that filled the world’s headlines. The author and journalist Isaac
Don Levine came on to Boston, convinced that a legal case could
be built around the issue of the Department of Justice files.
Perhaps Thompson might have inspected them in 1926 if he had been
more tactful in dealing with the tentative offer of the Bureau of
Investigation’s Boston branch. Since then Attorney General Sargent
had refused the defense any access to them. However, he offered to
forward them on request to Governor Fuller, the members of the Lowell
Committee, or the Commonwealth’s attorney general. Such a request
was never made. Fuller told reporters that the files would be no use
to him in forming his opinion inasmuch as he did not know what an
anarchist was.[33]
On August 10 the Defense Committee had sent a long telegram to United
States Attorney General Sargent claiming that “evidence exists in the
files of the Department of Justice, of the most competent character
which would clear Sacco and Vanzetti of the charge of payroll
robbery” and demanding that Sargent persuade President Coolidge
to intervene. The committee also repeated Thompson’s charge of “a
conspiracy between the employees of the Department of Justice and
Katzmann and Williams to wrongfully convict.” For Levine these claims
and charges were all very well, but in the unskilled hands of Gardner
Jackson and Mary Donovan and the Italians on the committee they would
lead to nothing. What was needed was a professional touch, “a fresh
corps of attorneys of national reputation,” publicity directed like
an arrow to the Department of Justice, names that carried weight.
For this purpose, and to the impotent fury of Mary Donovan, Levine
organized the Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti. He
himself kept in the background—the figurehead chairman was the _New
Republic’s_ editor, Robert Morss Lovett—but he brought to the new
organization his own energy and the names of noted acquaintances.
Glenn Frank, Zona Gale, Ida Tarbell, David Starr Jordan, Paul Kellogg
of the Survey, John Haynes Holmes, Oswald Garrison Villard, Alexander
Meiklejohn, Katharine Anne Porter, Jane Addams, William Hocking,
Waldo Cook, John Moors, Mary Woolley, and John Dewey were among those
endorsing the new committee.
In an open letter the committee announced its purpose, “to induce
the Federal Government to intervene in the Sacco and Vanzetti case
because of the grave charges which have been made against the
Department of Justice and because of the serious international
situation which has arisen.” During the last feverish week it raked
Washington with drumfire demands that the Department of Justice open
its files. The committee set up quarters in the Hotel Bellevue just
below the State House. There, in a long room on the second floor
known as Parlor D, a swarm of volunteer workers moved in with desks
and typewriters. For twenty hours a day letters and releases poured
out across the United States. Paul Kellogg sent over five hundred
telegrams to Americans of note. Almost everyone who arrived in
Boston, from Michael Gold to Edna St. Vincent Millay, now stopped off
at Parlor D rather than at the Hanover Street rooms. A new cluster
of lawyers gathered there: John Finerty of New York, who drew up the
final habeas corpus motion; former New York attorney general William
Schuyler Jackson; Arthur Garfield Hays, Francis Fisher Kane, and
Frank Walsh, who together would take up the matter of the Justice
Department files directly with Attorney General Sargent. The new
committee, unlike the Communists, managed to remain on speaking terms
with the old. Relations remained, in Levine’s words, “correct but
remote.”
* * * * *
The morning after the midnight respite, the three prisoners were
taken from the death house back to Cherry Hill. In spite of having
gone twenty-six days without food, Sacco was able to walk unaided
across the prison yard and up the iron staircase. When Musmanno
visited Sacco and Vanzetti in the barber shop later in the morning to
tell them that Justice Sanderson had allowed the exceptions to his
ruling to be taken to the full bench of the state supreme court, he
found them in a cheerful mood. Both seemed to absorb something of the
young Italian lawyer’s optimism. Although Sacco still refused to eat,
Vanzetti broke his five-day fast with a cup of coffee.
During the day the New England manager of the United Press, Henry
Minott, visited the prison and asked Vanzetti to write an open letter
explaining his side of the case. In his renewed optimism, Vanzetti
spent the next two days setting down what he well realized might be
his final thoughts. On August 12 his two-page letter to “Friends
and Comrades” was sent—in somewhat altered form—all over the world
through the wires of the United Press:
_There is nowhere, neither in earth nor in heavens, anything that can
makes the true untrue and the untrue true. By true I mean the truths
which altogether form the Universal truth. By truths I mean the real
conditions, faculties, essence of each one of those unnumerable,
relative things, all related and all evolving, which total sum forms
the Universal truth—which is what it is in itself and not at all what
anyone or ones—I, you, or all—believe or may think to know what it
is._...
II
_On Dec. 24, 1919, at 8.20_ A.M. _a robbery was attempted in
Bridgewater, Mass._
_In every minutes of the 24 hours of that day I was in Plymouth,
Mass., about 30 miles from the place where the above cited attempt to
robb occured. Furthermore, I had been never in such place before my
arrest on May 5th, 1920. In the very moment I was in the bakery shop
of Luigi Bastoni in Plymouth._
_On April 15, 1920, at 3_ P.M. _and highway robbery was commetted in
South Braintree and two men were killed_.
_In every minute of that day’s hours I have been in Plymouth, Mass.,
about 35 mile from the place of the crime; I have not yet been there,
that I know, and in the very minute of the crime I was speaking with
Mr. Corl, who was preparing his motorboat, on the Plymouth shore, to
be put in the water for the new fishing season (1920)._
_The above said is true and there is nothing that can makes it
untrue._
III
_At the Plymouth trial my counselor, Joe Vahey has betrayed me like
Iscariat betrayed Christ. He not even went to the place of the
crime to see how it happened what it was; what people were saying
and knowing. Out of hundreds of the eyes-witnesses of the crime who
came to look upon me for several consecutive days, on my arrest, in
Brockton police station, and all of them, safe one or two posetively
denied I was one of the bandit they saw. Mr. Vahey even failed to
produce a single one of those eyes-witnesses._
_Chief Steward, Katzmann, Judge Thayer succeeded to form a jury out
of a dozen hating, prejudiced, jelous, fearing, narrow-minded, vain,
excited and ferociouse provincial bigits, real lyncher in vest of
jurors._
_These our jurors may believe or feign to believe the most apparently
false Governament witnesses; they can disbelieve or feingn so, the
truthful 18 defence; witnesses and they can bring out a verdict of
guiltness against me._
_Judge Thayer can injoy in given me the most severe and cruel
sentence that I knew for such offense as the one of which I was
framed. He can insult me. All this may be a great sadisfaction for
the Plymouth Cordage Company, for Joe Vahey, Steward, Katzmann, &
Thayer._
_But I tell you that I am innocent of that crime and there is nothing
that can make me guilty of it._
IV
_Dedham trial.... Again Chief Steward, Persecutor Frederick Katzmann,
William, Judge Webster Thayer, Cheriff Copan, a Joshef Ross, Lola
Andrew, a Pelzner, twelf Linchers in vest of Jurors, a double verdict
of murder in first degree against us._...
_I tell you that I am innocent of such crime, and no State tools,
no perjuring harlots, crooks, criminals, venals, deficients, no
Steward, no Copan, no black-guards, no thief as Ross, no Katzmann,
no Williams, no sadism of jurors who had been ready to hang us
before the beginning of the trial, no verdict of guiltness, no death
sentence, no Webster Thayer, no Massachusetts, none of them nothing
of this, not even all of this can change an innocent man in a guilty
one._
_And I tell you that Nicola Sacco is neither a thief nor a highway
murderors and not even all of our enemies and of our case can make
this truth untrue._
V
_Judge Webster Thayer can denies us as many unrefutable and
undenyable appeals and doom us at his heart content._
_The Judges of the Massachusetts Supreme Judiciary Court can uphold
Thayer’s “decision” at their heart content._
_The Judges of the Supreme Court of the United State can uphold at
their heart content both Thayer and the Massachusetts Justice: we
will remain innocent._
Although Sacco had been able to walk from the death house to Cherry
Hill, his sturdy peasant body was beginning to give way. On the
thirtieth day of his strike Dr. McLaughlin, the prison physician,
told him flatly that the time had come when he must eat. To emphasize
this McLaughlin showed him a rubber tube three feet long, greased at
one end for insertion in the nose and with a rubber bulb for pumping
at the other end. Two guards had brought the men to the prison barber
shop, where Vanzetti, Musmanno, and Rosina were waiting. Rosina, as
she had done all along, begged her husband to eat. The others kept
urging him. Sliding the tube between his fingers, Dr. McLaughlin told
him: “You must eat. I can make you. I am stronger than you are.”
Sacco smiled, took a mug of soup that one of the guards had poured
out, lifted it, and said ironically, “Good health to all of you.”
* * * * *
The day after McHardy’s house was bombed, Hill appeared at the
heavily guarded Pemberton Square Courthouse to argue the exceptions
before the four available members of the Supreme Court. Impassively
the justices listened to the familiar argument that Judge Thayer
himself had become a defendant and that to allow him to hear any
question concerning Sacco and Vanzetti was to make him a judge in his
own case. Attorney General Reading countered that even if Thayer had
been privately prejudiced, that would not disqualify him unless his
prejudice had been communicated to the jury. The justices reserved
their decision.
Three mornings later Court Reporter Grabill walked down the inner
steps of the still-guarded courthouse with a copy of the Supreme
Court decision. He handed it to Musmanno and Hill, at the same time
informing the reporters: “Gentlemen, the exceptions in both cases
have been overruled.”
The Supreme Court had in effect reaffirmed that it had no
jurisdiction, that once sentence had been passed, a motion for a new
trial came too late. And a motion for revocation was the same thing
as a motion for a new trial. As for the prejudice of Judge Thayer:
_The judicial conduct of the trial judge in hearing and deciding
the motion based on his own alleged bias or prejudice need not be
discussed because neither the judge nor any of his associates had
jurisdiction to entertain the motion._
In brief there was nothing more to be expected from the courts of
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When Hill and Evarts asked Chief
Justice Hall for a stay of execution until the United States Supreme
Court might decide whether the law of the land had been observed in
the case, he coldly refused.
Musmanno went at once to Charlestown to tell the prisoners. Sacco
merely said it was what he expected, and continued the letter he was
writing to Dante.[34] But when Vanzetti heard the news the discipline
of his mind suddenly snapped. “Get the million men!” he shouted. He
demanded a radio transmitter in his cell so that he could tell the
whole world his story. All that morning he remained standing behind
the bars, calling out for the million men. That night he wrote a
letter to Thompson dating it “New Era year I”:
_My enemies make me to aim their cannons, shoting at me every night
to kill me._
_Please, send this instruction to the Boston Defense Committee—as
quickly as possible._
_Dear Friends of the Committee._
_I hope you have radiocasted at once my order of mobilization to
all the nations of the world. Big corps of men are in march, if I
perceived well last night. Take all the protective measure to the
crossing of Rio Grande and Panamal Canal; lent me the coasts most
you can. Renew my notes to the King of Italy and the Pope. I want
all my witnesses as well. Informe me by wireless, and immediately,
of each move and particular. I wait for you and Mr. Thompson as soon
as possible for a general council. Recur to Mr. Thompson for legal
matters._
In spite of Vanzetti’s seizure, the prisoners were taken back to the
death house that afternoon.
At almost the same time Luigia Vanzetti arrived in New York on the
_Aquitania_. She was met on the dock by Felicani, Rosina, Carlo
Tresca, Mrs. Henderson, Dorothy Parker, Ruth Hale—Heywood Broun’s
wife—a corps of newsmen, and several hundred supporters carrying
signs and banners. Rosina embraced her solemnly as a sister in
sorrow, then the reporters pressed in. The crowd made Luigia shrink.
She was a frail, plain, dark woman, plainly dressed, who even at the
age of thirty-six had the withered appearance of an autumn leaf.
Her large eyes were shadowed by a helmet hat, her mouth permanently
sad, her chin receding. She was of that Latin type, sexless and
compassionate, ordained from adolescence either to be a maiden aunt
or a nun. As she talked through an interpreter to reporters, she
fingered a gold medallion of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin. What
she said was embarrassing to all but Rosina. “I am here,” she told
them, “to guide my brother back to the religion from which he has
fallen, so that he may be prepared to meet his Maker. He was brought
up in the church and he used to be a good Catholic. I have prayed
continually that he return to the church and see a priest.”
* * * * *
In the last seventeen days before the executions, Hill and the other
defense lawyers appealed to fourteen justices of four courts. The
evening of Vanzetti’s seizure Musmanno took the train for Washington
to file writs of certiorari with the clerk of the United States
Supreme Court on the grounds that the actions of the Massachusetts
courts were a denial of the rights of Sacco and Vanzetti under the
Constitution’s fourteenth amendment, providing that “no State shall
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process
of law.” Once these writs were filed, once the case had officially
reached the Supreme Court, the young lawyer, boundlessly confident,
was certain that one justice could be found from among the nine who
would grant a stay of execution.
After finding that he could not yet file his papers because he had
not brought the record of the proceedings, he went on to the Justice
Department to see the acting attorney general, George Farnum, who
had once served in Massachusetts as Assistant United States Attorney
under Katzmann’s former aide, Harold Williams. Musmanno and Farnum
afterward gave conflicting versions of what occurred in their
interview. To Musmanno’s question, Farnum replied there was nothing
in the files linking Sacco and Vanzetti with the South Braintree
crime but added that there was matter in the files unfavorable to
them. What this was he refused to disclose unless Musmanno would
agree to keep it secret, and when the latter refused the conversation
came to an end. Next day Jackson, Hays, Kane, and Walsh, representing
the Citizens’ Committee, spent the morning with Farnum, to whom they
had been shunted by Attorney General Sargent, then on vacation in
Vermont. Farnum, repeating the Department’s refusal to make the files
available to representatives of unofficial organizations, declared
that they “contained no evidence tending to establish the guilt or
innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, or either of them, of the crime
for which they were convicted in the Massachusetts courts, nor any
evidence whatever of any collusion whatsoever between the State and
Federal authorities prior to the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti or
prior, during or subsequent to the trial of these two men.”
Meanwhile, the contest of the courtrooms accelerated. At the same
time that Musmanno was walking up the steps of the Capitol, Field, in
Massachusetts, was presenting another petition for a writ of habeas
corpus to Judge James Morton, Jr., of the United States District
Court. Morton brusquely denied the petition and refused to allow
any appeal. At 2:15 Hill and Evarts conferred with Justice Holmes
in Beverly. Holmes listened to them with grave courtesy but said
that he did not have the authority to meddle in the affairs of state
courts, and that he would not feel justified in granting a stay of
execution unless he felt that there was a reasonable chance that the
Supreme Court would ultimately reverse the judgment against Sacco
and Vanzetti. This he could not bring himself to believe, but he
added that another of his fellow justices might see the matter in a
different light.
With each rebuff the defense lawyers frantically sought out another
judge, each time to receive again the inevitable answer.
While Hill was arguing vainly with Holmes in Beverly, Luigia,
accompanied by Rosina, Felicani, and Mrs. Henderson, went to the
prison. Warden Hendry met her at the gate. Although it was quite
unprecedented, he had Vanzetti let outside his cell to meet his
sister.
Vanzetti had recovered from his seizure of the day before. He was
standing a few feet from the door as Luigia, followed by the others,
walked down the corridor. Then he stepped forward and took her
in his arms. In that moment the stooped, sallow prisoner in the
convict’s gray shirt and trousers and the fading spinster with her
tightly-drawn hair were as they had been in Villafalletto nineteen
years before—he the curly-haired young man, she the shy sprouting
girl of sixteen. During the hour allotted them they sat in the corner
clasping each other’s hands as they talked about the old days and
of their relatives and friends. Luigia said later that they had
not spoken of her brother’s predicament nor of religion. At the
hour’s end they embraced again and Vanzetti returned to his cell.
Despondently Luigia walked back along the corridor.
From Charlestown Mrs. Henderson drove her to Marblehead to see
Cardinal O’Connell at his summer home. The Cardinal, although
surprised by the visit, invited them to tea on the lawn. William
Cardinal O’Connell—who wintered in Nassau and was known as Gang-plank
Bill by some of the less reverent faithful—modeled himself after a
Renaissance prelate. Although a friend of Governor Fuller’s, he knew
better than to take secular sides as had Bishop Lawrence. Men’s ways
were not God’s way, he assured Luigia over the teacups. Later in the
day he amplified his remarks in a neatly ambiguous statement to the
Defense Committee:
_Human judgment is fallible always at best, but it is the only human
method of government which civilized life has developed. But the
justice of God is perfect, and in the end He and His way, mysterious
as they are, are our hope and our salvation._
Vanzetti had at least had the consolation of seeing his sister once
more. But, as he wrote in a note of thanks to Mrs. Henderson,
_Since I saw her my heart lost a little of its steadyness. The
thought that she will have to take my death to our mother’s grave, it
is horrible to me—to think of what she will soon have to stand and to
bear revolts all my being and upsets my mind._
Sunday the twenty-first broke grayly in a tentative drizzle. Early
in the morning Evarts and Hill reached Justice Louis Brandeis at his
summer home on Cape Cod, to ask for a stay of execution. Brandeis
was sympathetic but felt he was too close to the case personally to
take any action, since during the trial his wife had lent Rosina
their empty Dedham house and since he had talked the matter over many
times with his friend Frankfurter. Hill had counted most on Holmes
and Brandeis, the two liberals on the Supreme Court. The only other
New England justice, Harlan Stone, was spending the summer at Isle au
Haut, Maine, in the middle of Penobscot Bay. With Brandeis’ refusal
ringing politely in his ears Hill started immediately on the 275-mile
drive north.
Musmanno arrived back in Boston on the night train at about the time
Hill and Evarts were leaving Chatham. Still undaunted, he telegraphed
the Summer White House in South Dakota demanding that President
Coolidge intervene. When he received no reply, he telephoned and
managed to get hold of a presidential secretary who refused to give
his name. The President, the anonymous secretary informed Musmanno,
could not be disturbed; there could be no federal action in any case
since no federal question was involved. Musmanno offered to fly out
to South Dakota in a chartered plane. The secretary told him sharply
that if he did he would not be received. In 1917 Woodrow Wilson had
asked the governor of California to commute the Billings and Mooney
death sentences, but Cautious Cal was—as Musmanno discovered—no
Wilson.
Bouncing back from each rebuff, Musmanno telephoned Chief Justice
Taft, summering at Point-au-Pic, Quebec, and asked if he might fly to
meet him. Taft’s rotund voice came over the wire in such distortion
that Musmanno could barely make out the irritated reply. Taft said
he was outside the jurisdiction of the United States and it was too
far for him to cross the border. Finally he told Musmanno to send
a telegram explaining just what he wanted. To this telegram, which
Musmanno sent off at once, Taft replied at such length that the
collect charges came to $19.20. For all its length it merely said
“No.” Taft referred Musmanno to Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone, all
within the First Judicial Circuit. He saw no reason to think that
his own opinion would differ from that of Holmes. “The absence of
jurisdiction in our court to grant the writ of certiorari in the case
seems to me apparent,” he concluded.
* * * * *
The numbers of those who heeded the call of the Defense Committee
to come to Boston were disappointing, but the individuals who
flocked there in the last days gave the case and the cause a
permanent coloration. There were the dedicated, the troubled, the
bohemian, the self-seeking and the selfless, the lovers of justice
and strikers of poses, each wrapped in his own individuality. There
was Powers Hapgood, six years out of Harvard and still looking like
an undergraduate, from whose lips the word _comrade_ tripped more
frequently than any other and whose compulsion was to clash with the
police. Hapgood had been a fashionable young clubman at Harvard but
after graduating turned to romanticizing himself as a proletarian. He
had worked in coal mines in Wales, Germany, France, and the Soviet
Union; later he was to become Socialist candidate for Vice-President
of the United States. In December 1927, his proletarian zeal took the
form of marrying Mary Donovan.
There were John Howard Lawson and the young William Patterson,
president of the American Negro Labor Conference, whose reaction to
the futility of the last efforts would confirm them as Communists.
There was the elderly, leather-tongued Ella Reeve Bloor, recipient
of the Communist accolade of “Mother,” who had hitchhiked from
California. There was Paula Holladay, with boyish bob and red
slicker, who had trudged a mere 117 miles from Provincetown wearing a
sandwich board reading AMERICA CANNOT LOOK THE WORLD IN THE FACE IF
SACCO AND VANZETTI ARE MURDERED, subject to the jeering suggestions
of passing motorists that she go home and wash the dishes. There was
Captain Paxton Hibben, a dapper, martial little man with a clipped
imperial, who still clung to his military rank acquired overseas
with the 391st Field Artillery of New York. There was Wellesley
College’s retired professor of astronomy and mathematics, the
seventy-six-year-old Ellen Hayes, with white bobbed hair, flat hat,
flat heels, and invisible blue stockings. There was the mysterious
Louis Bernheimer, a Yale graduate, an aviator in France during the
war, a student of philosophy, and a hermit who had already circulated
more than thirty thousand pamphlets about the case to clergymen all
over the country.