chambers where he again argued the case from beginning to end before
the unwilling ears of Fuller and Wiggin. Finally the governor put
him off by telling him to see Attorney General Reading, promising to
accept any recommendations Reading might make. While Musmanno was
concluding his arguments Luigia and Rosina arrived and he remained
as their interpreter. Luigia, her rosary in her hand, knelt on
the floor, imploring the governor to save her innocent brother.
Rosina begged passionately for the life of her children’s father.
Fuller listened to the wildly pleading women for over an hour, his
professional courtesy fitting like a mask. “It cannot be expected,”
he told them finally, in dismissal, “that you would know the case as
the lawyers and judges know it, and I can understand the sorrow that
overwhelms you. I wish I could do something to lighten that sorrow,
but I can do nothing.”
Musmanno, after leaving the governor, went down the corridor to the
attorney general’s office. Reading listened to him with apparent
interest while he explained that there were still five United States
Supreme Court justices—any one of whom might grant a habeas corpus
petition—whom they had not been able to reach. Another respite was
necessary to allow the defense the necessary time. Reading said he
would let Musmanno know his decision within the hour.
Just before eleven o’clock, the waiting Musmanno was called into the
governor’s office. Fuller told him that the attorney general had
decided not to recommend a stay of execution. Musmanno, his voice
trembling, asked the governor if he would stand for all time on that
decision. Fuller replied that he would.
Charlestown prison, with eight hundred police surrounding it, was
quiet. Mounted troopers, cap straps under their chins, and supplied
with gas masks and tear gas, flanked the arched granite entrance.
Fire-department squads had connected their hoses. Marine patrol boats
chugged up and down the Miller River adjoining the freight yards.
Again the slum streets about the prison had become a dead zone, roped
off for a distance of half a mile. Those who lived within the area
were told to stay indoors.
The prison walls and catwalks were lined with machine guns and
searchlights. As the darkness came on, the purple-white rays began to
crisscross the whole moldering Charlestown area—the Boston and Maine
freight yards, the tenements, the slime-banked river. On the far side
of Rutherford Avenue, beyond the rows of junk shops, the light bands
swept across the forgotten cemetery where John Harvard lay buried,
flashing beyond to the Bunker Hill obelisk and the spire of the St.
Francis de Sales Church. Then, as if in reply, searchlights on the
roof of the State House began to probe the darkness. In the middle
distance the elevated cars moved across the Charlestown Bridge like
illuminated beetles.
Within the dead zone the quiet was broken only by the clip-clop of
horse hoofs on the granite paving blocks and by passing motorcycle
patrols. Only as the silence resumed did one become aware of the
steady cricketlike tapping of a cobbler’s hammer from a shop on
Rutherford Avenue.
As the twilight faded, the tenseness in the city was so pervading
that it seemed to go beyond action. Crowds gathered on the Common
across from the State House to gaze up silently at the lighted
windows of the executive wing. At ten o’clock the pickets reappeared.
Again the police hustled them away. Hundreds stood impassively in
Newspaper Row to watch the bulletin boards. The radio stations
announced that they would stay on the air until after midnight. In
City Square, Charlestown, several thousand men and women milled about
beyond the barriers, curious rather than partisan, making no attempt
at any sort of demonstration.
From the second-floor headquarters of the Hod Carriers’ Union, Mother
Bloor, flanked by Fred Beal, attempted to harangue a crowd of several
hundred in the street below and was promptly arrested. Beal then
set out with a group of fifty militants for Charlestown, placards
and banners concealed under their shirts, resolved to break through
the barricades and demonstrate in front of the prison itself. As
the marchers reached City Square, they brought out their placards
and banners, and at once there were cries of “The Reds are coming!”
A shot rang out. At the sound the bluecoats stampeded out of the
precinct station. The mounted police charged the crowd. A number of
people were hurt. Beal and nine others were arrested. “The crowd
didn’t beat you up,” the patrolman who had Beal by the collar told
him, “But, O boy, wait until you get to the station!”
Inside the prison walls everything was darkened and quiet except
for the smoke-filled press room with its clicking typewriters and
clattering telegraph keys. As on all execution nights, few of the
prisoners were asleep. At ten the electricians arrived to make a
final test of the chair. Shortly after eleven Musmanno arrived, his
panama hat flopping as he dashed up the steps, tears streaming down
his cheeks. The warden would not allow him to see the condemned men.
At 11:15 Warden Hendry, bearing himself with all the official
gravity he could muster, walked up the iron stairs into the death
house. Vanzetti had been pacing up and down in his cell. At the
warden’s approach he stopped. “I am sorry,” Hendry informed him in
the customary stereotyped phraseology, “but it is my painful duty to
inform you that you have to die tonight.” Vanzetti stood staring at
the floor for a moment, then flung his arms out, his eyes glittering.
“We must bow to the inevitable,” he whispered.
Sacco was at his desk writing a letter when Hendry repeated the
formula. He slumped down in his chair, then in a thin voice asked
the warden if he would see that the letter he was writing was mailed
to his father in Italy. Hendry promised to mail it himself. In the
last cell Madeiros lay on his back with his shoes off and a blanket
over him, as if asleep. At the warden’s announcement he neither moved
nor spoke. Father Michael Murphy followed the warden into the room
and asked hopefully if the prisoners would receive the rites of the
church. Vanzetti and Sacco refused. Madeiros did not reply. Sacco
thanked Father Murphy and told him he had enjoyed his talks with him.
The priest looked dejected when he left. “Well, I guess they don’t
want me now,” he told the newspapermen in the press room. The three
were the first condemned men in Charlestown’s history to refuse a
clergyman.
Shortly before midnight Executioner Elliott, with Warden Hendry and
Deputy Warden Hoggsett and the official witnesses, entered the death
chamber from a side door. The witnesses were Surgeon General Frank
Williams of the Massachusetts State Guard, Medical Examiner Magrath,
Dr. McLaughlin, Sheriff Capen, Dr. William Faxon from the Dedham
jail, and Dr. Howard Lothrop, a surgeon at the Boston City Hospital.
Warden Hendry would allow only one reporter to be present. Lots were
drawn in the press room and the choice fell to William Playfair of
the Associated Press.
The witnesses ranged themselves along the wall, stony-faced, their
voices held to a whisper. In the center of the room the chair stood
with its unfastened straps hanging down, under the glare of the
overhead lights. Executioner Elliott took his place behind the screen
that hid the switch but not his head. Another screen concealed three
litters.
Somewhere in the middle distance a clock struck midnight. At 12:03
two guards brought Madeiros into the bright silent room. Supported
by a guard on each side he shuffled as if he were walking in his
sleep. They guided him to the chair and he sat down and waited like
an automaton while they strapped his arms and legs in place, adjusted
the electrodes and the headpiece that covered the upper part of his
skull, and finally placed a black mask over his eyes. At a nod from
Warden Hendry, Elliott pulled the switch. The masked body stiffened,
the mouth grimaced, and in a few seconds the witnesses noticed the
odor of burning hair. Three times Elliott switched on the current,
then Dr. McLaughlin stepped forward, applied his stethoscope, and
pronounced Madeiros dead. Deftly the guards placed the body on one of
the litters.
At 12:11 Sacco was brought in. Although the guards flanked him, he
walked the seventeen steps from his cell to the chair unaided. As
they began to adjust the straps he sat bolt upright, casting about
wildly with his eyes. Then in the iron tradition of his belief,
like so many of his comrades on the gallows before him, he called
out in Italian: “Long live anarchy!” With that he grew calmer, and
added more quietly in English: “Farewell my wife and child and all
my friends.” Only then did he seem to become aware of the witnesses.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. The guards had finished with the
straps and the headpiece and the electrodes, and one of them now
slipped on the mask. In that last second Sacco found himself beyond
wife, children, friends, anarchy, bared to the last basic verity.
“Farewell!” he cried out in English as Warden Hendry nodded and the
executioner’s hand moved behind the screen, and then in Italian:
“Mother!” Elliott increased the current by 300 volts for that sinewy
peasant body.
When the guards came to Vanzetti’s cell, he knew that the other
two were already dead. With the guards beside him he entered the
death chamber, his step firm, his head erect, his gray denim prison
trousers flapping slightly from the slits in the sides. Just inside
the door he paused near Warden Hendry and said with great precision:
“I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime,
some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have
done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of
all, of all. I am an innocent man.”
With that he shook hands with Hendry, Deputy Warden Hoggsett, Dr.
McLaughlin, and two of the four guards, then took his place in the
chair.
There was still something more. As the guard on his right knelt to
adjust the contact pad to his bare leg Vanzetti spoke again, his eyes
covered. “I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing
to me,” he said gently. Warden Hendry’s eyes were filled with tears
as he gave the signal. Afterward he was scarcely able to pronounce
the required formula: “Under the law I now pronounce you dead, the
sentence of the court having been carried out.”
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Fuller has been accused of altering his decision following
Coolidge’s announcement, but he had undoubtedly made up his mind the
week before, after reading the Lowell Report.
[30] In 1960, at the State Police ballistic laboratory, I tried
carrying Sacco’s pistol in my belt. I found it impossible to move
without being aware of both its weight and bulk.
[31] In his book _Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth_, Robert
Montgomery attributes the following story about Magrath to Chief
Stewart and G. Andrews Moriarty, a friend of Magrath’s:
“During the trial Stewart ... obtained for Magrath several hairs from
Sacco’s cap and several hairs from the comb Sacco was using in the
jail. Magrath put these hairs on slides and looked at them through
a microscope. They were identical, and both Stewart and Magrath
suggested to Katzmann that he use the evidence, which certainly would
have been conclusive so far as the cap was concerned.
“Katzmann was tempted, but he finally decided against it, because
he believed that the defense and the newspapers might ridicule an
attempt to hang the defendants by a hair or make some other pun on
this much-punished word.”
[32] A reward was offered and a few unlikely suspects were
questioned, but the police never developed any real clues as to
the bomber. The same bombing pattern was followed five years later
when Judge Thayer’s house in Worcester was partially destroyed.
Executioner Elliott’s New York house was also bombed some time after
the executions.
[33] Nine years earlier Congressman Fuller had seemed more
knowledgeable when he voted to exclude the elected Socialist Victor
Berger from Congress and in a jangle of metaphors called for “the
crucifixion of disloyalty, the nailing of sedition to the cross of
free government, where the whole brood of anarchists, bolsheviks,
I.W.W.’s and revolutionaries may see and read the solemn warning.”
[34] Dante had visited his father the day before and Sacco had been
much moved, noting proudly that his boy was now taller than he was.
[35] The original of this letter is not available for comparison, but
undoubtedly the published version has been edited.
[36] Susie Valdinoce.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AFTERMATH
During the last hour before the executions Mary Donovan, Felicani,
Gardner Jackson and his sister Edith, Ruth Hale, Jeannette Marks,
and Joseph Moro waited in the inner office of the Hanover Street
headquarters. “They must be starting now,” someone remarked at
midnight. “Let us be quiet.”
The outer room was full of people, heavy with cigarette smoke,
darkly expectant. All evening there had been a constant coming and
going, a mixture of North End Italians and strangers from outside
Massachusetts. Some minutes before midnight Mother Bloor puffed up
the stairs, having been bailed out earlier by Mary Donovan.
The group in the inner office did not move. After twenty minutes the
telephone rang twice, the prearranged signal that the executions had
taken place. Jackson picked up the receiver, listened, and still
holding it to his ear nodded to the others. No one spoke. Felicani’s
face was a white mask. Then Mary Donovan cried out, “I can’t believe
it!” After several seconds she stood up, opened the door to the
anteroom, and said sternly, “It’s all over.” Moro bit at a sheaf of
papers he held in his hand, then began to sob. Outside there was
a babble of voices rising to shouts. Some of the less-restrained
Italians threw themselves down on the floor and howled. The rest
began to grope their way down the steep stairs. As Mary Donovan
turned back to the little office, the telephone bell tinkled again.
“Come,” she told the others, “let us not answer the telephone any
more.”
For many, as for those at the defense headquarters, that night was to
be the dividing line of their lives. Ferris Greenslet, the biographer
of the Lowells, stood with the crowd on Boston Common staring up
at the oval windows of the governor’s office, “hoping, doubting,
despairing.” From Parlor D at the Bellevue, a few minutes before
midnight, Tom O’Connor telephoned John Vahey at Plymouth. “This is
Vanzetti,” he announced to the lawyer savagely. “Thanks to you I’ll
be dead in twenty minutes!” O’Connor would spend the rest of his life
trying to vindicate the two dead men.
Helen Peabody, a young artist who had marched across the Charlestown
Bridge with Fred Beal’s group, somehow managed to slip through the
police lines to the gates of the prison, where she was arrested and
taken inside to the guardroom. Although offered a chair by one of
the guards, she insisted on standing at attention until after the
executions.
Beal, his lip gashed from a policeman’s blow, was sitting in a
cell in the City Square station house when a matronly woman he did
not know arrived to post his bail. “They’ve done it,” she told
him softly. “Sacco and Vanzetti are dead.” In just two years Beal
himself, as a textile workers’ organizer, would be on trial for his
own life on a trumped up murder charge in Gastonia, North Carolina.
Noel and Herta Field, sitting beside the radio in their Washington,
D.C., apartment, listened to the last-minute efforts with waning
hope. The shock of the executions was for them the beginning of a
long journey leftward that would lead them to a Communist prison
cell in Hungary. Rockwell Kent withdrew a show of his paintings in
Worcester and began a life-long boycott of Massachusetts.
Shortly before midnight Mrs. Evans went with Alice Hamilton to the
roof of the Women’s City Club on Beacon Street from where they could
see the State House dome and across the Charles River basin the
illuminated octagon of the prison. While they waited, the Church of
the Advent bell tower below them sounded the quarters. At a quarter
past twelve Mrs. Evans murmured, “Good-by, Sacco.”
In New York John Haynes Holmes, the pastor of the Community Church,
held a watch-night service at which La Guardia and others spoke.
_Those who spoke said what was right to say [Holmes wrote]. By common
consent those present put anger aside, and moved to higher levels of
the spirit. Watchers in Boston flashed to New York the fateful moment
when the two men died. Something happened in that moment when myriads
of hearts, the world around, were cleansed of fear and hate. In them
Sacco and Vanzetti were born again, and will surely live._
Others were not able to attain such humanistic serenity. For Eugene
Lyons, in the New York Tass office, Sacco and Vanzetti had become
like members of his own family. Up until the execution hour he kept
cabling the news to Moscow. When the two men died, he recalled,
_the case which was integrated with my own existence, intimate as few
things in life ever become intimate, was over, finished. Nothing to
do but go home to bed.... I remember wondering why I could not weep
and shriek with the hurt of it, just as I was to wonder seven years
later at my father’s coffin._
With the news of the executions, Europe seethed. The issues of the
case that had confused and divided the United States seemed perfectly
clear in transatlantic perspective. The inhabitants of expatriate
Elliot Paul’s tiny left-bank Rue de la Huchette represented the
workers generally in their indignant conviction that Sacco and
Vanzetti had been murdered because they were foreign anarchists and
leaders of American labor, and that Judge Thayer and Governor Fuller
had destroyed them for the good of their own privileged kind. Paul
saw the week of rioting that followed as the first of a series of
quakes that would jar France’s hostile classes apart and lead to the
death of the Third Republic. On the day of the executions Paris was
like a city under siege. A general strike halted almost all traffic.
Soldiers with machine guns took up positions in the principal squares
and along the boulevards. Republican Guards were out in their
brass helmets. The American Embassy was ringed with tanks. In the
working-class districts—which the bourgeois took care to avoid—the
metal shutters were closed. Yet there were no demonstrations during
the day, and except for the soldiers and the guns and the tanks the
city seemed almost empty. Pierre Van Paassen remembered the silence
of the streets as so intense it was almost frightening. But early on
the following morning, when _L’Humanité_ spread the news in an extra
sheet with one black-splashed word “_Assassinés!_,” the militants
struck out. On the Boulevard Sebastopol they tore the iron lamp posts
from the concrete and tossed them through plate-glass windows, then
looted the largest grocery store in Paris and pelted the police with
canned goods from behind a barricade of tables and carts. With linked
arms, fifty abreast, they surged across the Place de l’Opéra while
long-aproned café waiters scurried to hide the seltzer siphons. Sixty
police were injured in a pistol battle when a mob tried to set up
barricades in front of the American Embassy. In Montmartre the front
of the Moulin Rouge was demolished.
In Geneva, the evening before the executions, a mob of five thousand
roamed the streets for several hours, overturning American cars,
sacking shops displaying American goods, and gutting theaters showing
American films. Finally the mob gathered to smash the windows of the
Palace of the League of Nations. One rioter was killed, a number
injured, after troops with fixed bayonets were sent in.
In Germany _Die Rote Fahne_ and other Communist papers appeared on
August 23 with black borders. There were demonstrations in Bremen
and Wilhelmshaven, and a two-hour torchlight parade in Stuttgart. A
marcher was killed in Leipzig; in Hamburg a number of demonstrators
were wounded, and a policeman and a worker killed. At one of the
largest meetings in the history of the Weimar Republic, Ernst
Thälmann compared the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti to that of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The playboy mayor of New York, Jimmy
Walker, in Berlin on a visit, was booed as he entered the City Hall.
_Die Rote Fahne_ advised him to spend his vacation on Governor
Fuller’s farm.
In England forty protesters were injured in a riot at the Marble
Arch, and on the night of the executions a crowd gathered before
Buckingham Palace and sang “The Red Flag.” On the day of the funeral
the flag on the building of the Labor Party was at half-mast. Flags
were at half-mast throughout the Soviet Union. A street in Moscow was
named for Sacco and Vanzetti, and Sovkino, the state motion picture
bureau, ordered an Austrian company to start making a film about
them. Later the Soviet Government named a pencil factory in their
memory and for years produced pencils stamped with their names.
Many were hurt in Oporto, Portugal, when police broke up a
demonstration in front of the American Consulate. In Rosario,
Argentina, throngs waited in silence and bared their heads when just
after midnight the news of the executions reached them. Buenos Aires
experienced a general strike. In Mexico City, Diego Rivera spoke at a
mass meeting. In Sydney, Australia, a huge procession protested the
executions. In South Africa the American flag was burned on the steps
of the Johannesburg City Hall.
Nothing comparable occurred in the United States in the six-day
interval between the executions and the funeral. A plan of the
International Labor Defense and the New York Emergency Committee
to have the ashes of Sacco and Vanzetti brought to New York for a
Union Square memorial meeting broke up in recriminations between the
International Labor Defense and the Boston committee. The Communists
blamed Mary Donovan, Michael Gold describing her as “an obscure,
spiteful female with a great lust for publicity.”
For Boston, on the morning after the executions, the case at last
seemed finished. The _Herald_ sprinkled its editorial page with
relieved metaphors:
_The time for all discussion is over. The chapter is closed. The die
is cast. The arrow has flown. Now let us go forward to the duties and
responsibilities of the common day with a renewed determination to
maintain our present system of government, and our existing social
order._
The evening _Transcript_ viewed the executions more bluntly as “the
only possible end.”
During the forenoon Dr. Magrath performed the legally required
autopsies, and later in the day the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti were
taken to the National Casket Company’s room in Merrimac Street. A New
Bedford undertaker claimed Madeiros’ body.
The committee had planned a ritual lying-in-state, but could find no
one in the city willing to rent a hall for the purpose. Mary Donovan
wanted the bodies taken to the Hanover Street rooms. When some of the
Parlor D people tried to tell her that the rickety building would not
stand the strain, she turned on them furiously, shouting “They belong
to me now!” As soon as the owner of the building heard that the
coffins might be brought there, he barred the entrance with a heavy
vertical joist.
While the committee members searched and argued, the bodies remained
at the National Casket Company. William Gropper arrived from New York
to make the death masks. When it became clear that no halls would be
available in the city, Edward Holton James offered the use of his
Mount Vernon Street town house. However, the committee decided to use
Joseph Langone’s funeral parlor at the foot of Hanover Street.
Joseph Langone, the dapper, diminutive North End undertaker, was one
of the most prominent members of the Italian colony. In his official
capacity he always wore a tail coat and silk hat, and prided himself
on the punctiliousness with which he observed the etiquette of death.
His two massive Cunningham hearses with their custom-built Brewster
bodies and silver flambeaux on the sides were the most elegant in the
city. To him were left the funeral arrangements.