against the defendants, their lawyers submitted an affidavit by William
H. Daly, a good friend of the ex-foreman, who stated that he had run
into him at a railroad station several days before the trial. When Daly
had expressed some doubt as to whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty,
Ripley had replied, “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway.” The
prosecution offered no evidence to contradict the Daly affidavit.
In early October of 1921, Frank J. Burke, the glassblower who had
testified for the defense, ran into Roy E. Gould in Portland, Maine.
The razor paste peddler had never been called as a witness despite the
fact that he had given his name to the police. When the black Buick had
driven by him, he had gotten a good look at its occupants. According
to his sworn statement, which Moore used as the basis of his second
supplementary motion, “the man that he saw at South Braintree on April
15, 1920, at or about the hour of three o’clock in the afternoon,
riding in the bandit car, front seat, on the right-hand side of the
driver, is not the man that he saw in the Dedham County Jail, and
who was pointed out to him as Nicola Sacco.” As far as Vanzetti was
concerned, he had seen photographs of the condemned man and “he in no
sense resembles the man affiant saw at South Braintree on April 15th,
1920.”
On February 4, 1922, Lewis Pelser admitted in writing to Moore that he
had perjured himself at the trial. His original statement to a defense
investigator that he hadn’t seen anyone in the bandits’ car because he
had been huddling under his workbench was, he now admitted, the true
story. Pelser’s retraction was made part of the Gould motion. However,
several days later, he wrote a letter to Katzmann in which he claimed
that he had been drinking “pretty heavy” when Moore interviewed him.
“He asked me one question and other,” he wrote, “and finally had my
whole story contradicted what I had said at the Dedham Court.” He had
decided to write to the District Attorney because he was “worried at
the way they have framed me up and got me into trouble.”
Moore’s third motion was based on the fact that Carlos Goodridge, the
Victrola salesman who had rushed out of Magazu’s poolroom just as the
Buick drove by, had not used his right name at the trial. Furthermore,
the lawyer alleged that Goodridge had twice been convicted of theft
in New York and that, when he testified, he was a fugitive from a
third indictment. In opposing Moore’s motion, Katzmann introduced
an affidavit from the salesman, admitting most of the defense’s
contentions, but insisting that his testimony had been accurate.
On September 11, 1922, Moore filed a fourth motion. Two days earlier,
Lola Andrews had signed an affidavit in which she repudiated the
testimony she had given at Dedham, claiming that she had been coerced
by the District Attorney and the police. Now, she was prepared to state
that “each and every part of her testimony ... wherein she identified
the said Nicola Sacco as the person that she had seen on April 15,
1920, is false and untrue.” To the best of her knowledge, she had never
seen the defendant until he was pointed out to her in the Dedham County
Jail.
Four months later, Mrs. Andrews retracted this repudiation. She told
Katzmann that Moore and his associates had threatened to prosecute her
and her son if she did not sign a statement which indicated “that I had
told a lie, that I did not at any time see Sacco at South Braintree.”
She would never have signed the paper if her son hadn’t put his arm
around her and said, “Mother, sign this paper and have an end to all
this trouble, for you did not recognize these men, and you will be
doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.” She now
maintained that she had told the truth at Dedham.
In April of 1923, Albert H. Hamilton, a well-known criminologist,
who had testified in more than 165 murder trials, examined all the
exhibits in the case. He came to the conclusion that the fatal bullet
had not been fired from Sacco’s gun. He was supported in his thesis by
a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In opposing this motion--the defense’s fifth--Katzmann submitted
affidavits by several arms experts, disputing Hamilton’s claims.
As an adjunct to the Hamilton motion, William G. Thompson, who had
come into the case in 1923, filed an affidavit by William H. Proctor.
Captain Proctor, who had testified for the Commonwealth that Bullet
III was “consistent with” having been fired from Sacco’s pistol, now
explained that he had meant to say only that it was “fired from a Colt
automatic pistol of .32-caliber.” He insisted that he had “repeatedly”
told Katzmann that he could not swear that the “so-called mortal bullet
... passed through Sacco’s pistol.” “Had I been asked the direct
question,” he stated, “whether I had found any affirmative evidence
whatsoever that this ... bullet had passed through this particular
Sacco’s pistol, I should have answered then, as I do now without
hesitation, in the negative.”
After hearing argument on all these motions, Thayer denied each one on
October 1, 1924. He did not feel that the “mere production” of Ripley’s
cartridges in the jury room had in any way prejudiced the defendants
and, besides, he was unwilling to “blacken the memory” of the dead
juror. As far as Gould was concerned, he was convinced that the razor
paste salesman must have been mistaken. He disposed of the Pelser
retraction by blaming it on an excess of liquor. The motion attacking
Goodridge’s veracity because of a previous criminal record was a “bold
and cruel attempt to sandbag Goodridge by threatening actual arrest”
which he could only attribute to Mr. Moore’s “over-enthusiastic
interest in his client’s cause.” Lastly, Mrs. Andrews’ repudiation had
been procured by duress, Hamilton’s opinion was unconvincing, and, if
Captain Proctor had really believed that the fatal bullet did not come
from Sacco’s gun, he had had ample opportunity at the trial to make
himself clear.
After Judge Thayer’s decision, all of the defense attorneys except
Thompson withdrew from the case. On May 12, 1926, the five-judge
Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in a sixty-page opinion,
affirmed the trial judge’s denial of the various motions. Two weeks
later, Thompson filed another application for a new trial, this time
based on the admission by one Celestino F. Medeiros, a convicted
murderer, who had sent a note to Sacco in jail in which he confessed
that he had participated “in the South Braintree shoe company crime and
Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”
Although Medeiros would not name the men who had been associated with
him in the Slater & Morrill holdup, he was willing to reveal every
other aspect of the crime. He had met the four other members of the
gang in a Providence saloon and they had driven to Randolph in a
Hudson which they exchanged for a Buick in some woods outside of
town. Then they proceeded to South Braintree, killed Parmenter and
Berardelli, and drove back to the woods where they abandoned the Buick
and raced back to Providence in the Hudson. Medeiros’ role during the
holdup was to sit in the rear of the Buick with a gun and “help hold
back the crowd in case they made a rush.”
Despite all of Thompson’s astuteness, Medeiros would not name any
names. The most the lawyer could get from him was the fact that the
gang had been composed of Italians who “had been engaged in robbing
freight cars in Providence.” At the time of the South Braintree
murders, a group of criminals known as the Morelli gang had been
hijacking freight cars throughout New England. In fact, on April 15,
1920, several of its members were out on bail awaiting trial for
stealing shoes which had been consigned by both Slater & Morrill and
Rice & Hutchins. Medeiros’ descriptions of his confederates fitted the
known members of the Morelli group.
Although Felix Frankfurter was convinced that Medeiros, who maintained
that he had confessed because “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with
the kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” was telling the truth, Judge
Thayer felt otherwise. As far as he was concerned, Medeiros was
unworthy of belief because he was “a crook, a thief, a robber, a liar,
a rum-runner, a ‘bouncer’ in a house of ill-fame, a smuggler, and a
man who has been convicted and sentenced to death for ... murder.” If
Medeiros was so eager to save two men whom he claimed were innocent,
why didn’t he reveal the names of the other men who had supposedly
participated in the Slater & Morrill caper? Furthermore, he felt that
Medeiros’ haziness as to certain details of the crime clearly indicated
that he had not been there.
On April 5, 1927, Thayer’s denial was affirmed by the appellate
court. Four days later, the two defendants were brought before him
for sentencing. After both men had made statements affirming their
innocence, Thayer ordered that they “suffer the punishment of death by
the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the
week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our
Lord, one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven.” As the judge was
intoning the death sentence, Sacco interrupted to shout, “You know I
am innocent. That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago. You
condemn two innocent men.”
On May 3rd, Vanzetti wrote to Governor Alvan T. Fuller, on behalf
of Sacco and himself, requesting clemency. Fuller’s response was to
appoint an Advisory Committee composed of President Abbott Lawrence
Lowell of Harvard, President Samuel W. Stratton of M. I. T. and Probate
Judge Robert Grant, to investigate the evidence against the condemned
men. Because the three-week hearing didn’t begin until July 1st, the
executions were postponed for one month. On July 27th, the committee’s
members reported to the governor that they had “seen no evidence
sufficient to make them believe that the trial was unfair.” One week
later, Fuller stated that he had found “no sufficient justification
for executive intervention.” “I believe with the jury,” he said, “that
these men, Sacco and Vanzetti, were guilty and that they had a fair
trial.”
Since the executions were scheduled for August 10th, a variety of
petitions and motions were filed with everyone from Judge Thayer to
Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, all without success. In order to
give the defense time to appeal several of these denials to the Supreme
Judicial Court, Fuller granted a reprieve until August 22nd. Two days
earlier, petitions for certiorari were filed with the clerk of the
United States Supreme Court but Justices Holmes, Brandeis, Stone and
Taft refused to halt the executions. As Holmes put it, “I cannot say
that I have a doubt and therefore I must deny the stay.”
At 12:19 on the morning of August 23, 1927, Sacco died in the electric
chair at Charlestown State Prison. Seven minutes later, he was joined
in death by his friend Vanzetti who wished “to forgive some people for
what they are doing to me.” Perhaps the several thousand people who
milled around the prison that torrid August night could take some small
measure of comfort from Vanzetti’s remarks to a newspaper reporter on
the seventh anniversary of the South Braintree shooting: “If it had
not been for these things, I might have lived out my life, talking at
street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a
failure. Now, we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph.
Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for
justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident.
Our words, our lives, our plans, nothing! The taking of our lives,
lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler--all. That last
moment belongs to us. That agony is our triumph.”
5
_He Defied the Bible_
The State of Tennessee
_versus_
John Thomas Scopes
Macon County was, in 1925, one of Tennessee’s most rural areas. Without
a single mile of railroad track, its almost unbroken stretches of
farmland were tilled by a God-fearing, Bible-reading population whose
sole contact with the outside world consisted of weekly visits to
LaFayette, the tiny county seat. Its representative in the lower house
of the state legislature was one John Washington Butler, a combination
farmer-school teacher, who worked 120 acres just outside of LaFayette.
Butler had first run for election in 1922 on a platform that stressed
the need for a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public
schools of Tennessee. During his first term, he was evidently much too
engrossed with finding his way around Nashville to do any legislating,
but he assured his constituents that, if they sent him back for a
second stint, he would find the time to push an anti-evolution bill.
The good people of Macon County believed him and, in November of 1924,
he was resoundingly reëlected to the House of Representatives.
When he returned to the capital the following January, he lost no time
in living up to his campaign promise. He drafted a statute that would
make it unlawful for any public school teacher “to teach any theory
that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the
Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order
of animals.” The penalty was a fine ranging between one hundred and
five hundred dollars. Butler threw his bill into the legislative
hopper, saw that it reached the floor of the House, and then promptly
washed his hands of it.
By all odds, the proposed legislation should have died aborning. But
with surprisingly strong Baptist support, it carried the lower house
on January 28, 1925 by a vote of 71 to 5. The next day, Williams
Jennings Bryan, who had been fighting Darwinism up and down rural
America, roared into Nashville with his rhetorical “Is the Bible True?”
harangue. Every word of it was, he assured his enthusiastic audience,
some of whom were so carried away by his oratory that they printed his
speech and sent it to each member of the legislature. Six weeks later,
the Butler Act skipped handily through the Senate by a vote of 24 to
6. On March 21st, a skeptical Governor Austin Peay signed it into law
because he was convinced that it would never be “an active statute.” He
couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Up in New York, Roger Baldwin, the director of the struggling American
Civil Liberties Union, read a report of the new statute in a Tennessee
newspaper. He sent a press release to the Memphis, Chattanooga and
Knoxville papers, announcing that the ACLU would gladly finance a test
case against the Butler Act if only it could find a Tennessee teacher
with enough gumption to violate the law. A month later, a mining
engineer named George W. Rappelyea, who managed the Dayton mines of the
Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, informed Baldwin that he was in a
position to arrange a test case. His offer was promptly accepted.
Rappelyea, who had been raised on New York’s Third Avenue, was, in the
words of one observer, “an untidy little person with rather ill-tended
teeth.” But, from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, he looked out at
the word with alert, questioning eyes and the ACLU’s challenge was more
than he could resist. On May 5th, with Baldwin’s offer of financial
support in his pocket, he headed downtown to F. E. Robinson’s drugstore
where he promptly became involved with three members of the Dayton bar
in an argument over the constitutionality of the Butler Act.
At this fortuitous moment, John Thomas Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old
graduate of the University of Kentucky, who had been doubling as
science teacher and football coach at Dayton’s Central High School,
came into Robinson’s for his usual afternoon soda. Here, in this
bespectacled, towheaded biologist, whose father was, according to
Clarence Darrow, a man who “brought up his family to have their own
opinions and to stand by them,” Rappelyea saw his chance to make good
on his rash promise to the ACLU. It took the rest of the afternoon to
persuade Scopes to go along with the idea but, before the drugstore
conclave broke up that evening, Rappelyea was able to telegraph the
ACLU that he had found his prospective defendant. The next morning,
he received a wire from New York: “We will cooperate Scopes case with
financial help, legal advice and publicity.” The State of Tennessee
_versus_ John Thomas Scopes was under way.
Rappelyea didn’t waste any time. As soon as Scopes had consented to
be his guinea pig, he headed for the sheriff’s office where he swore
out a warrant for the young teacher’s arrest. A deputy was sent to
Robinson’s drugstore where, after waiting patiently for Scopes to
finish his third soda for the day, he arrested him. On May 10th, three
Dayton magistrates decided that there was enough evidence that Scopes
had been teaching his students the theory of evolution to hold him for
the action of the Rhea County Grand Jury which was scheduled to convene
early in August. Bail was set at $1000 and it was promptly posted by
the ACLU.
To the merchants of Dayton, the impending trial was a bonanza of no
mean proportions. It was sure to fill Main Street with thousands of
curiosity seekers who could be counted on to leave many a sawbuck
behind them. But more than that, if Dayton was ever to get on the
map, this was its main chance. For years it had been going downhill
as Chattanooga, its neighbor to the southwest, had grown by leaps and
bounds. With a monkey matched against the Bible in the newly painted
brick courthouse that sat on a two-acre plot off Market Street, there
was no telling what might be in store for the town.
But there was one disturbing cloud on the horizon. The possibilities of
a wide-open anti-evolution trial had not been lost on Chattanoogans who
began to press the city’s official family to get the jump on Dayton.
Judge John T. Raulston, of the Eighteenth Circuit Court, who was
slated to preside at the Scopes trial, spiked that one by calling a
special session of the grand jury on May 25th. After Rappelyea had been
replaced by Walter White, the Rhea County superintendent of schools, as
the complaining witness, the thirteen jurors took less than an hour to
indict Scopes whose trial was then set for Friday, July 10th. Raulston
had saved the day for the Main Street merchants who promptly organized
eager committees to scrub and paint the town into a brightness it
hadn’t known since Peter Donaldson’s blast furnace had failed in 1913.
As one reporter put it, “Dayton was determined to be ready for its
fame.”
In Darrow’s opinion, “the little town of Dayton, Tenn., had never
been heard of very far away from home.” The seat of Rhea County, it
was a prosperous village of some two thousand residents, most of whom
were gainfully employed by the four or five factories and mills that
punctuated its outskirts. Every Saturday afternoon, the Cumberland
Mountain farmers flocked into town to spend the money their wheat,
tobacco and strawberry crops had earned for them. They would park their
open Model-T Fords on the unpaved side streets and, after a snack at
the Hotel Aqua, wander in and out of the shops that filled the brick
and wooden buildings on Main and Market Streets. On Sunday morning,
almost the entire community could be found in the nine churches whose
spires gave Dayton the nearest thing to a skyline it would ever have.
However, the town was far from a hotbed of religious fanatics.
Although theology was always a lively subject on its shady street
corners, the average Daytonian was not one to lose his head over
sacerdotal differences of opinion. But its ministers didn’t share their
parishioners’ equanimity on matters spiritual. Convinced, publicly at
least, that “the Holy Bible contains and is itself the fountain of true
wisdom,” they set about raising funds which they hoped to donate to
the prosecution staff to offset the thousand-dollar fees which, rumor
had it, the ACLU was dangling before the eager noses of local lawyers.
Scopes and any other evolutionist had to be shown that anyone who
taught “our children any theory which has as its purpose or tendency
the discrediting of our religion” would be promptly punished. If the
Reverend L. M. Cartwright and his cohorts couldn’t disprove Darwin’s
hypothesis, they could certainly discourage its converts.
When Scopes was first arrested, he had retained John Randolph Neal,
a former law professor at the University of Tennessee, who had just
opened a law school in Knoxville. Neal, despite his reputation for
eccentricity, was astute enough to recognize that he lacked the trial
experience that Scopes’ defense demanded. Originally, he was convinced
that John W. Davis was the right man to represent the young teacher
but, when Clarence Darrow volunteered his services, Neal realized
that the man and the case had met. “For the first, the last, and the
only time in my life,” Darrow later told a friend, “I volunteered my
services in a case. I did this because I really wanted to take part in
it.”
What undoubtedly motivated Darrow to take this unprecedented--and,
as it turned out, extremely expensive step--was the fact that, on
May 13th, William Jennings Bryan, the thrice-defeated Democratic
candidate for the Presidency, had announced in Pittsburgh that he
would, Tennessee officialdom willing, represent the World’s Christian
Fundamentals Association in the case. Bryan, who was at the time a
vociferous hawker for Florida real estate, was, in Darrow’s opinion,
“the logical man to prosecute the case.” He had sparked the passage of
anti-evolution statutes in several Bible Belt states and was the leader
of the American fundamentalist movement. Two years earlier, he and
Darrow had clashed in the pages of the _Chicago Tribune_ over what the
Chicagoan considered the former’s attempts “to shut out the teaching of
science from the public schools.” A Dayton booster could hardly have
asked for a better cast.
On the evening of July 9th, Darrow arrived in a Dayton that looked
as if it were expecting a revival meeting rather than a criminal
prosecution. As he drove from the railroad station, he passed under
signs that admonished him to “Come to Jesus” and “Prepare to Meet Thy
Maker.” The town was bedecked with flags and bunting while sidewalk
refreshment stands, with monkey posters pasted on their sides, lined
both sides of Main Street. Two tame chimpanzees in a store window were
entertaining the curious crowds which had been flocking into town
for more than a week. Newspapermen, radio operators, photographers,
farmers, telegraphers, preachers, beggars, tourists and unemployed
coal miners--they all thronged into Dayton in such hordes that every
available bed had been spoken for weeks before the trial was scheduled
to get underway. If nothing else, the big show, which H. L. Mencken had
already dubbed the Monkey Trial, was sure to have an audience which
would be as huge as it was diverse.
Darrow’s first night in Dayton was spent in The Mansion, an abandoned
plantation on the outskirts of town that Rappelyea, in a burst of
sudden inspiration, had reopened for the occasion. But a man used
to the conveniences of Chicago was not one to camp more than twelve
hours in a house that lacked running water and the lawyer spent the
rest of the trial in the home of one of the local bankers. Bryan, who
had arrived two days before, was quartered at a private home from
which he sallied forth to address, in quick succession, the Dayton
Progressive Club, the Rhea County Board of Education, and the Methodist
Episcopal Church South. In between, when he could tear himself away
from the prodigious meals his hosts insisted on serving him, he posed
for pictures with John Washington Butler, Judge Raulston, and every
minister in town.