Extra guards were dispatched to the Summer White House in the Dakota
hills. Federal buildings were placed under guard. The Army announced
plans to move troops from Fort Meyer, Virginia, to Washington.
Machine guns were posted around Fuller’s summer home at Little Boar’s
Head. Harvard’s buildings were guarded. Yet Boston, on the Sunday
the Lowell Report was made public, seemed calm, almost indifferent.
Alfred Baker Lewis for the Defense Committee and Harry Canter for the
Communists had each obtained a permit to hold a meeting at designated
trees on the Charles Street Mall. On the Tremont Street side a band
in the Parkman Bandstand offered rival attractions. Between five and
ten thousand persons gathered on the Common that afternoon, no great
number for a city with a surrounding population of over two million.
Some were there who made a habit of sauntering on a summer Sunday
afternoon, others came from curiosity or to listen to the band. The
genuine sympathizers, mostly from the North End, were probably in
a minority. Nevertheless Superintendent of Police Michael Crowley
disapproved of any such meetings, and his feelings were reinforced by
the bombings of two days before. A plump set-faced man in a panama
with a turned-down brim, he waddled up the Mall to warn both Baker
and Canter that if any disparaging remarks were made about Governor
Fuller or the Lowell Committee, that would end the meetings.
In no time at all, Mary Donovan, standing on a platform with a banner
reading “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS?”—JUDGE
THAYER, proclaimed that Governor Fuller was a murderer. Crowley,
raising his fat hand, announced that the meeting was suspended. Four
mounted police edged their horses in and began scattering the crowd.
Mary Donovan protested wildly: “This meeting must go on. I will speak
for Sacco and Vanzetti. They are innocent men! They must not be
murdered!” Crowley, in an attempt to be fatherly to a fellow Celt,
observed that _bastard_ was no word for a lady to use. It was no word
for a judge to use either, Mary Donovan snapped.
As the core of the crowd began to mill about the speakers’ stands,
while the others moved away, the bearded Edward James bobbed up,
scarlet with indignation, to stutter: “Down with the police! Get at
them, men!” After a scuffle four men were arrested, including Canter
and a bloody-nosed James. Next day in police court James, in the true
revolutionary tradition, refused to recognize the judge or reply to
charges. He was fined seventy-five dollars, which he refused to pay
until the judge offered him the alternative of ninety days on Deer
Island. At first James announced that he was going to be a martyr.
Then, as the glow of the barricades faded, he paid up.
With the executions only three days off, the Defense Committee now
appealed for a hundred thousand Americans to march on Boston and take
part in a death watch at the State House and at the State Prison:
_We call the leaders of American letters, science, art, education and
social reform to lead the peaceful demonstration at the Charlestown
jail. Come by train and boat, come on foot or in your car! Come
to Boston! Let all the roads of the nation converge on Beacon
Hill! Come armed with a black band on your sleeve, come armed with
inextinguishable faith that Sacco and Vanzetti must and shall live._
Few people in Massachusetts failed to read the Lowell Report the
Sunday of its appearance. The Defense Committee denounced it at once,
the Communists derided it, but its effect—with the potency of the
Lowell name behind it—was to settle the matter for a large number of
Back Bay and Cambridge middle-of-the-roaders. “Most of the serious
and earnest-minded people who had misgivings as to the original
verdict in Judge Thayer’s court,” the _Herald_ editorialized, “have
had these dissipated by the calm and dispassionate recital of the
evidence by President Lowell and his associates.” Dr. Morton Prince
said he could see no escape from the report’s conclusions. Bishop
Lawrence, who was not bashful about treading with angels, wrote to
Fuller:
_You will, I am sure, allow me to express to you my admiration of the
way in which you have done your duty in the Sacco-Vanzetti case._
_You have been wise, patient, dignified and courageous, worthy of the
highest traditions of the Commonwealth._
Medical Examiner Magrath announced that he was now “morally certain”
of the two men’s guilt, an opinion he had undoubtedly held from the
beginning.[31]
Chief Justice of the United States William Howard Taft, whose
knowledge of the case was slight but whose Wigmorish opinion was that
the propaganda “had been created by large contributions of female and
male fools and had been circulated through all the communistic and
criminal classes the world over,” sent congratulatory notes to Lowell
and Grant later in the year, writing to the latter:
_Now that all is over I can properly ... thank you for accepting the
task of serving on the Governor’s committee of advisors in that case.
It was a thankless task and required courage and sacrifice to do it.
You and your colleagues did it and did it well. It concerned the
welfare of society and the world in an unusual way. It is remarkable
how Frankfürter with his article was able to present to so large
a body of readers a perverted view of the facts and then through
the world-wide conspiracy of communism spread it to so many, many
countries. Our law schools lent themselves to the vicious propaganda.
The utter lack of substance in it all is shown by the event. It was a
bubble and was burst by the courage of the Governor and his advisors._
Robert Lincoln O’Brien regarded the Lowell report in the light of an
umpire’s decision at a Longwood Cricket Club tennis match:
_To those of us who felt that the need of some further inquiry
existed, even after the Supreme Judicial Court had ruled that
the case had been properly concluded, it seemed the part of
good sportsmanship to accept the findings of Mr. Lowell and his
associates, particularly since we could find no three men in all the
world—were we to select them ourselves—in whose findings we would
have more complete confidence._
But there were others, conservatives like Waldo Cook, the editor
of the Springfield _Republican_, who found the report staggering.
Speaking of its mention of Thayer’s grave breach of judicial decorum,
Cook wrote: “If it was grave, it must taint irretrievably in the
record the Sacco-Vanzetti case for all time.” The New York _Times_
questioned the phrase “on the whole” and wondered “whether the
ends of justice could not better have been obtained in some other
way.” Pulitzer’s New York _World_, which under its chief editorial
writer, Walter Lippmann, had consistently taken the side of Sacco
and Vanzetti, gave its entire editorial page to an editorial “Doubts
That Will Not Down.” Heywood Broun, as columnist for the _World_,
announced bitterly that “if all the venerable college presidents in
the country tottered forward and pronounced the men guilty they would
still be innocent.” Broun—reacting to what he considered the general
apathy about the case in the United States—became so violent in his
comments on President Lowell’s throwing the switch and Harvard as
Hangman’s House that Pulitzer finally suspended his columns.
On opinion overseas, even conservative opinion, the Lowell Report had
almost no effect.
* * * * *
On Monday morning, August 8, in the Pemberton Square Courthouse,
Supreme Court Justice Sanderson listened to Thompson—now merely a
witness—testify that the right of the defendants had been violated
by Judge Thayer’s prejudice. The justice denied the application for
a writ of error and stay of execution. At Dedham in the afternoon,
when Judge Thayer opened his special session he found himself in the
anomalous position of ruling on his own prejudice. The courthouse
was again heavily guarded and the public barred from the courtroom,
although Sheriff Capen made no difficulties about admitting Rosina,
Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Henderson, and other friends. The prisoners
themselves were not present.
Thayer remained stubbornly vulnerable and Hill did not spare him. To
the latter’s passionate request that he step down from the bench he
observed impassively that the chief justice had assigned him and he
was there to hear the motion.
Hill’s anger vibrated through the open-windowed courtroom: “Do you
think you can sit on the case and consider the issues? It is beyond
human power to do. No man is so wise, clear-headed and dispassionate
that he can sit on the question whether he was actuated by prejudice,
and it is not fair to ask him. It should be before some other man,
not only because of the welfare of the defendants, the welfare of the
bench, the welfare of the administration of justice, but the welfare
of Your Honor himself.”
In answer to the motions for a new trial, Thayer ruled that according
to Massachusetts law he had no jurisdiction to grant one, once
sentence had been passed. As to the motion for a revocation of
sentence and stay of execution, he agreed to accept Hill’s affidavits
and listen to his arguments. With chill and condescending politeness
Hill, enumerating the affidavits, pointed out that Judge Thayer’s
state of mind at the trial and afterward disqualified him from acting
as a judge. Hill insisted that in all the judge’s rulings as well as
in his actions off the bench he had shown prejudice.
Thayer stared fixedly at Hill, his eyes hard and bright, a thin glow
behind his waxen pallor. When the lawyer had finished he began to
speak, his voice more charged with feeling than ever it had been
before in that familiar room:
“I agreed and always insisted with the full force of my nature that
no matter what race or religion, conservative or radical, conformist
or nonconformist was entitled to a fair and impartial trial and as my
mind goes back over seven years of lawyers contesting every point, I
recall that the case was taken on two occasions to the Supreme Court
and the court dealt with two hundred sixty exceptions and ... did not
leave one exception.
“That I am willing to be judged by—but prejudice—there isn’t any now
and there wasn’t at any time. I do this now as it is the only way
a judge can plead his own case. For seven years I have been in a
position where I could not say a word. This is the only time I could
say anything.”
The arguments were brief. Attorney General Arthur Reading for the
Commonwealth characterized Hill’s as “the most preposterous ever
heard from a learned lawyer.” Thayer at the end of the afternoon
announced that he would reserve his decision on the second motion.
Then, early Tuesday morning, he telephoned in from his home in
Worcester that the revocation of sentence and stay of sentence
were denied. From this and from Justice Sanderson’s ruling, Hill
at once filed exceptions. Privately, however, he admitted he had
given up hope. Only the young inexperienced Musmanno could find any
encouragement in the further manipulation of the bastard Latin legal
phrases. Certiorari, coram nobis—they were like the last moves in a
chess game when a player has only a pawn to interpose between his
king and his opponent’s queen.
That afternoon for the first time pickets appeared before the State
House, a half-dozen at the start, men in shirtsleeves and women in
work dresses, wearing black armbands and carrying placards denouncing
the imminent executions. Defiantly they marched back and forth,
their numbers growing to a dozen, a score, and finally to over a
hundred, watched with jeering curiosity by a much larger crowd from
the other side of the street near the Shaw Memorial. News of the
picketing spread through the State House. Governor Fuller stepped
into the council chamber briefly to look down from the oval-topped
window on the sweaty marchers. The picketing was the beginning of
the legend that in the last days of the case the Massachusetts State
House was zoned by a constantly replenished line of writers, artists,
and intellectuals. Some such did find their places in the line—John
Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others—and
were arrested and taken to the Joy Street Station on the other side
of Beacon Hill, but most of the picketers were foreign-born men and
women from the garment district.
Harry Canter led the pickets the first day, encouraged by Alfred
Baker Lewis. The Defense Committee, increasingly angry at the
Communists’ infiltrating efforts, held aloof. Fred Beal, a young and
dedicated Communist whose radicalism dated from the Lawrence strike,
was astonished at the coldness of his reception when he turned up
at Hanover Street. “Why can’t you leave Sacco and Vanzetti alone?”
Secretary Moro asked him bitterly. “Why can’t you let them die in
peace? You people don’t care for Sacco and Vanzetti. Let them burn;
it will be better for the cause.”
As the picketing continued and the watching crowds increased, Police
Captain James McDevitt was sent down from the Joy Street station. In
the pattern that would be followed in dealing with the subsequent
picketings of the State House, he approached the marchers and gave
them seven minutes to disperse. When they did not, he carted off
thirty-nine of them to the station. Thirty-one of those arrested were
named in the Boston papers. So far as their names are any indication,
twenty were Jews and three Italians.
The general strike called for that afternoon brought out only a few
hundred men and women in Boston, most of whom found their way to the
line in front of the State House. In New York almost 100,000 walked
out, the majority of them garment workers. Overseas there was an
almost hushed expectancy. Sacco and Vanzetti dominated the European
headlines. The Atlantic cables continued to be weighted with protests
that included such noted names as that of Lafayette’s great-grandson.
At the Charlestown prison Western Union and Postal Telegraph
installed eighteen wires, four for direct communication overseas. The
area within half a mile of the prison was declared a dead zone. The
streets were barred and Prison Point Bridge closed.
Early in the evening Vanzetti sent for Thompson, who spent two hours
in the death house talking with the prisoners. Sacco was now in the
twenty-third day of his hunger strike. Vanzetti had not eaten for
five days. Thompson, on leaving, met a group of reporters at the
prison gate and told them that the prisoners “continue to assert
their innocence, do not express any hope, remain courageous, and feel
they are dying for a principle.”
Would Governor Fuller grant the prisoners an additional respite
to give Justice Sanderson and Thayer time to decide on Hill’s
exceptions? That was the question on the morning of August 10. Fuller
reached his State House office at 9:30 and at once summoned the
members of his council.
At almost the same time the executioner for New York, New Jersey,
and Massachusetts, Robert Elliott, arrived with his famous black
bag at the South Station. When Musmanno went to the prison later in
the morning with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, he noticed
guards setting up machine guns on the brick ramp running along the
top of the prison wall. As he reached the death cells and began to
talk to the men through the bars, he could hear the workmen tinkering
with the electric chair in the next room, and he sensed the sudden
vibration of the floor as they switched on the current. Vanzetti told
him not to mind, that the men had been working on it since the day
before. Sacco again refused to sign any petition, telling Musmanno:
“They are going to crucify me, crucify both of us. They have been
driving nails into us for seven years. Let’s have it over.” Vanzetti
signed willingly enough, then inscribed his copy of _The Rise of
American Civilization_ and offered it to Musmanno, who refused
it, saying he would wait until Vanzetti got out. From Charlestown
Musmanno drove with Hill—as did Thompson and a Washington lawyer,
John Finerty, later in the day—thirty miles north to Beverly where
United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had his
summer home. All four men knew that if Fuller failed to act, the only
other hope for Sacco and Vanzetti was in an appeal to the federal
courts. Holmes met his visitors on the porch, listened to them
gravely, even regretfully, but held that he had not the legal right
to intervene in the internal judicial processes of Massachusetts.
“You don’t have to convince me that the atmosphere in which these men
were tried precluded a fair trial,” he told them, “but that is not
enough to give me as a Federal judge jurisdiction. If I listened to
you any more I would do it,” he continued. “I must not do it.” With
that the old justice turned on his heel and went into the house.
Hill, following his rebuff, went on to hunt out Judge George Anderson
of the United States Circuit Court. After the 1920 Palmer raids Judge
Anderson had released the Boston aliens rounded up by the Bureau of
Investigation and had castigated the Department of Justice. But this
time Judge Anderson, like Holmes, held that he could not interfere in
state affairs.
Fuller, determined to expand the collective responsibility for his
decision, sent for all the Commonwealth’s former attorneys general.
Seven of them arrived before midday at his office for consultation.
His council began its own deliberations after lunch and continued
all afternoon. Meanwhile the pickets with their black armbands and
placards, chanting their slogans, again marched in front of the State
House. Captain McDevitt gave his dispersal warning, and after seven
minutes the police moved in. Those pickets who did not scatter were
taken to the Joy Street Station. This time the watching crowd showed
itself much more hostile. There were mocking shouts of “Hang ’em!”
as the pickets were hustled up Joy Street. They were booked at the
station, and those who did not have the twenty-five dollars bail
money were bailed out by Mrs. Evans and her friends.
A solid blue line of police extended along the cobbled paving in
front of the Charlestown prison. Prison police, State Police,
Metropolitan Police, Boston and Cambridge police, had all been called
out—the largest force ever assembled in Boston’s history. On Prison
Point Bridge a platoon of firemen uncoiled hoses and stood ready to
water down any mob trying to force the barriers. Below the bridge, in
the slimy tidal inlet known as the Miller River, the police launch
_Argus_ chugged up and down with a machine gun at its bow.
Inside the blank-walled death house Madeiros and Sacco lay on their
cots in listless inanition. Some days earlier Sacco had begun a
letter to his son, but he no longer felt the strength to continue
with it. Vanzetti wrote brief farewell notes to Mrs. Winslow, Mrs.
Codman, Mrs. Henderson, and Mrs. Evans, whom he now addressed as
“Comrade.” His one enduring regret as the hours slipped away was that
he would not be able to see his sister Luigia again. Late in the
afternoon Madeiros’ mother and sister arrived from Providence, but
he received them indifferently. The old Portuguese woman collapsed
on the threshold of the death house and had to be helped from the
building.
At the cluttered Hanover Street rooms there was the same penumbral
atmosphere that there had been the night of Fuller’s decision, but
with the tenseness giving way by almost imperceptible degrees to
lassitude. Mary Donovan answered the telephone, the shaggy Jackson
scribbled notes, Felicani bent forward under the poster proclaiming
JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE, Rosina Sacco sat in a corner, silent except
for an occasional dry cough while from time to time she abstractedly
crumpled bits of paper. During the evening Frankfurter bustled in and
out on obscure errands, his eyes deep and compassionate behind his
rimless oval pince-nez. Hill and Joseph Moro appeared briefly and
spoke a few encouraging words.
After spending the afternoon with his council, Fuller broke off for a
meal, then resumed the sitting at 7:30. An hour later Hill appeared
in the Council Chamber and pleaded and argued for two hours, begging
the councilors and the governor not to destroy the subject matter
of litigation while it was still in the hands of the courts. After
he left, the councilors buzzed among themselves. Still the governor
could not make up his mind.
Meanwhile the slim, gray-haired, twisted-mouthed executioner arrived
at the prison with the official witnesses. As usual, refreshments had
been prepared. The prison officers’ clubroom now held the largest
group of reporters ever assembled in Massachusetts for an execution.
By ten o’clock the three prisoners had been notified that they were
to die at midnight.
At defense headquarters Rosina suddenly fell forward in a faint. Mary
Donovan picked her up, took her away in a taxi, and left her at a
friend’s house in the neighborhood. When she returned she sat down
again by the telephone, and, as if she were thinking aloud, suddenly
said: “What if the finger of God should stay this execution tonight!”
Then she picked up the receiver and in a broken voice called Thompson
to ask what steps should be taken to claim the two men’s bodies.
It was 11:24 before Fuller finally made up his official mind. With
the concurrence of his council he decided to grant the prisoners a
twelve-day respite “to afford the courts an opportunity to complete
the consideration of the proceedings.” Captain Charles Beaupré of
the State Police gave the word to the reporters outside the council
chamber. Secretary William Reed telephoned the news to Warden Hendry.
Hendry was pleased, and showed it. Despite his meaty butcher’s face,
he was a good-hearted man who hated executions. With the copied
reprieve in his hand he hurried down the long cement corridor to the
death house, calling out as he reached the threshold: “It’s all off,
boys!” The three men rose from their cots. Vanzetti gripped the bars
of the cell until his knuckles turned white. “I’m damn glad of that,”
he said shakily. “I’d like to see my sister before I die.”
Back at his office Hendry passed around cigars to the reporters and
witnesses while an unheeded assistant read out the formal wording of
the respite with all its whereases and know-ye-alls.
Not until a few minutes before midnight was the news of the respite
telephoned into the Hanover Street offices, yet when the announcement
came it caused no tremor, no babble of voices, only a relieving
quiet. Mary Donovan left without saying a word to go to Rosina.
Someone, who seemed to speak for everyone in the room, remarked: “We
have until the twenty-second. Well, that is something.”
Across the ocean it seemed for a moment as if the protesting voices
had won. _Pravda_ proclaimed:
_The mighty roar of protest from the Soviet Union, together with
the voice of the working classes the world over, forced even the
plutocratic American bourgeoisie to hesitate and maneuver._
In Berlin, _Die Rote Fahne_ announced triumphantly:
_The working millions and only they in the forefront of the battle
against class injustice have won the first victory. Sacco and
Vanzetti are provisionally rescued._
_L’Humanité_ rallied its readers with militant confidence:
_Now let us exact the liberty of the two martyrs._
In the United States there was a feeling that Fuller would now
commute the death sentences to life imprisonment, a course
recommended by the Springfield _Republican_. The New York _Times_
shared this opinion, observing four days after the respite:
_Honest and fair-minded people are still disputing about certain
aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but on our part there is virtual
unanimity of opinion. This is that the long delay in determining
the fate of the two men is a reproach to American justice. It is
something that is almost impossible to explain to foreigners._
Outside opposition and criticism had long since contracted the mood
of the Massachusetts community beyond reason. With each external
attack the community ranks closed in an emotional need—masquerading
as justice—to see Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This feeling was
reinforced by the bombing on August 15 of the East Milton home of
Dedham juror Lewis McHardy. The charge placed on the porch of his
two-story frame house at 463 Pleasant Street, exploded at 3:30 in the
morning. So great was the blast that little was left of the house but
the frame. Windows were shattered a quarter of a mile away. McHardy,
his wife, and three grown children were asleep on the second floor.
They were hurled out of bed and covered with debris, but somehow
managed to escape with only minor bruises.
If before the blowing up of the McHardy house there had been the
slightest chance of a commutation of sentence for Sacco and Vanzetti,
afterward there was none.[32]