Georg Branting, a well-known lawyer and son of a former Swedish prime
minister, who had crossed the Atlantic to make his own investigation.
The Defense Committee had planned a parade to welcome Branting,
and even though the police refused permission some fifteen hundred
sympathizers met him at the South Station and escorted him to Boston
Common. After ten days of on-the-scene study Branting announced that
he was persuaded the two men were innocent, and sent a telegram to
Sweden informing the press that “according to my best judgment, no
conviction would have been pronounced if case tried under normal
judicial conditions.”
Phil Stong, a young reporter for the North American Newspaper
Alliance, was another outsider who came to Boston to develop his
opinion of the case. One afternoon he visited the prisoners in the
jail library, later writing:
_Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written
in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face.... A ferocious
mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought
is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence
has made an anchorite._
It was at the conclusion of this visit that Vanzetti casually made
his utterance that has been so often quoted in anthologies. They sat
there with Vanzetti doing most of the talking, Sacco breaking in
only occasionally. Yet as these Italians talked in their imperfect
English, even joked at times, the effect of their personalities gave
Stong an overwhelming conviction of their innocence. He had brought
a newspaper with him containing an account of some college students’
suicides, a sensational topic of the last few days. “I think Dr.
Frood wrong,” Vanzetti remarked on glancing at it, “when he says
student kill himself to make someone sorry. It is when he cannot
make someone sorry, he kills himself in anger at world which pays
him not attention—in despair—” Sacco disagreed, maintaining that if
he himself were dead it would be the best way to free his wife and
children. Vanzetti observed that “only sick mind kill himself.” Then
he spoke of a Charlestown inmate who had murdered his wife when he
had caught her with another man. “You know what he says to me once?
‘Vanzetti, you know what I think of all night? My wife—my home. Every
night—all time. Now—all gone.’”
A bell rang, a gray line of prisoners began to file past on the way
from the workshops to the cells, blank-faced men, their arms folded.
Seeing them, Sacco grew bitter about his own enforced idleness.
“We’re capitalists,” Vanzetti jollied him. “We have home, we eat,
don’t do no work. We’re nonproducers—live off other men’s work; when
Libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.”
Sacco’s mood changed and he seemed amused. Then a deputy approached
as a sign that Stong’s time was up. He had managed so far to cover
his feelings by a forced cheerfulness but, as he rose to go, Vanzetti
spotted the lurking dismay in the other’s feature. He then began to
speak very quietly and simply as if to comfort the young man, and as
he spoke Stong jotted down the words in shorthand on the margin of a
newspaper:
_If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life
talking at street comers to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked,
unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and
our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for
tolerance, for joostice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do
by an accident._
_Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives
of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all!_
_That last moment belong to us—that agony is our triumph._[25]
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had expected Fuller to appoint his review
commission. “That would impose freedom,” Vanzetti told Mrs. Winslow,
“and the men of the judiciary and of the executive want save America
by dooming us.” As for Governor Fuller’s own private investigation,
Vanzetti’s conclusion was: “He may give us justice—I expect nothing.”
At times, when he was temporarily overcome by a mood of obsessive
frustration, Vanzetti would crudely appropriate the symbolism of
the Passion to express his dilemma. In such a mood he first learned
of Fuller’s appointment of the Lowell Committee. “His this double
investigation,” he wrote Mrs. Evans, “going to be another mockery?
spitting on our face? sponge of vinager and bitterness on the top
of a lance? the last stubbing between our ribles?” As the sun moved
higher in the sky, as the elms again arched their spring greenery
over the High Street, the two Italians behind the jail walls sensed
their lost freedom in all its urgency. “Oh! that Sea, that sky,”
Vanzetti wrote, “those freed and full of life winds of Cape Cod!
Maybe I will never see, never breath, never be at one with them
again.”
On June 29 Governor Fuller gave Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros a stay
until August 10, to allow his Advisory Committee time to review the
evidence and examine Madeiros’ confession. The Dedham interlude ended
abruptly and finally at midnight on July 1 when the prisoners were
waked, manacled to deputies, packed in a car followed by a second
car with armed guards, and driven along the empty Dedham streets
and across the drab brick outskirts of Boston to Cherry Hill. In
this midnight scurrying Vanzetti lost some of his books and papers.
Both men saw the hurried transfer as another example of deliberate
spitefulness on the part of the authorities. Actually it was a strict
following of the rule that a condemned man must be sent to Cherry
Hill ten days before the date set for his execution. Sheriff Capen,
anxious to get rid of his notorious prisoners, interpreted the rule
to the letter. Even though the executions had been deferred, their
official date as set by the court was still July 10.
Sacco accepted the transfer with shoulder-shrugging indifference
as no more than he had expected. Vanzetti could not get over his
depression at the ominous change from the casual Dedham jail with
“some air, light, a slice of land and of sky to contemplate, and a
daily blass of an hour of sunshine and free air in the yard” to the
“windowless, airless, lightless ... malebolgic of the State Prison.”
* * * * *
The Defense Committee took a more optimistic view of the Lowell
Committee than did Sacco and Vanzetti. They were content with Lowell,
neutral about Stratton, and objected only to Grant. Not only were the
petulant paragraphs of _The Convictions of a Grandfather_ exhumed,
but Grant was accused of having told John Moors and Samuel Eliot
Morison that he disapproved of anyone’s taking issue with the trial,
the verdict, and the subsequent decisions.
When Fuller questioned him about this, Grant explained with
characteristic prissiness that he had not read the evidence in the
case and knew nothing of the merits of the subsequent proceedings,
but thought it “indecorous and contrary to the bonos mores for a
professor at the Harvard Law School to rush into print while the case
was _sub judice_.”
The _Herald_ and that section of State Street less intransigent
than the _Transcript_ were pleased by the appointment of Fuller’s
committee. Privately the more sedate Boston legal circles had always
been dubious about Webster Thayer, and with the recent disbarment of
the district attorneys of Suffolk and Middlesex counties, Democratic
Joseph Pelletier and Republican Nathan Tufts, who could say what
might not have been going on in neighboring Norfolk? Bishop Lawrence
was another who had long been troubled by the thought, but now he too
was satisfied. With Cousin Abbott in the State House, all would be
well with the world!
Although the Advisory Committee appointment had been announced at
the beginning of June, President Lowell was too occupied with his
Harvard commencement activities to take any action until the end of
the month. Finally, on the thirtieth, the three members met briefly
in the governor’s council chamber to discuss procedure and to receive
typewritten transcripts of the trial record. Two days later they
drove to South Braintree to inspect the murder scene. On July 8 they
opened their hearings by examining seven of the Dedham jurors. The
next day they spent two hours talking with Sacco and Vanzetti. Of
that meeting Vanzetti wrote Mrs. Henderson:
_From the Commission interview of us I got the impression that
President Lowell and President Stratton are honestly intentioned and
not hostile to us by predetermination. Yet it seemed to me that in
spite of their great scholarship, they had not understood certain
most vicious actions of the prosecution and the iniquity of Thayer’s
conduct. As for Judge Grant he is but another Thayer._
Meanwhile Governor Fuller was continuing his own daily sessions in
his high-ceilinged office with the portraits of Sam Adams and John
Hancock staring down from the walls. Secretary MacDonald kept his
watchdog position at the Governor’s right, while the bald quizzical
Wiggin sat at his left. In spite of repeated objections by the
defense, Fuller insisted on complete secrecy for whatever the
witnesses might wish to tell him. Otherwise, he explained, his office
would be turned into a bear den. Day by day the reporters noted the
parade of faces up the State House steps—the ballistics experts,
including the disillusioned Professor Gill; the star witnesses from
both trials. There was no way that either the governor or the Lowell
Committee could compel anyone to testify. Pelser, Lola Andrews, and
Goodridge did not appear, either because they refused to or because
they had disappeared.
Philip Cox, the brother of Alfred Cox, the Bridgewater paymaster,
wrote to Fuller that his brother “alone had an opportunity to see the
man who held him up, and he declined to identify his assailant as
Vanzetti.” This, it seemed to Philip Cox, “should have afforded good
reason for hesitating to accept the verdict of guilty.” But what the
Bridgewater paymaster had come to think in 1927, and what he said
in the private interview he had with the governor, remained a tight
secret.
Yet, in spite of the imposed secrecy, signs here and there made it
apparent that Fuller’s mind was hardening against the two Italians.
When John Richards, who, as marshal, had arrested the Morellis for
their freight-yard thefts, talked with the governor, he was amazed
to hear him say he discounted Madeiros’ confession. “I am convinced
it was a fair trial,” he told Richards finally. When Robert Benchley
came from New York to tell of his conversation with Loring Coes in
which Coes—according to Benchley—had repeated Thayer’s clubhouse
remark that he would “get those bastards good and proper,” Fuller
asked Benchley to point out a single place in the record that
indicated the trial was not fair.
“Why didn’t Vanzetti take the stand at Plymouth?” It was a question
that the governor threw at defense witnesses with increasing
frequency. “Why didn’t Sacco testify at Plymouth for his friend
Vanzetti?” Fuller demanded of Tom O’Connor, who was trying to explain
how the case originated in Chief Stewart’s mind. Each point that
O’Connor made, whether it concerned Proctor’s ambiguous testimony
or the Department of Justice files, Fuller and his counsel Wiggin
brushed aside. O’Connor in a flash-tempered parry accused the
governor of prejudging the investigation, and the two men shouted
at each other until their voices reached the newspapermen in the
corridor. Fuller, red-faced and furious, stood up to indicate the
interview was over. Stalking from the room, he snapped at O’Connor,
“Why did Boda skip?” Later O’Connor told a friend, “His hand is on
the switch.”
* * * * *
A new volunteer defense lawyer now arrived from Pittsburgh,
young Michael Angelo Musmanno, bringing a petition in behalf of
the two men from the half million members of the Sons of Italy.
Dramatic, impulsive, abounding in cheerful energy, with a bronze
ex-serviceman’s pin in his buttonhole and wearing a poet’s brown tie,
Musmanno had quit the promising beginnings of his law practice to
offer all his talents to the Defense Committee. Sometimes his zeal
would trip him, as when he drove down to the New Haven slum where
Berardelli’s widow was living. She would not talk about the events
at South Braintree and refused to sign an appeal. The most Musmanno
could bring her to say was that she did not want to see innocent men
punished. That was enough, however, for the poetic-minded Musmanno,
who dashed to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to Fuller that
echoed across Europe as far as Moscow:
_I am one of the two who suffered most from the Braintree murders.
I lost my husband and the father of my two children, but I would be
sorry to have two innocent men put to death. I have always doubted
that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and I hope that you will free
them and let them go home to their families._ Several days later
Sarah Berardelli denied that she had ever written or sent such
a telegram. Musmanno had hoped that an appeal by Berardelli’s
widow would help counteract the recent news that Parmenter’s
fourteen-year-old son had been caught in South Easton, breaking and
entering the railroad station. The newspapers had blamed the poverty
and lack of direction of young Parmenter’s fatherless household.
* * * * *
Thompson forwarded to the governor a thirty-three-page analysis of
the discrepancies between the newly discovered Bridgewater Pinkerton
report and the Plymouth trial record. When this was not acknowledged,
John Moors finally went to ask Fuller about it. Apparently nothing
concerned with either the South Braintree or the Bridgewater
Pinkerton reports had ever reached the governor’s desk, for he
at once turned blankly to MacDonald. The secretary shrugged off
Thompson’s analysis as “just a lot of stuff about a cropped mustache.”
Hard-boiled Herman’s job was to cull the governor’s Sacco-Vanzetti
mail, most of which he threw away. In 1926 the Defense Committee
had forwarded a protest signed by a group of English M.P.’s. When
no reply came back, Gardner Jackson stormed up to the State House.
His complaint got no farther than the anteroom obstacle of the
secretary’s broad-topped desk. “Oh, those goddam crooks!” MacDonald
told him. “Do you think we pay any attention to this stuff? It comes
in here by the barrelful and we shoot it right into the fire!”
Rosina, when she appeared at Fuller’s office on July 11, quickly
sensed the hostility behind his superficial politeness. He told her
that Vanzetti had been asked by his lawyers to take the stand at the
Plymouth trial but had refused. Young Brini, as the chief defense
witness, had, he felt, merely learned an alibi by heart. After Rosina
left the governor she spent some time with the Lowell Committee in
the council chamber next door, then went on to Charlestown where,
much troubled, she repeated Fuller’s remarks. Only she and Thompson
were allowed to see the prisoners now, since according to regulations
condemned men in Cherry Hill could have visits only from close
relations and counsel.
Sacco brooded over what Rosina told him. On July 17, after
deliberating for several days, he began a hunger strike in protest
against what the Defense Committee called the “veil of secrecy that
encourages the bias—economic, racial, political and religious—which
has been shown all through this case.” Vanzetti joined with him to
protest “the whispers of nameless informers,” explaining to Mrs.
Evans:
_But my hungry strike is progressing because I knew that both the
Governor and the commission have ill-treated our witnesses, wrongly,
and that they believe nothing of what our witnesses say. They
believe, and treat well those handful of criminals, harlots, and
degenerated who perjured against us._
His stomach, he complained after a few days, affected his mind and
heart. He found difficulty even in writing letters. As he saw his end
drawing closer he felt a longing for his own blood, for that far-off
family in Villafalletto he had not seen in almost twenty years. The
day after he began his strike he asked Felicani to send a telegram to
his sister Luigia. Even though it might be too late now, he wanted
above all to see her again before he died.
Sacco could at least see his wife, who came daily with Ines and
Dante, now grown taller than his mother. The children were not
allowed to see their father but waited in the warden’s office.
Seven-year-old Ines wrote her first large-scrawled letter to her
father, and he was so moved that even in the lassitude of his hunger
strike he sat down at once to reply:
_I will bring with me your little and so dearest letter and carry it
right under my heart to the last day of my life. When I die, it will
be buried with your father who loves you so much, as I do also your
brother Dante and holy dear mother.... It is the most golden present
that you could have given to me or that I could have wished for in
these sad days._
As he wrote he found himself caught up in an imagined idyll:
_It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life
that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your
mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and
tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in
the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life
and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and
singing through the verdent fields picking the wild flowers here and
there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to
your mother’s embrace._
_The same I have wished to see for other poor girls, and their
brothers, happy with their mother and father as I dreamed for us—but
it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes saddened very
badly your father’s soul._[26]
When Fuller came for the first time to Charlestown to interview the
three condemned men he talked only briefly with the sullen Madeiros
and not at all with Sacco, who shook hands but told him courteously
that they had nothing to say to each other. With Vanzetti Fuller
spent over an hour and a half, breaking off only to dash back to a
State House reception for Lindbergh, who had arrived in Boston that
afternoon on his triumphal tour of the country. Vanzetti and Fuller
were open with each other. Fuller pointed out what he considered the
most damaging facts against Vanzetti: his failure to take the stand
at Plymouth, the revolver found on him, his quick convictions by two
juries. Vanzetti gave his interpretations of these things and then
quite typically began to talk of other matters unrelated to himself.
As they sat together in the warden’s office the two men found each
other curiously sympathetic. When Fuller broke off the interview he
promised to return later. “What an attractive man!” he observed to
Warden Hendry as he hurried away. Reporters noticed that the governor
appeared nervous as he headed down the walk to his waiting Packard.
His nervousness was probably not so much because of the interrupted
interview as at the thought of keeping America’s hero waiting.
Getting into the car he knocked his hat off.
Thompson wanted Vanzetti to break his fast so that he would be better
able to talk with Fuller on his next visit. Vanzetti finally agreed
to drink a cup of tea, and later took some coffee and milk. Fuller
spent most of July 26 in South Braintree inspecting the scene of the
shootings and driving over the escape route with Chief Stewart. In
the evening he again interviewed Vanzetti, arriving at Charlestown
just after nine and staying two hours. It was not time enough for
Vanzetti. He asked if he might write Fuller at length, and Fuller,
with salesman’s affability, agreed. In this second interview Vanzetti
felt a growing confidence in the governor that he showed in his
letter next day to Alice Stone Blackwell:
_He make me the impression of being just as you say of him; an honest
man, as he understand it, and sincere, courageous, stubborn man but
well intentioned at bottom and in a way, clever. And I like to tell
you that he gave me a good heartfull sake hand, as I lef. I may be
wrong, but I don’t believe that a man like that is going to burn us
on a case like ours._
A heat wave seared the city. Through two weeks the Lowell Committee
interviewed its witnesses. Thompson again and in vain asked for
public hearings. The committee agreed, however, that with the
exception of Judge Thayer, Chief Justice Hall, the district attorney,
and the jurors, all of whom would be examined privately, counsel for
both sides might suggest witnesses and be present to question them.
Most of the witnesses the committee examined had already been
interviewed by the governor. Sometimes, as Rosina had, they merely
stepped from the governor’s office to the council chamber.
Day after day the three old men in coats and stiff collars sat at
their wedge-shaped mahogany desks while the witnesses filed damply
by and Thompson and Assistant District Attorney Ranney struck sparks
from each other. Lowell dominated the sessions, with Stratton silent
and Grant fretting at his subordination. In the city four people died
of the heat. The grass on the Common where the derelicts sprawled
in alcoholic stupor—impervious to Prohibition—had turned to cocoa
matting. Through the open windows of the council chamber came the
summer hum of the city, broken faintly by the yelps of urchins
in the Frog Pond. Within that Federalist room dominated by the
spaniel-featured autocrat it was hard to realize that the matter of
debate was two men’s lives.
Katzmann, after testifying privately, voluntarily submitted to being
cross-examined by Thompson. Thompson accused the district attorney
of having arranged the Plymouth trial first so that Vanzetti would
appear in Dedham as a convicted felon. Katzmann said it was merely
the chance that there happened to be a June term in Plymouth and none
in Dedham. In the matter of Captain Proctor he would not positively
deny that the captain thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but
doubted he ever said so.
Katzmann was followed—at Lowell’s request—by Professor Guadagni and
Bosco, the editor of _La Notizia_. Lowell particularly wanted to ask
them about their Dedham testimony that they, along with Dentamore,
had met Sacco in Giordani’s Café on the day of the crime and had
remembered the date afterward because a banquet had been given at the
Franciscan Priory for the editor of the _Transcript_ that same day.
In reading over the trial record Lowell had noticed that although
Dentamore had said he had just come from the banquet, Guadagni
said it was to be held in the evening. Struck by the discrepancy,
Lowell had gone through the files of the _Transcript_ and discovered
that a group of Italians had given a dinner for Editor Williams
at Frascati’s on May 13, eight days after Sacco and Vanzetti were
arrested. Thinking that there might possibly have been two banquets,
Lowell telegraphed Williams, who happened to be in Washington.
Williams replied that there had been only one.
With this information concealed like a time bomb, Lowell faced
Guadagni while Bosco waited outside. Guadagni now appeared uncertain
whether the banquet had been held before or after the talk in
Giordani’s Café. When Lowell showed him the account of the banquet
in the _Transcript_, he concluded that it must have taken place the
night before and added ruefully, “I was so sure of that day.” Then
Lowell set off his bomb, pointing out that the paper was dated May
14. The banquet had taken place May 13! How, then, could Guadagni
have discussed it a month before? Lowell felt he had the proof in his
hand that the story was a fraud, concocted by Guadagni, Bosco, and
Dentamore to create an alibi for a fellow anarchist.
Thompson was shattered in his dismay. Guadagni’s lie seemed too
flagrant, too utterly exposed. “If it was deliberate I do not think
you would see me around here very much longer,” he told Lowell. “If
I did not think these men were innocent I should not be fooling away
my time. And I would not resort to any means to justify an end, just
because I was convinced these men were innocent, any more than if I
thought they were guilty.”
“Of course not, Mr. Thompson,” the other assured him urbanely.
Guadagni stood there, beaten down, admitting now that the banquet had
had nothing to do with his meeting Sacco, that he had accepted the
idea from Dentamore, that it was a mistake.