal academic
mind, just as within Boston their guilt had become a conservative
shibboleth—in both cases a hotly held nonrational belief. Academic
conformity, which—though usually opposed to—is even more rigid
than middle-class conformity, belatedly took up the Sacco-Vanzetti
cause, in part with sincere deliberateness but more often as a
fervent avant-garde gesture. The 381 protesting petitioners from
Mount Holyoke, the 326 from Bryn Mawr, the 203 from Wellesley, the
faculty and 650 students from the University of California, the 36
Amherst faculty members, the hundreds of bloc names from so many
other American colleges and universities, knowing only a smattering
of the case, were making a reflex response to an appeal to themselves
as an elite. In May, 61, members of assorted law faculties that
included Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and the Universities of Kansas,
Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Alabama, and Texas,
petitioned Governor Fuller for a commutation on grounds of reasonable
doubt. Dean Robert Hutchins of the Yale Law School, one of the
minority who had read the record, wrote an open appeal in which he
castigated Katzmann’s cross-examination of Sacco. Three-quarters of
the graduating class of the Harvard Law School, in defiant contrast
to the State Street alumni majority just across the river, signed
a request for a new trial. Professor Glenn Frank of Wisconsin, Dr.
Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, Mount Holyoke’s
Professor of English Jeannette Marks, and President Ellen Fitz
Pendleton of Wellesley added their academic pleas.
As the New England spring slipped into summer, the roster of those
opposing the impending execution and demanding a new trial added
names as diverse as Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Alfred Landon,
Senator Robert La Follette, the Right Reverend Chauncey Brewster
of Washington Cathedral, Sherwood Eddy, John Dewey, the Reverend
Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton, H. L.
Mencken and Dean Edward Devine of the American Catholic University.
Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn announced that he would
introduce a measure in the next session of Congress to compel the
attorney general to open the Department of Justice files concerned
with Sacco and Vanzetti. On June 22 Joseph Moro, Gardner Jackson, and
Mary Donovan appeared at the State House on behalf of the Defense
Committee with a giant rolled petition for a public investigation,
containing 474,842 names from all countries. Two weeks later the
committee forwarded 153,000 additional names collected by the Swiss
Union of Workers.
Within Massachusetts the reaction of the general public to such
high-placed outside criticism was one of embittered, unreasoning
hostility. A former district attorney said that it would be better
even for two innocent men to be electrocuted than for public
confidence in the established order of judicial procedure to be
broken down. John C. Hull, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives, received prolonged applause when he announced at a
banquet that the Commonwealth’s demand of outsiders was this: “We
would respectfully ask you to mind your own business.”
Such was the reaction of the well-born and the well-to-do. The
reaction of what William Butler Yeats called “the little streets”
was even more savage. In the massed streets of South Boston and
Charlestown and Brighton and Ashmont there was a virulent hatred
of Sacco and Vanzetti, coupled with a social jealousy of the
better-known colleges and universities, a smoldering distrust of the
professorial stance, a suspicion of academic attainments as being
tainted with subversion. If the wiser-than-thou professors from
Harvard and Yale were now taking it on themselves to proclaim that
Sacco and Vanzetti should be freed—then so much the worse for Sacco
and Vanzetti!
Sans-culotte anti-intellectualism echoed in a speech of Registrar of
Motor Vehicles Frank Goodwin to the Lawrence Kiwanis Club:
_It is impressive fact that the nearer we get to the scene of
this murder the more convinced are the people that these men are
guilty.... The citizens of Norfolk County know these men are guilty.
On the other hand, in those domains where foreign and un-American
principles are in vogue, such as Russia, Harvard, Argentine,
Wellesley, China and Smith, they are sure these men are innocent....
The leader of the movement to set these two murderers free is Felix
Frankfurter._
Professor Hocking might announce with urbane indignation from the
platform of Boston’s Community Church that he believed Sacco and
Vanzetti “as innocent of that murder as you or I.” Bishop Lawrence
and the Dean of Washington Cathedral might entertain refined
Episcopal doubts. But for the Reverend Billy Sunday—the preacher of
the little streets—hoarsely saving the city from the fate of Sodom at
Tremont Temple, no doubts existed. “Give ’em the juice,” he rapped
out from the pulpit. “Burn them, if they’re guilty. That’s the way
to handle it. I’m tired of hearing these foreigners, these radicals,
coming over here and telling us what we should do.”
* * * * *
For five weeks after their sentencing Sacco and Vanzetti occupied
adjoining cells in the Dedham jail. It was the first time since
their arrest that they had been together for any length of time.
Those shadowed weeks turned out to be the most serene of their
imprisonment. Everyone who met Vanzetti remarked on his composure.
Sacco, having decided not to struggle further against the fate
he considered inevitable, attained a tranquillity that gave the
surface appearance of cheerfulness. “As you know,” he wrote with wry
unaccustomed humor to Mrs. Henderson, “I am still living at the same
hotel, the same room, and also at the same old number 14—but on the
first of July probably, they will bring us to the death house, and
from there to the—eternity.”
A friend had brought Sacco a _boccie_ set, and the two prisoners were
allowed to bowl in the yard each afternoon for an hour and a half.
Vanzetti began to take morning exercises and wrote Mrs. Winslow that
he felt a new man. His cell was always filled with flowers from Mrs.
Evans and other friends. As he described it:
_My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing
colors and beauties forms: a giranium plants a tulipan plant from
Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches, buds,
and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a boquet of May
flowers from Mrs. Winslow._
Flowers he asked for instead of sweets, though as for tobacco—as
he himself admitted—he smoked like a Turk. Being under sentence of
death, and so exempt from prison work, he now had much more time to
read and write. For Mrs. Jack he translated the last stanza of Gori’s
revolutionary hymn, “May First”:
_Give flowers to the rebels failed
With glances revealed to the aurora
To the gayard that struggles and works,
To the vagrant poet that dies._
Even the free jail days were too short for him. After nine when the
lights went out he would prop himself up with a pillow against the
wall, a blanket over his shoulders, using the corridor light coming
through the bars to read some book that Mrs. Evans had just given him.
During the visiting periods Rosa came daily with the children for
the allowed half-hour, and Sacco noticed lovingly how big Ines was
growing and that Dante’s face was burned from the spring sun. Mrs.
Evans came almost as regularly to see Vanzetti.