to the aroused and hostile committee that there had been a banquet
for Commandante Williams on April 15 but that he had printed an
account of it on the sixteenth in _La Notizia_. Lowell stared at him
with contempt. “It is perfectly obvious that is not so,” he remarked
coldly. Thompson could scarcely control himself as he turned on the
still-defiant Italian:
“You can trust Mr. Lowell for that. He has investigated it. He knows
there was no banquet on the fifteenth.”
When Bosco remained adamant, Lowell ordered him to bring in the files
of _La Notizia_ for April and May 1920. Next morning Bosco and a
revived Guadagni appeared with the paper of April 16, 1920. There on
the front page was the vindicating notice:
_Yesterday the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street gave a
luncheon in honor of the new Commandante Williams, editor of the_
Boston Evening Transcript.
Lowell sent the Italians out of the room and put a telephone call
through to Williams. This time the _Transcript_ editor recalled the
earlier luncheon. Lowell turned to the stenographer, who had begun to
record the conversation, and told him not to take down “colloquies.”
He summoned Bosco and Guadagni back, shook hands with them, told them
he believed them to be honest, and that he regretted his mistake.[27]
Thompson tried to impress on the committee that since the alibi had
been reestablished, it must again be taken seriously. Lowell did not
reply. Grant remarked that “You are just back where you were before.”
Lottie Tatillo, though presented to the committee a few days later as
a new witness, could scarcely be considered new by either side. Both
prosecution and defense had been aware of her and her story since the
summer of 1920, when she made a statement to Brouillard and Stewart
that on the morning of April 15 she had seen Sacco and Vanzetti in
South Braintree.
Everyone in South Braintree knew Lottie by her maiden name of
Packard. In 1901, when she was fourteen, she had gone to work in the
stitching room of Rice & Hutchins. Pretty and wayward, full of wild
stories, she would take the path down behind the millpond evenings
with any good-looking young fellow from the factory. “Twelve ounces
to the pound,” Frank Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, described
her. “A nut. She is crazy and has been for years,” was Police Chief
Gallivan’s opinion.
After Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Lottie told Jackson that
she had seen Sacco in South Braintree the day of the murders and
remembered he used to work in Rice & Hutchins. Later she elaborated
on this story to John Shea, the local policeman, who passed her on
to Stewart and Brouillard. She claimed she had recognized Sacco’s
picture in the paper after his arrest because she had known him in
1915; when he was working in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins.
On the morning of April 15 on her way to lunch she had passed him on
Pearl Street standing near a shiny Buick touring car. She noticed him
bite his lip and then all of a sudden it came back to her that he was
the fellow named Sacco who used to work in the factory as a laster.
She would never forget him because once in a temper he had thrown a
last across the room at a boy and it had struck her in the foot.
If Lottie’s story was true, she would stand out as the most important
witness of the murder day, the only one who had known Sacco
previously and had then seen him at the scene of the crime. And if
she had told her story to Jackson or Shea the day after the holdup,
when no one in South Braintree had even suspected Sacco, that would
indeed have made an almost watertight case for the prosecution. But
Lottie had said nothing, nothing to Carlos Goodridge or anyone else,
until after Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and their pictures
had appeared in the paper. Stewart could find no record of Sacco’s
ever having worked at Rice & Hutchins. It is of course possible that
Lottie had seen Sacco during the week or so he worked in the factory
under the name of Mosmacotelli in October 1917, and if before the
arrests she had identified the man she had seen in the stitching room
then with the man she claimed she saw standing by the Buick on April
15, 1920, this would have come close to being conclusive. Even after
the arrests such an identification from a more stable person might
have carried weight. But, as LaBrecque, the Quincy reporter, later
explained to the committee, Lottie would tell one story one night and
another the next and make so many irresponsible statements there was
no use believing her. Stewart and Brouillard had long ago made the
same discovery. Whenever they tried to check up on her account, she
would take each question as an insult, denouncing both them and Sacco
and Vanzetti incoherently. Finally Stewart gave up. “A blister,” he
decided, as he struck her off his list of witnesses.
In the autumn of 1920 Moore had got wind of Lottie’s potentially
dangerous testimony and sent down a Joseph Mina from East Boston to
see what he could find out about her. Mirra, under the name of Joseph
Meyers, got himself a job as a vamper in the finishing room of Rice &
Hutchins and found it easy enough to strike up an acquaintance with
the accommodating Lottie. He made several dates with her, taking her
to the pictures at Gordon’s Olympia in Boston and to the amusement
park at Revere Beach. Each time he took her out he tried to pump her
about Sacco and Vanzetti. One night when he took her to his house in
East Boston for supper and felt he had broken the ice sufficiently,
he asked her if she would tell what she knew to a lawyer friend of
his. She agreed, and the two of them went to Moore’s Tremont Row
office.
Moore and several others were waiting with a stenographer when Lottie
and Mirra arrived. Lottie was voluble. She again said that she had
known Sacco in 1915. The morning of the murders when she passed him
on Pearl Street he was standing near the Buick wearing a derby,[28]
and looking as if he were in a hurry. Vanzetti, whom she had never
seen before, was standing on the other side of the street and called
across to Sacco as she passed: “I wish you would hurry up and get
this over. I have an appointment at 3:30 this afternoon in Providence
to dig clams.” After Sacco was arrested she said she had seen his
picture and asked the other girls in the factory: “What has Sacco
done?” They told her he was being held for murder.
Lottie told Moore she had informed Shea, the day after the crime,
that one of the men by the car was the one who had thrown the last
at her. But, she told Moore, she did not want to testify in court.
She had not come to ask him for money, but she saw no way of avoiding
going on the stand except to leave the state for a while. She
continued, according to the stenographic record, “I am pretty sure
that Mr. Sacco was the man who done the murder. It is his wife that
holds me back. I think she needs him.... I’ll tell you the truth. I
am not a girl crazy for money or anything like that.”
“How much are you willing to suggest that you want?” Moore asked her
finally.
“I don’t know,” she told him calculatingly. “I just came to help you
on the defense case.”
Lottie’s story as she presented it to the Lowell Committee had
altered singularly since that November evening, seven years earlier,
at Tremont Row. Whenever Thompson challenged her, she stormed at
him until her voice rang down the corridors. “I don’t remember,”
she replied at one point to a question of Lowell’s, “my head is too
full of music and things like that, to remember.” She now insisted
that Sacco had worked for Rice & Hutchins in 1908 at the time of a
strike—it was then and only then she had known him. That was the
time when he had struck her with the last, and she had thought to
herself: “That man will do something before he dies.” She denied
ever having told Moore she had known Sacco in 1915, or that when she
saw him on the street in 1920 he was wearing a derby. He was, she
told Lowell, bareheaded. When Lowell first asked her whether she
had seen Sacco on April 15 she replied: “I don’t say I saw him. I
will never say I saw him, and I don’t think it was him now.” A few
minutes later, however, she revived her story of seeing him by the
car with Vanzetti across the street talking about clams, this time
with Parmenter, the paymaster, standing in the background. After she
came back from lunch she had told Frank Jackson she had seen Sacco.
She did not tell Shea about this until after the men’s arrest.
When Thompson produced her 1920 statement that she had told Shea
about Sacco the day after the crime, she raged: “No, I did not
tell it to John Shea. How many times do you want me to answer that
question? I will tell the truth at the Divine bar of Justice, and
that has got more power than you have got. You have got a witness
here that you cannot make waver.”
Judge Grant, trying to calm her, brought her a glass of water and
accidentally spilled some down her back. Still trying to be helpful,
he suggested she might have lunch now. “I don’t want any lunch,” she
snapped, glaring at Thompson. “I have got enough lunch listening to
this man here, he’s good enough lunch for anybody.”
When Thompson remarked that she had gone to Moore voluntarily, her
voice rose to a shriek: “Who came to Moore voluntarily? You lie,
I did not; I was brought to Moore, for Sacco and Vanzetti to do a
dirty, rotten, nasty thing! I will make you prove your statement.”
She now insisted that Moore had offered her five hundred dollars to
leave the state, an offer she had indignantly refused. Thompson sent
her into another tantrum when he suggested she was trying to get
money from Moore. When Lowell finally dismissed her, she left the
room still spluttering.
A few days later Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, made his
appearance in the council chamber. He admitted that Lottie had told
him of seeing Sacco, but only after Sacco was in jail. Before his
arrest she had never mentioned Sacco to anyone. Only afterward had
she come out with her story of talking with him on the street the
morning of April 15. Jackson had no memory of Sacco’s working in the
factory, and there was no record of his having worked there.
Lottie, following her turbulent session with Thompson, swung round
again a few hours later and told a sympathetic _Post_ reporter that
she was now convinced that the man she had seen was not Sacco and
that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
* * * * *
One of the new discoveries claimed by the defense concerned the cap
found by Berardelli’s body—the cap that the prosecution had tried
to prove belonged to Sacco. Williams had pointed out the tear in
the lining, implying that Sacco had made it by hanging his cap on a
nail at the factory. It was a corroborative point mentioned several
times during the trial and later by Judge Thayer in his ruling on the
Madeiros motion.
Not until shortly before the Lowell Committee began its meetings was
the point again raised. Then Tom O’Connor, combing South Braintree
for new evidence, had the thought that he might pick up something
from the now-retired Chief Gallivan. He found him weeding in his
garden and quite willing to talk. The first thing they talked about
was the cap Loring had picked up.
Gallivan said that the Saturday after the murder Fraher called him
from Rice & Hutchins to say he had a cap found on the street after
the murders. That evening Gallivan went to pick it up. The autumn
before, he had been able to identify the remains of a man who had
hanged himself in the Braintree woods by the name inked into the
lining of the man’s cap. With that identification in mind, he ripped
a hole in the lining of the cap Fraher gave him. Finding neither name
nor marks, he tossed the cap under the seat of his car. There it
stayed for a week or two until John Scott of the State Police asked
him for it.
For O’Connor the tear in the cap seemed a tear in the very fabric
of the prosecution’s case. He gave his information to Thompson, and
Gallivan was summoned before the Lowell Committee. The ex-chief
readily admitted that there was no hole in the cap’s lining before
he got his hands on it, and said he told Scott he himself had made
the tear. Tampering with evidence was a concept alien to his naïve
mind; he still could see nothing wrong in what he had done. Katzmann,
when the tear in the cap was brought to his attention, insisted that
this was the first time he had ever heard of it—that if he had known
about it during the trial, he would have explained it to the jury.
Although Thompson argued that an important piece of evidence relied
on by the prosecution had now turned out to be false, and that this
alone should be sufficient grounds for a new trial or for clemency,
the committee members did not appear impressed.
The confidentially verbose Dr. Hamilton again came from Auburn to
defend his ballistics theses before the committee and to repeat his
conversation with the conscience-stricken Proctor. Whether or not
the committee had read the Dedham file on Hamilton, Ranney obviously
had, for he ticked off the ex-druggist’s extraordinary expertise and
ended with a reference to the Stielow case that made Hamilton jump.
Major Goddard’s apparently definitive report had been read, and the
committee was also much more aware than the jury had been that the
six obsolete Winchester bullets found on Sacco were similar to Bullet
III.
Thompson now produced Wilbur Turner, a self-designated criminologist,
who had just examined the four Berardelli bullets at Dedham and found
“a tremendous difference” between the markings on the base of Bullet
III and the others, “as though they were made with a different tool
or scratched with a different instrument.” And Thompson spelled
out for the record his bitter conviction that Captain Proctor had
substituted a fake bullet test-fired from Sacco’s gun for the genuine
bullet taken by Dr. Magrath from Berardelli’s body.
The hot days slipped by, the old autocrat met his two colleagues
with austere condescension each morning, and the parade of witnesses
continued. Lowell felt—he would feel this way for the rest of his
life—that he was performing a disagreeable civic duty because such
was the obligation of a Lowell. In essence the committee bearing
his name was conducting a second trial, but it had without his
conscious awareness become a trial in which the Commonwealth was the
defendant. What the Lowell Committee was taking on itself to decide
was not whether Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial and were
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but whether the presumably innocent
Commonwealth had beyond a reasonable doubt erred. In the beginning
Thompson and Ehrmann, as Harvard graduates, had pinned their hopes
on Lowell, but after the Guadagni-Bosco episode Lowell began to seem
more the challenger than the judge. The two lawyers had the uneasy
feeling that evidence and argument were becoming useless, and even
considered whether or not they should boycott the hearings.
_The doom of our clients seemed as inevitable as that of Socrates_
[_Ehrmann wrote afterward_], _and we were unwilling to continue in
the farce of fair treatment. We were diverted from this course,
however, by two outstanding jurists_ [_Dean Pound and Professor
Frankfurter_], _who inspired us with some semblance of hope. Theirs
was perhaps the greater wisdom, since, had we withdrawn, it would
have been said that we had lost faith in the cause of our clients._
By Saturday, July 23, the committee members had run through their
witnesses, from Cox the paymaster to Rosen the peddler, Gould, the
Hayes and Kennedy girls—everyone they thought might add anything new
to the case. Lincoln Wadsworth, still working for Iver Johnson, and
afraid that his Dedham testimony had been misinterpreted, told the
committee that although the revolver found on Vanzetti might have
been Berardelli’s, “there are thousands of times more chances that it
was not than that it was.”
Lowell spent the week end writing a report of the proceedings, which
in token deference to his colleagues he referred to as an abstract.
Monday the committee spent listening to the closing arguments of
Thompson and Ehrmann, followed by Ranney for the Commonwealth.
Then, when the humid council chamber was at last empty, Lowell
handed typewritten copies of his abstract to his colleagues, saying
off-handedly that it was just a suggestion, of course, but would they
look it over?
The next day the three met privately in the Faculty Room of Harvard’s
University Hall. The autocrat of the faculty table having made up
his mind in writing, all he wanted from the silent physicist and the
garrulous poetaster was confirmation. They spent that day and the
next discussing minor details of the abstract. “So fully did we find
ourselves in agreement,” Grant admitted later, “that though many
alterations were made in it, they were chiefly of phraseology and
shades of expression rather than the substantive point of view.”
On the afternoon of July 27 at ten minutes past five Lowell,
Stratton, and Grant, sphinx-faced, entered the executive offices of
the State House, each carrying a brown manila folder with a signed
copy of the revised abstract-report.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] An English writer, Edward Shanks, thought that these paragraphs
compared with the _Gettysburg Address_ but doubted that Vanzetti had
ever uttered them. Stong defended himself by saying that he could not
write that well, that he had supplied only the exclamation marks,
and that these would have been better left out. “It seems to me,” he
wrote, “that the internal evidence of that interview is sufficient
to convince any honorably disposed person of its authenticity. The
change of number in the pronoun was beautifully characteristic of
Vanzetti. ‘I’ unmarked, unknown, a failure—but ‘Our’ career, triumph,
work for tolerance and justice.” This version that Stong gave in the
New York _World_ of May 13, 1927, differs, nevertheless, in several
places from the one he printed in 1949 in his essay on the case in
_The Aspirin Age_.
[26] The original of this letter is not available. The published
version has undoubtedly been edited.
[27] The transcript of the committee hearings merely states that
Bosco appeared as requested on July 15 with editions of _La Notizia_.
The omission from the record of what followed has been much
criticized by defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti.
[28] A photograph of Sacco reproduced in the papers after his arrest
showed him wearing a derby.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AUGUST 1927
Governor Fuller continued hearing witnesses until the end of July.
Obviously he was not going to draw his own conclusions or even appear
to have drawn them before taking his cue from the Lowell Committee.
In an interview with Jackson and Felicani he asked them flatly how
he could be expected to believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling
eels on December 24. “I am a businessman,” he told them. “I am used
to proof before I decide anything. There isn’t a single document in
the case proving that Vanzetti sold eels. There’s only the word of
his Italian friends.”
Spurred by the governor’s disbelief and furnished with a sketch map
by Vanzetti, Felicani and Ehrmann made the rounds of the waterfront
wholesale fish dealers. Finally, at 112 Atlantic Avenue, they found
that one of the partners of Corso & Gambino remembered shipping
fish to Vanzetti in 1919. The firm had then been Corso & Cannizzo.
Ehrmann and Felicani dug away for hours among Corso’s dusty account
books until at last they uncovered what they had almost given up
hope of finding, an American Express Company receipt showing that on
Saturday, December 20, 1919, a forty-pound barrel of eels had been
shipped with C.O.D. charges of $21.79 to B. Vanzetti, Plymouth.
The eels must have been delivered either on Monday or Tuesday. Mary
Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, had testified they arrived “either
the twenty-second or the twenty-third, I do not remember exactly.”
She said the expressman had brought the barrel at about half-past
nine in the morning, when Vanzetti was out, and as she had no money
to pay him he had taken it away and come back later. “After one
Monday Vanzetti and the express came back” was the awkward way the
interpreter translated her explanation. Ehrmann took “after one
Monday” to mean “the following day.” Vanzetti would have received
his eels on Tuesday, spent Tuesday night cleaning them, and on
Wednesday—the morning of the Bridgewater holdup attempt—he would have
been busy making his deliveries. Ehrmann thought at last he had found
the key to unlock the doors of the state prison. He and Felicani took
the yellowed express receipt to Thompson who, in Fuller’s absence,
handed it over to the governor’s secretary—and that was the last they
heard of it.
* * * * *
Sunday, the last day of July, the heat wave broke in drizzling rain.
A crowd of three thousand, divided between sympathizers and the usual
Sunday afternoon floaters, attended a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting
on the Charles Street Mall of Boston Common. Alfred Baker Lewis,
the wealthy pince-nezed perennial Socialist candidate for governor,
introduced the speakers: Gardner Jackson, Harry Canter, Mary Donovan,
and Professor Guadagni. Canter called for a general strike, and Mary
Donovan shouted in a trembling voice that if they executed those two
innocent men they could execute her too. The fiery words spluttered
out damply in the rain; the crowd remained inert.
Fuller spent the week end at his summer estate at Little Boar’s Head,
Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Two days before, his son Alvan, Jr., had
to be operated on suddenly for appendicitis, and for a day or so the
governor thought he might have to delay his decision. However, just
before leaving the city he promised reporters that he would make it
known Wednesday evening. The feeling in the corridors of the State
House, in State Street, on Newspaper Row, among those in the know was
that the governor would end up by granting a new trial. Louis Stark’s
dispatch to the New York _Times_ concluded:
_Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the chair on
the date set. Neither will they be pardoned. Further reprieve pending
steps by the Massachusetts Legislature looking to a new trial was
indicated as the solution which Governor Fuller will place before the
Executive Council when it meets tomorrow night._
Whatever the rumors of a reprieve, there was no sign of it as August
began. Imperturbably the clockwork mechanism of the law advanced
another notch as, on the night of August 2, Sacco, Vanzetti, and
Madeiros were moved to the isolation of the death house. The day
before that move, Vanzetti had tried to persuade Sacco to give up
his hunger strike, but the other refused, saying there was no use in
making himself fat to be killed.
The transfer was made secretly, the guards waiting until ten minutes
after lights out before coming to the cells to take the condemned
men away. Down the short flight of iron stairs guards and prisoners
clattered to the darkness of the outer yard and then diagonally
across the inlaid brick to the narrow passage between the north wing
extension and the license-plate shop. “In coming, I got a glance to
the nighty, starry sky,” Vanzetti wrote. “Hit was so long I did seen
it before—and thought it was my last glance to the stars.”
There were only three cells in the blank-walled death house. The
white-tiled floors had a black line painted six feet in front of
each cell beyond which no visitor might step. Sacco and Vanzetti,
locked up there, could not see each other, but they could talk
back and forth. Each cell was lit by a lamp outside the bars and
contained a cot, a chair, a table, and a toilet. The perspective of
the antiseptic room concluded in a small gray door leading to the
execution chamber.
Sacco’s reaction to the death house was to pace up and down, his
energy undiminished even though he had not eaten for over two weeks.
Vanzetti, who again refused food, tried to immerse himself in _The
Rise of American Civilization_. Only Madeiros seemed unaffected by
the change. Torpid, outwardly indifferent, he ate enormously but gave
scarcely any other sign of life. When Warden Hendry offered to pay
his mother’s way to Boston, he said he did not want to see her.