House streaked with fog. Fuller returned from New Hampshire early in
the morning and again told the waiting reporters his decision would
be ready on Wednesday. During the morning he talked with Jackson,
Moro, and other members of the Defense Committee. In the afternoon he
spent several hours with the Brockton policemen, Connolly and Vaughn,
and after they left he conferred with John McAnarney. During the day
he sent for Judge Thayer, who was spending his vacation at Ogunquit,
Maine. Thayer arrived at the State House a little after six. The
reporters noted that the governor’s mood seemed genial. They thought
it a good omen for the prisoners.
Tuesday morning the governor was closeted with Assistant District
Attorney Ranney. At lunch time he informed reporters that he had
seen 102 witnesses besides those from the Plymouth trial. That day,
however, the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti was overshadowed by the
noontime news from the Summer White House in the Black Hills of South
Dakota where Calvin Coolidge had just announced: “I do not choose to
run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” Boston political gossips
at once recalled how the vacillating governor had made himself
nationally known as Law and Order Coolidge by what seemed, at least
outside Massachusetts, to have been his firmness in handling the 1919
police strike. Perhaps there would be a Law and Order Fuller now,
another President from the Bay State.[29]
The week between the submission of the Lowell Committee’s report
and the governor’s decision was one of vexing suspense that added
to the growth of Sacco-Vanzetti militancy all over the world. Even
the apolitical sports-minded newspaper readers in America, who had
remained so far indifferent, could no longer restrain their curiosity
as to the outcome of this mortal contest. Life and death, the
seven-year issue with all its implications, now lay in the stubby
hands of the ex-bicycle mechanic.
Correspondents from the various newspaper services had come to Boston
and set up their headquarters in the State House press gallery next
to the balcony entrance of the House of Representatives. For the
first time in Massachusetts history permission was given to run in
telegraph wires from outside. The news for the first three days,
however, was scant: the names of a few last witnesses, the rare
glimpse of the governor, a brush-off remark from Hard-boiled Herman.
Time seemed out of focus. The newsmen waited in the corridor outside
the executive chambers, wandered through the Hall of Flags, made
notes in the House balcony under the suspended Sacred Cod totem.
Wednesday, August 3, broke fair in Boston, with the fog bank receding
along the line of harbor islands. Fuller put in a brief appearance at
the State House, told the reporters he would give them the news at
8:30 that night, then announced he was leaving town to put the last
touches on his decision. Actually he went no farther than a suite at
the Ritz-Carlton at the other end of the Public Gardens, where he
shut himself up with a Boston newspaperman, Edward Whiting, who did
the actual writing, since the self-made governor was not capable of
such sustained literary effort.
Just after dusk a crowd of several hundred gathered across the street
from the State House, looking up at the five lighted windows in the
left wing of the otherwise darkened building until dispersed by the
police. At the Hanover Street defense headquarters the two littered
rooms were filled with tense silent figures. Mary Donovan sat by the
telephone to answer calls in English, Moro took over when the caller
was Italian. Frankfurter, in his shirtsleeves, squatted on a bale of
papers. Gardner Jackson kept dashing to and from the State House.
Most of the others were Italians from the North End. The thin light
from an unshaded fixture drew out the lettering on the wall posters
in bas-relief: JUSTICE IS DEAD in German; CALVARY OF SACCO AND
VANZETTI in Italian; a Mexican poster demanding LIBERTY AND JUSTICE.
At the State House a score of reporters were waiting at the
double-doored entrance to the executive chambers when Fuller finally
reappeared at 8:26, his plump face set and unsmiling above his
starched collar. He brushed past, impervious to questions. At 8:50 he
reappeared, and read out a statement he had scribbled on the back of
an envelope:
“I am very sorry not to oblige you with an interview. I can
truthfully say that I am very tired and I trust the report will
speak for itself. I would prefer not to indulge in any supplementary
statement at this time.” He promised that copies of the decision
would be distributed at 9:30.
Nine-thirty passed into ten, with still no sign from behind the
closed doors. There was the same impersonal sense of tension as
when a jury is out, the same unreality of the immediate moment. The
reporters walked up and down the darkened echoing corridors, talking
and smoking. Most of the crowd driven away from the State House had
drifted downtown to Newspaper Row. Hundreds gathered in front of the
_Globe_ and _Post_ buildings to watch the blackboard bulletins. It
was a strangely quiet crowd. A _Globe_ reporter looking down from
the second floor at the upturned heads wondered how anyone could
tell what they were thinking. The director of Station WEEI had held
an announcer ready all evening to go on the air with a special
bulletin; now that the closing hour of eleven was approaching, he
debated whether he should shut down. Mary Donovan and Moro at defense
headquarters kept repeating over the telephone, “No news, Nothing
yet.” Louis Stark, pacing the State House corridor, began to doubt
whether he would be able to meet the _Times’_ 11:30 deadline.
Finally at 11:25 the double doors opened and Hard-boiled Herman
appeared with several clerks who carried copies of the decision
in sealed envelopes, each addressed with the name of a newspaper.
Stark sprinted for the marble stairs, ripping open his envelope and
flipping through the pages:
_I believe ... Sacco and Vanzetti ... had a fair trial._
The telegraph operator was still holding the wire open to the Times
city room. “_Bulletin_,” Stark shouted as he reached the door of the
press gallery. “They die!”
The words flashed across the world from the ten telegraph wires.
Within minutes they were chalked up on the _Globe_ bulletin board,
broadcast to New England by the waiting WEEI announcer, headlined on
the morning editions that would shortly whip off the presses.
The morning papers carried the full text of the decision. Fuller
announced that he had set himself three tasks: to see whether the
jury trial was fair, whether the accused were entitled to a new
trial, and whether they were guilty or not guilty. Of Thayer he wrote:
_I see no evidence of prejudice in his conduct of the trial. That
he had an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused after
hearing the evidence is natural and inevitable._
The governor did not consider that any of the supplementary motions
presented valid reasons for granting a new trial. He gave no weight
to Madeiros’ confession, nor was he impressed with the latter’s
knowledge of the South Braintree crime. His conclusion and, he added,
the unanimous conclusion of his advisory committee was that Sacco and
Vanzetti were guilty.
Warden Hendry kept the news from the prisoners until the next morning
when Thompson arrived with Rosina and Felicani. While the other two
stood behind him with bent heads, Thompson quietly told the prisoners
that they must die. Sacco appeared unruffled. “I told you so,” he
called to Vanzetti in the next cell. Vanzetti seemed stunned. “I just
can’t believe it,” was all he said. Madeiros said nothing at all.
After Rosina had left, Sacco sat down and wrote an open letter to his
“Friends and Comrades.” Over the years his neat script had become
increasingly stylized, and in this moment the copperplate regularity
of his lines could have served for a formal invitation:
_From the death cell we are just inform from the defense committee
that the governor Fuller he has desede to kill us Ag. the 10th we our
not suprised for this news because we know the capitalist class hard
without any mercy the good soldiers of the rivolutions. We are proud
for death and fall as all the good anarchist can fall. It is up to
you know o, brothers comrades! as I have tell you yesterday that your
only that can save us because we have never had faith at the governor
for we have always know that the gov. Fuller—Thayer and Katzmann are
the murders._
Vanzetti’s blasting reaction found its outlet in a scarcely legible
scrawl, the direct opposite of Sacco’s passive acceptance:
_Governor Alvan T. Fuller is a murderor as Thayer, Katzmann, the
State perjurors and all the other. He sake hand with me like a
brother, make me believe he was honestly intentioned and that he had
not sent the three carbarn-boy to have no escuse to save us._
_Now, igoring and denia all the proofs of or innocence and insult us
and murder us we are innocent._
_This is the way of plutocracy against liberty, against the people.
Revenge our blood. We die for Anarcy. Long life Anarcy._
Yet by afternoon Vanzetti had so recovered himself that he was able
to give Mrs. Evans a remarkably detached view of Fuller.
_We are his opposite all at all and all in all, while our enemies are
affines to him in all-most everything. Consciousely, subconsciousely
and unconsciousely he cannot escape to be tremendously influenced and
predisposed against us. But he gave me the impression he is sincere;
had made great efforts to learn the truth and was not settled, at
least deliberately, against us, before to begin his inquiry._
_If he is sending us to death, it does not matter how honestly the
Governor can be convinced of our guiltiness, his conviction will not
make us guilty—we are and will remain innocent._
Fuller’s adverse decision was for Thompson the end of the road. There
might be hasty appeals to the state and federal supreme courts, all
the delaying paraphernalia of certiorari and habeas corpus, with at
best the addition of a few extra weeks to lives he was convinced
were forfeit. Thompson felt a profounder sense of failure than
Moore’s, for his world had failed—that pleasantly circumscribed
world of Boston into which he had fitted so easily. He had believed
that the venerable institutions of Massachusetts to which he gave
his allegiance would render justice even to two obscure foreigners,
would rectify the aberrations of a prejudiced trial and the blind
partisanship of a bigoted judge. Instead, the institutions had
savaged these men, and now were preparing to annihilate them. In
these institutions and in the comfortable society they guarded he
could no longer believe. A Harvard class day would never seem the
same to him again, a Sunday sermon at the sedately familiar Church of
the Redeemer would never sound the same. The brick fronts of Beacon
Hill would have lost their mellowness. A traditionalist still, in
the years that followed he faced Boston and complained of the lack
of a responsible aristocracy that could restrain what he called “the
shopkeeper’s mentality.” He tried to compensate for his disbelief in
his class by participating in liberal causes, taking the stump at
elections, speaking at legislative hearings and in the Massachusetts
Judicial Council. But the gesture had lost its meaning, the spark had
gone from his life.
He had already told Frankfurter that he would not continue. On
receiving the news of the governor’s decision, he and Ehrmann sent
the Defense Committee their formal resignation, explaining:
_We feel that the defendants are now entitled to have the benefit of
the judgment of counsel who can take up the case untrammelled by the
commitments of the past and less disturbed than we are by a sense of
injustice._
Frankfurter at once telephoned Arthur Hill to say that he had a most
serious matter to discuss with him. They lunched at the Somerset
Club, then crossed Beacon Street and sat on a bench on the Common
overlooking the Frog Pond. Frankfurter asked Hill if he would
undertake the final appeal of the Sacco-Vanzetti case to the Supreme
Court. Hill did not share Thompson’s belief in the men’s innocence,
but he did believe they had not had a fair trial. He felt he could
not refuse to make the effort on their behalf.
First of all he persuaded Elias Field and Richard Evarts to join
him as junior counsel. Then on the morning of August 5 he called
a conference in his office of Frankfurter, Ehrmann, and Musmanno.
It was a conference of desperation, as Hill, beneath his assured,
impervious exterior, was well aware. So it was felt by everyone
present except for the buoyant Musmanno. There were only a few legal
maneuvers left, and time was running out like quicksilver from a
broken thermometer. Hastily they evolved a program. They would file
a motion in Dedham for a new trial and revocation of sentence on the
grounds of Judge Thayer’s prejudice. They would request Chief Justice
Hall of the Superior Court to assign a judge other than Thayer to
hear the motion. They would petition Governor Fuller for a stay of
execution. They would file a motion in the Supreme Court for a writ
of error, a writ of habeas corpus, and a stay of execution.
Musmanno arrived next morning at the clerk of court’s office with a
sheaf of affidavits from Mrs. Bernkopf, Mrs. Rantoul, Frank Sibley,
George Crocker, Robert Benchley, Professor Richardson, and Chief
Gallivan. He had also dug up a new witness of the South Braintree
crime, Candido Di Bona, whose peculiar version of the event was
that the driver of the Buick had been a gray-haired man, the two
men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence had been about
eighteen years old, and that there had been a fourth man wearing a
soldier’s uniform and carrying a rifle. Hill and Field, arguing on
Thayer’s unsuitability, got nowhere at all with Chief Justice Hall,
who retired into legal phraseology to observe that “precedent and
established practice require that the said motions in the said cause
should be heard by the judge who had presided at the original trial
thereof.” He then directed that the motions should be heard before
Judge Thayer on Monday, August 8.
* * * * *
Musmanno had more to think of than his affidavits as he drove to
Dedham on that August Saturday, for the morning papers were splashed
with accounts of a series of bombings that had wrecked four New York
subway and elevated stations the night before. Between 11:17 and
11:37 tremendous explosions had occurred at Times Square, and on
Fourth Avenue at Thirty-third, at Twenty-eighth and at Twenty-third
streets, destroying surface kiosks, blowing sidewalks into the
air, and shattering windows a hundred yards away. Only one person
was killed, but numbers were injured. The same night the Emmanuel
Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was bombed, as was the house of
the mayor of Baltimore. None of the bombers was ever discovered—in
that respect the police kept their record unblemished.
Two days later bombs did heavy damage in Utica, New York. News
came—undoubtedly exaggerated—of a wave of bombing overseas. Whether
or not the bombings were the result of Governor Fuller’s decision,
a renewal of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, most Americans
thought that they were. That week Massachusetts businessmen took
out two hundred million dollars’ worth of bomb and riot insurance.
Boston police were placed on a bomb alert, all leaves and vacations
were canceled, and the police commissioner ordered three hundred
rapid-fire guns for the riot squad. Filene’s sent John Dever away on
an indefinite paid vacation.
* * * * *
The full text of the Lowell Committee report was published in the
Sunday papers of August 7. Those concerned with the case spent the
better part of the day analyzing it. It was a curiously ambiguous
document. In regard to Sacco it concluded:
_The Committee are of the opinion that Sacco was guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt. In reaching this conclusion they are aware that it
involves a disbelief in the evidence of his alibi at Boston, but in
view of all the evidence they do not believe he was there that day._
As for Vanzetti:
_The alibi ... is decidedly weak. One of the witnesses, Rosen, seems
to the Committee to have been shown by the cross-examination to be
lying at the trial; another, Mrs. Brini, had sworn to an alibi for
him in the Bridgewater case, and two more witnesses did not seem
certain of the date until they had talked it over.... Four persons
testified that they had seen him.... His face is much more unusual
and more easily remembered, than that of Sacco. On the whole, we are
of the opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt._
What had the Committee meant by the phrase “on the whole” which
seemed in itself to imply reservations about “reasonable doubt”? Did
the Committee still feel some residual doubt in regard to Vanzetti?
That was just one of the enigmas of the report. As for Madeiros:
_His ignorance of what happened is extraordinary, and much of it
cannot be attributed to a desire to shield his associates, for it had
no connection therewith.... Indeed, in his whole testimony there is
only one fact that can be checked ... his statement that after the
murder the car stopped to ask the way at the house of Mrs. Hewins. As
this house was not far from ... where Madeiros subsequently lived, he
might very well have heard the fact mentioned._
With Grant a judge and Lowell a historian, the committee’s ignorance
of the law was at times astonishing:
_The impression has gone abroad that Madeiros confessed committing
the murder at South Braintree. Strangely enough, this is not really
the case. He confesses to being present, but not to being guilty of
murder.... If he were tried, his own confession, if wholly believed,
would not be sufficient for a verdict of murder in the first degree._
According to the law, of course, an accessory to a murder is equally
guilty.
As for the trial:
_The Committee have seen no evidence sufficient to make them believe
that the trial was unfair. On the contrary, they are of the opinion
that the Judge endeavored, and endeavored successfully, to secure
for the defendants a fair trial; that the District Attorney was not
in any way guilty of unprofessional behavior, that he conducted
the prosecution vigorously but not improperly; and that the jury,
a capable, impartial and unprejudiced body, did, as they were
instructed, “well and truly try and true deliverance make.”_
However, in a measured way, the committee censured Judge Thayer:
_From all that has come to us we are forced to conclude that the
Judge was indiscreet in conversation with outsiders during the trial.
He ought not to have talked about the case off the bench, and doing
so was a grave break of official decorum. But we do not believe that
he used some of the expressions attributed to him, and we think that
there is exaggeration in what the persons to whom he spoke remember.
Furthermore, we believe that such indiscretions in conversation did
not affect his conduct at the trial or the opinions of the jury, who
indeed, so stated to the Committee._
Judge Grant felt more troubled than his colleagues, as he indicated
later in his autobiography:
_It had fallen to me, at the request of my two associates, to examine
Judge Webster Thayer when he appeared before us at the State House.
The evidence that he had been grossly indiscreet in his remarks
off the bench was cumulative. I was amazed and incensed that any
Massachusetts Judge could have been so garrulous. That he had talked
he did not deny, but he declared under oath with convincing emotion
that several of the accusations against him—notably that of having
rehearsed a part of his charge to the jury—were untrue. When we came
to consider the language of our Report, I was asked, as the one who
ought to know how a judge should conduct himself, to suggest the
words of censure. They were used, and if my associates felt a shade
less outraged than I by his unseemly conduct, it was from a due sense
of perspective._
Most of the new evidence that the defense had unearthed appeared
to the committee inconsequential. The cap with the lining Gallivan
had torn was dismissed as a trivial matter. Gould’s evidence added
nothing new. Whatever affidavits Proctor may have signed later, “It
must be assumed that the jury understood the meaning of plain English
words, that if Captain Proctor was of the opinion that the bullet had
been fired through Sacco’s pistol he would have said so, instead of
using the language which meant that it might have been fired through
that pistol.” This, of course, was an assumption Judge Thayer himself
failed to make in his charge to the jury.
The committee did not mention Major Goddard’s report, but from
an inspection of the Van Amburgh parallel photographs they were
“inclined to believe” that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol.
They were impressed by its similarity to the obsolete cartridges
found on Sacco. Thompson’s contention that this bullet was a
substitute they considered preposterous:
_Such an accusation, devoid of proof, may be dismissed without
further comment, save that the case of the defendants must be rather
desperate on its merits when counsel feel it necessary to resort to a
charge of this kind._
They found it a telling fact that the two men were armed when they
were arrested. “Carrying fully loaded firearms, where they can be
most quickly drawn,” they observed, “can hardly be common among
people whose views are pacifist and opposed to all violence.” That
Sacco could have put his pistol in his belt and forgotten about it
they found incredible.[30] Nor did they feel that the defendants’
radicalism explained all their lies. Lottie Packard’s whirlwind
remarks, for all their flights, impressed them. “The woman is
eccentric, not unimpeachable in conduct,” they concluded, “but the
Committee believe that in this case her testimony is well worth
consideration.”
* * * * *
To the militants in Europe the reports of Governor Fuller and of the
Lowell Committee set the official seal on what even the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_ now referred to as a “political judicial murder.” Letters
and cables to Fuller, to the Secretary of State, to the White
House, poured in from overseas, a certain lack of information and
spontaneity apparent in the fact that some of them were addressed to
President Harding, four years dead. The Vatican expressed its hope
that an appeal to the United States Supreme Court “may open the way
to justice or clemency.” Former French Premier Edouard Herriot asked
for a “measure of clemency.” _Le Soir_ reacted to the decisions “with
a sentiment of profound horror.” A past era echoed dimly when the
Veterans of the Commune forwarded their protest. In Paris the police
had forbidden all meetings, but in the Bois de Vincennes just outside
the city a group of five thousand bannered militants paraded with
linked arms behind Luigia Vanzetti. Luigia, passing through on her
way to America, carried a banner reading: PARISIAN PEOPLE, SAVE MY
BROTHER AND SACCO. THANKS.