embalmed and dressed them, and placed them in their coffins. Only
just in time did Gardner Jackson discover that Langone planned to
have Sacco and Vanzetti wearing tuxedos.
Madeiros had gone on display in Rogers & Silvia’s undertaking parlor
in Providence, and during the day some ten thousand sightseers came
to view his corpse. The bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti were not shown
until Thursday evening. During the afternoon crowds began to gather
in front of Langone’s parlor, and the police had to rope off the
sidewalks for several blocks. A police guard was posted at the parlor
entrance.
At seven o’clock the doors were opened and the spectators flooded
through the little room at the rate of thirty-seven a minute. The
mahogany coffins were so close together that only a single line could
file between them. On each was a laurel wreath from the committee.
The dead men’s faces were drawn and hollow, the color of bronze.
The room was banked to the ceiling with scarlet-flowered wreaths
and sprays. One ribbon on a floral piece read ASPETTANDO L’ORA DI
VENDETTA—“Awaiting the hour of vengeance.” Another read merely
REVENGE. Several read MASSACHUSETTS THE MURDERER.
In each corner of the parlor stood a committee member or friend as
guard of honor. Eight thousand of the dedicated and the curious
passed through Langone’s that evening, only the stiff-faced
anarchists with their wide black hats and butterfly ties
distinguishable in the anonymous throng.
Just as the doors were to open, Mary Donovan posed at the head of the
coffins with a sign: “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHISTIC
BASTARDS?”—JUDGE WEBSTER THAYER. When Langone, fearing for his
license, refused to allow her to continue there, she stalked outside
with the placard and showed it to reporters. A police sergeant
snatched it from her. There was a scuffle, the placard was torn up,
and she was taken to the station, charged with inciting to riot and
distributing anarchistic literature.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the bodies lay in state from six in
the morning until ten at night. A hundred thousand people filed
through the narrow parlor—so many that the terrazzo floor and the
marble threshold began to crack. Huge floral pieces kept arriving by
the hour. The windows of adjoining shops were borrowed to display
them. Everyone in the North End, whatever his politics, viewed the
bodies at least twice. In after years a common question of the
district was: “Were you at Langone’s?” Many North Enders dropped by
on their way to work. Children made a game of seeing how many times
they could dart in and out. Afternoons the line extended up the
street beyond the double line of ropes. Evenings it reached over a
third of a mile to Waldron’s Casino.
It was planned to hold the funeral on Sunday and to have the bodies
cremated at the Forest Hills Crematory. The health commissioner
granted an extension of the four-day burial law. Saturday, Langone
re-embalmed the bodies. Jackson wanted to have a procession with a
band, the coffins carried by relays of pallbearers past the State
House and through the heart of the city. Superintendent Crowley told
Jackson he would allow nothing of the kind. There was to be no band,
no filing past the State House, the coffins must be in hearses, and
although those who wished might follow on foot there were to be no
banners carried or shown.
Sunday morning broke gray and desolate. A line of sightseers and
sympathizers still passed through the undertaking parlor for a last
look at the now much-darkened faces. At ten o’clock Langone locked
his doors and closed the coffin lids.
The procession was to start from North End Park near the Paul Revere
House. Five hundred policemen patrolled the North End. Seventy
mounted police were assigned to guard the cortège. The police were
edgy, resentful of the gadfly agitation that had kept them on
twenty-four-hour call for the last two weeks. Just to make certain
there would be no gesture before the State House, Crowley had the
pavement at Beacon and Tremont streets ripped up. Heavy trucks loaded
with sand were placed there, as well as at the corner of Park Street.
Police also blocked off the streets behind the State House.
All during the morning crowds collected along Hanover Street,
trampling the turf of North End Park into mud. The men—many wearing
black neckties, and red carnations in their buttonholes—outnumbered
the women eight to one. Four open cars heaped with scarlet blossoms
stood in front of Langone’s. At 1:30 a column of mounted police
cantered over the cobbles of Scollay Square and formed a double line
along Hanover Street. Volunteers now began to remove the dozens of
floral pieces from the undertaking rooms and the shop windows. Some
of the pieces were so large that it took half a dozen men to carry
them. At 2:20 the topheavy hearses drew up in front of the funeral
parlor, and members of the committee earned out the coffins while
Langone supervised them nervously in tail coat and silk hat.
In spite of Superintendent Crowley’s order, a group of men in black
moved through the crowd, quietly passing out red felt armbands
stamped REMEMBER JUSTICE CRUCIFIED! AUGUST 22, 1927. At half
past two Alfred Baker Lewis, as organizer of the procession, gave
the signal. The two Cunninghams glided from the curb, the cortège
advanced up Hanover Street. First came four mounted policemen in
black rubber capes. Then a single marcher led the way with the
committee’s laurel wreaths. Behind him six men, with some difficulty,
carried an eight-foot-high floral piece showing photographs of Sacco
and Vanzetti and inscribed MARTYRS OF MASSACHUSETTS. Two rows of
marchers carrying smaller floral pieces were followed by the hearses,
moving side by side and flanked by an honor guard. Behind the hearses
more volunteers carried more floral displays—eighteen in all. Then
came the open cars heaped with flowers, and two limousines with
drawn curtains, one carrying Rosina, Dante, Luigia, and Felicani,
the other, members of the committee. Fifteen mounted police rode on
either side.
The marchers followed in close-packed ranks, eight abreast,
stern-faced, overwhelmingly Italian. Five thousand started from North
End Park. It was the most spectacular funeral the city had ever seen.
The sidewalks of Hanover Street were packed with watchers. As the
hearses moved up the gradient to Scollay Square, the undertone of
muttering was punctuated by the clop of horseshoes on the rain-glazed
cobblestones. The marchers, their arms now linked, stretched down the
street to the curve of North End Park. On they came, over the cobbles
and glistening parallels of car-tracks into Scollay Square, past the
pawnshops and the painless dentists, past Waldron’s Casino, past
the drab lodgings of the American House and the Crawford Chambers,
the cheap shoe and clothing shops, the pasticcerias, the shoeshine
parlors, the poolrooms, and the bowling alleys. Hundreds of faces
clustered in the second- and third-story windows. Along the six-mile
route two hundred thousand watched the procession. The March of
Sorrow they called it afterward.
At first the attitude of the police seemed neutral, but as the
hearses and limousines crossed Scollay Square and turned left into
Tremont Street, a detachment of state troopers in trucks cut between
them and the massed marchers. Halted momentarily, the marchers surged
over the sidewalks, sifted past the subway entrances, picked their
way among the stalled vehicles. So great was the crush in Scollay
Square that a plate-glass store front caved in. There was a moment
of panic as the glass crashed on the pavement. The police now seemed
less neutral. Two bystanders were arrested for jeering at them.
Still numbering in thousands, the marchers formed up again on the
wide length of Tremont Street, linked twenty-five abreast from
curb to curb. As they reached the corner of Park Street they began
to put on their armbands, and suddenly the dark ranks were bright
with scarlet. An occasional marcher would fall out. Others joined in
from the throngs lining Boston Common. A fleet of taxicabs followed
the marchers, ready to pick up the footsore at a flat rate of a
dollar apiece to Forest Hills. Mike Flaherty, near the head of the
procession, spotted Felix Frankfurter and his wife in a doorway near
Park Street and beckoned to them. They joined with him as far as
Boylston Street. At the corner of the Common, those who had carried
the largest floral pieces began to tear them apart and strew the
blossoms in the street before the oncoming hearses.
From Tremont Street through the slum miles of the South End and the
Negro district the police at each intersection directed traffic
into the now thinning ranks. Near Roxbury Crossing the hearses
unaccountably speeded up to twenty-five miles an hour and were soon
over a mile ahead of those on foot. Scrambling to catch up, the
marchers broke ranks, many dropping out or taking to cabs. A hardy
remnant of a few hundred red armbands reached the elevated station
at Egleston Square within sight of Forest Hills and continued along
Washington Street under the dripping el structure.
Up to this point the spectators had been impassive, but now, in the
Irish Catholic district of Forest Hills, they turned hostile. Jeering
faces filled the windows of the three-deckers flanking the el, and
there were derisive shouts of “Guineas” and “Go home!”
The remaining marchers were passing the office of the Metropolitan
Coal Company, a few hundred feet from the Forest Hills terminal,
when the police charged them. No one knew why. At one instant the
bedraggled armbanded figures were trudging along in the drizzle, at
the next the police were flailing at them with their nightsticks,
led by a furious sergeant wielding a heavy-handled umbrella. At the
impact the ranks broke, most of the marchers bolting up Washington
Street. The charging police seemed to go completely out of control.
Anyone with an armband became a fair target. Men were dragged from
the running boards of cars and beaten. Others trying to escape on
foot were cornered in dead-end alleys. Dozens of fugitives burst into
the yard of the Gulf Refining Company in a last attempt to dodge
the swinging clubs. A Boston _Post_ reporter, himself running, saw
several men clubbed and kicked as they fell, and he caught a glimpse
of a girl in a doorway, her face in her hands and her split chin
dripping blood. The rain began to fall in torrents.
Not more than 150 marchers finally managed to work their way down
side streets and back lots to join up on the other side of the
terminal. When they arrived at the crematory on Walk Hill Street, a
half-mile beyond, the hearses had already arrived, the coffins had
been carried into the chapel, and the gates were locked.
Several thousand others who had come safely by car were waiting
inside the grounds on the downhill slope in front of the chapel,
watched impassively but without anger by the mounted police. The
sodden, weary marchers could do no more than stand with bared heads
while the cremation took place.
Only the committee and those closest to the defense were admitted
to the small chapel. Luigia and Rosina chose to remain outside in
the car. There was no formal service. Mary Donovan read five bitter
paragraphs by Gardner Jackson, scarcely able to control her voice as
she spoke the words over the coffins:
_You, Sacco and Vanzetti, are the victims of the crassest plutocracy
the world has known since ancient Rome.... And now Massachusetts
and America have killed you—murdered you because you were Italian
anarchists.... In your martyrdom we will fight on and conquer._
That was all. At 4:30 the coffins were placed in the retort chambers.
The gates were opened, the hearses and the curtained limousines
rolled away, the police reined in their restive horses as the
crowd dissolved into small groups and individuals making their way
unmolested along Walk Hill Street. Those who looked back saw a thin
column of smoke rising from the crematory’s central chimney, black
and unwavering against the low sullen sky.
* * * * *
Like the Dreyfus case to which it has been so often compared, the
Sacco-Vanzetti case became a tumult of the intellectuals. As I look
back on it, my father and my Aunt Amy in their lesser way were
representative of that tumult. For my father Sacco and Vanzetti
became a challenge to the institutions he believed in, and he
shut his mind against them. After Captain Van Amburgh’s testimony
convinced him they were guilty he did not concern himself further
with the fairness of the trial, although as an honest man he took a
thin view of Judge Thayer. My Aunt Amy could not imagine that her
friends of the Elizabeth Peabody House and The Women’s City Club
might be wrong, that John Haynes Holmes, whom she had known as a
young man, might be wrong, that liberalism could be wrong. She, too,
closed her mind.
For the more extreme partisans on both sides the belief in the guilt
or the innocence of the two Italians became a dogma. Just before
the 1961 ballistics tests were conducted a member of the Committee
for the Vindication of Sacco and Vanzetti told me that even if a
test should show indisputably that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s
pistol, he would still be convinced that Sacco was innocent.
For myself, I found that when I examined the various confessions,
they had a way of falling apart. After Sammarco’s lie-detector
test there was nothing to be said for Silva’s Bridgewater tale.
Madeiros’ various statements about South Braintree had just too many
discrepancies in them. Once I had driven and checked the getaway
route and found that the license-plate number of the murder car noted
down in South Braintree was last identified by Julia Kelliher in
Brockton eight miles beyond Randolph, I could no longer believe that
the bandits had switched cars in the Randolph Woods. They would not
have been foolish enough to go to the useless trouble of putting the
telltale plates on a second car and driving away in it. Nor did it
seem possible for Madeiros, if he had been in the back seat of the
Buick, to have mistaken two metal boxes planted at his feet for a
leather bag. And of course if he and the Morellis had not arrived at
South Braintree until noon—as he claimed—then who were the men who
shadowed Neal, who strolled around the town during the morning, who
spoke to Lola Andrews? It has been asserted that Madeiros had nothing
to gain by making a fraudulent confession to the South Braintree
crime, but in fact by making one he prolonged his life two years.
The hypothesis that the Morelli gang committed the South Braintree
holdup is at first plausible, yet it is too closely bound to the
Madeiros confession to stand alone. Extraordinary coincidences are
brought to light in Ehrmann’s book but, just in the matter of the
cars, I could not imagine the one that Mike Morelli was casually
driving through the center of New Bedford three hours after the crime
was the murder car. Nor could I believe that the Morellis would on
three separate occasions drive forty miles to an obscure Boston
suburb to steal two sets of license plates and a car. Why all the way
to Needham when there were so many nearer places? It was as absurd
as imagining Mike, the night of the crime, driving the Buick back
through those miles of waste land to abandon it in Brockton when all
the police in New England were on the alert for it.
As for Joe Morelli’s confession, he knew how much money Silva had
made with his pseudo-confession, and he may have thought Morris
Ernst an easy mark. When he was writing his autobiography in the
Lewisburg penitentiary, he used as source material Osmond Fraenkel’s
550-page summary of the case. The still-extant volume, inscribed
“Joseph Morelli, Nov. 10, 1935,” is larded with marginal notes made
by Joe and his friends. Yet the later parts of Joe’s autobiography
were written after he had lost contact with Ernst. To dismiss it
completely is to leave a number of intruding questions unanswered.
How did it happen that Joe was so familiar with the names Coacci,
Boda, and Orciani—all mentioned only casually in the trial record?
How did he know that Coacci had worked at Slater & Morrill unless he
had had some contact with him? Was there something, after all, in the
persistent rumors that Berardelli had recognized the men who shot
him? It was hard to imagine Sacco, even harder to imagine Vanzetti,
associated with the anthropoid Morellis, but Boda, as a bootlegger,
would have needed underworld connections for his supplies. For a
time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley,
within walking distance of Needham. Boda drove a car. He fits the
description of the man who tried to borrow license plates at Hassam’s
garage. And it is easier to imagine him walking from Wellesley to
Needham to steal plates and a car than it is to imagine the Morellis
making the successive trips from Providence.
Having begun the writing of this book with the assumption that Sacco
and Vanzetti were innocent, I found myself holding to it with an
increasingly troubled mind as my work progressed, but I did not begin
to consider whether they might not, after all, have been guilty until
I learned of what Moore had told Upton Sinclair. That Moore had come
to doubt his hotly held convictions made me feel I must at least
re-examine mine. Moore, the dedicated radical, the battler for lost
and almost-lost causes, was not the man to have denied himself out of
pique. His reasons for his change of mind must have been profound.
According to Eugene Lyons, he had spent much time following the trail
of a criminal group he had reason to believe was involved in the
South Braintree crime. “But when he got near the end of the trail,”
Lyons wrote, “the Italian anarchist members of the Defense Committee
called him in and ordered him to ‘lay off.’ They wouldn’t say why,
but the inference is that they feared his line of investigation.”
One of Moore’s investigators told me that Moore had finally come to
the conclusion that Boda was the man who engineered the holdup. As
convincing to me as Moore’s reluctant reversal was the fact that
Upton Sinclair’s experience seemed to support it.
_I had visited Sacco’s family [Sinclair wrote in 1953], and I felt
certain that there was some dark secret there. Nobody would be
frank with me, and everybody was suspicious even though I had been
introduced and vouched for by Mrs. Evans, a great lady of Boston who
had led and financed the fight for freedom of these two Italians._
To thousands like my Aunt Amy the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti
appeared so transparent that it should have been obvious to anyone
with the slightest knowledge of the case. Yet at the very core of
the defense there was disbelief. I was overwhelmed when I discovered
that even Carlo Tresca shared it—Tresca, the acknowledged and admired
leader of the anarchists in the United States, to whom they turned
as a matter of course when they were in trouble. No one, not even
the police who arrested him—and he had been arrested thirty-six
times—questioned his integrity. He looked after his own. According
to Sinclair, when Moore was leaving for Boston in 1920, Tresca—to
Moore’s annoyance—put two comrades wanted by the police for a robbery
in the car with him. In the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, Tresca
played the part of guardian angel or great-uncle. If anyone should
have had inside knowledge of the affair, Tresca was the man.
In 1943, a few weeks before Tresca was murdered in New York by the
Italian-born Soviet agent Enea Sormenti, Max Eastman, who had known
Tresca for years and had written a profile on him for _The New
Yorker_, talked with him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case:
_I felt close enough to ask him one day, when whispers had reached me
concerning Upton Sinclair’s distressing experiences in Boston:_
_“Carlo, would you feel free to tell me the truth about Sacco and
Vanzetti?”_
_He answered: “Sacco was guilty but Vanzetti was not.”_
_At that moment some people entered the room where we were talking
and I lost the chance to ask more. I lost it permanently, for I had
no opportunity to see Carlo again before he was himself shot by an
assassin._
The reasons for Tresca’s answer died with him, yet they must have
been compelling or he would have skirted the question.
Thirteen years after Tresca’s death a new and conclusive series of
ballistics tests was to bear him out. Many times postponed, they were
finally conducted in the laboratory of the Massachusetts State Police
on October 11, 1961, by Jac Weller, the honorary curator of the West
Point Museum, and Colonel Frank Jury, a former head of the Firearms
Laboratory of the New Jersey State Police.
The one certain method of determining whether two bullets have
passed through the same gun barrel is examination with a comparison
microscope, which brings the bullets together in one fused image. If
the striations match, the conclusion is that both bullets were fired
from the same weapon.
Using a comparison microscope and bullets they themselves had just
fired from Sacco’s pistol, Weller and Jury determined beyond dispute
that Bullet III had been fired from that pistol. The other five
bullets, they found, had all been fired from a single unknown gun. As
for the four shells that Bostock had picked up and given to Fraher,
three had been fired in an unknown gun. Weller and Jury agreed,
after comparing the breechblock markings of Shell W with those of a
newly fired test shell, that Shell W had unquestionably been fired
in Sacco’s pistol. Thus, the comparison microscope findings of 1961
confirmed the tests made by Major Goddard in 1927.
Turning to the question of a bullet substitution, Weller and Jury
found it unlikely that the prosecution or its agents would have
attempted to obtain suitable bullets by firing them from Sacco’s
pistol into a side of beef; such a deception would not only have
been difficult to keep secret, but the method would have offered no
certainty of a plausibly lopsided bullet.
Captain Proctor had custody of the bullets and the guns, the bullets
from the time of Berardelli’s autopsy until they were offered in
evidence at the trial. If any substitution was made, Proctor was
the only one with the extended opportunity to accomplish it. Van
Amburgh was called to the trial as an outside expert; at that time
he would have had neither the motive nor the occasion to make such a
substitution.
When, just before the ballistics testimony at the trial, Van Amburgh,
Proctor, and the defense expert Burns test-fired Sacco’s pistol, none
of them was able to get hold of any obsolete Winchester cartridges
similar to Bullet III. Proctor fired three Winchesters of the new
type without the cannelure; Van Amburgh fired three Peters; Burns
fired eight U.S. cartridges. None of these could have been used as a
substitute for the obsolete Winchester Bullet III.
That Proctor made any switch of bullets or shells seems impossible
in view of his character and the relevant facts. Proctor was
amateurish in his knowledge of ballistics, and it was for other
reasons than the bullet evidence that he felt Sacco and Vanzetti
were not guilty. At the trial he had not thought Bullet III had come
from Sacco’s pistol, and in 1923, in his affidavit for Thompson, he
still insisted that Sacco’s pistol had not fired the mortal bullet.
But if the prosecution had somehow replaced the original Bullet III
by a falsely marked bullet actually test-fired from Sacco’s pistol,
there would have been no need for Van Amburgh to be so qualifying in
his identification of the bullet, and no need for Proctor to use his
ambiguous “It is consistent with.” Both he and Van Amburgh would have
_known_ that the false bullet came from Sacco’s pistol and could have
said so flatly.