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Title: Tragedy in Dedham
The story of the Sacco-Venzetti case
Author: Francis Russell
Release Date: June 13, 2023 [eBook #70970]
Language: English
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from
images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
_In his Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard,
Lowes Dickinson inquired,
“Is immortality desirable?”
I almost think it is,
if only to get at the truth
of the Sacco-Vanzetti case._
—FERRIS GREENSLET
TRAGEDY
IN DEDHAM
THE STORY OF THE
SACCO-VANZETTI CASE
_Francis Russell_
NEW YORK / TORONTO / LONDON McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC.
TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
COPYRIGHT © 1962 BY FRANCIS RUSSELL.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF
MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT
WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.
_Library of Congress Catalog Card Number_: 62-13822
54340
CONTENTS
CHRONOLOGY vii
MAPS xii
ONE THE TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM 1
TWO HISTORY,
WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE 10
THREE APRIL 15, 1920 28
FOUR BRIDGEWATER
AND WEST BRIDGEWATER 49
FIVE THE NIGHT OF MAY 5 60
SIX THE MEN AND THE TIMES 71
SEVEN THE PLYMOUTH TRIAL 93
EIGHT THE YEAR BETWEEN 107
NINE THE TRIAL—I 129
TEN THE TRIAL—II 158
ELEVEN THE TRIAL—III 176
TWELVE POST-TRIAL—I 216
THIRTEEN POST-TRIAL—II 237
FOURTEEN THE CONFESSIONS 270
FIFTEEN MORE HISTORY,
WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE 302
SIXTEEN 1926 326
SEVENTEEN 1927 349
EIGHTEEN THE PUBLIC
AND THE LOWELL COMMITTEE 380
NINETEEN AUGUST 1927 404
TWENTY AFTERMATH 451
SOURCES
AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 467
INDEX 471
CHRONOLOGY
1919
June 2. Attorney General Palmer’s house bombed,
Washington, D.C.
November 7. First of the Palmer Red raids.
November 23. Buick belonging to F. J. Murphy stolen
in Needham.
December 22. License plates stolen from Hassam’s garage,
Needham.
December 24. Bridgewater holdup.
1920
January 2. Red raids in thirty-three cities.
January 6-7. License plates stolen from car, Needham.
February 25. Elia and Salsedo detained in New York
by Department of Justice.
April 15. Holdup and murders in South Braintree.
April 17. Discovery of abandoned Murphy Buick.
April 20. Stewart interviews Boda.
April 25. Vanzetti goes to New York.
May 5. Sacco and Vanzetti arrested.
May 6. Orciani arrested. Katzmann questions
Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco’s preliminary
hearing on South Braintree charge.
May 11. Orciani released.
May 18. Vanzetti’s preliminary hearing on South
Braintree charge.
June 11. Vanzetti indicted for Bridgewater
holdup.
June 22-July 1. Vanzetti tried for Bridgewater holdup.
August 16. Vanzetti sentenced.
August 19. Fred Moore takes up defense of Sacco
and Vanzetti.
September 16. Wall Street bomb explosion.
1921
January. Negotiations between Angelina DeFalco
and Defense Committee.
May 31-July 14. Trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.
October. Mass demonstrations in Europe against
verdict.
October 29, November 5. Motion for new trial argued.
November 8. First supplementary (Ripley) motion
filed.
December 24. Thayer denies motion for new trial.
1922
May 4. Second supplementary (Gould-Pelser)
motion filed.
July 22. Third supplementary (Goodridge) motion
filed.
September 11. Fourth supplementary (Andrews) motion
filed.
1923
March 8. William Thompson agrees to argue supplementary
motions.
April 23. Sacco committed to Bridgewater State
Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
April 30. Fifth supplementary (Hamilton-Proctor)
motion filed.
September 29. Sacco discharged from Bridgewater
Hospital.
October 1-November 8. Hearings on the supplementary motions.
1924
August. Moore withdraws from case.
October 1. Thayer denies all five supplementary
motions.
1925
January 2-May 28. Vanzetti committed to Bridgewater
Hospital.
June. International Labor Defense takes up
case.
November 18. Madeiros confesses.
1926
February. Renewed demonstrations overseas.
May 12. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court
rejects Thompson’s appeal from Thayer’s
denial of the supplementary motions;
convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti confirmed.
May 15-20. Madeiros’ second trial.
May 22. Herbert Ehrmann finds trail of Morelli
gang.
May 26. Motion based on Madeiros confession
filed.
June 2. Samuel Johnson’s house bombed.
September 13-17. Thompson argues Madeiros motion before
Thayer.
October 23. Thayer denies Madeiros motion.
1927
January 27,28. Thompson appeals Thayer’s denial of
October 23 to Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court.
March. Frankfurter’s _Atlantic Monthly_ article.
April 5. Supreme Court affirms Thayer’s denial of
October 23.
April 9. Sacco and Vanzetti sentenced.
May 4. Governor Fuller receives Vanzetti’s clemency
petition.
June 1. Fuller appoints Advisory (“Lowell”)
Committee.
June 3. Calvin Goddard tests shells and bullets.
July 27. Lowell Committee reports findings to
Governor Fuller.
August 3. Fuller refuses clemency.
August 5. Bombings in New York, Philadelphia,
Baltimore.
August 7. Lowell Committee report made public.
August 15. Juror McHardy’s house dynamited.
August 23. Madeiros, Sacco, and Vanzetti executed.
1932
September 27. Thayer’s house bombed.
1959
April 2. Massachusetts Legislature Committee
hearing on posthumous pardon for Sacco
and Vanzetti.
1961
October 11. Re-examination of ballistics evidence by
Jac Weller and Frank Jury.
[Illustration:
BEFORE THE SHOOTING:
1 Neal
2 Tracey
3 Heron
4 Novelli
5 Behrsin
DURING THE SHOOTING:
6 Where Buick waited
7 Where Berardelli fell
8 Where Parmenter fell
9 Bostock
10 Wade
11 Nichols
12 McGlone
13 Langlois
14 Pelser
15 Liscomb
16 Laborers at excavation
AFTER THE SHOOTING:
17 Kennedy, Hayes
18 Splaine, Devlin
19 Carrigan
20 Pierce, Ferguson
21 Levangie
22 Workers on railroad
23 Gould
24 Burke
25 DeBeradinis
26 Goodridge
27 Damato
]
[Illustration: Brockton map]
CHAPTER ONE
THE TRAGEDY IN DEDHAM
The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which began as the prosecution for
a commonplace if brutal murder, developed gradually into one of the
world’s great trials. In the end it was much more than a trial. It
became one of those events that divide a society. Although the issues
that it raised have been overlaid by war and political events, they
never wholly die. Even today middle-aged men and women, hearing by
some chance the names Sacco and Vanzetti, still find themselves
stirred by the passion and violence of their younger days. Sacco and
Vanzetti have become a symbol, and, like all symbols, the meaning
varies with those who adopt it.
I myself do not have any memory of the trial, being then in the
sixth grade of the Boston public schools, but I do remember from my
eighteenth year the agitation and excitement of those summer weeks
in 1927 preceding the two men’s execution. The day they were to die
I spent the better part of the afternoon walking over Beacon Hill
and across the Common in the muted August sunshine. Police were
everywhere, hard-faced and angry, some of them carrying rifles—a
thing I had never seen before. Pickets with placards marched up and
down before the Bulfinch façade of the State House. Periodically the
police carted groups of them away in a patrol wagon to the Joy Street
Station. Almost at once their places were filled by others. Buses
kept arriving from New York hung with signs proclaiming SACCO AND
VANZETTI MUST NOT DIE! and trailing red paper streamers. As the buses
pulled into Park Square those inside began to sing “The Red Flag.”
They looked like foreigners, most of them. I did not like their
looks. I sensed in myself the hostility of the bourgeois world toward
those two men. In spite of any pickets and red-streamered buses from
New York, I knew that they were going to die that night. As I walked
under the lindens on the Tremont Street side of the Frog Pond I felt
a sense of oneness with the community that was asserting itself. I
was glad Sacco and Vanzetti were going to die.
It never occurred to me that they might be innocent. In the
shabby-genteel private school I went to in Roxbury none of the
masters would have dreamt of such a thing. We took our opinions
from them and from our parents. The father of one of my classmates
was Reporter of Decisions of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. He
published in 1927 a much-approved pamphlet on the trial in which
he demonstrated the quasi-divine status of Massachusetts justice,
a status that made even the appointment of the Lowell Committee to
investigate the case a reflection on the Commonwealth’s judicial
system. According to the reporter, that system, sanctified by the
past, could not err. Such a conservative position was common enough
in Massachusetts then. Nor did it change. Thirty years later the
reporter still listed his pamphlet in _Who’s Who_ as his single
literary accomplishment.
By and large one’s view of the case depended on one’s status in
the community. If one was middle-class and Republican and read the
_Herald_ mornings and the _Transcript_ nights, one thought Sacco and
Vanzetti guilty. Any latent doubts subsided after President Lowell
of Harvard issued his report. But if one was a university liberal,
one tended to think the trial unfair, and if one read the _Nation_ or
_New Republic_ one was sure they were innocent.
My father was a lawyer and a Republican. He believed the two men
guilty not from any particular study of the trial itself but because
of his acquaintance with Captain Van Amburgh, a ballistics expert who
testified at the trial. Van Amburgh, through laboratory examinations,
was certain that one of the recovered murder bullets had been fired
from Sacco’s gun. This convinced my father, although—as it came out
later—it never convinced Captain Proctor of the State Police.
My Aunt Amy, who was a social worker and lived in the Elizabeth
Peabody House, was equally convinced of the two men’s innocence. This
again was not from studying the evidence—it was simply the way one
had to feel if one was a social worker. Nobody could have continued
to stay at the Elizabeth Peabody House who felt otherwise—not that
such a person would ever have been there in the first place. One of
the proud moments of Aunt Amy’s life was when she was arrested for
picketing the State House and taken away in a patrol wagon. I think
she was almost disappointed that the policeman who arrested her was
so courteous about it.
I do not know when my views about Sacco and Vanzetti changed. It must
have been sometime in the thirties, when I happened to read a book
of their letters. Those letters were just not congruous with the
sordid and mercenary Braintree murders. As to the question, Who were
the murderers if Sacco and Vanzetti were not? I thought I found that
answered later by one of their counsel, Herbert Ehrmann, whose book
_The Untried Case_ seemed to prove that the men who did the killing
were from the Morelli Gang of Providence. If one accepted that
explanation, reinforced by other evidence as time went on, everything
apparently fitted together. One of the Morellis looked enough like
Sacco to have been his brother.
Dedham, where the trial took place, is a colonial backwater. For
the most part it is a mill town stretched along the loops of the
Charles River, but the older section near the High—not Main—Street
is a well-preserved relic, with spacious frame houses of the
mid-eighteenth century and later and more grandiloquent mansions
of the century’s end. The courthouse, built in 1827, is a stone
building with massive Greek-revival columns. Its Roman dome, soberly
proportioned to the columns, is the most conspicuous object in
Dedham. From the flat country beyond the river it looms above the
elms, flanked by white meeting-house spires, a symbol of authority.
Almost always when I see the great dome so secure above the peaceful
community I find myself thinking back to the Sacco-Vanzetti trial.
Whatever one’s feelings about the trial, its presence still seems
tangible in the courthouse and the High Street.
I felt the presence in 1953, thirty-two years after the trial, when
I was called on to serve for a month as a juror in the same paneled
room where Sacco and Vanzetti were tried and found guilty and,
after all the exceptions and delays, were sentenced to death six
years later. Scarcely a day of that month passed but there was some
reference to the case.
Sometimes during the lunch hour one of us would ask the old sheriff
about the trial. In his blue serge cutaway he had served the
Dedham court for forty years. For him the law revealed there was
majestically certain. I do not think he ever entertained the idea
that it might err or that the Sacco-Vanzetti decision might have been
unjust. To think this would have been to challenge the things that
had become part of him—his engraved brass buttons, his white mace
with the blue state seal on it. His office did not, however, keep
him from having his personal feelings. He had come to like Sacco and
Vanzetti. “They were good boys,” he told us. “I knew Nick best, but
they were both good boys. Never any trouble.”
At the end of the afternoon session he occasionally took a few of
us through the jail, two streets away, and—after showing us the
reception hall and the dining room and the laundry—he would point out
the cells Sacco and Vanzetti had occupied. “I was in the court,” he
told us one afternoon, “that day when Judge Thayer sentenced them.
Vanzetti made his speech first, that long speech—maybe you heard
about it. And all the time he was talking Judge Thayer just sat there
with his chin in his hand looking down at his desk. Never moved. But
when Vanzetti finished, then he let him have it.”
On our way into the courtroom we would pass the prisoners’ cage, used
in all Dedham murder trials. In this cage Sacco and Vanzetti had sat.
The cage is often mentioned in the literature of the case, as if the
men had been exhibited in court like monkeys in a zoo. But in spite
of its name the cage is no cage at all. It is a topless enclosure of
metal lattice about three feet high in front, rising to five feet in
the back. Except for its symbolism there is nothing very formidable
about it.
I was on a civil jury. Most of our cases concerned personal injuries.
One of our last, involving a woman who had cut her leg in the door
of a car, made the courtroom buzz as the lawyer for the plaintiff
appeared. The clerk came over to the rail and muttered something to
our foreman.
The lawyer was a portly man in his seventies, with a manner so
assured that it was almost contemptuous. He was nearly bald, his
face florid, with the flesh sagging under the cheeks. Behind his
rimless spectacles his pale blue eyes watered. He was dressed with
the conservatism of a Boston banker, wearing a hard-woven worsted
suit cut in characteristic pear-shaped style. Two points of a linen
handkerchief projected sharply from his breast pocket. His shoes
were of Scotch grain. His voice was upper-class Bostonian—with that
elastic prolongation of the vowel sounds that has come to be known as
the Harvard accent. As soon as he opened his argument he lapsed into
Victorian rhetoric.
The clerk’s remark was passed along the jury box. The man next to me
nudged my elbow. “That’s Katzmann,” he said, “the fellow that got
Sacco and Vanzetti.”
He seemed a culmination of the ghosts of the month. There he was
again, in Judge Webster Thayer’s old courtroom, at the scene of his
triumph of a generation before. As he faced us, spinning polysyllabic
phrases out of nothing, I tried to form an impression of him divorced
altogether from the Sacco-Vanzetti case. If I had seen him only at
that moment, I should have thought him empty and pompous, but I
should also have admitted his basic honesty.
He died the following autumn. Some months later I talked with a judge
who had known Katzmann. When I told about seeing him at Dedham he
asked me my opinion of the man. I said he was verbose, third-rate,
not wholly grammatical. He laughed. “That describes most of us
lawyers,” he said. “As for Katzmann, he was average—an average
district attorney, a little tricky like most of them, but no worse
than most out to get a conviction. He thought Sacco and Vanzetti were
guilty. I’m sure he never changed his mind.”
Four decades have passed since the trial. Judge Thayer, Katzmann,
President Lowell, Governor Fuller, and most of the jurors and
witnesses are dead. What remains out of this shadowed past? Beyond
all else, doubt. Refusing to face this doubt, the two sides became
irreconcilable. One side felt, as did the court reporter in his
pamphlet, that anything less than the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti
would undermine the Massachusetts judiciary. The other side demanded
that the whole proceedings of Judge Thayer’s court be repudiated.
There should have been some middle way out, some face-saving formula
that would at least have pacified if not contented the reporter and
his kind and yet given the men their lives. Whatever the defense’s
private opinion of Judge Thayer, it would have been better to
have said less about him and to have concentrated on the evidence
discovered after the trial. That this evidence changed nothing was
preeminently the responsibility of President Lowell. Working as he
did in private with his committee, unhampered by the strict rules of
legal evidence, he had the opportunity to examine all the facts. A
word from him, an indirect indication, and Governor Fuller would have
stayed the death sentences and ordered a new trial.
Governor Fuller, of course, took his cue from the Lowell Report. If
he, the parvenu, had not been so in awe of Lowell and the Back Bay
ascendancy he represented, perhaps he would have acted otherwise. His
jail meetings with Sacco and Vanzetti are said to have been friendly.
Once or twice a year in the decade after World War II, going into the
State Street Trust Building, I used to see Fuller. The doorman would
see him first and swing the door open with a ringing “Good morning,
Governor.” I could slip through in the eddy. The old financial
clipper would billow ahead of me under full sail. Self-esteem carried
him along like a favoring wind. His was the pride of manner that had
reached its goal. An Alger story of the new century. From a Malden
bicycle shop to the head of the Packard agency for New England when
Packard was the Rolls-Royce of America. A mansion on the water side
of Beacon Street hung with Gainsboroughs and Romneys and Raeburns.
That was the first stage. Then the governorship. And when Packard
slipped in the Depression, the ex-governor sensed the moment of ebb
and shifted to Cadillac.
There was a cragginess to his features in age. More and more he came
to resemble the Back Bay Brahmins he so much admired. I suppose
Sacco and Vanzetti, those men whose hands he had shaken so long ago
in the death cells, had become blurred impressions, overlaid by
eighteenth-century paintings and the tailfins of Cadillacs. “Our
reputation is your protection,” said the governor’s used-car ads. Yet
I never saw him sweeping into the State Street Trust but I thought of
his role in the case.
Public opinion in Massachusetts was against Sacco and Vanzetti. To
the community they were two murderers who had been given a fair trial
and every opportunity for appeal afterward. The whole thing had gone
on for much too long. Radicals and anarchists and Communists were
trying to use the case as a lever to pry apart the foundations of law
and order. But Massachusetts was not going to be dictated to by such
people. There might be demonstrations in front of American embassies
throughout the world, there might be more bombs planted in the houses
of those concerned—as had already happened to a witness and one of
the jurors. Nothing like that was going to change the course of
justice! Conservative opinion more and more adopted the point of view
that Sacco and Vanzetti had become a challenge to society that could
be answered only by their deaths.
Literary talent was the forte of the other side. That side consisted
of the literary left, radicals, liberals, Communists, woolly
well-meaning progressives like my Aunt Amy, plus a large scattering
of people who could not be labeled politically but whose sense
of justice had been outraged. Some of these latter were starched
conservatives. The crystallized view of the opposition was that
Sacco and Vanzetti were the victims of a malignant conspiracy.
Neither judge nor district attorney had really believed them guilty
of murder. The trial was a put-up job to get rid of two troublesome
agitators.
For the Communists—to whom this case in its later stages gave their
first opportunity for an international mass appeal—Sacco and Vanzetti
were martyrs of the proletariat, murdered by reactionaries trying to
preserve an unjust social order. Seen from this point of view, two
alien Reds could expect no justice from a Massachusetts court or a
Dedham jury.
During my month in Dedham I used to wonder about that earlier jury.
Drawn in much the same way that we were, the jurors could not have
been so very different from ourselves. And what were we? Some middle
class, some working class, a few of us stupid, a few opinionated,
but most of us reasonable enough to weigh an issue. At least we
tried to overcome our prejudices. The jury I sat on would have been
prejudiced against Reds, but it would not have convicted a Communist
on a capital charge because of his political beliefs. It did not seem
to me the Sacco-Vanzetti jury could have been otherwise. Granted even
that the foreman was prejudiced, some of the others would have stood
out against injustice. I felt sure that when the jurors decided that
Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, it was because they were convinced
that they were guilty of murder.
Thinking of the great trial, I found myself wondering how I should
have voted, had I been on that jury. As soon as I had the time I read
the transcript of the record. Much it could not offer—the atmosphere
of the court, with its tensions, the appearance of the witnesses
and the defendants, the subtleties that could be gathered from a
tone of voice but could not be preserved in black and white. Yet the
substance, the prime matter of the trial, endured, each word spoken
during that six weeks pressed and dried between the now-yellowing
pages. As the inchoate mass gradually took shape for me, I tried to
disavow any preconceptions, to imagine myself in the jury box at
Dedham occupied solely with the question of whether two men murdered
two other men, and knowing no more about it in advance than the
evidence offered. How should I have judged?
I knew one thing—that I should have disregarded the testimony of the
experts. My month had taught me that. Experts canceled each other out
as the paid bias of either side, and a jury then decided on other
grounds. The real grounds in this case were the half-dozen or so
witnesses who identified Sacco—and to a lesser extent Vanzetti—as
being at or near the scene of the murder on that April day. In
opposition to them were an equal number of witnesses who testified
that these two were not the men. It was a question finally of which
group to believe. The weakest part of the Commonwealth’s case was
that it never established an adequate motive for the crime.
On the other hand Sacco and Vanzetti were armed the night the police
picked them up, Sacco with an automatic of the type that fired the
murder bullet, Vanzetti with a revolver that might have been taken
from the murdered guard. This was the most damaging evidence against
them. Sacco maintained that he had tucked his gun inside his belt
that afternoon and forgotten about it. Vanzetti said that he carried
his for protection. Both statements may have been true. Often the
lame excuse is the truthful one. Yet here were two philosophical
anarchists who maintained that the use of force was never justified,
not even for the advancement of their beliefs, who boasted that they
had never shed blood, but when they were picked up, they had on them
weapons of force. If they had not been armed the chances are they
would never have been tried.
The trial may well have been more unfair than seems apparent in the
record. There the most glaring fault is the district attorney’s
harrying interrogation of the two men as to their beliefs, their
lack of patriotism, and their reasons for running away to avoid the
draft. The impropriety stares out of the printed page. Here certainly
was error, yet I cannot believe that this was primary in the
jury’s verdict. On the other hand, the judge’s charge, which Felix
Frankfurter so condemned, seems reasonable enough in cold print. I
was finally left with the feeling that if I had been on the original
jury, I should have voted with the others. Yet I was not really
certain.
Looked back at over the lapse of years, the case of Sacco and
Vanzetti becomes a tragedy in the classical sense. It was no
melodrama, as many have seen it, with good neatly divided from
evil. Katzmann was as sharp as most district attorneys out for a
conviction, a limited man but not a bad one. Judge Thayer could
not hide the bias of his obsessions. He was indiscreet and he was
weak, but he made an effort to conduct the trial fairly. Both he and
Katzmann believed to their dying day that Sacco and Vanzetti were
guilty.
It was not a conspiracy of evil men against noble men, as Maxwell
Anderson saw it in his play _Gods of the Lightning_. There was
something more, something deeper and more embracing in the case. It
was in fact fate that was the mover behind the events at the Dedham
courthouse in the spring of 1921. And it was fate in the ironic Greek
sense, dwarfing all the participants, ending in inexorable disaster.
Sacco and Vanzetti were figures of Greek tragedy: the doomed king’s
son becomes in modern dress two Italian workmen. Fate lurks behind
them at each step. Sacco scarcely misses a day at his factory except
the day of the murders. If he had missed any other day, the factory
records would have been his alibi. Without him it is agreed that
Vanzetti could not have been convicted. Fate engineered the almost
accidental arrest of the two men as they were riding on the Brockton
streetcar. But for fate, Sacco would have been off to his native
country in three days.
And as in Greek tragedy the hero condemns himself unknowingly in his
own words, is doomed by his own inner weakness, so in the end are
Sacco and Vanzetti doomed by theirs. The men of peace go armed. Fate
plus human weakness—that is the basis of high tragedy, a tragedy such
as theirs that they played out to the end with bravery and dignity.
It was a tragedy for everyone concerned with the case, and in the end
it is best accepted so, as it was by the Greeks.
CHAPTER TWO
HISTORY, WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE
Walking up State Street a third of a century after the executions,
on another August afternoon, I wondered again about the enigma of
the case. The whole drama had been played out within twenty miles of
here: in South Braintree, in Bridgewater, in sedate Dedham, in the
gilt-domed State House beyond the Common, and finally just across
Prison Point Bridge in the granite fortress of the now-demolished
state prison. Would it ever become as clear-cut as the Dreyfus
affair, where everyone was at last satisfied of the grossness of
the injustice done? That still seemed unlikely. In 1950 the seven
surviving jury members were interviewed as to their later opinions.
The decades had only confirmed their belief in the rightness of
their verdict. In 1959 a judiciary committee of the Massachusetts
legislature had refused to consider granting Sacco and Vanzetti a
posthumous pardon.
Where the past is reduced to shelves of documents in a library it
becomes manageable enough for the scholar or historian to make
his evaluation. But where it is still an actual present in the
contradictory minds of living men, what yardstick can one use except
that of preconceptions? Was the chief of police who arrested Sacco
and Vanzetti a forger of evidence? Did their first lawyers betray
them? Was the district attorney a barrator with his hand out under
the table? Was the judge mad? Was President Lowell of Harvard a
Yankee bigot? Many upright men had maintained these things. Were
Sacco and Vanzetti quietistic anarchists, or did they believe in the
politics of the deed?
Boston seemed downcast, heatstruck. The Old State House at the head
of State Street had, I noticed, been steam-cleaned, and the clock
over the balcony had been replaced by a more authentic sundial. As I
reached the subway entrance under the ancient foundations, an eddy
of heat snapped in my face like a dirty towel. At that moment a herd
of tourists following the Freedom Trail had paused at Point 9 to get
Freedom Stamps from the slot machine for their souvenir albums. A
shiny-faced man in a Hawaiian sport shirt was maneuvering against
the sun to get a photograph of the lion-and-unicorn supports on the
Old State House facade, no doubt thinking they went back to 1776
instead of merely to a twentieth-century Armenian tinsmith’s shop.
Watching the tourists, I felt I ought to have some sort of souvenir
book myself to paste with self-congratulatory stamps for interviewing
people on an afternoon like this.
My first call was on a corporation lawyer who had spent years
writing a book to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. His
firm, occupying the sixth floor of a large old-fashioned building
on Federal Street, was ostentatiously shabby with a well-preserved
Edwardian décor. A horseshoe-shaped receptionist’s desk dominated an
outer office.
The man in his seventies who showed me into his private office
without shaking hands was less the calcined Boston type than I had
expected. There was a metallic quality about his eroding features.
His wiry gray hair fluffed over the collar of a rumpled white
shirt. He had taken off his coat, exposing waist-high trousers held
up by police galluses. His eyebrows were tufted and he wore round
gold-rimmed spectacles.
“I did not,” he announced, “like the tone of your Sacco-Vanzetti
article in _American Heritage_ at all. Nevertheless I am willing to
see you. What is it you want to know?”
I told him I was trying to write an impartial study of all the events
in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, that I knew he thought they were guilty,
and that I wanted to include his point of view.
His knees creaked a little as he sat down opposite me. A smile broke
through his clouded face. “If you want to write a book like your
article you could probably finish it in four or five months; but
if you really want to be honest, it will take you two years just
to do the preliminary reading. The fundamental thing is to make
the proper comparisons between the trial record and that of the
governor’s committee. Of course if you tell the truth you’ll never
find a publisher. Because if you really go into the case you can only
conclude that those two Italians were guilty. And you’ll never get a
hearing on that. Why? Because their innocence has become a liberal
trademark. There has never been any real doubt about this case among
those who know about it. It was just used by people—by the anarchists
and that radical lawyer of theirs and then the Communists.
“The case was open and shut. Everyone at the Dedham trial was
convinced they were guilty, except a few old women social workers
and Frank Sibley of the _Globe_. Sacco and Vanzetti said the night
they were arrested they were out to pick up anarchist literature
from their friends because they were afraid of the Department of
Justice raids. That was May fifth, though. All those anarchists knew
beforehand that the raids were going to take place on May first. No,
they weren’t out to pick up their anarchist papers that night. They
were going to Bridgewater with guns on them to get a car because they
knew that next day was payday at the factories. They needed money for
the defense of their comrade Elia in New York, and they were going to
get it in the only way they knew.”
I said that I could not imagine why, if a man had shot someone, he
would be foolish enough to have the murder weapon in his belt three
weeks later. Any sensible murderer would have thrown the gun away.
“Ordinarily, yes,” he went on, “but they had those guns on them
very simply because they needed them, because they were planning a
robbery next day. That radical business was an excuse they concocted
afterward—and don’t forget it was the defense that introduced
anarchism into the case. During the trial they had some Italian
professor from the North End testify that he had seen Sacco in town
the day of the South Braintree murders and that Sacco had left him to
go to the Italian Consulate. But it took him over a year to tell that
tale. If, as soon as he’d heard Sacco was arrested, this man had gone
to Katzmann and told him he’d been with Sacco that day, then they
could have gone directly to the Italian consul. And if the consul had
confirmed the story, that would have been the end of the case. But
they didn’t because they couldn’t fake that fast, because the whole
alibi was something they concocted months afterward.”
“Moore, their counsel, knew they were guilty. He was just in it
for the money. Why, all in all they collected a third of a million
dollars for their defense fund. They say that Italian anarchist
printer fellow who organized it made himself a small fortune. Moore
finally had to quit the case or they’d have arrested him for perjury.
He chased one witness, that poor fellow Goodridge, to Maine after the
trial and pretended he was going to have him arrested if he didn’t
change his testimony. The Andrews woman from Quincy who identified
Sacco—he had her beaten up. Orciani—the third one they arrested—he
probably was the one who did it. Orciani had a time-clock alibi for
the day of the robbery so they couldn’t touch him, but you know it’s
easy enough to get some other man to punch your time card. He was in
the court for the early part of the trial. He was the one the defense
said sold the gun to Vanzetti, but Moore could never get him to
testify. That was the way it was all through with the defense—lies,
cheating, evasion.”
I mentioned that some of the prosecution witnesses had changed their
stories several times between the preliminary hearing and the Dedham
trial.
“Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t convicted on the testimony of the
witnesses,” he said. “It was the evidence of the bullets that
convicted them. Some of the bullets they found on Sacco were so
obsolete that the State Police experts couldn’t find any duplicates
when they wanted to make firing tests. Yet the same kind of obsolete
bullet was found in the guard’s body. As far as witnesses go, you
may not be able to describe a man properly but if you see him again
you’ll recognize him. Could you describe our receptionist now?”
I had to admit that I could not.
“Yet you just talked with her. But if you went out there you would
know if another girl had taken her place. You see!”
He paused and I could hear the squeak of his swivel chair. “Maxwell
Anderson wrote a play about the case just after the executions. He
had dinner with me afterward and I told him he was barking up the
wrong tree. I explained why, and I think I convinced him. Then he
wrote _Winterset_, and in that he saw the case quite differently.
To my mind the greatest wrong, the greatest injustice in the whole
trial, was done to Webster Thayer. He was an upstanding man, and they
took years off his life. The trial grew to be an obsession with him
later, but it’s small wonder the way he was threatened. He once told
me that every day at noon he telephoned home to see if his house was
all right, and every day he felt sick inside thinking it might be
blown up. You remember they finally did dynamite it.
“One of the jurors, Dever, became a lawyer afterward and he wrote an
account of his experiences during the trial. Simon and Schuster would
have published it. They found it all very interesting, if he’d only
put in a happy ending: tell how he changed his original opinion and
decided they were innocent. But Dever wouldn’t do it, so he never did
find a publisher. That’s the situation I’ve been up against. That’s
what you’ll face if you’re honest. It’ll take you five years, and
you’ll come up against a stone wall.”
He stood up abruptly and stalked to a table on which were two piles
of manuscript, each over a foot high. “Here’s my answer,” he said,
patting them. “This is my book on the case, the definitive answer.
But do you think any publisher will touch it? Of course not. Can’t
you imagine what the _Times_ and the _Herald Trib_ and the _Saturday
Review_ would say to anything like this?”
The chapters of the book were bound separately. He let me leaf
through the one on the ballistics testimony while he moved over to a
row of filing cabinets labeled S-V. “Look,” he said, rolling open the
drawers one after another. “That’s the raw material. It would take
you years to get all that together, years. Much of it’s not even in
the record. There’s the report from the Attorney General’s office,
for example—never been released. I can’t even tell you how I got it.
“You aren’t a lawyer, your mind isn’t trained to evaluate,” he said,
leading me out to the elevator. “If you’ll take my advice, kindly
meant, just give up the whole business.”
When I stepped from the air-conditioned building onto sun-baked
Federal Street the city growled. The sky beyond Post Office Square
looked rancid. I remembered the World War II British Army expression
for accumulated paperwork: _bumf_. Those tight-packed filing cabinets
with their formidable accumulation of details were bumf. The
transcript of the record itself ran to over six thousand pages, and
on top of this was enough additional bumf to bury me.
My next call was to be on Aldino Felicani, the man the lawyer
had dismissed as “that Italian anarchist printer fellow.” An
extraordinary old man, Felicani. The organizer of the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee, he seemed so much a part of the past that I could
never quite get used to the idea of his still being around. He was
an anachronism. Whenever I saw him in public he wore the red shirt,
the black Latin Quarter tie, and the wide-brimmed hat that had been
the anarchist uniform in Bakunin’s time. So I had seen him last at
the legislature’s Judiciary Committee hearing for a posthumous pardon
for Sacco and Vanzetti. As I watched him listening to the proceedings
I thought of the charge Vanzetti had given him: “Avenge our blood!
Clear our names!” I had heard Felicani repeat it many times in his
heavy accent.
Sacco and Vanzetti had about as much chance of getting a pardon from
that legislative committee as Benedict Arnold. The gum-chewing
faces behind the oak desks in the State House’s Gardner Auditorium
were implacable. When my father had been in the legislature during
World War I, the characteristic member had been a lawyer, Republican,
middle- to upper-class, interested more in maintaining the _status
quo_ than in himself. In 1959 the social revolution of forty years
was apparent enough in these lower-middle-class legislators whose
interest was mainly in keeping their feet in the trough.
Yet from these men representing a new emergent class I should somehow
have expected more charity for the two dead Italians. Instead
there was entrenched hatred, concentrating in the chairman as he
interrogated Judge Musmanno.
Justice Michael Musmanno of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, one
of Sacco and Vanzetti’s final counsel, was the main speaker in favor
of the committee’s bill. Silver-maned and silver-tongued, he unwound
reels of words until he was stopped by the chairman’s hard voice. The
latter had the features of the ur-Celt: savage blue eyes, gray shaggy
hair looped over the back of his collar like an old-time United
States senator.
“Look, Judge, why did Vanzetti have the loaded revolver on him, and
a pocketful of slugs that fit it and why did he go for it when the
police grabbed him?”
Musmanno tried to explain that carrying revolvers was then a common
custom in America, especially among Italians, and that it was a right
guaranteed by the Constitution. The chairman’s voice, burred as a
cat’s tongue, broke in.
“You mean to tell me that the district attorney, the judge, the
jury, the governor, the president of Harvard, the Supreme Court of
Massachusetts, the Supreme Court of the United States—they’re all
wrong and you’re right?”
Musmanno maintained that this was just what he was trying to tell
him. Applause from the audience, in which I saw old Felicani join,
brought the familiar threat to have the hall cleared. That audience
was a curious conglomeration of the elderly, a scattering of
students, and a cluster of beatniks at the side in beards and blue
denims tied up with rope.
The elderly were survivors of an old storm, their eccentricities
accentuated by age, the crackpot label attached to their clothes,
their hats, their gestures. Emotionally they were drawn to lost
causes, and here they gathered again like old soldiers at a reunion.
The Sacco-Vanzetti case with its drawn-out tragic climax had been
for them a generation ago a self-fulfillment in indignation that
they were now reliving. At one point a woman near the exit caused a
stir, almost a suspension of the hearing, by holding up Sacco’s and
Vanzetti’s death masks.
* * * * *
Felicani’s Excelsior Press was on the ground floor of a decrepit
building near the foot of Milk Street under the shadow of the new
John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald Expressway where the business district
fringes into the Italian North End. Every time I saw the large red
and green linoleum squares on the floor of that familiar little
office I thought back to the hopscotch games of my childhood. The
walls were of pebbled tin sheeting painted with mauve Chemtone.
Next to Felicani’s desk was a pay telephone and just above it an
oak-framed clock, invariably six minutes fast. On top of a filing
cabinet next to a spindly philodendron plant was a plaster bust of
the dead anarchist leader, Carlo Tresca.
I was glad to find the old man there on this hot August afternoon.
A man who towered in any crowd and looked more like a viking than a
Latin, he was wearing a brightly patterned sport shirt. His gray eyes
peered with astigmatic blankness until he recognized me and smiled. I
told him of the mass of bumf I had just encountered.
“Yes,” he said, offering me a chair, “but what were they, those
papers? I have almost as many papers myself. If your lawyer’s wrong
at the start, it doesn’t matter how many files he has. There are not
many of us left from those days, the ones who really knew.”
I asked Felicani what he had done immediately after the two men’s
arrest. He thought for a moment.
“It’s strange,” he said. “When you begin to think, then all the
memories come back, just as clearly as if it all happened yesterday.
I knew Vanzetti best. He was one of my closest friends. As soon as he
was arrested he got word to me and I got the others together. We went
to see them at the Brockton police station. We raised money—two or
three dollars here, another dollar there. It’s all down in writing,
every penny. Then, at the first trial for the Bridgewater holdup,
Thayer gave Vanzetti twelve to fourteen years. When Tresca heard
that he came on from New York. ‘What is going on here?’ he asked us.
‘Fourteen years? Is that what you do?’ So then he got Moore, the
lawyer from the Lawrence strike, to come in and take charge of the
case.”
“I know this may be painful to you,” I told him, “but I have
a letter from Upton Sinclair, who talked with Moore after the
executions. Moore told him then—his exact words were: ‘Sacco was
probably, Vanzetti possibly guilty’.”
Felicani’s sport shirt rippled as he shrugged his vast shoulders.
“I’ve heard things of that kind, so many rumors. You know, Sinclair
wrote most of _Boston_ right here in this office. I don’t see why he
didn’t mention it to me. Moore was angry after he left the case. His
anger just got too big.”
I knew that Sacco had come to distrust Moore, but I did not know the
details of Moore’s leaving. Felicani was roundabout in answering me.
“I never say Moore kept money for himself. He was an honest man. But
for all the money you gave him, he wanted more always—for witnesses,
for travels, for new investigations. He had no idea of money. If you
gave him a thousand dollars every other day Moore was all right, but
we didn’t have that much, the committee. Finally I tightened the
purse strings. Then Moore started his own committee to raise money.
That was why he got into a fight with Sacco, how the bitterness
started. That was why we let Moore go and got Thompson.”
His voice was heavy with regret. “Ah, if we had had Thompson from
the beginning, then we would have got them off. When we first went
to him he was cold. He listened to us and he said he’d take the case
for twenty-five thousand dollars. When he started he didn’t know the
difference between an anarchist and a Communist. You could tell that
by an appeal he drew up that Vanzetti corrected. After he talked for
some time with Vanzetti, he understood. It made all the difference.
He took part then as if we were friends. A wonderful man, Thompson.
An aristocrat, the way the word should mean. He would have made
mincemeat of a man like Katzmann, if only we’d had him instead of
Moore.”
One thing I had been wanting to ask was about the various bombings
connected with the case. Would he agree that anarchists had been
responsible for them? Sacco and Vanzetti themselves were said to have
been philosophical anarchists, as opposed to violence as Tolstoy was.
But where did the dividing line come?
Felicani stared at me with his guileless eyes. “You know,” he said,
“there are times when a man is so desperate that he will do such a
thing as set off a bomb. When that happens and to what man, I don’t
know. Vanzetti never could have done anything like that—but, yes,
in certain circumstances Sacco might have. That is the type of man
he was. But a holdup murder, to kill innocent men like that? It was
quite impossible.
“Think of the times,” he said, lifting his hands palms upward. “I
carried a pistol in my pocket then. I never fired it, I didn’t
even know how to load it, but it gave me strength to feel it in my
pocket.” He stopped as if he were thinking again of those far-off
days. I watched him, the peaceable elderly printer who had outlived
his party and his time. Where the word _anarchism_ had once aroused
fear, it now brought a kind of nostalgia. Violent some of the
anarchists may have been, but there had been an integrity about them,
a trust in human nature that I could never have. Now here he was,
gnarled and sturdy as an old oak, speaking to me of the lost comrades
of his young manhood.
Afterward, as I walked out into the reverberant street, I felt I had
put the bumf into perspective. I knew it was intuition rather than
reason, that the historical method had fallen by the wayside, yet I
did not see how anyone could spend an afternoon talking with Aldino
Felicani and still feel that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. But
that was the difficulty in trying to form any picture of an event by
talking with the survivors. The three principals in the case whom
I had seen in the flesh and who were now dead—District Attorney
Katzmann, Governor Fuller, President Lowell of Harvard—I had judged
harshly. But others I met, whom I had expected to find fools or
knaves, I had found neither.
Among these was Michael Stewart, the Bridgewater police chief whose
suspicions started the events that led to the arrest of Sacco and
Vanzetti. Some time after the trial Stewart had left Bridgewater
to become police chief of Scituate, a seaside town southeast of
Braintree. He had a speech about the case that he liked to deliver
at men’s-club meetings. Now retired, he lived with his son in a
white bungalow near Scituate Harbor. I knew the inside of it well:
the gumwood trim, the nicknacks on the tapestry-brick mantel, the
Child Jesus of Prague under cellophane, the sofa and the overstuffed
chairs. Whenever I rang the bell I could see Stewart through the
glass as he came limping to the door, lame from some old police
injury. There was an unmistakable Celtic look about him from the cut
of his mouth to the blueness of his eyes and the wave to his white
hair.
Never since the night in 1920 that he had driven down to the Brockton
police station to interview Sacco and Vanzetti had he ever had any
doubt about their guilt. To him, it was all very simple. Godless men,
atheists like Sacco and Vanzetti, were capable of any crime. Yet his
relations with them after their arrest were for a period amiable, and
he had liked Vanzetti.
“Sacco I never paid much attention to,” he told me. “He was just a
sap, but Vanzetti was a real interesting man. I used to drive him
to the Plymouth trial from the jail, and each morning I saw him I’d
say ‘Hello, Bertie,’ and he’d say ‘Hello, Mike.’ Sometimes he used
to sing songs for us in Italian on the way over, and he had quite a
voice. After he heard me testify in court though, the next time he
saw me he raised his hands—he was handcuffed—and shook them at me.
And he never spoke to me again. The thing I remember most about him
is his eyes. He had terrible eyes, like fire when he looked at you.”
Though Orciani, who was with Sacco and Vanzetti just before their
arrest, had produced a watertight alibi after he was picked up,
Stewart was nevertheless convinced of his guilt. “For my money
Orciani was the cleverest of the lot,” he told me. “That’s how he
managed to rig himself up such a good alibi. He was one of those
wise guys. During the trial he used to go to court every day. There
was a little room in back the defense had for exhibits and things
like that, and he had charge of it. Most of the time he’d stand in
the doorway watching what went on in court. Well, Katzmann spotted
him there and the day they were cross-examining Vanzetti and asking
him about where he got his gun, Katzmann looked straight at Orciani
and said, ‘I’ll tell you, Mr. Vanzetti, where you got that gun.’
You could hear his voice right down the corridor. ‘You got it from
your friend Orciani after he took it off of Berardelli’s dead body.’
Katzmann pointed his finger right at him and Orciani ducked. That was
the last time he ever showed up.”
* * * * *
One late-summer afternoon I drove to Billerica to meet Dr. Warren
Steams, dean emeritus of Tufts Medical School, who as state
prison psychiatrist had seen Sacco and Vanzetti regularly in the
years following their conviction. I found him in the study of his
classically square colonial mansion facing the common. He was
listening to a middle-aged man in heavy tortoise-shell spectacles who
held an open book in his left hand and pointed to a passage with his
right.
“It says here,” the man explained, “ten thousand people were there
to see him hanged. That was 1820. I wonder what would draw all those
people to an execution?”
Steams, with his wreath of kinky white hair surrounding a bald
dome, looked amiable, but his voice was tart. “Cruelty. If it were
announced that I was going to be publicly tortured and hanged next
Monday morning on Boston Common there’d be at least a hundred and
fifty thousand people there to see it.”
He beckoned to me apologetically and then, when the other had left,
pointed to a chair. “I’m the Billerica antiquary,” he said. “The
local historians all call on me with their problems. Seventy-five
years old I am. That gives me a life expectancy of five years—and it
would take fifty for me to do all the things I have to do. You came
here to ask me about Sacco and Vanzetti. What do you want to know?”
Without waiting for my answer he went on. “I don’t think the truth
will ever be known. As to whether they did it or not, I don’t know
and I’ve made a point of not trying to know. I tell you this, though.
They weren’t criminal types. For a while I think I saw them as much
as anyone. Sacco had a very winning way about him. Of course he was
a more settled type, with a wife and family. Vanzetti reminded me
of a trade-union leader. That rigid mentality. He once said to me
that where he came from in Italy there was a castle above the town
and one family living in it had been oppressing the ordinary people
in the valley for eight hundred years. I told him that it wasn’t so
in America, that a family scarcely lasted three generations here.
He’d read a little, but he’d not digested it too well—an unstable,
wandering type, paranoid at times. When I saw him once over in the
Charlestown Prison he said to me, ‘I don’t deny the right of the
state to execute a man, but they have no right to castrate me and
make me a laughingstock.’”
The doctor had known personally almost everyone connected with the
case on both sides. Katzmann was to him lazy and incompetent, though
he thought better of his assistant, Harold Williams. Judge Thayer he
gave credit for honest intentions, but found him irascible, a snob,
and obsessed with the idea that the Communists were just about to
take over the United States. Governor Fuller was merely a successful
automobile salesman. Thompson he respected, but felt that he had gone
into the case merely for the fee.
“I thought,” I said, making another stab at it, “that seeing Sacco
and Vanzetti so closely, you might have formed some opinion as to
their guilt or innocence.”
“I feel,” he said, “as William James did about psychic phenomena. I
just do not know.”
When I left, he walked out with me through his back garden blooming
with zinnias. “If you are interested,” he said finally, “I’ll try to
find my files on Sacco and Vanzetti for you. There may be something
there. I’ve had so many cases since that I can’t remember the
details. But drop in when you’re by this way again.”
Three weeks later he was dead.
* * * * *
By chance I discovered that Beltrando Brini was living in Wollaston,
a twenty-minute drive from my home in Wellesley. When a boy of
thirteen, Brini had testified at Vanzetti’s first trial that the
two of them had been delivering eels in Plymouth the day before
Christmas, 1919—the day Vanzetti was to be found guilty of attempting
a holdup in Bridgewater. As he grew up, Brini had broken away from
the Italian community. He had graduated from Boston University and
was now an elementary school principal. Community affairs seemed to
take up most of his spare time. Two weeks passed before he could
find a free evening to see me. I found his house easily enough, a
decent inconspicuous house in a decent inconspicuous street. He was
a small man in his fifties. Like many of the second generation he
still looked Italian, but to a diminished degree. He showed me into
his living room. His wife was standing near the fireplace, a thin
fair-haired woman, not Latin at all. After he had introduced me to
her we sat down, taking each other’s measure while she went into the
kitchen to make coffee.
“You know,” he said finally, “I could have been a musician. I really
could at one time have gotten into the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
But I thought it was safer to be a teacher. That’s why I never seem
to be home nights—always something they want a school principal to
be doing, somewhere they want him to be.” He looked at me sharply.
“You want to know about Vanzetti. He lived with us a long time. He
paid more attention to me than my parents did. He was kind to all
children. I remember one Halloween we all had jack-o’-lanterns.
The others had theirs lighted but mine didn’t have a candle in it.
Vanzetti came along and asked me why I didn’t get a candle. I said I
hadn’t any money. He asked me how much candles cost and I said two
cents, so he fished in his pocket and gave them to me. When I got to
the hardware store I found he’d given me a cent and a dime. So I got
my candle and I brought him back the nine cents. I’d never had that
much money in my pocket before, but I remember how proud of myself I
was that I brought that nine cents back to him.
“I remember the last time I saw him before his arrest. It’s a thing
I somehow still feel ashamed about. A bunch of us were playing ball
in Suosso’s Lane and somebody hit one over the fence into a garden.
While I was climbing over to get it I trampled on some vegetables and
the man who owned the garden came out and started to bawl me out. I
answered him back, like any fresh kid. Then Vanzetti came along, took
me over by the fence, and talked to me. He wasn’t angry, he didn’t
raise his voice, but what he said made me feel ashamed. I didn’t feel
like playing ball any more. I’ve often wished it hadn’t been that
way, the last time I saw him free.
“You know, of course,” he went on, “that I testified I was delivering
eels with him the morning he was supposed to have been holding up the
pay truck in Bridgewater. That’s been the terrible thing for me. I
_was_ there with him all that morning long, and I couldn’t make them
believe me. Sometimes I’ve asked myself, Could I have been wrong,
could I have dreamed it all? Was Vanzetti really at Bridgewater?
But then I know, I _know_ that I was delivering eels with him that
morning. It couldn’t have been any other day, because that’s the
one day Italians always eat eels, no matter what they cost. And I
remember how I started out that morning to go to Vanzetti’s house. It
was muddy and I forgot my rubbers. At the corner I met my father and
he sent me back for them, so I was late. Vanzetti was waiting for me
with the pushcart. We delivered eels until, it must have been, two
o’clock. It’s funny the things you remember. I remember a two-family
house where I made a mistake and went to the wrong door. When we got
all through Vanzetti paid me off at the corner of Cherry Lane and
Court Street. And I know that it happened that way, that it was the
day before Christmas, the same day and the same time they said he was
holding up the truck in Bridgewater. When I told my story in court
Katzmann complimented me on learning my part so well.
“I was only thirteen then and I was scared. I’d never been in a court
before. Katzmann would go at me like a tiger, fire three questions at
me at once. Thayer would never help me out. His face was so stern. He
never said anything, but you could feel his hostility.”
Brini’s wife came in with a tray, and Brini took a pile of magazines
from the coffee table to make room.
“Tell me,” I said, as she joined us. “If you had a friend in trouble
you knew was innocent, could you lie to establish an alibi for him?”
He leaned back in his chair for some seconds, frowning slightly,
while his wife poured the coffee. “I thought you might ask me
something like that,” he said finally. “No, I couldn’t. I suppose you
wanted me to say yes, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why I couldn’t,
either.”
“Could you?” his wife asked me.
“Yes,” I said truthfully, “I could quite easily. Under oath too.”
“So could I,” she said, looking at her husband as if she thought he
was being foolish.
“Well,” he said, “I know this, that I didn’t want to go to court.
Young as I was, I knew what a disadvantage it would be for me to get
mixed up in it. I wanted to be a musician, and whatever I might want,
once I testified, I knew I’d find the way blocked. And it’s shadowed
me ever since. They’ve pointed me out—Brini, the boy who testified
for a murderer. In 1927 I told my story to Governor Fuller, and he
said he believed me, but he never did anything about it. The day
before they were executed I tried to see the governor again, but I
couldn’t get past his secretary. I shouted at him, ‘If I lied, why
don’t you arrest me for perjury?’ All he said was, if I was so brave
why wasn’t I out picketing on the Common. I told him I’d been there
the day before, and I asked to be locked up, but he just turned his
back.”
He set down his coffee cup. “I don’t suppose what I’ve been telling
you helps you much. These are just my feelings. Those others, where
we delivered the eels that morning, they didn’t want to testify
either. They were all good Catholics and Vanzetti was an anarchist.
But they’d bought the eels, they’d seen Vanzetti, and my father
talked to them. They had respect for him, not fear but respect, so
they went.”
As we talked the lights of the suburban street began to wink out,
and I could see it was time for me to go. “You’ll probably think of
things you forgot to ask me,” he said at the door. “Just telephone me
or come down, if there’s anything more you want to know. Any time.”
Driving home, I thought over what Brini had told me. What had a
respectable school principal to gain by lying? If he had had anything
to hide, forty years after the event, he could simply have refused to
see me. Yet if Brini was telling the truth, Vanzetti was innocent of
the Bridgewater holdup. And if he was innocent of the first crime, it
seemed to me he was most probably innocent of the second. But Brini
knew. If he had told me the truth, Vanzetti was an innocent man.
“I think you can sense whether a person is telling the truth or not,”
I told a sergeant at the State Police headquarters a few days later.
“You can judge a man by the sort of person he is, by the general
impression he gives as much as by what he says. You can size him up,
don’t you think?” The sergeant did not reply directly, but his laugh
had a jeering ring.
* * * * *
For weeks I had been trying to get an interview with Michael Dray,
Katzmann’s old law partner, but always, without quite turning me
down, he had eluded me. Katzmann had been dead six years, but Dray
still kept the firm’s name. After the trial Katzmann had never made
any public comment on his great case. Nor since his death had his
partner been less reticent.
Finally, unexpectedly, Dray offered to see me. I drove through Dedham
again, past the rain-wet courthouse with its glistening columns, down
the empty High Street and across the empty square, and then through
the mean industrial section of East Dedham, following the loops of
the Neponset River to Hyde Park. It was a strange feeling to be on
that journey, as if I might at last be heading toward the center of
the maze.
_Katzmann & Dray_—there was the name on the downstairs directory
of the modernized office building on River Street. Upstairs it was
not quite so modern. I followed the dark, creaking corridor until I
faced the name painted on an open door, then walked into a narrow
brown room with nothing in it but a table, a lamp, and a gilt-framed
photograph of Katzmann. I recognized him at once from the afternoon
at Dedham: the square domineering head with the close-cropped hair.
Dray came suddenly out of a back room, a short, pudgy man in his
sixties, with thin mouse-gray hair and blue eyes. “Just go in there,”
he said pointing to another room, “and I’ll be right with you.”
On the oak door were the faded letters F. G. KATZMANN, Room 12.
Stepping inside, I found myself alone. An oak desk faced me. On its
plate-glass top I noticed the issue of _American Heritage_ containing
my Sacco-Vanzetti article with the Ben Shahn illustrations—to
my embarrassment, for my description of Katzmann in it was not
flattering.
Dray strode in briskly, sat down at the desk, and stared at me
several seconds before speaking. “I could have seen you at any time
within the last two months,” he said finally, “but I couldn’t make up
my mind whether to or not. This is what decided me.” He tapped the
magazine. “You write here that though you thought they were innocent,
just by reading the evidence alone you’d have found them guilty. When
I read that I decided you at least were honest. But for that I’d not
have seen you.
“You know that Fred, as long as he lived, refused to discuss this
case publicly with anyone. Of course he mentioned it to me. I don’t
suppose a day went by that he didn’t think of it in one way or
another. I saw him come in sometimes with tears in his eyes and say,
Why do they say these things about me? Why do they keep on attacking
me?’ Don’t think he wasn’t hurt.
“Now he’s gone, thinking it over, I’m willing to tell you a few
things I know to set the record straight, because so much has
been said against him. Fred was almost like a father to me. I was
twenty-four when I came here just after the trial, and I studied what
law I know right here in this office. Fred never had a son of his
own, just his two daughters, and I think he came to look on me sort
of as a son. All I know is this: My son’s at law school now, and if
I can teach him as much decency and as much law as Fred Katzmann did
me, I’ll think I’m a lucky man. You think I admire Fred. I do.”
He opened the _American Heritage_. “Here you speak of Katzmann as
being, in spite of his name, a Mayflower descendant. He wasn’t. His
father was a German, his mother Scotch and came from Roxbury. They
were poor. His mother used to work. Fred had nothing. I think when he
went to Harvard an aunt helped him out a little, but he used to tend
furnaces to work his way through. Sometimes he earned a bit singing.
He had a fine voice. Even when he was starting up his practice he
still used to sing sometimes at churches and funerals.
“We got pretty close over the years. I don’t think in the end
there was anything he kept back from me. I knew about his family,
his social life, his practice. I knew how he felt about the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. In that he never changed. He didn’t just think
they were guilty, he _knew_ they were guilty. He wouldn’t have
avoided the case, for he never did put off dirty jobs onto other
people, but sometimes he’d say to me, ‘Mike, if I had my life to live
over, I’d never want to go through that again.’ He always felt it
shortened his wife’s life, the whole business. For years they had to
have guards round his house. He said whenever he woke up nights he’d
hear them tramping round.
“A lot of things I set myself out to tell you,” Dray went on, “but
they slip through my mind right now. Just this, though. I’ve built up
a good practice in Hyde Park. I’ve done all right here. But I always
have the feeling somehow that it was Fred’s practice, that anything
I’ve amounted to has been through him. I want to defend his memory,
and that’s why I’m talking to you.
“I’ll tell you another thing. When Jerry McAnarney was on the
Sacco-Vanzetti defense, he thought his clients were innocent. I never
heard any of the Defense Committee boys criticize Jerry. He went to
the governor’s committee afterward and he still thought they were
innocent. But he and Fred stayed the same good friends all through
the years. They were partners together on that Willett-Sears case.
Maybe you remember, that case lasted fourteen months—the longest jury
case in the history of Massachusetts. I suppose if anyone asked Fred
to name his ten best friends, Jerry McAnarney would have been among
them. And if Jerry named his best five, Fred would have been on the
list. I remember, too, just a short while before Jerry died he said
one day right in this office: ‘No matter what they said about you,
Fred, you were all right.’”
So we talked—or rather, I listened—as the lawyer talked through the
afternoon. Katzmann had avoided the Dedham courtroom the day Thayer
passed sentence, but Dray had gone there deliberately, and had heard
Vanzetti’s speech to the court and watched him point his finger at
the judge. For Dray, Vanzetti had seemed a sinister figure at that
moment with his glaring eyes, his heavy bobbing mustache, and his
passionate foreign voice.
Inevitably, we got to the subject of the guns.
“There’s a church just across the street,” Dray said. “The priest,
Father Fraher, had a brother who was in here after the trial. He told
Fred, ‘You want to know where Berardelli got his gun? He got it from
me, that’s where he got it.’ There was a crack or nick or some sort
of mark on the handle, and this Fraher said, ‘If the one you found on
Vanzetti has that mark on it, it’s the same gun.’ He hadn’t even seen
the gun then, mind you, but when we showed it to him, there was the
mark, just like he said.
“Ah,” he said at last, sadness in his voice, “I wish I could explain
to you in words what Fred really was. You couldn’t really understand
him, seeing him just that once. Perhaps you were fed up with being
on a jury. Fred wasn’t tricky. He was honest all the way through. I
remember some man came in here once and wanted Fred to defend him
in a robbery case, offered him five thousand dollars. That was a
lot more money then than it is today. When he came to pay Fred, he
brought the money in a box, all in bills, done up in little piles. As
soon as Fred saw it, he wouldn’t touch the case. That money looked
too much like payroll money. But an assistant district attorney over
in Suffolk County didn’t mind taking it. No, you couldn’t get Fred
to do anything that had even a suspicion of being wrong. He was that
kind of man.”
I left Dray in the anteroom. We shook hands beside Katzmann’s
picture. “I’m glad you came,” he said finally.
Out I went into the slashing rain, to my car parked by the dark bulk
of the Catholic church where Father Fraher or his successor was
probably still hearing confessions. If only Dray could have whipped
open one of his filing cabinets and taken out the ultimate document
that would have satisfied everyone from Aldino Felicani in his
sheet-metal office to the corporation lawyer on Federal Street. I
would have settled for a villain, but I had found only decent-enough
people in irreconcilable positions, and still at the core of the
labyrinth two men who had died a third of a century earlier in the
electric chair.
CHAPTER THREE
APRIL 15, 1920
Thursday mornings Shelley Neal, the South Braintree agent for the
American Express Company, met the 9:18 local from Boston to pick
up the payrolls of the Slater & Morrill and Walker & Kneeland shoe
factories. Until January 1920, the payrolls had been sent down on
Wednesdays, but recently there had been so many holdups around Boston
that the head office had altered its delivery schedules.
It was an uneasy time, that year after the soldiers returned. In
November the savings bank in the neighboring town of Randolph, a few
miles west of Braintree, had been held up and robbed. A month later,
on the day before Christmas, four men in a touring car had tried to
rob the paymaster of the L. Q. White shoe factory in Bridgewater,
sixteen miles to the south. An unknown gang had recently stolen
several freight-car loads of shoes belonging to Slater & Morrill.
Almost every week Neal received a notice from the Boston office
warning him to take every precaution, particularly to watch out for
suspicious strangers. He now carried his 38-caliber Colt in his
pocket with the pocket flap tucked inside so that he could reach for
it quickly.
South Braintree was the other side of the New York, New Haven
& Hartford tracks, at the wrong end of town. Had there been a
national-bank branch there, the payroll money would not have
had to be sent down by train, but the triangle of factories and
narrow streets and workers’ houses was not commercially important
enough. Braintree itself, lying ten miles south of Boston, was an
undistinguished community of about fifteen thousand inhabitants that
one passed through almost absent-mindedly on the old turnpike road to
Cape Cod.
On Thursday morning, April 15, Neal, in his customary dark suit,
derby, and overcoat, waited on the station platform with Art Stevens,
one of his expressmen. The 9:18 was late. Neal drew out his gold
Waltham on its heavy chain with the Masonic seal. Nine twenty-one. He
could hear the wail of the steam-whistle—two long notes, a short, and
a long—as the train approached the Braintree crossing. It would take
another five minutes to reach South Braintree.
His express wagon was backed up to the curb, the driver hunched
forward on the seat, his coat collar over his ears. Between the
shafts the horse jingled his brasses, stamped, steamed, and tossed
his head. Although the sun was four hours up, the air still held an
aftermath of winter. Neal’s blunt hands with their hairy knuckles
showed red, the diamond set in the thick gold band on his left ring
finger reflected the light coldly.
A cumulus puff from the invisible train billowed up, blurring the
horizon outline of the water towers on Penns Hill, Quincy. Within
a minute the engine rounded the curve, growing larger as it moved
soundlessly against the wind. Then the whistle echoed again and
suddenly the train loomed up on the Union Street crossing by the
Victorian brick aggregate of Thayer Academy. The station windows
began to vibrate with the sound.
Almost before Neal was aware of it the train had slipped into the
station, the brass bell on the boiler clanging, the driving wheels
slurring to a halt. He waved to the engineer as the cab passed.
Below the station at the Pearl Street crossing Mike Levangie, the
lank-mustached, one-legged gate-tender, hobbled out of his shack
and cranked down the double gate, then clumped over the tracks and
lowered the single one.
Several passengers got off, a man and a woman got on, the
stationmaster came out to check a bundle of Boston newspapers. Neal
and Stevens walked to the baggage car where the freight clerk was
waiting for them. Neal did not know his name—he was a new fellow—but
he was a Mason. “Cold morning,” he remarked as he shoved an iron box
across the floor. It contained some thirty thousand dollars in bills
and coin. After Neal had signed the receipt book the clerk handed him
the box’s key in a sealed envelope.
Neal and Stevens carried the box across the platform to the wagon and
pushed it under the seat. Then Neal climbed up beside the driver.
The driver flicked the reins and the horse started forward. Stevens,
who had climbed over the tailboard, remained standing. Just as the
wagon began to move, the locomotive backed up suddenly with a clank
of couplings. Its piston rods reversed, a jet of steam shot from the
cylinders, and the train started off in the direction of Weymouth,
Hingham, and the South Shore.
The shadow of the wagon moved diagonally across Railroad Avenue
toward the Hampton House, a mansard-roofed structure, four stories
high, that had been built in the seventies for a trunk factory.
It now housed the Slater & Morrill offices as well as the cutting
rooms of the upper factory—Slater & Morrill’s lower factory was some
distance away on Pearl Street. On the ground floor of the Hampton
House, to the left of the center entrance, was the express company’s
office. The gilt sign over its door, unchanged from an earlier day,
read _New York & Boston Despatch Express Co._
Its clapboarding flaked and blistered, the gray building lay full
in the slanting sunlight that burnished its windows. A narrow grass
border divided the avenue from an indented strip of pavement in front
of the porticoed Slater & Morrill entrance. Six or seven cars were
parked along the outside of the border. Neal recognized them. It was
still possible to know all the cars in town at sight. “A lot of autos
here this morning,” he remarked to the driver. There was one auto
parked by the granite curb near the central entrance that Neal had
never seen before: a touring car, dark and shiny as if it had just
been polished. The top was up, the rear side curtains were fastened
in place, and the motor was running. Neal’s driver had to turn out
sharply to avoid scraping its fender. A man slumped down in the
driver’s seat did not turn or look at them. He wore a felt hat, and
his shoulders were hunched so that all Neal could see was the back of
his neck, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Then, standing in
the doorway under the portico, Neal noticed a second man, thin and
fair-haired, with a pale sunken face. He had on a brown coat like an
old army overcoat and he wore a gray hat pulled over his forehead.
Neal did not like his looks.
The driver backed the wagon into the space in front of the express
office, and Neal and Stevens carried the box inside. After the
outside chill the office was warmly pleasant, smelling of floor oil
and cigars. Neal took the key from the envelope and opened the box.
Inside were the payrolls for the two companies, each in a brown
canvas bag stamped National Shawmut Bank. He took out the Slater
& Morrill bag and put the box containing the Walker and Kneeland
money in the safe. Then he closed the safe door, pressed down the
nickel-plated handle, and spun the dial.
With the bag tucked under his arm Neal motioned to Stevens and they
started out the door toward the building’s center entrance. Neal now
noticed another strange car. This one was parked across the avenue,
facing south. He could not tell what kind it was. It was streaked
with mud. He heard its driver call out “All right!” to the man in the
first car. The pale man was still standing under the portico leaning
against the door post. His hands were thrust into his overcoat
pockets, and he held his head low, but as Neal and Stevens passed he
stared up at them, moving his eyes without lifting his head. Neal
felt for the reassurance of the Colt in his pocket. The man did not
move. He had blue bulging eyes, the whites muddied, and his skin was
yellowish, sickly, as if he were tubercular.
There was something queer about him, about his being there, Neal felt
as he trudged up to the second floor. “Some funny-looking people
round here today,” he told the girl at the desk. Margaret Mahoney,
the paymistress, was at her desk by the water cooler. Neal had known
Margaret Mahoney for years. The payroll bag was heavy for her so he
walked across the office and put it in the safe himself. She gave him
the receipt for it, and he and Stevens started downstairs.
From the top of the landing Neal could see the pale man still
standing in the doorway but when he was about halfway down the man
took his hands out of his pockets, walked over to the touring car,
opened the rear door, and got in. Neal kept his hand on his Colt.
By the time he reached the doorway the car had started up and swung
round the corner of Holbrook Avenue. The mud-streaked car had already
disappeared.
* * * * *
South Braintree Square was empty at half-past ten when Harry
Dolbeare, a piano tuner, finished a cup of coffee at Torrey’s
Drugstore on the corner and started up Washington Street to Cuff’s
Music Store. Cuff had called him the day before to see about the
felts on a secondhand upright, and Dolbeare told him he would have
a look at it. As he reached Gregor’s Restaurant he noticed a black
touring car turning left from Holbrook Avenue to Washington Street.
He could see two men in front and, although the rear side curtains
were up, three more men in the back seat. One of the men in back was
leaning forward talking to the driver. Dolbeare had never seen any of
them before, or the car either. They looked to him like foreigners,
maybe some of that Dago bunch from the Fore River shipyards. Tough
tickets, the lot of them, he thought to himself after the car had
passed him.
At 11:15 Lola Hassam, a hard-faced woman in her forties, got off the
train from Quincy with Julia Campbell, the old woman who rented one
of her two rooms in the Alhambra Block there. Lola now called herself
Lola Andrews, her name before her divorce, although some people said
she had never been married. At various times she had been a waitress,
a cleaning woman, and a practical nurse. Men often used to come to
her room in the Alhambra. Since things were slack in Quincy, she and
Julia had decided to come to South Braintree and look for work in one
of the shoe factories.
They crossed the tracks by the gate-tender’s shack at the end of
Railroad Avenue, walked down Pearl Street past the double pipe fence
in front of Rice & Hutchins, and continued another twenty-five yards
to the lower Slater & Morrill factory. Julia Campbell was developing
cataracts, and she took the younger woman’s arm going downhill.
About thirty feet from the factory they passed a black touring
car parked at the side of the road. A dark stocky man with high
cheekbones was bending over the raised hood adjusting the motor.
Lola Andrews saw another man sitting in the back of the car, a pale,
sick-looking sort of fellow in a khaki overcoat.
The men paid no attention to them and the women walked up the steps
of Slater & Morrill. Once inside they could not locate the employment
office. As they stood there undecided, a middle-aged man in a
business suit came down the corridor and asked them what they wanted.
“We want work, mister,” Lola Andrews said. The man said that three
months ago he could have given them both jobs. Now they were not
taking on any new help. She was not to be put off so easily,
insisting she had heard in Quincy that the factory needed people. He
told her she had heard wrong. “Isn’t this Rice and Hutchins?” she
asked him finally.
No, he told her, Rice & Hutchins was up the road.
When the women again passed the touring car, the pale man in the
overcoat was standing behind it and the dark man had crawled
underneath and was working on the motor from below, his head and
shoulders just visible through the spokes of the front wheel. Lola
had almost to step over his feet to get by. He had a screwdriver in
his hand, and just as she was opposite him he glanced up at her.
“Pardon me,” she said, “could you tell me how to get to the factory
office?”
He crawled out from under the car, stood up, and asked her what
factory she wanted. When she told him Rice & Hutchins, he pointed
out the brick building and told her to take the driveway to the left;
that was the office up there.
Lola and old Julia went down the gravel walk along the side of the
brick building, up the stairs, and through the double folding doors.
They could see the Employment Office sign there plainly enough.
Whenever William Tracey drove to the square on an errand, as he did
two or three times a day, he liked to drive by his building, the
wooden three-decker he had built in 1907 at the corner of Hancock and
Pearl. Torrey’s Drugstore occupied the ground floor. That Thursday
morning as he parked on Pearl to pick up his wife’s groceries at
Dyer & Sullivan’s, just across from the drugstore, he noticed two
strangers standing with their backs to Torrey’s window where the big
glass vase of red water hung from its chains. The men were swarthy,
about medium height, one just a little taller than the other. If it
had been twelve o’clock the streets would have been full of factory
hands and he probably would not have noticed them, but it was still
half an hour before the noon whistle and the square was empty. He
could not help but notice them.
After Tracey reached home with the groceries he found he had
forgotten bread, so he drove back again, past his building and left
to Schrout’s Bakery on Pearl Street. The strange men were still
leaning against the window as he went in. When he came out they were
gone.
Not quite an hour later William Heron, a railroad detective, noticed
the same two men in the station. They were sitting on a bench by
the gents’ toilet smoking cigarettes and talking in some foreign
language. Dagos, he thought they were. He had come down on the 12:27
from Boston, and he was scarcely off the train before he spotted a
fresh kid who had climbed on top of the Union News stand and was
trying to tip it over. Eleven or twelve years old he was, one of that
gang that hung around the station afternoons. Heron grabbed him by
the collar and ran him into the operator’s room. The Dagos didn’t
even look up as he went by.
McNamara was the kid’s name. The operator said his old man was all
right, worked for the railroad, so Heron told the kid what he’d do to
him if he ever caught him hanging round the station again, and let
him go. He was not in the operator’s room more than five minutes, but
when he stepped out again the Dagos had left. Somehow they stuck in
his mind, and he wondered where they had gone to.
By trade Ralph DeForest was a shoemaker, though he had been
unemployed for two months now. When he had nothing else to do, and
that was most of the time, he wandered around South Braintree Square
or sometimes dropped in at Magazu’s poolroom on Pearl Street. At 2:20
he was talking with Officer Shea on the corner next to Torrey’s when
he spotted two men in front of the jewelry store. In the last two
months he had seen everyone in town, but he had never seen those two
before. Shea left to go up to the town hall and DeForest walked down
by the fruit store past the jeweler’s. The two men looked him over
as if they wanted to make something of it. Dark men they were, tough
babies. He wasn’t going to let them think he was scared of them,
though. Deliberately he turned round and walked past them again. They
stared at him, and he stared at them, and finally he said: “I don’t
think I owe you fellows anything.”
Without answering him they started off down Pearl Street, one about
five feet ahead of the other. DeForest decided he would follow them.
At the crossing they turned left toward the station. Just in front of
the station a pinch-faced man in a brown coat was tinkering with the
engine of a black touring car. The other two paused on the platform
and DeForest brushed right by them and through the station into the
toilet. When he came out the car and men had disappeared.
At ten minutes to three Jenny Novelli, a nurse, was on her way down
Pearl Street to call on her friend Mrs. Knipps, who lived on Colbert
Avenue, a dead-end dirt road just beyond Rice & Hutchins on the left.
As she passed Schrout’s Bakery she noticed a large curtained touring
car abreast of her and going in the same direction scarcely faster
than she was walking. The car kept level with her until she reached
the cobbler’s shop on the corner. At first she thought the man next
to the driver was a friend of hers, William Mooney, but at second
glance she realized she was mistaken. The pale driver she scarcely
noticed.
For sixteen years Lewis Wade had been working in the sole-leather
room at Slater & Morrill. Then, late in 1919, the boss had put him in
charge of the shed and gasoline pump in front of the lower factory.
Any time the company cars needed gas he went out to take care of
them. Every afternoon at the same time Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s
chauffeur, would come round to fill up Slater’s Marmon sedan, and
Wade was always ready for him with the shed door open and the pump
unlocked.
On this April 15 just before three o’clock, Behrsin dropped by as
usual and said he was on his way to the garage and that he would be
back in ten minutes. A couple of minutes after three, as Wade was
hitching the hose onto the pump, he happened to see a touring car
below the factory in front of the little wooden house that belonged
to the carpenter at Rice & Hutchins. A man was bending over the hood
of the car fixing something.
Behrsin pulled up alongside the shed with the gray Marmon and
Wade put in about eight gallons of gas. While he was cranking he
kept watching the black car until before he knew it the tank had
overflowed. Behrsin and he wiped up the overflow, then Behrsin drove
off up Pearl Street toward the station.
As he passed Rice & Hutchins he saw two men sitting on the pipe fence
near the end of the building, their feet on the lower bar. He knew
they were strangers, but that was all he noticed about them.
From the time Shelley Neal brought in the payroll money, Margaret
Mahoney had been dividing it to make up the envelopes for the lower
factory. There were almost five hundred separate envelopes to be
filled, and dividing the $15,776.51 took her right up to three
o’clock, with only about ten minutes off for lunch. After she had
sealed the envelopes she packed them in two wooden cases that went
inside steel cashboxes with Yale locks. Hardly had she got the locks
fastened before Mr. Parmenter and his guard Berardelli, the one
everyone called the detective, stood there waiting for them.
Frederick Parmenter was in his middle forties, a full-faced man with
a short mustache. The solidness of his body, his slightly sagging
features and thinning brown hair made him seem older. Margaret
Mahoney and the other girls in the office looked forward to his
weekly visits. He liked to joke and pretend to make dates with them,
though it was only in fun, for he had been married for years and
did not play around. He was always very careful of his dress. That
day he wore a white shirt with black and pink stripes and a new
brown felt hat. Before he left he kidded a bit with the bookkeepers,
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine. He said he would take his pay now
while there was still some money, and Margaret Gabney, the assistant
bookkeeper, told him he had better, for there might not be any
tomorrow. Then he took one of the cashboxes by the handle, and the
detective took the other. The detective was just another Italian who
never said anything.
Margaret Mahoney remembered afterward how Parmenter stood for a
moment in the doorway and then how the stairs creaked as he and the
detective walked down. It was a few minutes past three.
Outside the main entrance of the Hampton House, Parmenter, with
Berardelli behind him, met Albert Frantello from the lower factory.
Frantello said he was on his way to the office to get some cardboard
tags. The paymaster and his guard walked on out of the shadow of the
Hampton House.
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine watched them for some minutes from
their window on the second floor. Parmenter, without an overcoat,
kept to the outside of the gravel walk and the detective, his
overcoat buttoned up, walked a little way behind him. Just before
they reached the crossing Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his left
to his right hand. Fifteen feet beyond him the gate-tender was out
washing a window of his shack.
From the cutting room on the third floor, Mark Carrigan, also looking
out a window, kept his eye on the paymaster and the detective with
their boxes as they passed the cobbler’s shop on the corner and went
on toward the railroad-crossing sign. Just beyond the crossing, they
stopped to talk with a man coming uphill from the other direction.
Then they went on down, behind the high board fence by the water
tower.
The first-floor windows of the lower Slater & Morrill factory were
open, and Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes at their workbench noticed
a touring car parked by the side of the street only about ten feet
from them. A slight fair-haired man in a blue suit was fussing with
the motor, lifting one side of the hood and then the other. Finally
he stood by the front mudguard and lit a cigarette. A sickly young
man he seemed, but not bad-looking. While he was standing there with
a screwdriver in his hand, Thomas Treacy drove up with a wagonload
of coal for Slater & Morrill, noticed the man’s light hair, and
remembered that he had seen the same car with another man in front of
the railroad station early that morning.
After a while the two girls watched the fair-haired man get into the
car, drive down Pearl Street toward the swamp, turn round, and start
back again.
Roy Gould had invented an oil-and-pumice paste for sharpening safety
razor blades. All you needed to do was smear a little on the edge
of a blade, run the blade a couple of times around the inside rim
of a glass tumbler, and it was as good as new. He used to go to the
different South Shore factories on paydays and sell his paste at the
gates as the men came out. On April 15 he arrived at South Braintree
on the 2:59 train. There was a young fellow standing on the platform
and Gould asked him if he knew where and how they paid off at the
shoe factories. The other pointed to two men walking down the street
to the railroad crossing. “There goes the paymaster now,” he told
him. “Just follow him.”
Gould started off toward the gateman’s shack. He could see the
paymaster stop briefly at the crossing to talk with someone, then
disappear behind the board fence the other side of the tracks.
Jimmy Bostock, the bandy-legged machine repairman, hurrying up Pearl
Street from the lower factory to get the 3:15 trolley to Brockton,
was near the water tower when he saw Parmenter and Berardelli coming
down the street. He crossed over to meet them.
“Bostock,” Parmenter said as he came up, “there’s a pulley off one of
the motors up at Number One.”
“I can’t look at it, not today,” Bostock told him. “I got to get this
quarter-past-three trolley to Brockton to do a job there.”
“Well,” said Parmenter amiably, “they just told me to tell you if I
saw you. That’s all.” While they were talking, Behrsin drove by in
the Marmon sedan, honking and waving as he passed. Bostock said he
would have to leg it to catch his trolley. “Don’t let me keep you,”
Parmenter told him. He and his guard continued down the gravel walk.
Parmenter shifted the cashbox from his right to his left hand. The
afternoon sun was warm on his back. To his right was the garage with
the tin roof, and beyond it the tower of Rice & Hutchins. The lilac
bush on the little dirt triangle in front of the factory was just
coming into bud. A flock of pigeons circled over the tower, then
headed back to their loft in Cain’s livery stable. Across the street,
beyond a pile of bricks, some Italians were digging the cellar for
a new restaurant. A loaded truck had just started up out of the
excavation. Jim McGlone’s dump cart was pulled up to the curb beside
a couple of little carts into which the Italians were shoveling dirt.
Parmenter passed the telephone pole with the red fire-alarm box on
it. Two strangers were standing by the fence in front of Rice &
Hutchins, dark squat men, their hands in their pockets. One wore a
cap, the other a felt hat. He kept on past them, one step, two steps,
three....
As his guard, still following, reached the telephone pole, the
strangers whipped their hands from their pockets, and the man in
the cap lunged forward, pinning Berardelli by the shoulder with his
left hand while his right brought up a pistol. Berardelli tried to
grapple with him, but before he could get a grip the man fired into
him three times. Parmenter turned like a cat to find the same man
now facing him, pistol in hand, and Berardelli just behind, his
knees buckling. Then the gun muzzle flashed and a bullet struck him
in the chest. He flinched, took a few steps sideways, and the man
fired again. This time the bullet struck him in the back, and as he
staggered across the street his legs began to go limp. Berardelli lay
in the gutter, his arms twitching, the second cashbox just beyond the
reach of his right hand. The man in the felt hat snatched up the box,
then darted out toward the box Parmenter had dropped.
The man in the cap, who had followed Parmenter halfway across the
street, now signaled with his pistol and fired again. As he did so
the dark touring car that had been parked below Slater & Morrill
seventy-five yards away started jerkily uphill with a grinding of
gears.
The staccato sound of the shots echoed from the factory walls.
From the loft of the livery stable the pigeons swirled up into the
sunshine, then wheeled over the Hampton House. At the end of the
wooden fence, almost at the crossing, Jimmy Bostock turned to see
Berardelli doubling up and the gunman firing. Parmenter was walking
jerkily across the street, and Bostock did not realize the paymaster
had been hit until he began to sag. Seeing him fall, Bostock took a
few steps toward him, but as he did so the man in the cap froze him
by the fence with two shots.
The touring car churned along the street, sputtering and skipping,
the driver furiously working the spark lever on the steering wheel.
Berardelli had managed to get to his hands and knees. Before the
car stopped a man, crouched on the running board, sprang off near
the brick pile. He had an automatic in his hand. Stepping to the
swaying Berardelli, he fired point-blank. Berardelli collapsed in the
gravel. The first two bandits had piled into the back seat with the
cashboxes. After firing several shots at the upper factory windows,
the third bandit climbed in the back seat after them. As the car
whined toward the crossing he crawled over into the front seat,
leaning out, pistol in hand.
Wade was just snapping the lock on the gas pump when he heard the
noise and looked up the street, thinking the Italians had started
a fight. He saw Parmenter drop behind the cart and then watched a
wavy-haired man shoot at Berardelli.
Along the front of each floor of Rice & Hutchins were nine rows of
frosted-glass windows. Even if the sash of the middle cutting-room
window on the first floor had not been jammed several inches above
the sill, the cutters at their benches might still have heard the
shots above the noise of the machinery. The jammed window made
this certain. At the sound William Brenner leaned forward from his
cutting board to peer through the slit, as did Louis Pelser on his
right. As they looked down they saw Berardelli writhing in the
gutter almost directly below them and a man with a pistol standing
over him. Afterward they found it difficult to remember just what
or how much they had seen in that one glimpse. As Pelser later
testified, “We seen a glance of the whole thing.” From behind them
Peter McCullum sprang on top of the bench, kicking the cutting boards
aside and throwing the window up to the sash. What he saw was a dark
man pushing a box in a car with his right hand. The sunshine was
flickering on a whitish pistol in his left hand.
“Duck!” McCullum yelled, “There’s shooting going on!” Another shot
echoed, and there was a tinkle of broken glass. McCullum, Brenner,
Pelser, and the rest of the cutters threw themselves on the floor
under the benches. A few seconds later a cutter at the other end of
the room shouted that the automobile was crossing the tracks. They
crawled out from under the benches, and Pelser pushed down to the
end of the room where someone had opened the last window. He managed
to see only the rear of the car jolting over the tracks but he could
still make out the license plate. Going back to his cutting board he
wrote down the number: 49783.
From the treeing room on the floor above, the foreman, Edgar
Langlois, glanced incredulously down at the slumped Berardelli and
the two strangers. “Someone’s been shot!” he shouted and ran for
the wall telephone in the corridor. Barbara Liscomb peered from the
window to see the paymaster and his guard on the ground, and just
below her a dark, short, hatless man with a pistol in his hand. As
she looked, he lifted his head and stared directly at her, a face
that she could never afterward get out of her mind. He pointed his
pistol, but before the bullet crashed through the pane over her head
she had fainted. Langlois, dashing back, looked out again to see the
dark car rolling toward the crossing. The glass had been removed from
the back window and a rifle or shotgun barrel was sticking through
the opening.
In the Slater & Morrill lower factory Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes
had gone upstairs to the ladies’ room. When they heard the shots they
dashed to the window just in time to catch a glimpse of the vanishing
car.
From the kitchen of the frame house in back of the excavation Annie
Nichols, so startled that she could hardly breathe, had watched
the shooting, seen Berardelli and Parmenter fall, and the laborers
scatter and dodge toward her fence. Then the touring car appeared and
a man tossed the cashboxes into it. In his house next door Maurice
Colbert, a carman for the railroad, had just gone into the kitchen
to take off his coat when he heard the shots and saw the Italians
running. He started for the front door only to find that his wife,
sensing trouble, had locked it and removed the key. All he could
see from the window was the auto and the two men with boxes running
toward it.
As the car approached the railroad crossing, it came so close to
Bostock that he could have reached out and touched it. Levangie,
washing the windows of his shack, had heard the shots without heeding
them until he saw a man come out from behind the brick pile and
commence shooting. At that very moment the warning bell began to ring
for the Brockton train, and he left his cloth and bucket to crank
down the gates. Just as he brought the bars horizontal the touring
car came to a halt in front of him, a man leaning out with a pistol
that he jerked up sharply, shouting “Up! Up!” The train was still
beyond the Hood Rubber Works, the engine just rounding the bend.
Again the man jerked the pistol, then pointed it. Levangie raised the
barrier. The touring car jolted across the ties, passing within a few
feet of Roy Gould on his way to the factories with his razor-blade
paste. A bareheaded gunman fired at Gould almost point-blank, the
bullet piercing a lapel of his overcoat. Gould fixed the man’s look
in his mind: the blown wavy hair, the blue suit, and oddly enough the
watchchain that he was wearing across his waistcoat.
Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin from their Hampton House office,
Mark Carrigan from the cutting room above, watched the topheavy
car with its flapping curtains as it crossed from the tracks to
the cobbler’s shop on the corner. The gunman in the front seat was
firing at random. Workers scurried out the side entrance of Rice &
Hutchins. Someone was chasing up the street from the factory calling
“Stop them! Stop them!” A railroad gang working beside a sandpile
stood gaping, their shovels still in their hands, Angelo Ricci, the
foreman, trying to keep them back.
On the corner of Railroad Avenue in front of the cobbler’s shop the
car almost brushed Frank Burke, an itinerant glassblower down for the
day from Brockton. The gunman in the front seat aimed directly at
him and pulled the trigger, but the hammer merely clicked. “Get out
of the way, you son of a bitch!” he bellowed at Burke, the curtains
blurring his face.
Louis DeBeradinis in his cobbler’s shop was giving an order to a
salesman, Merle Averill, when he heard the tattoo of shots. “What the
hell’s that?” Averill asked him, dropping his order book and running
to the door. DeBeradinis followed. Together they saw the touring car
sputter past the shop. The gunman leaned out and fired almost in
DeBeradinis’ face. Again the weapon misfired.
At the poolroom at 66 Pearl Street, beyond the stable, Carlos
Goodridge, a Victrola salesman, had been having a quick game with
Peter Magazu, the proprietor, who also owned the shoe store next
door, when he heard the first shots. He walked to the window, saw
nothing, came back, and was chalking his cue when he heard more shots
and people shouting. This time, stepping out to the edge of the
sidewalk, he saw the dark touring car only twenty feet away and a
swarthy man leaning out of it pointing a revolver at him. He ducked
back inside and slammed the poolroom door, then peered out through
the glass as the car spun by. The gunman had lowered his hand now,
but he still held the revolver. Goodridge, his stomach tightened in a
knot, watched the car swerve past the bakery, a gun barrel protruding
from the gap of the rear window.
It gathered speed, running more smoothly, rolling past the stores and
the frame two- and three-family houses and the barber shop with its
spiraling striped pole. At 54 Pearl Street Nicola Damato, the barber,
watched it pass, as did a shoe worker, Olaf Olsen, who had just come
out of Torrey’s Drugstore. Both of them saw the gunman leaning out.
Olsen noticed how he kept his left hand over his mouth as he held the
pistol in his right. As the car swung left onto Washington at the top
of Pearl Street, the tires spewing up the gravel, one of the men in
the rear seat threw out several handfuls of tacks.
Elmer Chase, loading a truck in front of the Co-operative Society a
hundred yards down Washington Street, heard the squeal of brakes and
the grinding of gears. He looked up at the oncoming car, expecting a
smashup. It slowed slightly as it passed him, and he had a glimpse of
a sickly-looking driver and a stocky dark man with blowing hair bent
over next to him.
* * * * *
Scarcely a minute had elapsed from the first shot until the getaway
car vanished, but with its disappearance the actuality faded and the
myth took over. All in all there were more than fifty witnesses of
the holdup in its various stages, yet each impression now began to
work in the yeast of individual preconceptions. The car was black, it
was green, it was shiny, it was mud-streaked. There were two cars.
The men who did the shooting were dark, were pale, had blue suits,
had brown suits, had gray suits, wore felt hats, wore caps, were
bareheaded. Only one had a gun, both had guns. The third man had been
behind the brick pile with a shotgun all the time. Anywhere between
eight and thirty shots had been fired. On some points there was a
rough agreement: The car was a touring car, there were five men in
it, the driver was a fair, sallow man, and the two men who had begun
the shooting were short and clean-shaven.
The three gunmen had scarcely climbed into their car before Jim
McGlone crawled from the excavation to where Parmenter lay sprawled
on a stone. “I got him by the shoulder,” McGlone related two days
later at the inquest, “and asked him where he was hurt and he didn’t
answer, and I lowered his head to the ground. I went to the double
team and got a horse blanket to put under Parmenter’s head and my
brother came along and we lifted Parmenter up and they spread the
horse blanket out and we put Parmenter in, and my brother and two
other fellows took hold of a corner of the blanket and we carried him
into the house.”
As soon as the car had passed the water tower Jimmy Bostock ran back
to Berardelli. The detective lay on his side, his lips open, and with
every breath blood foamed from his mouth. Bostock propped the guard’s
head up slightly and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
Berardelli gave a shudder, the bright bubbling at his mouth stopped,
and Bostock knew that the man was dead. In the gravel Bostock noted
four spent shell cases. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.
All the factory entrances were now clogged with gesticulating
figures. Those who remained inside lined the open windows. From
the shops and tenements and the Hampton House beyond, people were
streaming across the tracks to where the two men were lying. Around
Berardelli they gathered ten deep. Fred Loring, who had run out with
the others from the lower factory, saw a dark cloth cap lying a foot
or so from the guard’s body. He picked it up and tucked it into
his pocket. McGlone kept pushing the crowd back from the groaning
Parmenter. Then he and his brother and Bostock carried the paymaster
into the Colbert house, just behind the excavation. Crowds swarmed
into Pearl Street: men in shirtsleeves, women in work aprons, small
boys underfoot pushing their way through the others. The roadway was
soon blocked from the factories to the railroad crossing. The voices
of the men and women mingled, a collective murmur of incredulity
that a thing such as they might have read about in newspaper
headlines could actually have happened in South Braintree.
Shelley Neal arrived with his special police badge pinned on his coat
and his Colt in his pocket just as they were carrying Parmenter into
the Colbert house. The paymaster looked almost gone. As soon as Neal
saw him in the blanket his one thought was to get back to the office
and call the man’s wife. It took him five minutes, bucking the crowd,
to reach the Hampton House and once there he found all the telephone
lines busy. After trying several times to get central, he hurried
down the steps to his harnessed wagon and headed for the telephone
exchange.
Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan, driving up in his Ford, passed the
careening wagon, Neal with his feet braced against the dashboard
and slashing at his galloping horse. By the time Gallivan covered
the mile and a half from his home to Rice & Hutchins, Parmenter had
been taken inside and Berardelli was dead. The chief shouldered his
way through the crowd until he stood looking down at the familiar
body with the unfamiliar glazed eyes. The mill workers pressed about
him, their voices clamorous as they pointed out where the shots had
been fired and the route of the car. Fire Chief Fred Tenney, already
on the spot, told him it was a touring car with a green body. Its
motor was acting up, Tenney said. He thought there might still be a
chance to catch the gunman. Gallivan was willing to try. Together
they started off in the red department runabout, forcing their way up
Pearl Street, Tenney sounding the brass bell mounted on the radiator.
After a left turn onto Washington Street they had to stop to brush
away the scattered tacks, but after that they were in the clear. At
the Plain Street railroad crossing Gallivan shouted at Joe Buckley,
the gate-tender, that there had been a killing. Had he seen a car
pass? Buckley had not. Gallivan and Tenney continued straight south
toward Holbrook, two miles away.
At Holbrook Square they found a soldier who had seen just such a
green touring car ten minutes before on the way to Abington. They
swung east on the Abington road, Gallivan gun in hand, Tenney
clanging his bell as he held the accelerator to the floor. The flat
wooden town came on them with a rush, but beyond, in the network of
roads between Whitman and Cox’s Corner, they lost the trail. Back and
forth through the barren landscape they circled, along dirt ways that
looped back on themselves or ended in the litter of some squatter’s
chicken yard. The dust rose behind them and the afternoon shadows
lengthened as the red runabout pushed on—until after almost two hours
of driving they gave up.
Gallivan’s revolver was back in its holster and the fire chief’s bell
silent when they again reached the Plain Street crossing. Buckley
waved for them to stop. “I forgot to tell you about a car that came
down here and went up that way,” he told them, pointing north. “It
went out of my mind. The brakes screeched so much I thought it was
going into the river.”
“Well,” said Gallivan, “it’s too late now.”
* * * * *
Instead of continuing over the tracks at Plain Street the car—with
the screech that Buckley noted—had made a hairpin turn and headed
back toward South Braintree on the almost parallel Franklin Street.
But at the hill corner by the white-spired South Congregational
Church it had swung west on Pond Street, following the curve of
Sunset Lake on the right, and past the cemetery and the Torrey
Elementary School on the left. After following Pond Street west for
a mile, slapping and jolting, side curtains billowing and the motor
roaring, the car turned south on Granite Street toward Randolph.
Mrs. Alta Baker saw it near the Randolph line, moving at fifty miles
an hour. At twelve minutes after three it passed Walter Desmond, a
tobacco salesman, on his way from Randolph to South Braintree. Then
at the junction with the Randolph highway it swung right along the
broken surface of Oak Street, cut through the scrubby outskirts of
the Randolph Woods for a mile and a half, and took the left fork near
an old cemetery into Orchard Street. On this obscure lane it passed
Albert Farmer and his wife Adeline with their horse and wagon that
they had just taken from the barn where the two roads joined. The
Farmers noticed the swirl of dust as the car moved toward them and
they watched it make the abrupt turn south into Orchard Street.
The driver must have soon realized he was off course, for ten minutes
later George Chisholm, a road laborer working on Main Street, a
stone’s throw from Oak, saw the car beating up north with flaring
curtains, hurtling by him so fast he thought the tires were coming
off. It turned right into Oak Street and continued a quarter of
a mile east, bearing down Orchard until it again arrived at the
junction. The driver stopped, hesitated, then swung the car into the
yard of the Hewins house on the corner just across from the Farmers.
Mabel Hewins was standing on her porch when the swarthy man in the
front seat leaned out and asked her the way to Providence. She told
him to follow Oak Street to Chestnut across North Main and keep
going. He grunted, reversed the car jerkily, and started back the way
he had come. She could see both men in the front seat clearly, but
not the others.
Not quite two miles farther, a mile beyond Tower Hill where Chestnut
Street merges with the Stoughton Post Road, John Lloyd and Wilson
Dorr, working in a sandpit, saw the car jouncing south along the
road that was “all hills and hollows and ruts.” Dorr noticed that
the glass was missing from the back window. On the sharp gradient
of Tucker Hill leading into Stoughton it overtook Francis Clark and
Elmer Pool in their bakery wagon, veered out, and continued on the
left-hand side of the road and over the crest. Clark, too, noticed
the oblong gap in the back of the cloth top and told Pool to copy the
license plate. All Pool could spot was 49.
The car disappeared south in the isolation of the old turnpike and
was not glimpsed again until it reached the outskirts of Brockton
at a quarter to four. A high school girl, Julia Kelliher, saw it
coming down very fast over the hill from Brockton Heights, churning
the dust behind it, the curtains fluttering in the wind. As it went
over a bump she saw something tossed up in the back seat behind the
curtains. There were two men in front. After the car passed she tried
to take down the license number. She could made out an 83 at the end
and a 9 and a 7, and these she wrote in the sand beside the road.
At 4:15 Austin Reed, the railroad-crossing tender at Matfield, a
small settlement on the outskirts of West Bridgewater, eight and a
half miles southeast of Brockton Heights and twenty-two miles from
South Braintree, stepped out of his shanty at the approach of the
train from Westdale. As he stood in the middle of the road with the
yellow Stop sign in his hand, he saw a touring car racing down the
hill from West Bridgewater. He walked toward it holding up his sign.
The driver did not seem to want to stop, but finally he pulled up
about forty feet away. A man sitting next to the driver leaned out
and shouted, “What the hell are you holding us up for?” Then the
train passed between them. After it had rumbled by, the car started
up over the crossing and the man in the front seat pointed his finger
at Reed as if it were a pistol and bellowed again: “What the hell did
you hold us up for?” He was only four feet away.
The rattling car took the right fork on Matfield Street, then, as if
it had made a circle, returned three minutes later on the left fork
of Belmont Street and recrossed the track. Reed saw it edge over the
hill and watched the cloud of dust that slowly settled behind it.
That was the last seen that day of the touring car.
* * * * *
Parmenter lay propped up on the sofa in the front room of the Colbert
house. Scarcely conscious, he managed to whisper that one gunman was
dark, short, and stocky and the other short and thin.
When the Weymouth medical examiner, Dr. John Chisholm Frazer, arrived
at four o’clock there were several other doctors already in the room
with Parmenter. Frazer stopped by Berardelli’s body—it had been
carried into the Colbert kitchen—only long enough to note that he was
dead and that blood was oozing from his back and arms. Shortly after
the medical examiner’s arrival, the ambulance from the Quincy City
Hospital came for Parmenter. As the paymaster was carried down the
steps the onlookers surged in toward the stretcher. They surged in
again twenty minutes later when Berardelli’s body was taken away in a
wicker basket.
After the hearse had disappeared the crowd began to thin. Most of the
workers headed home, leaving behind a diminishing core of the young
and idle. The long shadow of the afternoon moved along the factory
fronts and the sun turned the Slater & Morrill windows orange. A
group—mostly boys in corduroy knickers—still stood around the stains
in the gravel where Berardelli had fallen.
Later, as the sun edged toward the Blue Hills and the light began to
fade, the crowd increased again. Workers and their wives strolled
down Pearl Street after supper for a second look, voluble witnesses
repeated the details, and as the news spread to the neighboring
towns the curious and the morbid began to arrive from the compass
points—Randolph, Quincy, Holbrook, Weymouth.
Dr. Nathaniel Hunting operated on Parmenter shortly after his arrival
in the hospital. A bullet that had apparently glanced off his ribs,
causing an elongated but superficial wound, was shaken out of his
jacket. The second bullet, the one that had struck him after he
turned, had cut horizontally through his abdomen, perforating the
_vena cava_, the body’s largest vein. Hunting was able to remove
it easily from a mass of blue flesh just below the surface of the
abdomen. He marked the bullet with a cross on the base. After the
operation Parmenter recovered consciousness for a few minutes and
managed to tell Assistant District Attorney George Adams, who had
been waiting at his bedside, that he did not recognize the men who
shot him. Then he drifted off again. He died at five in the morning,
some fourteen hours after he was shot.
Dr. George Burgess Magrath, the medical examiner of Suffolk County,
made the autopsy on Berardelli, assisted by the Norfolk County
examiner, Dr. Frederick Jones. He found four visible wounds: the
first in the left back upper arm, the second near the left armpit,
the third lower down on the left side, and the fourth at the right
shoulder. According to Dr. Magrath, Berardelli might have recovered
from the first three wounds, but not from the fourth. The bullet
there had pierced the right lung, severed the great artery issuing
from the heart, and continued down through the intestines until it
lodged in the hipbone.
All four bullets had remained in the body. As Dr. Magrath recovered
them he took a surgical needle and scored each in turn on the base
with a Roman numeral. The mortal bullet he marked with three vertical
scratches.
The shell cases that Jimmy Bostock had picked out of the gravel he
handed to Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent. These
consisted of two Peters shells, one Remington, and one Winchester—the
last identifiable by a W stamped on its base. Fraher in turn gave
them to Captain William Proctor, the head of the State Police, who
had driven down from Boston as soon as he heard of the shootings.
Several hours later Fred Loring gave the cap he had picked up to
Fraher, who kept it overnight and then passed it on to Chief Gallivan.
Over that week end South Braintree bubbled with gossip. State Police
and Pinkerton detectives, occasionally at crosspurposes, combed the
town, interviewing and filling out their reports. Chief Gallivan
spent Sunday with a state policeman searching the Braintree woods for
abandoned cashboxes. He found nothing. That was his last discouraged
gesture in the case.
A rumor floated round that Berardelli had recognized the man who
shot him, that he had known in advance something was up, and that
was why he had been killed. There was a lot of such talk in the
Hampton House. Mary Splaine and Jimmy Bostock told a young Pinkerton
operative, Henry Hellyer, they thought a man named Darling who
worked in the order department might have been the front man for the
bandits. Darling had a bad reputation. Two of his friends had been
arrested some years back for stealing shoes from the factory, and
only a few weeks ago the police had found some stolen shoes at his
house. Mary Splaine supposed that Darling had probably hatched the
scheme and tipped off his accomplices as to the time the payroll went
out. But when Hellyer asked Fraher about this, the superintendent
told him that Darling was completely trustworthy and that Mary
Splaine was too irresponsible for anyone to take her seriously.
On Saturday, when the inquest was held before Judge Albert Avery
in the Quincy District Court, several witnesses said they had seen
two cars during the holdup, a large touring car and a small sedan.
Levangie, the gate-tender, described the driver of the touring car as
having a “dark complexion, dark brown mustache, soft hat, and brown
coat.” Everyone else described him as a pale, fair-haired man with a
smooth yellowish face.
Detectives brought down a selection of rogues’-gallery pictures from
Boston. Bostock, Wade, and several others who riffled through the
assortment picked out a New York bank robber, Anthony Palmisano,
as one of the South Braintree bandits. On April 23 a group that
included Bostock, Wade, Albert Frantello, and Mary Splaine was taken
to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House and shown a number
of photographs, including Palmisano’s. Mary Splaine positively
identified his picture as that of the man she had seen leaning out
of the car with the revolver. Frantello and Bostock said it was an
excellent likeness.
Unfortunately for their promising identification, it was soon learned
that Palmisano—also known as Tony the Wop and Baby Tony—had been
arrested in Buffalo in January and was still in jail there.
CHAPTER FOUR
BRIDGEWATER AND WEST BRIDGEWATER
The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in
Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in
loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to eight on that freezing
overcast morning Alfred Cox, the company paymaster, was taking
the week’s payroll of $33,113.31 in his delivery truck from the
Bridgewater Trust Company to the factory at the foot of the hill
by the railroad station. The truck, a Ford with a tarpaulin top
and solid rubber tires, was driven by Earl Graves, with Constable
Benjamin Bowles beside him. Cox sat just behind Graves, on a large
galvanized-iron box containing the money.
Craves drove from the bank along Summer Street to the square, then
turned down Broad Street—divided in the middle by a single streetcar
track—moving at a cautious ten miles an hour because of the ice on
the road. A streetcar moving in the same direction had just stopped
at the corner of Hale Street, seventy-five yards away. At the same
moment a curtained touring car swung over the tracks and pulled up
on the corner, its wheels on the sidewalk. Three men jumped out
and dog-trotted toward the oncoming truck. The man in the lead,
bareheaded, with a dark mustache and wearing a long black coat,
carried a shotgun. The two behind him held pistols.
Graves had first noticed the touring car—a Hudson, he thought it
was—while he was passing Harlow’s blacksmith shop. He watched the men
get out and start running, but it was not until the mustached man
knelt and took aim that he realized he was in for a holdup. Yanking
on the gas lever, he veered the truck across the tracks. Bowles
reached for his revolver. When the truck was some twenty-five yards
away the mustached man fired both barrels. A few pellets rattled
against the truck’s metal body without doing any damage. One of
the men with pistols, standing eight feet behind the man with the
shotgun, exchanged random shots with Bowles until the streetcar came
between them. Then the mustached man dashed across the street and
fired again at the slithering truck.
Cox, from his seat on the cashbox, saw the kneeling figure and the
smoke from the discharged shotgun, “everything like the snap of a
camera.” As the truck skidded, Graves lost control of the wheel.
Bowles grabbed it out of his hands. Wavering from one side of the
street to the other, the truck finally crashed against a telephone
pole, smashing headlights and radiator. In the meantime the three
gunmen had scurried back to their car with its waiting driver and
spun out of sight down Hale Street in the direction of the normal
school.
When Frank (“Slip”) Harding, an auto-parts salesman on his way to
Bassett’s Garage just across from the corner of Hale Street, first
saw the men carrying guns, he thought it was some kind of movie
stunt. He was only four feet away as they began firing and he watched
them, too astonished to move. Then within seconds they had run back
to their car and driven off. Harding later described the car as a
black Hudson Six with the license number 01173C.
Dr. John Murphy, a young general practitioner with his house and
office at 76 Broad Street, was getting dressed when he heard the
shots. He looked out his window just in time to glimpse the touring
car moving away. By the time he reached the street, about the only
thing he could see was the litter of glass where the truck was rammed
against the pole. Then he noticed a spent shotgun shell in the
gutter. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
For Bridgewater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, the robbery attempt
lay outside the range of small-town peccadilloes with which he was
used to dealing. His force consisted of two officers, one patrolman,
and one night patrolman. In addition there were the specials, one at
the normal school, one for the night performances at the Princess
Theater, one at the L. Q. White factory, and six for the Fourth of
July only. Stewart, in his forties, had held his job since 1915.
Before this he had spent four years as chief of the two-man force in
Rockland, another of the flat semirural manufacturing towns lying
inland between Boston and Cape Cod. In Rockland most of his trouble
had come from the foreign workers. The same was true in Bridgewater,
where a third of the population was now made up of Poles, Russians,
Greeks, and Armenians. As a second-generation Irish-American Stewart
tended to be suspicious of these newcomers. He had an idea that the
holdup men might be Russians, with a confederate working in the
factory. Inspector Albert Brouillard of the State Police, who was
sent down to Bridgewater to work with Stewart, was more inclined to
think the holdup the work of one of the gangs that had moved into the
area after the recent Boston police strike. Graves thought the men
were Italians.
The license number that Harding had written down was traced through
the Registry of Motor Vehicles to George Hassam’s garage in Needham,
a Boston suburb, twenty-three miles northwest of Bridgewater. It
turned out to be a dealer’s plate. Hassam owned five sets of them.
On Monday, December 22, a foreigner had come into Hassam’s office and
asked if he could borrow a set of plates. In broken English he told
Hassam he had just bought a car in Wellesley and wanted to take it
away. When Hassam said he could not lend his dealer’s plates, the man
left. He was a surly man of about forty, as Hassam remembered him,
dark, with a close-cropped mustache.
Hassam forgot about him until the police telephoned regarding the
plates on the Bridgewater car. Then, as he went to the back of his
garage to look at a secondhand Hupp that had been carrying a set of
his dealer’s plates, he found them missing. When or how they had been
taken he did not know.
On December 26 the Pinkerton operative Henry Hellyer noted in his
report that on Sunday evening, December 21, a Buick touring car
belonging to Daniel H. Murphy of Natick had been stolen from 115 Fair
Oaks Street, Needham, not far from Hassam’s Garage. Hellyer was right
about the Buick though not about some of his other details. The car,
belonging to a Francis J. Murphy had actually been stolen in Needham
a month earlier, on November 23, from in front of a house in Fair
Oaks Park.
That same November night a Dedham police officer, Warren Totty,
standing under the arc light in the granite shadow of Memorial Hall,
had seen the car speeding across Dedham Square. He had stepped out
with his hand raised, but the car swung past him down the hill and
under the railroad bridge toward Hyde Park. The license number that
Totty managed to copy down turned out to be Murphy’s.
“It is thought,” Hellyer reported, “that this car may have been used
by the men last Wednesday.” The connection between the Murphy Buick
and the Needham license plates appealed to Stewart, even though both
Graves and Harding had said that the car was a Hudson. Hellyer now
interviewed Richard Casey, a student at Rhode Island State College,
who had seen the car on Main Street before the shooting, and John
King, who noticed it afterward near the normal school. Whether or not
Chief Stewart had prompted them, both said it was a Buick.
Stewart and Brouillard had managed to trace the car as far as
Stoughton. Beyond that point, although they called at all the garages
in the vicinity, their leads came to nothing. Chief Shine of Dedham
had a notion that an Italian gang in East Dedham might be involved.
Stewart visited Dedham, Needham, even some suspects in Newton, and
arranged meanwhile for circulars describing the car to be distributed
to the local garages and gas stations. He now began to think the car
was hidden somewhere between Stoughton and Dedham.
Meanwhile the Pinkerton agents had been spreading out through the
Italian districts of Quincy and Boston. On December 30 Assistant
Superintendent Henry Murray reported:
_Today informant telephoned in; later met him at supper and in the
course of conversation stated that he had learned that the Italian
mentioned yesterday had said that the men who were implicated in
the Bridgewater holdup had occupied temporarily a shack in close
proximity to Bridgewater and that the car that had been used was
left there along with some overalls or disguise of a similar nature,
used by one of the men implicated in the holdup; that these men
were Italians, had deserted the car, returned to Quincy by trolley;
that they are believed to be residing in the vicinity of Fore River
Shipyard and are known as Anarchists._
The “Italian mentioned yesterday” was a floater who spent most of his
time hanging around the Boston American Building near Summer Street
or in Monahan’s Bar in the North End. It took the Pinkerton agents
several days to track him home to 31 Waverly Street, in the massed
tenement district of Brighton. The house was a brick three-flatter,
and there was a SCARLET FEVER card on the front door. Hellyer,
Stewart, and Brouillard went there the afternoon of January 3,
1920. By ringing the three doorbells until they got an answer they
learned that the man they wanted had left for Allston earlier in the
day. They waited almost five hours on the upper landing until he
came back. He turned out to be a flashily dressed Sicilian, Carmine
Barasso, who had anglicized his name to C. A. Barr. Quite willing to
talk, he invited the three men in to his flat. According to Hellyer’s
report:
_Barr related a rambling statement about a machine that he had
invented with which he could detect who had committed a crime no
matter where it was committed. He stated that one Mrs. Vetilia of 2
Lexington Street East Boston, had looked into the machine and saw the
holdup happening and saw the man plainly but did not know who they
were._
As Stewart drove back to Bridgewater along the empty snow-edged roads
of the Blue Hills he added another piece to the puzzle he was fitting
together in his mind. If the Pinkerton information was right, the
holdup men were anarchists. It was not a difficult conclusion to come
to in the winter of 1919-1920. A group of 249 anarchist and Communist
aliens that included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had just been
deported to Russia. That very day, January 3, the headlines of the
papers were flaring with the news of Attorney General Palmer’s raids
that had taken place all over the country the previous evening. RAIDS
TO HEAD OFF REVOLUTION was the heading of the weekly Bridgewater
_Independent_. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MAKES PUBLIC COMMUNISTS’ PLAN TO
OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. ARRESTS IN FIFTY TOWNS.
But such incidents and antagonisms, the social change and struggle
of the postwar period, were sensed only vaguely in Bridgewater. By
the time the wave of history reached the inland cape towns it was
scarcely a ripple. The same issue of the _Independent_ made Charlotte
Randall’s twenty-first birthday party in West Bridgewater the subject
of its editorial.
When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect on January 16 the
December holdup no longer seemed worth discussing. The Pinkerton men
had gone. The thousand-dollar reward posted by Loring Q. White for
the gunmen’s capture was unclaimed. At his headquarters in the back
room of the wooden-pilastered town hall, Chief Stewart still thought
about the crime, but he could find no more pieces to add to his
puzzle.
It was the snowiest winter in fifty years. The weeks followed into
the lengthening afternoons of February. On the sixth a mockingbird
was seen by the members of the Bridgewater Bird Club. Five days later
a blizzard swirled in from the northeast and the town was snowed
under again. In the Superior Court in Brockton Judge Webster Thayer
fined a young Brava (the local name for the colored Cape Verde Island
Portuguese) two hundred dollars for manslaughter under extenuating
circumstances, and asked that the fine be turned over to the victim’s
family for funeral expenses. The thaw began on March 19, and the
basement of the Bridgewater Central Square Congregational Church was
flooded.
Then on April 15 a South Braintree paymaster and his guard were
killed during a holdup. Having already gone to press, the April 17
edition of the _Independent_ made no mention of the murders. Yet
the event had already impinged on Bridgewater. Shortly after the
passage of the 1918 Deportation Act, Chief Stewart had assisted the
Immigration Service in arresting six Italians charged with spreading
literature advocating the overthrow of the government. The six were
marked down for deportation and released on bail. Stewart supposed
they had all long since been sent back to Italy.
But that spring at least one of the six, Ferruccio Coacci, was still
living in a section of West Bridgewater called Cochesett. Coacci,
sometimes known as Ercole Parrecca, had come to Quincy in 1915 and
taken up with a woman named Ersilia Buongarzone. Ersilia had borne
him two children, both delivered at the state almshouse in Tewksbury.
For a period Coacci was employed at the L. Q. White Company. At the
time of his arrest, Joseph Ventola, an anarchist friend from Hyde
Park, had posted the thousand-dollar bond, and Coacci was released
on condition that he marry Ersilia and support her children. While
awaiting his deportation order he worked for Slater & Morrill in
South Braintree. Early in April 1920, after receiving his notice to
report on the fifteenth at the East Boston Immigration Station, he
quit his job.
Since the first of the year Coacci had been living in Puffer’s Place,
at the corner of Lincoln and South Elm Street, in the empty flatland
about a mile from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. Puffer’s Place was a
small, decayed two-story structure with a rust-colored mansard roof
and irregularly spaced gables. Once it had been the office of the
long-since-defunct Alger Iron Foundry. Then Clarence Puffer, a local
handyman, had turned it into a dwelling. Mario Buda, a young Italian
who called himself Mike Boda, had rented it early in the winter, and
a month or so later Coacci had moved in from Quincy. Ersilia, who was
pregnant again, kept house and did the cooking.
The Italians in Puffer’s Place were scarcely noticed by their
scattered Yankee neighbors. At times cars would be parked on the
corner on Sunday afternoons and talk and singing would echo from
inside, but for the most part the newcomers were orderly enough. No
one knew what Boda did for a living. With the Eighteenth Amendment
in force, some people on South Elm Street suspected the Italians
might be engaged in selling liquor. In this they were right. At one
time Boda and his brother had run a dry-cleaning shop in Wellesley,
adjoining Needham, but after prohibition he became a bootlegger. His
avocation was anarchism. All his spare time and his enthusiasm he
devoted to distributing radical pamphlets and journals to the Italian
colonies of eastern Massachusetts.
Boda was a dapper man, five feet six inches tall, with a short
mustache, aquiline nose, and deep-set hazel eyes. If anyone happened
to ask him what he did, he replied that he was a salesman for a New
York fruit-importing firm. Since coming to West Bridgewater from Hyde
Park he had bought a green Overland which he kept in a shed beside
the house. The car was a 1912 model, more often than not laid up for
repairs. Boda had not registered it for 1920.
During the two years he had been out on bail Coacci had maintained
that he wanted to go back to Italy and that he was just waiting for a
free ride. When his bondsman, Ventola, learned from the Immigration
Service that Coacci had not turned himself in on April 15, he was as
surprised as he was dismayed. He drove at once to West Bridgewater,
arriving at Puffer’s Place at half past four. There was no one home
but the door was open. He went into the kitchen to wait. About five
o’clock he at last saw Boda coming down the road from Elm Square,
wearing a green velour hat and carrying a leather bag.
Boda said he had just come back on the trolley from Brockton. Ventola
told him that Coacci had not reported at the immigration station and
that he was worried about his bond. Boda assured him that Coacci
would report next morning. For the time being Ersilia and the
children would stay in the United States. Ventola, relieved, offered
to help them.
The following afternoon Coacci telephoned the Immigration Service and
told Inspector Root that he could not come in. His wife was sick,
he said, and he needed a few extra days to take care of her. Root
in turn called Chief Stewart in Bridgewater and suggested they both
drop in on Coacci that evening. But Stewart had to attend a dress
rehearsal of _Aunt Jerusha’s Quilting Party_, a play in which he had
a part. Besides, West Bridgewater was a separate town outside his
jurisdiction. However, he agreed to send his night patrolman, Frank
LeBaron.
Root and LeBaron arrived at Puffer’s Place after dark. Coacci
admitted them and announced that he was ready to leave. There seemed
to be nothing wrong with his wife. Root, who had a lodge meeting
that night, offered to have the deportation postponed another week,
but Coacci refused, saying that he wanted to get back on the first
steamer to his sick father. When Root suggested that Coacci leave his
wife some money, Coacci—who had two hundred dollars with him—said she
did not need any. As the inspector led him down the steps with his
baggage, Ersilia and the children stood in the doorway crying.
After his rehearsal, Chief Stewart hurried back to headquarters.
LeBaron was already there, behind the desk. “That Dago,” he said.
“There wasn’t nothing wrong with his wife. Just a stall.” As Stewart
walked home from the town hall, under the elms of the deserted
common, he kept mulling over LeBaron’s remark. He suddenly recalled
what Barr-Barasso had said in December about some anarchists
living in a shack near Bridgewater. On April 15 these anarchists
had been—where? It was in this evening moment, in Chief Stewart’s
responding mind, that the Sacco-Vanzetti case had its origin.
* * * * *
On the afternoon of April 17, Charles Fuller, the business manager
of the Brockton _Enterprise_, locked his office, walked over to the
Fair Grounds where he kept his horse, and started out with his friend
Max Wind on their usual Saturday ride. They left the Fair Grounds at
half past two, riding out the back gate toward West Bridgewater. Once
over the railroad track on Manley Street, not far from the Poor Farm,
they headed down a bridle path through the thick secondary growth of
maple and scrub oak and alder known as the Manley Woods. Fuller rode
ahead. About six hundred feet in from the road, he came face to face
with a Buick touring car. So close were the bushes that he and Wind
had to dismount and lead their horses past it. The car had apparently
been there overnight, for the windshield and hood and fenders were
streaked with dew. Fuller glanced in as he went by and saw a few
coins on the front seat and a coat in the back. A moment later when
he looked back to see if Wind could get by, he noticed that the glass
was missing from the rear window.
Before remounting the two men stopped to look at the smeared
dark-blue car. It had no license plates, but otherwise it seemed to
resemble the holdup car they had read about the day before. Just
ahead of the car they made out the thin tracks of a smaller car,
perhaps a Ford, leading to Manley Street. They rode back the way
they had come, stopped at the first house, and called the Brockton
police. Within fifteen minutes City Marshal Ryan arrived with Officer
William Hill.
Together the four men examined the car inside and out. Besides the
coins and the old brown overcoat, they found a phial that was thought
afterward to have contained dope, and on the floor the glass from the
rear window. Since Fuller was more familiar with a Buick than the
others he drove it out through the snagging bushes. Reaching Manley
Street, he turned the car over to Hill, who drove it to the police
garage in Brockton. The next morning the police, examining the car a
second time, found a bullet hole in the rear door.
Stewart and Brouillard were notified, and they inspected the car
Sunday evening. The Buick’s spare tire was missing, and the maker’s
number near the gas tank had been chiseled off. The engine number,
however, was still intact: 560,490. It was the number of the Murphy
car stolen in Needham on November 23. The Registry of Motor Vehicles
had reported that the license plate, _49783_, had been stolen from
a Ford belonging to Warren H. Ellis of 602 Webster Street, Needham.
Just after ten o’clock on the night of January 6 Ellis had put his
car in his garage. Next morning the plates were gone.
Stewart learned about the Ellis plates on Monday. In December he had
connected the missing Needham Buick with the Bridgewater holdup. Now
it turned out to be the car used in South Braintree. And both the
Bridgewater and the South Braintree license plates had been stolen
in Needham within an interval of about two weeks. The two crimes now
seemed to him to be the work of the same gang—another piece added to
his puzzle. It was curious too—a kind of corroboration of his theory
of the other night—that the car should have been found less than two
miles from Puffer’s Place. Coacci again!
Unfortunately, Coacci was at this point somewhere on the Atlantic.
Nevertheless Stewart felt there might still be some evidence to be
found in the South Elm Street house. He telephoned Brouillard and
they arranged to go over to Puffer’s Place on Tuesday.
That same Monday Joseph Ventola turned up at Puffer’s with a truck
to move Ersilia, her children, and her belongings to a house in
South Braintree. Not long after he had gone Simon Johnson and his
brother Samuel arrived from their Elm Square Garage with a tow truck
to haul away Boda’s broken-down Overland. Boda helped them push the
car out of the shed at the side of the house. After they had hitched
it up, Boda, who had known the Johnsons ever since he had moved to
Cochesett, rode the mile to Elm Square with them in the truck. The
Italian wore his velour hat and was carrying his leather bag. The
Johnsons let him off at the car stop and he boarded the Brockton
trolley.
Tuesday afternoon Stewart picked up Brouillard and they drove to
Puffer’s Place. In the fading light, the ramshackle gabled house with
the gnarled apple tree in front of it and the leafless grapevine in
the rear looked as if it might have been cut out of cardboard. Broken
windows in the shed had been tacked over with burlap.
After Stewart knocked several times, Boda came to the door in
his shirtsleeves. Stewart said he and Brouillard were from the
Immigration Service and that they wanted a photograph of Coacci. Boda
said Coacci had already sent in two photographs. Stewart explained
that one of them had been lost. Boda let the men in. When Stewart
asked about Coacci’s friends, Boda said that they sometimes came to
the house but he did not know who they were. They were, he told the
chief, “bad peoples.” More than that he could or would not say. When
Stewart asked if Coacci had owned a gun, Boda said he had kept one
in the kitchen drawer. Stewart opened the drawer. Though he found
no gun, the drawer contained the manufacturer’s diagram of a Savage
automatic.
Still ostensibly looking for photographs, Stewart and Brouillard
searched the house while Boda tagged after them. When they asked if
he himself had a gun, Boda produced a Spanish-type automatic from
his bureau. He said he had no license, but that he never carried
the gun outside. Brouillard removed the clip and examined the three
cartridges. Each was of a different make; all were American.
When the three men went out on the porch, Stewart asked about the
padlocked shed. Boda said he kept his car there, but just now it was
at the Johnson’s garage. Stewart asked if he could look inside the
shed. Boda unsnapped the padlock and slid the door back.
On the right of the dirt-floored shed stood two planks on which the
Overland had rested. To the left of the planks the floor had recently
been raked. Stewart and Brouillard inspected the shed carefully.
Afterward Stewart chimed that a small unraked patch near one of the
planks showed the clear imprint of a U. S. Royal tire, much too large
for an Overland but the right size for a Buick.[1]
Boda locked the shed again and Stewart thanked him for his
cooperation, saying he might have a chat with him later.
The more Stewart thought about Boda afterward the more dubious the
Italian began to appear. Later, he felt he should have arrested
him on the spot, but at the time there had seemed nothing tangible
except the pistol. Early the next morning he drove over to Puffer’s
Place alone. Boda was eating breakfast at the kitchen table when he
glimpsed the chief’s car coming down South Elm Street. By the time
Stewart knocked on the door, he had slipped out of sight. Stewart
knocked several times, peered through the window at the breakfast
table, and then drove off.
For Boda that second visit was conclusive. The police would be
coming back. Whatever they might want, he preferred not to be there.
An Italian friend came down from Brockton and helped him get his
belongings together. He left on the Boston train that afternoon, and
for the next few weeks stayed under cover with an Italian family in
East Boston.
Just as Boda had suspected, Stewart returned the following evening.
But this time, when he flashed his light through the kitchen window,
there was nothing to see. Except for a few tin cans in the corner the
place was empty.
Stewart drove to the Elm Square Garage. Boda’s Overland was still
there. Stewart told Simon Johnson ominously that there was some
pretty serious business afoot and that if Boda or anyone else should
come for the Overland, Johnson was to string him along until he could
call the police.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Several years later another investigator measured the shed and
said that it would have been impossible to maneuver a car from the
right-hand threshold to the area on the left.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE NIGHT OF MAY 5
A week after Stewart’s visit, Simon Johnson received a long-distance
telephone call at his garage from Boda asking if the Overland was
ready. Johnson told him it was. Boda said he would pick it up next
day. Next day he did not appear. Another week passed, and Johnson
began to worry about his bill. He asked Stewart if he could sell the
car for what was owing on it. Stewart told him to wait.
On the evening of May 5 Johnson had felt out of sorts and gone to bed
early. At a little after nine o’clock his wife, Ruth, was sitting
in the front bedroom of their one-story wooden house on North Elm
Street, a quarter of a mile from the garage, when she heard a knock
at the front door. Going to the vestibule, she asked who it was. A
voice replied that it was Mike Boda and that he had come for his car.
From the bedroom Johnson recognized the foreign voice. As his wife
came back, he whispered to her to go next door and telephone. She
nodded, then said loudly enough to be heard outside: “Mr. Boda is
here for his car. While you’re getting up I’ll go over for the milk.”
As she opened the front door and stepped outside she found herself
caught in a beam of light. At first she could make out nothing beyond
the whiteness, then she saw Boda vaguely outlined against a telephone
pole ten feet away. As her eyes grew more used to the glare, she
noticed two strangers walking toward her from across the railroad
bridge thirty feet south of the house. She could hear them talking—in
Italian, she thought. The glare caught them. They looked foreign. One
was wearing a derby and an overcoat. The other, who wore a felt hat,
Ruth Johnson remembered afterward because of his drooping mustache.
Boda called out something to them and then walked toward her.
“Mr. Johnson isn’t feeling good,” she told him, “but he’s getting out
of bed to get your car for you.”
Boda nodded as she walked past him toward the Bartlett house next
door. The light, she now saw, came from a motorcycle. A man in a
checked mackinaw with a hat pulled over his eyes was sitting in the
saddle with one hand resting on the empty sidecar. After she had
passed into the darkness she had the uneasy feeling that the men were
following her. But there were no steps behind her as she turned up
the Bartletts’ driveway. To her relief, the lights in the house were
still on downstairs.
One of the Bartlett children let her in. Over the hall telephone, in
a voice barely under control, she told the operator to get through
to the police. For the moment that was all she could think of to
say. West Bridgewater then had no police force, only two part-time
policemen. The operator connected her with the house of one of them,
Warren Laughton, who was also fire chief and water commissioner.
Laughton had just stepped out, his wife said, but she took the
message that the Johnsons had agreed on with Stewart: “Boda has come
for his car.”
Johnson dressed slowly. When he finally stepped out of his house the
first thing he noticed was Boda walking toward him from the bridge.
Farther off he saw the motorcycle with the indeterminate outlines of
the driver and the two other men. The usually dapper Boda was wearing
a crumpled brown suit and an old slouch hat. He said he wanted to
take the Overland away at once. Johnson asked him if he had brought
license plates. Boda said he had not. Johnson told him he could not
drive without plates. “I will take the chance,” Boda said. Johnson
said that when his wife got back, they would go down to the garage.
Boda, watching Mrs. Johnson return, said he guessed it was too late
for the car now, that he would send someone with plates for it next
day. He said good night and turned away. The man in the mackinaw
kicked the motorcycle’s starter pedal and the other two men stepped
back. Ruth Johnson, as she passed, sensed that they were watching
her and she thought she caught the word _telephone_ mixed in their
foreign speech.
Boda stepped into the sidecar, squatted down, and the motorcycle
spluttered off north toward Brockton. The taillight was out, but
Johnson had already noted the license plate: _871_. As the motor
echoed away, the two strangers, the man in the derby and the man with
the drooping mustache, started back over the railroad bridge. The
Johnsons watched them hesitate, turn, and disappear in the direction
the motorcycle had taken.
Along empty North Elm Street they trudged for a mile, following the
Bridgewater-Brockton trolley line. Meeting a solitary woman, they
asked her where the car stop was. She pointed just beyond them to a
white-striped pole on the corner of Sunset Avenue. They thanked her.
A few minutes later the electric car from Bridgewater hummed along
the track. It was 9:40 when the two men stepped aboard it.
Until he had a closer look at him, Austin Cole, the
twenty-three-year-old conductor, thought that the man in the derby
and the walrus mustache was a Portuguese named Tony. Cole asked if
they were going to Brockton and the other man, who was clean-shaven,
said yes. At that hour the car was almost empty. The newcomers walked
stiffly down the aisle and sat in the first cross-seat at the rear.
Somehow they reminded Cole of a pair who had got on at the same place
about the same time a few weeks back.
The car swayed and rattled through the darkness. Where North Elm
Street crossed the Brockton line it became Copeland Street, and the
houses—most of them with their lights out now—began to give way to
small shops and an occasional church. Cole, counting transfers, eyed
the strangers in the back seat. They were aliens. Anyone could see
that. The high-cheek boned man with the drooping mustache was easy
to spot, but beyond his obviousness there was a quality about them
both—a stiffness of feature, a fixed look to the eyes, just the
awkward way they wore their clothes—that set them apart. Americans
were put together more loosely.
When Warren Laughton arrived home and received Ruth Johnson’s
message, he had no idea what was back of it but called Chief Stewart
at once. However, by the time Stewart arrived at the Johnson house
the two strangers were already on the Brockton car.
How Stewart knew they were on that car is not wholly clear. One
account has it that Johnson followed them and saw the car stop
at Sunset Avenue. It may be that the unnamed woman at the corner
of Sunset Avenue reported them. In any case, Stewart went to the
Bartlett house and called the Brockton police headquarters.
A few minutes before 10 P.M. Michael Connolly, the officer on
duty at Station 2, Campello, received a call from the Brockton
central station telling him that two foreigners on the trolley from
Bridgewater had just tried to steal an auto. The trolley was due in
Brockton any minute. Connolly put down a sandwich, nodded to the
sergeant at the desk, and hurried off to Main Street with Officer
Earl Vaughn. Vaughn walked north, Connolly headed south. It was four
minutes past ten. Connolly saw the trolley’s headlight as it turned
into Main Street from Keith Avenue. A hulking, florid, pugnacious man
who liked a good pinch, he hoped that the suspects had not got off.
He signaled to the motorman and swung aboard while the trolley was
still moving.
As Connolly steadied himself and glanced down the aisle he saw the
foreigners in the rear seat. A year later at the Dedham trial he gave
his version of the arrest:
_I went down through the car and when I got opposite the seat
I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said,
“Bridgewater.” I said, “What was you doing in Bridgewater?” They
said, “We went down to see a friend of mine.” I said, “Who is your
friend?” He said, “A man by the—they call him Poppy.” “Well,” I said,
“I want you, you are under arrest.” Vanzetti was sitting on the
inside of the seat ... and he went, put his hand on his hip pocket
and I says, “Keep your hands on your lap, or you will be sorry.”_
_They wanted to know what they were arrested for and I says,
“Suspicious characters.” We went on—oh, it was maybe about three
minutes’ ride where ... Officer Vaughn got on ... and I told Officer
Vaughn to fish Vanzetti, and I just gave Sacco a slight going over,
just felt him over, did not go into his pockets, and we led them out
the front way of the car._
Vaughn found a loaded revolver in the hip pocket of the man with the
mustache and gave it to Connolly, who kept it in his hand all the
way to the Brockton central station. Officers Spear and Snow of the
central station had driven down to meet the trolley.
_I put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back of our light machine [Connolly
continued], and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took
the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.... I told
them when we started that the first false move I would put a bullet
in them. On the way to the station Sacco reached his hand to under
his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes
and on his lap.... I says to him, “Have you got a gun there?” He
says, “No.” He says, “I ain’t got no gun.” “Well,” I says, “keep your
hands outside your clothes.” We went along a little further and he
done the same thing. I gets up on my knees on the front seat and I
reaches over and I puts my hand on his coat but I did not see any
gun. “Now,” I says, “Mister, if you put your hand in there again you
are going to get into trouble.” He says, “I don’t want no trouble.”
We reached the station, brought them up to the office and searched
them._
The revolver taken from the mustached man was a 38-caliber Harrington
& Richardson, its five chambers loaded with two Remington and three
U. S. cartridges. Taken from him at the Campello station were four
shotgun shells, a pocket knife, a handkerchief, twenty dollars, and
several pamphlets. The smooth-faced man was searched by Officer
Spear, who found a 32-caliber Colt automatic tucked in his waistband.
The Colt had eight cartridges in the clip and one in the chamber.
In the man’s pocket were twenty-three loose cartridges. Though all
32-caliber, the cartridges were of assorted makes—sixteen Peters,
seven U. S., six Winchesters, and three Remingtons. In addition the
man had in his pocket a penciled announcement in Italian that read:
_Proletarians, you have fought all the wars. You have worked
for all the owners. You have wandered over all the countries.
Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your
victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile
on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a
piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like
a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this
theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.
Hour____Day____Hall____Admission free. Freedom of discussion to all.
Take the ladies with you._
Within a quarter of an hour Chief Stewart arrived at the station,
heady with excitement at the springing of his trap. With him were
his night patrolmen Frank LeBaron and Warren Laughton, and Simon
Johnson. Johnson at once identified the prisoners as the men he
had seen standing by the motorcycle. Stewart then questioned them
individually. He talked to the mustached man first, taking care to
repeat the cautionary formula that the latter did not have to answer
questions but that anything he said might be held against him. The
prisoner did not hesitate. He said his name was Bartolomeo Vanzetti,
that he was an Italian, thirty-two years old and a fish peddler,
and that he lived at 35 Cherry Street, Plymouth. For the last two
days, he said, he had been visiting his friend, Nick Sacco, in South
Stoughton. The two of them had gone to Bridgewater that evening to
see Vanzetti’s friend Poppy, but it was so late by the time they
arrived that they decided Poppy had probably gone to bed and they
might as well go home. They were on their way back to South Stoughton
when the police picked them up. As for Poppy, that was only the
man’s nickname. Vanzetti did not know his real name or even his
address in Bridgewater, but he was a big man who usually wore a blue
shirt. They had worked together in the Plymouth Cordage plant.
Vanzetti denied knowing anyone named Boda or Coacci. He said he had
never before been in West Bridgewater. He had walked some distance
before he had taken the trolley, but he had seen no motorcycle all
evening. Stewart suddenly asked Vanzetti if he was an anarchist, if
he approved of the government. All Vanzetti would admit was that he
was a little different and that he liked things different. As to
why he was carrying a revolver, he said that he was in business and
needed it for protection. He had no permit.
Stewart’s questioning of the second man followed the same line. The
suspect said his name was Nicola Sacco, that he was married, lived in
South Stoughton, and had been in America eleven years. For the last
two years he had worked at the Three-K factory in Stoughton. He had
once looked for a job in Bridgewater, but he had never been in West
Bridgewater until tonight. He did not know any Boda or Coacci. He had
not seen a motorcycle. He was not an anarchist or Communist. As for
the automatic in his waistband, he carried it because there were a
lot of bad men about. He had bought it a long time ago at some shop
near Hanover Street in Boston. The cartridges were from a box he had
bought and they just happened to be in his pocket. He had planned to
shoot them off in the woods with his friends.
Stewart’s questioning of both men lasted about ten minutes. They were
then locked up.
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had been behind bars before. Now, in
adjoining cells under the shadowless glare of the overhead light,
with a wooden shelf to sleep on and a seatless toilet in the corner,
they sensed the isolating fear of arbitrary impersonal force. To
the policemen going on and off duty they were curiosities and as
such subject to a certain amount of crude horseplay. When the two
men requested blankets the reply was that they would find it warm
enough when they were lined up in the hall for a little live target
practice, and one patrolman showed Vanzetti a cartridge which he then
slipped into the barrel of his revolver, cocking it and pointing
between the bars. When Vanzetti did not move, the other spat on the
floor contemptuously and turned away.
* * * * *
According to the Registry of Motor Vehicles records the motorcycle
in which Boda had ridden off belonged to Ricardo Orciani. A molder
in a Norwood foundry, Orciani boarded at 1532 Hyde Park Avenue with
Angelo Ventola, whose brother, Joseph Ventola, lived across the
street. Orciani was picked up in his room the night of May 6 and
taken to Brockton. Still wearing the checked mackinaw of the night
before, he was identified by Simon and Ruth Johnson as the driver of
the motorcycle. A short, cocky Italian with an assured round face
and clipped mustache, he was unperturbed by his arrest. He refused
to answer questions. Where he went, he told the police, was his own
business. The revolver found in his bureau was one he just happened
to have.
On Thursday, May 6, the district attorney for Norfolk and Plymouth
counties, Frederick Gunn Katzmann, appeared at the Brockton station
to take over the questioning, bringing with him a stenographer and an
interpreter.
Katzmann was then in his late forties, a plump, ambitious man
whose presence seemed underlined by the smartness of his dress,
his snap-brim hat, and his raglan Burberry coat. He had grown up
on one of the poorer streets of Hyde Park, a gray semi-industrial
adjunct of Boston, attending the Boston Latin School and then
crossing the Charles River to enter Harvard with the class of 1896.
As an unathletic poor boy from Hyde Park, his years at Harvard
were obscure. He belonged to no clubs, took part in no sports
or undergraduate activities. Nor, on the other hand, was he a
scholar. At the end of his senior year his one distinction was an
honorable mention in engineering. Returning to Hyde Park with his
diploma, he worked for several years as a meter-reader for the local
electric-light company. What he really wanted was to be a lawyer. If
he had had the money he would have gone on to the Harvard Law School.
Instead he attended night sessions at Boston University, receiving
his bachelor of laws degree in 1902.
For the next year he served as an apprentice with one of the
established firms of Boston’s Pemberton Square. But the staid legal
world of Beacon Hill and State Street was a fenced-off Brahmin
preserve. A Hyde Park boy with a B.U. law degree and a dubious name
would not penetrate that circle.
Katzmann was sensitive about his name. His mother’s maiden name—his
own middle one—was Gunn, and he tried to emphasize its Anglican
propriety in his signature. After his year at Pemberton Square he
returned to the familiar puddle of Hyde Park and set up his office
on the second floor of a wooden building on River Street. There,
in a small ocher room with a creaking floor smelling of oil, he
hung his two diplomas and filled several sectional bookcases with
secondhand volumes of _Corpus Juris_. He prospered. From 1907 to
1908 he represented Hyde Park in the Massachusetts legislature. The
following year he was appointed assistant district attorney. From
1909 until Hyde Park was absorbed by Boston in 1912 he served on the
school committee. In November, 1916, he ran for district attorney and
was elected to a three-year term. In 1919 he was re-elected.
Katzmann’s personality, like his figure, expanded with success.
He could plan to go back to his Harvard twenty-fifth reunion with
pride, the chill of his undergraduate years forgotten. As an active,
conforming Republican, the prospect of a judgeship in the superior
court or even, with luck, the state attorney-generalship lay ahead
of him. The drawback of his name scarcely bothered him now. He lived
with his wife and two young daughters in a Victorian frame house on
the Mattapan side of River Street, within walking distance of his
office. He was a member of the Hyde Park Lodge of Masons, the Cebra
Tennis Club, and the Wollaston Golf Club. He became Hyde Park counsel
for the Family Welfare Society of Boston. As district attorney he
was popular if undistinguished, a routine prosecutor addicted to the
McKinley-baroque style of oratory. The district had re-elected him
in spite of the war-fanned prejudice against German names. As with
many criminal lawyers, the law was for him, like politics, a game
where at times one might have to cut a few corners, but in the end
the best man usually won, and the loser congratulated the winner. It
was a game played with other men’s years and sometimes with their
lives—but still a game. Such was the man, soon to become a symbol
of chicanery and deceit for indifferently informed protestors all
over the world, as he arrived at the Brockton police station for the
routine questioning of two holdup suspects.
Especially in questioning foreigners the district attorney favored
the disarming approach, bluff, fatherly, confidential—you deal
straight with me and I’ll deal straight with you. It is particularly
effective after a suspect has spent a night in a cell. Katzmann first
questioned Sacco. For some time he put merely routine questions to
him about his acquaintances, about the gun and the cartridges. Sacco
said he had bought his gun two years before in the North End. He had
not given his right name then because he was afraid. As to Orciani,
yes, he knew him but Vanzetti did not. Boda he had never heard of.
Boda did not sound like an Italian name. Suddenly Katzmann asked
if he knew anyone named Berardelli. Sacco asked him who Berardelli
was. In the course of the interrogation Sacco said that his mother
had died recently and that he was planning to return to Italy. When
Katzmann asked if he had heard about the South Braintree murders, he
said he had read in the _Post_ “there was bandits robbing money.”
He had worked in various shoe factories, he admitted, but never in
Braintree. He had taken a day off early in April to go to Boston for
his passport, but thought he had been working in Stoughton on April
15, the day of the holdup. That was all—the opening gambit—but both
men were now aware of the South Braintree crime in relation to each
other.
When Vanzetti appeared, Katzmann asked him if he spoke English. He
said that he spoke a little. When reminded that he was free not to
answer questions, he said he was willing to answer any. He had known
Sacco for a year and a half. He told of taking the trolley from
Stoughton to Bridgewater with him to see a friend, and of changing
cars at Brockton. During the wait he had gone into a fruit store to
buy some cigars and to a lunchroom for a cup of coffee. At no time,
the evening of May 5, had he seen a man on a motorcycle. The name
Boda meant nothing to him. His revolver he had bought four or five
years before for eighteen or nineteen dollars at a shop on Hanover
Street. At the same time he had bought a box of cartridges. Some of
these he had fired off on the Plymouth beach. The remaining six were
in the revolver. Katzmann led him indirectly to the date of the South
Braintree crime. Vanzetti remembered Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth
of April, because it had fallen on a Monday. He had no particular
recollection of what he had done the preceding Thursday.
Katzmann had already discovered, before questioning the men, that
Sacco had been absent from his work on April 15. When he left the
police station he was convinced that Sacco had been involved in the
South Braintree murders. Of Vanzetti he was not so sure.
After their questioning, the two Italians, unshaven and bedraggled,
were photographed. They were then taken to the Brockton police court
and charged with carrying concealed weapons. A local lawyer, William
Callahan, was engaged for them. They pleaded guilty. The judge, after
consulting with the district attorney’s office, held them without
bail under an unrepealed wartime act that empowered him to hold men
suspected of major crimes.
Later in the day several dozen witnesses were brought from South
Braintree and Bridgewater to see if they could identify the prisoners
as participants in either of the holdups. In the small Brockton
police station there was no attempt to have the two Italians mixed
with other suspects in a lineup. They were merely led into the
emergency room by themselves where they stood docilely until ordered
to kneel, put on and take off their hats, raise their arms, and
assume the crouching position of a man firing a pistol. The various
witnesses walked around them slowly observing them from every angle.
Mary Splaine, Frances Devlin, Minnie Kennedy, Louise Hayes, Mark
Carrigan, Albert Frantello, Frank Burke, Hans Behrsin, Louis
DeBeradinis, Jimmy Bostock, Mike Levangie, and Lewis Wade were among
those who came from South Braintree. Minnie, Louise, Carrigan, Burke,
and Bostock could not identify either man. Frantello was certain that
they were not the ones he had seen on April 15. Wade thought Sacco
resembled the man he saw shooting Berardelli.
Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine studied the two men separately
several times. Sacco was again ordered to raise his arm as if holding
a pistol. The two women finally decided that he might possibly have
been the man they saw leaning out of the car and shooting, but they
were certain they had never seen Vanzetti before. Of all the South
Braintree witnesses only Levangie, the gate-tender, picked Vanzetti
as the driver of the getaway car. Jenny Novelli, coming to the
station with a later group of witnesses, said that Sacco resembled
the man she had seen in the bandit car, but she could not be positive
about him.
The shotgun bandit in the Bridgewater holdup had been described
by Constable Bowles as having a close-cropped mustache, and Slip
Harding had so described him to a detective the afternoon of the
crime, adding “I did not get much of a look at his face, but I think
he was a Pole.” Nevertheless, he no sooner caught sight of the
droop-mustached Vanzetti in the Brockton station than he pointed to
him with great positiveness as the man with the shotgun. Cox, on the
other hand, was inclined to think Vanzetti was not the man. Bowles
thought that he might have been.
While these identifications were being made, Chief Stewart and
Assistant District Attorney William Kane took the handcuffed but
still unperturbed Orciani on an identification marathon from
Brockton to Needham to Braintree to Bridgewater. Faced with Sacco
and Vanzetti, Orciani smilingly declared that he had never seen them
before in his life. In Needham George Hassam said Orciani was not the
man who had tried to borrow his dealer’s plates in December. When
Orciani was displayed in the Braintree town hall, three witnesses
identified him as one of the April 15 gunmen. In Bridgewater Harding
was positive that Orciani had been one of the gunmen in the December
24 holdup.
Back in Brockton, Orciani was taken to court and charged with
exceeding the speed limit on his motorcycle and not having a
taillight, the only things the police could pin on him for the
moment. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he was held without bail. Although
state and local police combed their districts for Boda they could
find no trace of him.
The headlines of the Boston _Evening Globe_ of May 6 announced that
Governor Calvin Coolidge had vetoed the 2.75 Beer Bill. Tucked away
on page six were several short paragraphs about “Bert Vanzetti, 32,
of Plymouth, and Mike Sacco, 34, of South Stoughton ... arraigned
this morning in the Brockton Police Court charged with carrying
concealed weapons.” The last paragraph mentioned that an unnamed
witness was almost sure that one of the men under arrest had driven
the getaway car the day of the South Braintree murders.
These few lines were the first notice in print of what would in the
next seven years become the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MEN AND THE TIMES
An introspective man, the sensitivity of his features concealed
by prominent cheekbones and the drooping thatch of his ferocious
mustache, Vanzetti was well known in North Plymouth’s Italian
settlement. Unmarried, he boarded with the Fortini family in a
house halfway up Cherry Lane. Daily he sold fish to the Italian
and Portuguese families, pushing his cart with its clanking brass
scales and load of haddock, cod, halibut, and swordfish along Cherry
Lane and Cherry Court and Standish Avenue. The fish for his regular
customers he carefully wrapped in newspapers, marking the packages
with the name and price.
Most of the Italians of North Plymouth worked at the Plymouth Cordage
Company. Vanzetti had been employed there for eighteen months during
1914 and 1915 but had quit when they wanted him to shift from an
outside to an inside job, preferring to work outdoors on the Plymouth
breakwater. He had been on the strikers’ fund committee in the
Cordage strike that broke out over a wage dispute in January 1916. At
that time the men were receiving eight dollars a week, the women six.
The strikers demanded twelve and eight dollars, but finally accepted
the company’s offer of a general raise of a dollar. After that,
Vanzetti never worked or attempted to work for the Cordage again.
In the spring of 1919, in an effort to be independent of bosses and
foremen, he bought his pushcart and scales and knives from a friend
who was going back to Italy.
Each morning at the Fortinis’ he would come downstairs in his
slippers, take his boots from the zinc platform under the coal stove,
and put them on before having breakfast. Then he would push his cart
either to the town pier or the railroad station, returning to the
Fortinis’ with his load of fish, which he could clean in the cellar.
When fish were scarce he would go clamming on the flats between the
town pier and the Cordage plant. He liked being on the windy beach.
Everybody knew the fish peddler, Bart the Beard, along the narrow
lanes of his route, even the Yankee policemen. Children loved
him. At mealtimes he was welcome in the Italian kitchens along
his route, where he would sit at the table with his elbows on the
checkered cotton tablecloth drinking coffee (for some years he had
drunk nothing stronger) while the others downed glasses of homemade
red-eye. He liked to talk and he liked to read. Over the years he
had read Darwin, Marx, Spencer, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Zola, in random
persistent efforts to overcome his lack of formal education. And he
had read the anarchist fathers, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Malatesta, long
since convinced that only anarchism could strike off the chains that
fettered human freedom. His best-thumbed books, however, were _The
Divine Comedy_ and Renan’s _Life of Jesus_. Anarchist that he was, in
his personal relations he was not a doctrinaire. At one time he had
enrolled in an evening course given by a liberal Protestant minister
in Plymouth.
Sacco would never have set foot inside a church. Like his friend a
member of the loose-knit Galleani group of New England anarchists, he
was rigidly class-conscious. Yet in his private life he was much more
the petty-bourgeois than Vanzetti. Domesticity, which meant little
to Vanzetti, touched Sacco more deeply than anything else. He lived
with his wife Rosina and his seven-year-old son Dante in a five-room
bungalow rented from Michael Kelley, the owner of the Three-K Shoe
Company, where he worked. His wife, who was expecting another child,
was a delicately featured auburn-haired woman of the northern Italian
type. As is often the case with Latin women, she left politics to the
men and held to her inherited Catholic faith.
Sacco, as a skilled piece worker, often earned sixty or seventy
dollars a week. A short, muscular man, he read little except the
daily paper and repetitious anarchist tracts, preferring to spend
his free time in his garden. Often he would be there at sunrise of a
summer morning before going off to the factory, and after hours he
would be working among his vegetables until dark. Sometimes he gave
Michael Kelley beans and corn and tomatoes to distribute to poor
families in the vicinity. Kelley thought well of Sacco. During the
cold months he gave him the small extra job of tending the factory
furnace. When Sacco stoked the fire in the evening he always checked
the premises. Mornings he always made sure that the place was warm
by the time the workers arrived. Whenever he went to the factory
after hours he carried his 32-caliber Colt with him. Kelley warned
him several times to get a permit from the chief of police if he
wanted to carry a pistol.
Sacco had come to the United States in 1908, the same year as
Vanzetti. In the dozen years since their arrival they had both kept
close to the immigrant community. They spoke scarcely more than a
pidgin English.
“Nameless, in the crowd of nameless ones,” Vanzetti described himself
in his twenty-page autobiography, “The Story of a Proletarian Life,”
that he wrote in the Charlestown prison.
He was born in June 1888 into a prosperous family of Villafalletto,
Piedmont, a village on the Magra River. Life in northwest Italy had
the harshness of most peasant life, but the landscape itself could
have served to illustrate the _Georgics_. Villafalletto was a rich
agricultural community raising corn, wheat, beets, silkworms, and
three crops of hay yearly. In the surrounding Alpine hills were
apples, pears, cherries, grapes, plums, figs, and peaches. Vanzetti’s
earliest memories were of his father planting peaches, of blue
flowers in the garden of his house, and of his mother giving him
honey every morning from a beehive.
Vanzetti lived with his parents, a brother, and two sisters until
his fourteenth year. At school, loving study “with a real passion,”
he won examination prizes that included a second prize in religious
catechism. Under other circumstances the eager introspective boy
might have developed into a teacher or scholar. William Thompson, who
became Vanzetti’s counsel in 1924, thought he was one of the most
gifted men he had known and—applying a Boston yardstick—felt that
with an education he might have been a Harvard professor.
Vanzetti’s father was a practical peasant-minded man. For some time
he could not make up his mind whether to apprentice his son or to
let him continue his studies. But when he read in the _Gazzetta del
Popolo_ that forty-two Turin lawyers had applied for a position
paying thirty-five lire a month, he decided then and there that
education was a waste of money.
_And so [Vanzetti wrote] in the year 1901 he conducted me to Signor
Conino, who ran a pastry shop in the city of Cuneo, and left me there
to taste for the first time, the flavor of hard, relentless labor. I
worked for about twenty months there—from seven o’clock each morning
until ten at night, every day, except for a three-hour vacation twice
a month. From Cuneo I went to Cavour and found myself installed in
the bakery of Signor Goitre, a place that I kept for three years.
Conditions were no better than in Cuneo, except that the fortnightly
free period was of five hours’ duration._
Later he became a caramel-maker in Turin. Scarcely out of his
childhood, drifting from city to city, reading whatever came to
hand, he found nothing to replace the memory of Villafalletto.
His companions, the casual workers of the urban proletariat, were
blasphemously Marxist, and he, still loyal to his heritage, would
occasionally defend his religion with his fists. Yet, as the hard
years of his adolescence passed, he too was drawn to the socialist
image of a better world. His Catholicism eroded to a vague deism.
Early in 1907, working again in Turin, he fell ill of pleurisy, and
his father came from Villafalletto to take him home. In spite of his
suffering, when he saw from the train the deep green of his native
countryside Vanzetti felt renewed.
_And so I returned after six years spent in the fetid atmosphere of
bakeries and restaurant kitchens, with rarely a breath of God’s air
or a glimpse of His glorious world. Six years that might have been
beautiful to a boy avid of learning and thirsty for a refreshing
draught of the simple country life of his native village. Years of
the great miracle which transforms the child into the man. Ah, that I
might have had the leisure to watch the wonderful unfoldment!_
After two months in bed, nursed by his mother, he began to recover.
He was now twenty years old. Later he was to describe the period
of his convalescence as one of the happiest of his life, a time of
gardening, of talking, and wandering through the woods bordering the
Magra. The happiness was brief, for his mother developed cancer and
after three agonizing months died. Vanzetti cared for her as she had
cared for him. He remained at her bedside day and night. For the last
two months of her life he did not even undress. She died in his arms.
In after years he recalled that death in all its immediacy:
_It was I who laid her in her coffin, I who accompanied her to the
final resting place, I who threw the first handful of earth over her
bier. And it was right that I should do so, for I was burying part of
myself ... the void left has never been filled._
It was in the days following her death that he decided to go to
America, to that land across the ocean where the past might be
erased. On June 9, 1908, he left Villafalleto, accompanied far down
the road by his tearful relatives and neighbors. After traveling
across France he embarked at Le Havre in the packed steerage of a
giant liner.
New York, the impersonal sky-swept metropolis, seemed to him from the
huddled deck both inviting and threatening. In his autobiography one
can sense the bewilderment of the immigrant coming down the gangplank.
_How well I remember standing at the Battery, in lower New York,
upon my arrival, alone, with a few poor belongings in the way of
clothes, and very little money. Until yesterday I was among folks
who understood me. This morning I seemed to have awakened in a land
where my language meant little more to the native than the pitiful
noises of a dumb animal. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Here
was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer.
The automobiles and the trolleys sped by, heedless of me._
That depression year of 1908 was a sorry time for a friendless
stranger to arrive in the United States. Like all immigrants facing
the unknown, Vanzetti sought out his fellow countrymen; one of them
found him a job in a fashionable restaurant where he worked as a
dishwasher and slept in a vermin-infested garret. Three months later
he moved on to a similar job at Mouquin’s. As in so many such places
the glittering dining room bore little relation to the squalid
kitchen. The scullery where Vanzetti worked was windowless.
_When the electric light for some reason was out, it was totally
dark so that we couldn’t move without running into things. The vapor
of the boiling water where the plates, pans and silver were washed
formed great drops of water on the ceiling, took up all the dust and
grime there, then fell slowly one by one upon my head, as I worked
below. During working hours the heat was terrific. The table leavings
amassed in barrels near the pantry gave out nauseating exhalations.
The sinks had no direct sewerage connection. Instead, the water was
permitted to overrun to the floor. In the center of the room there
was a drain. Every night the pipe was clogged and the greasy water
rose higher and higher and we trudged in the slime._
_We worked twelve hours one day and fourteen the next, with five
hours off every other Sunday. Damp food hardly fit for dogs and five
or six dollars a week was the pay. After eight months I left the
place for fear of contracting consumption._
Three months he tramped the streets of New York looking for work.
Behind the bright towering façade of the world city he saw the human
refuse that slept out of doors and rummaged in garbage barrels. There
were two worlds—he could see them for himself—the world of those who
sat at the tables of Mouquin’s, and the world of those like himself
who worked in sculleries. And for him they were irreconcilable. At an
employment agency he met a young Italian who had not eaten for two
days. Vanzetti bought him a meal. They decided to strike out into the
country where they thought there would be a better chance of finding
work and where at least the air would be clean.
With Vanzetti’s last savings they bought tickets and took a steamboat
up the Connecticut River to Hartford. They then set off, aimless and
hopeful, knocking on doors and asking for work but rarely finding
any. A farmer they encountered took pity on them, fed them, and let
them stay two weeks on his farm although he had no real need of their
labor. Vanzetti never forgot the man’s kindness.
Their wanderings took them from village to village. Penniless,
often soaked by rain, they were glad to find a few slices of bread
at the end of the day or an abandoned stable to sleep in. Finally
they managed to get work in a brick factory near Springfield,
Massachusetts. The other man soon quit, but Vanzetti stayed on, the
hard labor at the furnaces compensated for after work by the gay
spirits of a little colony of his countrymen, natives of Piedmont,
Tuscany, and Venice. In the evenings, someone would strike up a tune
on a violin or an accordion. Some would dance. Vanzetti like to watch
them, keeping time to the music with his foot.
Later he went to Meriden, Connecticut, where he worked almost beyond
his strength in the stone pits. His friends kept urging him to go
back to his trade as a pastry cook, insisting that the unskilled
worker was the lowest animal in the social system. After two years
Vanzetti returned to New York and took a job as assistant pastry
chef in the Savarin Restaurant on Broadway. Eight months later he
was unexpectedly discharged. He found a new job in a Seventh Avenue
hotel, only to be discharged again after five months. Finally he
learned the reason. The employment agencies were splitting their fees
with the chefs, who found hiring and firing more profitable than
keeping regular help.
Again he was out of work, walking the streets, unable to find a job
even as a dishwasher, buffeted by the weather, sometimes sleeping in
doorways, his clothes lined with newspapers to keep out the cold.
After five months he learned of an employment agency that was looking
for pick-and-shovel workers.
_It was necessary [he recalled] to present one’s self with unbuttoned
shirts, because they wanted to see what one was like, they wanted to
see the hair on the chest of the worker, and good for me that I am
Latin with haired chest. They used to say: “You are too small—you are
too old.”_
He was sent to a barrack settlement near Springfield, Massachusetts,
and put to work on the railroad. After he had swung a pick several
months and saved enough to pay off his debts in New York—a little
over a hundred dollars—he moved on to Worcester, first working on the
Boston & Albany Railroad, then in various factories.
In 1914 he arrived in Plymouth where he was employed as a gardener,
then with a loading gang in the Plymouth Cordage Company. Through
all his working years he spent his scant free hours in reading. “Ah,
how many nights I sat over some volume by a flickering gas jet,” he
wrote, “far into the morning hours! Barely had I laid my head on my
pillow when the whistle sounded and back I went to the factory or
stone pits.” His reading was now mostly political: Gorki and Merlino,
Reclus, Marx, Leon de Labriola, the _Testament_ of Carlo Pisacani,
Mazzini’s _Duties of Man_.
He boarded at first with Vincenzo Brini and his wife Alfonsina in
Suosso’s Lane, one of the unpaved unnumbered streets, like Cherry
Street and Cordage Lane, of North Plymouth’s Little Italy. The houses
were either the barracklike structures of the Cordage Company or else
square boxes with haphazard additions, always with a grape arbor in
the rear. They clustered round the Cordage plant like houses round a
medieval cathedral.
The Brini house was a wooden double tenement opposite the Amerigo
Vespucci Club, the social center of the Italian colony. Vanzetti had
been drawn to Brini by his anarchist beliefs. Brini was a forceful,
outstanding man, respected in the community for an integrity strong
enough to overcome the suspicion of his free-thinking. For, in the
pattern of immigrant groups, the Italians of Plymouth were more
devout than those of the old country, their religion reinforcing
their nationality in a foreign land. The Brini house was a way
station for every passing anarchist. Luigi Galleani had stopped
there, and big, genial, bearded Carlo Tresca, and the poet Arturo
Giovannitti, and Malatesta himself, the aristocrat turned radical,
with his beautiful voice. Night after night they used to sit in the
Brini kitchen, talking, talking, talking of the brave new world to
come.
Vanzetti felt himself more a relative than a boarder in the four
years he lived at the Brinis’. He was fond of the little girls,
LeFavre and Zora, but their brother Beltrando came to seem almost
a son to him. Vanzetti always had time for the children when the
parents had none. He used to take Beltrando on walks, showing him
the kinds of flowers, or in the early evening pointing out the
constellations. On Saturdays Beltrando would sometimes help him with
the pushcart. Vanzetti liked to listen when Beltrando practiced his
violin. Though he could not read music, Vanzetti had a sharp ear for
the wrong note. “Paganini” he called the boy.
Although the Cordage strike had left him blacklisted in the local
factories, Vanzetti stayed on at the Brinis’ taking odd jobs: carting
bricks, digging cellars, building breakwaters, cutting ice, or
after a northeaster shoveling snow for the town or the railroad. He
continued in this casual way until the spring of 1917.
* * * * *
Nicola Sacco had been baptized Ferdinando, a name he sometimes
used in later life, but when his eldest brother, Nicola, died, he
inherited the name by which he came to be generally known. The third
of seventeen children, he was born in 1891 into a prosperous peasant
family living on the outskirts of Torremaggiore, an Adriatic village
in the foothills of the Appenines. His father, who owned olive groves
and vineyards and who had married the daughter of an oil and wine
merchant, was not made conservative by his prosperity. He belonged to
a local republican club. Nicola’s older brother Sabino went one step
further and became a socialist.
Recalled from his Dedham prison cell, those early years at
Torremaggiore became a sun-drenched idyll that Sacco would sometimes
describe in letters that were at the same time exercises in English:
_About sixty step from our vineyard we have a large piece of lant
full of any quatity of vegetables that my brothers and I we used to
coltivate them. So every morning before the sun shining used comes
up and at night after the sun gos out I used to put one quarts of
water on every plant of flowers and vegetables and the small fruit of
little trees. While I was finished my work the sun shining was just
coming up and I used always jumping upon well wall and look at the
beauty sun shining and I do not know a long I used remane there look
at that enchanted scene of beautiful._
At fourteen he left school to work in the fields. He became the
reliable son. Sometimes his father would send him off in a cart
paying off workmen or buying supplies. When the grapes were ripe he
used to sleep in a hayrick to guard the vineyards. Summers he tended
the steam engine that threshed all the wheat of the region. He liked
machines.
When Sabino was called up for his three years in the army, Nicola
took over as the head of the family. A trustworthy boy, old for his
age, he still did not want to settle down in Torremaggiore. Sabino
had long been fascinated by the dream of going to America and his
younger brother absorbed the idea from him. Their father had a friend
who had some years before emigrated to Milford, Massachusetts, and
when they wrote to him he replied enthusiastically, urging them to
come over as soon as possible.
Sabino finished his army years in the spring of 1908. In April he and
Nicola sailed from Naples on one of the White Star ships. They landed
in East Boston just before Nicola’s seventeenth birthday, and went at
once to Milford.
The realities of immigrant life were too much for Sabino. Within a
year he returned to Italy. Nicola stayed on. For his first few months
he worked in Milford as a water boy with a road gang. Sometimes the
engineer would let him tend the steam roller. He liked to stand
beside the clanking shining engine, stoking it with coal or squirting
oil into it from the long-nozzled can. After three months, however,
he was given a pick and shovel. Then for a year he worked in the
foundry of the Draper Corporation in Hopedale, trimming slag off pig
iron.
As an unskilled foreign laborer he was at the bottom of the heap
and he knew it. He decided to learn a trade. In Milford, Michael
Kelley, then superintendent of the Milford Shoe Company, ran a school
where immigrants could learn edge-trimming, lasting, stitching, and
the other processes of shoe manufacture. The course lasted three
months and cost fifty dollars. More burdensome than the fee was the
necessity of spending a quarter of a year without earning anything.
But Sacco took the chance and the course. He became a skilled edger.
The benefits were immediate. Where before he had been earning $1.15
a day, he could now earn $40 or $50 or more a week. After a short
period in another factory, Sacco went to work in the Milford Shoe
Company, remaining there from 1910 until the spring of 1917.
Three evenings a week he attended English classes, then compulsory
for foreigners working in factories. Most of the pupils showed up
in their work clothes, sweaty and indifferent, but Sacco always
arrived washed and shaved, in a decent suit of clothes. His teacher
remembered his courtesy, his eager mind. She liked him, as did
everyone else in the clanbound community, even though they all knew
that he was a radical.[2] Sacco joined the Italian dramatic society
and took part in most of the neighborhood social events. It was at a
benefit dance he got up for a crippled accordion player that he met
Rosina Zambelli. She was sixteen that year, 1912, and had arrived
from a convent school in Italy only a few months before to live with
her parents. Father Zambelli heard a lot about Sacco as soon as he
began to court Rosina. A _sovversivo_, a free-thinker! When the
_sovversivo_ eloped with his daughter, Zambelli was furious. “That
one will end on the gallows!” he shouted. Later he became somewhat
reconciled with his son-in-law.
Sacco was happier in his married life than he had ever been before.
But for this it is probable that in a few years he would have
followed his brother back to Italy. He never identified himself with
America. He kept to the society of Italians and gave up his efforts
to learn English. Like many radical-minded Italian immigrants of the
time, he found himself drawn to anarchism. Until coming to America
he had been a republican. In Milford he read _Il Proletario_, a
paper edited by the poet-anarchist Giovannitti, Galleani’s _Cronaca
Sovversiva_, and other more fugitive sheets. Sometimes he and Rosina
acted in fund-raising propaganda melodramas with titles like _Senza
Padrone_ and _Tempeste Sociale_.
In 1913 he joined a local anarchist club, the Circolo di Studi
Sociali. He helped organize meetings in neighboring towns,
distributed crudely printed apocalyptic pamphlets, raised small sums
of money, and occasionally welcomed visiting leaders like Tresca or
Galleani. In 1916 his club held a meeting in Milford to raise money
to support a strike Tresca was running in Minnesota. The meeting did
not have a police permit and the speakers were arrested, among them
Sacco. He was convicted and paid a fine for disturbing the peace. It
was the only time he was ever arrested until the May night when he
was picked up on the Brockton streetcar.
* * * * *
For most Americans the belated entry of the United States into World
War I was an exhilarating experience. The bloody reality of the Civil
War had long since been embroidered by legend. After half a century
of peace—the Spanish-American affair was, after all, little more than
a maneuver—combat could again seem the grandest of human hazards. For
Sacco and Vanzetti the complex tragedy of the war was simplified to
the formula of predatory capitalism. Their attitude was summed up in
the Anarchist-Communist Anti-Conscription Appeal, which demanded that
the workers refuse to serve in the Army at any cost.
A month after Congress declared war, President Wilson signed the
Selective Military Conscription Bill, requiring every male between
the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, whether or not a citizen of
the United States, to register on June 5, 1917. The official notice
explained that registration did not mean liability to military
service except for citizens or those who had taken out first
papers. Sacco and Vanzetti were not liable, but so remote were they
from ordinary American life that neither of them understood this.
The passage of the act filled them with panic. A week before the
registration date they left for Mexico. It was only a week before
this that Sacco and Vanzetti had first met.
Some thirty New England anarchists formed a cooperative community
in Monterrey. Those who could found jobs. Sacco worked in a bakery,
sometimes taking his pay in bread and carrying a sack of it back to
the others. But life in the adobe huts was difficult. From the United
States letters came telling of high wages there and how easy it was
to avoid the draft. Gradually the Monterrey anarchists slipped back
across the border. Sacco, who had suffered much from the separation
from his family, returned to Massachusetts late in August. Under
his mother’s maiden name of Mosmacotelli he rejoined his wife in
Cambridge and worked briefly for the New England Candy Company, going
on to a succession of poorly paid jobs in East Boston and Haverhill,
and a better one in Brockton. This he gave up rather than buy a
Liberty Bond. For a short period in October 1917 he was employed by
Rice & Hutchins in South Braintree, but quit when he found that he
was making only thirteen dollars a week.
A few days before the Armistice, when it was obvious that war was
ending, Sacco reappeared under his own name at the Three-K Shoe
Factory in South Stoughton. It was a small plant of about 125
workers, owned by the same Michael Kelley who had run the apprentice
school in Milford. Sacco walked into his office and said, “I am
Nick.” At first Kelley could not place him. Then he remembered the
deft young Italian he had taught six years before. He called his
elder son and told him, “George, if you need an edge-trimmer, here’s
a good man.” And Sacco was a good man: steady, arriving early and
staying late, “a great fellow to clean up everything.”
Unlike Sacco, Vanzetti had no personal goal. Returning to the United
States at about the same time as Sacco, he wandered for a year: first
to St. Louis; then Youngstown, Ohio; Farrell, Pennsylvania; and
finally, in the summer of 1918, back to Plymouth. For a few months he
stayed again with the Brinis, then Vincenzo found him a room with the
Fortinis in Cherry Lane. But though Vanzetti no longer lived at the
Brinis’, the old intimacy remained.
For a year Vanzetti worked at various jobs. Then he bought his
pushcart. He had no competitors in North Plymouth, and there were
days when he would sell up to two hundred pounds of fish. The
difficulty was the supply. Often the trawlers did not go out until
April, and sometimes they came back with empty holds. During the
slack summer of 1919 Vanzetti worked for the town, but in the autumn
he again pushed his cart. Sometimes he had to go to the Boston docks
for his fish. When he was in the city he would drop in to see his
friend, the printer Aldino Felicani, in the press room of the Italian
daily _La Notizia_, or else would take the one-cent ferry to East
Boston to visit some of his anarchist comrades there. After the first
of Attorney General Palmer’s Red raids in November, Vanzetti told
Felicani they should plan to set up an underground press.
* * * * *
In 1917 the slogans that after the war came to seem as shabby as a
last-season’s theater poster had rung taut and true. _Beat the Hun!
Stand by the President! Keep the World Safe for Democracy!_
It had been a time of sauerkraut turned liberty cabbage, of Wagner
turned John Philip Sousa, of the conductor of the Boston Symphony
Orchestra, Dr. Karl Muck, driven from the podium and dachshunds
driven from the streets. Several states had even passed laws against
speaking German. High schools dropped the language from their
curricula. Upper-school boys of my school, Roxbury Latin, who were
still allowed the choice between Greek and German, used to joke that
it was better to choose Greek because you could study it on the
streetcar.
Except for the scapegoat Germans, all American racial and religious
groups were welded into the unity of the war years. Only a meager
minority, a few hundred thousand at most, continued to stand aside.
What opposition to the war still remained came from the foreign-born
of the big cities with their inherited dread of conscription, from
the dwindling Socialist Party, the still belligerently confident
Industrial Workers of the World—the Wobblies—and from the anarchists.
War unity, seeming at the time to be forged in steel, has a way
shortly afterward of showing its puttylike consistency—as 1919 soon
demonstrated. In a soothing-syrup speech that year Senator Warren G.
Harding coined _normalcy_, a word that has endured because it somehow
expressed the common yearning to return to the idealized prewar
period.
Instead of normalcy, 1919 was a year of fragmentation that began with
President Wilson triumphant on his European journey and ended with
him in America broken and defeated. It was the year of the High Cost
of Living (as inflation was then known), the year of the great steel
strike, the Seattle general strike, the outlaw railway strikes, coal
strikes, textile strikes, maritime strikes, telephone operators’
strikes, the Boston police strike, actors’ strikes, even strikes of
rent-payers. At one point almost three million workers were out.
Above all it was a year of antitheses. The first year of peace, it
saw the United States reject the peace treaty. In Versailles the
League of Nations was born, while in Berlin the Spartacist revolt
was bloodily suppressed. The AEF paraded under Madison Square’s
plaster triumphal arch in New York, and just before Christmas the
Spanish-American War transport _Buford_—nicknamed the Soviet Ark—left
Ellis Island for Russia with a load of assorted radical deportees
that included Emma Goldman. Within a few months of each other the
American Legion and the American Communist Party were founded.
“Hell will now be for rent,” Billy Sunday announced triumphantly as
Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the prohibition
amendment; at the same time a crime wave surged from coast to coast.
It was a year of violence. When President Wilson landed in Boston on
February 23 after his return from the Paris Peace Conference, Secret
Service men lined the roofs and all windows were ordered closed as he
drove through the streets. The day before, two members of the Groupa
Pro Prensa, a Spanish anarchist circle in Philadelphia, were arrested
by Secret Service agents and accused of plotting the President’s
assassination. On April 28 Mayor Ole Hansen of Seattle, who had
been denouncing the Red Menace, received a bomb package in the mail.
The following afternoon a maid at the Atlanta home of Senator Thomas
Hardwick, former chairman of the Committee on Immigration, opened
a package that blew off her hands. Subsequently, thirty-four bomb
packages were put in the mails addressed to Attorney General Palmer,
the Postmaster General, the Secretary of Labor, the Commissioner of
Immigration, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge K. M. Landis (who
had recently presided at an anarchist trial), Senator Lee Overman
(chairman of a committee investigating Bolshevism), J. P. Morgan,
John D. Rockefeller, and others.
May Day, the first since the Armistice and the second since the
Bolshevik _coup d’état_ in Russia, was anticipated by the police in
all major American cities. Attorney General Palmer had announced that
there was a plot afoot to kill high officials and force American
recognition of Soviet Russia. But the bomb packages were followed
by nothing so drastic. In New York a Tom Mooney protest meeting
that overflowed Carnegie Hall was charged by ex-servicemen in
uniform. The New York offices of the socialist _Call_ were sacked
by a mob of soldiers and sailors. There were demonstrations and
counter-demonstrations in Chicago, and in Cleveland a man was killed
when paraders carrying a red flag were attacked. The worst street
fighting took place in Boston when the Communist-dominated Lettish
Workmen’s Society attempted to hold a parade after a mass meeting in
the Dudley Street Opera House.
In mid-May Luigi Galleani, the leading anarchist figure in the
United States, was taken to the East Boston Immigration Station for
deportation. A man of leonine bearing and much charm, Galleani had
edited the brilliantly inflammatory _Cronaca Sovversiva_ in Paterson,
New Jersey, in Barre, Vermont, and finally in Lynn, Massachusetts.
“Our master,” Vanzetti called him.
Following his deportation, on the evening of June 2, bombs exploded
in eight cities. The chief target was Attorney General Palmer, whose
house at 2132 R Street, Washington, had its front blown in just as
he was going to bed. Windows of neighboring houses were shattered,
including those of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt
directly across the street. Apparently the bomb had gone off
prematurely, killing its carrier, for parts of a body were found up
and down the street, one fragment lying on the Roosevelt doorstep.
The police also found a cheap suitcase large enough to hold about
twenty-five pounds of dynamite, two pistols, a derby, a sandal, and
shreds of a pin-stripe suit and a polka-dot bow tie. About fifty
printed pink flyers entitled PLAIN WORDS were scattered over the
neighborhood. Several of these were picked up by Secretary Roosevelt.
They read:
_The powers that be make no secret of their will to stop, here in
America, the world-wide spread of revolution. The powers that be must
reckon that they will have to accept the fight they have provoked._
_A time has come when the social question’s solution can be delayed
no longer; the class war is on and cannot cease but with a complete
victory for the international proletariat...._
_Do not say we are acting cowardly because we keep in hiding, do not
say it is abominable; it is war, class war, and you were the first
to wage it under cover of the powerful institutions you call order,
in the darkness of your laws, behind the guns of your boneheaded
slaves...._
_There will have to be bloodshed ... we will destroy to rid the world
of your tyrannical institutions...._
_Long live social revolution! Down with tyranny!_
_The Anarchist Fighters._
The same evening a watchman was killed in New York when a bomb
exploded on the steps of the town house of Judge Charles Nott. Our
Lady of Victory Church in Philadelphia was bombed, and in Pittsburgh
there were blasts at the homes of United States District Judge W. H.
Thompson, who had once presided over a prosecution of Carlo Tresca,
and Chief Inspector W. W. Sibray of the Bureau of Immigration.
In Boston Judge Hayden, who had dealt severely with the arrested
May Day paraders, had his house almost demolished by a bomb made
of iron pipe stuffed with shrapnel and dynamite. In suburban
Newtonville, a similar bomb blew off the side of the house belonging
to Representative Leland Powers, who had sponsored an anti-anarchy
bill in the state legislature. Copies of PLAIN WORDS were found in
the vicinity of both explosions.
Except for the watchman and the obliterated carrier, no one was
injured in any of the bombings, but the effect over the country was
one of dismay at the recurring challenge and indignation against
the alien radicals held responsible. The New York _Times_ might
consider the bombings of “Bolshevik or I.W.W. origin,” but the
public generally believed them the work of anarchists. Ever since
Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre of 1886, when six policemen were
killed by a bomb thrown at an anarchist meeting, Americans had been
haunted by the image of the terrorist alien. President McKinley’s
assassination by the half-mad half-anarchist Leo Czolgosz hardened
the image. Such acts were in the tradition of the propaganda of
the deed, as proclaimed by anarchist patriarchs like Malatesta and
furthered gleefully by disciples like Johann Most in his _Science
of Revolutionary Warfare—A Manual of Instruction in the Use and
Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating
Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poison, Etc., Etc._
But for their rare spectacular gestures of political violence,
the anarchists would doubtless have been left to wither in the
obscurity of their cult. The nobly absurd anarchic conception of
a governmentless future when, in Vanzetti’s words, man would no
longer be wolf to the man, was held in America by only a miniscule
group—mostly immigrants from the more backward countries to whom it
seemed quite feasible that workers could run factories cooperatively.
Because by his philosophy of freedom each anarchist made his own
basic decisions, there was no way of separating the theorist from the
activist. Sacco and Vanzetti were said to be quietistic anarchists—as
opposed to the activist bombers of June 2—yet the dividing line was
as difficult to establish in 1919 as it was two generations before
with the abolitionists, whose ranks could include John Greenleaf
Whittier and John Brown.
“Property is theft,” Proudhon had said, and some anarchists accepted
this literally, asserting, in Galleani’s words, “the right to
expropriate the bourgeoisie—which lives by theft—whenever the need
presses or the struggle against the evil social order demands it.”
During the 1880s in Paris, one such anarchist expropriator, Clement
Duval, was convicted of robbery and sent to Devil’s Island. His
successor, François Ravachol, became one of the saints of anarchism
through his bombings of the houses of judges. In the course of
various robberies Ravachol committed several brutal murders.[3]
Galleani spoke well of both Duval and Ravachol, and when Duval
escaped from Devil’s Island and reached the United States,
published his prison memoirs and a biographical sketch in _Cronaca
Sovversiva_. In 1917 this material appeared in book form, edited by
Andrea Salsedo, a forty-year-old Sicilian who had helped Galleani
with his newspaper.
* * * * *
The bombing of his house may well have caused Attorney General Palmer
to believe that “resident aliens in large numbers and of a desperate
type” were conspiring to overthrow the government by means of a
“physical force revolution.” Certainly from then on Red plots became
his phobia. Appointing William J. Flynn, former head of the Secret
Service, Director of the Bureau of Investigation, Palmer ordered him
to conduct “a dragnet for Reds all over the country.”
The first raids took place on November 7, the second anniversary
of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly, an army of government agents,
local police, and special deputies, augmented by a haphazard swarm
of private detectives, many of dubious background, swooped down on
the various headquarters of the Communist Party, the Communist Labor
Party, the Union of Russian Workers, and the Russian anarchists.
During that wild and vengeful night the raiders smashed their way
into buildings in all the large cities, wrecked property, broke open
safes, and indifferent to warrants and the niceties of habeas corpus
hustled thousands of citizens as well as noncitizens to the lockup.
But the November raids were only a prelude to the sweeping raids of
January 2, 1920. These were timed to take place simultaneously in
thirty-three cities. Six thousand warrants were issued, and thousands
of aliens were picked up with or without warrants. Subsequently,
about three thousand were held for deportation—although in the end
only 446 of these were deported.
In Massachusetts there were fourteen such raids, and in Boston five
hundred aliens were marched through the streets in chains and taken
to the Deer Island House of Correction, where they were isolated in
brutally chaotic conditions.
The callous illegalities of the raiding procedures caused much
indignation among native Americans. In Boston, Federal Judge George
Anderson spoke out sharply against the mob actions of government
agents. Twelve nationally known lawyers, among them Zechariah Chafee,
Roscoe Pound, and Felix Frankfurter, all of the Harvard Law School,
collaborated on a report condemning the illegal practices of the
Justice Department.
If the raids caused indignation among the native-born, among the
alien radicals they caused terror. No one seemed safe from the
midnight knock on the door, the hard-faced men with clubs, the
blinding lights and the hammering questions of the night-long
interrogation. Rumor exaggerated the Palmer proceedings to outright
murder as they were discussed by Sacco and his friends in Stoughton
and by Vanzetti and his comrades on Sunday afternoons in the Italian
Independent Naturalization Club of East Boston.
* * * * *
After months of following each clue, even to tracing the polka-dot
tie to the store that sold it, Department of Justice agents concluded
that the man blown to pieces in the bombing of Attorney General
Palmer’s house was an Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoce, a member
of the dynamite-minded group in Paterson, New Jersey. Valdinoce had
been associated there with Galleani in the printing of the _Cronaca
Sovversiva_. In addition, Flynn, the new Bureau of Investigation
director, had collected enough evidence to convince him that an
explosion of the same date in Paterson was the work of another local
anarchist, Ruggero Baccini, who had since been deported. There were
no clues in the other eleven bombings, though Flynn was certain that
they were all the work of anarchists and that the dynamite had come
from Paterson. Efforts to determine the origin of the PLAIN WORDS
flyer failed.
Then, in February 1920, Flynn received a tip from an ostensible
direct-action anarchist named Ravarini. Recently, in Boston,
Ravarini had sold subscriptions to Malatesta’s _Umanita Nuova_ to
Sacco, Vanzetti, Boda, and Orciani, among others. He told a federal
agent that a Roberto Elia, a printer at Canzani’s Printing Shop in
Brooklyn, New York, was engaged in publishing anarchist literature,
including flyers. On the night of February 25, Bureau agents picked
up Elia in his lodgings. At the print shop the agents turned up pink
paper similar to that of the flyer and unearthed from the Canzani
fonts the peculiar S that had not matched the typeface used for the
first nine letters of the title PLAIN WORDS. Canzani’s typesetter
turned out to be Galleani’s old associate, Andrea Salsedo.
Salsedo and Elia, questioned separately, at first maintained they
knew nothing about PLAIN WORDS. They were taken to the Manhattan
offices of the Department of Justice at 21 Park Row and there they
remained until the morning of May 2 when Salsedo’s smashed body was
found on the pavement, fourteen floors beneath the window of his
room. It was believed by the anarchists at the time, and afterward by
many liberals, that Salsedo had been tortured by Bureau agents and
then thrown from the window. Actually, Salsedo was a suicide.
Neither he nor Elia was under formal arrest at Park Row, although
the agents made it clear that the alternative to staying was jail or
deportation. According to a Department of Justice report, Salsedo
confessed that he had printed PLAIN WORDS. Elia admitted that he had
been in the shop and that he had delivered a bundle of the flyers to
Carlo Recchi, a member of the Galleani group. After consulting with
their lawyer, Narciso Donato, the men agreed that they would remain
in the Department’s offices, “that their whereabouts should remain
unknown to all except their families, their attorney, and certain
of their friends, and, further, that neither should be subjected to
interrogation or examination without the presence of their attorney.”
Donato later said that his clients had been well treated and had been
questioned only when he was present.
Subsequently, Elia was deported. Before leaving the country he set
down his own version of the events at Park Row in an affidavit for
one of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense lawyers. On March 8, he related,
while being taken to an interrogation room, he had passed another
room where he had seen Salsedo surrounded by four agents in their
shirtsleeves. Then, while he himself was being interrogated, he had
heard Salsedo scream. The next morning he had been taken to Director
Flynn’s office.
_I was alone in the outer room [Elia deposed] until Salsedo came in
with Mr. Donato. Salsedo’s face and forehead were bruised from the
beating he had received. He had red spots and scratches on his cheeks
and temples and his eyes were vacant. He was depressed. I never saw
him normal during all the times after that we were together._
_In Mr. Flynn’s waiting room Salsedo told me about his interrogation
the night before. They showed him a bloody sandal and said “You see
this blood? This is the blood of the man who was blown up. Tell me
whose blood that is.” He would say that he did not know, and they
would swear at him and strike him in the face or body with the heel
of the sandal. They did this over and over again._
_Mr. Donato told me that we were charged with murder in the first
degree. Salsedo said “I do not want to die. We have done nothing, but
we are in a trap. What are we to do? I will admit that I printed_
PLAIN WORDS, _because I cannot stand any more, and maybe I will help
myself.”..._
_On the next day we were questioned by Mr. Flynn. Salsedo said that
he had printed the leaflet in May 1919; that I had nothing to do with
it; that it had been ordered by one Recchi. I stated that I had seen
Salsedo printing it, but had nothing to do with it...._
_After that we were not formally questioned any more and we were very
well treated. A room was fitted up for us with two beds. We had good
meals; we were taken out for walks; once we were taken to the movies.
When any one asked me if I was content or if I was willing to stay at
the Department of Justice I always said “Yes,” because I did not want
to go to prison and I thought that all depended upon the good will of
the agents...._
_Mr. Donato came to see us frequently. So did Salsedo’s wife, who
sought to tranquillize him. But Salsedo was always despondent and in
fear. He would say, “We who are innocent, are in jail. Maybe those
who are guilty are out there in freedom.” I would tell him that we
would be free, but he did not believe it. He would lie groaning and
lamenting all the night. He complained continually of pains in his
stomach and head. He was always nervous. He refused absolutely to
eat. He showed clear signs of an unbalancing mind...._
_On the evening of Sunday, May 2nd, Salsedo walked a little with me
in the corridor as was our custom. He went to bed about nine o’clock.
Then I sat with the Department of Justice agents who were smoking
and telling stories. About eleven o’clock I came into our room with
Palmera the interpreter. Salsedo begged me to turn off the light; he
said “I have a terrible headache. That cigarette you gave me hurt
me.”_
_I went to bed. For a long time I heard Salsedo groaning and
lamenting. Then I fell asleep. I know nothing more until I was
awakened by the watchman who came to call us every morning between
five and six o’clock so that we should be up before the cleaning
women came to the offices. I said “Is it not early?” He answered,
“Your comrade is dead. He has jumped from the window.”_
To the anarchist groups of New York, New Jersey, and New England the
detention of Elia and Salsedo was ominous. Tresca, who had succeeded
the deported Galleani as leader, consulted with Donato, but was
unable to see the men. He suspected the lawyer of back-hand dealings
with the Department of Justice.
On Sunday afternoon, April 25, fifteen or twenty of the East Boston
anarchists, meeting in their hall overlooking the docks, discussed
what they could do for Elia and Salsedo. Sacco, Vanzetti, and
Orciani were present. Ever since they had learned of their comrades’
mysterious detention these men had been raising money and sending it
on without, however, knowing just where it was going. Somebody from
Boston, they now decided, must go to New York and find out what
was happening. Vanzetti, being self-employed and having no family
responsibilities, was chosen. He left that evening on the train.
In New York he found that Tresca could give him little new
information. Luigi Quintiliano, the chairman of a committee to defend
Palmer raid victims, warned Vanzetti that there would soon be more
raids and urged him to tell his Massachusetts friends to get rid of
any anarchist literature they might possess.
Vanzetti passed on this warning when he returned to Boston, but about
Salsedo and Elia he had no more to tell than was known before.
In spite of the Attorney General’s prediction that a gigantic bomb
plot and general strike would erupt on May Day, the day was for the
most part a quiet one all over the country. Palmer’s zeal produced
only a few victims, among them members of the Association of Harvard
Clubs who, marching in Washington behind their crimson banners, found
themselves mistaken for a Red parade. Public opinion began to turn
against the Attorney General, even as his shadow still loomed large
over the alien radicals.
At their Sunday meeting on May 2, the East Boston Anarchists were
not aware of any change in the public temper. To them the times
seemed desperate, with the possibility of a police ambush at the next
corner. Most of their talk was about getting rid of their anarchist
literature. Orciani, who had recently seen Boda, reported that the
latter still owned a car; he thought they might use it for rounding
up the literature. Sacco suggested that he and Vanzetti and Orciani
should meet with Boda some time early in the week. Vanzetti reminded
everyone that there would be a meeting in Brockton on May 9 to raise
money for Salsedo and Elia.
After the meeting Sacco told Vanzetti that on the ninth he and his
family would be on their way to Italy. He suggested that Vanzetti
come back to Stoughton with him for a last visit. Vanzetti promised
to come down the following afternoon.
Monday morning Vanzetti visited the Boston piers but found that fish
was still scarce and too expensive for his pushcart customers. He had
lunch with some Italian friends near Haymarket Square and heard the
news of Salsedo’s death. Late in the afternoon he took the train for
Stoughton.
Only Rosina and the child were at the bungalow when he arrived. Sacco
had quit his job on Saturday, but had gone back to the factory to
help break in a new man. He returned just after five o’clock.
Tuesday morning Sacco had to go in to Boston to the Italian
Consulate for his passport. Vanzetti spent the day reading. After
Sacco had picked up the passport he rode out to Hyde Park on the el
to meet Orciani, who had come down from Readville on his motorcycle.
They talked again about the books and pamphlets that had to be
collected, and Orciani said they could arrange with Boda to get the
car the next evening. He gave Sacco a ride back to Stoughton. As they
chugged into the yard of the bungalow they saw young George Kelley,
the factory superintendent, who lived next door. Sacco introduced him
to Orciani. They stood there a few minutes talking about motorcycles
and the weather. Orciani said he would be over again next afternoon.
On Wednesday Sacco stayed home all day. He and Vanzetti chopped
wood in the morning, had lunch, took a walk, and then sat down in
the kitchen while Rosina went on with the packing. Vanzetti said
afterward that he happened to notice several shotgun shells on top of
the kitchen cabinet. Rather than see them thrown out he put them in
his pocket, thinking he might sell them to some comrade in Plymouth
and perhaps make a quarter for the cause.
Orciani arrived on his motorcycle about half past four, the elusive
Boda in the sidecar. Boda told them he had telephoned the garage man
about his car; they could pick it up that evening. After the four ate
supper, Orciani and Boda left on the motorcycle, having agreed to
meet Sacco and Vanzetti at Elm Square in West Bridgewater.
Sacco and Vanzetti caught the 7:20 streetcar for Brockton. There they
found they had to wait for the Bridgewater car. It was growing dark.
Vanzetti went into a store on Main Street and bought several cigars.
Then the two men had a cup of coffee in a lunchroom. While they drank
it Vanzetti took out a paper and pencil and began to write the notice
for the Sunday meeting in Brockton.
He continued to work on it after they boarded the Bridgewater car.
Just before they reached West Bridgewater he gave the notice to
Sacco and told him it was ready for the printer. At the Elm Square
they waited a while under the street light by the Johnson brothers’
garage, which was shut. Then, after starting toward Bridgewater, they
turned back, recrossed the square, and walked in the direction of
Brockton. As they reached the railroad bridge they saw the solitary
beam of a motorcycle headlight snaking toward them.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] According to his teacher, no one in Milford ever believed Sacco
was guilty of murder. After his arrest the Italian community ran
benefits to raise money for his defense. It also contributed to his
funeral expenses.
[3] The most sensational of the anarchist criminal groups in this
century was the Bonnot Gang of Paris. In December 1911, the members
attacked two bank messengers on the street, shot one, grabbed their
bags, and made off in a waiting car in what was apparently the
world’s first motorized holdup.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PLYMOUTH TRIAL
The first of the East Boston comrades to visit the Brockton police
station was Professor Felice Guadagni, a graduate of the Institute
of Naples and editor of the _Gazzetta del Massachusetts_. He was
proud of being an educated man and in spite of his anarchism liked to
call himself and have others call him Professor. He found that his
two friends did not seem to understand the reason for their arrest.
Vanzetti told him with a shrug that even if they were going to be
deported now, they would at least go to Italy at Uncle Sam’s expense.
The point of Katzmann’s opaque questioning was suddenly clear when
Guadagni explained that they were being held, not because they were
anarchists, not for running away to Mexico during the war, but
because they were accused of murder.
When the news of Vanzetti’s predicament reached Plymouth, Vincenzo
Brini gathered his friends together to decide what to do. Like most
aliens they felt confused when faced with governmental authority.
Whenever such difficulties came up in North Plymouth—troubles with
police or courts or town officials—the Italian community turned to
Doviglio Govoni. Govoni, the Plymouth court interpreter, was also the
local fixer. He knew English, he knew the judges and the district
attorney and the sheriff, he knew the routine of the town hall and
the heads of the various departments, most of whom he called by their
first names. Whether it was a tax abatement, a couple of boys caught
robbing a fruit store, a matter of filing first papers, or getting a
runaway son out of the Navy, Govoni was the man to go to.
After Govoni had listened to Brini and the others, he told them
straight off that they must get rid of their lawyer, Callahan. What
they needed was a good smart lawyer, like Judge John Vahey of the
district court. Not only did Vahey know his way around Plymouth, but
his brother was a big Boston attorney who might come in handy in case
things didn’t turn out right.
Vanzetti’s friends agreed. They and Govoni went down to the Brockton
station the following evening with a declaration of discharge. They
explained to Vanzetti that they would do everything they could for
him, but that they needed a lawyer they had confidence in. Vanzetti,
though he had come to like Callahan, signed the declaration.
Meanwhile Sacco’s comrades had engaged a Boston lawyer, James
Graham. An Irish Catholic, Graham had built up a large practice in
the Italian North End, where he was noted for his ability to get on
with politicians and to get his clients off. The latters’ guilt or
innocence did not concern him. He assumed that most of the Italians
who came to him in trouble were troublemakers.
Harding’s positive identification of Vanzetti as the Bridgewater
shotgun bandit had been enough to convince Chief Stewart, and on May
11 he filed a complaint in the Brockton police court charging that
Vanzetti “being armed with a dangerous weapon did assault Alfred
E. Cox with intent to rob him.” That same afternoon, to Stewart’s
disgust, Orciani had to be released, since his time card showed that
he had been at work in Norwood on the date of both crimes.
The preliminary hearing on the Bridgewater charge against Vanzetti
was held in the Brockton police court before Judge Herbert Thorndike
on May 18, 1920.[4] Graves, the truck driver, who had thought the
bandit car a Hudson, had died in the interim, but Cox the paymaster,
Bowles the guard, and Slip Harding appeared as witnesses for the
Commonwealth. The three still described the man with the shotgun as
having a cropped mustache but picked out the droop-mustached Vanzetti
as the man. Bowles and Cox, who had been vague when they first saw
Vanzetti in the police station, had by this time become much more
positive. “I think he looks enough like the man to be the man,” Cox
told the court, although under cross-examination he admitted that he
was still not completely sure. Bowles was sure. “That is the man who
had the shotgun that morning,” he said.
Harding remained as certain about Vanzetti as he had been at the
station, but the car he had originally described as a Hudson Six had
now firmly become a Buick. In addition to the three repeaters the
Commonwealth had a new witness, a Mrs. Georgina Brooks, who a few
minutes before the Bridgewater attempt had been walking down Broad
Street with her five-year-old son. She had crossed just in front of
the bandit car and had noticed the four men inside. The driver had
followed her with his eyes as she passed. Now she picked Vanzetti as
the man she had seen behind the wheel of the car. “I am positive,”
she said.
Vahey having not bothered to produce any defense witnesses, Judge
Thorndike held Vanzetti for action by the grand jury, and on June
11 two indictments were found against him: for assault with intent
to rob, and assault with intent to murder. At the conclusion of the
May preliminary hearing Assistant District Attorney Kane told the
court that he had witnesses who would positively identify Vanzetti in
connection with the South Braintree murders. On learning this, Judge
Thorndike refused to admit Vanzetti to bail and remanded him to the
Plymouth county jail. His trial was scheduled for June 22.
In the intervening weeks Vanzetti continued to insist that he had
spent December 24, the day of the Bridgewater attempt, delivering
eels to his customers in North Plymouth. Among Catholics the day
before Christmas is a fast day, and among Italians it ends in a feast
that always includes eels. Even the poorest or the most free-thinking
of Italian families manages to have eels on that traditional day.
Brini rounded up several dozen witnesses to testify that they had
bought eels from Vanzetti or seen him with his pushcart the day
before Christmas.
Sacco’s lawyer, Graham, became associated with Vahey in Vanzetti’s
defense. Six years afterward, while in Charlestown State Prison,
Vanzetti wrote a pamphlet, “Background of the Plymouth Trial,”
denouncing both his Plymouth lawyers. One of his chief complaints was
that Vahey had refused to allow him to testify in his own behalf.
Vanzetti wrote that when they discussed the matter,
_He asked me how I would explain from the stand the meaning of
Socialism, or Communism, or Bolshevism, if I was requested by the
district attorney to do so. At such a query, I would begin an
explanation on those subjects, and Mr. Vahey would cut it off at its
very beginning._
“_Hush, if you will tell such things to the ignorant, conservative
jurors, they will send you to State prison right away._”
Graham set down his version thirty years later. According to it he
and Vahey went to the Plymouth jail one evening and spent hours
discussing whether or not Vanzetti should take the stand. Graham
said he told Vanzetti that when a defendant failed to testify in
Massachusetts he was usually found guilty.
_Vanzetti [Graham wrote] was carefully advised as to the evidence
that had gone in as to what inference the Jury might draw if he
failed to take the stand despite what the Judge would tell them in
his charge, and as to what information might be elicited from him if
he did take the stand. “But you,” Vahey told him, “are the one who
has got to make the decision as to whether you will testify or not.”_
Sacco had been moved to the Dedham jail and Vahey, at Vanzetti’s
request, went there to discuss the matter with him. When he returned,
Vanzetti, according to Graham, said in substance: “I don’t think I
can improve upon the alibi which has been established. I had better
not take the stand.”
Vanzetti was sure afterward that he had been betrayed, and attacked
Vahey in the bitter language of his pamphlet. Part of his bitterness
was undoubtedly caused by the fact that in 1924 Vahey became
Katzmann’s law partner.
* * * * *
May passed into June. Except among the Italians of North Plymouth and
the small anarchist circle in East Boston, Vanzetti’s forthcoming
trial caused little interest. There was a flurry in June when the
Boston _Sunday Advertiser_ reported—it later turned out to be a
newspaperman’s hoax—that a letter, signed the “Red X Society,” had
been found near Plymouth Rock demanding Vanzetti’s release “or
take the consequences.” But for most people the trial was just a
routine affair coming at the end of the spring criminal session.
The newspapers and public were much more interested in the trial of
Jennie Zimmerman in Springfield, accused of murdering her cousin and
lover, Dr. Henry Zimmerman.
Although Chief Stewart had received a setback with Orciani’s release,
he still stuck to his theory that the deported Coacci and the missing
Boda had been mixed up in both crimes. Boda, he was convinced, was
the man who had appeared at Hassam’s garage in Needham looking for
license plates. But Boda had successfully vanished. Actually, during
all the time the police were looking for him, he was living quietly
with friends in East Boston. In August he moved on to Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, where he stayed for two months, then went to Providence
where—under his old name of Buda—he received a passport from the
Italian vice-consul and returned to Italy. Several attempts were made
later to induce him to come back to Massachusetts and testify for
Sacco and Vanzetti, but each time he refused, maintaining that his
life would be in danger.
When Stewart went to North Plymouth and searched Vanzetti’s room
at 35 Cherry Street, he discovered nothing except odds and ends
of clothing. He took away a black coat, a shirt, a sweater, and a
brown cloth cap. An earlier search of Sacco’s bungalow in Stoughton
had produced a gray cap and a rifle, along with a few books and
a few anarchist pamphlets that Rosina had neglected to burn. In
Joseph Ventola’s garage in Hyde Park the police turned up a box that
had belonged to Coacci. It contained forty dollars’ worth of shoe
material stolen from Slater & Morrill. Of the missing South Braintree
payroll there was no trace anywhere.
* * * * *
Vanzetti’s trial began in the second-floor courtroom of the
brick-pilastered Plymouth courthouse on Tuesday, June 22, with the
selection of the jury. This ran off quickly. There were no challenges
by either side, even though one of the jurymen, Arthur Nickerson,
a foreman at the Cordage, might well have been challenged by the
defense. Vahey and Graham were opposed by District Attorney Katzmann
and Assistant District Attorney Kane. Judge Webster Thayer presided.
At the opening of the trial Judge Thayer was within two weeks of
being sixty-three, although the leathery texture of his face made him
seem a decade older. He was about five feet two inches tall, with
the edgy vanity of many short men, and a voice that easily turned
petulant. On the bench he looked the part of a judge. He had a high
forehead, a sudden little hawk nose bridged by pince-nez, thin gray
hair and mustache, dark-circled eyes, and a narrow Yankee line of
mouth. Governor Samuel McCall, a fellow graduate of Dartmouth, had
appointed him to the bench in 1917.
Thayer was born in Blackstone, Massachusetts, twenty-five miles south
of Worcester, the son of the local slaughterer and provisions dealer.
After going through the local public schools and Worcester Academy,
he entered Dartmouth with the class of 1880. Known there as Bobby,
he was more noted as an athlete than a scholar. While a sophomore
he organized the first college baseball nine and was its captain for
three years. Once he was suspended for a half-year as the result
of a rowdy prank, but he returned to graduate with his class. His
undergraduate pictures show a fair-haired young man with a sprouting
mustache, a quizzical expression, and eyes so deep-set that they seem
almost hooded.
On graduation he briefly considered going in for big-league baseball,
but instead returned to Worcester, where for two years he read law on
his own. He was admitted to the bar in 1882. For the next thirty-five
years he remained in that small city, rising higher in its restricted
social world than might have been expected of a butcher’s son. He
married early and well. He became an Odd Fellow, chairman of the
Worcester Athletic Association, and a member of the Dartmouth Alumni
Council. Indicative of his popularity, he was elected a Democratic
alderman in Republican Worcester, the youngest alderman the city ever
had. Later he conformed more strictly to his social group and became
a Republican. His greatest regret, for which his appointment as
Superior Court Justice was only partial solace, was that he had not
been young enough to join the Army in 1917.
Webster Thayer—the Anglo-Saxon coupling had a bell-like resonance
in which were blended the Mayflower tradition and that of the young
federal republic. Yet there was a hollowness to the ring, as the
butcher’s son well knew. Thayer, even as a justice of the Superior
Court, was haunted by an inner sense of doubt that made him seek the
approbation of other men, constantly, uncritically. In his three
years on the bench he appeared a run-of-the-mill justice, causing no
particular attention adversely or otherwise. The court attendants
noted his irascibility, and his vanity came out in a fondness for
buttonholing lawyers in the corridor to tell them about the charge
he had just written. As an old-line Yankee, he had no great sympathy
with foreigners, but no one had ever questioned his fairness.
Other than Vanzetti’s Italian neighbors and a couple of cub reporters
from the Boston papers, there were scarcely any spectators at the
trial. The routine was the same each morning. Vanzetti was brought in
handcuffed and taken to the prisoner’s box in the center of the room,
where his handcuffs were unfastened. Then Vahey and Graham conferred
with him, and the set melancholy face with the drooping mustache
would take on a momentary animation. Katzmann and Kane always nodded
affably to the defense lawyers as they came in. Then there was a
wait of several minutes until Judge Thayer appeared, consciously
delaying the daily drama of his entry, sweeping over the threshold
in his black robe, inwardly satisfied that the room was standing for
his presence and would remain standing until he took his seat. The
crier intoned: “Hear ye, hear ye. All persons having anything to
do before the Honorable Justices of the Superior Court now sitting
at Plymouth within and for the County of Plymouth, draw near, give
your attendance and you shall be heard. God save the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts!”
With his intoning, the ritual of the court took over. The actuality
of the outside world, the muted summer noises of the town entering
with the sea air through the open oval-topped windows, became less
real than this legal world where all action had been reduced to
verbalizations. Symbolic in more than one sense was the statue of
Justice in a niche of the courthouse, holding up her gilded scales
and covered by a protective layer of chicken-wire.
During none of the trial sessions was there discussion of Vanzetti’s
political beliefs. The prosecution’s case was merely an elaboration
of the preliminary hearing. The district attorney relied chiefly on
the primary identification witnesses—Bowles, Cox, Harding, and Mrs.
Brooks—reinforcing them with corroborative evidence that would in
itself have been insufficient even to indict. Bowles still maintained
that Vanzetti was the man with the shotgun, but the mustache he had
earlier described as close-cropped now became merely trimmed. Cox
denied that he had said, on seeing Vanzetti in Brockton, “I think
there is doubt.” Even now, though he had become much more certain, he
was not wholly sure of his identification, and the best that Katzmann
could get out of him was “I am not positive but I feel certain he is
the man.”
All three men had been shown the car found in the Manley Woods.
Harding, disregarding his first statement about a Hudson, again
described the Bridgewater car as a seven-passenger Buick. The
“croppy” mustache of the bandit that he “did not get much of a
look at” was now “a heavy dark mustache that had been trimmed.”
On December 24 he had described the shotgun bandit to a Pinkerton
investigator as “slim, five feet ten inches, wore a long black
overcoat and a derby hat.” Now he described him: “Long coat, no hat,
high forehead, hair was short, dark complected man, I should say,
high cheekbones, rather hard, broad face and the head, perhaps, more
a round head, bullet shaped.”
Mrs. Brooks repeated her story of crossing in front of the parked
car and looking through the windshield at the driver. She had picked
Vanzetti out of a lineup of four men in the Brockton police station
as that driver. Facing him in the courtroom, she was still certain
he had been the driver. After she had entered the railway station,
she testified she heard shots and, looking out the window, saw the
flashes from two gun barrels as the L. Q. White truck lurched down
Broad Street. In cross-examining her Vahey questioned whether it
was possible (as indeed it was not) to have an unimpeded view of
the street from the station, and whether in fact she had seen the
shooting at all. Mrs. Brooks became confused and hesitant, but Vahey
did not press the point. Neither did he bring out the fact that
Vanzetti did not know how to drive.
The only other witness to identify Vanzetti in court was Maynard
Shaw, a schoolboy who had been delivering papers at the time of the
attempt. From one hundred fifty feet away on Broad Street he had seen
a dark-mustached man with a shotgun get out of a touring car on the
corner and fire at the payroll truck. “He is the one I saw,” the boy
said, pointing at Vanzetti. He added that even at a distance he knew
the man was a foreigner “by the way he ran.” Vahey made much of this
remark, asking Shaw whether Italians and Russians ran differently
from Swedes or Norwegians and how anybody could tell the difference.
Shaw had not paid much attention to the bandits’ car, thinking it a
Hudson or a Buick. Later, though he did not explain why, he concluded
it was a Buick.
The other witnesses were routine. John King of Grove Street had been
in his upstairs bedroom when he heard the car roar by. Looking out,
he noted it was a seven-passenger Buick. Dr. Murphy once more told of
picking up the spent shotgun shell. Simon and Ruth Johnson appeared
and told their stories, and George Hassam, the Needham garage owner,
told his. Officer Connolly told of arresting Vanzetti. Chief Stewart
submitted a transcript of his interview with the defendant. Most of
it was excluded because of its references to political beliefs.
Captain William Proctor of the State Police, testifying as a
ballistics expert, claimed that the 12-gauge Winchester shell Dr.
Murphy had found in the gutter and the Winchester shells found in
Vanzetti’s pocket were identical, except that one was empty and the
others loaded. Vahey objected that the shell in the gutter might
have been dropped there by any passing hunter and that there was no
connection between it and the shells found on Vanzetti four months
later. Judge Thayer overruled Vahey and admitted the shells as
evidence for the jury to pass on.
Sacco’s name was mentioned only once during the trial, when Austin
Cole, the streetcar conductor, testified that he had seen Sacco and
Vanzetti on the Brockton car not only the night of their arrest but
also on the fourteenth or fifteenth of April, when the two men had
got on at the same Sunset Avenue stop at the same time and had got
off at Brockton. On that first night, according to Cole, Sacco had
paid the fares with a quarter and a nickel. “I changed the quarter,”
Cole continued, “and I said to him ‘To Brockton?’ He says ‘Yes.’ I
said, ‘It will be thirty cents.’ ‘I know it,’ he says and he handed
me a nickel and the other hand was thrust into the pocket, and he
asked for two transfers. When I was talking with him he smiled and I
noticed the gold tooth on Sacco.”
Vahey wanted to know how the conductor could remember a particular
day of no special significance among many days he could not remember
at all. Cole maintained that he had worked Wednesday and Thursday,
the fourteenth and fifteenth, and not again until the following
Tuesday. He remembered those dates particularly because he associated
them with Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth.
Katzmann’s efforts to link Boda with the holdup attempt were
fumbling. One witness, Napoleon Ensher, who lived a quarter of a
mile from Puffer’s Place, said that early in the spring he had
seen Boda drive past in a Buick and that Boda had waved to him.
At the Dedham trial a year later Ensher’s evidence was ruled out
as unsubstantiated. Another witness, Richard Casey, had watched
the bandit car stop near his house at the corner of Broad and Main
Streets. He described the driver as a man with a short mustache and
prominent nose, wearing either a velour or a black soft hat. All that
Casey could remember of the man next to the driver was that he wore
a brown cap. When Stewart showed him half a dozen caps, Casey picked
out the one that the chief had taken from Vanzetti’s room.
District Attorney Katzmann took three and a half days to present his
case. On Monday, June 28, just before the noon recess, he announced
that the Commonwealth rested.
The defense lawyers did not search Bridgewater for refuting
witnesses. Their strategy was to rely on Vanzetti’s alibi as
established by his North Plymouth neighbors. Judge Thayer charged
the jury that if they could conclude Vanzetti was in Plymouth on the
morning of December 24, the case was ended. In addition the defense
had collected several witnesses to testify that during all the years
Vanzetti had lived in Plymouth he had never worn anything but his
present shaggy mustache.
Awed and uneasy, the Italian witnesses marshaled by Vahey sat
together in the back of the courtroom talking in whispers and
waiting for their names to be called. Except for those who were
American-born, they spoke through the interpreter, Govoni. First to
take the stand was Vittorio Papa, the elusive Poppy Vanzetti had
claimed he was trying to visit the night of his arrest. Papa merely
said that he had been friendly with Vanzetti in Plymouth and that
when he moved to East Bridgewater he had asked his friend to come and
visit him. He had not given Vanzetti his address there.
Papa was followed by Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, who told how
on that day before Christmas she had gone upstairs and called her
lodger at a quarter past six. A few minutes later he had come down
in his stocking feet, wearing overalls and a green sweater. She had
warmed some milk for his breakfast. After drinking it, he had put on
his boots and gone out.
A day or two before, a barrel of eels had come down from Boston for
him by express, and she happened to be at home when it arrived.
Vanzetti had spent the evening of the twenty-third in the kitchen
cleaning and weighing them, wrapping them in newspapers, and
ticketing them for delivery next day. After he left the house the
morning of the twenty-fourth, he came back again about eight o’clock
with a boy who was helping him, and the two of them had loaded the
pushcart and a wheelbarrow with the packages of eels.
Carlo Balboni, a night fireman at the Cordage, said he had left the
plant at six in the morning and gone directly to the Fortinis’ to
pick up the eels he had ordered the day before. Vanzetti was still
in bed when he got there and Mrs. Fortini had gone upstairs to wake
him. John DiCarlo, a shoemaker on Court Street, said that on December
24 he had opened his shop as usual at 7:15 and was just starting to
sweep the place out when Vanzetti came in with a package of eels.
DiCarlo could even remember that they weighed a pound and a half.
Rosa Balboni of South Cherry Street said that Vanzetti had delivered
the eels she had ordered in the afternoon, but she had also seen him
early that morning as she was going to the baker’s. Enrico Bastoni,
the Cherry Street baker, told the court that Vanzetti had come to his
shop the day before Christmas just before eight o’clock to see if he
could rent a horse and truck for the day. But that day Bastoni needed
them himself. It was a little before eight when Vanzetti arrived, for
just afterward Bastoni heard the second Cordage whistle blow. Terese
Malaguti, also of Cherry Street, said that she had bought eels from
Vanzetti the same morning and that he had come about seven o’clock,
when the first whistle blew. Adeladi Bongiovanni remembered that
she had bought three pounds of eels at forty cents a pound. The boy
brought them to the door and she had offered him two dollars, but as
he had no change she had gone out in the street and paid Vanzetti
herself. Just as the boy arrived she had been cooking polenta, and
while she was out chatting with Vanzetti the polenta caught fire. Her
next-door neighbors, Margherita Fiochi and Emma Borsari, told how
they had also bought eels from Vanzetti that morning, as did a high
school student, Esther Christophori, living in Suosso’s Lane, and
young Vincent Longhi of 42 Cherry Street, both of whom testified in
English.
In dealing with this solid block of testimony Katzmann tried to
discredit it generally. He asked the witnesses how they could recall
the details of one particular day among all the other days of the
year. Might not Vanzetti as easily have delivered his eels on the
twenty-third as the twenty-fourth? His landlady, for example,
although she said she had called him at quarter past six the day
before Christmas, could not recall what time he got up the day after
Christmas, or New Year’s Day or Washington’s Birthday or any other
specific day.
The most important witness for Vanzetti was thirteen-year-old
Beltrando Brini. The defense claimed he had been Vanzetti’s helper
on his morning round delivering the eels. Nicknamed Dolly, he was an
intelligent, nervous boy, small for his age, looking rather helpless
in his Norfolk knickerbocker suit and high boots. On the night of
December 23, he told the court, two men had brought a half a pig
to his house in Suosso’s Lane. His father had ordered the pig for
Christmas. That same night Vanzetti had stopped in to ask if the boy
would help him deliver eels next day. Dolly promised he would. On
that damp and muddy morning before Christmas he met Vanzetti first
in front of Maxwell’s Drugstore. Near the drugstore Dolly’s father
had run into him, taken one look at his boots, and told him to go
home and get his rubbers. At first the boy could not find them. By
the time he had located them under the stairs and hurried back to
Vanzetti’s house in Cherry Street it was eight o’clock, for as he
trotted along he could hear the Cordage whistle blowing.
Vanzetti was putting his packages of eels in his pushcart and an
extra wheelbarrow when Dolly arrived. He told the boy he had wanted
to hire a horse and cart but could not find one. The two of them
started out with wheelbarrow and pushcart, making their deliveries to
the regular customers up and down Cherry Street, Cherry Place, Cherry
Court, and finally down to Court Street. Dolly had worked from eight
in the morning until two in the afternoon, when Vanzetti paid him off.
On Christmas Eve, Vanzetti dropped in at the Brinis’. When he left
he noticed the children’s stockings hanging by the mantel and put
two half-dollars in each one. On Christmas Day Vanzetti stopped in
again, and Dolly thanked him for the half-dollars and showed him his
Christmas presents.
Katzmann began his cross-examination with deceptive gentleness,
calling the boy “son” and asking if he would like to testify sitting
down. As he continued, his voice hardened and he began to box the boy
in with questions. How many times had he told his story? How many
times had he gone over it with his parents? With Mr. Vahey? Had he
learned it just like a piece at school? Who corrected him when he
left something out? The district attorney stalked him through all the
details of the morning: the houses where the boy had left packages,
the weight of the basket he carried, the time he started and the time
he finished his deliveries. Had he finished at one-fifteen, or was it
one-twenty? The boy squirmed and looked pleadingly at Judge Thayer,
but there was no relief coming from that stiff-robed parchment-faced
figure. Young Brini had to admit that he had repeated his story a
number of times to his parents and others, and that when he repeated
it and omitted anything his father would correct him.
Beltrando’s parents, Vincenzo and Alfonsina, both testified. Vincenzo
told of meeting his boy in the lane on the morning of December 24
and sending him back for his rubbers. He also mentioned the side of
pig that had arrived the night before, when Vanzetti dropped in for
a visit. Vanzetti’s mustache was untrimmed then, just the same that
night as it was now. Alfonsina corroborated her husband. In a lengthy
cross-examination Katzmann tried to force her into admitting that she
had coached her son in his story, but the most she would say was that
she had listened to him tell it a number of times.
John Vernazano, the Court Street barber who had shaved Vanzetti and
cut his hair for the last five or six years, now took the stand
to say that he had never trimmed Vanzetti’s mustache, that it had
always been just as it was today. He received unexpected confirmation
from two non-Italian members of the Plymouth police force. Officer
John Gault said that he knew Vanzetti and had seen him three or
four times a week for several years. Gault had never noticed any
change or alteration in the Italian’s mustache, but under Katzmann’s
cross-examination he admitted that he had not paid any particular
attention to it. Officer Joseph Schilling had seen Vanzetti off and
on several times a week in the months before his arrest, and his
mustache had always looked the same. It might not have been the same,
Schilling admitted, but he had never noticed any difference.
Cross-examining Vernazano, Katzmann asked him if he knew William
Douglass, the proprietor of the Samoset House, and if the man had
a mustache. The barber said he knew Douglass by sight and that he
had a small light mustache. Katzmann then produced the clean-shaven
Douglass on the stand to say that he had never had a mustache.
On this inconclusive note the defense ended its case on Monday
morning, July 1. Judge Thayer, in a short, conventional charge to
the jury, instructed them that no inference should be drawn against
the defense witnesses because they were Italians. However, in spite
of the judge’s words, the Italians’ embarrassment as they spoke
through their interpreter undoubtedly made the Anglo-Saxon jury feel
that—in Vanzetti’s later words—“all the wops stick together.” If
the headmaster of the Plymouth High School or the wife of the local
Congregational minister had testified to buying fish from Vanzetti
on the morning of December 24, that would have been as good as a
directed verdict. But these swarthy aliens were suspect.
The jury retired at 10:15. Henry Burgess, the foreman, was curious
about what was inside the shotgun shells and just before lunch
he opened two of them. They were loaded, not with birdshot, but
buckshot. Simon Sullivan and several of the other jurors took a few
of the pellets as souvenirs.
After the lunch recess the jury resumed deliberation. At 4:18 it
brought in its verdict, finding Vanzetti guilty of assault with
intent to rob and guilty on three counts of assault with intent to
murder. As the foreman pronounced the word “guilty,” a protesting
wail broke out from the thickset peasant women in the back of the
courtroom. Vanzetti remained calm. “_Coraggio!_” he called out to
them as he was led away.
The echo of Vanzetti’s voice subsided into the dusty calm of legal
decorum. Vanzetti’s friends moved toward the exits, looking back
now and then at the men filing out of the jury box. Judge Thayer,
after Vahey and Graham had stepped forward to consult with him,
extended the time for filing exceptions to August 18 and set bail at
twenty-five thousand dollars.
Several days later Juror Sullivan happened to run into Judge Thayer
in a Brockton store and mention that he and a couple of others had
taken away some of the buckshot. Judge Thayer ordered him to see
that all of it was at once returned to the district attorney. The
chastened Sullivan brought the pellets back, and Katzmann warned him
not to say anything more about the matter.
On August 16 Vahey filed a bill of exceptions in which he requested
that the shotgun-shell evidence and the testimony of Simon and Ruth
Johnson be excluded. The exceptions were not allowed, and Vahey
did not carry the matter further. On that same morning, in the
almost-deserted courtroom, Vanzetti appeared for sentencing. He stood
in the dock, an alien, slightly bent figure, flanked by his guards,
with high forehead and high cheekbones and flowing mustache. The heat
of the day had not yet set in, and the oval windows were open. If the
prisoner had glanced to his left he could have looked down Brewster
Street to the blue line of Plymouth Harbor. Instead, he stared ahead
at Judge Thayer sitting on the dais beneath the Plymouth seal, and
the judge stared back from the mask of his withered face.
Then Judge Thayer began to pronounce sentence in his precise
dessicated voice, the phrases falling like a curtain: “The Court
having considered the offense whereof the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti
is convict does order and adjudge that the said Bartolomeo Vanzetti
suffer imprisonment for a term of not less than twelve years nor
more than fifteen years, one day thereof solitary imprisonment and
the residue of said term confinement to hard labor, in and within
the limits of our State Prison situate in Boston in our County of
Suffolk.”
FOOTNOTES:
[4] The preliminary hearing on his participation in the South
Braintree murders followed on May 26 before Judge Avery in the
Quincy District Court. Sacco, against whom the evidence seemed more
substantial, had appeared in the Quincy Court on May 8.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE YEAR BETWEEN
A few days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti their typesetter
friend Aldino Felicani organized a defense committee among the East
Boston anarchists. The seventeen members were skilled workers—one was
a building contractor—but they were men detached from American life,
distrustful of outsiders. The freeing of their comrades from the
ominous charge hanging over them was, they felt, their affair. Their
first pamphlet, published in Italian, appealed to “Men of Good Will.”
_Two of our active good friends and comrades ... have become involved
in one of those tragic, dark legal plots in which innocence has all
the semblance of guilt, and honesty has the hypocritical mask put on
by the subtlest of rogues.... In a country where subversive ideas
are persecuted with Inquisitorial fury, anarchists are beyond the
pale.... We are convinced that an attempt is being made, through the
persons of Sacco and Vanzetti, to strike at all subversive elements
and their libertarian ideas. A sentence ... would serve, in the
hands of our enemies, to show that lovers of liberty are common
criminals and that their ideas are not entitled to any of the civil
freedoms.... We face a severe, a terrible test._
Energetically the committee raised a defense fund from the nickels
and dimes and quarters of their countrymen in the crowded streets of
the North End and East Boston. It was the committee that hired Graham
as counsel, counting on his American skill to mediate between the
two Italians and the complexities of Massachusetts justice. For the
committee, the result of the Plymouth trial was a disaster.
In New York, Carlo Tresca and his fellow anarchists were appalled
by the verdict. Tresca sent Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, with whom he
had been living since he met her in a 1912 May Day parade, to talk
matters over with Felicani. “Gurley,” the founder and secretary of
the Workers’ Defense Union, was bound for Boston in any case, to see
what could be done for the aliens imprisoned on Deer Island as a
result of the Palmer raids. With Mrs. Marion Emerson, secretary of a
workers’ defense organization in Boston, she made her way through the
twisting streets of the North End to the offices of _La Notizia_, and
there, under the shadow of the Old North Church spire, they talked
with the tall, indignant Felicani, who at that time could speak only
through an interpreter. So it was that Gurley and Mrs. Emerson on a
July afternoon in 1920 were the first non-Italian sympathizers to
hear the story of Sacco and Vanzetti. Later Felicani took them to see
the other now thoroughly worried members of the committee, who asked
them to try to arrange English-speaking protest meetings and to help
find a lawyer who would understand the defendants’ radical viewpoint.
Returning to New York, Gurley hired the Forward Hall on East Broadway
for a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting. She, the president of the
Free Speech League, and the veteran anarchist Harry Kelly, were the
speakers. So few people showed up that the caretaker of the hall
insisted on immediate payment. “You’ll never get it in a collection,”
he explained. Shortly afterward Mrs. Emerson organized a similarly
uneventful meeting in the rickety Grand Opera House in Boston’s South
End.
It was through Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, both of whom had
known him and worked with him over the years, that Fred Moore now
entered the case. It was a fateful entry. At this point, while Sacco
and Vanzetti were still inconspicuous foreigners whose names meant
nothing, a capable conservative lawyer like their later counsel
William Thompson might have secured their acquittal. Moore, the
radical labor lawyer, was to make them internationally famous, to
link their names indissolubly, but he may well have signed their
death warrants in the process.
Tresca had met Moore eight years earlier during the Lawrence Textile
Strike of 1912 and the murder trial that was its by-product.
Lawrence, Massachusetts, an industrial city of unrelieved drabness on
the banks of the Merrimack, was in 1912 a polyglot company town owned
by the Lawrences and the Lowells, and worked by Italians, Germans,
French-Canadians, Poles, Lithuanians, Belgians, and Syrians, with a
scattering of Russians, Jews, and Greeks. When the Massachusetts
legislature in its 1911 autumn session reduced the work week from
fifty-six to fifty-four hours, the Lawrence textile mills countered
by reducing wages correspondingly. Weekly pay then averaged $8.76 a
week for adults, $5 or less for the many child workers.
The calculated meanness of the reduction, amounting only to about
twenty-five cents, so infuriated the workers that on January 12,
1912, they spontaneously downed tools, in some cases smashing the
looms. There followed a bitter struggle that brought twenty-three
thousand workers onto the streets. After a number of riots between
strikers and police, Governor Eugene Foss called out the militia.
The strike was taken over and managed by the I.W.W. with anarchist
assistance. From New York came Joe Ettor of the I.W.W. executive
board, and Arturo Giovannitti. Ettor was an organizer, Giovannitti
a persuasive speaker who kept up the strikers’ courage through the
bitter winter. In finally winning the strike the I.W.W. reached the
peak of its influence in the East.
One afternoon while police and militia were charging a picket line,
a girl worker, Annie Lopizza, was shot dead. No one knew who fired
the shot, but the police at once arrested “the troublemakers” Ettor
and Giovannitti as accessories to murder. They were held without bail
until the end of the strike.
With the leaders in jail the I.W.W.’s Big Bill Haywood, the one-eyed
giant who was already almost a legend, came to Lawrence and took
command. With him he brought Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. By the time
of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial she had become enormously fat, but in
1912 she was a slim young firebrand with flashing blue eyes and a
lacerating tongue. Theodore Dreiser had called her the East Side Joan
of Arc. An Ettor-Giovannitti Defense Committee was at once formed,
and Haywood had Fred Moore brought on from California. The strategy
of the committee was to have the indefatigable and ingenious Moore
help in selecting the witnesses and collecting evidence but to have
the case tried by a well-known local conservative. James Sisk, a
staid Lynn lawyer, was chosen to represent Ettor and Giovannitti in
court.
The results of this strategy were highly successful. In spite of the
pressure of moneyed opinion against them, Ettor and Giovannitti,
appearing before the Irish-Catholic Judge Joseph Quinn and a
native-American jury, were acquitted.
It was this pattern that Tresca had in mind when he sent Moore to
Boston in the fall of 1920. Moore was again to be the assiduous and
inspired fact-gatherer. He would again prepare the brief and then
some irreproachable Massachusetts lawyer would try the case. Such,
too, was the intention of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee when
it accepted Moore. It was not Moore’s intention at all.
Moore, then in his late thirties, was the barrister bohemian in
looks, dress, and manner. His long hair seemed to flow back from
his forehead, he often wore sandals, and the broad-brimmed Western
hat he brought with him from California became almost his trademark
in Boston. He had started out as a railroad attorney in Seattle,
then moved on to Los Angeles where for a time he seemed a brilliant
young corporation lawyer on the way up. But money and an established
bourgeois existence meant nothing to him. When a casual I.W.W.
acquaintance arrested in a free-speech fight in San Diego telephoned
him for help, Moore picked up his broad-brimmed hat and a revolver,
told his associates he would be back shortly, and walked out of the
promise of his law career. After that he went wherever his underdog
interests took him. He became a labor defense expert, particularly
devoted to serving the I.W.W., drifting from one labor fight to
another, taking on the hopeless, desperate cases that could not
afford better-known lawyers.
When he ran into Tresca in New York in the summer of 1920, he had
just come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had defended “Big Boy”
Krieger, an I.W.W. organizer charged with dynamiting the house of a
Standard Oil official. The charge was a frame-up, a fact cheerfully
accepted by the townspeople, the prosecution, the defense, the
judge, and the jury. Fortunately for Moore, one of the jurymen with
a personal grudge against Standard Oil held out for acquittal. In a
second trial the fraud was too apparent and Krieger was freed.
As Moore headed for Boston he was certain it would be a similar
story with Sacco and Vanzetti, and the more he reflected on the
ramifications of the South Braintree crime the more convinced he
became that this backwater New England affair could be his big case,
the culmination of his career.
Eugene Lyons, the young left-wing labor journalist who had been with
Moore in Oklahoma and who later followed him to Massachusetts to work
for the Defense Committee, was awed by the lawyer’s dexterity. Moore,
he wrote long afterward,
_was at heart an artist. Instinctively he recognized the materials
of a world issue in what appeared to others a routine matter. A
socialist newspaperman spent a few days in Boston and returned to
New York to report that “there’s no story in it ... just a couple
of wops in a jam.” Not one of the members of the defense committee
formed immediately after the men’s arrest suspected that the affair
was anything larger than it seemed. When the case grew into a
historical tussle, these men were utterly bewildered. But Moore saw
its magnitude from the first. His legal tactics have been the subject
of dispute and recrimination. I think that there is some color of
truth, indeed, to the charge that he sometimes subordinated the
literal needs of legalistic procedure to the larger needs of the case
as a symbol of the class struggle. If he had not done so, Sacco and
Vanzetti would have died six years earlier, without the solace of
martyrdom._
_With the deliberation of a composer evolving the details of a
symphony which he senses in its rounded entirety, Moore proceeded to
clarify and deepen the elements implicit in the case._
Arriving in Boston, Moore installed himself at 5 Rollins Place, a
small four-story brick house in a cul-de-sac of Beacon Hill in that
no-man’s land where proper Boston tapers off into the improper. The
house, masked by a wooden porch with Greek-revival columns, and the
brick-paved roadway, too narrow for any vehicle, seemed to suggest
that whoever might live there would be gone tomorrow, a feeling that
harmonized with Moore’s personality. Shortly after moving in, Moore
married Lola Darroch, the handsome young woman who had been with him
during the Krieger trial. Their marriage lasted officially a little
over a year, though unofficially it was concluded much sooner when
Lola was supplanted by a Lithuanian stenographer. In the environment
this seemed rational enough. Wherever Moore went in his travels he
pursued his weakness, which he considered a need, for pretty young
women.
Five Rollins Place was a catchall: a home for Moore and his assorted
associates, an informal office, a dormitory for out-of-town
enthusiasts, Italian and otherwise, a lodging house for prospective
witnesses and intellectuals and freshly minted college girls heavy
with purpose. There were nights of talk and more talk, of makeshift
Prohibition drinking, of song and vacillating affections. Eugene
Lyons, an almost daily visitor, later wrote that:
_Commonplace stenographers accidentally drawn into this tense
atmosphere developed into flaming radicals. Roughneck detectives
sprouted a social conscience. Cautious A.F. of L. officials hobnobbed
with foreign firebrands. A milk-white, golden-haired little poetess
swept like a tornado through the defense group, working havoc
among the harassed men and spreading despair among their wives and
sweethearts; she dominated the lives of a writer, a strike leader,
a lawyer and a Boston newspaperman in quick succession, with
forays into the domestic preserves of half a dozen others, while
composing soulful verses in defense of the accused Italians. A gawky,
half-savage boy lured from the Maine woods to plead with his mother,
a crucial identification witness, to retract her perjured testimony,
had to be forced, literally, to take a bath; soon he blossomed into
a spic-and-span U.S. Marine. One of the closest comrades and most
ardent defenders of Sacco fell hopelessly in love with Sacco’s wife
(he married her after Sacco’s execution). Within the larger drama
of the case, there developed complicated cycles of lesser dramas of
private emotion._
Before going to Boston, Lyons had gone to Italy in pursuit of
revolutions. Moore wrote him there, persuading him to create
propaganda for the case and to interview potential witnesses. In that
convulsive period of red-flagged cities and rising Fascism the arrest
of two Italians in a New England mill town was a small enough pebble
on an eroding beach, but Lyons—through Sacco’s brother Sabino, now
the mayor of Torremaggiore—managed to get Leon Mucci to bring the
Sacco-Vanzetti affair to the floor of the Italian Chamber of Deputies
for its initial foreign mention.[5]
Coacci, Lyons found in a sleepy village in the Marchesan hills,
posing grandly as an international revolutionary:
_His shelves were lined with brochures on the home manufacture of
bombs and he professed himself a terrorist of the Galleani school. So
deep, however, had the fear of American law and the police entered
his heart that it needed a week of pleading and threatening and
pressure by Merlino, the grand old man of the anarcho-syndicalist
movement, to bring this terrorist to the point of signing an
innocuous affidavit in support of Sacco’s alibi._
Sacco and Vanzetti were to typify a cause, Moore explained to a
friend, adding, “In saving them we strengthen our muscles, develop
our forces preparatory to the day when we save ourselves.” The more
extreme anarchists of the Defense Committee were critical of such an
attitude, feeling that Moore was more interested in building up the
biggest labor case in history than in the fate of the men involved.
This, too, was Rosina Sacco’s feeling from the first time she met
Moore. Not interested in issues, she merely wanted her Nick back to
resume their old family life, to see the new baby Ines, born four
months after his arrest. Instinctively she distrusted the sparkle of
the bohemian lawyer.
Moore’s initial objective was to expand the case beyond the parochial
limits of Norfolk County. With this in mind he worked up a number of
sensational appeals, following the pattern customary both in American
criminal cases and in charity drives. He wrote, he telegraphed, he
traveled, he sent out assistants, volunteers, anyone whom he could
persuade to lend a hand. His salary ($150 a week) never seemed to
cover his expenses. He was lawyer, detective, fund-raiser, and
propagandist combined. At their annual conventions the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers and the American Federation of Teamsters found
themselves demanding the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, although few
of the delegates had ever heard their names before some official
friendly to Moore introduced the resolution. If Moore sent word that
there was a frame-up in the offing, his word was enough for the
central labor unions in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Worcester, Seattle,
and Salem, just as it was for the United Mine Workers, the Minnesota
State Federation of Labor, and dozens of other organizations Moore
had known or assisted. Although their resolutions may have been
quickly presented and quickly put aside, their effect was to be
cumulative.
By the end of 1920 there were stirrings across the country, and
echoes from overseas. To anyone with as sensitive an ear as Moore’s
they were a promise of what was to come.
Moore’s temporary office in the Olympian Building at 3 Tremont Row,
echoing with talk and typewriters and shuffling feet, was like a
bus terminal in its comings and goings. In one corner the blond
Lithuanian stenographer hammered away at the keys. Opposite her
John Nicholas Beffel, a free-lance socialist journalist from New
York, sat chain-smoking and preparing press releases in English.
Art Shields, sent on by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, assisted him. Frank
Lopez, a young Spanish anarchist, a cabinetmaker by trade, preserved
somehow by Moore from a deportation order, got out propaganda for the
Spanish-speaking world. Felicani and the committee, from an upstairs
room on Battery Street, took care of the Italian publicity.
Only gradually did Moore bridge the gap between the Italian
anarchists and the indigenous Boston liberals. When he approached
John Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee, Codman
asked for satisfactory proof that Sacco and Vanzetti would not be
given an impartial trial. He had served recently on a jury in Dedham
and said he had been impressed by District Attorney Katzmann’s
ability and fairness. Moore eventually managed to convince Codman
to the extent that in February 1921 the Civil Liberties Committee
contributed five hundred dollars to the Defense Committee. Later in
the year it published its own pamphlet: “Sacco and Vanzetti: Shall
There be a Mooney Frame-up in New England?”
Through the Civil Liberties Committee link a number of elderly
Boston women of assured position and belligerent good works began
their participation in the case. In the social-worker tradition of
Elizabeth Peabody, with the inherited wealth to be cultured as Boston
understood the word, they functioned as nonconformists within the
Back Bay circle of conformity. The most conspicuous and determined of
these was Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a pacifist and campaigner for
women’s suffrage. Level-headed and charming, she avoided the crackpot
label so easily attached to middle-aged female reformers. Hundreds of
prisoners in Massachusetts jails were indebted to her often-anonymous
kindness. Dozens owed their freedom to her. She had married a
promising young lawyer, a friend and classmate of Louis Brandeis
at the Harvard Law School, who died a few years after graduating.
During the whole period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case she lived in the
Brandeis household, where the children called her Auntie Bee. When
Eugene Lyons and his young wife first came to Boston, Mrs. Evans
furnished their apartment for them simply by opening the cellar where
Justice Brandeis had stored some of his furniture. She seemed to know
everyone, not only in Boston but throughout the country, and she had
the key to people as well as buildings. When she was drawn into the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, she saw it as just one more worthy cause, but as
the months passed she developed a preoccupying attachment for the two
men that would last through the years to their execution.
Moore soon brought the case to the attention of the American Civil
Liberties Union in New York, and the organization did much to
interest native Americans in the predicament of the two Italians. The
minutes of its meeting on November 22, 1920, read:
_Mary Heaton Vorse reported on the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, two
young Italian anarchists on trial in Boston for highway robbery
and murder, stating that they had been indicted on questionable
circumstances and because of their activity on behalf of Andrea
Salsedo, a political prisoner who committed suicide by throwing
himself from the Park Row Building, New York, while being held for
deportation. It was agreed that the Union should do everything
possible to secure publicity for this case._
Mary Heaton Vorse was a writer with one foot in Greenwich Village and
the other in the radical labor movement, the prototype of a number
of women who would eventually become concerned in the Sacco-Vanzetti
case. Brought up in the cultivated restriction of Emily Dickinson’s
Amherst, educated abroad, her experiences in the 1912 Lawrence
strike turned her sympathies and her writings to the workers and the
dispossessed. One can trace her career by the titles of her many
books, from _The Breaking in of a Yachtsman’s Wife_ to _Strike—A
Novel of Gastonia_.
After Tresca told her of Sacco and Vanzetti, calling their case a
frame-up as bad as the Mooney case, Mrs. Vorse went to Dedham to
visit Sacco. In the outline of the case she wrote for Norman Thomas’
magazine, _The World Tomorrow_, she described Sacco in his gray
prison trousers and striped blue cotton shirt as
_a little fellow so life-loving that even six months of inaction in
jail had not effaced his vividness. Short, clean-cut as a Roman coin,
eyes that looked at you straight, and above all a friendly way with
him almost like that of a child who had never known anything but
affection. There was something about Sacco that made you think of
swift happy things—a jumping fish, a bird on the wing._
She concluded with a paraphrase of Moore:
_Active labor men have all the dice loaded against them. All labor
is on trial with Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. It is bound
up with all the fight that is going on for the closed shop and the
determinations of the employers to smash the worker’s organizations._
The _New Republic_ in its December 29 issue carried John Beffel’s
article, “Eels and the Electric Chair.” This account of the Plymouth
trial asked for a reversal of Vanzetti’s conviction lest there be
“another conviction which will send him through a little green door
into a wired chamber of death.”
Thus, by the New Year, with the trial scheduled to begin in Dedham
on March 7, 1921, one of the left-liberal magazines most widely
circulated among the intelligentsia of the United States had made
the names of Sacco and Vanzetti at least fleetingly familiar to its
readers. Moore’s case was beginning to gather momentum. Art Shields’
pamphlet “Are They Doomed? The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and the Grim
Forces Behind It” (actually, Beffel wrote most of it) appeared early
in the year as the first general statement of the defense position.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s Workers’ Defense Union distributed fifty
thousand copies before the trial. The cover had a sensational drawing
by Robert Minor showing Salsedo hurtling from a skyscraper window.
Shields described the Brockton arrest as a frame-up from beginning to
end, the murder charge against the two men “a mere device to get them
out of the way,” and stated that they were practically the last of
the Italian radicals in New England who had not already been jailed
or deported.[6]
The New York office of the Workers’ Defense Union sent out weekly
Sacco-Vanzetti releases, most of them written by Beffel, to more than
five hundred papers. Gurley Flynn went on a speaking tour, explaining
the case to college liberal clubs, including those at Pennsylvania
and Harvard, as well as to the captive audience of Mrs. Evans’ League
for Democratic Control.
* * * * *
After his sentencing at Plymouth, Vanzetti was taken to the
Charlestown State Prison, across the river from Boston. That granite
fortress, built in 1820, was surrounded by a disintegrating brick
slum fouled with the smoke of the Everett chemical plants.
On his arrival Vanzetti went through the usual routine. He was
questioned in the interview cell, then given a shower and issued
prison clothes, a blanket roll, an enamel slop bucket and a smaller
wooden bucket for drinking water, and locked in his cell. Within a
few days he was assigned to the shop making auto-license plates, one
of the few production tasks allowed convict labor.
The machinery of the law continued to function with bureaucratic
regularity. Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted on September 11, 1920,
charged with the murder of Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick A.
Parmenter. Five days afterward a bomb explosion seared New York’s
Wall Street, killing thirty persons. The crime, never solved, was
generally believed to be the work of anarchists. On September 28
Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned. They pleaded not guilty.
Sacco, as a prisoner still awaiting trial, remained in the Dedham
county jail where he had been taken after his preliminary hearing.
Unlike the overcrowded Charlestown fortress, the Dedham jail, located
on a rural side street, was a relatively pleasant place with fewer
than seventy prisoners, most of whom the warden knew by their first
name. It was like a well-kept ship, the walls and floors bright
with paint, brass shining. The reception room, with its oak benches
and bookcases, gave the fugitive impression of a library. There,
prisoners could visit with friends and relatives without a guard
being present.
What was hardest for Sacco to endure was the idleness. From the
time the sun rose until it set, there was a gap of hours marked
only by meals and the swing of the shadow from east to west across
the recreation-room floor. Except for the few trusties who stoked
the boilers or worked in the tailor shop or the laundry or did the
cooking, there was no way to kill time except by talking or playing
cards.
Inactivity and restraint chafed Sacco’s spirit. He missed his wife
and son; the baby he had never seen he could not get out of his mind.
To this man of abundant energy, for whom the day had never been long
enough, the tedium of empty hours became a frenzy of frustration.
Yet in this early period he never seemed to doubt that he would be
eventually set free.
Sacco and Vanzetti saw each other seldom during the seven years of
their imprisonment. Except for the six weeks of the trial and the
final period in the death house, they would meet only briefly when
some new motion or empty formality brought them into court. Sometimes
they would not meet for a year.
Although the interest aroused by the case was still spotty, there was
more awareness of the coming trial outside Massachusetts than there
was within the state. In Norfolk County it was more or less taken for
granted that the suspects were guilty. The Braintree _Observer_ of
May 8, 1920, had announced that the two South Braintree “yeggs” had
been positively identified. It said nothing more about the case till
the trial began.
By the time the Thayer Academy boys in their black-and-orange jerseys
were holding their autumn football practice behind the Braintree
town hall the April robbery was no longer a matter of general
conversation. However, Shelley Neal still thought of it each time
the payroll came in, delivered now by armed guards, and the girls in
the Slater & Morrill offices still liked to gossip about it during
the lunch hour.
Two days after the Plymouth trial ended, Katzmann appointed
Chief Stewart his official investigator. Stewart’s friend Alfred
Brouillard, on leave from the State Police, was made his assistant.
Proud of his new status and glad to resign his Bridgewater job,
Stewart did most of his sleuthing under the direction of the
Assistant District Attorney, Harold Williams. From Katzmann the chief
received the four shotgun-shell exhibits of the Plymouth trial. Now,
the district attorney told him, it was up to him to dig up the right
kind of witnesses. Stewart had little to go on at first. As a starter
he went to the Boston Public Library and read the accounts of the
South Braintree crime in the back numbers of all the Boston papers,
copying down the names of persons mentioned. He and Brouillard were
on their own. Chief Gallivan was no help at all. Stewart usually
found him sitting on the Braintree town-hall steps with a quid in his
cheek.
Not until the new year was the approaching trial mentioned again in
the Boston papers. Then a Dedham court interpreter, Angelina DeFalco,
spread it briefly across the front pages after Moore had her arrested.
The affair had its origins just before the New Year, when Felicani
received a telephone call from Beniamino Cicchetti of Providence,
Rhode Island, who introduced himself as a “compatriot of ideas” and
said that he had an important letter concerning Sacco and Vanzetti.
He agreed to meet Felicani at the Defense Committee headquarters on
Sunday morning, January 2.
Like Govoni in Plymouth, Cicchetti was a fixer who followed his
special line in the Italian Federal Hill section of Providence,
arranging bail and, on a percentage basis, collecting defense funds.
For Italians who had run afoul of the law he was useful, almost
necessary, to know. An oily, persuasive man, he bustled into the
Battery Street office and assured Felicani he knew a woman who
could do a great deal for Sacco and Vanzetti. When Felicani showed
interest, he bustled out again and returned almost at once with a
dumpy nearsighted woman in her early twenties whom he introduced as
Mrs. DeFalco.
She explained that she had come from the Dedham court, and that
if the Defense Committee would put up a sufficient sum she could
guarantee Sacco’s freedom. Felicani asked her how it could be done.
“Oh,” she told him, “we have a little society of our own, Fred
Katzmann, Mr. Squires, and Percy Katzmann.”[7] When Felicani asked
about Vanzetti she said that was something else again, and that she
would have to consult Fred. She then tried unsuccessfully to reach
the district attorney by telephone. Felicani did not say much. He
told her he would have to consult with the rest of the Defense
Committee, and she agreed to meet him next day, suggesting at the
same time that he bring along five hundred dollars as a deposit.
They met the following morning with Professor Guadagni in a coffee
house in North Square. Mrs. DeFalco told them that fifty thousand
dollars would be needed to take care of everything. First of all, she
said, the committee must appoint Squires and Percy Katzmann counsel
for Sacco and Vanzetti. Money spent on other lawyers would be wasted.
When they had paid the fifty thousand dollars, Percy would take
charge of the defense. Fred would not prosecute, but the case would
be given to Harold Williams or one of the other assistant district
attorneys. Guadagni said the committee could not collect so much
money quickly, and suggested that Mrs. DeFalco take ten thousand
dollars and get the case postponed until September. She said she
would see what she could do, and Felicani and Guadagni agreed to meet
with her again.
During the week various members of the committee met almost daily
with Mrs. DeFalco, though as yet she was paid no money. She made an
appointment with Felicani and Guadagni for Friday at the defense
headquarters. Following Moore’s advice, Felicani concealed a
microphone in the room so that a public stenographer in the basement
could take down the conversation in shorthand.
Mrs. DeFalco said she had come to complete arrangements with them,
that Fred Katzmann and Squires had assured her of the freedom of the
two men, but that by Monday the committee must pay fifteen thousand
dollars. The money was to be paid to Squires or Percy Katzmann and
all the committee’s evidence was to be turned over to the latter.
After the payment there would be a mock trial with the jury made up
so that the foreman would be a member of the county ring. She told
them it was a simple matter to fix a jury.
When Guadagni objected that fifteen thousand was still too much,
Mrs. DeFalco telephoned the Dedham courthouse and after talking
briefly with someone not identified, told them that five thousand
would be enough for a start; they would also reduce the remainder to
thirty-five thousand, which had to be paid as soon as the trial was
postponed. She said she had arranged to have the lawyers meet the
committee members at her house that evening. Felicani and Guadagni
agreed to drive out.
They left Boston about eight o’clock. When they reached the back
street in East Dedham where the DeFalcos lived, they hesitated. The
small square house was brightly lit and two cars were parked in front
of it. Felicani and Guadagni decided not to go in. Before leaving,
they copied down the license numbers of the cars. One turned out to
be Squires’, the other Fred Katzmann’s.
The members of the committee were inclined to pay the money. Not so
Moore. Suspecting that the defense might be charged with trying to
bribe public officials, he—over Felicani’s protest—had Cicchetti and
Mrs. DeFalco arrested. Cicchetti was released but Mrs. DeFalco was
held on the technical charge of attempting to solicit law business,
not being an attorney. As no money had changed hands this was all she
could be charged with.
On the stand in the Boston municipal court she gave a rambling
account of how Cicchetti, a brother-in-law of her brother, had asked
her if she could help him see his friend Sacco. He had also asked
if she and her brother would go to Boston with him to see Felicani
about getting a Norfolk County lawyer to defend Sacco and Vanzetti.
She admitted that she had had talks with members of the Defense
Committee. One morning she had met Guadagni, who introduced himself
as Mr. Giovannitti of New York. He had told her the committee had a
lawyer, Moore, whom they were paying three hundred dollars a week
although he was not doing much. When Felicani had asked her what
lawyer she would recommend she had named Squires, whom she knew
because her husband was his gardener. She had arranged a meeting for
them with Squires at her home, but Felicani and Guadagni had never
showed up.
District Attorney Katzmann then took the stand to deny that he knew
Mrs. DeFalco. He had never even heard of her until her arrest. Percy
Katzmann said he had known her for about seven years and had employed
her as an interpreter in his Italian cases. Mrs. DeFalco had asked
him several times if he would take on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and
though he first told her he would not, out of friendship for her he
had agreed to meet Felicani and Guadagni at her house.
Inspector Flaherty, who had arrested Mrs. DeFalco, testified she
had said then she would “fix those anarchists.” She was found not
guilty. Judge Murray called her conduct “imprudent, unwise, but not
criminal.”[8]
Whatever Mrs. DeFalco had been up to, the episode and the standing of
the men involved gave the Greater Boston community its first inkling
of the enlarged dimensions of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore’s
propaganda efforts were getting not only action but reaction.
Even before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, their names were in
the files of the Department of Justice. After the Plymouth trial the
Boston office began to take a more active interest in them. Agents
were assigned to attend the various Sacco-Vanzetti defense meetings.
One of them, Harold Zorian, even managed to become a collector for
the Defense Committee, although, as he admitted afterward, he kept
most of the money for himself.
William J. West, the agent in charge of the Boston office’s Radical
Division, furnished memoranda regularly to District Attorney Katzmann
about Sacco and Vanzetti’s anarchist activities. As Fred Weyand, one
of the Department’s Boston agents explained it:
_The understanding in this case between the agents of the Department
of Justice in Boston and the District Attorney followed the usual
custom, that the Department of Justice would help the District
Attorney to secure a conviction, and that he in turn would help the
agents of the Department of Justice to secure information that they
might desire._
Weyland, West, and other agents attended the Dedham trial in the
expectation of finding sufficient evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti
to deport them as anarchists in case they were acquitted of murder.
In the autumn of 1920, either West or Katzmann conceived the idea
of planting an informer in the cell next to Sacco. West hoped to
find out something about the Wall Street bomb explosion of September
16. Although all the clues in that bombing had come to nothing, the
Justice Department held to its theory that the explosion was the
work of anarchists. West and Katzmann talked the matter over with
Feri Felix Weiss, formerly one of West’s agents. Weiss operated his
own “Scientific-Secret-Service,” but still did occasional work for
the Department’s Bureau of Investigation. He sent a letter to an
informer, John Ruzzamenti, in Reddington, Pennsylvania, asking if he
would be willing to help in getting evidence against two probable
criminals. He might have to stay in jail for a few days, but success
in this job might lead to bigger investigations, like the Wall Street
explosion, with juicier expense accounts. The eager Ruzzamenti
arrived on Weiss’s doorstep two days after Christmas.
Katzmann, on meeting Ruzzamenti in his courthouse office, appeared
bluffly cordial, helping him off with his overcoat and calling him
John. He then explained his plan. Ruzzamenti would be arrested with
burglar tools in the act of breaking into a house. The sheriff would
see that he was placed in the cell adjoining Sacco’s. Ruzzamenti
would act depressed for the first few days and say nothing, then try
to strike up a conversation.
Ruzzamenti objected to being tagged with a police record and when
Katzmann could not change his mind, he suggested that Ruzzamenti
go to Stoughton and see what he could ferret out there. They would
arrange that he got some sort of job in the town, perhaps in a shoe
factory. As an Italian he might even manage to rent a room from
Rosina Sacco. Katzmann said he had reports that she was in an upset
state. It should be easy to establish friendly relations with her.
To this proposal Ruzzamenti agreed. Whether or not Katzmann was
serious about it or was just thinking aloud, he soon afterward
dropped the idea as well as any connection with Ruzzamenti. He and
West and Weiss managed to place a more amenable informer near Sacco.
The man, Antony Carbone, spent several days in the jail and managed
to talk with Sacco at intervals but could find out nothing.
The guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti in regard to the South
Braintree murders was of no direct concern to the Department of
Justice. Most of the Boston agents who knew anything about the case
felt that Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty. This was the opinion of
Fred Weyand, who later deposed:
_From my investigation, combined with the investigation made by
the other agents of the Department in Boston, I am convinced not
only that these men had violated the Selective Service rules and
regulations and evaded the draft, but that they were anarchists,
and that they ought to have been deported. By calling these men
anarchists, I do not mean necessarily that they were inclined
to violence, nor do I understand all the different meanings that
different people would attach to the word “anarchist.” What I mean
is that I think they did not believe in organized government or in
private property. But I am also thoroughly convinced, and always
have been, and I believe that it is and always has been the opinion
of such Boston agents of the Department of Justice as had any
knowledge on the subject, that these men had nothing whatever to do
with the South Braintree murders, and that their conviction was the
result of cooperation between the Boston agents of the Department
of Justice and the District Attorney. It was the general opinion of
the Boston agents of the Department of Justice having knowledge of
the affair that the South Braintree crime was committed by a gang of
professional highwaymen._
Six months before the trial Moore was reiterating the claim,
sensationally and vociferously, that Sacco and Vanzetti would not
and could not get a fair hearing in the biased atmosphere of Norfolk
County. In his experience rigged trials were common enough, but
beyond this it was part of his tactics to claim unfairness in advance.
Many earnest defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti have maintained, as did
Moore, that in the postwar period of xenophobia no alien holding
extreme political beliefs could possibly have found justice in
conservative Dedham at the hands of a local jury. As early as January
1921, a Defense Committee pamphlet claimed that “a Northern jury
does not examine the law and the evidence impartially when a murder
accusation is leveled against a member of the Mediterranean race
whose reputation is colored with the fanciful versions of the Mafia
that furnished Sunday-Magazine readers mental diet for so many years.”
Yet, in contrast to these a priori beliefs, a case tried in Dedham in
April 1920 demonstrated that the citizens of Norfolk had lost neither
their sense of justice nor their common sense. The very week Attorney
General Palmer was curling the hair of the credulous by announcing
that on May Day the Reds planned to make the national capital “the
scene of the slaughter of high officials” an alien anarchist with the
outlandish name of Segris Zagroff was brought before Judge Thayer,
charged with advocating the overthrow of the government by violence.
Zagroff had been picked up in a foreign radical club in Norwood, the
walls of which were hung with pictures of the new Bolshevik Russian
leaders. He freely and volubly admitted to the police that he was
an anarchist and that he did not approve of the American form of
government. In spite of his statements the Dedham jury freed him.
Judge Thayer was vibrant with anger at the verdict. “Mr. Foreman,” he
asked testily, “did you take into consideration the testimony that
was given us here by the police officers that the defendant told them
he believed in the overthrow of the government? Didn’t you hear the
testimony to the effect that the defendant said in the presence of
witnesses and in the conversations he had with officers that he did
not like this form of government and that the only true government
was the kind run by workingmen? How did you arrive at the verdict
that you announce?”
Unintimidated, and with equal testiness, the foreman replied that
“the jurors disregarded the testimony of the officers after they
understood the definition of ‘advocating anarchy,’ as given by the
court, to be the act of a person who actually used violence in
bringing about his aims and not the advocacy of those aims when he
talked on the subject.”
Although this verdict showed that in Norfolk County ordinary men
could still think clearly and act justly, it also showed the bias
of Judge Thayer. Curiously enough, the prosecution of Zagroff was
conducted by Assistant District Attorney Kane, who would shortly
assist Katzmann in the prosecution of Vanzetti at Plymouth. Zagroff
was defended by Katzmann’s brother Percy.
In February, at Moore’s request, the trial was postponed from March
until May 31 so that he could secure an affidavit in Italy from
Giuseppe Adrower, a former consulate clerk who claimed to have
seen Sacco in Boston on the day of the crime. The ninety days that
followed were a period of rapid polarization. Moore, the artist, had
taken two aliens, neither of whom sympathized or cooperated with the
organized labor movement, and fashioned them into generic figures of
the workingman. He had made ringingly spectacular claims about the
fate of accused anarchists in Norfolk County, and now the community
responded by accepting his challenge. During Vanzetti’s first trial
there had been almost no mention of his social and political beliefs,
but long before anarchism became an issue in the Dedham court
everyone on the jury, in the courthouse, in the town was aware of
it. Moore’s class-angling in troubled waters had stirred the depths.
While no one can now say for certain that, solely in the light of
the evidence presented, Sacco and Vanzetti would have been acquitted
if they had been Elks or members of the American Legion, they would
certainly have had a much better chance.
It was Moore the artist who painted the affair in broad
expressionistic strokes, embellished it and retouched it, spread the
panoramic design on a world canvas. But for Moore there would have
been no case as it is today remembered, and the Dedham trial—whatever
its outcome—would have been as forgotten now as the then-sensational
Zimmerman trial.
By the time the formal preparations for the trial were being made,
Moore had created the situation he wanted. Nick and Bart, the two
Italians at first mentioned so casually, had become symbols of
man’s injustice to man. No one, whatever his views, could now take
the trial casually. If the Defense Committee members already saw
the shadow of injustice lying across the path of their imprisoned
comrades, the citizens of Dedham had a feeling of sinister forces
in the offing. Any morning the mannered inhabitants of the High
Street half expected to see the columns of the courthouse collapse
under a dynamite charge. Sedate Dedham beside its winding river
began to take on the aspect of a besieged town with the courthouse
a forward bastion. The blue-coated local police, out in force, were
augmented by a detachment of the recently formed paramilitary State
Constabulary. The tension was sharp as an east wind.
A week before the trial, Stewart interviewed George Kelley. Kelley
still considered himself a friend of Sacco’s and said so. The arrest
made no difference. He had visited Sacco in jail, and his wife had
stayed with Rosina during her confinement. Many a time before this
trouble the two men, next-door neighbors, had chatted together at the
end of a long summer evening as Sacco was coming in from his garden.
Kelley did not think much of Sacco’s socialist ideas and had warned
him about airing them too freely. But Sacco had just laughed, saying
that what was in the heart had to come out of the mouth.
Stewart asked Kelley if he could describe Sacco’s cap. Kelley said
all he could remember about it was that it was dark. Then Stewart
showed him a cap and asked if it was Sacco’s. It was the cap found
near Berardelli’s body. Kelley did not want to say. When Stewart
pressed him for a definite opinion, he still declined. “I have an
opinion about the cap,” he said finally, expressing the prevailing
Dedham atmosphere, “but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.”
* * * * *
Moore and the Defense Committee had had differing ideas about how
the defense should be managed. Local lawyers might be useful,
indeed necessary, but Moore wanted them subordinate, subject to his
direction. He was in no hurry. This was, after all, his case. Not
until May did he start looking for any legal assistance. On the
nineteenth he wrote to a friend:
_The defense committee has agreed to pay the McAnarney brothers who
are supposed to be the highest grade porch climbers in the business,
$10,000 for their professional ability. They don’t care how we get
the money. We don’t particularly care how they get results._
The McAnarneys, John, Thomas, and Jeremiah, had been practicing law
together thirty years in the tide-edged granite city of Quincy,
five miles south of Boston. John had been for thirteen years city
solicitor as well as president of the county bar association. Thomas
was associate justice of the district court. Jeremiah, the youngest,
was in general practice, and counsel for the Eastern Massachusetts
Street Railway. Second-generation Irish-Americans, piously Catholic,
conservative in attitudes and beliefs, they represented the middle
class that had moved away from the proletarian South Boston matrix
that had first sheltered the beaten immigrant survivors of the Famine
years. So far had the McAnarneys evolved in the more open environment
of Quincy that they had even become Republican—still an act of
apostasy in South Boston, if rewarding elsewhere. Thomas had been
appointed to the bench by Governor Calvin Coolidge.
John McAnarney was the head of the family, partly from being the
eldest but mostly because of his assimilated dignity. White-haired,
formal in speech and sedate in manner, he had in his late middle age
come to resemble the Yankee prototypes that the Irish were replacing.
He kept a second office in Boston where, as the years passed, he
spent the greater part of his time, concerning himself more with
banks and investments than actions and torts. He moved familiarly in
the Boston legal world that was so much a postgraduate extension of
the Harvard Law School; he numbered his acquaintances from the law
firms with the triple-barreled names; he became a recognized figure
on the well-beaten path from State Street through Pemberton Square to
the State House.
Thomas, the judge, was the family wit. Frail and in failing health,
his legal work off the bench had become nominal. Jerry was the trial
lawyer of the family. He was Jerry to everybody. The priest who
baptized him had been the last to call him Jeremiah. Unlike John, he
had not conformed to State Street, and his speech still bore traces
of the South Boston flats. Short, short-mustached, ruddy-faced, he
had a tendency to trip over his grammar if he became excited. When he
hurried down the street, as he always did, he seemed to do a little
clog dance. He had a habit of buttonholing people, in the literal
sense, emphasizing the point he was making with a jab of an index
finger toward his auditor’s chest. He also had the reputation of
winning his cases.
When Moore, prodded by the committee, finally decided to use local
reinforcement, he consulted James Sisk, with whom he had worked
on the Ettor-Giovannitti case in Lawrence. Sisk, who had since
been appointed to the superior court, recommended the McAnarney
combination. Moore went to John in his Boston office. McAnarney said
he no longer took court cases. His brother Jerry, he felt, would be
the one to deal with a case like this, with Tom perhaps helping out.
He would talk it over with them, but before doing so he wanted to
know more about the two Italians. Like everyone else, he had been
shocked by the South Braintree murders. Any man, it was true, was
entitled to a defense, but if Sacco and Vanzetti had been in any
way concerned with this crime his office wanted nothing to do with
keeping them from getting the punishment they deserved. Only if the
men were innocent would the McAnarneys consider taking part. Moore
was convincing.
The three McAnarneys drove over to Dedham and spent the better part
of an afternoon in the jail’s reception room talking with Sacco
and with his wife, who happened to be there on a visit. Sacco was
forthright. The McAnarneys felt satisfied with the answers they
received. After leaving the jail John McAnarney met Moore and the two
of them walked the back streets of Dedham for an hour, discussing
the matter. McAnarney said he had put Sacco through every test he
could think of and his answers—in fact everything about him—convinced
him that the man was innocent. His brothers felt the same way. His
office could work for Sacco’s acquittal with a clear conscience. The
McAnarneys would accept the brief.
* * * * *
The measure of Moore’s success in building up the Sacco-Vanzetti
case was sensed by the legal profession some time before the rest
of Massachusetts became aware of it. Judge Thayer, stimulated by
the prospect (and with a blindness to proprieties that would later
become increasingly apparent), wrote to his fellow Dartmouth alumnus,
Chief Justice John Aiken, requesting that he be appointed presiding
judge at the Dedham trial. Thayer apparently saw nothing improper
in the request. In fact he may well have visioned himself as a
judicial Peter plugging the American dike against the flooding seas
of radicalism. Years later at a Dartmouth reunion, he told a friend
that if he knew the Reds were outside the door and he could save his
country by walking through it to be shot down by them he would be
glad to sacrifice his life.
Apparently the impropriety of Thayer’s approach to the chief justice
was offset by their Dartmouth kinship. Aiken, too, must have been
sniffing the wind when he wrote in reply: “I am assigning you to hear
the most important murder case tried in Massachusetts since the last
century, if not in all time.”
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Like Sacco a native of Torremaggiore, Mucci had spent some
time in America and had been one of the defending counsel in the
Ettor-Giovannitti trial at Lawrence.
[6] Shields would end up a Communist. Minor, already one, visualized
even that early the propaganda possibilities in Sacco and Vanzetti.
He became a cartoonist for the _Daily Worker_ and later its editor.
By the time of the Bridgewater crime he had written a savage attack
on anarchism in which he defended the recent suppression of the
Russian anarchists by the Bolsheviks.
[7] Francis J. Squires was clerk of the district court in Dedham;
Percy, a lawyer, was Fred Katzmann’s brother.
[8] Four years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelina
DeFalco appeared in the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, accused of
the theft of fifteen hundred fifty dollars from Mrs. Giovanino Voce
on the promise of bringing about the release of the latter’s brother,
then serving a ten-year sentence in state prison. Found guilty of
grand larceny, Mrs. DeFalco received a six-month jail sentence.
She was still living in Dedham in 1961. When I telephoned her and
mentioned the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she hung up. A few weeks before
Francis Squires died in 1960, I found him unwilling to discuss the
DeFalco incident.
CHAPTER NINE
THE TRIAL: I
Judge Thayer’s voice rasped as he looked down from the bench at the
plump venireman from Brookline, the fourth in succession who had
asked to be excused because he did not believe in capital punishment.
“Do you set your opinion above the law?” the judge asked caustically.
“Have you done anything to get the law changed? Have you seen
your local representative about it?” The man did not know who his
representative was.
From the look of the odd-lot prospective jurors who were passing
through the courtroom on this first morning of the trial it seemed
as if most of the able men of Norfolk County had managed to sneak
their names off the jury list. The apologetic line filed by the
bench—fogies long past the statutory age, invalids, men who had been
deaf for years, whose wives were dying and who had certificates to
prove it, who were just about to sail for Europe, and finally the
objectionable objectors.
Of course there were the occasional better prospects, but every time
a man came along who looked educated or respectable, as if he might
be somebody, Moore seemed bound to challenge him. That was the way it
struck Jerry McAnarney. If Jerry had been going on trial for murder
he knew he would rather take his chances with a businessman than
with some fellow who dug sewers. But not Fred Moore; he wanted the
sewer-digger every time. There was a young fellow Jerry had spotted
in the line, a good clean-cut college type; as soon as Moore found
out he worked for Page & Company, that finished him. Then there was
someone McAnarney recognized from the New England Trust Company, the
sort of man any defense lawyer ought to get down on his knees to
have on a jury. He told Moore so, but Moore would not have him.
For thirty years Jerry McAnarney had been going in and out of the
Dedham courthouse, but he had never seen anything like this morning.
State troopers in khaki, some mounted, were deployed all around the
courthouse. Other troopers with motorcycles and sidecars swept up
and down the High Street, the pop of their exhausts sounding like
machine-gun fire. And inside there were police and deputies at the
doors, parading up and down the corridors, on the stairs.
When Jerry and Tom arrived at the courthouse just before ten they
found the front door locked. The side door was also locked. When they
knocked, a guard looked through the glass and waved them off. Finally
a court officer recognized them and let them in. Inside, a trooper
patted them over for weapons. Then a flashy policeman stopped them at
the foot of the stairs, and on the landing they were stopped again.
The way the place was guarded, Jerry told his brother, it looked as
if Sheriff Capen was getting ready to try the Kaiser.
Entering the courtroom, the brothers glimpsed the backs of the
defendants in the waist-high prisoners’ cage. Rosina Sacco, with
seven-month-old Ines in her arms, sat close behind her husband, the
only ordinary spectator allowed in the courtroom that day. The others
present were either reporters or deputies. Fred Katzmann, tanned and
glowing from a long week end at golf, spotted the McAnarneys in the
doorway and waved to them with casual friendliness. Moore was behind
the bar talking with Judge Thayer. The judge’s face seemed frozen.
Just before the McAnarneys went in, a deputy sheriff said under his
breath: “Tom, I like to see you boys win your cases, but I hope to
God you lose this case. These men are no good.”
At the opening Moore filed a motion for severance and a separate
trial for Sacco on the grounds that his association with Vanzetti
would be prejudiced because of the latter’s conviction for the
Bridgewater crime. Similarly, the McAnarneys requested a separate
trial for Vanzetti, since his defense was to be “separate and
distinct.” Both motions were denied.
During the whole morning not a single juror was picked. By lunchtime
it was obvious that the Yankee judge was taking a poor view of the
Western lawyer. The McAnarneys could tell that merely by the way
Thayer glared at Moore, the lines at each side of his mouth etching
into his cheeks before he replied to one of Moore’s objections.
Even Rosina Sacco, with her imperfect knowledge of English, sensed
it. Moore kept on needling Thayer, objecting to each triviality,
challenging each likely juror. The class-conscious Westerner
demanded that prospective jurors be asked if they were opposed to
organized labor, if they belonged to a union, or if they hired union
help. These questions Judge Thayer disallowed. At the noon recess
he remarked angrily and audibly as he left the courthouse that no
long-haired radical from California was going to tell him how to run
his court.
It was midafternoon before the first juror, Wallace Hersey, a
real estate dealer from Weymouth, was picked. By the end of the
afternoon only two more had been selected: John Ganley, a grocer,
and a machinist, Frank Waugh. Each defendant was allowed forty-four
challenges, and that day the defense used up twenty-one. Judge
Thayer, exasperated by the delays, held an evening session until ten,
when he had to leave to catch the last train back to Boston. It took
ten hours and 175 veniremen to get the initial three jurymen.
There was, as there usually is in even the most ponderously sustained
trial, an occasional lighter moment. At one point a plump sugar
dealer from Braintree had the idea of getting himself excused by
pretending he was deaf. The courtroom echoed with laughter as Judge
Thayer pounced on him. Sacco laughed so hard that tears rolled down
his cheeks. Then the courtroom settled down again, the hivelike
humming broken only by the squeak of Sheriff Capen’s boots as he
walked gingerly across the floor to the upright mace. Behind the
judge’s dais the triple-cylindered pendulum of the marble-faced clock
ticked away the formal minutes.
From time to time the sallow-faced defendants in the cage whispered
to one another. Sacco had aged in the year of his arrest. His hair
was thinning. That morning was the first time he and Vanzetti had
seen each other in eight months. When they met before court opened,
they had kissed each other gravely on the cheek.
The McAnarney brothers, seated inside the bar enclosure, saw the
unhappy pattern of the morning repeated all through the afternoon
and evening. It was clear by now to Jerry McAnarney that Moore, for
all his reputation, was doing nobody any good, least of all the
men in the cage. Jerry was as convinced as ever that the two men
were innocent. He had even brought his wife to the jail after the
Decoration Day parade to let her talk with Sacco and get her opinion,
and she had felt the same way he did. But now, even before the jury
had been picked, he had the feeling of the sands slipping from under
his feet, of being beyond his depth. The Italians were never going
to get a square deal with Moore running things. Jerry could hear
Thayer’s edged voice: “Mr. Moore, that may be the way they practice
law out West, but not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”
At the close of the evening session the brothers drove to John
McAnarney’s house in Quincy and told him of what was blowing up
between Moore and Judge Thayer. They wanted John to get rid of Moore
and take charge. John thought it over, and then, even though it was
midnight, telephoned William G. Thompson. Thompson was an old Yankee,
a lawyer’s lawyer, a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and whatever
he said carried weight in Massachusetts.
In his Chestnut Hill home, Thompson listened to John McAnarney
explain the difficulties his brothers were facing at the beginning of
the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. John begged him to come to Dedham in the
morning, insisting that the lives of two men were at stake, and that
in his opinion the men were innocent. Thompson agreed to look in.
As Thompson got off the train in Dedham and walked up from the
station past the spent lilac hedges of the High Street, the brim
of his Panama flopping with each step, the Phi Beta Kappa key and
the Institute of 1770 charm jingling on his heavy watchchain, he
looked the very model of a proper Boston lawyer. Even the loose way
he held his pipe in his mouth reinforced his assurance. He found
John McAnarney, much upset, waiting for him in front of the closed
courthouse gates.
They went in through a side door. In the lower corridor the two
lawyers found Moore arguing with Rosina Sacco in the center of a
group of gesticulating Italians. Thompson could hear Rosina’s voice
shrill to the edge of breaking, demanding of Moore by what right he
represented her husband. She didn’t want him, she shouted, she didn’t
believe in him. She wanted a good lawyer.
Rosina’s outburst was the culmination of months of bitterness.
She had neither liked nor approved of Moore from the beginning.
Her thrifty peasant nature was affronted by his manner of life,
his Beacon Hill house and car with chauffeur—all paid for by poor
Italians. Now she was telling him in effect: Get out! And he was
refusing.
Thompson and John and Jerry McAnarney talked the matter over in one
of the anterooms. “I want either you or John to replace Moore,” Jerry
told Thompson. Thompson said it was too late. The next day at latest
the jury would be empaneled. “You have got to make the best of it,”
he told the brothers.
When Moore joined them in the anteroom, Jerry McAnarney offered to
turn back his first payment of two thousand dollars and go on with
the case for nothing if Moore would only retire. Moore refused to
consider it. He had hired the McAnarneys as subordinates, not to
give him orders. With their narrow conservatism, he considered them
incapable of the larger view the case demanded.
During the rest of the morning Thompson sat with the McAnarneys
watching the resumed parade of prospective jurors. A new lot of 160
veniremen had been brought in, but the selection was going no faster
than it had the day before. Moore was again needling Judge Thayer.
He could not seem to help it, even though he must have sensed the
tensing of the atmosphere. It was a morning Thompson was to remember
in all its immediacy years later. “Katzmann would say something,” he
recalled to the Lowell Committee in 1927, “and Moore would object to
it. He was jumping up all the time. He would make objection after
objection. Judge Thayer would sit there and look at Moore with the
fiercest expression on his face, moving his head a little. Moore
would say ‘I object to that’ and Judge Thayer ... would sit back in
his chair and say ‘Objection overruled.’ It wasn’t what he said, it
was his manner of saying it. It looked perfectly straight on the
record; he was too clever to do otherwise. I sat there for a while
and I told John McAnarney ‘Your goose is cooked. You will never in
this world get these men acquitted. The judge is going to convict
these two men and see that nothing gets into the record; he is going
to keep his records straight and you have no chance.’”
* * * * *
When John Dever, a Filene’s clothing salesman, received a post card
ordering him to report at the Norfolk county courthouse for jury
duty, he had expected he might serve on some civil case. Not until
the Decoration Day week end did he learn that his summons might be
for the South Braintree murder case. Of that case he had only a
blurred recollection, something he had read in the papers the year
before. It gave him a queer feeling to think he might find himself on
a murder jury. His supervisor at Filene’s told him he was lucky—it
would be like having time off, with Filene’s paying his salary.
Although Dever was twenty-seven, he could have passed for twenty-one.
He had been a poor Irish-Catholic boy brought up on the wrong side
of the tracks in the quarry city of Barre, Vermont. As he grew up
he had played with many of the children of the Italian immigrant
stoneworkers. Some of these workers had been anarchists, or at least
radicals. Dever, though a pious adolescent, had had no particular
feeling against the local anarchists in their clapboard hall. He was
used to them.
At fifteen he had left Barre for Boston, where he first worked as
a bellboy in the Parker House. He had volunteered for the Army in
1917 but had not been sent overseas. In 1919 he had gone to work
at Filene’s. Unmarried, he lived in a brick rooming house on upper
Beacon Street, Brookline.
Inconspicuous as this slight, fair-haired young man may have seemed
when he was shepherded into the courtroom with the other veniremen,
he was in one respect unique. In the course of the day he would
be one of three accepted for the jury, and of the final twelve he
alone would write about the trial. His memoirs, although fragmentary
and redundant, remain the sole record of the case as seen from the
jury box. As a result of the trial Dever became so interested in
the judicial process that he enrolled in an evening course at the
Suffolk Law School and eventually passed his bar examinations.
During the last ten years of his life he prepared his _Memoirs of
the Sacco-Vanzetti Case_ and at his death in 1956 the manuscript
had reached several thousand pages. Interspersed among the tedious
legalities are telling casual incidents, still bright over the years:
how the jurors were picked, where they slept, where and what they
ate, what they did in their spare time, and how they felt about the
case.
This was the first time Dever had ever been to Dedham. As he walked
from the railroad station through the square he kept thinking what
a pleasant town it was. Above the masking elms he could see a white
dome with round windows in it like portholes. That, he supposed, was
the courthouse. He wandered up and down several of the side streets
before heading for the domed building.
Never before had he been inside a court, and the neoclassic building
with its marble-tiled floors and marble stairs and marble-paneled
walls awed him. With the other veniremen he was taken to the
courthouse, where Judge Thayer first explained the procedure and then
exhorted them to perform their disagreeable duties as patriotically
as the American soldier boy in France.
“What, gentlemen, does the law seek to accomplish?” he concluded.
“It seeks to select twelve jurors who will stand between these
parties, the Commonwealth on the one hand and these defendants on
the other, with an unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness and
unflinching courage in order that truth and justice shall prevail,
for, gentlemen, verdicts must rest upon truth and justice in order
that the life, the liberties, and the properties of the people of
the Commonwealth, including the defendants, shall be secure and
protected.”
John Dever was impressed not only by the rhetoric but by the whole
formalized proceedings. To him Judge Thayer seemed “a sincere,
honest, absolutely fair and impartial man.” Dever was not called
during the morning. At one o’clock he ate a sandwich and a piece of
pie at Gilbert’s Lunch, a one-arm in the square. When he returned to
the courthouse it was still too early for the afternoon session. He
sat on the back grass plot with some of the other men. Dever said he
hoped he would not be picked, because he might lose his two weeks’
vacation. “Don’t worry,” a man wearing a Red Men’s badge told him.
“You’ll be challenged. You’re too young. Besides they don’t want any
of you fellows on this jury.” He pointed to the ex-serviceman’s pin
in Dever’s buttonhole. “They’ll show you right out the front door,”
he concluded.
Afterward Dever could not remember much about the afternoon. One by
one the names were called, one by one the veniremen disappeared. No
jurymen had been picked during the morning and only two after lunch:
Frank Marden, a mason from Weymouth; and a slightly deaf, slightly
senile retired farmer with a handlebar mustache, Walter Ripley,
who raised bulldogs and called himself a stockkeeper. For all his
challenging, Moore did not spot the fact that Ripley had once been
chief of the police and fire departments in Quincy. It was not until
eight o’clock that Dever’s name was finally called. He was led into
the courtroom. Thayer asked him a few questions and then announced,
“The juror stands indifferent.”
_I looked in front of me [Dever recalled] and saw a whole battery
of attorneys, eight or nine in all, I should say. Before I had a
chance to orient myself a man whom I was to know as District Attorney
Katzmann stood on his feet and said “the Commonwealth accepts the
juror.” Well, I thought to myself, the defense will now challenge me.
I looked at the defense table and saw four attorneys looking at a
very large book. They would look in the book, then look hard at me;
and then whisper to each other. That went on for what seemed to be
six or seven minutes. I began to feel I was on trial. I turned in the
witness stand getting ready to leave, Judge Thayer glanced at me and
said, “Stay right where you are, young man, we are waiting for these
gentlemen,” and looked at the defense table. After about two more
looks at me, Mr. Jeremiah McAnarney stood up and said, “If your Honor
please, both defendants accept the juror.”_
Dever was the sixth juror accepted. A few minutes later the court
adjourned. The six jurors were taken to the ground floor room of the
Court of Probate and Insolvency, where twelve iron cots from the
county jail had been set up. There they were locked in for the night.
When Dever woke the next morning, he thought at first he was in a
lecture hall. Then he remembered. He got up, washed, and fixed his
hair with the brush and comb the sheriff had given each juror. He was
not given a razor. At eight o’clock a deputy appeared and took them
to breakfast.
Almost at the beginning of the morning session the seventh juror,
Lewis McHardy, an elderly quiet-mannered mill worker from Milton,
was selected. Seventeen more veniremen filed past the bench. Then
the sheriff informed the judge that his list of five hundred was
exhausted.
According to the General Laws of Massachusetts, if such a situation
occurs in a murder case after seven jurors have been chosen, “the
Court shall cause jurors to be returned from the bystanders or from
the county at large to complete the panel.” Judge Thayer cited the
statute and ordered Sheriff Capen to have two hundred more men
present by ten the next morning. The sheriff was doubtful. “They will
jump,” he remarked, “when they see me coming.” He was right. The
news got round, and almost before the afternoon session closed, the
streets of Dedham and the adjoining towns were deserted.
Capen spread his deputies that evening through Brookline, Needham,
Dedham, Norwood, Millis, Medway, Stoughton, and Quincy. They struck
at random, ringing doorbells when they saw lights in windows,
sometimes summonsing luckless veniremen from their beds. They
consulted assessors’ lists, voting lists, any list they could get
their hands on. In Needham nine unsuspecting men were picked up
coming out of a Masonic meeting. Deputy Allen Loring broke up a band
concert at Hollis Field, Braintree. Norman Gardenier of Quincy was
whisked away from his wedding supper. In spite of all this, Capen
managed to seine in only 175 indignant additions. He hoped they would
suffice. The defense still had twenty-nine challenges left.
Judge Thayer decided to remain in session until the jury was finally
chosen, no matter what the hour. Not until after midnight was the
selection finished. The five additional jurors were Harry King of
Millis, a shoemaker; George Gerard, a Stoughton photographer; Alfred
Atwood, a Norwood real estate dealer; Frank McNamara, a Stoughton
farmer; and Seward Parker, a Quincy machinist. By the time Parker’s
name was called the defense had used up all its challenges. Katzmann
affably offered to challenge Parker if Moore had any objection to
him, but Moore declined.
No sooner had the left-over veniremen been excused than Moore
objected to the five new jurors of the completed panel on the
grounds that none of them were bystanders, according to the meaning
of the statute. In the clammy courtroom the attendants and deputies
yawned and the district attorney fiddled with a blotter while Moore
developed his lengthy quibble. Judge Thayer overruled Moore on every
point. At 1:20 A.M. he ordered the jurymen brought in and sworn. “The
jury is in bed,” a deputy sheriff told him.
Thayer’s voice rose two notes. “Who allowed them to go to bed? Bring
them in!”
A few minutes later, bleary-eyed and bristly, the twelve trudged in
to take their seats in the box. Several of them were collarless,
their shirts open. Two wore felt slippers. Thayer gave them the
conventional warning. He also advised them to get plenty of exercise.
In conclusion he told them that they must “see to it that a trial
is held according to American law and according to American justice
and nothing must be done by anybody to mar or impair a fair, honest
trial.” The jurors then took their oath and the court adjourned until
Monday morning at ten o’clock.
* * * * *
The jurors slept late on Saturday, June 4, took a walk by the Charles
River in the afternoon accompanied by a squad of deputies, and in the
evening read the Boston papers. All references to the trial had been
snipped out, and they made the unhappy discovery that most of the
sports news had been on the back of what was cut.
The twelve soon formed their habit patterns. Dever found himself
going to bed at nine and waking at five. He spent a lot of time
reading old _National Geographics_. The older jurors usually played
cards; Dever preferred listening to the Victrola. There were a
lot of records that he liked: Van and Schenk, and the All-Star
Trio; songs like “Dardenella,” “Whispering,” “I’m Forever Blowing
Bubbles.” After he had cranked the Victrola a few times, though, the
card-players would begin to look over at him as if to say “Don’t you
think you’ve played enough for tonight?” Then he would go back to the
_Geographics_.
On their first Sunday they just sat around their made-over courtroom.
Since they all had to stay together and could go only to one church,
they decided not to go to any. They had breakfast at the Dedham Inn
on Court Street beyond the Episcopal church and dinner at the Haven
House just across the way; in the afternoon they went for a bus ride.
Monday was hot, a blue clear prelude to summer. The jury, after
being polled in the courtroom, spent the rest of the day viewing
the various locations connected with the South Braintree crime. A
cavalcade of eight cars drove from place to place, carrying not only
the jury but also the judge, the district attorney, and two carloads
of newspaper reporters.
The jurors arrived at their first stop, South Braintree, just as the
noon whistles were blowing, and at once the cars were surrounded by
curious factory workers. Katzmann had to order a retreat to Braintree
for lunch. When the cavalcade returned, the factory windows were
filled with faces but Pearl Street itself was free. From the railroad
crossing the procession followed the route of the bandit car along
the side roads through Randolph and Stoughton and Brockton to West
Bridgewater. The dust churned, covering the men in the cars, coating
their faces like masks. The jurors were shown Simon Johnson’s house,
the Elm Square Garage, the house where Coacci and Boda had lived,
and then the Manley Woods. A motorcycle was parked beside the bridle
path, and as the assorted jurors, lawyers, police, and newspapermen
made their way to where the Buick had been found, they surprised the
cyclist and his girl making love under a bush. Their last stop was
the gate-tender’s shanty at the Matfield crossing. At the end of the
day they had covered ninety-one miles, and Dever thought each of them
had absorbed about a pint of dust. There was no place for the jurors
to get a bath, either—he noted ruefully—after they got back to the
courthouse.
* * * * *
Tuesday morning, June 7, when Assistant District Attorney Williams
made the opening statement for the Commonwealth, set the pattern for
the month to follow. Sacco and Vanzetti, handcuffed to each other
and to a deputy, with three blue-uniformed policemen in front, three
to the rear, and two on either side, were marched from the jail
down Village Street past the cemetery, then up Court Street to the
courthouse. A trooper, with a bandolier of a hundred rounds slung
across his shoulder and a rifle in his saddle boot, rode sternly
ahead of them, while a second mounted trooper followed as a rear
guard. At the midday recess the prisoners were marched back to the
jail. This martial procession took place four times a day.
Once in the courtroom the defendants were placed in the cage and
their handcuffs removed. Then followed a pause of some minutes until
the diminutive judge in his built-up heels strode through the door,
his black silk gown billowing behind him. At his appearance Clerk
Worthington rapped with his gavel and gave the peremptory command
“_Court!_” Everyone stood up. For the first time the public was
allowed in the courtroom. Among the spectators were Mrs. Glendower
Evans, representing the New League for Democratic Control; Cerise
Carman Jack, the wife of a Harvard professor, representing the New
England Civil Liberties Committee; and Lois Rantoul of the Federated
Churches of Greater Boston, a relative of Harvard’s President Lowell.
Felicani was present, as were most of the members of the Defense
Committee and the Italian consul, the aloof pince-nezed Marquis
Ferrante di Ruffano, on instructions from his government.
In informal preliminary discussions the prosecution and the defense
had come to an agreement not to bring up the subject of radicalism
during the trial. Katzmann had also offered to agree “that no
particular bullet came from any particular gun” and refrain with
the defense from trying to prove one way or the other whether the
murder bullets had been fired from Sacco’s automatic or Vanzetti’s
revolver. Moore had refused, exclaiming melodramatically that he was
being asked to turn his sword into a shield, and insisting on being
free to have the bullets and guns examined by experts. Officially
Moore, assisted by William Callahan—the lawyer engaged for Sacco
and Vanzetti in the Brockton police court—represented Sacco, and
officially the McAnarney brothers represented Vanzetti, but this was
merely a maneuver to give both Jerry McAnarney and Moore the right to
argue before the jury and to cross-examine. In reality Moore was as
completely in charge as if he had been captain of a ship.
The contention of the Commonwealth, Assistant District Attorney
Williams said in his explanatory statement,
_is that this crime was committed by five men; that use was made
of this stolen Buick car which after its theft from Dr. Murphy of
Natick had been kept in the curtained shed of the Coacci house in
West Bridgewater; that on the morning of the murder it was taken
from the Coacci house and was driven to South Braintree; that they
picked up Vanzetti at the East Braintree station; that the men who
guided and drove that car were very familiar with the localities of
West Bridgewater and the roads leading to and from that section; that
they went down to the railroad crossing after the shooting, and made
that hairpin turn to throw their pursuers off the scent ... that they
proceeded by those back roads, Oak Street and Chestnut Street, until
they got to the old turnpike, which, though a rough road, furnished
a direct means of access to the West Bridgewater locality; and they
tore down there and either started to take Vanzetti over to Plymouth
and for that reason went over the Matfield crossing or went over
there with the idea of perhaps disposing of something in the Matfield
River ... found it inadvisable to do that which they intended to do,
came back over the Matfield crossing and subsequently abandoned their
car in the region adjacent to the Coacci house._
Williams claimed he would later show that Mike Boda was seen driving
a Buick touring car during the winter of 1920. Reminding the Jurymen
of Puffer’s Place, the house they had seen the day before, he gave an
unsubstantiated account of the police visiting the shed and finding
traces of a hole recently dug in the dirt floor as well as tire marks
to the left of the boards on which Boda had kept his Overland.
Although Judge Thayer later excluded references to the shed, and
although no evidence was brought forward connecting Coacci, Boda,
or Orciani with the South Braintree crime, Williams in his opening
nevertheless managed to link them with it by innuendo.
The first witness to take the stand was Boston photographer John
Farley, who had photographed the various buildings, places, and
objects covered in the case and whose pictures were now offered to
the jury as exhibits. Moore objected to the angles at which several
of the pictures had been taken and there followed an inconclusive
wrangle with the prosecution, to the visible annoyance of Judge
Thayer.
During the noon recess, while Sacco and Vanzetti were marched back
to the jail for their meal, Judge Thayer walked down the street to
the Dedham Inn. Whenever he was in Dedham he took his midday meal
there, as did the newspapermen and most of those connected with the
courthouse. Returning from the inn, Thayer could not conceal his
scorn at the sight of the coatless Moore taking a nap on the grass
plot in front of the courthouse. Moore was always doing things
like that, offending the New England sense of decorum without even
realizing he had offended. Once in court on a hot afternoon he took
off his shoes and stepped before the bench to make an exception
in his stocking feet. Jerry McAnarney, watching Judge Thayer’s
bottled-up indignation as it approached the uncorking point, was
fearful as well as dismayed. “For God’s sake,” he warned Moore, “keep
your coat and vest on in the courtroom, can’t you?”
Ripley, the dodderer with the tobacco-stained mustache, had been
appointed foreman of the jury, possibly because at sixty-nine he was
the oldest of the twelve. When on that first day he returned to the
courtroom from lunch, he paused with self-conscious rectitude and—to
the embarrassment of the others—saluted the American flag that stood
beside the jury box.
The photographer was followed by Edward Hayward, the surveyor who
had made the large-scale map of the South Braintree scene that
hung to the right of the flag. Then the medical testimony began,
the reiterative technicalities that the law requires to prove
the indisputable fact that a man is dead. Indifferently the jury
followed the course of the bullets through the bodies, listened to
Dr. Hunting, who had operated on the dying Parmenter; Dr. Jones,
who had picked up the bullet shaken out of Parmenter’s jacket; Dr.
Frazer, who had examined Berardelli’s body in the front room of the
Colbert house. The medical evidence was summed up and concluded by
Dr. Magrath, whose boast was that he had performed more autopsies
and attended more symphony concerts than any other medical examiner
in New England. His toupee, the most obviously artificial in
Massachusetts, was equally familiar to Symphony Hall, city morgues,
and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Magrath was a character. There
was an iron quality about him that did not brook contradiction. Even
Moore had no questions to ask him.
Such preliminaries took up the first week. Meanwhile Judge Thayer,
irritated enough by the sight of the squint-eyed California lawyer
bobbing up in front of him, found a more pervasive irritant in the
printed broadsides of the Defense Committee denouncing the unfairness
of the trial even before it started. “I am here to see the defendants
get a fair trial,” he announced from the bench. And one day he asked
a group of reporters at the Dedham Inn if they had ever seen a case
in which so many leaflets had been spread around saying that people
could not get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts. As he went
out onto the porch his face was flushed and his voice rose. “You wait
till I give my charge to the jury,” he told the reporters, shaking
his fist. “I’ll show ’em!” Even the monarchist Ferrante, whose chief
regret was that Sacco and Vanzetti had not become American citizens
so that he could have washed his hands of them, sensed within the
first few days that Thayer was sure they were guilty.
Not until Wednesday morning, June 8, did the South Braintree express
agent, the Commonwealth’s first important witness, take the stand.
Considerably embellishing the story he had told in the Quincy court
the year before, Shelley Neal again described his payroll delivery,
the pale man in the doorway of the Hampton House, his brief view of
the car that he was again to see jolting over the railroad crossing
after the holdup. But Neal did not attempt to identify Sacco or
Vanzetti as anyone he had seen that day. Margaret Mahoney, the
paymistress, followed Neal; she told of making up the payroll boxes
and handing them over to Parmenter and Berardelli just before three
o’clock.
Mark Carrigan, the shoe-cutter, was next. From his window on the
third floor of the Hampton House he had watched the paymaster and
the guard go down the street; then he had heard the shots and seen
the car cross the tracks with the gunman crouched in the front seat.
But from that glimpse Carrigan had not been able to identify the
defendants in the Brockton police station and he was not now able to
identify them in the courtroom.
So far the trial was going in the routine manner that Katzmann had
planned. These early witnesses were not expected to identify anyone.
They were there merely to set the scene. Something more, however,
was expected of Jimmy Bostock, the repairman, who had talked with
Parmenter and Berardelli at the crossing, had seen the two men fall,
and afterward had held the dying guard in his arms. The getaway car
with the Italian-looking man who was leaning out shouting had passed
so close to Bostock on Pearl Street that he could have reached out
and touched it. Nevertheless, when asked in the Brockton station if
he could tell whether Sacco and Vanzetti were the bandits he had
answered, “No sir, I could not tell whether or not they was, no sir.”
On the stand Bostock testified that Berardelli usually carried a
38-caliber revolver. He had seen it several times, the last time the
Saturday before the murder. He had joked with Berardelli about it and
asked him if he carried it to shoot rats. The mention of the revolver
seemed irrelevant—especially as nobody had seen it on April 15—and
Moore objected. Judge Thayer held a conference at the bench. There
Assistant District Attorney Williams revealed for the first time the
Commonwealth’s contention that the revolver found on Vanzetti had
been taken from Berardelli’s body by the man who shot him.
When Lewis Wade was taken by Katzmann to the Brockton station he had
pointed out Sacco as the wavy-haired man he had seen standing over
Berardelli. At the preliminary hearing in the Quincy court three
weeks later he was not quite as certain. “I don’t want to make a
mistake,” he had said, looking at Sacco. “This is too damn serious,
but he looks like the man.” Since then Katzmann had given Wade a
pep talk and was now counting on him for a positive identification.
Williams, leading the witness along, became stutteringly disconcerted
when Wade balked, maintaining that although Sacco looked to him
somewhat like the man who did the shooting, he “had a doubt.” Several
weeks ago, Wade explained, he had seen a man in Damato’s barbershop
who looked just like the man who had shot Berardelli. Since that
time he had decided that Sacco was not the man. Williams managed to
recover his composure, but though he did his forensic best, he could
get no further in persuading the intractable Wade.
As Wade left the stand one of the police officers at the door called
him a piker and another muttered: “We’re not through with you yet.”
It was a remark borne out a few weeks later when Wade was dismissed
from his job at Slater & Morrill. He had it coming to him. That was
the way people felt in South Braintree.
John Dever, in the first row of the jury box, glancing from time to
time at the defendants in the cage, was so far not impressed by the
Commonwealth’s case. Sometimes he felt frightened at having to decide
whether two men should live or die. Sacco and Vanzetti, he thought,
_did not look like criminals. Sacco appeared to be an alert, bright,
and rather clean-cut young fellow. Every time I looked at Vanzetti he
seemed to be thinking with an impassive look on his face or listening
intently to whatever was taking place at the time.... My sympathies
were with the men on trial and I was hoping that the evidence would
not be sufficient to establish their guilt “beyond a reasonable
doubt.”_
The reasonable doubt became more shadowy after the spinsterish
Hampton House bookkeepers, Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin, appeared.
Both pointed to Sacco as the man they had seen leaning out of the
murder car. Mary Splaine told how, after they had heard the shots,
she and Frances Devlin had gone first to the front window, then to
the one looking out on Pearl Street, just in time to catch the car as
it careered across the railroad tracks. From sixty feet away she had
watched the bareheaded bandit for the three seconds the car took to
pass. “He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt—had a grayish, like
navy color, and the face was what we would call clear-cut, clean-cut
face ... a little narrow, just a little narrow. The forehead was
high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think,
two inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark
eyebrows, but the complexion was white, peculiar white that looked
greenish.” She had particularly noticed his left hand resting on
the back of the front seat. It was “a good-sized hand that denoted
strength.”
Dever thought Mary Splaine seemed honest, but he did not see how
anyone could have remembered all those details from such a distant
glimpse, and he decided that she must have refreshed her memory on
her visits to the Brockton police station. At the Quincy hearing
the year before, when her memory was greener, Mary Splaine had
not been so certain of her identification. There she had said of
Sacco: “I am almost sure I saw him at Braintree, but I saw him at
the Brockton police station afterward.” When Moore, with the Quincy
transcript in his hand, pressed her about her negative answers then,
she belligerently denied making them but was finally forced to admit
that she had said: “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the
right to say he is the man.” This she now qualified by saying that
her observation of him for several hours in the Quincy court had
convinced her that Sacco was the man in the car. “I am positive,
certain he is the man,” she concluded, her voice ringing and
determined. “I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain
I am not making a mistake.” As she said this Sacco thrust his head
forward, smiling at her with fixed bitterness.
Frances Devlin’s story was almost the same as her friend’s, although
not so detailed. She had seen the car spurt over the hill with a man
leaning out firing at the crowd. She described him as “a dark man,
and his forehead, the hair seemed to be grown away from the temple,
and it was blown back and he had clear features, and rather good
looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thickset man, I
should say.” Sacco was that man. She was positive. Like Mary Splaine,
in the Quincy court she had been less positive. There, the most she
had said of Sacco was: “He looks very much like the man that stood up
in the back seat shooting.”
McGlone, the young teamster who had caught the staggering Parmenter,
was another disappointing witness for the Commonwealth. A
ferret-faced, stubborn man, he said that the two bandits he had seen
were Italians, but that was all he would say about them. Assistant
District Attorney Williams could not bring him to say that Sacco and
Vanzetti were the gunmen, any more than Moore could bring him to say
that they were not. “Well,” McGlone kept on telling them, “I did not
get a good look at them to see what they did look like.”
Edgar Langlois, the Rice & Hutchins foreman who had looked down from
the second-floor window at the two gunmen below him, described them
in court as short and dark-complexioned, full-chested, clean-shaven,
with curly or wavy hair. He had not been able to identify either
Sacco or Vanzetti at Brockton as the men he had seen from the window,
nor was he now willing to identify them in court.
The only witness of the actual shooting to make any such
identification was the young Jewish shoe-cutter Louis Pelser, who had
been working on the first floor of Rice & Hutchins. After hearing
shots outside, he said, he had opened the middle window and looked
out at a bareheaded man with a gun, only seven feet away, shooting
at Berardelli. “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow,” he told the
court. “It was the last shot. He put four bullets in him.” The gunman
had “wavy-hair—pushed back ... dark complexion,” and was wearing dark
green pants and an army shirt. He had then seen the gunman climb into
the car. Pelser pointed to Sacco as the man. Katzmann twice asked
him, over Moore’s objections, if he had any question in his mind but
that Sacco was the man. Pelser hesitated. In the heat of the day, in
his blue serge suit, he was an abject sight. John Dever thought he
“looked and acted like a man who was doing something he didn’t want
or like to do.” Looking at Sacco, pressed by the district attorney,
Pelser reluctantly came out with it: “I wouldn’t say he is the man,
but he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He added that he had
thrown open the factory window and watched there from the time the
gunman shot Berardelli until the car disappeared up Pearl Street.
The day that Pelser testified, June 10, was the hottest of the year.
Outside the sun was molten and inside the air had become so humid
that the walls and marble floor were beaded. Judge Thayer allowed the
jurors to take off their coats, and finally ordered the sheriff to
bring them fans.
Moore, beginning his cross-examination, was like a cat with a not
overly nimble mouse. Pelser sweated so that the drops fell. Some
months earlier, when interviewed by Robert Reid, a white-bearded
Boston constable who had become a defense investigator, Pelser had
denied seeing any of the shooting. “They were shooting while I was
at the window,” he had told Reid, “and I got under the bench, and
that is all I seen of them.” Now he claimed that he had lied to Reid
because he did not want to be called as a witness. Moore, driving
him into a corner, made him admit that he had, after all, ducked
under the bench. He also admitted that he had avoided going to the
Brockton station with the other witnesses by telling the police he
had not seen enough to identify anyone. However, Moore could not
shake Pelser’s insistence that he had seen the gunman and the getaway
car—and it was a fact that Pelser was the only person in South
Braintree who had written down the car’s license number.
William Brenner, Peter McCullum, and Dominic Constantino, all of
whom worked at the front benches with Pelser, were brought in as
defense witnesses to contradict Pelser’s story, but their effect was
lessened by the tidy mechanics of legal procedure that postpones
the appearance of rebuttal witnesses until the prosecution has
finished its case. So it was not until two weeks later, when the
details of Pelser’s testimony were overlaid by that of a score of
other witnesses, that Brenner took the stand. He too, after he had
heard shots, looked through the partially opened center window and
saw a man “sinking—sinking.” Pelser had not been near the window.
After McCullum had raised the sash he had slammed it down again and
yelled “Duck!” and they had all got down behind the benches. Under
cross-examination Brenner admitted he really did not know where
Pelser was when he himself was looking through the window.
McCullum, following Brenner, was not sure where Pelser was either,
but Constantino was certain that when the shooting started Pelser
was “right down under the bench.” Afterward Pelser had told them:
“I did not see any of the men but I got the number of the car.”
Constantino admitted he had not given any thought to where Pelser was
until he had read the latter’s testimony in the newspaper two weeks
before. Then he had gone to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and
volunteered his information. At first he maintained that Pelser was
at his workbench three windows down when McCullum had thrown up the
sash, but Katzmann finally forced him to admit that he really did not
know where Pelser was or whether he might have opened another window.
The appearance of Hans Behrsin, the Slater chauffeur, was
unsatisfactory to the prosecution. All he could say was that the two
men he had seen sitting on the Rice & Hutchins fence as he drove past
in the Marmon “seemed to be pretty well light-complexioned fellows.”
He had not noticed their features, and the district attorney did not
even bother to ask him to identify the defendants.
It was generally agreed by the newspapermen covering the trial that
Lola Andrews was the prosecution’s star witness, since she was the
only one who had actually talked with any of the gunmen. She was an
unpredictable woman. When Moore and two assistants had gone to Quincy
on January 14 with a stenographer to interview her as a prospective
defense witness, he found her calm and pleasant. According to the
stenographer’s record she told Moore that she could not identify the
two men she had seen near the car in front of the Rice & Hutchins
factory. When she was shown pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she said
they were not the men. Although she did not mention it to Moore
on January 14, she later claimed that two evenings before, a dark
one-eyed man in a sailor’s reefer had appeared at her door, spoken
incomprehensibly about the South Braintree crime, and then, when
she refused to listen to him, followed her into the hall toilet and
assaulted her.
The evening before Lola appeared in court, Jerry McAnarney had gone
to see her in Quincy, and she had told him that she could not and
would not identify Sacco or Vanzetti as the men she had seen near the
automobile in front of Slater & Morrill. Moore had even considered
using her as one of his own witnesses and was surprised when she took
the stand for the Commonwealth. She wore a stiff-crowned hat with a
flat brim that shadowed her face. It was a coarse apprehensive face
which, though faded, still managed to preserve a physical appeal.
Again she told her story of walking down Pearl Street to the Slater
& Morrill factory, of seeing the pale man and the dark man by the
touring car, of asking directions from the dark man on the way back.
“He told me—he asked me,” she said, looking at the defendants in the
cage, “which factory I wanted, the Slater? I said ‘No, sir, the Rice
and Hutchins.’ He said to go in the driveway and told me which door
to go in, it would lead me to the factory office.”
Williams then asked her dramatically if she had seen the man since.
She replied that she had seen him in the courtroom. It was the climax
to which the assistant district attorney had been building. “Do you
see him in the courtroom now?” he asked. She paused, raised a bare,
fleshy forearm, and pointed to Sacco.
“I think I do. Yes, sir. That man, there.” Sacco jumped to his feet
in the cage, his eyes flashing. “I am the man?” he demanded in his
thick accent. “Do you mean me? Take a good look!”
Moore in his cross-examination went back at once to the January
evening when he had shown her a selection of photographs including
one of Sacco holding a derby in his hand. According to the
stenographer’s record she had said that the man with the derby was
not the one she had talked with in South Braintree. Now, on the
stand, she denied that she had said any such thing, claiming on the
contrary that she had then identified the man in Moore’s picture as
the man who had got up from under the car.
Though Moore could not shake her story he brought out that in
February Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail.
There she had looked through a grating at a cell tier on a lower
level. For about ten minutes she had watched a dark muscular man
pacing up and down, the man—she finally decided—whom she had talked
with in front of the factory on the day of the murder. That man, she
was told, was Nicola Sacco.
At one o’clock Judge Thayer suspended the session for the week end.
Lola Andrews’ cross-examination would continue Monday and into
Tuesday. Moore was determined to drive her to the wall. But in
his determination he overlooked the one question that should have
occurred to any trained legal mind. Lola Andrews had been given
detailed directions to Rice & Hutchins by a man who spoke English
easily. Sacco’s command of English was so slight that he would not
have been capable of such fluent talk. His heavy accent was at times
almost incomprehensible. Yet Moore in his two days of hammering at
Lola Andrews never once brought up the question of the speech and
accent of the man who had directed her.
Judge Thayer’s weekend instructions to the jury seem, at least from
the record, judicious and temperate. “Drop this case now,” he told
them, “to be taken up Monday morning at ten o’clock. Don’t discuss
this case among yourselves. You haven’t heard all the evidence; you
haven’t heard any of the evidence of the defense. You haven’t heard
the argument; you haven’t heard the charge. Just keep your minds
open, absolutely open, fair and impartial, so that when you finally
cross the threshold of the jury room for your final determination of
this case your mind will be as impartial and as open as it is humanly
possible for any man’s mind to be.”
The trial was now beginning to look like a long one, and most of the
jurors were concerned about getting back to their families. They
talked about asking the judge to hold longer sessions. Dever was
worried that Filene’s might cancel his summer vacation after he had
been away so long. Saturday morning he had just opened a _Geographic_
when Sheriff Capen stuck his head in the door and asked if anyone
wanted to take a bath. At first they thought it was his idea of a
joke, but the sheriff marched them up to the jail and there in the
basement they found twelve bathtubs all set up and waiting. For over
an hour they soaked and splashed and tossed cakes of soap back and
forth. Dever could see a rim of dirt forming all along the edge of
his tub. The water felt great. So did the clean clothes his sister
had sent him.
Monday morning brought Lola Andrews back to the stand. Moore
repeatedly tried to force the witness into admitting that she had
spoken to the pale sickly man, not the squat dark one. Over and over
he asked about the location of the car, the position of the two men,
the distance from the factory. Katzmann objected to the repetitions.
So did Judge Thayer. “I thought we had been all through this before,”
the judge exclaimed caustically. Moore explained that he was trying
to show that “much of the testimony of the witness ... is one of
rather hopeless confusion.” Katzmann objected and Thayer turned on
Moore. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness,” he told the
Westerner. “Kindly refrain from taking up a subject that has already
been exhausted.”
Moore’s tactics were apparently to wear the witness down. All morning
he kept hammering at her, going back again and again to what she
had told him in January, making her retrace each step along Pearl
Street on the morning of the crime. He could not, however, change her
identification of Sacco.
Much of the testimony was irrelevant. Moore wanted to know how long
the witness and Julia Campbell had worked at Rice & Hutchins, what
they did there, and whether they had worked on men’s or women’s
shoes. He became visibly embarrassed when the subject of Julia
Campbell’s present address in Maine came up and Lola Andrews said
he had asked her how she herself would like a little vacation down
there. When she had told Moore she was afraid she would lose her job,
he had promised her a job in Maine “as good or better.” Katzmann and
Williams, sitting at the side of the enclosure, grinned at Moore’s
efforts to defend himself.
At the beginning of the afternoon session Jerry McAnarney took over
the questioning, leading back to the matter of the photographs that
Mrs. Andrews had or had not identified for Moore in January. Then
there was a conference between Thayer and the lawyers as to how far
the defense might go into the witness’ past history. On overhearing
this, she complained that she felt faint. A few seconds later she
fell forward. Katzmann and Williams caught her as she slumped. She
did not take the stand again until the following morning.
In the anteroom she told the district attorney that she had fainted
because she had suddenly seen in the courtroom the man who had
assaulted her. During the short recess it was whispered in the
corridors that one of the spectators had been caught with a revolver.
Unlike most courtroom rumors, it happened to be true. The man had a
permit and was released, but on the morning following Lola Andrews’
fainting fit those who arrived early found the courthouse gates
closed and guarded. Only five minutes before the session were they
opened, and then each entering spectator was patted. There was
another flurry when the police thought they had discovered a man in
possession of three small bombs. They turned out to be hard-boiled
eggs that he had brought for his lunch.
When John Dever thought of Lola Andrews being overborne in Quincy by
Moore, with a stenographer taking down every word she said, he felt
sorry for her. Moore’s harsh cross-examination backfired, causing
Dever and the other jurymen to feel sympathetic enough to believe her.
Although Lola’s testimony dragged on for another day, little more was
added. There was an involved and lengthy discussion as to whether the
photograph she had identified for Moore had been of Sacco—as she now
maintained—or of an unidentified mustached man in a straw hat holding
a cigar. Indirectly Williams brought up the matter of the one-eyed
stranger who had assaulted her. The assistant district attorney
claimed that she had been in a frightened state of mind at the time
of her interview with Moore and could not be held to what she had
said. Although the jury was sympathetic, the newspapermen were less
so. One of the Hearst reporters nicknamed her “Fainting Lola.”
Moore was sensitive enough to a jury’s mood to realize the impression
her identification had made. To help repair the damage he brought in
five refuting witnesses. Alfred LaBrecque, a young Quincy reporter,
had gone to Lola Andrews’ room shortly after the assault, and she
had told him that she could not say if the man who forced her into
the toilet resembled the man at South Braintree because she had not
seen the face of the man in South Braintree. George Fay, a Quincy
policeman, testified that Lola had told him much the same thing.
Harry Kurlansky, a tailor, who had known Lola for eight years, told
of her passing his shop in February and his saying “‘You look kind of
tired.’ She says ‘Yes.’ She says ‘They’re bothering the life out of
me.’ I says, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I just came from jail.’ I says, ‘What
have you done in jail?’ She says, ‘The Government took me down and
want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing
about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them’.”
Judge Thayer looked down sourly at the little Polish Jew. “Mr.
Witness,” he rasped, “I would like to ask one question. Did you
attempt to find out who this person was who represented the
Government who was trying to get her to take and state that which
was false?” Kurlansky, already bewildered by the courtroom
atmosphere, was almost speechless at the thought of turning himself
into a private detective. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t come into my
mind. I wasn’t sure, you know. It didn’t——” Only later, with Jerry
McAnarney to encourage him, was he finally able to say that he didn’t
see why he should bother about it.
Moore sprang a surprise on Katzmann when he produced the aged but
peppery Julia Campbell, whom he had brought down from Maine. Mrs.
Campbell addressed Katzmann as “dear man,” and when he tried to
confuse her with a litany of dates, she sent a titter round the
courtroom by exclaiming “Oh, chestnuts!” She swore that Lola Andrews
had never spoken to the man under the car but to the man standing
by it. As for the two defendants in the cage, she did not think she
“ever saw them men in the world.”
Lena Allen, who ran a lodging house in Quincy, was the last refuting
witness. She said that Lola Andrews had roomed at her house until the
other roomers had threatened to leave if she didn’t get rid of her.
Lola Andrews had a bad reputation and was untruthful, according to
Lena Allen—who admitted she disliked her.
* * * * *
Five witnesses identified Vanzetti in one way or another, but only
one of them, Mike Levangie, the Pearl Street gate-tender, placed
him at the scene of the murders. Almost all the other witnesses
had described the driver of the getaway car as pale, fair, sickly.
Levangie, at the inquest two days after the crime, had asserted the
man was dark, with a dark brown mustache. Now he pointed to Vanzetti
in the cage as the man, the only man he had seen.
Katzmann in his summing-up admitted that the driver of the car was
indisputably a pale blond man, but he explained that Levangie’s
identification was still valid as he must have glimpsed Vanzetti
leaning over from the back seat and in the excitement thought he was
the driver.
Although Levangie was the only witness to place Vanzetti in the
Buick, two others placed him in South Braintree on that day.
Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, had been summoned to Dedham as
a prospective juror. While waiting in the courtroom he had seen
the defendants being led by. Suddenly he had recalled the carload
of tough tickets he had seen on Hancock Street the morning of the
South Braintree crime. The man with the mustache, handcuffed to
the sheriff, looked just like one of those men in the back seat.
Having gone to the district attorney’s office with his story, he now
found himself appearing as a witness. Dolbeare had no particular
recollection of the other four men in the car except for the general
impression of their toughness, but the middle man in the back seat
was Vanzetti. “I had the same view of him in the courtroom as I
had in the car, a profile view,” he told the court. He had “not a
particle of doubt” about Vanzetti being the man.
John Faulkner, another surprise witness, picked out Vanzetti as a man
who had ridden with him in the smoking car of the train from Plymouth
to Boston on the morning of April 15. Faulkner, a patternmaker at
the Watertown Arsenal, was an unhesitating witness. Each day he was
accustomed to take the train from Cohasset and he always rode in the
smoking car. On the morning of the fifteenth as the train was pulling
into East Weymouth a man across the aisle had said someone in back
wanted to know if the stop was East Braintree. Faulkner turned and
saw a foreign-looking man sitting in the single seat next to the
toilet. He had a black mustache, high cheekbones, and was wearing
old clothes. At Weymouth Heights the man again leaned forward and
asked if the stop was East Braintree. When the train stopped at
East Braintree the man had picked up an old leather Boston bag and
got off. “That is the man,” Faulkner said, identifying Vanzetti.
He was sure. However, when asked by Moore if he could remember the
man across the aisle who had first spoken to him, Faulkner had no
recollection of him at all. He remembered the date because it was the
time when he had been injured and had gone in on the late train to
the hospital. The next day he read about the murders and wondered if
the foreigner he had seen had had anything to do with them.
In refutation Moore brought in Henry McNaught, the conductor of
the train, who said that no cash fares had been collected that day
from Plymouth to Braintree. The station agents of Plymouth, North
Plymouth, and Kingston testified in addition that no tickets had been
sold from their stations to the Braintrees. However, Katzmann made
them admit that they did not know if any such tickets had been sold
the day before or how many might have been sold to Quincy or Boston.
Edward Brooks, the ticket agent at East Braintree, recalled that
about the time of the murders and several times since he had seen a
tall dark man carrying a black bag get off the morning train and walk
from the station toward Quincy Avenue. He had seen the man perhaps
half a dozen times. Vanzetti was not the man.
The other two who identified Vanzetti were Austin Cole, the streetcar
conductor, and Austin Reed, the gate-tender at the Matfield
crossing. Cole told the same story he had told at the Plymouth trial.
The two men who boarded his car at Sunset Avenue on May 5 and had
been taken off by the police in Brockton had also got on at the same
stop the night of April 14 or 15. Sacco and Vanzetti were the men.
Reed, a man in his early twenties, told of the car that had swirled
up to his crossing just as the train was coming and how he had gone
out into the road with the stop sign in his hand. A man with a
“stubbed” mustache and high cheekbones had leaned out of the car and
asked loudly what the hell he was holding him up for. When Reed read
of the South Braintree holdup the next day he had been sure those
men were the bandits, and after he heard of the arrests on May 5 he
had gone of his own accord to the Brockton police station to have a
look at the suspects. The man with the mustache, Vanzetti, was the
same man who had shouted at him from the car. He was sure of it in
Brockton, he was sure of it now. There was no doubt in his mind.
Jerry McAnarney cross-examined Reed at random, asking what he was
doing before the car appeared, how often the trains ran, where he
now worked, how much dust was on the faces of the men in the car,
what sort of hats they were wearing. Then Moore took over and at the
last came close to the vital question when he asked if the man had
spoken “in a loud bold voice.” Reed admitted that he had and that
the quality of the English was “unmistakable and clear.” But Moore
did not pursue the matter. As with Faulkner’s and Lola Andrews’
testimony, Moore overlooked the matter of the defendants’ accents.
His jibes at Reed’s youth and at his going on his own to the police
station aroused John Dever’s sympathy for the witness.
The weather continued oppressive; the motionless air bore down damply
on the marble wainscotting. The routine of the court so enveloped
the jurymen, the spectators, and even the lawyers and the sheriff’s
men, that the outside world became unreal. Though the enlarged map of
South Braintree still hung on the wall to the right of the jury box,
there seemed no organic connection between the act of violence that
had taken place there fifteen months before and this decorous legal
game with its inherited rules.
For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of
the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front
pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of
Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and
several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls
and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been
arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of
Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old
Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a
French name, facing disbarment.
* * * * *
It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial
without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti
the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants
ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs,
police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were
guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling
pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters,
covering the trial for the Boston _Globe_, did not like it.
As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He
had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but
notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so
obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware
of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession
of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the
room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being
said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell
out of here! Who called you up here?”
Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not
discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by
Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several
times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer
announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools.
A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin
Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a
quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were
not getting a fair trial.
* * * * *
The last three witnesses to identify Sacco were William Tracey, the
owner of the Tracey Building, the railroad detective William Heron,
and Carlos Goodridge, who had heard the shooting as he was playing
pool with Peter Magazu. Of the two men Tracey had noticed standing
by the drugstore on the morning of the murders, one, he felt, was
Sacco. “While I wouldn’t be positive, I would say to the best of my
recollection that was the man,” was the most Katzmann could get out
of him. When he was cross-examined he maintained that he felt quite
sure he was right, but “would not positively say Sacco was the man.”
Heron recalled the two Dagos he had seen in the South Braintree
station the morning he had collared the McNamara kid. He remembered
them particularly because they were smoking under the no smoking
sign. There was no question in his mind but that Sacco was one of the
men he had seen.
Goodridge, a middle-aged man of uneasy appearance, picked out the
bandit who had leaned from the car and pointed a gun at him. He was
“the gentleman on the right in the cage”—Sacco.
“Are you not,” Jerry McAnarney asked Goodridge “a defendant in a
criminal case in this court?” Goodridge denied it, and Judge Thayer
broke off the line of questioning by reminding McAnarney that a man’s
record as a defendant could not be brought up unless he had been
convicted. There was another conference at the bench, with the jury
sent out. Jerry McAnarney handed Judge Thayer a document from the
clerk’s office showing that on the same day Sacco and Vanzetti were
arraigned Goodridge had pleaded guilty to stealing money from his
employer and a week later had been placed on probation. Thayer ruled
against the jury being allowed to hear this because the case had been
filed. John Dever sensed that something was wrong about Goodridge,
even if McAnarney could not bring out the details.
Goodridge was contradicted by four defense witnesses who, unhappily
for the defense, also contradicted each other. Harry Arrogni, a
barber in Damato’s shop, said that when Goodridge had had his hair
cut a few days after the holdup, he had told of seeing the man in the
car, adding, “if I have got to say who that man was I can’t say.”
Katzmann forced Arrogni to admit that this was the only customer’s
conversation he could remember from a period of fourteen months.
Damato himself claimed that Goodridge had said he was inside the
poolroom and did not see any of the men in the automobile.
Just before the shooting Peter Magazu had left his poolroom to wait
on a customer in the shoe shop on the other side of the partition.
After the car had swung by he asked Goodridge if he had seen
anything. Goodridge told him, “‘I seen the men, they pointed with a
gun.’ I says, ‘How do the men look like?’ He says, ‘Young man with
light hair, light complexion and wore an army shirt. This job wasn’t
pulled off by any foreign people.’”
Andrew Manganaro, Goodridge’s disgruntled employer, related that
Goodridge had told him he “saw this automobile going by and as he did
one of the men pointed a gun at him and he run in. When he saw the
gun he was so scared he run right in from where he was. He could not
possibly remember faces.” As for Goodridge’s reputation for veracity,
Manganaro announced with emphatic satisfaction that it was bad.
After the identifications there followed a string of residual
witnesses to establish at length for the bored jury facts that were
for the most part apparent at a glance. Charles Fuller and Max Wind
told of finding the Buick in the Manley Woods, whereupon Moore
engaged in a lengthy dispute with Judge Thayer as to whether or not
the Buick should be admitted as evidence. Francis Murphy, the owner,
testified that the car was his. Warren Ellis identified his stolen
license plates. There was more interest in the story of William Hill,
the police officer who had driven the Buick to Brockton. He had spent
fifteen or twenty minutes looking the car over in the police garage
and found it undamaged, yet the next morning he had noticed a bullet
hole in the right rear door.
Assistant District Attorney Williams, putting Napoleon Ensher on the
stand, announced that the Commonwealth would “show that this man
Boda ... was seen driving a car of the type which is of interest to
us in this case; that he was associated with one Orciani, that he
was associated with Sacco, and we shall ask the jury ... to draw
the inference that the car which Boda was then driving was the car
concerned in this murder, and we shall tie up the car and Boda,
by evidence of other association between these four men, Sacco,
Vanzetti, Orciani and Boda.”
Unfortunately for this theory, there was no link for Williams to
connect the murder car with the one Ensher claimed to have seen Boda
driving. The assistant district attorney admitted that all he could
hope to show was that it was the same kind of car; he could not,
however, “place the four men together at any time in this particular
Buick car.” For lack of such a connection, Judge Thayer excluded
Ensher’s testimony.
Officers Vaughn and Connolly again told their tale of arresting
the two Italians, Connolly elaborating on the story he had told at
the Plymouth trial. Vanzetti had so far controlled his feelings,
but as Connolly told of Vanzetti’s reaching for his revolver the
Italian jumped up in the cage and shouted “You are a liar!” The
deputies forced him down, his eyes sparkling with anger, as Connolly
continued.
Following Connolly, Parmenter’s widow gave brief, pathetic, and
largely inconsequent testimony. Fred Loring told of picking up the
cap near Berardelli’s body. George Kelley, Sacco’s neighbor, refused
to identify the cap as Sacco’s. The most Williams could get him to
say was that the cap was similar in color to the cap Sacco wore
and that at the Three-K factory Sacco hung his cap on a nail each
morning. Williams asked whether he knew of anything happening to
the cap because it was hung on a nail. Kelley said he did not. Then
Williams asked what he noticed about the condition of the cap lining
he was examining on the stand. “Torn,” Kelley replied. As he went
on, he did his best to put in a good word for Sacco. His feeling of
friendship was obvious. However, he was obliged to admit that Sacco
had not worked during the Christmas week of 1919—an admission later
corroborated by his sister Margaret, the Three-K paymistress.
Mrs. Glendower Evans had become such an assiduous note-taker that
the sheriff finally provided a small table for her. Even from behind
the table she managed to display a vast assurance and a well-bred
disapproval of the proceedings. Judge Thayer took for granted the
enmity of radicals and of anarchists (_arnuchists_, he pronounced it)
but he expected something different from these Boston women of old
families who seemed to form a phalanx at the trial and who, he felt,
were people of his own class. One day, as the court adjourned, he
asked Mrs. Rantoul to step into his chambers. She found him alone,
waiting in his black robe. At once he asked her how she thought the
trial was going. “I told him,” she said later in an affidavit, “that
I had not yet heard sufficient evidence to convince me that the
defendants were guilty. He expressed dissatisfaction both by words,
gestures, tone of voice, and manner. He said that after hearing both
arguments and his charge I would certainly feel differently.”
The Commonwealth rested its case on the first day of summer.
CHAPTER TEN
THE TRIAL: II
Of the four bullets taken from Berardelli’s body, plus the one
removed from Parmenter in the Quincy hospital and the one found in
his jacket, five had been fired from a 32-caliber pistol or pistols.
The type was determined by measuring the lands (ridges) and the
grooves impressed on the bullets by their passage through the barrel.
In addition, the rifling had a right-hand twist that also left its
mark.
The sixth bullet—the mortal one that Dr. Magrath had cut from
Berardelli and marked with three needle scratches—had been fired from
a 32-caliber automatic with a left-hand twist. Only the Colt among
American automatics had such a twist. The question that four experts
debated for several days was simply whether or not this bullet had
been fired from the Colt found on Sacco.
For the jury, the experts’ testimony was the most tedious part of the
trial—“a wilderness of lands and grooves,” as the Boston Post put it.
Through the long sticky days the jurymen fidgeted, fanning themselves
as the voices droned on.
Captain Proctor of the State Police led off for the prosecution. From
the time he had arrived at South Braintree the night of the murders
until Katzmann appointed Chief Stewart, he had been in charge of the
investigation. At the very beginning he felt that the holdup with its
careful timing was a professional job, and after the arrest of Sacco
and Vanzetti he told Katzmann that Stewart had got hold of the wrong
men. He still felt so. It was not, however, about his theories but
as a ballistics expert that the white-haired Proctor now testified.
Only three days before taking the stand he and his colleague Charles
Van Amburgh and the defense expert James Burns had fired fourteen
test bullets through Sacco’s automatic into a box of oiled sawdust.
The recovered bullets were compared with the mortal Bullet III. That
bullet had a milled groove around it (known as a cannelure) that
had been discontinued in more recent Winchester bullets of the same
caliber. Burns was unable to obtain any of the older Winchesters
corresponding to Bullet III, so used U.S. bullets as most closely
resembling the obsolete type.[9]
To John Dever, Proctor seemed a reluctant witness. The captain first
explained that he was accustomed to testing 38- and 32-caliber
revolvers by pushing bullets through the barrel manually. When
in his demonstration he showed himself unable to strip the Sacco
pistol, Dever was not impressed. Proctor then told the jury that the
five right-twist bullets had come from a Savage automatic. When the
assistant district attorney asked him if he was sure, he replied:
“I can be as certain of that as I can of anything.” However, when
Williams asked his opinion as to whether Bullet III had been fired
from Sacco’s Colt, Proctor phrased his answer in a much more measured
manner. “My opinion is,” he told Williams, “that it is consistent
with being fired by that pistol.” In the casual moment the ambiguity
of the answer escaped Moore. Thomas McAnarney spotted it at once and
nudged his brother, but wise in the ways of the police, he feared
a trap. If he should now ask Proctor what he meant by consistent,
Proctor might reply that he meant that the bullet had gone through
the gun—and this would be so much the worse for the defendants.
Thomas therefore said nothing.
As for the four shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel walk,
Proctor explained that Shell W—with the identifying Winchester W
on it—had been fired in one pistol, the other three in another. He
compared the indentation made by the firing pin on Shell W with the
indentations on the test shells fired in Sacco’s pistol. The marks
on both, he said, were consistent—again he used the word—with their
being fired in the same weapon.
The Commonwealth’s second expert was Charles Van Amburgh of
the Remington Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Before going to Remington, he had spent nine years
at the Springfield Arsenal, and then periods at the Westinghouse
and Colt Firearms companies. His evidence was a corroboration of
Proctor’s. He, too, had compared Bullet III with those recovered
from the sawdust. By measuring the lands, he had determined
that the bullet had been fired from a 32-caliber Colt. As to
whether he thought it had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, he replied
circumspectly, “I am inclined to believe that it was fired, Number
III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.” He went on
to say that there was a rough rust track at the bottom of the pistol
barrel, and that corresponding marks could be traced on the bullet.
Under cross-examination he admitted that it was common for Colts to
rust at that particular place. Like Proctor, he thought that the
other five bullets had come from a Savage and had been fired from the
same weapon.
Burns, the first of the defense’s experts to testify, had spent
thirty years as a ballistics engineer with the U.S. Cartridge
Company. He agreed that Bullet III could have been fired from a Colt
but felt that it could also have been fired from a Bayard, a foreign
make. Whatever pistol it had come from, the rifling had been fouled
and corroded. The other bullets, he testified, could have been fired
from a Savage, a Steyr, or a Walther. Burns produced six of the eight
bullets he had fired from Sacco’s Colt—the other two, he explained,
he had lost. He pointed out that the lands and grooves were regular
and clean. To the question whether Bullet III had been fired from
Sacco’s pistol his answer was: “In my opinion, no. It doesn’t compare
at all.”
J. Henry Fitzgerald, the second defense expert, backed him up.
Fitzgerald had been twenty-eight years in the weapon business and
was now in charge of the testing room at the Colt Patent Firearms
Company. “Number III bullet was not fired from the Sacco pistol,” he
told the court. “I can see no pitting or marks on bullet Number III
that would correspond with a bullet coming from this gun.”
With these paired contradictions the bullet testimony ended.
Berardelli had owned a 38-caliber Harrison & Richardson revolver.
After his death it could not be found. It was Katzmann’s contention,
underlined in his summing-up, that the revolver found on Vanzetti the
night of his arrest had been lifted by Sacco from the dying detective.
In Dedham Vanzetti was to tell a different story about his revolver
than he had told at the Brockton police station. When he took the
stand he admitted he had lied before, claiming that he had wanted
to protect the friends from whom he had bought the gun. His first
story—that he had bought it five years before his arrest for eighteen
dollars was false; he had really owned it only two or three months,
and he had bought it from Luigi Falzini, an East Boston marble
cutter, who in turn had bought it not long before from Ricardo
Orciani. Instead of paying eighteen dollars for it, Vanzetti had paid
five; he had never fired it; the bullets now in the revolver were
there when he bought it. The reason he had bought it was to protect
himself, for often when he went to buy fish he carried eighty or a
hundred dollars in his pocket, and it was “a bad time, it was many
crimes, many holdups, many robberies.” He did not remember telling
Katzmann in Brockton that he had bought a box of cartridges or that
he had shot off all but six on the beach at Plymouth. If he had said
this, it was not so.
Falzini took the stand after Vanzetti and recognized the revolver as
his because of rust spots and a deep scratch behind the trigger guard
that he had noticed when he bought it. In the time he owned it, he
had never fired it or taken it apart.
For his next corroborating witness Moore brought Rexford Slater
from Dexter, Maine. Before settling in Maine, Slater had worked in
the same Norwood foundry as Orciani. He had bought a Harrington &
Richardson revolver from his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Mogridge, who
happened to bring it with her when she came from Maine on a visit. He
had fired it several times, once killing a cat, and in 1919 had sold
it to Orciani. He recognized it on the stand by the way the nickel
plating had worn off the end of the barrel and over the cylinder. The
holster—picked up by the police in searching Vanzetti’s room—he also
recognized from the brass knob on it, a tear in the back, and a small
side-strap.
Slater was at first an argumentative witness. When Katzmann asked if
another revolver of the same kind fired under the same conditions
might not show the same wear, he denied that any conditions could
ever be the same. As Katzmann kept pressing him, Slater’s confidence
began to wilt. The district attorney asked him if he was not just
guessing, if he was sure that Vanzetti’s revolver was the one that
had belonged to him. “I am sure the same scars as on the gun I sold,
and exactly the same,” Slater answered in syntactical confusion.
Katzmann persisted. “I did not ask you that. Are you sure that is
the same gun?” Slater delayed his answer so long that Judge Thayer
finally rapped out: “Answer the question!”
“I am not,” he admitted.
Eldridge Atwater, Slater’s brother-in-law, took the stand to say
that eight years before he had often borrowed his father-in-law’s
Harrington & Richardson to shoot at bottles and cans. After
Mogridge’s death, his widow had taken the revolver with her when
she went to Norwood to visit her daughter and that was the last
Atwater had ever seen of it. He could not quite bring himself to say
that the revolver exhibited in court was the same one he had fired
seventy-five or a hundred times in Maine. The closest he would come
to it was to say that “as far as those two markings, that is the
revolver Mr. Mogridge had eight years ago.” He had never paid any
attention to the revolver’s serial number.
The missing link in the ownership chain was Orciani. Some months
before the trial he had given up his foundry job to become Moore’s
chauffeur. The fact that he was never called as a witness was not
missed by the jurors. Katzmann in his summing-up made the most of
it. “Why didn’t you bring Orciani into this courtroom?” he demanded
rhetorically. “He has been within the control of this defense. He
has been outside the courtroom, and he is not produced. What is the
reason?”
While there was no one in South Braintree who could say with
certainty that Berardelli had his revolver with him on the day of his
death, his widow testified that he generally carried it. Margaret
Mahoney and the other girls in the Slater & Morrill office had seen
the revolver at various times, and he had even showed it to Jimmy
Bostock the Saturday before the robbery. Bostock knew that it was
nickel-plated and that the guard carried it in his hip pocket, but
what kind it was he did not know. No one had seen the bandits take
anything from Berardelli’s body. Lewis Wade saw the guard reach for
his hip pocket as he was falling, and Peter McCullum saw one of the
bandits holding a “white” revolver in his left hand.
Sarah Berardelli, a sad, illiterate Jewish woman, told what she knew
of her husband’s revolver. It was like Vanzetti’s. Three weeks before
the murder her husband had taken it to Boston to be repaired—it
had a “spring broke.” Sarah had accompanied her husband and they
had gone to a store on Washington Street which—with prompting from
the district attorney—she remembered: the Iver Johnson Company.
Berardelli had been given a claim check. This he turned over to
Parmenter, who then let him take another gun that looked just like
the first. Whether anyone had picked up the gun at Iver Johnson’s,
whether it had come back into her husband’s possession, Sarah
Berardelli did not know.
Lincoln Wadsworth, the clerk in charge of repairs at Iver Johnson’s,
said that according to his records he had received a 38 Harrington
& Richardson, the property of Alex Berardelli, on March 20, 1920,
to which he had given the repair number 94765. George Fitzemeyer,
the gunsmith on the fifth floor, testified that he had been given a
revolver with that repair number sometime between the nineteenth
and the twenty-second of March. He had repaired it and marked it
“H. & R., revolver 32, new hammer, half an hour.” Since he repaired
twenty-five or thirty revolvers a day, he could not be sure of the
caliber of this particular one. On inspecting Vanzetti’s revolver he
said that it had a new hammer. “The firing pin,” he said, “does not
show of ever being struck.” Williams, conducting the questioning,
neglected to ask him whether the Vanzetti revolver was the one he had
repaired.
Fitzemeyer’s testimony about the hammer contradicted that of the
defense ballistics experts, Burns and Fitzgerald. Burns stated that
to the best of his knowledge the hammer was no newer than the rest of
the weapon, but admitted that the revolver “bore little indication
of being fired much.” Fitzgerald maintained that “the hammer in this
revolver has every indication of being as old and used as much as any
other part of the pistol.” Thinking it over, John Dever felt that
Fitzemeyer, with thirty years’ experience taking revolvers apart,
ought to know what he was talking about.
According to James Jones, the manager of the Iver Johnson firearms
department, the gun with repair number 94765 must have been delivered
because it was no longer in the store. When a repaired gun was not
called for in a reasonable time the firm’s policy was to lock it away
until after stocktaking time in January. If still unclaimed, it was
then sold. Iver Johnson kept a record of every sale. There was no
record of Berardelli’s revolver being sold. Unfortunately, records of
delivery were not made, and there seemed to be no written record that
this revolver had been delivered.
If the serial number of the missing revolver had been recorded when
it was left for repair, it could have been determined at once whether
or not Berardelli’s was the one found on Vanzetti—but at this point,
as at so many in the case, the direct proof turned as elusive as a
will-o’-the-wisp.
To Ripley, the jury foreman, Vanzetti’s revolver looked just like the
Harrington & Richardson he himself owned. The last time he had used
it—to fire some blanks at the Quincy firemen’s muster—he had found
three bullets in the cylinder. These he had extracted, putting them
in the vest of the suit he had worn to court. At the next recess,
when he was downstairs in the dormitory, he searched his vest pockets
and found the bullets still there. He later showed them to Hersey and
McNamara, and Dever also had a glimpse of them.
While Ripley was downstairs examining his bullets, Thomas McAnarney
in the upstairs corridor happened to run into Captain Proctor and the
Commissioner of Public Safety, Colonel Alfred Foote, and they chatted
together before court resumed. McAnarney never forgot Proctor’s
parting remark to the commissioner: “These are not the right men. Oh,
no, you haven’t got the right men.”
On Wednesday, June 22, the short opening statement for the defense
was made by William Callahan, who, although he had been dropped as
Vanzetti’s counsel in the Plymouth trial, still remained associated
with Sacco’s defense. Whatever his capacities, he kept the confidence
of both defendants to the end. Moore wanted him, as a local lawyer,
to present the case, and this was one of the few times he emerged
from his background role. Callahan first reminded the jurors that the
defendants were presumed innocent. Then he promised that the defense
would show what Vanzetti was doing on April 15 and would prove that
Sacco was in Boston getting a passport. In addition, the defense
would offer witnesses to show that the men in the South Braintree
bandit car were not Sacco and Vanzetti.
Moore intended to swamp the prosecution with witnesses. After a
protracted exposition by Charles Breed, a civil engineer who had
made maps and photographs of the Pearl Street area for the defense,
Moore produced Edward Carter, a cutter at the lower Slater & Morrill
factory. As the first shots were fired Carter had looked out a window
and up the street to what, until he saw a man drop, he thought was
a bunch of boys fooling. From his distance of eighty yards and with
the sun in his eyes the men had been indistinct. He was unable to say
whether or not the defendants were the men he had seen.
Frank Burke remembered the man in the front seat who had thrust a
pistol in his face as the Buick passed the cobbler’s shop. That man
was “very dark complected and needed a shave very badly.” Burke also
noticed a man with a “short cropped mustache” in the back seat. But
when Callahan asked him if the defendants were the men he had seen
ten feet away in the car, the most he could get Burke to say was: “I
would say they were not.” John Dever was not favorably impressed.
Burke seemed to him to be “altogether too anxious at times to
volunteer information and at other times evasive and vacillating.”
Katzmann wanted to know how Burke knew the car was a Buick. Because,
Burke said, it was like the car belonging to lawyer Callahan in which
he had ridden to court this morning. His powers of observation were
at a discount when it turned out that Callahan’s car was a Hudson.
Albert Frantello, who had run into Parmenter and Berardelli as they
left the Hampton House, recalled that on his way up from the lower
factory he had met two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins pipe
fence. He particularly remembered the dark one in a dark cap who
needed a shave, for he had passed so close he could have touched him.
The other man had a lighter complexion. They were talking to each
other in “the American language,” and he was sure that neither of
them was either of the men in the cage.
As part of his cross-examination Katzmann led Frantello to the jury
box, asked him to observe two jurors, then turn away and describe
them. Although both jurors were clean-shaven, Frantello described one
of them as having a mustache as well as a nonexistent watchchain.
Immediately after the murders he had told Brouillard that the dark
man by the fence was “a regular wop”; now he denied that the man was
an Italian. Whether or not he had told Brouillard that he did not
know the language the men were speaking he could not recall, but
whatever he might have said then, he now insisted that they were
speaking “American.”
Wilfred Pierce and Lawrence Ferguson, shoe-cutters who had been
working with Mark Carrigan on the third floor of the Hampton House,
were no more satisfactory witnesses for the defense than Carrigan
had been for the prosecution. Both had heard the shots and looked
out the window as the touring car crossed the tracks. Both had seen
a dark man climb from the rear seat to the front. Pierce saw him
fire a shot. When asked if the man was either of the defendants, he
would say no more than “I don’t think it was, but I am not positive.”
Ferguson was equally uncertain: “It may or it may not have been.
I don’t know positively.” The most that their testimony seemed to
show—and this by contrast—was the extraordinary vision and tenacious
memory of Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine.
* * * * *
Through the last of June the hot spell was unrelenting. To speed up
the trial Judge Thayer agreed to extend the session from 9 A.M. until
6 P.M., but he rejected the jurors’ suggestion for evening sessions.
The days followed each other torpidly. Sacco and Vanzetti sat upright
in the cage, occasionally whispering to one another; the jurymen sat
fanning themselves. The succession of witnesses accelerated and the
spectators thinned out. Mrs. Evans, the “angel for the radicals” as
the _Post_ called her, continued to write voluminously at her desk.
Her hats changed frequently, her attitude did not.
With June fading, Moore found the defense again in the familiar
position of running short of money. The fifty thousand dollars
collected over the past year was gone, used up in investigations and
fees and a hundred other unavoidable expenses. Judge Thayer offered
to allow the defense to proceed _in forma pauperis_ with some of
their costs home by the Commonwealth, but this humiliation Moore
refused to accept. On June 29 with the defense lacking funds even
to pay witnesses, Mrs. Evans produced $1500 to tide them over for
the week. At the end of the week she added to this all her available
income, $2950, plus $600 contributed by her friends. Mrs. Cerise Jack
handed over $100.
The sixteen-man crew that had been digging the excavation across
the street from Rice & Hutchins and that Mrs. Nichols saw cut and
run when the shooting started could scarcely be considered the most
reliable of witnesses, but Moore with his weight-of-numbers tactics
how brought in five of them, of whom only one could speak English.
William Foley, the driver of a dump truck, had just left the
excavation with a load when the shots rang out and the Buick swayed
up Pearl Street. Foley, headed in the other direction, saw only the
driver clearly and his description of him was unique: “eyeglasses,
short mustache, soft hat, high cheekbones, sallow complexion.” He
also had a glimpse of another man in a cap sitting in the rear seat.
At this point he could not recall the men’s faces, but they were not
the men in the cage. Katzmann, weaving back to Boda, asked Foley
several times if the driver was not wearing a velour hat. Foley
remembered it as a soft hat, but was positive it was not velour. He
admitted that he could not tell whether or not the man in the back
seat was one of the defendants.
Emilio Falcone, who had been shoveling dirt into Foley’s truck just
before the shooting, testified through the court interpreter, Joseph
Ross, who also acted as Judge Thayer’s chauffeur. Falcone thought
that he had been forty or fifty feet away from the shooting, near
enough at least so that he heard Parmenter groan as he dropped. The
man who shot him was “kind of pale, light, pale.” Another man had
picked up the money-box. Under Callahan’s rather fussy questioning
as to whether the two men in the cage resembled the men in the car,
Falcone said they did not. Callahan’s reiterations, doubly tedious
through translation, made Falcone lose his temper. “Well, for God’s
sake,” he replied, “why do you ask me again?”
Three Spaniards who had been working next to Falcone testified
through an interpreter of their own. Pedro Iscorla, on his way to get
a drink of water, had seen a “high, thin, slim, light fellow” shoot
Parmenter and a dark man shoot Berardelli. These men were not the
defendants. Henry Cerro had seen a light gunman who resembled neither
of the defendants. Like Iscorla, Sibriano Guidierris had seen a light
man and a little dark man with a dark cap. Each shot a different man.
Neither gunman resembled the men in the cage.
Moore now brought in eight of the railroad workers who had seen
the Buick pass. They had all noticed the meager light-complexioned
driver and four of them had seen the dark man next to him. All
were positive that the defendants had not been in the car. Nicola
Gatti, one of the workers, had known Sacco in Milford eight years
earlier—the only witness of the crime who had previously known either
of the defendants. In spite of the remonstrances of the foreman, he
had pushed ahead of the others when he heard the shots until as the
Buick passed he was standing just behind the gate-tender. He had been
that close, and he had seen three men distinctly: the pale driver,
the dark man beside him, and a man in the back who was firing a gun.
Sacco was none of these men—nor was Vanzetti.
One of the track workers, Joseph Cellucci, testified in English. He
had recently joined the Navy and appeared on the stand in uniform. As
soon as he had heard the shots he had thrown down his shovel. Ricci,
the foreman, had tried to stop him, but he had ducked away and was
only about five feet from the Buick as it passed. A dark bristly man
half-kneeling between the front and back seats had leveled a revolver
and fired at him, the shot winging so close to his ear that he was
deaf for three days. Cellucci had only a glimpse of the driver but it
was enough to convince him that neither of the prisoners had been in
the getaway car.
Barbara Liscomb, who had looked directly down at the bareheaded
gunman, was considered the star witness for the defense. The
contorted face of the dark man with the pistol who stared up at her
as she stood at a second-floor window of Rice & Hutchins, had made an
imprint in her mind she could never forget. “I would always remember
that face,” she told the court. She was “positively sure” it was not
the face of Sacco or Vanzetti.
Jenny Novelli described the man she had seen in the car who looked so
much like her friend as having “dark hair and a dark complexion, like
a man that has to shave every day.” Neither prisoner was that man.
Just after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Hellyer, the Pinkerton
operative, had shown Mrs. Novelli a photograph of Sacco and she said
it greatly resembled the man next to the driver. She now denied ever
making such a tentative identification. Sacco was not the man.
Hellyer himself would take the stand almost at the end of the trial
and testify that when he interviewed Mrs. Novelli on April 17, 1920,
she had described the man beside the driver as “twenty-seven years,
five feet seven inches tall, slim build, black hair, black eyes, dark
complexion, thin features, wide mouth, smooth-shaven, but appeared
to be a man who could grow a heavy beard from the dark stubble on
his face.” Hellyer’s Pinkerton report, which was not produced in
evidence, recorded a markedly different description of the man: “27
years, 5 feet eight inches, medium build, light brown hair, fair
complexion and smooth shaven, wore a cap but cannot recollect what
else he wore.”
Mrs. Novelli was followed by minor witnesses whose fleeting glimpses,
although not enough to establish much about the other passengers in
the Buick, at least corroborated the now-undisputed fact that the
driver was a pale, fair man. Elmer Chase, who had been loading his
truck in front of the Co-operative Society as the Buick passed, had
looked down at the driver and the bareheaded man next to him. He was
positive that neither of the men he saw that day were the men in the
cage. Walter Desmond, the tobacco salesman who had met and passed the
Buick on his way from Randolph, had seen the pale-faced driver but
scarcely noticed the man next to him. All he could say in court was
that the driver was not one of the defendants. Wilson Dorr, working
in the sandpit with John Lloyd on the Stoughton Post Road, had
seen four “light complected,” men in the Buick as it passed within
twenty-five feet of him. All had looked directly at him. None of them
resembled Sacco or Vanzetti.
* * * * *
It was to be Vanzetti’s claim that he had spent April 15 in North
Plymouth going his usual rounds with his pushcart. Before he
himself took the stand to make this claim, the defense introduced
witnesses to corroborate it. The first was Joseph Rosen, a
thirty-three-year-old cloth peddler from Dorchester.
On the fifteenth Rosen arrived in Plymouth at ten minutes to eight.
After eating breakfast at Ventura’s Restaurant on Court Street, he
had taken the streetcar to North Plymouth, carrying a valise of
men’s suiting and some swatches. He met Vanzetti near Cherry Street
and showed him a piece of blue serge that was enough for a suit.
He offered it cheap because it had a couple of small holes in it.
Vanzetti wanted to let Alfonsina Brini see the cloth. Together Rosen
and Vanzetti walked several blocks to Cherry Court, where the Brinis
had recently moved. Alfonsina knew cloth because she had once worked
in a woolen mill. She felt the material and said it was a good buy.
Vanzetti paid Rosen $12.25, then gave him another fifty cents when
he complained he was losing money. It must have been about twelve
o’clock when they left the Brinis’, for as they came out the whistles
were blowing and people were hurrying home from the Cordage for lunch.
That afternoon Rosen had gone back to the center of Plymouth, peddled
more cloth, stopped in again at Ventura’s, and finally left on the
last train at 6:10. He had got off at Whitman, about halfway between
Plymouth and Braintree, and spent the night in a dollar room at
Littlefield’s Rooming House. The next day he had continued to peddle
his goods in Whitman.
Katzmann spent an afternoon cross-examining Rosen, using the old
legal trick known as taking the witness over the hurdles. Where, the
district attorney asked Rosen, had he been on May 15, 1920; June 15,
1920; April 15, 1921; May 15, 1921, June 15, 1921?
Rosen could not say, but he maintained he had particular reasons
for remembering April 15, 1920. In the morning his wife had paid
his delinquent 1918 poll tax and when he returned home next day
she had given him the dated and receipted bill he now produced in
court. Also, the evening of the fifteenth “it was all boiling” in
Whitman about the South Braintree murders. Lillian Shuler, who ran
Littlefield’s Rooming House, later corroborated Rosen by producing a
record of having rented him a room the night of the fifteenth.
When Vanzetti’s picture was published in the papers after his arrest
and Rosen saw it and the words “fish peddler,” it reminded him of the
day he sold the piece of blue cloth to the Italian in North Plymouth.
He went to ask Alfonsina Brini about the matter the next time he
happened to be in Plymouth, and it was through her that he came into
the case.
Alfonsina herself again appeared to testify for her old friend.
Katzman had agreed not to refer to the Plymouth trial in return
for the defense’s renouncing any evidence as to the peaceful and
law-abiding reputation of the defendants. Regardless, in his
summing-up he called Alfonsina “a stock, convenient and ready witness
as well as friend who ... in another case when another date was
alleged, testified to the whereabouts of this same Vanzetti on that
other date there involved.”
Alfonsina told much the same story that Rosen had told of the two
men coming in to show her the damaged cloth. She recalled the date
as the fifteenth because she had been ailing at the time and Dr.
Shurtleff had come from Plymouth to see her on the fourteenth and
sixteenth. In between those visits the Cordage nurse had called.
Gertrude Matthews, a nurse at the Plymouth Cordage Company, said she
had visited Alfonsina between the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth
but could not recall the exact dates. LeFavre Brini, Alfonsina’s
daughter, told of Vanzetti’s coming to their house at about ten
o’clock the morning of the fifteenth with some fish which he had
left in the sink. He had come back about noon with a peddler and she
saw him hand a length of cloth to her mother. She recalled the date
because her mother had been in the hospital and it was just a week
after she had had to quit her own job at the Gorton-Pew Fisheries to
care for her.
Angelo Guidobone, a rug-weaver who lived in Suosso’s Lane, told
through an interpreter of buying some codfish from Vanzetti during
the lunch hour. He remembered it was Thursday the fifteenth because
on the nineteenth he had had his appendix removed. When Katzmann
asked him if he could not have bought his fish on the thirteenth or
the fourteenth, Guidobone said that he bought fish fresh on Thursday
to eat on Friday. “Do you think I keep fish in the house for a week?”
he asked the district attorney indignantly.
Melvin Corl, a Plymouth fisherman from whom Vanzetti some times
bought his supplies, recalled April 15 as the day he had been
painting his boat at Jesse’s Boatyard. About two o’clock Vanzetti had
come down to the water’s edge and stopped to talk with him, saying
that the fish business was so bad he was thinking of looking for
another job. Corl remembered the date because he had planned to put
his boat in the water the next day; however, he had not managed to
finish it until two days later—the seventeenth, his wife’s birthday.
On that same day, the seventeenth, he had towed a boat belonging to
Joseph Morey from Duxbury to Plymouth.
Frank Jesse, the boatyard owner, remembered seeing Corl painting his
boat and Vanzetti standing talking to him, but he could not recall
the date. Joseph Morey testified that Corl had towed his boat on the
seventeenth; he remembered the date because it was two days before
Patriot’s Day. Under cross-examination he admitted that he and Mrs.
Corl had talked it over and finally decided that the seventeenth must
have been the date. Katzmann finally edged him into admitting that
neither he nor Corl was completely sure.
John Dever was not sure either. Corl at first had seemed convincing,
but Dever now felt that if these people could not be certain about a
date, they could not be certain about anything.
* * * * *
For several days Jerry McAnarney had noticed among the courtroom
spectators a man with a high forehead, long nose, and drooping
mustache so combined that he could have served as Vanzetti’s double.
He turned out to be an unemployed Italian named Joseph Scavitto who
had known Sacco slightly, and who, having nothing else to do, was
spending his days at the trial. Jerry sent him, with a borrowed
hat that intensified his resemblance to Vanzetti, to have some
photographs made. If witnesses like Austin Cole could be persuaded
to identify Scavitto from a photograph as the man they had seen, it
might do much to establish Vanzetti’s alibi.
Nothing came of the idea, but Scavitto’s appearance in court resulted
in a comic interlude. Asked on the stand what his business was, he
replied that he was in the mosaic business. Asked where his place of
business was, he answered: “I ain’t got no business.” From the flat
pages of the record it is hard to determine just why his appearance
and his explanation caused so much amusement, but according to the
_Herald_, when he told of picking up someone else’s hat “the court
filled with laughter.”
* * * * *
It would have been logical for Vanzetti to have followed his alibi
witnesses to the stand. However, they had concluded on Friday, July
1, and with the Fourth coming on Monday, Moore did not want to
have Vanzetti’s testimony interrupted by the holiday week end. In
his place several witnesses were introduced to account for Sacco’s
whereabouts on the day of the murders.
The first, John Williams, a mild-looking advertising agent, said
that he had met Sacco in Boston on April 15 between 1:15 and 1:30
at Boni’s Restaurant in North Square. He had gone into Boni’s for
lunch and had seen an acquaintance, Professor Guadagni, sitting at
a table with a stranger whom he introduced as Nick Sacco. Guadagni
had finished his meal and was smoking a cigar. As the three talked
together, Sacco said he planned to go back to Italy and was going to
get his passport that afternoon.
Williams, who sold advertising space in several foreign-language
newspapers, including _La Notizia_, was well known in Boston. It was
not so well known that he was a left-wing socialist and had been an
associate of Trotsky and Bukharin in New York in 1917. Every Thursday
he made the rounds of the small North End factories soliciting
help-wanted ads for the Saturday editions. On April 15, according
to his advertising book, he had taken an order from the Washington
Knitting Mills. Later in the afternoon he had gone uptown to see his
doctor, Howard Gibbs, who was treating him for asthma.
After the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Felicani asked Williams if he
remembered seeing Professor Guadagni and Sacco at Boni’s. Williams
said he did. Felicani then asked him if he realized this was the
date of the South Braintree crime. Williams had not thought of it,
but checking back in his advertising book to the Washington Knitting
Mills order, he found it was so. Felicani and Williams felt that this
fixed Sacco in Boston instead of in South Braintree. As Williams
explained it in court: “The fact that I secured this order and the
fact that I met this young man down there, and the fact that he
was said to be going for his passport; all of those things brought
a sequence of events back to me, and I recalled the incident very
easily.”
Under Katzmann’s cross-examination Williams could not remember the
dates of other visits to his doctor, or any advertisements he had
taken on April 14, or any other occasions when he had met Guadagni.
However, Dr. Gibbs testified that although he treated Williams
regularly, he had seen him only once in April and that was on the
fifteenth.
Albert Bosco, one of the editors of _La Notizia_, was another witness
who claimed to have seen Sacco in the restaurant. Bosco was already
at Boni’s with a man named Reffi when Guadagni came in with Sacco and
introduced him as “the man that is going to Italy.” Then Guadagni
talked about the banquet that the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett
Street were giving at their priory that same day in honor of James T.
Williams, Jr., editor of the Boston _Transcript_, whom the Italian
government had just made a _Commandante_ in recognition of his war
work. The next day Bosco published an account of the banquet in _La
Notizia_—and also ran a story about the South Braintree killings.
When Guadagni spoke to him after the arrests about his meeting with
Sacco, Bosco went to the newspaper files and found that the banquet
they had discussed in Boni’s restaurant had been held on April 15.
Another witness, a contractor named Angelo Monello, had known Sacco
for several months before his arrest. On April 15, just before
noon, they had run into each other on Hanover Street. Monello had
the date fixed in his mind because on Sunday the eighteenth he had
tickets for _Madame X_, playing at the Tremont Theatre with the great
Italian artist Mimi Aguglia. Both he and Sacco were amateur actors
and belonged to dramatic clubs, and they had talked about the play.
Katzmann at once took Monello over the hurdles, asking if he had
talked with anyone about the play on April 16, 17, 13, 12, 19, 21,
28. All Monello could say was that he did not remember.
Michael Kelley and his son Leon appeared willingly as witnesses
for Sacco, but because of the agreement of counsel they were not
allowed—as they had intended—to testify as to his character. Katzmann
hovered over any such mention with an instant objection. Michael
Kelley managed to say, however, that he trusted Sacco with the keys
to the Three-K factory and that every night the place had been in
his hands. Early in the spring Sacco had shown Michael Kelley a
black-bordered letter saying that his mother had died. The letter,
from Sacco’s father, begging him to come home, was then translated to
the jury.
District Attorney Williams now read a deposition by Giuseppe Adrower,
made in Rome. In April 1920, Adrower was a clerk in the Italian
consulate in Boston. Sacco, he deposed, had appeared early in April
about a passport and had been told to come back with two photographs.
On April 15 he had returned with an oversize family photograph.
Adrower remembered the date because it was “a very quiet day in
the Royal Italian Consulate and since such a large photograph had
never before been presented for use on a passport I took it in and
showed it to the Secretary of the Consulate. We laughed and talked
over the incident. I remember observing the date in the office of
the Secretary on a large pad calendar while we were discussing the
photograph. The hour was around two or a quarter after two, as I
remember about a half an hour later I locked the door of the office
for the day.” When Professor Guadagni came to the consulate the
week after the arrests to ask about the incident, Adrower could not
remember Sacco, but after Guadagni showed him the oversize photograph
he remembered both it and the date and had no doubt about either.
The written cross-interrogatory contained the by-now-familiar
Katzmann hurdles. Adrower had stated that between a hundred fifty
and two hundred people a day came to the consulate to inquire about
passports. He was asked to give the name of each person he talked
with on April 17, 19, 21, 24, 29, and May 2, 3, and 4. He could not
remember their names. He was then asked to describe every person with
whom he talked on those days. “I cannot describe them in detail,”
he admitted. In the defense’s redirect interrogatory, Adrower stated
that although many people appeared at the consulate with family group
photographs, none had ever brought in such a large one as Sacco
produced.
Friday’s last new witness was Dominic Ricci, a carpenter living in
a boarding house in South Stoughton, not far from Sacco’s bungalow.
He had known Sacco several years. The morning of April 15, he said,
he had seen Sacco on the Stoughton railroad platform at about
half-past seven and Sacco had told him he was going to Boston to get
a passport. Next day, seeing Sacco in the Three-K factory at eight
o’clock, Ricci had talked with him about the newspaper accounts of
the South Braintree murders.
Katzmann, with deceiving gentleness, asked Ricci if he had worked
on the eighteenth. Ricci said he had. Katzmann asked him about the
twenty-fifth, May 2, May 9, 16, 23, 30, and June 6, consulting
a pocket diary each time he asked. A titter spread through the
courtroom as the realization came that each of these dates was a
Sunday. The realization did not come as quickly to the embarrassed
Ricci. Katzmann continued leading him on a trail of Sundays through
the rest of the year, finally closing his diary with mock weariness
and smiling ironically at the bewildered Italian. “I have got to the
end of my calendar. You worked every Sunday, didn’t you, from then
on? That is all.”
George Kelley now reappeared briefly to say that on April 16 he had
got to the factory at seven in the morning and Sacco had already been
working there three-quarters of an hour.
* * * * *
Friday evening about ten o’clock, long after the courthouse gate had
been bolted and the jury locked in for the night, John Drummond, the
courthouse janitor, heard a noise in the library and found Jerry
McAnarney lying collapsed on the center table. One of the deputy
sheriffs drove him back to Quincy. Actually, Jerry was malingering
to give Moore an extra day he claimed he needed for tracking down a
new witness. Next morning Thomas McAnarney told Judge Thayer that
his brother was under a doctor’s care and asked for a postponement.
Thayer adjourned the court until Tuesday, July 5.
The prospect of the long week end dismayed the jurors, most of whom
had hoped to be back with their families by the Fourth. However, they
felt somewhat more cheerful after Judge Thayer told the sheriff to
see that they were taken on an outing over the holiday. When John
Dever heard that after a month of sitting still they were going to
the beach, he felt the way he used to when the circus came to town.
The rest of Saturday the jurors spent as usual—playing cards,
talking, reading the cut-up remains of the newspapers, and going out
to meals. Sunday afternoon they went on their usual ride, this time
through Wellesley and the Newtons.
Monday morning, after breakfast at the Dedham Inn, they went by bus
to the wooden-turreted Cliff House at North Scituate. There they sat
in rocking chairs on the wide veranda, looking out over the sea and
enjoying the breeze until their shore dinner was ready. Dever long
remembered that meal—clams and lobsters and more lobsters. George
Gerard, the Stoughton photographer, had a Graflex with him. He had
been born in Paris, and the others kidded him at the table, telling
him it was too bad he couldn’t go down on the beach and take French
pictures of the girls. During the afternoon Sheriff Capen produced a
fishpole for each man and they sat on the rocks in the sun, joking
and fishing.
It was almost dark by the time they got back to the courthouse. Dever
felt contented even though his face and arms were red and the skin
tingled on the back of his neck. As he went up the courthouse steps
he noticed fireflies zigzagging about.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] The six Winchester shells found on Sacco in the police station
were of this same obsolete type, a parallel overlooked by the
prosecution and barely hinted at by the defense during the trial but
emphasized later.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TRIAL: III
On July 5 Jerry McAnamey resumed his place within the bar enclosure.
Attendance had fallen off in the last week, but on this Tuesday
morning every seat was occupied in anticipation of the defendants’
taking the stand. The first witness was Aldeah Florence of Quincy,
with whom Sarah Berardelli had boarded after her husband’s death.
Testifying for the defense, she said that Sarah had told her a few
days after her husband’s funeral that he might still be alive if only
he had not left his revolver in the repair shop. Her examination and
cross-examination lasted less than ten minutes. Then came a pause,
with Moore and the McAnameys whispering together, while the district
attorney stood by, smiling knowingly.
Finally Jerry McAnamey turned toward the cage and asked “Will the
defendant Vanzetti be brought forward?” A murmur ran through the
courtroom. It was the moment that everyone had been awaiting since
the beginning of the trial. A deputy unlocked the metal door.
Quietly, Vanzetti stepped forward and raised his hand in oath before
Clerk Worthington. The receding hairline of his domed forehead, the
wrinkles around his eyes, the slight sag of flesh under his chin,
above all his drooping mustache, made him look at least fifteen years
older than thirty-three. He was dressed neatly in a dark suit, white
shirt, high stiff collar, and black bow tie. On the stand he told
his story in an assured manner, using few gestures, answering all
questions without hesitation.
Guided by Jerry McAnamey, he told briefly of his early life, then of
his years of wandering until he ended up with the Brinis in Plymouth.
The rest had by now become a familiar story. On April 15, he said, he
had been peddling fish in North Plymouth. Almost at the corner of
Castle Street he had met Rosen with his bolt of cloth and they had
gone to the Brinis’ together. About one o’clock he had sold all his
fish and was going down Ocean Street with his empty pushcart when he
saw Mr. Corl painting his boat. He stopped to talk with him and while
they were talking Mr. Jesse, the boatbuilder, came along, and also
a Mr. Holmes from the lumberyard. They chatted a while, and after
he left Mr. Corl he had gone home with his pushcart, changed his
clothes, and cooked his evening meal. What he had done that evening
he did not now remember. The next morning he went to Marvelli’s
store to buy a Boston _Post_ and find out what time the tide would
be low so that he could dig clams. He dug clams most of the day and
afterward sold them. On April 17 in the morning he tried to get a
job at the garage they were building in front of the carbarn. There
was no work there, however, so in the afternoon he took the train to
Whitman and from there the streetcar to Brockton where he had eaten
supper with a friend named Caldera and afterward gone on to Boston.
He stayed overnight with a friend, Vincent Colarossi, and next
morning, Sunday, had breakfast with him and Felicani in Scollay
Square; later they had dinner at Boni’s with a group of friends. They
spent the afternoon at the Naturalization Club in East Boston and at
the end of the day Vanzetti had gone back to Plymouth.
On Monday he went around Plymouth looking without success for a job.
The next day he tried to get fish from Antonio Carbone down on the
pier, but fish seemed as scarce as jobs. He was at Carbone’s house
that evening paying a bill for fish and Carbone had just given him
two cigars when Chief of Police Armstrong came in to tell them an
Italian fisherman named Pacci had drowned. Two days later Vanzetti
happened to visit the dock, and there was a dory near the wharf with
Pacci’s body in it and the undertaker’s car waiting on the siding. He
told the men in the dory it would be easier if they brought the body
to the shore and took it up the three cement steps to Water Street.
All that week he could find neither work nor fish. On Saturday he
went to Boston, again staying with Colarossi. At their Sunday meeting
in the Naturalization Club his friends asked him to go to New York on
their affairs and he left that night. Three days later he returned,
coming back on the Providence boat.
May Day found him again in Boston with Colarossi, and the next day
there was the usual get-together at the Naturalization Club. Monday
morning he spent at the fish piers; everywhere he went he found the
prices too high. In the afternoon he took the train to Stoughton and
stayed overnight at Sacco’s house. Next day he spent around the house
while Sacco went to Boston to pick up his passport. In the evening
Sacco came back with Orciani on the latter’s motorcycle, and the
three of them agreed to meet the following day.
That last day he and Sacco cut wood while Rosina packed. Just by
chance he had pocketed four shotgun shells he found on Sacco’s
kitchen cabinet.[10] Vanzetti told in detail about the evening of May
5: how Orciani, with Boda, had gone on ahead, and how he had composed
a notice for the next Sunday’s meeting. Sacco had thought the notice
too long, so he had cut out some of it. Although they had agreed to
meet Orciani and Boda at Elm Square, there was no sign of them when
they arrived. Only when they were walking over the railroad bridge
near Simon Johnson’s house had they seen the motorcycle coming along
from Brockton.
After talking about the license plates with Johnson they had given up
their project. Boda had then told Vanzetti: “I and Orciani go with
the machine and you take a car and you go home. We will look for a
new number. When I am ready I will tell you and we will come here
some other day. We will come to take the automobile.”
They had needed the automobile “to carry books and newspapers.”
As Vanzetti vaguely explained it, they planned to collect this
unspecified material “from any house and from any house in five or
six places, five or six towns. Three, five or six people have plenty
of literature, and we went, we intend to take that out and put that
in the proper place ... not subject to policemen go in and call for,
see the literature, see the papers, see the books, as in that time
they went through in the house of many men who were active in the
radical movement and socialist and labor movement, and go then and
take letters and take books and take newspapers, and put men in jail
and deported many.”
Everyone in the courtroom from Judge Thayer to the defendants
themselves knew that this was the great divide. In these few
sentences the issue of radicalism, moving so long just below the
surface, finally emerged. Katzmann at once objected, and his
objection was a warning to the defense. The district attorney was
perfectly willing to avoid any reference to the political views of
the two anarchists if the defense would agree to do the same. For
the latter it was a peculiar dilemma. Moore was aware of the latent
syllogism that the jurors no doubt then shared with most native-born
Americans. An anarchist is capable of anything; Sacco and Vanzetti
are anarchists; Sacco and Vanzetti are capable of anything: _Q.E.D._
Yet to go along with the district attorney, to gloss over the
defendants’ political beliefs, would be to destroy any explanation
except that of consciousness of guilt for their actions on the night
of their arrest.
Before Vanzetti took the stand, Judge Thayer had advised the
McAnameys that they had better consider whether or not they were
going to inject the radical issue into the trial. Moore insisted
there was no alternative. John McAnamey told his brothers the same
thing: that the defendants would have to tell about their connection
with the radical movement fully and frankly. Only thus could they
account for their equivocal behavior.
When Vanzetti from the stand finally pronounced the words _radical
movement_, John McAnamey was just leaving the courtroom. “As I
was passing out,” he testified six years later before the Lowell
Committee, “Judge Thayer looking over to me, well in his peculiar way
of laughing or smiling, sort of threw back his head as much as to
say, ‘Well you see Mr. McAnamey it is coming out.’ That is what he
was telling me by his facial gesture. That stands out clearly in my
mind. The government would have wanted that kept out of the case I am
thoroughly satisfied because how could the men explain the facts?”
Vanzetti admitted he had been in West Bridgewater once, six years
before his arrest, but said he had never been there again until May
5. He had never been to East Braintree, had never asked directions
of a stranger on the South Shore train, and he had not been in South
Braintree on April 15, 1920. When Jerry McAnamey asked him why he had
lied to Chief Stewart in the Brockton police station he answered:
“Because I was scared to give the names and addresses of my friends
as I know that almost all of them have some books and some newspapers
in their house by which authority take a reason for arresting them
and deport them.”
The direct examination continued until midafternoon. Then the
district attorney took over with a cross-examination that was to
last through the following morning. For this climax Katzmann pushed
Williams aside and took full command. His first question was barbed.
“So you left Plymouth, Mr. Vanzetti, in May 1917, to dodge the
draft, did you?” All that Vanzetti could answer was “Yes, sir.”
Katzmann made him admit that he had run away so that he would not
have to be a soldier.
“If I refused to go to war,” the nettled Vanzetti told his
interrogator, “I don’t refuse because I don’t like this country or I
don’t like the people of this country. I will refuse even if I was
in Italy and you tell me it is a long time I am in this country,
and I tell you that in this country as long time I am, that I found
plenty good people and some bad people, but that I was always working
hard as a man can work, and I have always lived very humble and—”
Katzmann, who had allowed him to go on that far, now demanded that
the answer be stricken out.
Vanzetti’s story shaped itself awkwardly through the counterpoint of
questions and answers. Katzmann hinted that when he was working on
the railroad at Springfield he had driven a truck. Vanzetti agreed
that there were trucks used, but denied he had ever driven one—he did
not know how to drive, still did not know. The district attorney then
asked him what he had really intended to do the night he and Sacco
had gone to West Bridgewater. To John Dever the answer did not seem
very cohesive: “We want to take the automobile, and then my intention
is to take the automobile with Boda, because I do not know how to
drive the automobile, to go to Bridgewater and if we will be able to
find the party, because I do not remember the address of the party.
I do not know exactly where he lived. We will tell to Pappi about
telling the Italian people of Bridgewater to come in Brockton next
Sunday at the speech, and after I found Pappi, and speak to Pappi, go
toward Plymouth and speak with my friends if I can find some friends
who want to take the responsibility of receiving such books in their
house, in his house.”
Vanzetti admitted that he had lied to Katzmann in the Brockton
station the morning after his arrest, even after the district
attorney had told him he was not compelled to answer questions. He
had lied about his revolver, about buying the cartridges and firing
them, about knowing Boda, about the motorcycle. “I was scared,” he
explained. Admitting that most of these lies would not have helped
conceal the names and addresses of his friends, he still insisted
that he had lied because he had been frightened about his friends’
safety and because Salsedo’s death in New York had made him afraid of
the police.
Katzmann hemmed him in, getting him to say there were half a dozen
people in Bridgewater from whom they were planning to collect
literature, forcing him to confess he knew none of their names. The
district attorney then questioned him about his stay in Mexico,
leading quietly up to the thundering demand: “And are you the man,
Mr. Vanzetti, that on May ninth was going to advise in public meeting
men who had gone to war? Are you that man?”
“Yes, sir,” Vanzetti told him. “I am that man, not the man you want
me, but I am that man.”
When Vanzetti had first been questioned in Brockton he could not
recall anything specific that he had been doing on April 15. Katzmann
now wanted to know how he could recall so much of that day fifteen
months later. It was, Vanzetti told him, because in Brockton he had
no idea he was going to be charged with murder. But “three or four
weeks after my arrest I understand enough to see that I have to be
very careful to save my life and my liberty and I have to remember.”
Thinking back, he was able to reconstruct most of the day by checking
with what he had been doing on the following Monday, Patriot’s Day,
and on other days. As for the night of his arrest, he had planned to
go on to Plymouth with Boda in the Overland. Sacco and Orciani were
to go back to Stoughton, and he had not expected to see Sacco again.
When asked again about the literature they planned to collect, he
said there must have been four or five hundred pounds of it, and that
he had been told by his friends in New York to get rid of it. In a
brief re-examination Vanzetti said again that when he was arrested he
had thought it was because of political matters since he was asked
“if I am a Socialist, if I am an I.W.W., if I am a Communist, if I am
a Radical, if I am a Blackhand.”
Through a day and a half the district attorney flashed questions
at Vanzetti so fast that his acquired English collapsed. Still, he
managed to keep his calm manner. Such self-control would be beyond
Sacco’s capacities. For a year now he had fretted in the Dedham jail,
and a month’s submission to the routine of the courtroom had brought
him close to the point of explosion—as the experienced Katzmann well
realized.
After Vanzetti was released from the stand, Simon Johnson returned to
answer a few questions about Boda’s Overland. This ended the morning
session. At the beginning of the afternoon session, at a word from
Moore, Sacco with one quick backward look at his wife stepped to the
stand.
In spite of his jail pallor and his thinning hair, Sacco still
kept an appearance of youth. Although born only three years after
Vanzetti, he seemed a generation younger. He was dressed in a neat
dark suit, a white shirt, and a black string tie. The _Post_
reporter found his appearance “frank and open.” He seemed glad
finally to be able to tell his story.
With Moore guiding him, he gave the matter-of-fact details of his
childhood in Torremaggiore, then told of his early longing to go
to America. “I was crazy to come to this country,” he explained,
“because I was liked a free country, call a free country.” It was a
fateful remark.
After Sacco’s arrival in America there were the years of odd jobs
before he learned a trade, there was his marriage, and finally there
was the black-edged letter from his father that made him decide to
go back to Italy. Only in passing did Sacco mention that he had left
the United States in June 1917 and returned sometime in August. All
this was just a preliminary to the history of April 15, 1920. That
day, according to his account, he left Stoughton on the 8:56 A.M.
train for Boston to go to the Italian consulate and apply for a
_foglio di via_, a one-way passport to Italy. He arrived at the South
Station and walked from there along Atlantic Avenue to the North
End. On Prince Street he bought a copy of _La Notizia_ and spent
some time reading it. Then he walked down Hanover Street, turned the
corner, and ran into his friend Angelo Monello. Together they walked
to Washington Street; Sacco continued alone, looking in the store
windows and pricing the new suits and straw hats. The morning was
getting on, and he thought he might as well have lunch and see about
his passport afterward.
As he was going in to Boni’s Restaurant he met Professor Guadagni,
and they sat down at a table together. Albert Bosco was already
there, and later Mr. Williams, the advertising man, joined them.
Sacco stayed about an hour and afterward went uptown to the consulate
on Berkeley Street. Arriving there at two, he said to the clerk, “I
like to get a passport for my whole family. He asked me—he said,
‘You bring picture?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ so I gave it to him, see a big
picture. He says, ‘Well, I am sorry. This picture is too big.’
‘Well,’ I says, ‘can you cut and make him small?’ he said, ‘the
picture we cannot use, because it goes too big.’ I says, ‘Can you
cut?’ He says, ‘No, no use, because got to make a photograph just for
the purpose for the passport, small very small.’”
After a quarter of an hour at the consulate he went back to the North
End, dropped in at a café for a cup of coffee, and met Professor
Guadagni again with a Professor Dentamore. Then he went over to a
store on the other side of North Square to buy some groceries. Some
time in the afternoon he met a man named Afa—that was the way he
thought the name was spelled—and paid him fifteen dollars he owed
him. A little after four he took the train for Stoughton and arrived
there about six. On the way home he stopped off at the drugstore and
bought some elixir for a physic.
Sacco was interrupted by a wrangle between Moore and Judge Thayer
when Moore tried to bring in the details of the April 25 meeting at
the Naturalization Club, “to lay a foundation for the explanation
of the subsequent acts of the defendants.” Thayer ruled that the
subsequent acts must be proved before any explanation could be
offered, and the two debated noisily. When Sacco was finally allowed
to continue, he told how on May 4 he had gone to Boston for the last
time to pick up his passport. He had then taken the elevated to Hyde
Park to see Orciani. The two met on River Street, went to Orciani’s
house for the motorcycle, and then drove to Sacco’s home.
Sacco was more explicit than Vanzetti about why they had gone to West
Bridgewater the following evening. “We decided in the meeting in
Boston to get those books and papers,” he told the court, “because in
New York there was somebody said they were trying to arrest all the
socialists and the radicals and we were afraid to get all the people
arrested, so we were advised by some friends and we find out and
Vanzetti take the responsibility to go over to the friends to get the
books out and get no trouble. The literature, I mean, the socialist
literature.”
The dark cap that had been picked up near Berardelli’s body was
produced and Sacco tried it on. He said it was too small—and so it
seemed in the courtroom sketches made by the _Post_ cartoonist,
Norman (W. Norman Ritchie). With regard to the Colt taken from him
at the Brockton police station, he explained that his wife had found
it in a bureau drawer along with some bullets while she was cleaning
up, and asked him what he was going to do with it. “I said, ‘Well, I
go to shoot in the woods, me and Vanzetti.’ So I did. I took it in my
pocket. I put the revolver over here and the bullets in my pocket,
in my pocket back. Well, we started to talk in the afternoon, me and
Vanzetti, and half past four Orciani and Boda came over to the house,
so we started an argument and I forgot about to go in the woods
shooting, so it was still left in my pocket.” The bullets he had
bought on Hanover Street in 1917 or 1918.
His story of the trip to West Bridgewater and the subsequent arrest
and questioning did not differ greatly from Vanzetti’s, although
Sacco told in more detail of the identification witnesses coming to
the Brockton station. In the conclusion of his direct examination he
maintained that he had not been in South Braintree on April 15, 1920,
and that he had never made an attack on anyone or participated in any
crime, then or at any other date.
“Did you say you love a free country?” was Katzmann’s first rapier
question. And when Sacco answered yes, the district attorney thrust
again. “Did you love this country in the month of May 1917?” “I do
not say,” Sacco told him, “I don’t want to say I did not love this
country.” The other insisted. “Did you love this country in the month
of May 1917?” “If you can, Mr. Katzmann, if you give me that—I could
explain—” The district attorney had the Italian in the corner. “Do
you understand that question? Then you will please answer it.” “I
can’t answer it in one word,” Sacco insisted.
Katzmann’s voice was crusty with disbelief. “You can’t say whether
you loved the United States of America one week before the day to
enlist for the first draft?” “I can’t say in one word, Mr. Katzmann,”
Sacco replied.
“Did you,” the district attorney finally asked him, “go away to
Mexico to avoid being a soldier for this country that you loved?”
Sacco breathed deeply before he said “Yes.”
“And is that your idea of showing your love for this country?”
The other hesitated. He knew what he wanted to say but there was no
way for him to say it, no means to surmount the barrier of this alien
tongue. “Is that your idea of showing your love for America?” the
contemptuous voice persisted. “Yes,” Sacco said, and again he found
himself saying what he had not meant, what he did not want to say, to
the courtly, smiling district attorney.
It was question and answer, cat and mouse:
“Do you think it is a brave thing to do what you did?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think it would be a brave thing to go away from your own wife
when she needed you?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you stay down in Mexico?”
“Well, first thing, I could not get my trade there. I had to do any
other job.”
“Why didn’t you stay down there, down in that free country, and work
with a pick and shovel?”
“I don’t think I did sacrifice to learn a job to go pick and shovel
in Mexico.”
“Is it because—is your love for the United States of America
commensurate with the amount of money you can get in this country
per week?”
“Better conditions, yes.”
“Better country to make money, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Sacco, that is the extent of your love for this country, isn’t
it, measured in dollars and cents?”
Jerry McAnarney kept objecting to such questioning. “You opened up
this whole subject,” Judge Thayer told him.
When McAnarney continued his objections, Thayer asked, “Is it not
your claim that the defendant wanted the automobile to prevent people
from being deported and to get this literature all out of the way?
Does he not claim that this was done in the interest of the United
States, to prevent violation of the law by the distribution of this
literature?”
The amazed McAnarney replied that the defense had taken no such
position. All they claimed was “that this man and Vanzetti were of
the class called socialists, that riot was running a year ago last
April, that men were being deported, that twelve to fifteen hundred
were seized in Massachusetts.”
Thayer returned to the theme. “Are you going to claim that what the
defendant did was in the interest of the United States to prevent
further crimes from being committed by the authorities?”
“Your Honor please,” Jerry McAnarney replied. “I now object to your
Honor’s statement as prejudicial to the rights of the defendants and
ask that this statement be withdrawn from the jury.”
Thayer denied any such effect. “There is no prejudicial remark made
that I know of, and none were intended. I simply asked you, sir,
whether you propose to offer evidence as to what you said to me.”
A lengthy dispute ensued, Katzmann defending his cross-examination
as “tending to attack the credibility of this man as a witness.”
Over Moore’s loudly voiced objections Judge Thayer decided to let
the district attorney question Sacco further as to what he meant by
loving a free country.
Frank Sibley, writing with the afternoon deadline only a few minutes
away, pricked up his ears at the “interest of the United States.” He
could scarcely believe it when he heard the judge’s caustic voice ask
about preventing crimes from being committed “by the authorities.”
Before he had a chance to think twice, the telegraph boy had taken
away the yellow sheet of paper with the phrase on it. The phrase
appeared in the evening _Globe_. When Sibley wrote his more extended
story for the next morning’s edition he omitted it. “I couldn’t
credit my remembrance, and so did not use the vicious sentence,”
he wrote Attorney General J. Weston Allen a few months later. His
colleague Shea of the _Post_ had also picked up the remark and used
it.
The next day Judge Thayer summoned Sibley to his chambers and angrily
insisted that he said no such thing. Sibley, having consulted with
Shea, refused to back down even when shown that the transcript of
the court stenographic notes did not contain the phrase. Just then
a bailiff appeared to announce the arrival of the jury, and Thayer
huffily broke off the conversation.
As the cross-examination continued, Sacco found himself caught in
a web of words of which he could see each strand as it formed,
from which he knew he could break out if only they would let him.
But always it was the _yes_ or _no_ answer demanded, always the
cutting-off of his explanation, that made it seem as if he had come
back from Mexico merely to eat better food and to make more money and
to be with his wife and speak a more familiar language. “Food, wife,
language, industry—that is love of country, is it?” Katzmann asked
him, and he found himself answering yes. The rules, the thin threads
of questions twisted about him, smothering his replies. He could feel
the anger of frustration pulsing through him at the reiterations.
Deftly the district attorney led him into the trap.
“What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a free country?”
“First thing I came to this country—”
“No, pardon me. What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a
free country?”
“Give me a chance to explain.”
“I am asking you to explain now.”
Suddenly Sacco felt himself clear of the web, standing free at
last with his own thoughts. The frustrations of his arrest and
imprisonment, the long months in jail, the legal niceties that had
sealed his mouth in the courtroom, now found violent relief in a
cascade of words. As he talked on, his wiry body seemed to grow
tense and his eyes snapped fire. At first some of the jurors smiled,
but before he had finished everyone in the courtroom was listening
intently.
“When I was in Italy, a boy,” he began, “I was a republican, so I
always thinking republicans has more chance to manage education,
develop, to build some day his family, to raise the child and
education, if you could. But that was my opinion; so when I came here
to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before,
but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy
not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there
just as well.... Of course, over here there is good food, because
it is bigger country, to any those who got money to spend, not for
the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to
laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh.... When I been started work
here very hard and been work thirteen years, hard worker, I could
not put any money in the bank. I could no push my boy some to go to
school and other things.... I could see the best men, intelligent,
education, they been arrested and sent to prison and died in prison
for years and years without getting them out, and Debs, one of the
great men in his country, he is in prison, still away in prison,
because he is a socialist. He wanted the laboring classes to have
better conditions and better living, more education, give a push his
son if he could have a chance some day, but they put him in prison.
Why? Because the capitalist class, they know, they are against that,
because the capitalist class, they don’t want our child to go to
high school or to college or Harvard College. There would not be
no chance, there would not be no—they don’t want the working class
educationed; they want the working class to be a low all the times,
be underfoot, and not to be up with the head. So, sometimes, you
see, the Rockefellers, Morgans, they give fifty—mean they give five
hundred thousand dollars to Harvard College, they give a million
dollars for another school. Everybody say, ‘Well, D. Rockefeller is
a great man, the best in the country.’ I want ask him who is going
to Harvard College? What benefit the working class they will get by
those million dollars they give by Rockefeller, D. Rockefellers?
They won’t get, the poor class, but I want men to live like men. I
like men to get everything that nature will give best, because they
belong—we are not the friend of any other place, but we are belong
to nations.... So that is why I love people who labor and work and
see better conditions every day develop, makes no more war. We no
want fight by the gun, and we don’t want to destroy young men. The
mother been suffering for building the young man. Some day need a
little more bread, so when the time the mother get some bread or
profit out that boy, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and some of the
peoples, high class, they send to war. Why? What is war? The war is
not shoots like Abraham Lincoln’s and Abe Jefferson’s, to fight for
the free country, for the better education, to give chance to any
other peoples, not the white people but the blacks and the others,
because they believe and know they are mens like the rest, but they
are war for the great millionaire. No war for the civilization of
men. They are war for business, million dollars come on the side.
What right have we to kill each other? I been work for the Irish, I
have been working with the German fellow, with the French, many other
peoples. I love them people just as I could love my wife, and my
people for that did receive me. Why should I go kill them men? What
he done to me? He never done anything, so I don’t believe in no war.
I want to destroy those guns.... I remember in Italy, a long time
ago, about sixty years ago, I should say, yes, about sixty years ago,
the government they could not control very much these two—devilment
went on, and robbery, so one of the government in the cabinet he
says, ‘If you want to destroy those devilments, if you want to take
off all those criminals, you ought to give a chance to socialist
literature, education of people, emancipation.’ That is why I destroy
governments, boys. That is why my idea I love socialists. That is why
I like people who want education and living, building, who is good,
just as much as they could. That is all.”
Norman’s on-the-spot cartoon caught Sacco gesticulating fiercely, his
string tie awry, the astonished jurymen leaning forward and Moore
and Jerry McAnarney looking blank with dismay, the harassed court
stenographer begging for mercy. Katzmann and Judge Thayer were shown
with heads spinning. The district attorney’s head, however, was
perfectly clear. Making no objections to the passionate outburst, he
registered each point in his mind.
When Sacco finally finished and stood there in rumpled exhaustion a
ponderous silence followed, broken only by a few muffled coughs among
the spectators. Then the district attorney took up the threads of his
web again. If, he asked, things were as bad in America as Sacco said,
why had he not gone back to Italy where by his own admission the food
was better, he could have lived as well, and he would not have had to
work as hard? Did he intend to condemn Harvard College? Did he know
how many children were being educated free by the city of Boston?
Over the solid objections of the defense, Judge Thayer allowed
such questions on the grounds that they referred to statements the
defendant himself had made. Jerry McAnarney, losing his temper,
announced that he objected both to the questions and the answers.
The South Braintree murders had drifted into the background.
Gradually the district attorney’s questions led back to them. If
Sacco and his friends had been so alarmed by Salsedo’s death, why
did they wait three days before doing anything about collecting
the incriminating papers? Why had Sacco said they were going out to
pick up books and papers on the night of their arrest while Vanzetti
had testified they were merely going to make arrangements to pick
them up? “Probably I mistake or probably Vanzetti is right,” Sacco
replied. Katzmann quietly asked a few irrelevant questions about the
mackinaw Orciani was wearing. Then suddenly Sacco felt the knife at
his throat: “Did you take that revolver off the person of Alessandro
Berardelli when he lay on the sidewalk in front of the Rice and
Hutchins factory?”
“No, sir.”
Defendant and prosecutor stared long and silently at each other in
the quiet courtroom.
There were, Katzmann reminded Sacco, the lies he had told the night
of his arrest. The district attorney led him over them. It was a lie,
Sacco admitted, that he had bought his Colt in the North End. He had
really bought it at a store in Milford in 1917. He had lied, too,
about buying a new box of cartridges. The truth was that cartridges
were hard to come by during the war and he had bought an odd lot of
them in a partially filled box somewhere on Hanover Street. Katzmann
at once wanted to know if the fact that he later learned there were
four different kinds of cartridges had anything to do with his
changing his story. If he had told the truth about that box, would
it have helped to give away the names and addresses of his friends
who had radical literature? Following each logical advantage, the
district attorney pinned Sacco down to admitting he could give no
reason for such lying that had anything to do with the names and
addresses of anarchists.
Sacco still insisted that when he had gone out on May 5 with the Colt
tucked in his belt he had forgotten about it. He was used to carrying
it while on his watchman’s rounds, he said, though it was true he had
not been a watchman during the winter of 1920. Sometimes when he went
into Boston and came back late on the train he carried it.
“Wasn’t it a pretty unusual thing for you to carry the gun?” Katzmann
thrust at him.
“Well,” Sacco parried, “it is, but men have to defend themselves. In
the country you don’t know what you need.”[11]
As to his other lies, Sacco had lied when he denied knowing Orciani.
He had lied about the time he worked in South Braintree because he
was afraid if the police found out he had been working there under
the name of Mosmacotelli he would be punished as a slacker and they
would find the radical literature in his house. He had lied when he
said he had known Vanzetti only a year and a half because he did not
want to tell about their going to Mexico. He had known Boda for three
years; he had lied when he said he never had heard of him; Boda was
a radical and he wanted to protect him. He had had no intention of
looking up Pappi that night. That was another lie. As for the day of
the crime, he had said in the Brockton station he worked all that day
because he really thought he had. Katzmann forced him to admit that
he had lied to George Kelley, his friend, in telling him he would be
gone only half a day. Next morning he had invented a story for Kelley
that there was such a crowd in the consulate that he could not get
his passport in the morning and so missed the noon train.
Katzmann questioned Sacco minutely about the evening of May 5. Then
after a short recess the district attorney appeared with two caps.
Sacco objected that the first, a gray one, was too soiled to be his,
but then admitted it belonged to him. The hole or tear in the lining
he could not account for, although Katzmann pressed him to agree that
it came from the nail in the factory wall on which he used to hang it
each morning. The second cap, the dark one found next to Berardelli’s
body, Sacco denied was his.
Mrs. Evans enlivened the courtroom Friday and caused some confusion
among the courtroom attendants by appearing with binoculars.
Thursday, July 7, was Judge Thayer’s sixty-fourth birthday, and he
had been sent a bouquet of rambler roses. They now stood in a vase
on the great oak desk, nodding cheerfully in the breeze from the
electric fan.
When Sacco, his face heavy with fatigue, resumed the stand he asked
for an interpreter and Joseph Ross was assigned to him. Katzmann
began to hammer at why Sacco had said he was working at the factory
the day before he had admittedly read in the paper about the South
Braintree murders. Sacco tried to explain that at the time he had not
given the date much though. The district attorney insisted. “Why did
you tell me a falsehood that on Thursday, the day before you read the
account in the paper, you worked all day?”
“Well, I did not remember for certain,” Sacco told him. “I said that
I had been out two or three days.” There were two other days, Sacco
admitted, that he had gone to the consulate, although he could not
even now remember just what days they were. But they were half-days;
April 15 was the only whole day he had spent in Boston.
As the cross-examination continued, a dispute arose as to the
accuracy of Ross’ interpreting. Sacco accused him of translating
inaccurately. Felix Forte, a young, bilingual lawyer brought in by
the defense, debated with Ross as to the translation of _quanto_;
Ross had translated it as _before_ whereas Forte held that it meant
_when_. As the argument boiled up, Judge Thayer sent the jury from
the room. An arbiter called by Thayer, A. Minini, tried to reconcile
his colleagues. A flurry of English and Italian followed. Vanzetti,
in the cage, sprang to his feet to object to Ross.[12]
After the jurors had again taken their seats, Sacco denied that in
Brockton he had said he was away from the factory at the beginning of
April and that this was the only time he was away for a whole day.
The district attorney turned abruptly from the debate on days: “Did
you shave this morning?” When Sacco said yes, he continued, “Have you
shaved every day since this trial opened?” Scarcely waiting for the
affirmative answer, the district attorney announced: “That is all,
sir.”
It was Moore’s task in the re-examination that followed to patch
up the damage done. He brought out that although Sacco might have
admitted in Brockton that there was one whole day in April he had
not worked, he had given Katzmann no definite date. He had lied to
Michael Kelley about being delayed at the consulate because he was
ashamed to admit that the reason he had broken his word about getting
back in the afternoon was that he had spent the time talking to his
friends. The letter that he had received from his father, after
Sabino’s earlier letter announcing the mother’s death, was shown as
corroborative evidence to the jury.
Once more Sacco went over the night in the Brockton police station,
still maintaining that he thought he had been arrested because he
was a radical and a slacker. The first thing Stewart had asked him
was whether he was “an anarchist, communist, or socialist.” Again
the dispute welled up about Ross’ integrity. As the morning session
reached its end Jerry McAnarney asked that the jury be retired. He
then presented another motion for a severance, asking for a separate
trial for Vanzetti on the grounds of Sacco’s outburst:
“At the beginning of these cases,” he told Thayer, “I was
apprehensive and fearful of what might transpire during this case
were it tried in conjunction with the indictment against Nicola
Sacco, and meeting that situation we filed a motion for a severance
and a separate trial. At that time, in informal discussion before
your Honor, mention was made that if at any time during the trial
things should occur we could renew the motion. It now seems to me
peculiarly fitting in view of all the evidence on this record at the
present moment that the motion be granted for a severance of these
cases, and I now offer the motion.”
Judge Thayer asked if proper instructions to the jury would not take
care of the situation. The defense lawyer must have realized that
there was no chance of the motion being granted, but he also realized
what a damaging effect Sacco’s outburst had had on the jury. He felt
he must at least make the gesture of dissociating Vanzetti, with the
possibility that this might be allowed later by a higher court.
As Sacco resumed the stand on Saturday morning, the books and
pamphlets found in his house were admitted as evidence. Then Jerry
McAnarney, taking over the re-examination, asked more details about
letters Sacco had received from Italy announcing his mother’s death.
The week had been long, and the morning seemed anticlimactic, as if
the trial were now coasting downhill to its conclusion. Suddenly,
dramatically, McAnarney revealed that Sacco had recently seen a man
sitting in the front row of the court who, he was certain, had ridden
back on the train from Boston with him on April 15.
To Judge Thayer’s question as to why this was not merely hearsay,
McAnarney replied that he proposed to follow the statement by
producing the man in question. Sacco said that Moore had often asked
if he remembered anyone who had ridden up on the train with him that
day. He had never been able to, then all at once he had noticed
this man in court and he somehow remembered his face. He did not
know his name. He had not spoken to him. The mysterious witness had
been subpoenaed by the defense, but with the conclusion of Sacco’s
testimony he could not at once be found.
His place was taken by a routine witness, a Stoughton photographer,
Edward Maertens, who stated that some time in April he had made a
passport photograph of the Sacco family, as well as a much larger
one several weeks earlier. Next Walter Nelles, a New York lawyer,
testified that he talked with Luigi Quintiliano the last week in
April 1920 about disposing of socialistic and radical literature.
Two Brockton shoe-workers, Rocco Dalesandro and Michael Columbo,
then testified that on Monday, May 3, they had talked with Sacco in
Brockton about getting rid of their literature. Later, Columbo had
bundled up all such papers and pamphlets that he owned.
The last witness of the week was Felice Guadagni, the comrade who
had been first to visit Sacco and Vanzetti at the Brockton police
station. He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 alibi, telling how the two of
them had met by chance on the steps of Boni’s Restaurant at 11:30
A.M. Sacco, he said, was wearing a derby and a dark suit. They
had gone in together and were later joined by Bosco and Williams.
Guadagni had come out of Boni’s with Sacco at 1:30. He had then gone
back to his office at the _Gazzetta del Massachusetts_ and Sacco had
gone uptown to the consulate. About three in the afternoon he had
seen Sacco again in Joe Giordano’s café. Guadagni recalled the date
of his meeting with Sacco as the fifteenth because on that day he had
been invited to a banquet given by the Franciscan Fathers of North
Bennett Street in honor of Mr. Williams, the _Transcript_ editor, who
had just been made a _Commandante_.
Four or five days after Sacco’s arrest Guadagni had gone to the
consulate with Rosina, taking along a photograph of Sacco. There
they had talked with the acting consul and the vice-consul and the
clerk Adrower, but by the archaic rule of law—so frustrating to
laymen—Guadagni was not allowed to repeat what had been said.
Under cross-examination he admitted that he had seen Sacco in Boston
on several other days, always wearing the derby and the dark suit.
He could not, however, recall any specific dates. When Sacco came
into Giordano’s Café, Guadagni was already there talking about the
banquet. He had not attended it, but since it was the only banquet to
which he had ever been invited, he could not help but remember it.
The invitation had come the week before—he could not fix the date.
Court adjourned just before one o’clock and the jurors were left
alone in the marble courthouse to face another Saturday afternoon and
Sunday. They were almost certain, however, that this would be the
last weekend they would be kept in Dedham.
Judge Thayer spent his weekends in Worcester. There, at the familiar
golf club, he could join a foursome and forget the incidents and
frustrations of the past week. In the clubhouse after the game, in
the protecting company of his friends, he found a cathartic relief in
saying just what he really thought about those Bolsheviki who were
trying to intimidate him. Nobody, he told his friend Loring Coes,
could intimidate Web Thayer. A bunch of parlor radicals were trying
to get those Italian bastards off and trying to bring pressure on
the bench. He would show them, he told Coes, his face darkening with
accumulated anger. He would see them hanged, and he would also like
to hang a few dozen of the radicals.
On Monday morning George Kelley was recalled to explain more details
about the caps. He maintained that the lighter-colored of the two,
the one Sacco had agreed was his, looked much more like Sacco’s.
The one found near Berardelli’s body was darker than any Sacco had
ever owned. Kelley admitted reluctantly that he might have made some
remark about “not wanting to get a bomb up my ass” to Stewart and
Brouillard. This morning, while he was waiting in the courthouse
library to take the stand, he had seen a pepper-and-salt cap on the
table that looked much more like Sacco’s cap than the other two.
“The nearest I have seen yet,” Kelley remarked, as the third cap was
offered in evidence. When cross-examined by Katzmann, Kelley admitted
that he was fond of Sacco. Four or five months before the murders,
learning that Sacco’s radical activities were being investigated,
he had warned him. It was obvious that Kelley, whatever his own
political views, had not changed his friendly feelings.
During the recess Judge Thayer again asked Mrs. Rantoul to come to
his chambers. She made notes of the interview immediately afterward.
Judge Thayer began by asking her what she now thought of the case.
_I answered [she said in an affidavit in 1926], that I thought
Kelley’s statement as to Sacco’s character was important. I well
remember Judge Thayer’s reply and the manner in which he gave it. He
expressed scorn and contempt for my view, and told me that Kelley did
not mean what he said because he [Judge Thayer] had heard that on
the outside Kelley had said that Sacco was an anarchist and that he
couldn’t do anything with him. I told Judge Thayer that I had never
before realized that it was fair to judge a case by what witnesses
said outside of court, and that I had supposed that the only proper
way to judge a case was by what the witnesses said in open court.
Judge Thayer’s manner and expression of face expressed dissent from
this view, but he made no definite statement of dissent._
The mysterious spectator Sacco claimed to have seen on the Stoughton
train now appeared as a witness. He turned out to be James Hayes,
for thirty-three years a mason and contractor in Stoneham, and
town highway surveyor until March 1920. A defense investigator had
brought him to court in regard to some technical information about
the Stoughton street layout. Watching the trial, Hayes had become
interested in it, and he and his wife had returned on three other
days to follow the proceedings. It was while he was sitting there
that Sacco caught a glimpse of him.
Hayes agreed that he had indeed gone to Boston on April 15. He was
certain of the date because he had gone through his time-books and
found that on that day his brother had paid him fifty dollars. He had
used part of the money the same afternoon to buy parts for his Ford
in Boston.
April 11, Sunday, he remembered because it was the birthday of one
of his children. Monday, working at an excavation, he had sprained
his instep. Tuesday and Wednesday and part of Thursday morning he had
spent at home taking down the rear end of his Ford. Friday he needed
parts, and he had gone to Boston on the train that left a little
after twelve. He arrived back in Stoughton between five and six. Next
day, Friday, he started working again. He did not know Sacco, never
had met him, did not know whether Sacco was on that train or not, but
he did know he himself was.
Katzmann now took Hayes over the hurdles. What had he been doing on
March 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31? Hayes could not say. He thought he
had probably gone in to Boston a dozen or fifteen times, but he could
not remember any particular date because he had not had any occasion
to look it up.
Sacco, recalled, testified that he had seen Hayes that day in the
train from Boston. There was another inconclusive dispute with Ross
as to whether Sacco had said “in Boston” or “in the train from
Boston.” Sacco said he had been sitting in the middle of a coach on
the right-hand side, and a man had been sitting opposite him in the
aisle seat on the left. There was no particular reason why he should
have remembered this man except that they both got off at Stoughton
and somehow Sacco was struck by his face.
Hayes corroborated Sacco’s statement that he had been sitting midway
in the car on the left next to the aisle. No one had asked him until
that moment where he had been sitting. There was a person across the
aisle from him, but who it was, a man or woman, he could not say. He
had paid no attention.
Following Hayes, Antonio Dentamore of the foreign-exchange department
of the Haymarket National Bank took the stand to corroborate
Professor Guadagni. On April 15, just before three o’clock, he had
been talking with Guadagni in Giordani’s Café when Sacco came in. He
had never met Sacco until Guadagni introduced them. They had talked
together for about twenty minutes, mostly about passports. The reason
Dentamore remembered the day was that he had just come back from the
banquet for the _Transcript_ editor, and in fact he and Guadagni were
discussing it as Sacco appeared. Katzmann took him over the customary
hurdles. Dentamore could not recall what he had been doing at ten
minutes to three the day before or the day after the banquet, or
twenty days ago, or twenty-one days ago. He could not say where he
had had lunch twenty-two days before. “I am not a fortune teller,” he
told Katzmann.
The defense tried to get the information into the record that
Dentamore and Sacco came from the same district in Italy. Judge
Thayer excluded the references. Thwarted at each turn, Moore tried to
explain that “through this witness the defense offers to prove that
in the conversation that was had between the witness and Mr. Sacco
it became known to the witness that Mr. Sacco and himself were both
from the same section of Italy, that they were both mutual friends
and acquaintances of Mr. Mucci,[13] and that the witness, after
learning that Sacco was returning to Italy at an early date ... asked
Mr. Sacco to convey to Mr. Mucci his good wishes and the fact that
they had met one another in Boston.” At once the district attorney
objected and his objection was sustained.
As Monday drifted into afternoon there was a feeling of the wheels
running down, of impatience for the hour of decision. Everyone in
the court sensed there would be no more surprises, no more climaxes.
Half the reporters’ desks were empty. The _Post_ sent its cartoonist
over to the Middlesex courthouse to sketch the juicier proceedings
in the Mishawum Manor scandal. The remaining witnesses, including
the handful to be offered by the Commonwealth in rebuttal, were like
odd bits of string, useful only for tying up loose ends. Speaking
through an interpreter, Carlos Affe, a grocer whom some of the
Italians jokingly called the mayor of East Boston, told of selling
$15.67 worth of groceries to Sacco on March 20, 1920. On April 15 he
had again seen Sacco, who had paid him $15.50. Affe had made a record
of this in his account book and marked the date. That book he now
produced.
Luigi Quintiliano appeared briefly to say that he had seen Vanzetti
in New York on April 27 and 28 and had talked over the problem of
getting rid of radical literature. The Spanish anarchist Frank Lopez
refused to take an oath and affirmed instead that he had talked
to Vanzetti both before and after his New York trip about getting
incriminating literature out of their friends’ houses.
Then Rosina Sacco came forward, glancing at her husband with as much
courage as she could muster. She stood there, a slight pathetic,
determined figure, her red-gold hair softening her fine, slightly
archaic features so that with her sprinkling of freckles she looked
almost adolescent. Her story was simple. She told of her husband’s
receiving the black-bordered envelope containing the news of his
mother’s death one noon just after he had eaten. He had gone back to
the factory, but after half an hour came home again. She remembered
how on the day of his arrest she had been cleaning out a closet and
found the shotgun shells. Vanzetti had picked them up and said he
would sell them for fifty cents to a friend. Then, going through the
bureau drawers, she had found a pistol and some more shells. These
she placed on top of the bureau and asked her husband what he was
going to do with them. That same day Orciani and Boda had come to
supper. After supper her husband left with Vanzetti to catch the
Brockton streetcar. Boda and Orciani started out later after fixing
a tire on the motorcycle. When Vanzetti had said good-by to her, he
had given her a message to take back to Italy. She did not learn of
her husband’s arrest until twelve the next day when officers Connolly
and Scott and two or three others arrived at the house. On April 15
a man from Milford named Iacovelli had come to see about taking over
Sacco’s job and stayed a quarter of an hour.
Jerry McAnarney showed Rosina the caps that had been exhibited
before. The gray cap, she thought, looked like her husband’s, like
the cap the police had taken from her house on May 6. As for the
dark one with the earflaps, her husband had never owned such a cap
“because he never liked it ... he don’t look good in them positively.”
When Katzmann questioned her, she told him that even before the death
of Sacco’s mother they had been planning to return to Italy. “That’s
why we were saving our money, because we wanted to go across in the
old country, but since the mother died, we hurried more because he
was sorry about his mother died without seeing him.” Sabino’s letter
telling of the mother’s death had arrived March 23 or 24. Thirteen
or fourteen days later Sacco had gone in to the consulate with his
photograph. Katzmann wanted to know how thirteen or fourteen days
after March 24 could make the date April 15. “Well, you count up from
the twenty-third or twenty-fourth of March,” she told him, “and going
to the fifteenth, I says thirteen or fourteen days, and I don’t think
it is much different, because it is over a year he is in prison,
and I don’t remember everything.” Katzmann asked her nothing more.
Sacco’s savings-bank book, introduced as evidence, showed that from
December 9, 1918, he had deposited amounts from $30 to $270 for a
total of about $1500.
The Milford shoe-worker Henry Iacovelli was the last defense witness.
In April 1920 he received a letter from Michael Kelley telling him
there was a job open in the Three-K factory. He had gone to Stoughton
on April 15, first seen George Kelley, then gone to Sacco’s bungalow.
Rosina told him that Sacco had gone to Boston, but this hearsay
evidence Jerry McAnarney could not bring out in court. On this fading
note the defense rested.
Among the residual rebuttal witnesses were Angelo Ricci, the foreman
of the railroad gang near the crossing; a Mary Gaines, who knew Lola
Andrews and Julia Campbell; Henry Hellyer, the Pinkerton agent; Chief
Stewart; Lieutenant Guerin; and a belated identification witness by
the name of Frank Hawley.
Ricci maintained that when the getaway car went over the tracks he
did not see any of his gang at the crossing, but he admitted under
cross-examination: “When you got to control twenty-four men, what to
hell, one fly away. I could not tie them up with string and hold them
all as one. If they went around, sneaked around the pile of dirt or
something like that, I could not hold them.”
Mary Gaines of Quincy was brought in to show that “the statement
Mrs. Andrews made about making inquiry of the man under the car is
not of recent contrivance.” She had visited Julia Campbell and her
sister and Lola Andrews in the Alhambra Block the week following the
shooting. Lola had then told them “she seen this man underneath the
automobile, and she taps this man on the shoulder, she asks him to
please direct her to the Rice and Hutchins shoe shop, and he got up
and directed her to it.”
Hellyer gave his altered account of what Jenny Novelli had told
him. As the existence of his written report was not then known, his
statements passed unchallenged. Lieutenant Guerin told of going to
Sacco’s house and picking up the gray cap with a rip in the lining
from the kitchen table. Moore objected to the cap being admitted
as an exhibit on the grounds of unlawful search and seizure. He
also objected to the jury’s seeing the Buick and demanded that
all references to it be struck out. As usual his objections were
overruled.
Hawley, a salesman and a former Brockton special police officer, said
that on April 15 he was driving his Ford in Brockton. In starting
to turn around on School Street to go to Whitman, he had forced a
Buick touring car to come to a stop. It was a dirty car with flapping
side-curtains and as it stopped the driver stuck his head out and
asked the way to Whitman. The man Hawley had seen sitting next to the
unidentified driver was Vanzetti.
Chief Stewart resumed the stand briefly to add a few more passages
of the Brockton interrogatory that he had previously omitted. There
followed a discussion about the admission as evidence of the books
found in Sacco’s house and whether they should be translated. Finally
both sides agreed to let them in as they were, Moore remarking that
the titles spoke for themselves. Shortly after lunch both sides
rested.
There was a pause, a rustle in the courtroom, as the lawyers gathered
up their documents and the spectators eyed Judge Thayer. He cleared
his throat, looked dryly at Moore, then turned to the jury.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said in his toneless voice, “the book of
fate in these cases has been closed. You will undoubtedly get
these cases for final determination Thursday forenoon, or Thursday
morning. During your absence quite a number of things have been
settled between counsel, one of which is that arguments will be
made tomorrow, beginning at nine o’clock. It has been agreed that
four hours shall be given to each side—that is four hours for the
defendants and four hours for the Commonwealth. They may run a little
over that time.
“I must again suggest to you to still keep your minds open. The
evidence has simply closed now. You have not heard the arguments of
both counsel. You have not heard the charge of the Court. You must
hear what the law is of the Commonwealth in order that you may apply
the law to established facts found by you to be true, and therefore
with this request, which is kindly made by the Court, I trust you
will do what you can to see to it that it is fully carried into
effect.”
Edmund Morgan, in his study of the trial published in 1948,
considered it an act of incomprehensible folly for the defense to
agree to any such four-hour limitation. But in agreeing to the
limitation, Moore and the McAnarneys were from long practical
experience aware of the dangers of taxing a jury’s patience. Jurymen
who had already sat through thirty uncomfortable days of testimony
might react against an argument running several days. Besides, it was
common bar knowledge that by the time the summations were reached, a
jury, despite any judge’s hortatory injunctions, had pretty well made
up its collective mind.
Moore and Jerry McAnarney agreed to divide their allotted morning,
with Moore appearing first. But the ingenious and aggressive general
counsel of the I.W.W., the victor of so many underdog courtroom
battles, was that Wednesday morning like a speaker who has lost
rapport with his audience. He rambled. The telling points escaped
him. Jerry McAnarney, tripping over his grammar, made a far better
follow-up.
Moore opened by remarking wryly that in the six weeks of the trial,
he, as a Californian, had felt almost an alien in the Dedham
court. He then went on to develop his argument, claiming that the
primary—in fact the only—issue was one of identification. Taking
the Commonwealth’s witnesses in order, he asked why it was that
the expressman Neal, when he felt his life was in danger, had not
bothered to look at the number of the threatening car directly in
front of his door? How was it that Faulkner, on the train, could
remember the man he said was Vanzetti leaning over from the rear seat
and yet could not remember the man in the seat beside him? Moore
recalled to the jury the Italian railroad worker, Nicola Gatti, the
one witness who had known Sacco before the crime, and begged them not
to be prejudiced by the fact that the man was an Italian. He pointed
out that Mary Splaine’s elaborate identification must have derived
from the times she saw Sacco at the police station and not from the
fleeting glimpse she had had from the upper window of the Hampton
House, and he brought up again her indecisive statements in Quincy,
so opposed to her Dedham positiveness. As for Lola Andrews, “even
though we had not offered a single witness against her, she killed
herself on the witness stand by her own personality, but Campbell,
Fay, La Brecque finished her up.” Pelser was unemployed when he told
defense investigator Robert Reid that he had seen nothing of the
shooting, but a few months after he got a job with Rice & Hutchins he
was willing to testify for the Commonwealth. Goodridge, the poolroom
man, was in the courtroom for some other purpose when he identified
Sacco. Why?
“Gentlemen,” Moore summed up, “there isn’t a single witness called by
the government who had an unqualified opportunity of observation who
gives an identification. Bostock had the opportunity and wouldn’t.
McGlone had the opportunity and wouldn’t. So on down the line. But
it is the Lola Andrews, the Goodridges, the Pelsers that made the
identification. Miss Splaine and Miss Devlin I reject, because their
testimony is utterly unreasonable. They did not have the opportunity.
They could not. You know it and I know it.”
Moore asked the jury to consider again whether or not the defendants
believed on the night of May 5 they were in fear of deportation or
that they believed their lives or liberties were in danger, and
whether Stewart’s questions about anarchism had not inflamed Sacco’s
suspicions. There were, too, Sacco’s alibi witnesses for April
15—Bosco, Dentamore, Williams, Affe, Kelley, Hayes. Had all these men
committed perjury?
Only in passing did Moore mention the guns and bullets. “If,” he
said, “the time has come when a microscope must be used to determine
whether a human life is going to function or not and when the users
of the microscope themselves can’t agree, when experts called by the
Commonwealth and experts called by the defense are sharply defined in
their disagreements, then I take it that ordinary men such as you and
I should well hesitate to take a human life. You are the responsible
men,” he concluded. “You are the judges of the facts.” And he stood
there a moment staring somberly at the jurors.
“Take a recess of five minutes,” Judge Thayer told the courtroom,
then nodding curtly to the Californian, added, “You ran over your
time twenty minutes, Mr. Moore.”
Jerry McAnarney, in his two hours, did not confine himself to his
ostensible client, Vanzetti, but proceeded to go over the same
ground that Moore had just covered. He criticized the Splaine-Devlin
contradictions, he asked why Sacco and Vanzetti had not been shown
to witnesses in Brockton in a lineup, he speculated as to what
Goodridge had been doing in Dedham when he first identified Sacco.
Then he asked why Sacco, already recognizable in South Braintree as
Mosmacotelli, would have spent a morning standing in front of the
drugstore or hanging around the depot or finally leaning on the fence
under the window of the very factory where he had once worked.
The testy little lawyer warned the jurors about Katzmann: “He can
stand up to this rail and say to you gentlemen ‘What have we
been here for six weeks for, for two slackers, for two men who
did not think enough of their country but what they would go to
Mexico—murderers, slackers, anarchists?’ Ring the changes, gentlemen,
and you can play any tune you want to on that. And you have got to be
very careful that you don’t vibrate in unison with those words. They
are fearful, they are potent, they are laden to the limit.”
McAnarney poked fun at the bravado of the Brockton officer, Connolly,
“listening to the sweetest music of his young life, the sound of
Connolly’s voice when he was telling you what he did.” But when
McAnarney mentioned Levangie, the man he had interviewed and who
two weeks later had denied under oath talking with him, his face
reddened. Captain Van Amburgh he referred to as the “circles” man,
but he had obviously not grasped the implications of his testimony,
for he reminded the jury: “Van Amburgh said that that number three
shell, the fatal bullet that killed Berardelli, came from ...
the Colt revolver that was found on Sacco.” In the question of
Berardelli’s revolver McAnarney pointed out that if the defense had
planned to falsify evidence, it would not have been too difficult
to have the various witnesses memorize the number of Vanzetti’s
Harrington & Richardson and afterward recite it on the witness stand.
McAnarney asserted, as had Moore, that the primary fact was in the
end identification, and that there was not sufficient evidence to
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men had been in South
Braintree that day. “I want every man on this panel to treat these
two defendants as if they were your own individual brother,” he
concluded with sincere irrelevance. “Take that as the text, not the
other that we feel and what this evidence would make them out, treat
them as though, as your brother. He came to this world by the same
power that created you, and may he go from this world by the same
power that takes you. I thank you, gentlemen.”
* * * * *
After the lunch hour Katzmann approached the jury box for his final
argument. As usual his debonair appearance was unaffected by the
heat. Confident of the game he was playing, sure of his arguments,
he faced the jury in the floridity of his top form. But though his
verbiage was lush, his mind was sharp.
He began with provincial urbanity by complimenting the jury, the
defending lawyers, and the judge. Then he covered the case point by
point, missing none of the discrepancies of the defense witnesses and
not neglecting by innuendo to tie in Orciani. There was Burke who
had said that Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the car as it passed
him, Burke who had ridden to court in Callahan’s Hudson and called
it a Buick, who had described the driver of the getaway Buick as a
thickset dark man—when both sides now admitted that the driver was
pale and fair. There was Chase, on the truck at the Co-operative
Society, a man with permanently impaired eyesight. There were Sacco’s
alibi witnesses in Boston and Vanzetti’s in Plymouth. Katzmann
agreed that Corl had painted his boat, that Williams had taken his
advertising orders, that Dentamore had gone to a banquet for the
_Transcript_ editor. “But what in logic is the connection between any
of these things that they say helps mark the time?”
The district attorney did not miss the fact that Vanzetti claimed
that on the night of May 5 they were just going to get the car,
whereas Sacco first said they were going to pick up radical
literature. In the matter of picking up literature, if it was so
urgent to get rid of it, why did Vanzetti do nothing for a week
after coming back from New York? Why did he not warn his friends
in Plymouth? Why did Sacco, after he heard from Vanzetti, take no
steps to get rid of what he himself owned and so protect his home?
Why would Sacco be so afraid of deportation when he was leaving the
country in two days? What were they afraid of, anyhow, the night of
May 5 when they had no incriminating papers with them?
As for the weapons, Katzmann argued: “They had arsenals upon them.
Vanzetti had a loaded 38-caliber revolver, this man who ran to Mexico
because he did not want to shoot a fellow human being in warfare,
a loaded 38-caliber revolver, any one of the cartridges instantly
death-dealing. This tender-hearted man who loved this country and who
went down to Mexico because he did not believe in shooting a fellow
human being, going down to get a decrepit old automobile, had a
38-caliber loaded gun on him.
“And his friend and associate, Nicola Sacco, another lover of
peace, another lover of his adopted country who abhorred bloodshed
and abhorred it so that he went down to Mexico under the name of
Mosmacotelli ... had with him, this lover of peace, thirty-two
death-dealing automatic cartridges, nine of them in the gun ready for
action and twenty-two more of them in his pocket—carried it where the
ordinary citizen carries it there? No, gentlemen, carried where those
who have occasion to use it quickly and want to slip it out and use
it quickly would be prone to carry it, that death-dealing instrument.
“But more than that, gentlemen, and ammunition enough to kill
thirty-seven men if each shot took effect, they had or Vanzetti
had four shells—no weapon in which to fire them at the moment that
we found, but you will remember, gentlemen, that sticking out of
the back of the bandit’s car on April 15 was either a rifle or a
shotgun, and in Vanzetti’s pocket were four 12-gauge shells loaded
with buckshot that they were going out to shoot little birds with....
Maybe, gentlemen, you think that is the way men would be armed who
were going on an innocent trip, innocent so far as death-dealing
matters are concerned at night time after closing hours of the garage
and when the man who ran it was in bed, going to make a social trip
down to see Pappi, the friend of Vanzetti, and he did not know where
he lived, save that it was in East Bridgewater, gentlemen.”
The district attorney admitted that Pelser had lied at first both to
the defense and the Commonwealth, because he did not want to be a
witness, but afterward he was “manly enough to tell you of his prior
falsehoods and his reasons for them.” On the subject of Splaine and
Devlin, Katzmann became almost lyrical: “Gentlemen, do you think that
two young women, presumably endowed with Christian instincts, young
ladies who could have no enmity against the defendant Sacco, who
could have no reason for committing the most damnable of perjuries,
would bespeak evidence against a human being that would take his
life away? Gentlemen, that passes the bounds of human credulity. You
can’t believe that. You cannot have looked on Mary Splaine, a smart
businesswoman, you cannot have looked on the gentle Frances Devlin
and have seen the truth shining like stars out of her young womanly
eyes and believe for a moment that either or both of them would dare,
before a court of justice or before God their Maker, condemn Sacco
to his death with a willful lie. You cannot believe that, gentlemen,
having seen those women.”
He agreed that Levangie, the gate-tender, was wrong in saying that
Vanzetti had driven the car. The probability was that Vanzetti was
directly behind the driver, was leaning forward, and Levangie had
given just a quick transposing glance. Lola Andrews conjured up a
briefer burst of lyricism: “I have been in this office, gentlemen,
for now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too long
service for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye or
given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews.” As for Julia
Campbell, she was “Aunt Julia, the elderly lady with the cataracts.”
The district attorney underlined the fact that the Buick getaway
car was found only a mile or so from Elm Square. “You don’t find the
car in Worcester. You don’t find it in Pittsfield. You don’t find
it in South Boston, nor do you find it in Fall River. You find it
in West Bridgewater, and the night these men were arrested, they
were arrested within hailing distance of it. Can you put two and two
together?”
In contrast to Moore’s objection to the microscope’s evidence,
Katzmann declaimed: “Heaven speed the day when proof in any important
case is dependent upon the magnifying glass and the scientist.” He
marshaled the evidence of the guns and the bullets carefully in the
Commonwealth’s favor. “What is the reason Captain Van Amburgh gives
for saying that bullet number three was fired by the Colt of Sacco?”
he asked, thus compounding Jerry McAnarney’s error.
It was after six before Katzman, facing a weary jury and a long-since
emptying courtroom, made his last points. He asked who knew better
about the Harrington & Richardson revolver, the man who had put in a
new hammer or an expert who had never seen it before. He questioned
the disorder and general lack of dates in Affe’s grocery account
books. He wondered why the defense had produced no witnesses from
Rice & Hutchins, where Sacco had worked, to say he was not the
man. He concluded with a flourish: “You are the consultants here,
gentlemen, the twelve of you, and the parties come to you and ask
you to find out what the truth is on the two issues of guilt or
innocence. Men of the jury, do your duty. Do it like men. Stand
together, men of Norfolk!”
Nothing was left but the judge’s charge and the jury’s verdict.
* * * * *
Judge Thayer spent that evening at the University Club in Boston
working on his charge. Like most intermediate judges, he tended to
make his charges set pieces formed out of the accumulated mosaics
of the law, varying in detail according to the particular case,
but in general outline the same. The basic function of a charge
is to enable the jury to sift the relevant from the irrelevant.
In his Sacco-Vanzetti charge of twenty-four pages, only ten were
given to the specific aspects of the case. The formula was based
on a standard set of legal truisms: that a man is innocent until
proved guilty, that reasonable doubt is the doubt of a reasonable
man, that no inference of guilt shall be drawn from an indictment,
that circumstantial evidence can at times be as weighty as direct
evidence, that English common law as adopted by American practice is
one of the glories of the world, and so on. Thayer’s first childhood
memories were of the boys in blue of the Civil War; he had been
appointed to the bench the year that the United States entered the
World War, and his attitude toward soldiers was that of a sentimental
civilian. Ever since his appointment he had peppered his charges and
his less formal addresses with references to “our soldier boys.” It
was a habit that still continued three years after the Armistice, and
that could have somewhat sinister connotations in the trial of two
draft-dodging anarchists.
With the fervor of a poet Thayer worked at his manuscript late into
the night. He was proud of his literary efforts. Like most Americans
whose school course included the elocution lessons of the post-Civil
War period, his taste ran to the flamboyant. Vague metaphorical
phrases blossomed under his hand. “Let the star of a sound judgment
and profound wisdom guide your footsteps into that beautiful realm
where conscience, obedience to law and to God, reigneth supreme.”
Such phrases he found reassuring. And his indwelling sense of
insecurity made him need assurance, turned him at times garrulous,
biased him against foreigners, and drove him to indiscretions that
were later to become notorious.
When Judge Thayer went down to breakfast early Thursday morning and
looked hopefully around the club’s almost empty dining room, his eye
fell on the frosty George Crocker at a table by the window and he
walked over and sat down opposite him. Crocker, an elderly codfish
Bostonian, greeted Thayer with a noticeable lack of cordiality.
Several times during the month the judge had waylaid him in the
lounge and filled his unwilling ears with news about the Dedham
trial, insisting that Americans must now stand together to protect
themselves against anarchists and Reds. Conservative lawyer that
he was, Crocker felt offended at Thayer’s violation of the legal
proprieties in even mentioning a current case. Oblivious of the
other’s disapproval, Thayer would say that it was nonsense that the
defendants were being prosecuted as radicals. Just the same, in his
opinion, they were anarchists and draft-dodgers, and they had failed
to establish alibis.
This morning, before Crocker had finished his grapefruit, Thayer
pulled some sheets of paper out of his pocket saying proudly: “I
want to read you part of the charge I am going to deliver today.” He
talked on, quoting part of Moore’s argument, and then reading more of
his charge, smacking his lips at the end with “That will hold them!”
Crocker replied sniffily or not at all. On leaving the dining room
he warned the steward, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t put me with that
man again!”
* * * * *
Court opened late. Judge Thayer had again timed it that way for
dramatic effect. Every seat was taken and the bar enclosure was
filled with lawyers as Sacco and Vanzetti took their place in the
cage, for it had been noised about in State Street that the judge’s
charge would make legal history. The opening, however, had more the
air of a graduation ceremony than a murder trial. The judge’s desk
was buried in flowers—a huge vase of gladioli sent by the sheriff,
and large bouquets of pinks from Mrs. Katzmann and the wife of
Assistant District Attorney Kane. Among the spectators were the
Marquis Ferrante, Rosina Sacco with the boy Dante, and of course Mrs.
Evans and her inevitable notebook. In spite of the heat Sheriff Capen
had resumed his blue cutaway.
With the clerk’s cry, Judge Thayer rustled in and sat down behind
the bank of flowers. For the last time the ritual was intoned, the
jury was polled, the defendants answered “Present.” Jerry McAnarney
approached the bench with a motion for a directed verdict on the
grounds that the district attorney in his argument had disclaimed
that Vanzetti was driving the getaway car as it crossed the railroad
track. Moore made the conventional request that the court order the
jury upon all the evidence to return a not-guilty verdict for Sacco.
Neither motion, they knew, would be granted. There were a few more
words added to the record about the Berardelli revolver, then the
judge’s brittle voice began:
“Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury—you may remain seated—the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most
important service. Although you knew that such service would be
arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier,
responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty.
There is no better word in the English language than ‘loyalty.’
For he who is loyal to God, to country, to his state and to his
fellow men, represents the highest and noblest type of true American
citizenship, than which there is none grander in the entire world.
You gentlemen have been put to the real test, and you have proven to
the world, and particularly to the people of Norfolk County, that you
truly represent such citizenship. For this loyalty, gentlemen, and
for this magnificent service that you have rendered to your State and
to your fellow men, I desire, however, in behalf of both to extend to
each of you their profoundest thanks, gratitude and appreciation.”
It was of course conventional to butter up a jury at the end of a
long trial, but Thayer enjoyed the convention. His mind slipped
easily among the sententious moralizings, the hortatory appeals to
truth, the assurances of equality before the law:
“Let your eyes be blinded to every ray of sympathy or prejudice but
let them ever be willing to receive the beautiful sunshine of truth,
of reason and sound judgment, and let your ears be deaf to every
sound of public opinion or public clamor, if there be any, either in
favor of or against these defendants. Let them always be listening
for the sweet voices of conscience and of sacred and solemn duty
efficiently and fearlessly performed.”
Warning the jury not to be influenced or prejudiced by the fact
that the defendants were Italians, he went on to a brief history
of murder in common law, the development of degrees of murder, the
definition of malice aforethought. He pointed out that there was no
vital distinction between circumstantial and other evidence, that
the important thing was the degree of proof. He must have puzzled
the jurors with his remark that “over-positiveness in identification
might under some circumstances and conditions be evidence of weakness
in the testimony rather than strength.”
There was the expected truism—none the less true—that “guilt or
innocence of crime do not depend upon the place of one’s birth;
neither should the place of one’s birth, the proportion of his
wealth, his station in life, social or political, or his views
on public questions prevent an honest judgment and impartial
administration and enforcement of the law, for when the time comes
that these conditions exist to an extent that men, because of these
conditions, cannot be indicted, tried, acquitted or convicted
according to the laws of the Commonwealth in a court of justice, the
doors to our courthouses should then be closed and we should announce
to the world the impotency of our courts and the utter failure of
constitutional or organized government.”
Not until he had passed the halfway mark did Judge Thayer abandon
generalities for facts. Then he summed up the case adequately enough:
“The Commonwealth claims that these defendants were two of a party
of five who killed the deceased. The defendants deny it. What is the
fact? As I have told you, the Commonwealth must satisfy you of that
fact beyond reasonable doubt. The defendants are under no obligation
to satisfy you who did commit the murders, but the Commonwealth must
satisfy you beyond reasonable doubt that the defendants did. If
the Commonwealth has failed to so satisfy you, that is the end of
these cases and you will return verdicts of not guilty. This is so
because the identity of the defendants is one of the essential facts
to be established by the Commonwealth. On the other hand, if the
Commonwealth has so satisfied, you will return a verdict of guilty
against both defendants or either of them that you so find to be
guilty.”
[Illustration: _Dedham, April 9, 1927, just before sentence was
passed._]
[Illustration: (Top) _The shells Bostock gave to Fraher; Shell W
third from left._
(Center) _The bullets removed from Berardelli’s body. The mortal
Bullet III, deformed by impact, is third from left._
(Bottom) _The bullets as marked by Dr. Magrath. Note deformation of
Bullet III, third from left._]
[Illustration: _Sacco’s Colt automatic._]
[Illustration:
_Vanzetti’s Harrington & Richardson revolver._ ]
[Illustration:
_Composite photograph of Shell W_ (left) _and test shell_ (right),
_showing continuous breechblock markings above and below firing pin
indentation_.
AMERICAN HERITAGE MAGAZINE ]
[Illustration: (Above) _District Attorney Frederick Katzmann._]
[Illustration: (Below) _Judge Webster Thayer._]
[Illustration: (Right) _William Thompson_, _Herbert Ehrmann_, _Tom
O’Connor_.]
[Illustration: (Far right) _Fred Moore and Eugene Debs_ (front)
_after visiting Vanzetti in Charlestown Prison_.]
[Illustration:
_The jury’s Fourth holiday at North Scituate._
_Ripley_ _King_ _Marden_
_Gerard_ _McNamara_ _Parker_ _Dever_ _McHardy_
_Fales_ (Sheriff) _Capen_ (Sheriff) _Hooper_ (Sheriff)
_Ganley_ _Hersey_ _Waugh_ _Atwood_
]
[Illustration: (Left) _Sacco tries on the cap and addresses the
court. Sketches by Norman._]
[Illustration: (Right) _Governor Alvan Fuller._]
[Illustration: (Far right) _Edna St. Vincent Millay._]
[Illustration:
BOSTON HERALD
]
[Illustration: (Far left) _Rosina Sacco and her children leaving
Charlestown Prison, August, 1927._]
[Illustration: Governor Alvan Fuller]
[Illustration: (Left) _Rosina and Luigia Vanzetti visiting the death
house, August 20._]
[Illustration:
BOSTON GLOBE
_The start of the funeral procession._]
In weighing the testimony of the identifying witnesses, the jurors
would have to consider the latter’s intelligence, “their opportunity
for observations, their reasons for making such observations, the
duration of such observations, and the mental or nervous condition
of the witness at the time.” Turning to the ballistics testimony,
Thayer fell into the crucial error of McAnarney and Katzmann, for he,
too, accepted Van Amburgh’s “I am inclined to believe” as a direct
assertion that the Berardelli death bullet had come from Sacco’s
automatic. “You must determine this question of fact,” he told them.
In speaking of the Vanzetti revolver, he first said that it had had a
new hammer and spring, then later corrected himself.
The emphasis of the latter part of the charge was on the question
of consciousness of guilt, to which Judge Thayer gave much more
space than he did to the other testimony. “If the defendants were
only consciously guilty of being slackers,” he informed the jurors,
“liable to be deported, fearing punishment therefore, and were not
consciously guilty of the murder of Berardelli and Parmenter, then
there is no consciousness of guilt during the time they were at the
Johnson house, because the defendants were solely being tried for the
murder of Berardelli and Parmenter, and for nothing else.”
This was a question of fact for the jurors to decide, just as it was
for them to decide whether or not the defendants had “the desire
and purpose and intention” of drawing their weapons when they were
arrested on the streetcar. The court decided questions of law, but
only the jury could decide on the facts. Alibis were always questions
of fact. “Therefore,” he instructed them finally, “all testimony
which tends to show that the defendants were in another place at the
time the murders were committed tends also to rebut the evidence that
they were present at the time and place the murders were committed.
If the evidence of an alibi rebuts evidence of the Commonwealth to
such an extent that it leaves reasonable doubt in your minds as to
the commission of the murders charged against these defendants then
you will return a verdict of not guilty. On the other hand, if you
find that the defendants or either of them committed the murders and
the Commonwealth has satisfied you of such fact beyond a reasonable
doubt from all the evidence in these cases, you will return a verdict
of guilty.”
Thayer had been talking for several hours. He shifted a vase of pinks
slightly to his right so that he could eye the jury more emphatically
before beginning his peroration, his particular pride:
“My duties, gentlemen, have now closed and yours begun. From this
mass of testimony introduced you must determine the facts. The law,
as I have told you, places the entire responsibility in your hands.
I therefore call upon you to constantly bear in mind these parting
words of the Court that here, in this temple of justice, before
God and man, you made oath that you would ‘well and truly try the
issue between the Commonwealth and the defendants according to your
evidence. So help you God.’
“I have now finished my charge. My duties are now at an end. I
have tried to preside over the trial of these cases in a spirit of
absolute fairness and impartiality to both sides. If I have failed
in any respect you must not, gentlemen, in any manner fail yours. I
therefore now commit into your sacred keeping the decision of these
cases. You will therefore take them with you into yonder jury room,
the silent sanctuary where may the Great Dispenser of justice, wisdom
and sound judgment preside over all your deliberations. Reflect long
and well so that when you return, your verdict shall stand forth
before the world as your judgment of truth and justice. Gentlemen, be
just and fear not. Let all the end thou aimest at be thy country’s,
thy God’s and truth’s.”
There was a moment’s silence, then a murmur went through the
courtroom like a collective sigh, followed by a shuffle of feet as
spectators and jury began to file from the room, while the lawyers
worked their way to the back for another consultation. Vanzetti bent
over and whispered to Sacco as a deputy with handcuffs opened the
cage door.
Moore, observing legal etiquette, remarked formally to the Court that
whatever the jury’s verdict no one could say that the defendants had
not had a fair trial.
* * * * *
Judge Thayer was in a good mood as he walked briskly to the Dedham
Inn for lunch. The trial that had cut so deep into his summer was
over. He would no longer have to endure the daily sight of that
long-haired California radical. His charge had gone off well.
Inside the dining room he stopped at the reporters’ table where
Frank Sibley, with his Windsor tie, sat at the head. “Did you see
that jury when I finished my charge?” Thayer asked of no one in
particular. “Three of them in tears!” Sibley and the others said
nothing. The silence nettled the judge. He looked them up and down
and then said pettishly, “I think I am entitled to have a statement
printed in the newspapers that this trial was fairly and impartially
conducted.” Again there was silence. Sibley looked down at the
tablecloth in embarrassment.
Finally Thayer spoke to him directly. “Sibley, you are the oldest.
Don’t you think this trial was fairly and impartially conducted?”
Sibley stared at him above his wilted tie. “Well,” he said quietly,
“I don’t know whether to express their opinion, but of course we have
talked it over, and I think I can say I have never seen anything like
it.”
Thayer looked down scornfully, turned on his heel, and walked away.
* * * * *
As the defendants arrived for the afternoon session and the courtroom
filled, Rosina and Dante were allowed briefly inside the cage. While
Sacco talked to his wife, Vanzetti rumpled the boy’s hair playfully,
his deep eyes glowing, a smile wrinkling across his face. The jury
was brought in, polled, and then retired. The defendants were again
led away. Lawyers, reporters, and most of the spectators went
outside. Those wise in the ways of juries did not expect a verdict
until after the evening meal. Sheriff Capen predicted five hours. It
was then three o’clock.
Much in the preceding weeks had seemed a legal game, but now the
verbiage had been swept away, leaving nothing but the bone-bare
interlude like time suspended, a feeling somehow intensified by the
paper-littered courtroom and the ticking marble-faced clock and the
summer brightness filtering through the maple trees.
* * * * *
From the courtroom the sheriff led the jurymen down the corridor to
a room on the left with the word jury stenciled on the frosted glass
of the door. He closed the door behind them and locked it. They found
themselves alone in a room containing nothing but a long table and
twelve leather-cushioned chairs. Another door at the side led to the
lavatory. John Dever noticed that all the doorknobs had the county
seal embossed on them.
In their six weeks of close association the twelve men had developed
a sense of camaraderie that would bind them together for the rest of
their lives. Over thirty years later, Dever, destitute in a veteran’s
hospital, would find himself visited by Atwood and Gerard, and there
again they would talk over the case. But in this first moment of
being alone no one quite knew how to begin.
Dever finally suggested that first of all they take an informal
ballot, nothing binding, just to get an idea how they felt. Sitting
around the table, each marked a slip of paper and handed it down to
Ripley who, as foreman, occupied the end seat. Dever believed the
defendants guilty but he voted for acquittal on the first ballot to
open up a discussion. The vote was ten to two for conviction. “Then,”
Dever told a reporter long afterward, “we started discussing things,
reviewed the very important evidence about the bullets, and everybody
had a chance to speak his piece. There never was any argument,
though. We just were convinced Sacco and Vanzetti had done what the
prosecution had charged them with.” The Winchester bullet taken from
Berardelli’s body had, they felt, been fired from Sacco’s pistol.
And the same three kinds of shells that Thomas Fraher had picked up
in front of Rice & Hutchins had been found in Sacco’s pocket. Seward
Parker remarked that you couldn’t depend on the witnesses—“but the
bullets, there’s no way of getting round that.” Alfred Atwood agreed
with him. John Ganley was impressed by what Reed, the Matfield
gate-tender, said about seeing Vanzetti at the crossing. The twelve
did not even bother to ballot again. They talked over various aspects
of the case but no longer debated guilt or innocence. Someone
suggested that they ask for a reading glass to examine the bullets.
A deputy brought them one. It would have been possible for them to
bring in their verdict at the end of the afternoon. They decided,
however, that it would look better if they waited until after supper.
Shortly after six Judge Thayer sent them out to eat. By half-past
seven they were back.
The shadows of the trees and the buildings were long across the
High Street, but the setting sun brought no relief from the heat. A
scattering of spectators waited in the courtroom. There were groups
of white-shirted figures on the steps, on the grass, on the sidewalk
across the street, restless groups that joined together, broke apart,
or receded in the direction of Dedham Square. Always there was a
corporal’s guard of newspapermen to keep a careful eye on the upper
rear window where, behind the plate glass, the overhead light had now
been turned on.
At 7:55 Deputy Sheriff Fales heard a triple knock on the jury-room
door. It was sharp, final, not the tentative knock meaning that a
reading glass or some such thing was wanted. He unlocked the door
and Ripley told him the verdict was ready. Fales’ face kept its
professional impassivity. He took the message, locked the door again,
then went downstairs to telephone the warden at the jail. To the
newsmen who looked at him questioningly as he passed, he nodded.
A few minutes before, a slight breeze had sprung up. Harold Williams,
the McAnarneys, several state troopers, and deputy sheriffs were
standing near the columns enjoying the coolness when someone came out
and whispered the news. An invisible telegraph seemed to flash the
word through Dedham. The white-shirted groups on the grass dissolved,
the loungers vanished, from all directions running figures converged
on the courthouse. The High Street echoed with footsteps. Upstairs
the courtroom windows suddenly blazed with light.
In the ten minutes that it took to bring the defendants over from the
jail the gates had been closed and a guard of troopers thrown around
the courthouse. On the steps a crowd that by now stretched across the
street forced its way up to the iron barrier. Those who had gone up
to the courtroom earlier were allowed to stay, but, except for the
lawyers and the newspapermen, no one else was admitted.
Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in through the side entrance, taken
up the back stairs, their handcuffs removed, and the door of the cage
closed behind them. Sacco looked pale, almost ill. Vanzetti spoke
a few words to him, a frown scoring his forehead. Rosina sat close
by, making quick birdlike movements, managing to smile each time her
husband glanced at her.
The pause before the jury entered the room was so oppressive that it
became almost tangible. Inside the bar enclosure the lawyers waited,
Moore fiddling with a pencil, his hair dank. The deputies stood at
the entrances, the stenographers had their notebooks open, Judge
Thayer sat in his place. From time to time everyone in the courtroom
glanced at the twelve empty seats flanked by the American flag. Then
the door opened.
The jurors filed in, their eyes fixed on the floor. Seeing their
mood, Tom McAnarney raised his arm in a gesture of despair. The lines
between Vanzetti’s eyes were like cords. Sacco glanced from one face
to another as the jury passed.
The jurors settled in their seats. Judge Thayer nodded obliquely at
Clerk Worthington who, precise and impersonal, asked them if they had
agreed on a verdict. Then, scarcely waiting for the foreman’s reply,
he called out “Nicola Sacco.” Sacco rose to his feet as if he were in
a trance, and Worthington’s singsong voice continued:
“Hold up your right hand, Mr. Foreman; look upon the prisoner.
Prisoner, look upon the foreman. What say you, Mr. Foreman, is the
prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty?”
Ripley’s voice was like a croak as he spoke the one word. “Guilty.”
“Guilty of murder?” Worthington went on.
“Murder,” Ripley answered him.
“In the first degree?”
“In the first degree.”
While the impact of the verdict was still in transit, Worthington
rapidly repeated the formula for Vanzetti.
“What say you, Mr. Foreman; is Bartolomeo Vanzetti guilty or not
guilty of murder?”
“Guilty,” Ripley croaked again.
“In the first degree, upon each indictment?”
“In the first degree.”
“Hearken to your verdicts as the Court has recorded them,”
Worthington hurried on, his words falling limply in the hush. “You,
gentlemen, upon your oath, say that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo
Vanzetti is each guilty of murder in the first degree upon each
indictment. So say you, Mr. Foreman? So, gentlemen, you all say?”
There were murmurs of “We do, we do,” from the jury box. Vanzetti
stood in the cage, his arm still raised in the air. Then suddenly
Sacco’s voice rang through the courtroom: “_Sono innocente!_”
“_Sono innocente!_” he shouted again, and behind the cage Rosina
cried loudly, ran to him breaking through the ring of guards
and throwing her arms around his neck. Her hat fell off and her
copper-red hair tumbled about her neck. “You bet your life,” she
babbled. Then she cried out as if overwhelmed, “What am I going to
do? I’ve got two children. Oh, Nick. They kill my man.” She clung to
him sobbing, burying her face in his neck, the torrent of her words
unintelligible. Sacco stood upright, paler than ever, stroking her
head and occasionally whispering to her. Vanzetti, next to them, said
nothing, but his face was drawn with sympathy. Moore tried gently to
disengage her. Finally a policeman removed her from Sacco’s shoulder
and led her away.
Judge Thayer nodded to the clerk for adjournment. No one was even
aware of his few words of thanks to the jury.
“They kill an innocent men!” Sacco called out in a shaken voice as
judge and jury were leaving. Several of the jurymen looked back at
him but none of them paused. “Don’t forget. Two innocent men they
kill!” he shouted at them.
Within ten minutes the police and deputies had delivered the
defendants back to the jail. On their way there the loiterers on the
courthouse steps pushed forward and Sheriff Capen threatened to draw
his gun if they came any closer.
Now the darkened streets were as empty as the courtroom. Lawyers,
deputies, public, all had gone except Tom McAnarney, who was
rummaging among some papers on the oak table. As he closed his brief
case he noticed Assistant District Attorney Williams in the doorway,
and observing the customary legal etiquette he stepped toward him
with extended hand.
“Congratulations,” he said, “on a brilliant victory.” Then he noticed
that the other’s face was wet with tears.
“For God’s sake, don’t rub it in,” said Williams, without taking
his hand. “This is the saddest thing that ever happened to me in my
life.” And with the tears still streaming down his cheeks he walked
on through the courtroom.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The two shells that had not been tampered with during the
Plymouth trial were admitted in evidence at Dedham after several
witnesses claimed to have seen what they thought was a shotgun
protruding from the rear of the getaway car.
[11] Long after the trial Sacco admitted privately to Thompson, his
later counsel, that he was carrying the Colt that night “because we
were at war with the government.”
[12] During the trial Ross’s wife gave birth to a son. To the immense
delight of the judge, he was named Webster Thayer Ross. Katzmann
became the child’s godfather. As it did for Mrs. DeFalco, the calling
of court interpreter eventually proved too much for Ross: In 1926 he
was sentenced to the Middlesex House of Correction after pleading
guilty to attempting to bribe a judge.
[13] Leon Mucci, the deputy from the district that included
Torremaggiore.
CHAPTER TWELVE
POST-TRIAL: I
The convictions made the Friday headlines of all the Boston papers,
but by mid-August references to Sacco and Vanzetti had disappeared
from even the back pages. Theirs had been just another Massachusetts
murder trial, longer than most, but finished now in every sense.
So it seemed to J. Weston Allen, the Attorney General, when he
sent a letter of congratulation to District Attorney Katzmann. So
it seemed to Chief Justice Aiken, who wrote to his colleague and
fellow Dartmouth alumnus Webster Thayer that “Your management of
the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti entitles you to the highest degree
_summa cum laude_.” Whatever undercurrents of radical protest might
still persist, they remained well below the surface of middle-class
complacency.
But while in the United States the storm centered in Massachusetts
subsided, overseas there were increasing rumblings broken by
occasional flashes of lightning. As early as August 6, 1921, the
Executive Committee of the Chamber of Labor Unions in Rome sent a
telegram to President Harding expressing the hope that “the crime of
the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti will not be recorded.” Eugene
Lyons in his six months in Italy had done a skillful publicity job,
for by the time of the trial, Italians were generally convinced that
Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. The Latin anarchists in the United
States had written voluminously to their comrades in Italy, Spain,
and Portugal, laying the groundwork for the later agitation. Frank
Lopez, through his contacts with the more important South American
newspapers, had managed to appeal to the widespread anti-gringo
feeling there.
Although American consulates and embassies overseas had begun
to receive letters of protest in September, the real force
of the agitation did not strike until October, when large
Communist-organized demonstrations took place in many cities. For all
their tenacity, the anarchists were no longer a mass organization
and, so far as European developments were concerned, the East German
historian Johannes Zelt is undoubtedly right in claiming that “from
the beginning the Communists stood at the head of the Sacco-Vanzetti
campaign.” In a tactic foreshadowing the Popular Front of the
thirties, the Communist International called on all Communists,
socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists to unite for the rescue
of Sacco and Vanzetti—while, at the same time, the anarchists in the
Soviet Union were being liquidated en masse. The organized protest,
as it spread across Europe, would include men of good will of all
beliefs and persuasions, but control of the movement stayed in the
hands of the Communist International and, later, the subsidiary
International Red Aid, founded by the Cheka chief, Dzerzhinsky.
For the Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti were pawns in the class
struggle, convenient symbols to be exploited in a drive for power
where the blood of even anarchist martyrs might become the seed of
the Party. However the anarchists were to feel about the Communists
taking over—and in time they would feel bitter indeed—the Party
had the tight organization, the mass control, and the finances
that made quick action easy. On September 20 the Central Committee
for Action of the French Communist Party began making plans for a
monster demonstration before the American Embassy. According to the
resolution then drawn up, “Only direct and clearly revolutionary
action can save the Italian liberators Sacco and Vanzetti from the
death penalty to which they have been condemned.” The Communist
daily _L’Humanité_ opened a subscription fund for the two men and
proclaimed: “There is an American Embassy in Paris. We owe it a
visit!”
Rank-and-file demonstrators had scarcely heard the names of the two
Italians when they received orders to take to the streets, but in
their militancy they responded, just as they had for other issues
and would again when some central committee pressed a different
propaganda button.
The October demonstrations were centered in France and Italy, with
echoes in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia.
Concerned for the moment with other matters, the German Communist
Party did not participate. In Paris, even before the end of September
various committees for action had met. Eight thousand militants
filled the Salle Wagram and, on leaving, sang the “Internationale”
while from a doorway someone lobbed a grenade at the drawn-up police,
wounding several of them. The American Embassy was deluged with
letters and telegrams. On October 19 a grenade, wrapped with sinister
humor in a copy of the Royalist _Action Française_, was sent through
the mail to the new American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. The valet
who opened the package set off the fuse but managed to throw it into
a bathroom, where it went off, wounding him slightly and demolishing
the room. On the twenty-fourth, ten thousand police and eighteen
thousand troops had to be called out to hold back the vast crowd
demonstrating before the American Embassy.
The wave spread across Europe. In Switzerland the Communists
organized demonstrations in Zurich, Basle, and Geneva. In St. Gall
a letter to the American Consulate protesting the judicial murder
of “Sachi” and Vanzetti was signed by Communists, syndicalists,
socialists, and trade unionists. Amsterdam workers held a protest
meeting, as did the Dutch Free Thinkers. Communists marched in the
streets of The Hague, Brussels, Liége, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. The
American ambassador in Madrid was threatened with assassination. In
Lisbon a bomb was exploded in the vestibule of the consulate-general
shortly after a letter had been placed under the door demanding the
release of the “Brockton anarchists.” Medical students of Portugal’s
National College struck for a day to show their sympathy. Although
a demonstration by English Communists before the American Embassy
fizzled out in a London rain, the Party’s Tooting branch forwarded
its objections in a letter to the ambassador. A polite communication
was sent to Washington by the Communist Party of Ireland.
When November found the Massachusetts prisoners still alive and no
date set for their execution, the Communist International turned
off the spigot and the European agitation dried up, but a new wave
of agitation now began in Central and South America. The Latin
American movement was less well organized, less literate, and, as
might be expected, more violent. Anarchists of Guadalajara, Mexico,
paraded behind red and black banners reading: “Yankee bourgeoisie,
if you assassinate our comrades, Sacco and Vanzetti, your lives and
your interests will pay the penalty.” La Junta Federal of Santiago,
Chile, announced that “the day the Communists of the world learn that
Sacco and Vanzetti have been shot, the residences of all American
ambassadors which exist in various countries will be destroyed by
a tremendous charge of dynamite.” In Havana, anarchist circulars
warned that “in Cuba, Yankee tyrants are not lacking in whom to let
fall the vengeful dagger.” A bomb was found in the embassy garden
in Rio de Janeiro. The American consul in Mexico City received
anonymous threats from “the comrades of Saco and Banzet.” There were
demonstrations in front of the United States embassies and consulates
in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Panama.
In Massachusetts the overseas disturbances, recorded with increasing
frequency in the local papers, stirred up feelings of apprehension.
Moore was dismayed, and said so. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how
any intelligent and sane person sincerely interested in obtaining
ultimate justice for these two men could hope that this sort of thing
could benefit them.” The bombings, he tried to make out, were the
work either of enemies or insane people. Prompted by Moore, and aware
of the hardening of community opinion, the Defense Committee issued a
disclaimer, maintaining that
_the lurid plots and threats attributed to mythical individuals
referred to as Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers are so thoroughly harmful
to the effort being made to save the two men from the electric chair
that they could not have originated in the minds of friends. Either
they were planned by persons desirous of putting the case of the two
prisoners in disrepute or they are lies pure and simple._
Two days after the trial’s end the defense lawyers filed the
customary motion for a new trial on the grounds that the verdict was
against the weight of the evidence. This motion was scheduled to be
argued before Judge Thayer in Dedham on Saturday, October 29. On
the twenty-eighth the Boston papers spread a sensational story that
groups of Italians were coming to the hearing from New York dressed
in army uniforms and carrying automatics. Extra police were at once
stationed throughout the city, and the Post Office and the Federal
Building placed under guard. At the South Station plain-clothes
men watched each incoming train. That night the Dedham jail was
surrounded with searchlights.
Saturday morning the courthouse was more heavily guarded than at any
time during the trial. State troopers, mounted and on motorcycles,
patrolled the streets, and portly Colonel Foote, the Commissioner
of Public Safety, came over from the State House in person.
Plain-clothes men in all their obviousness tramped up and down the
High Street. The Boston riot squad appeared, loaned for the day
by the Boston police commissioner. The public was banned from the
courthouse. Reporters who were admitted were patted for weapons.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in and their handcuffs taken
off, there were fewer than fifty persons in the courtroom. Three
months had done much to alter the two men. In July, overwhelmed by
the verdict, they had felt isolated. Now the news from overseas
had given them the satisfaction of knowing that there were workers
the world over who were not going to stand by while the courts of
Massachusetts sent their comrades to the electric chair. Newly
confident, Sacco and Vanzetti were also full of resentment,
particularly against the debonair district attorney whom they once
more faced.
Both Moore and Jerry McAnarney well knew there was no chance that
Judge Thayer would overrule the jury’s verdict, but the motion
was a legal step always taken in murder cases. The arguments and
counterarguments lasted all that Saturday and the following Saturday,
Moore appealing particularly to the fact that the jury had given no
consideration to the alibi witnesses. While Katzmann was delivering
his arguments defending the verdict, the men in the cage kept
interrupting and contradicting him. When he told of taking a witness
to the Dedham jail who picked out Sacco from a group of prisoners,
Sacco jumped up in the cage and accused the district attorney of
having prompted the witness. “Yes,” he shouted to Judge Thayer, who
motioned to a deputy, “that man he said, ‘There’s Sacco.’ That’s the
way he know!” The deputy grabbed Sacco by the arm. “Go easy!” Sacco
cried out, trying to brush him off. Vanzetti now broke in savagely:
“You bring every crook in Massachusetts to testify against us! You
and every man of sense know it.” Judge Thayer observed acidly that
the defendants ought not to interrupt. When they continued to shout
and gesticulate, he again signaled to the deputies to quiet them. He
too had been hearing of the turmoil in Europe, and had been receiving
letters and telegrams daily—some of them threatening—demanding a
new trial. His house in Worcester was now under guard, and he was
simmeringly aware that last summer’s court session and verdict had by
no means ended the case. “These cases,” he announced with controlled
but still obvious anger as he looked sourly at the cage, “seem to
have assumed a state, national and international interest. Overseas
a statement was published that the presiding justice said to the
jury that these men must be convicted because they were Italians and
radicals. That statement was absolutely false.”
He and Moore continued their verbal dueling, carrying it over to
the concluding arguments on Saturday, November 5. When Moore tried
to explain how the issue of radicalism had injured his clients,
Judge Thayer pointed out his trial ruling that “No evidence of the
defendants’ radical activities or opinions would be allowed until the
defense released such matter themselves.” Moore characterized the
ruling as a Greek gift, the Virgilian reference escaping Judge Thayer.
Following this formal and predetermined motion the defense filed
five supplementary motions for a new trial: the Ripley motion, the
Gould-Pelser motion, the Goodridge motion, the Andrews motion, and
the Hamilton-Proctor motion.
A month or so after the trial Jerry McAnarney had met the jury
foreman, Walter Ripley—whom he had known for years—on the street in
Quincy. They stopped on the corner to talk, and Jerry learned for
the first time about the three cartridges that Ripley had casually
brought to court in his vest pocket and during the trial compared
with the five cartridges found in Vanzetti’s revolver. Ripley thought
nothing of the matter, but for Jerry it was the first crack in the
verdict. He now interviewed nine of the other jurors and obtained
affidavits from several of them. Wallace Hersey and Frank McNamara
admitted they had seen the Ripley bullets, Frank Marden and Seward
Parker that they had heard about them. Ripley himself had died of a
heart attack on October 10, before McAnarney could get an affidavit
from him. His widow signed an affidavit that her husband had had the
bullets with him during the trial. This admitted fact was the basis
of the first supplementary motion, a lengthy document that claimed in
substance that “if during the trial Ripley made a comparison between
these three cartridges and the five cartridges taken from Vanzetti’s
revolver, then the defendants are entitled to a new trial as a matter
of right.” The Ripley motion with its accompanying affidavits was
filed on November 8. Judge Thayer announced that he would set a
hearing date satisfactory to both sides.
On the afternoon before Christmas, 1921, exactly two years after
the Bridgewater crime, in a gray, nearly empty courtroom, the
wintry-faced Thayer denied the October motion for a new trial. “I
cannot,” he intoned, “as I must if I disturb these verdicts—announce
to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their
oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor,
judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust
reposed in them by the law as well as by the Court. And all for what
purpose? To take away the lives of two human beings created by their
own God. The human frailties of man, his tender regard and love for
human life and his profound sympathy for his fellow-men, when charged
with the gravest offence known to the law, repudiates the suggestion.”
Three days after this denial Fred Moore wrote to a friend:
_The one hope for these boys now rests in the hope that we may be
able to unearth new facts. This means endless investigations. It
means that every clue as to the real bandits must be followed up
expertly and carefully. As you know this means money._
Thus, briefly, Moore stated his problems for the next three years,
and the last problem would always be the most harassing, the one
that would seem to be squatting like a dollar sign on the doorstep
of Rollins Place each time he returned. For him money was a wretched
commodity, something that arrived in the morning and went out in
the afternoon, a means merely through which he might obtain more
publicity, wider investigations. His restless and inventive mind
never stopped thinking of new angles to explore. One week would
find him at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on a tip that two
inmates there were connected with the gang that, it was rumored, had
really pulled off the Bridgewater job. The next week might find him
uncovering the bigamous career of a prosecution witness. Pressed
constantly for funds, he wrote countless dunning letters, cajoled his
old radical friends and associates from coast to coast, unabashedly
appealed to prominent strangers, cultivated sympathetic old women.
Given enough money, he was sure he could win.
The trial had been over for half a year, the sentencing of the two
men lay somewhere in the months ahead. General interest dwindled.
Only the most faithful sympathizers still sent in contributions.
The Defense Committee had moved from Battery Street to the more
central Hanover Street, where most of the North End Italian shops
were located. Eugene Lyons, returned from Italy, now replaced Art
Shields. The new headquarters at number 256 was on the third floor,
a large garret anteroom leading into a small inner office. Every
Thursday night the committee members would climb the warped, narrow
stairs to listen to a repetition of what had been said the week
before. Three or four times a year there would be a meeting of
several hundred sympathizers at Paine Memorial Hall in the South
End, most of them Italian comrades, with a sprinkling of Back Bay
dissidents, members of the Civil Liberties Committee, and the more
radical trade-union officials.
_It was [Lyons wrote] a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched
company that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were
moved by an undiluted urge to save the two innocent men, others were
interested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still
others got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were
hot-headed and desperate Italians distrustful of all law, bitterly
sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits, and often
refusing in principle to cooperate with their own lawyers. At the
other extreme were men and women of old New England stock chiefly
concerned with saving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the
stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice. I can recall vital meetings
in which a snarling, red-headed Italian exponent of direct action
argued some question of policy with a benign pacifist like Mrs.
Evans. It was Moore’s delicate job to reconcile these people and
placate their idiosyncrasies._
The money that Moore needed in floods came in dribbles—$18.30 from
an Italian picnic in Connecticut, an anonymous dollar bill posted in
Seattle, $38.65 from the Pietro Gori Group of Nokomis, Illinois, the
occasional windfall of five hundred dollars collected by the Workers’
Defense Union at a New York meeting in Beethoven Hall, a small but
steady flow from Moore’s friends in the United Mine Workers. Moore
knew that what was required was a full-time treasurer to coordinate
finances and fund-raising. He wanted Felicani to quit _La Notizia_
and devote all his time to the job at a regular salary. Felicani
would not hear of it. He was willing to work until midnight each
night on the committee accounts, or on propaganda, or whatever else
needed doing, but those pathetically small sums that kept dribbling
in for the defense of his friends—he could not bear to pay himself
from that money. He insisted on keeping a record of every amount
received, no matter how small, and of every cent paid out.
Moore did not see the point of such finical accounting. To him it
was foolish to waste time on columns of figures when two men’s lives
were at stake. He and Felicani were always at odds about money. To
Felicani it seemed that no matter how much he provided, Moore always
needed more. It was as if the lawyer had a hole in his hand. For
Moore it was both ridiculous and humiliating that he, the general
counsel of the I.W.W., whose name struck sparks from coast to coast,
who had taken this case out of the gutter and made it a world issue,
should have to appear hat in hand before a printer-nobody to beg
for money—and often not get it! Time and again Moore saw what he
considered promising investigations shut off by the anarchists. Later
he was to ask himself if some deeper motive than a financial one lay
behind their refusals. On October 20, 1922, the doctrinaire Frank
Lopez, who had become secretary of the Defense Committee, wrote Moore:
_I warn you to keep your hands off of many things that in order to
obey or please other persons you had been trying to do for many
months past._
To supplement such part-time detectives as Robert Reid, Moore hired
two permanent investigators, Tommy Doyle and Albert Carpenter. Doyle,
a pious Catholic, was still young enough to think of himself as a
sleuth, so intrigued at playing Sherlock Holmes that he did not care
whether he was investigating thieves, anarchists, or Republicans.
Carpenter was an older man, more self-contained, oriented to
radical reform. He and Moore had first meet in San Diego, during
the free-speech fight of 1911. Together they had tracked down and
exposed the perjurer, Frank Oxman, in the Mooney-Billings case. In
Everett, Washington, in 1915, after a dockside clash in which five
I.W.W.’s and two sheriffs were killed and seventy-four Wobblies later
indicted for first-degree murder—a national record—Carpenter acted as
Moore’s chief investigator. In Chicago during the 1917 I.W.W. trials,
after Moore had been framed by the police and was on the run, it was
Carpenter who kept track of him through Lola Darroch, then Moore’s
secretary. Once Moore had settled down in Rollins Place, it seemed
only natural for him to send for his old reliable friend.
Moore had early become convinced that the South Braintree holdup was
the work of a gang of professionals. Also, his legal sixth sense
warned him there were unexplored depths to such equivocal witnesses
as Louis Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Carlos Goodridge. It seemed a pity
to him to have the money problem overshadowing all the others.
* * * * *
On May 4, 1922, Moore filed the second supplementary motion, the
Gould-Pelser motion. Roy Gould was the razor-paste salesman who on
the day of the South Braintree murders had stood near the crossing
and been fired at from the getaway car, the bullet passing through
his overcoat lapel. No one, not even Jimmy Bostock or Frank Burke,
had been so close to the moving car or had such a clear view of its
occupants. Immediately after the shooting Gould gave his name and
address to a Braintree policemen, John Heaney. Soon afterward he left
town to follow the summer carnivals and country fairs across New
England with his razor paste.
Moore first learned about Gould and his experience from Frank Burke,
who had known him for some time. No one, however, seemed to know
what had become of Gould. Moore sent Reid all over New England
inquiring at every carnival he could trace, without success. Finally
on November 3, while Burke was in Portland, Maine, on business, he
noticed Gould’s name on the register of his hotel. Burke was almost
too astonished to believe his eyes. When the two met, Gould said he
had gone to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island shortly after the
murder, and had not read much about the trial.
Moore came to Portland on the next train and found Gould perfectly
willing to tell his story about South Braintree. The man who had
fired at him that day, Gould said, was someone he could never forget.
Moore paid Gould’s way to Boston and there showed him photographs of
Sacco and Vanzetti. Gould was positive that neither was the man who
had fired at him. Later Moore took him to the Dedham jail where they
talked with Sacco. After watching Sacco for about ten minutes Gould
said he was certain that this was not the gunman and he was willing
to sign an affidavit to that effect.
It was Moore’s claim that Gould’s affidavit was “new and independent
testimony,” that the Commonwealth had known about him and yet made no
effort to call him as a witness, and that his identification would
have been sufficient to warrant a different verdict.
Louis Pelser was the next witness on Moore’s retribution list. All
Moore could learn of him at first was that after the trial he had
lost his job and left his parents’ flat in Jamaica Plain. Tommy Doyle
finally tracked him to a derelict South End rooming house. Pelser was
in an abject alcoholic state, red-eyed and maudlin. When he said he
had not eaten anything all day, Doyle bought him a meal, then gave
him seventy cents and paid his carfare to Moore’s Pemberton Square
office.
Doyle had telephoned ahead and Moore was waiting there with Lyons,
Reid, and a stenographer. Pelser sobered up when he saw them. As
always, when faced with authority, he began to doubt himself, what
he had seen, what he had previously said. Moore tried to reassure
him, patting him on the back and telling him “You look like a regular
fellow.” Pelser said that the day he arrived at Dedham District
Attorney Williams had taken him to a little upstairs room in the
courthouse and shown him several pictures of Sacco, asking if he was
the man he had seen below the factory window. “No,” Pelser had told
him, “I don’t think that’s the man I seen. I just got a glance of
everything. I could not identify if you brought me a hundred pictures
here.” Williams insisted that he, Pelser, knew “right well” Sacco was
the man.
Now, in the Pemberton Square office, Pelser said he “did not get a
good enough view to see any man.” How the “dead image stuff” had come
up in court he could not tell.
“Now why in God’s world did you testify as you did?” Moore bellowed
at the cowering sour-breathed Pelser.
“I must have been forced,” the other replied lamely. He still
maintained that he had seen a man with a gun, but he could in no way
describe him. The “dead image,” he admitted, had been a mistake.
Moore asked if he would go on the stand again and take back what he
had said. Pelser hesitated. Moore bore down on him: “You can tell
anything that is the truth. If it’s not true that he is the dead
image, then you owe it to yourself and your conscience to tell it. If
it is the truth, for God’s sake stick to your story. It might come
to the point when in order to save a couple of men’s lives it is
going to be necessary—you have got the stuff to come through if it is
necessary, that right?”
Pelser gulped out an abject “Yes.”
It took the stenographer twenty minutes to prepare the transcript.
After Pelser signed it Moore slapped him on the back again, gave him
a couple of cigars, and Lyons offered to take him and his girl to the
Westminster Winter Garden. Pelser refused. Afterward, when he thought
of what he had signed, he felt sick. Two days later, at his parents’
flat, he wrote to the district attorney:
_287 Centre St.
Jamiaca Plaine
Feb. 6, 1922._
_Mr. Katzmann_,
_Dear Sir:—Saturday afternoon a man called for me in regards the
Sacco Case. He did not say which side he represented._
_He asked me if I could give a little information on the case._
_I was drinking pretty heavy that day. He said I want to show a
couple of pictures and got me on the way in town gave me some money
bought a dinner cigars & cigarettes we went into some office in
Pemberton Sq. he introduced me to Mr. Moore then he sat me down and
locked the door Moore said to me you look like a white man._
_He patted me on the back & gave me a Cigar & said give me a little
dope on the Sacco Case he handed me a couple of pictures & asked me
if I ever saw them. I said “no”, he showed me some more. One word
led to another, he got around me some way & I didn’t know what I was
up against. He had 3 or 4 men in his office & a girl stenographer.
He asked me one question & other and finally had my whole story
contradicted what I had said at the Dedham Court. I am worried at the
way they have framed me & got me in to trouble. When it was over one
of the men asked me if I would not have a drink & invited me to a big
dinner & dance at the West Minster Hotel. Some how I refused to go
because I felt it was another trap to get me to say more._
_When I came to my Senses the next day & had a little talk with my
folks they told me to get in touch with you as soon as I could I
tried to get you on the phone and then decided I had better write
you._
_Hoping you will give this your immediate attention and favor me with
an early reply._
_Respectfully,
Louis Pelser_
_P.S. I forgot to mention that I also signed two papers of some kind._
As soon as Assistant District Attorney Williams read the letter,
forwarded to him by Katzmann, he had Pelser up on the courthouse
carpet. Williams asked him if he did not remember looking at Sacco’s
picture and saying “That looks like the man,” of seeing Sacco and
exclaiming “By George! If he isn’t the man he is a dead image for
him.” Pelser now maintained that what he had said on the stand was
the truth as he believed it, and that nothing had since happened to
change his mind. The fact was that when he had talked to Moore in
Boston he was in no condition to know what he was saying.
However spineless Pelser seemed in other respects, the “dead image”
term still troubled him. When Williams asked him again if he had
meant those words, he insisted “I didn’t mean them in that way. I
don’t know how I happened to use that word ‘dead image.’”
In his new motion Moore claimed that the affidavit Pelser had signed
in his office was “tantamount and equivalent to a repudiation of the
testimony given by the said Louis Pelser on the trial of this case”
and that his testimony was “not entitled to be considered by the jury
as trustworthy and reliable.”
* * * * *
Eleven weeks later Moore filed the third supplementary motion, based
on what he had learned about Carlos Goodridge, the pool-playing
Victrola salesman who had so unhesitantly picked out Sacco as the
gunman he had seen in the getaway car. During the trial the defense
had discovered nothing more about Goodridge than that he was married
and lived in Cambridge and that in September 1920 he had pleaded
guilty to a charge of grand larceny in the Dedham court and had been
placed on probation. What Moore had since learned about Goodridge was
enough to destroy him.
Goodridge turned out to be Erastus Corning Whitney, a shiftless
bigamist from upper New York State, an arsonist, a passer of bad
checks who had served two terms in jail for petty larceny, a man who
had passed most of his adult life escaping from old misdemeanors and
importunate females. Tommy Doyle spent three months and more than
ten thousand dollars collecting documents, pictures, letters, and
affidavits that made all this plain.
Armed with the evidence, Moore started off for Vassalboro, Maine,
where Goodridge was now living. Stopping in Augusta, he picked up
Ethel Lee, a deputy sheriff, and her sister-in-law, Marjorie, a
stenographer. It was twilight by the time they reached Goodridge’s
Vassalboro farm. His third wife, Margaret Rose, said her husband
was down the road at a church meeting. Moore found him in the white
clapboard building, called him out in the middle of a hymn, and
asked him to get into the car. There he displayed Doyle’s documents
and asked Goodridge if he was not Erastus Corning Whitney, under
indictment for larceny in Livingston County, New York. Goodridge
admitted that he was. He did not dispute any of the facts that Doyle
had dredged up. “Well, the game is up,” he said wearily, “and I
suppose I will have to go back to New York.” He was not aware of the
woman in the back seat taking shorthand notes, nor did he recognize
his questioner until he said “My name is Moore.”
“Glad to meet you,” Goodridge said, trying to cover up his fear with
cordiality. “I’ve heard of you from San Francisco to Maine.”
Moore said flatly that he was not interested in what Goodridge had
or had not done in New York. All he wanted was the full story of how
he had come to testify in the Dedham court, and what influence the
district attorney’s office had brought to bear on him. Of course if
Goodridge did not want to talk, there was the deputy sheriff in the
back seat and an indictment waiting in New York.
Goodridge agreed to tell his tale. He had first recognized Sacco’s
picture, he said, in a newspaper. He had then shown it to a girl
he knew, Lottie Packard, who worked at Rice & Hutchins. “I says to
Lottie, ‘Whose picture is that?’ and she called him by name. I had
the paper folded so that she couldn’t see nothing but the picture. ‘I
used to work with him in a factory.’ I says, ‘That’s the fellow that
was in the gang down here.’ I told Lottie never to say anything about
it. I never told anyone but my wife.”
Williams and Brouillard and Stewart had been after him in the autumn
of 1920 to come to the Dedham jail with them, Goodridge continued,
but he had always refused, telling them it was no use to take him
there, that he had seen nothing and “didn’t know anything about the
deal.” When he himself was arraigned in Dedham he had recognized
Sacco as soon as the latter was brought into the courtroom, but he
never told anyone about this. He had lied to the district attorney’s
people and to the police because he did not want to get mixed up in
the case.
Moore came back again and again to his central question: Why had
Goodridge refused to talk from September to July, and then suddenly
gone on the stand and identified Sacco? Goodridge did not have any
explanation.
“I think I testified to the truth to the best of my ability,” he
complained, “and it’s a pretty hard proposition.”
The lawyer asked him sharply if he thought a man should die on his
statement. No, Goodridge did not think so. But when he had testified
he thought he had been right. No one had forced him, no inducements
had been offered. It was just that Sacco was the man he thought he
had seen. “But afterwards a good many times since I have thought that
I am not positive,” he went on. “I am not positive that if I would
have to swear that that man was the one, I could positively identify
him as the man.” As Moore continued to batter him with questions,
Goodridge began to cry.
Moore insisted that the assistant district attorney had badgered
Goodridge into taking the stand. Goodridge no longer denied it.
“You know just how those things is yourself,” he told the lawyer
pleadingly. “He talked to me so much I was just about dead, I guess.”
The stenographer now interrupted to say she had run out of paper. The
four drove back to the farm. On the way Moore urged Goodridge to
sign an affidavit. He refused. Finally Moore turned to the sheriff.
“I think, Mrs. Lee,” he said sternly, “that it is your duty to take
this man back to Augusta and notify the New York authorities.”
While Goodridge changed his clothes, Moore spent twenty minutes
talking, with his wife, reducing her, too, to tears. Goodridge then
quietly got in the car and they headed for Augusta. Just before they
reached the city Moore made a final effort: “Whitney, what I would
like to know is what inducement was held out to you to testify at
this trial. You did not testify at this trial willingly unless you
benefited by it some way or another; that is what I want to know and
if you will tell me you will save yourself the trouble of going back
to New York.” Goodridge still would not say.
Moore took him first to the county jail. There the warden refused to
admit him without a warrant. With the help of Deputy Sheriff Lee,
Moore managed to have him locked up in police headquarters as a
fugitive. “I will come back later,” Moore told the police chief, “as
I want this fellow to come clean and he is holding back things that
he ought to tell us.” Mrs. Lee then telegraphed the district attorney
of Livingston County that they were holding Erastus Corning Whitney
for him. Moore telephoned the clerk of courts in Genesee and asked
if Whitney was still wanted. The clerk said he did not think so, but
he would ask the sheriff. The sheriff expressed no interest in the
eleven-year-old indictment.
Goodridge remained the night at police headquarters. When next day he
was brought before Judge Robert Cony and the judge learned that the
indictment was dated November 24, 1911, he announced angrily from the
bench: “They will never bother you on it, and unless I hear from them
tonight I will let you go in the morning, and I do not intend to have
his office used by any lawyer to build up any cases for the State of
Massachusetts or any other state, and the best thing you can do is
not to see Mr. Moore again.”
Goodridge was released next morning. There was nothing more Moore
could do about him.
* * * * *
On September 11 Moore presented a fourth supplementary motion,
requesting a new trial because of additional facts discovered about
the witness Lola Andrews, “a person whose testimony should not
constitute the basis of a verdict of guilty on a charge of murder.”
Six months before the trial, when Moore had interviewed her in
the Alhambra Block in Quincy and shown her pictures of Sacco and
Vanzetti, she had been unable to identify them and had made a
statement exonerating the defendants. On the witness stand she had
claimed that this statement had been untruthfully reported. Now
Moore, as he wrote to Upton Sinclair, had “wilted” her. She had
signed an affidavit for him repudiating her court testimony and
admitting that she had lied because the district attorney knew “many
chapters of her private life that she could ill afford to have
revealed.”
Her affidavit stated that some time before the trial Stewart and
Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail, shown her Sacco, and
asked if he was the man she had seen on April 15. She said she did
not know. Later Assistant District Attorney Williams put the same
question to her. She said she could not be positive. Williams then
shook his finger in her face and told her, “You can put it stronger
than that. I know you can.”
Her testimony in court had been “false and untrue.... She had never
... at any time or place or under any conditions and specifically on
April 15, 1920, at South Braintree, seen said Nicola Sacco until she
saw him in the Dedham County Jail.” Her false statements “were made
under the intimidating influences of Michael E. Stewart, Albert L.
Brouillard, Harold Williams and Frederick G. Katzmann.”
Like Pelser, Lola Andrews found herself overborne by any determined
person who talked with her. In addition she had much to conceal.
Her life in Quincy was in part known to the police. Recently there
had been some business about a naval officer named Landers in her
room, hushed up for the time but still rumor-heavy. When Moore found
out that she had originally come from Gardiner, Maine, he sent Bert
Carpenter there to see what he could learn. What Carpenter learned
would have ruined her in any court.
She had been born Rachel Andrews, the by-product of an encounter
between a Yankee farmer’s daughter and an itinerant Italian. A
tow-path child brought up in a shanty settlement on the outskirts of
the trim Kennebec town, she had scarcely passed adolescence when she
married an ex-soldier returned from the Philippines, Mayhew Hassam,
an alcoholic who used her cruelly. She had borne him one son. After
the marriage ended she had stayed on in Gardiner across the street
from the Soldiers’ Home, available and accommodating. In Augusta
she had been convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct. Moving on to
Massachusetts, she had left her son behind, sending money back for
his board. At the time she testified in Dedham he was eighteen years
old. What her life had been she did not ever want him to know. The
boy was her weak spot—a spot Moore did not hesitate to exploit. He
had been hard on Pelser, hard on Goodridge, he would be hard on her.
A lawyer, to his mind, could not be delicate when men’s lives were at
stake.
Lola Darroch brought young Hassam from Maine, hired a room for him
in the seedy Hotel Essex opposite the South Station, and sent for
the mother. The boy, though an unkempt rustic, had proved tractable
and intelligent, accepting Moore’s version of the case and agreeing
to try to persuade his mother to repudiate her courtroom testimony.
Lola Andrews, brought in from Quincy, confronted her son while Moore
told her that she had lied in Dedham and that it was now up to her
to tell the truth. She wilted at once and began to cry. Moore spent
the evening drafting an affidavit. When it was handed to her, her
son begged her to sign. Moore showed her certain affidavits that
Carpenter had collected in Gardiner, without, however, allowing her
to read them. She signed.
Moore could indeed browbeat such witnesses as Pelser, Goodridge, and
Lola Andrews. The difficulty was that when they were alone again they
had second thoughts that generally took the form of a disclaiming
letter to the district attorney. On January 9, 1923, Lola signed
a counteraffidavit for District Attorney Katzmann and Assistant
District Attorney Williams in which she claimed that Moore had used
her boy to trap her and that she had not read the nine pages of the
affidavit. She had not wanted to sign it.
_I told them that if I put my name to that paper that they had
already drawn up for me ... I could see it meant a terrible disgrace
for me. They told me no, that I was doing the grandest thing a woman
could do, and that by doing what they wanted me to do I would gain
the respect and friendship of everyone, and that my boy would not
be ashamed to look upon me as his mother, and the evidence they had
brought with them from Maine would not be submitted to the court
or to the eyes of anyone, not even to my son.... Mr. Moore took me
over to a small desk and laid the paper in front of me and told me
to sign it. I told him I would not, for I did not realize what I was
doing.... They dipped the pen in the ink and tried to pass it into my
hand.... All the time I was crying and asking them not to force me to
sign it. My son then said, “Mother, I want you to sign that paper,
for it means a whole lot to me.” I do not seem to remember much what
happened after that, only that someone put the pen in my hand and
told me to sign it, and asked my boy to come over to me and help me.
My boy came over and put his arm around me and said, “Mother, sign
this paper and have an end to all this trouble, for you did not
recognize these men”—meaning Sacco and Vanzetti—“and you will only be
doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.”_
“I was like I was in a trance,” she later told Katzmann.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most crucial testimony offered in the trial, the deciding
factor—if John Dever is to be believed—was the evidence of the guns
and the bullets. If, as Moore was well aware, it could be proved
beyond a doubt that the mortal bullet found in Berardelli’s body
had not been fired from Sacco’s automatic, the keystone of the
Commonwealth’s case would be demolished. In February 1923, with this
in mind, he engaged Dr. Albert Hamilton, a New York expert who had
testified in 165 homicide cases, to prepare the fifth supplementary
motion, the Hamilton-Proctor motion.
Hamilton came into the case through Frank Sibley, who happened to
meet him while riding on the train from Portland, Maine, to Boston.
Hamilton, an authoritative little man with a convincing air, told
Sibley that if he had been a witness at Dedham he could have proved
quickly and conclusively whether or not Sacco’s pistol had fired
the mortal bullet. Once back in Boston Sibley recommended Hamilton
enthusiastically to Moore. The lawyer immediately wrote Hamilton to
ask what he would charge for coming to Boston. Without bothering
to reply, Hamilton confidently took the next train. In their first
interview Moore told Hamilton he was vitally concerned in learning
the answers to four fundamental questions: Had the hammer of the
Vanzetti revolver been replaced by a new hammer? Were one or more of
the shells that Fraher had picked up fired in the Sacco pistol? Had
Bullet III been fired from the Sacco pistol? Was the mortal bullet
discharged from a cartridge of the same date of manufacture as any of
the cartridges found on Sacco when he was arrested? Hamilton agreed
to make the investigation and determine the four answers.
Hamilton was an unlucky choice. Moore did not suspect that
his doctorate was self-awarded. By trade a druggist and
concocter of patent medicines in Auburn, New York, Hamilton had
developed expertness as a second career, advertising himself
as a “micro-chemical investigator.” His avocation became his
calling. In 1908, in a publicity pamphlet entitled “That Man from
Auburn,” he described himself as a qualified expert in chemistry,
microscopy, handwriting, ink analysis, typewriting, photography,
fingerprints, toxicology, gunshot wounds, guns and cartridges,
bullet identification, gunpowder, nitroglycerine, dynamite, high
explosives, blood and other stains, causes of death, embalming, and
anatomy. Unknown to Moore, he had earlier written to Judge Thayer
claiming that he knew a method of examining the Sacco-Vanzetti
ballistics exhibit that would reveal the truth. He had received no
reply. Men who had worked with Hamilton in the past did not recommend
him. The Auburn coroner said that his reputation for truth was bad.
The assistant district attorney of Monroe County considered him “a
professional expert ... whose testimony should not be accepted in any
court of record, and should receive no credence at the hands of a
judge or jury.”
Much of Hamilton’s clouded reputation in New York stemmed from the
murder trial of Charles Stielow who, in 1915, was accused of shooting
Charles Phelps and his housekeeper in West Shelby. Hamilton had
appeared for the prosecution. After tests and a minute examination
of Stielow’s revolver and of the three bullets taken from Phelps’
body and the one from that of his housekeeper, he testified that only
Stielow’s revolver could have fired the bullets. Principally because
of this testimony Stielow was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Later he was proved to be innocent and pardoned. In a post-trial
review of the evidence Max Poser, an expert in applied optics with
the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, demonstrated that the bullets
taken from the bodies had not come from the Stielow revolver. “The
opinion expressed by the expert Hamilton in his evidence at the
trial,” Poser concluded, “was worthless.” The setback, however, did
not seem to hamper Hamilton’s career.
It did not take Hamilton long, after inspecting the Sacco-Vanzetti
exhibits, to come to his conclusions. In the motion, filed on
April 30, 1923, he claimed that by using a Bausch & Lomb compound
microscope he was able to ascertain discrepancies between the
markings on the test bullets from Sacco’s pistol and the markings on
Bullet III. According to his measurements the land and groove widths
in the barrel of Sacco’s Colt agreed with the land and groove widths
on the test bullets but not with the mortal bullet. He also found
that a microscopic examination of the Fraher shells eliminated the
possibility of any one of them having been fired in the Colt. Because
of a difference in the cannelures, he contended that Bullet III was
not manufactured at the same time as the six Winchester cartridges
found on Sacco. Augustus Gill, Professor of Technical Chemical
Analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been
engaged to assist Hamilton. His tabulations, made under different
conditions, varied somewhat from Hamilton’s. Nevertheless, he was
convinced from his own measurements “that the so-called mortal bullet
never passed through the Sacco gun.” As for Vanzetti’s revolver,
Hamilton maintained that it had not been fitted with a new hammer,
because an essential screw did not show marks of having been removed.
Captain Van Amburgh, in an affidavit for the Commonwealth, became
much more positive than he had been at the trial. He now used a
more powerful microscope and in addition he had had comparative
photographs taken of Bullet III and one of the test bullets. He
offered twelve pictures of each bullet in which the lands and
grooves were separately photographed so that the enlarged pictures
could be compared. “The facts which I have found from my entire
investigation,” he asserted, “are so clear that, in my opinion, they
amount to proof. I am absolutely certain that the Fraher Shell W
was fired in the Sacco pistol. I am also positive that the mortal
bullet was fired in the Sacco pistol.” His findings were confirmed
by Merton Robinson, a ballistics engineer for the Winchester Arms
Company. Robinson not only maintained that Bullet III had been fired
from Sacco’s pistol, but rejected Hamilton’s argument that the
mortal bullet and those found on Sacco were of a different date of
manufacture. As for Hamilton’s photographic evidence to prove that
the hammer in Vanzetti’s revolver had not been replaced, it would
have been quite possible, Robinson asserted, for an expert repairman
to have inserted a new screw, or to have removed and replaced the old
one, without leaving marks on the screw head.
* * * * *
On March 8, 1923, after much persuasion on the part of the McAnarney
brothers, William Thompson agreed to enter the case for the limited
purpose of arguing the motions for a new trial. He had been hesitant
about becoming involved, but, ironically enough, it was Katzmann’s
attack on the integrity and qualifications of Dr. Hamilton that
finally persuaded him.
Thompson knew that his entering this by-now notorious case would
arouse a great deal of hostility in State Street legal circles, and
he persuaded his friend of many years, Arthur Dehon Hill, to come
in with him so that, as he explained, he would have an associate
he could talk with more frankly than he could with Moore. Hill, a
lawyer who had once been corporation counsel of the City of Boston,
was a more integral State Street figure than Thompson, who—like
Judge Thayer—had been brought up in Worcester and was a Bostonian
merely by attrition. Although fortuitously born in Paris, Hill was
an inbred Bostonian whose perspective was limited by the familiar
triangle of Beacon Hill, the Harvard Yard, and the North Shore. Like
so many Boston lawyers who moved securely in their dimly lit world
of irrevocable trusts, he was cadaverous—as if his blood stream had
by some subtle osmosis absorbed the dried leather of a century’s
_Massachusetts Reports_. Even as a Harvard undergraduate he looked
as if he had never been young. Yet this secure, aloof lawyer who
appeared so typical of his caste was not wholly typical. There was
something more to him, a quality of _fiat justitia_ that went beyond
Beacon Hill. In the 1912 Bull Moose campaign he had come out for
Theodore Roosevelt, a rejection of the Boston norm. When Thompson
first asked him to enter the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he was reluctant.
Although he had a poor opinion of the garrulous Thayer he thought
well of Katzmann, whom he had known for a number of years.
Hill joined the defense on March 15 feeling, as he later explained,
“What do I care about these draft-dodgers who were skulking in Mexico
when their countrymen were fighting for the very life of the land?
But I do care for the honor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
Thompson would in time come to consider the cause of Sacco and
Vanzetti as his own. For Hill, who would appear as counsel in the
last tumultuous weeks, it was a case and not a cause, and he the
advocate rather than the partisan.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
POST-TRIAL: II
Just before Thompson and Hill entered the case Sacco went on a hunger
strike. A year and a half had elapsed since his conviction, and he
announced that he would continue to fast until the court ruled on his
fate. Much of the delay during 1922 had resulted from the additional
time granted Moore to follow up clues that he hoped might lead to the
real criminals. In the autumn Judge Thayer underwent an operation,
causing a further delay.
Sacco chafed under his barred restraint. He was not one to find
escape in reading or thinking his thoughts. Even the anarchism that
was so fundamental to him attracted him more by its unrelenting code
than by its philosophy. He was a man of abounding physical energy
for whom work and love were necessary releases. Jail was an exercise
in patience that he could never learn. Several times in the course
of his years at Dedham he approached and even crossed the borderline
of sanity. From his cell, with its rolled blanket and wooden water
bucket and tin mug and enamel slop pail, he watched the flaring
twilights diminish, the approach of morning along the empty streets,
the orbit of the sun as it shifted across the upper windows. Days and
weeks and months passed meaninglessly.
In November 1921, Sacco had written to Vanzetti in the grimmer
confinement of Charlestown: “I am very sorry that no one comes and
see you, no one comes to see me neither, but Rosie.” The week before,
his wife had brought little Ines to the jail for the first time.
Sacco was delighted to hold the plump crowing baby in his arms. Mrs.
Evans became a staunch periodic visitor. Sacco, in spite of his
theoretical rejection of bourgeois society, developed an intense
filial affection for her. From Mrs. Glendower Evans, separated from
him by the whole range of the sociological spectrum, she became
Auntie Bee. In 1925 he wrote her: “From since the day I have meet
you, you have occupied in my heart my mother her place, and so like I
been respect you and I been loved you.” It was a curious transition
from the brown peasant woman of Torremaggiore to the self-contained
Bostonian, but Mrs. Evans was only one of the elderly women who were
to take an increasingly maternal interest in the Dedham prisoner.
Among the earliest was kindly, mousy Mrs. Cerise Carman Jack in
her squeaky high-button boots; for a while she took Rosina and the
children to her farm in Sharon. There was Mrs. Jessica Henderson,
matron of good causes and pillar of the Anti-Vivisection Society. And
there were Mrs. Gertrude Winslow and Mrs. Codman, the latter a cousin
by marriage of the head of the Civil Liberties Committee. Sacco
always took a more trusting attitude toward women than toward men.
Evenings were the most difficult for “thes sad reclus,” as he
whimsically termed himself. He kept thinking of the bungalow in South
Stoughton, how he would sometimes visit friends after supper and
come back with the sleeping Dante in his arms and Rosina beside him.
“Those day,” he wrote Mrs. Jack, “they was a some happy day.”
The jail rule that unsentenced prisoners might not work kept Sacco
in idleness, intensifying the feelings of persecution that he had
developed after the trial. On February 14, 1923, he began his hunger
strike. Sheriff Capen made no attempt to force him to eat, and by
the middle of March he had grown noticeably weaker. On the afternoon
of the sixteenth, at Judge Thayer’s request, he was examined by
Charles Cahoon, superintendent of the Medfield State Hospital; Albert
Thomas, superintendent of the Foxboro State Hospital; and a Boston
psychiatrist, Abraham Meyerson.
Sacco, lying on his cot, calmly explained to the doctors that the
state was trying to kill him. Poison was being put into his food—even
into the food his wife brought him; poisonous vapors were being blown
into his cell and electric currents circulated under his bed. His
suffering had become so intense, he explained, that he could not
permit it to go much further. When Dr. Cahoon asked him why he drank
water, which would prolong his life, he “stated that he did not want
to die too quickly because, on account of a hearing for a new trial
he felt that he should allow his counsel some opportunity to plead.
He had no confidence, however, that he would get a new trial; he did
not expect any justice from the state or the government.”
The doctors found that Sacco was mentally disturbed, and Judge
Thayer ordered him to the Boston Psychopathic Hospital for
observation. On his arrival he was warned by Dr. Meyerson, “Nick,
they have sent you here to eat, and if you don’t, we will feed you
with a tube.” According to the newspaper reports he was then forcibly
fed by an attendant in the doctor’s presence, although Sacco later
claimed that he broke his strike voluntarily. “You know,” he told
another doctor some months afterward, “I have read in an Italian
magazine that you can live a long time if they feed you with a tube;
I knew this, and then I was too weak and could not fight them, so
I said, I go ahead and eat. I was against going because I wanted
justice.”
For the first two days in the hospital he lay on his cot and was
fed broth and gruel every hour. Then he began to eat regularly,
gaining ten pounds within a week. His Dedham delusions vanished and
he spoke of them as “all a mistake” and “prejudices.” Although he
identified the hospital with the state that was persecuting him, he
was friendly with the doctors, sometimes speaking of his love for his
wife and children and his feeling for the out-of-doors, joking about
his hairiness that “proved the correctness of Darwin’s theory,” or
talking about his work as sole-trimmer.
On March 22, a few hours after Sacco had gone to bed, he complained
of a headache and asked the ward attendant for a wet towel to place
across his forehead. When the attendant left, Sacco sprang out of
bed and struck his head several times against a chair, lacerating
his scalp. Wardmen rushed in and seized him, and as they struggled
he cried out, “I am innocent! There is no justice!” It took four men
to restrain him and put him in a dry pack. Next morning he was again
calm and cooperative, and when the director, Dr. C. MacFie Campbell
arrived, he said with some embarrassment, “I am ashamed of what I
done.” He told the director that he was tired of life and wished to
kill himself. Dr. Campbell considered the incident “a transitory
condition of emotional tension which was intelligible in view of the
emotional strain to which the patient has been subject.” There was
no recurrence of any such episode or of the Dedham delusions. At the
end of the observation period Dr. Campbell wrote to Judge Thayer
that with the exception of that one night Sacco’s “behavior has been
that of the ordinary hospital patient. There has been no difficulty
in caring for him ... his mood has, on the whole, been equable.”
He concluded: “The result of the observation of the patient in the
Boston Psychopathic Hospital has been that we have found no evidence
of insanity of any type.”
Nevertheless, Thayer extended Sacco’s observation period for another
month, and the early days of April presented quite a different
picture. Mrs. Evans, visiting Sacco on April 2, was much disturbed
by his mental state. She told the doctor in charge “that she knew
nothing about medicine but that in her opinion [the] patient was
talking like a crazy man.”
_She said_ [the hospital report continued] _that the patient insisted
he would kill himself.... He said that he had suffered long enough,
that he wanted it over with one way or another, that when he went
back to jail he would give the judge twenty-four hours to decide the
case and that if he did not set him free patient would “take things
in my own hands.”_
Five days later when Rosina was visiting, Sacco told her that he was
going crazy. After she left, according to the report, he
_suddenly jumped out of his bed and rushed toward the edge of the
open door, with his head lowered in a blind, impulsive manner....
Thereafter, he became excited, somewhat noisy, and struck out
violently, requiring considerable restraint. He was given treatment
in the form of a dry pack with cold compresses to his head. He was
talking and shouting in an excited tone, maintaining that his wife
was confined in the ward above him, whence he had been hearing (as a
matter of fact), the voices and cries of the women patients, which he
believed were those of his wife._
By evening he had calmed down and now said “that he must be going
crazy in this place, that his ideas about his wife were all a
mistake.” Early next morning he spoke of voices telling him that a
bunch of roses had been left for him in the hospital lobby.
On the morning of April 12 he suddenly lunged forward as if he were
going to dart out of the room. To Dr. Campbell he later explained
that he had thought he heard his wife’s voice call “D-a-a-n-t-e.”
For about a week he seemed calm. Then, on April 19, he became
unmanageable. Seven times in the next four days he had to be placed
in wet packs.
_During these attacks [the ward doctor reported] he shouts and
screams that he wants his freedom; he wants to go home to his family.
Between the attacks and often during the attack, when he can for
a moment be made to control himself, he is rational, clear and
oriented, knows the time and the date and the place, and clearly
recognizes those about him. During the attacks he at times strikes
viciously at those about him, or those who attempt to restrain him,
and also hurls all manner of abusive and profane imprecations upon
others._
According to Dr. Ralph Colp, in a psychiatric study published in
1958, Sacco was suffering
_sensory deprivation, which in its strictest sense, involves the
isolation of an individual from everyday sights, sounds and actions.
Nick Sacco had been exposed to a somewhat analogous situation for
nearly thirty-six months. Although he had contact with people,
he had been deprived of the three most important things in his
life: wife and children, job, and his exercise and contact with
nature. The daily visits of Rosina—in Dedham she had not visited as
frequently—aggravated the patient instead of assuaging him, and were
the direct cause of his most powerful delusions and hallucinations.
It was as if every visit—however much her husband desired it—could
only be unbearable to him. No one understood this better than the
bachelor Vanzetti, who later wrote: “Has Nick a wife? Yes, and a good
one; but, not being free, he most either thinks that she is consoling
herself with somebody else, or that she is suffering the unspeakable
agony of a loving woman compelled to mourn is living lover.”_
Sacco was diagnosed as suffering from psychosis of a paranoid
character. The court committed him on April 23 to the Bridgewater
State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Moore was greatly troubled by Sacco’s suicide attempts. As one way of
saving his client he had agreed to Sacco’s examination by alienists
and—even though he objected to the Bridgewater institution—signed the
commitment papers. Sacco and his wife never forgave him for it, and
the differences of opinion that had troubled the two men now began to
harden into enmity.
Sacco spent five months at Bridgewater. His mood on entering seemed
cooperative. He was not isolated but given a bed in a ward; within
two days he began chatting with the other prisoners. Soon he was
at work polishing floors and before long he had a chance to work
mornings on the prison farm, where he tended a small vegetable
garden. His appetite was good—in a month he gained twenty-six pounds.
Throughout his stay he remained quiet, cautious, but agreeable. When
a doctor asked him whether he was insane, he replied, “I am not one
of that kind. My mind is clear. I am not crazy.” Although Sacco was
at times hopeful about his chances for a new trial, Dr. Mountford,
the Bridgewater physician, noted that he occasionally presented a
worried look “which he explains by saying that it is all caused by
the long procedure of the court which keeps his case from being
settled one way or the other.” Thought of suicide still ran through
his mind. On July 9 Dr. Mountford noted that Sacco
_says he has not given the suicide idea up, and regrets that he did
not die in his former attempt. In explaining this statement, says
he does not wish to commit suicide now, but says he wants to get
justice, and insists if ever confronted by similar conditions of
those before he came here, he would not hesitate to commit suicide._
After saying this, Sacco looked out the window into the prison yard,
and with great interest watched some prisoners playing baseball.
On September 29 he was discharged from Bridgewater with the diagnosis
“not insane” and returned to Dedham in time for the arguments on the
five supplementary motions, postponed because of his condition.
* * * * *
Some time during the previous summer Elias Field, a lawyer of the
modest firm of Brown, Field and McCarthy, and the defending counsel
in a Middlesex County murder case, learned that the famous Dr.
Hamilton was in Boston. Hamilton seemed to him just the man to
examine some bullets, then in the custody of the State Police, that
were to be introduced as evidence. Hamilton was willing. On August
7 he and Field went to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House
to find out about the bullets. Proctor told them that they happened
to be at his house in Swampscott, twelve miles away. However, if
Field wanted to drive him there, they could look at them. Field
agreed. While he drove, Hamilton and Proctor began to discuss the
Sacco-Vanzetti case.
“I suppose you know” Hamilton said, “that I have been retained by the
defense to study some of the exhibits in connection with the pending
motion for a new trial.”
“I don’t care,” Proctor told the other two. “I have been too long in
the game, and I’m getting to be too old to want to see a couple of
fellows go to the chair for something I don’t think they did.”
Hamilton asked Proctor why he had not said more in his testimony
about whether Bullet III had gone through Sacco’s gun. “If the
defense had asked me any more particularly,” Proctor replied, “then
I should have told them I didn’t think it went through that gun, and
I did tell the district attorney before the trial I thought it was
consistent with going through that kind of a gun, but I don’t think
it went through that gun.”
Hamilton wondered why the defense had not taken up “consistent with.”
“I wondered too,” Proctor said. “I suppose they were afraid to.” The
conversation made such an impression on Field that he noted it in
his diary. Some weeks later he talked the matter over with his old
Harvard classmate and partner, H. LaRue Brown. Brown, a Kentuckian
whose liberalism had become in Boston almost a second career, knew
all about the Sacco-Vanzetti case through his connection with the New
England Civil Liberties Committee. He relayed the conversation to
Thompson.
Thompson felt that this story—if it could be confirmed—would shatter
the prosecution’s case. But whether Captain Proctor would be as
frank with a defense lawyer as he had been on that casual ride to
Swampscott was doubtful. However, when Thompson visited him at the
State House, Proctor was surprisingly open. He admitted that before
he testified in Dedham Katzmann and Williams had repeatedly asked him
if Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, and each time he told
them he had found no convincing evidence in the tests. The captain
was obviously distressed in this interview with Thompson, his mind
haunted by the role he had played at Dedham. When Thompson asked him
if he would sign an affidavit, he at once agreed.
In the affidavit, dated October 20, 1923, he stated that
_at the trial the District Attorney did not ask me whether I had
found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet passed through
Sacco’s pistol, nor was I asked that question on cross-examination.
The District Attorney desired to ask me that question, but I had
repeatedly told him that if he did I should be obliged to answer in
the negative.... Bullet Number III, in my judgment, passed through
some Colt automatic pistol, but I do not intend to imply that I
had found any evidence that the so-called mortal bullet had passed
through this particular Colt automatic pistol and the District
Attorney well knew that I did not so intend and framed his question
accordingly. Had I been asked the direct question: whether I had
found any affirmative evidence whatever that this so-called mortal
bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should
have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative._
Although this affidavit stood as an entity in itself, Thompson filed
it as a subsection of the Hamilton motion. In a counteraffidavit,
Katzmann swore that he had not “repeatedly” asked Proctor “whether he
had found any evidence that the mortal bullet had passed through the
Sacco pistol,” but he did not deny having asked the question, nor did
he deny Proctor’s answer. Proctor died in March 1924, before Judge
Thayer could rule on any of the supplementary motions.
* * * * *
Early in September 1923 Thompson had picked up a story about Ripley,
the jury foreman, that he considered important enough, even though it
was hearsay, to include in the first motion. William Daley, a Quincy
contractor who said he had known Ripley intimately for thirty-eight
years, willingly signed an affidavit about an occurrence at the Adams
railroad station during the last week of May 1921. Daley had met
Ripley on the platform there while waiting for a train, and Ripley
had told him that he was going away for a couple of weeks to be a
juror in the case of the two South Braintree Guineas.
Daley said he did not believe the Guineas were guilty, and that it
was not reasonable to suppose a man would go and rob a factory where
he had worked and was well known, and in broad daylight.
“Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway!” Ripley had replied.
Of course there could be no corroboration of Daley’s statement, for
Ripley had been dead now for over two years.
* * * * *
On October 1 Thompson, Hill, Moore, and the McAnarney brothers
appeared in an almost empty courtroom to argue the supplementary
motions. Again the defendants were brought in and placed in the cage.
Sacco was still tanned from his outdoor work at the Bridgewater
hospital. Vanzetti looked waxen, his eyes more deeply sunk than ever.
Rosina was there with Ines, as was the indefatigable Mrs. Evans. Ines
had on a pink dress and bonnet, and both defendants’ faces lighted
up as Sacco held her for a moment in the cage. When Rosina started
to walk away toward Mrs. Evans, Ines became frightened at being left
alone with two strangers. She howled until her mother took her away.
Judge Thayer’s step lacked none of its briskness as he strode into
the room, and his face had lost none of its masklike quality, even
though this prolonged case impinged on him now like a recurring bad
dream. “There seems to be no justification or excuse for the delays
in filing affidavits,” he announced in pettish protest. “The court
has several times set dates for the completion of filing affidavits
on both sides. Apparently no attention has been paid to these orders.”
When the report that Sacco was not insane was read to the court,
Sacco smiled ironically. Thompson, his self-assurance unruffled,
urbanely at home where Moore had appeared the bumptious stranger,
nevertheless seemed to feel it necessary to explain his presence
in the radical galley. “It is supposed that these defendants have
radical opinions,” he announced, in opening the argument for the
Ripley motion. “Mr. Hill and I do not hold such opinions,” he
went on, refraining from glancing at Moore, “and we are not here
supporting such opinions. I think I shall be believed also when I say
that we are not here for pecuniary reasons. We think we are rendering
humble service to the institutions of law and order by coming here to
argue that an error has been committed.
“I have no reason to believe that either one of these two defendants
has ever endeavored by threats or in any other improper way to obtain
undue influence in the court. Some of their enthusiastic friends may
have done so, but this fact ought not to weigh against the defendants.
“That’s why Mr. Hill and I are here,” he concluded. “It’s because
some of our friends have talked in the way Daley says Ripley talked.”
Thompson then spent the morning arguing the Ripley motion. In
the afternoon Hill took over. “From the time I had been in the
courtroom fifteen minutes,” he later told the Lowell Committee,
“and had my first talk with the judge I did not have any doubt as
to what the result of the case would be, independent of its actual
merit, and that was not because I felt that there was anybody
who was consciously trying to do wrong, but I thought everybody
connected with the case had got themselves into a state of mind, a
mental condition where reason had practically ceased to operate and
prejudice and emotion had taken its place.”
The session saw a prolonged altercation between Judge Thayer and the
usually quiet-spoken Thomas McAnarney.
“I understand Your Honor to say that after a night of discussion we
decided not to open up the issue of radicalism,” Judge McAnarney
challenged Judge Thayer, his voice hard. “That is not so.”
“It is so,” Thayer announced bluntly, a tawnier shade creeping into
his parchment cheeks.
McAnarney struck back. “All I ever said to my client was to tell the
truth and tell all the truth at all times. It didn’t take me five
minutes to decide that.” He turned away from the bench and walked
toward his chair, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.
Thayer’s voice pursued him. “Mr. McAnarney! Three times you opened up
this subject, and three times it was stricken out.”
McAnarney’s voice trembled a little. “Three times it had to be opened
up. There was no safe course for the defendants to pursue excepting
to tell the truth and all the truth.”
“I know what took place here,” Thayer insisted.
At the end of the session he reluctantly postponed the hearing until
October 25 to allow both sides to file additional affidavits. On that
day the Andrews and Pelser affidavits and counteraffidavits were
read. The next day Moore took over with his old vitality and argued
all day on the Goodridge motion, insisting again and again that the
district attorney had intimidated the man and shaped his evidence by
the threat of revoking his Massachusetts probation.
* * * * *
Judge Thayer was once more living at the University Club. Each
morning he and a group of reporters took the same train from the Back
Bay Station. Among them was a pretty young woman, Mrs. Elizabeth
Bernkopf, from the International News Service, to whom the senescent
but still gallant judge took a particular fancy. At first he merely
waited until she had taken her place in the car and then asked if
he might sit with her. Later he took to joining her on the platform
before the train arrived.
Sitting beside her in the train, he would unburden himself of his
incubus case while she kept inviolably silent. As the city slums
receded, replaced beyond Forest Hills by the trim rectangles of the
suburbs and the autumn outline of Great Blue Hill, he talked on
and on, boasting that he “could not be intimidated by anybody or
anything.” The defense “would find that they could not hoodwink him.”
He represented the integrity of the courts of Massachusetts, he told
her, and he was going to maintain that integrity.
One morning Judge Thayer gave Mrs. Bernkopf his autographed picture.
Occasionally she would get a knowing look from the other reporters
as they passed down the aisle. The judge said he had long been put
out by the kind of people who were supporting the defense, but what
really stirred him so that even the recollection stepped up his pulse
was “that long-haired anarchist lawyer from California.” The old man
would lean forward confidentially, assuring the young woman that if
Moore thought he could outwit the courts of Massachusetts he had
another think coming. Maybe Moore could play that game successfully
in California, but those tricks and threats just would not work in
Dedham. He, Judge Thayer, was not going to be imposed on!
As the train pulled into the Dedham Station, Thayer with avuncular
gallantry would guide Mrs. Bernkopf’s elbow down the aisle, tip his
hat to her on the platform, and say that he hoped he would have the
pleasure of her company again. Three years later she recorded the
substance of his conversations in an affidavit.
* * * * *
The hearings seemed to fall into the pattern of being argued for
a day and postponed for a week. Not until November 8 were they
concluded. When Thompson argued the Hamilton-Proctor motion and
mentioned the police captain, sparks flew between him and District
Attorney Harold Williams.[14] The district attorney insinuated that
the reason Proctor had turned on the Commonwealth was that Katzmann
had refused to approve his claim of five hundred dollars for his
expert testimony, although it had later been approved by the court
and paid.
“I don’t want to make this a personal matter,” Thompson reminded
Williams after the gust of angry words had died down. “I don’t want
to go off on an attack upon any person. But here are these men,
assured by the State of fair treatment here if nowhere else—and then
a prearranged question and answer made to appear the exact opposite
of what the witness really thought.”
“Are you sure there was a prearranged question?” Thayer interrupted.
“They knew and don’t deny it that Captain Proctor didn’t believe that
bullet went through that gun,” Thompson replied. In a passionate
summing up he asked Thayer if the court could really say that Sacco
and Vanzetti had had a fair trial in the face of the failure of the
government attorneys to bring out Proctor’s real opinion.
Toward the close of the hearing Thompson reserved the right to be
heard in a request to fire one hundred cartridges through Sacco’s
pistol with a view of making further ballistic comparisons. At this
point there began one of the equivocal episodes in the post-trial
proceedings. Dr. Hamilton appeared with two new 32-caliber Colt
automatics and offered to compare them with Sacco’s pistol. Before
Judge Thayer and the lawyers for both sides he disassembled all
three pistols and placed the parts in three piles on a table. Then,
picking up various parts one by one, he explained their function
and pointed out their interchangeability. After reassembling the
pistols, he slipped his two in his pocket and handed Sacco’s to the
assistant clerk. Hill and Thompson were already leaving the courtroom
when Hamilton started after them. “Just a minute, gentlemen!” Thayer
called out as they reached the door.
Years afterward, not long before his death, Thayer related the sequel
to Captain Van Amburgh: “They stopped, turned and looked at me. I
said, ‘Come here, Mr. Hamilton.’ Hamilton advanced towards me. I
said: ‘Hand me your pistols.’ He did so and I said: ‘They shall be
impounded.’ I don’t know why I impounded those pistols. It merely
seemed like the proper and thorough thing to do. I have thanked God
many times since that I did so. And then the astounding discovery
made later that the original barrel in the Sacco pistol was missing
and an entirely different barrel substituted for it!”
On November 2, at Judge Thayer’s request, District Attorney Williams
borrowed from Van Amburgh a plug gauge, a device for measuring the
diameter of a gun barrel. He found Sacco’s pistol barrel to measure
.3045 inches. Hamilton’s measurement had given the diameter as .2924
inches, but Williams thought little of the discrepancy since he
himself had never seen a plug gauge before and felt he might easily
have made a mistake. However, when Hamilton, on December 4, in the
presence of the clerk of court, checked Sacco’s pistol with the
gauge, he confirmed Williams’ measurement. Hamilton now observed
that the fouled rusty barrel was shiny and, according to his later
testimony in a special hearing before Judge Thayer, his first thought
was that the court had been cleaning it. “I could not conceive in my
mind why you would do it,” he told Thayer, “but I said to myself no
one else could have done it.... I immediately dispelled it because I
said, no court would alter an exhibit.”
Whatever Hamilton’s opinion of the altered condition of the barrel
and the variations in his first and second measurements, he afterward
maintained that when he examined Sacco’s automatic on December 4 it
never occurred to him that the barrel was anything but the original.
Acting on Thompson’s request to make fresh firing tests, Judge
Thayer on February 11 called in Van Amburgh to inspect Sacco’s Colt
and determine its condition. With the district attorney present,
Van Amburgh took the gun from the clerk of court and prepared to
disassemble it. No sooner had he drawn back the slide than he saw
that the barrel was not the barrel he had last examined. It looked
brand-new. There was even a film of cosmoline on it.
“Someone has switched barrels,” he at once told Williams.
The two hurried to Judge Thayer. Thayer, after listening to them,
announced that he would hold an investigation.
Two days later he began hearings in his chambers with only Moore,
Williams, Hamilton, Van Amburgh, and a stenographer present. Press
and public were barred, unaware even that such hearings were taking
place. They lasted just over three weeks. At the opening Clerk
Worthington brought in the three pistols. The briefest examination
made it clear to everyone that Sacco’s Colt had acquired a new
barrel. Hamilton, not at all abashed that every finger seemed to
point to him, admitted that the new barrel must have come from one
of his pistols, but insisted that he had not made the switch. In his
opinion this had been done by someone connected with the prosecution.
After examining the fouled barrel in one of his own new guns under a
microscope, Hamilton stated that he was unqualifiedly of the opinion
it was not the Sacco barrel.
Williams accused Hamilton of working the substitution with the idea
of later making the discovery himself so that he could then demand a
new trial. Repetitious and acrimonious, the arguments went on each
day until five o’clock, but no one in the closed chambers had any
real doubt as to who had switched the barrels. Even Moore, arguing
bravely that this was more dirty work on the part of the district
attorney’s staff, knew that Hamilton’s deft fingers had done it.
At the conclusion of the hearings Thayer reserved judgment as to who
had made the substitution and whether or not it had been accidental.
He ruled merely that the barrel in the new pistol had come from
Sacco’s Colt and he ordered the fouled barrel replaced and the three
pistols delivered into the clerk’s custody “without prejudice to
either side.” The prejudice, however, was not so easily obliterated.
Hamilton’s chicanery had undermined his value as a witness, past
or future. Although he was to continue his association with the
defense almost to the end, he would prove only a detriment—expensive,
untrustworthy, and untrusted.
* * * * *
Almost at the very time Hamilton was discrediting himself in Dedham,
Van Amburgh, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was demolishing his own
ethical and technical reputation in the Harold Israel case. Israel
was a young ex-soldier of small intelligence who had been charged
with the murder of Father Hubert Dahme, pastor of St. Joseph’s
Catholic Church. On the evening of February 4, 1924, Father Dahme was
strolling along Bridgeport’s Main Street when a man approached him
from the rear, placed the muzzle of a revolver close to his head, and
fired. Several witnesses saw the murderer run from the scene.
A week later the police of Norwalk, a dozen miles away, picked up a
man who was wandering the streets at midnight in a suspicious manner.
He was found to have a 32-caliber revolver in his pocket with four
of the five chambers loaded and the other empty. He said his name
was Harold Israel, that he had just come from Bridgeport, and that
he was on his way to see his father in Philadelphia. Next morning he
was given thirty days in the Bridgeport county jail for carrying a
concealed weapon. Once there he was interrogated about the priest’s
death, and several witnesses of the shooting were brought in to look
him over.
The crucial evidence against Israel was the 32-caliber bullet removed
from Father Dahme’s brain. Captain Van Amburgh, called in from the
Remington Company, compared it with a test bullet fired through
Israel’s gun and announced that both had been fired from the same
weapon. This he said he had determined not only by his measurements
but by the similarity of the bullets after he had made a strip
photograph of each and superimposed one upon the other.
After a prolonged interrogation, Israel tangled himself in a web of
conflicting statements and confessed that he had killed Father Dahme.
When a detective asked what had become of the cartridge of the mortal
bullet, Israel said it was in the toilet of his boarding house. The
police found it there. With this evidence added to the confession,
Israel’s trial and conviction seemed only a formality.
Homer S. Cummings, later Attorney General of the United States and
then state’s attorney for Fairfield County, at first had no doubt of
Israel’s guilt but gradually noticed flaws in the state’s case. First
of all, Israel soon repudiated his confession, claiming that when he
made it he had been questioned for so long that he was willing to
confess anything to get a rest. Then Cummings discovered that after
the police had left the boarding house, the landlady had found still
another empty cartridge in the toilet. Both shells had been exploded
by a dull firing pin. The pin of Israel’s revolver was sharp, and it
turned out that a friend of his had sharpened it at his shop several
weeks before the murder.
Cummings now spent some time with Van Amburgh examining the strip
photographs of the bullets. As he testified at the preliminary
hearing, Van Amburgh, in order to develop his argument, cut a slit
in the photograph of the Dahme bullet. “Then,” said Cummings, “he
inserts through that slit the strip picture of the recovered bullet,
and pushing this up and down, finally reaches a place where he says
the lines coincide. Well, I worked at that for two hours one day,
and yesterday, in the presence of Captain Van Amburgh worked on it
for more than an hour. It took Captain Van Amburgh fifteen minutes
to find the point of juncture himself—well, say five minutes, it
will be more conservative. Then a peculiar thing developed. I called
his attention to it, and he had absolutely, so far as I could see,
no answer to it. I asked him to put the photographs in the position
which he claimed demonstrated his point, and he got them into that
position. Then I said, ‘Now, lift up the flap and look and see what
is under it,’ and I thought, somewhat reluctantly, the flap was
lifted and on the under picture we saw a scene totally different from
that which we saw on the upper picture. I asked him whether it was
not perfectly logical to assume that if the two pictures had been
superimposed—that is, if the other picture was transparent and placed
over the other—that there ought not to be a continuous similarity in
the surface appearance. He admitted that was logical, and I never
could get a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy.”
Cummings turned over the bullets and the photographs to five other
experts from the Remington Company plus another from the New York
Police Department. Their unanimous opinion was that there was no
continuous similarity, that the mortal bullet had perceptible land
and groove marks lacking in the test bullets, and that it could not
have been fired through Israel’s gun. Following this testimony,
Israel was released.
Van Amburgh’s Connecticut record apparently did not follow him north,
for not long afterward he was appointed head of the newly formed
ballistics laboratory of the Massachusetts Department of Public
Safety.
* * * * *
Thompson had a way of striding into a courtroom with a confident
ring of leather heels, as if he were taking over command on a parade
square. That was how he struck Moore during the arguments on the
supplementary motions. Moore, underneath his class-angled exterior,
retained a sensitive—at times almost a sentimental—nature. He was
hurt by being thrust aside by this corporation lawyer and by the
supercilious Hill, who, even as he prided himself on doing his duty
to his native state by defending two unpopular radicals, could remark
“I do not like these people.”
In fact, Moore felt put upon. From his arrival in Boston he had
transformed the case. At least a third of the defense money had come
from sources he had tapped. He had brought in the American Civil
Liberties Union, the International Labor Defense, the phalanx of
Back Bay women headed by Mrs. Evans. Thanks to him the Cincinnati
convention of the American Federation of Labor had passed a
resolution demanding a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, “convicted
by a biased jury under the instructions of a prejudiced judge.”
And before the convention the delegates had never heard of the
two Italians! At the next convention he would take care that they
passed a stronger resolution. These things were his doing. If he had
not managed to free the two men, he had at least managed to keep
them alive for almost three years. He had brought them visitors,
arranged for their English lessons, and encouraged them by letters
and by visits, disregarding and excusing Sacco’s latent hostility.
The reward for his efforts had been the sullen suspicions of the
doctrinaire anarchists. They were always a problem to him. “The
practical difficulty with such men as Felicani, Lopez and some of the
others,” he complained in a letter, “is not that they do not want to
help, but that in many cases they do not know how to help. They are
not affiliated with either the American organized labor nor with the
Italian labor movement.”
To Moore the Defense Committee seemed to have become more and more
impotent. For lack of funds he had had to give up his Pemberton
Square office and work from the crowded confusion of Rollins Place.
He, who liked good clothes, was now too hard up to buy a suit off the
gaspipe racks at Raymond’s. His cuffs had frayed, the seat of his
trousers showed patches. If he was to continue with the case, _his_
case—nd the “if” was beginning to take shape in his mind—he did not
want to have his efforts diverted any longer by fund-raising and
publicity and stubborn anarchists. Now was the time for him to bring
his own friends together—those he had personally interested in the
fate of the two obscure Italians—in a common unimpeded effort.
Early in April 1924, Moore arranged a meeting at Tremont Temple
to organize the New Trial League, with the support of Mrs. Evans,
Mrs. Anna Hallowell Davis (who directed the Garland Fund’s legal
assistance for radicals), John Van Vaerenewyck of the Cigar Makers’
Union, and Alice Stone Blackwell. Alice Blackwell, who was to
become Vanzetti’s most frequent and voluminous correspondent, whom
he would address as Comrade, was the daughter of Lucy Stone, the
pioneer women’s-rights crusader. Old beyond her sixty-seven years,
wrinkled and determined, she followed in the tradition of the
previous century’s indomitable female eccentrics. She belonged to the
International League for Peace and Freedom, the Women’s Municipal
League, and would later lend her name to the Communist-directed
International Labor Defense. A member of the belligerently liberal
Twentieth Century Club, she used to carry her lunch there in a brown
paper bag and eat it in the library, holding the bag close to her
face to avoid spilling any crumbs. It was understood that she was to
nap undisturbed in a corner afterward.
Moore chose to remain in the background of the new organization. John
Codman of the New England Civil Liberties Committee was appointed
treasurer. Professor Guadagni, Albert Carpenter, and Harry Canter,
secretary of the Communist Party of Boston, accepted appointment
on the editorial board. The board got out its one bulletin in May
and published a pamphlet containing Eugene Lyons’ translation of
Vanzetti’s “The Story of a Proletarian Life.”
From the New Trial League’s office Moore proceeded to raise money
and make plans independently of the Defense Committee. Felicani
questioned Moore’s judgment rather than his honesty, but other
members of the Defense Committee were unyielding in their resentment
of this independent step. Lola Darroch, no doubt glad to escape the
ambivalences of Rollins Place, went to New York to raise funds. Much
to the resentment of the anarchists, more money began to flow into
the New Trial League’s Tremont Street office than to the Hanover
Street headquarters. But the league was only an expedient, without
roots. Even the conciliatory Felicani realized the impossibility
of the dual situation. Scarcely had the league been formed than it
began to disintegrate. With the intransigent Lopez gone—he had been
deported at last in February 1924—Codman and Mrs. Evans were willing
to discuss merging with the committee. Only Moore remained purblind
in his good intentions.
* * * * *
Since his return to the Dedham jail Sacco had grown increasingly
bitter, and though his sanity was no longer in question he became
so dominated by feelings of resentment and persecution that he
refused to see Mrs. Evans and his other American visitors. He even
turned his back on Mrs. Jack, who had been coming weekly during the
winter to give him English lessons. Vanzetti, in Charlestown, was
much distressed by the news and sent Mrs. Jack a letter of apology
assuring her that Sacco’s action was caused not by “adverse feelings,
sentiments or thought” but by his misfortune. “And, oh, how worth of
sympathy and forgiveness the poor Nick is, even in his herrors,” he
wrote commiseratingly.
Sacco found the ultimate outlet to his anger in Moore and the New
Trial League. The latter had sent him several pamphlets and flyers
from the new organization. Reading them, Sacco—as on that July day in
court three years before—erupted. He had never liked the Westerner,
but this was the last straw. On August 18 he spent the afternoon in
his cell penning a letter that was a distillation of his bitterness.
_Sir:—Saturday I received your letter with enclose the post card that
Mrs. Mateola Robbins sent to me—and the little pamphlet that you use
to send to me it just to insult my soul. Yes, it is true, because
you would not forget when you came here two or three times between
last month with a groups people—that you know that I did not like to
see them any more; but you broad them just seem to make my soul feel
just sad as it could be. And I can see how clever and cynic you are,
because after all my protest, after I have been chase you and all
yours philanthropist Friends, you are still continue the infamous
speculation on the shoulder of Sacco-Vanzetti case. So this morning
before these things going any more long, I thought to send you these
few line to advise you and all yours philanthropist Friends of the
“New Trial League Committee” not to print any more these letters with
my picture and name on, and to be sure to take my name out if they
should print any more of these little pamphlets, because you and
yours philanthropist has been use it from last three years like a
instrument of infamous speculation. It is Sim thing to carry any man
insane or tuberculous when I thing that after all my protest to have
my case finish you and all yours legione of friends still play the
infame game. But, I would like to know if yours all are the boss of
my life! I would like to know who his this men that ar abuse to take
all the authority to do every thing that he does feel like without
my responsiblity, and carry my case always more long, against all my
wish. I would like to know who his this—generous—man!! Mr.—Moore—!
I am telling you that you goin to stop this dirty game! Your heare
me? I mean every them word I said here, because I do not want have
anything to do any more with “New Trail League Committee,” because it
does repugnant my coscience._
_Maney time you have been deluder and abuse on weakness of my
comrades good faith, but I want you to stop no and if you please get
out of my case, because you know that you are the obstacle of the
case; and say! I been told you that from last May twenty fifth—that
was the last time you came see me, and with you came comrade Felicani
and the Proffess Guadagni. Do you remember? Well, from that day I
told you to get out of my case, and you promised me that you was
goin to get out, but my—dear—Mr. Moore! I see that you are still in
my case, and you are still continued to play your famous gam. Of
course it is pretty hard to refuse a such sweet pay that as been
come to you right long—in—this big—game. It is no true what I said?
If it is not the truth, why did you not finish my case then? Another
word, if this was not the truth you would quit this job for long
time. It has been past one year last June when you and Mr. Grilla
from New York came to see me into Bridgewater Hospital and that day
between you and I we had another fight—and you will remember when I
told you this Mr. Moore! I want you to finish my case and I do not
want to have anything to do with this politics in my case because it
does repugnant my conscience—and you answer to me was this: Nick, if
you don’t want, Vanzetti does want! Do you remember when you said
that? Well, do you think I believe you when you said that to me? No,
because I know that you are the one that brings in always in these
mud in Sacco-Vanzetti case. Otherwise, how I could believe you when
you been deluder me maney times with your false promise? Well—I
anyhow, wherever you do if you do not intent to get out of my case,
remember this, that per September I want my case finish. But remember
that we are right near September now and I don’t see anything and any
move yet. So tell me please, why you waiting now for? Do you wait
till I hang myself. That’s what you wish? Lett me tai you right now
don’t be illuse yourself because I would not be suprise if somebody
will find you some morning hang on lamp-post._
_Your implacable enemy, now and forever_,
Nick Sacco
How hurt Moore was by this he showed only indirectly in the courtesy
of his reply:
_Dear Mr. Sacco_
_Enclosed you will find a copy of my Withdrawal as your counsel,
filed today._
_I wish you every possible success in your battle for justice._
_Very truly, yours_,
Fred. H. Moore
Although Moore continued officially as counsel until November, he
took no further part in the defense. On November 8 he left Boston
for good in the old Dodge touring car that was his sole permanent
acquisition from the case, alone, in his frayed suit and cracked
boots, and with three hundred borrowed dollars in his pocket. His
immediate wish was to get back to California, to that land of
brighter sunshine and wider horizons, three thousand good miles
away from the mongrel English city where even the anarchists seemed
affected by the constrictions of the Puritan heritage. Stacked behind
him in the Dodge were several dozen packages of little tin signs,
for attaching to rear license plates, that read: IF YOU CAN READ
THIS YOU’RE TOO DAMN CLOSE. By selling these at filling stations and
garages he hoped to cover his expenses on the way back.
As he drove down the slum side of Beacon Hill on a lowering afternoon
with the taste of winter in the air, he could see the obelisk of the
Bunker Hill Monument and squat beyond it the granite pile of the
prison that held Vanzetti. “Chill and dreary, the three-hilled city
of the Puritans,” Francis Parkman had described an earlier Boston.
For Moore it was the dreary three-hilled city of his failure. He had
failed as a lawyer, as a propagandist, as a husband, as a man, even
as a money-changer. Most of all, he had failed himself. For his last
glimpse of Boston left him with the racking uncertainty of his own
cause, the nebulous doubt that would feed on disappointment until he
could reveal to his friend Upton Sinclair three years later that he
no longer believed in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Sinclair was aghast. A quarter of a century later he recorded his
conversation with Moore:
_I questioned Fred for many hours, deep into the night. Sacco
and Vanzetti were anarchists, and Fred told me that some of the
anarchists were then raising funds for their movement by robbery. It
was strictly honest from the group’s point of view—that is to say,
they kept none of the money for themselves.... I pressed him with
questions: “Did Sacco or Vanzetti ever admit to you by the slightest
hint that they were guilty?” He answered, “No.” I asked him: “Did
any of their friends ever admit it?” Again he answered, “No.”... I
went home with my mind in confusion. The first person I went to see
was Fred’s former wife, who had divorced him and was employed in
Hollywood. Lola Moore said, “I am astounded that Fred should have
made such a statement. I worked on the case with him all through the
years, and I knew about it as intimately as he did. He never gave me
a hint of such an idea, and neither did anyone else. I feel Fred is
embittered because he was dropped from the case, and it has poisoned
his mind.”_
Where Sacco’s sense of outrage at being imprisoned so permeated
him that it could at times cloud his mind, Vanzetti endured his
imprisonment in Charlestown with a stoic objectivity. Sacco saw
himself as the predestined victim of a predatory class; Vanzetti
remained hopeful, willing to admit that he might be wrong in his
judgments. His relations with Moore remained amiable, even though he
instinctively had more confidence in the caste-formed Thompson than
in the class-conscious Westerner.
Yet, although his studious celibate nature was more adaptable to
constraint, in his own way he found jail as constraining as did
Sacco. He, too, would face a period when his mind failed him. Unlike
Sacco, he had never experienced an emotional outlet in his work.
Sacco was the good shoe-worker, he the _poor_ fish peddler. It was
not a garden or a wife or the starting hum of a factory at eight in
the morning that he missed, but the days of sun and wind when he
ambled along the lanes of Plymouth with his cart, the salt odor of
the flats where he dug clams.
To Mrs. Evans he expressed his longing for the earth in phrases that
suggest Whitman:
_O the blissing green of the wilderness and of the open land—O
the blue vastness of the Oceans—the fragrances of the flowers and
the sweetness of the fruits—The sky reflecting lakes—the singing
turrents—the telling brooks—O the valleys, the hills—the awful Alps!
O the mistic dawn—the roses of the Aurora, the glory of the moon—O
the sunset—the twilight—O the supreme extasies and mistery of the
starry nights, heavenly creature of the eternity._
_Yes, Yes, all this is real actuallity but not to us, not to us
chained—and just and simple because we, being chained, have not the
freedom to use our natural faculty of locomotion to carry us from our
cells to the open orizon—under the Sun at daytime—under the visible
stars, at night._
During his first year in Charlestown, preoccupied with the
approaching Dedham trial and learning to accustom himself to the
regimen of prison life, Vanzetti came for the first time in his
thirteen years in the United States to know Americans—the various
assorted liberals and radicals whose interests and emotions drew them
to the case. Moore, through his contacts with the New England Civil
Liberties Committee, had brought Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and a number
of other Back Bay women as visitors to Charlestown. With Vanzetti, if
not so directly as with Sacco, they developed a maternal relationship
as engrossing to them as to him. He for the first time in his life
discovered people with whom he could share his profounder feelings.
The week after the Dedham trial, writing to Mrs. Evans, he composed
his first letter in English, struggling with the language.
_I was just thinking what I would do for past the long days jail.
I was saying to myself: Do some work. But what? Write. A gentle
motherly figure came to my mind and I rehear the voice: Why don’t you
write something now? It will be useful to you now when you will be
free. Just at that time I received your letter._
_Tank to you from the bottom of my earth for your confidence in my
innocence; I am so. I did not splittel a drop of blood, or still
a cent in all my life. A little knowlege of the past; a sorrowful
experience of the life itself had given to me some ideas very
different from those of many other umane beings. But I wish to
convince my fellow men that only with virtue and honesty is possible
for us to find a little happyness in this world. I preached; I
worked. I wished with all my faculties that the social whealth should
belong to every umane cretures, so well as it was the fruit of the
work of all. But this do not mean robbery for insurrection._
During his prison years Vanzetti studied English with Mrs. Virginia
MacMechan, a friend of Mrs. Jack. About his uneven progress he could
write wryly to Mrs. Evans, “One Friend tells me that my English is
not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why
not say horrible?” Vanzetti always had this capacity for laughing
at himself, for seeing the humorous side of even the jail world—a
quality lacking in Sacco. His difficulties in English, as he
explained, did not come from the big words derived from Latin and
Greek and familiar to Italian, but from the tricky monosyllables of
Nordic origin. In the solitude of Charlestown he felt the renewed
lust for learning that had enveloped him so long ago when he had
read Dante, Renan, and Malatesta in his squalid room by the
flickering gaslight until the stars faded. Now, however, he would
read Longfellow and Franklin and Paine and Jefferson. By 1923 he was
reading James Harvey Robinson’s _The Mind in the Making_; William
James’ _Psychology_; books by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton
Sinclair; and such periodicals as the _Survey Graphic_, the _New
Republic_, the _Nation_, and the _Daily Worker_. He felt himself
carried away by a Faustian longing to know mathematics, physics,
history.
For all its galling restraints, imprisonment was to provide the key
that would unlock his personality. His tragedy was to be, as he said
himself, his triumph. Earlier than Sacco he sensed that the two
of them had become symbols such as Moore had foreseen at the very
beginning. The week before the Dedham trial he had written to Alice
Blackwell:
_What has been done for us by the people of the world, the laborers
(I mean workers) and the greatest minds and hearts proves beyond any
possible doubt that a new conception of justice is planing its way in
the soul of mankind: a justice centered on man as man. For as I have
already said, you, they are doing for us what once could only have
been done for saints and kings._
Somehow in the years at Charlestown, Vanzetti—the misfit, the
wanderer—became the master of language. Even in his early fumblings
with grammar he was always eloquent. As early as December 1921, after
a brief glimpse of the close-ranged Roxbury streets on the way to his
Dedham hearing he could write: “O, funny, humble, old, little houses
that I love; little house always big enough for the greatest loves,
and most saint affects.”
In his letters, in his speech to the court, one can trace the
developing cadences of English, the tone-giving rhythm of the
Anglo-Saxon that runs below the surface of the modern tongue. This
moving eloquence—where did it come from? It was as if the man grew
as his prospect of life shortened. After raging to Alice Blackwell
against those he considered his persecutors, he could apologize in
his next letter: “I am yet man enough to look streight in to the
eyes, the black gastly reality and the tragedy of my life.”
As he came face to face with that reality, he had no room for
accretions and superficialities. What was left to him was
acceptance. “I neither boast nor exalt, nor pity myself,” he wrote
Mrs. MacMechan. “I followed my call, I have my conscience serene.”
He understood that the most one could hope for was “the little
knowledge of the enormous mystery surrounding us and from which we
sprang.” His freedom taken from him, he became a free man.
Anarchism remained the core of his beliefs: a vision of the peaceable
kingdom where the wolves and the lambs of the industrial world would
attain their ultimate reconciliation. “Oh, friend,” he wrote to his
teacher, “the anarchism is as beauty as a women for me, perhaps even
more since it include all the rest and me and her. Calm, serene,
honest, natural, vivid, muddy and celestial at once, austere, heroic,
fearless, fatal, generous and implacable—all these and more it is.”
He defined the anarchist’s creed as
_All what is help to me without hurt the others is good; all what
help the others without hurting me is good also, all the rest
is evil. He look for his liberty in the liberty of all, for his
happiness in the happiness of all, for his welfare in the universal
welfare._
If the golden age could only come about through violence, he would
accept violence—though with deep personal regret:
_I would my blood to prevent the sheeding of blood, but neither the
abyss nor the heaven’s, have a law who condamns the self-defence....
The champion of life and of the liberty should not yield before the
death._
Sacco’s nature had a darker turbulence. The now obsolete term
_anarchist-communist_ would have applied to him as it would never
have applied to Vanzetti. Anarchist though he called himself, he saw
life in terms of the Marxist class struggle, in which “as long as
this sistem of things, the exploitation of man on other man reign,
will remain always the fight between those two opposite class.”
Unlike Vanzetti, he did not concern himself with anarchism as the
rejection of government, but with the immediacy of conflict. In a
dream he had at Dedham he described how he found himself in the
middle of a strike in a Pennsylvania mining town and how soldiers
with guns and bayonets came to put it down:
_And so the fite it was to beginning, and while the fite was begin I
jump upon a little hill in meddle of the crowd and I begin to say,
Friend and comrade and brotherhood, now one of us as going to move a
step, and who will try to move it will be vile and coward, here the
fite as go to finish. So I turn over towards to the soldiers and I
said, Brothers you will not fire on your own brothers just because
their tell you to fire, no brothers remember that everyone of us we
have mother and child, and you know that we fite for freedom wich is
your freedom. We want one of the fatherland, one sole, one house, and
better bread. So while I was finish to say that last work one of the
soldiers fire towards me and the ball past throught my heart, and
while I was fall on ground with my right hand close to my heart I
awake up with sweet dream!_
On a secondary level the dream was Sacco’s acceptance of his
execution, which he saw as predetermined, inevitable. Vanzetti, on
the other hand, was optimistic until almost the end. Even Webster
Thayer, in whom all the forces inimical to him and to Sacco seemed
concentrated, he could view with the dispassionateness of his note to
the Brinis just after the arguments on the supplementary motions: “I
dislike to vilify humane being and would be more than glad, happy—if
he by one just act, would comples me to change my opinion—but there
are no reasons till now.”
A few months later, discouraged from any such fugitive hopes,
Vanzetti reverted to a more somber picture of the judge:
_I have never expected, nor I expect from him other than some then
thousand volts divided in a few times; some meters of cheap bord and
4 x 7 x 8 feet hol in the ground._
_No matter how much of sympathy I try to bestow upon him, or with how
much of understanding I try to judge his actions; I only and alone
can see him a self-conceit nerroved mind little tyrent, beliving
himself to be just, and beliving his utterly unjust and unnecessary
social office to be a necessity and a good. He is a bigot and,
therefore, cruel. At the time of our arrest and trials, his peers
were sawing red all around, and he was sawing more red than his
peers._
Nineteen twenty-four was the year of indecision when, after
Hamilton’s discomfiture over the pistol barrels, the legal clockwork
seemed to have run down, when Judge Thayer—who alone might have
rewound it—was again ailing, when no one could even guess the date
of his decisions on the supplementary motions. Vanzetti, at the time
Sacco was turning his back on visitors, became so frustrated by the
suspense that for a while he considered going on a hunger strike. “I
am tired—tired—tired!” he wrote early in the autumn. “I asked if to
live like now for love of life is not, rather than wisdom or heroism,
mere cowardness.”
From July until September the courts closed for the long recess. In
the yard of the Dedham jail during the exercise period the prisoners
hung about languidly under the shadow of the wall. At Charlestown the
sun beating down on the slate roofs set the air smoldering. In such
weather the excremental smell of drains seemed to ooze from the very
stones of the old building. Vanzetti noted that it must be equally
fetid in the narrow streets of the North End.
Those who could get away fled the heat. Judge Thayer had gone to
his cottage at Falmouth, on Cape Cod where, with the breeze cutting
in from across Buzzards Bay, he spent the mornings working on his
decisions on the five supplementary motions. The close of summer did
not see his task at an end. Not until the first of October did he at
last file his findings in the clerk’s office at Dedham.
The news flashed across the Boston papers in blacker headlines than
any that had appeared since the conviction. Thayer had denied all
five motions!
With regard to the Ripley motion Thayer found “that said Ripley
brought with him innocently and thoughtlessly the said three
cartridges ... that whatever Ripley said or did in relation to said
three cartridges, he never intended to prejudice in any manner the
rights of the defendants.” Hamilton had made an affidavit claiming
that the Ripley shells showed signs of having been pushed into
Vanzetti’s revolver. Thayer pointed out that the other jurors had
sworn that Ripley had not exhibited the bullets in the jury room, and
there would have been no other opportunity. He considered that any
comparison Ripley made between his own cartridges and the exhibits
must have been a mental one, since, although jurors had seen the
Ripley bullets in the dormitory downstairs, no one had seen them
elsewhere.
The basic claim of the defense was that there had been an improper
exhibit in the jury room. Certainly Ripley’s three bullets were
improperly, if accidentally, there. But Thayer’s finding seems
reasonable: “The mere production of the Ripley cartridges and the
talk or discussion about them did not create such disturbing or
prejudicial influence that might in any way affect the verdict.
“At any rate,” he concluded, in one of the rhetorical flourishes of
which he was so proud, “I am not willing to blacken the memory of Mr.
Ripley and to pronounce those eleven surviving jurors as falsifiers
under oath by claims of counsel that are so weak, so fragile, and so
unsatisfactory. If this motion for a new trial based upon hearsay
statements made by a deceased juror to a counsel for the defendants
under such circumstances as are herein disclosed [were granted], it
would result in smirching the honor, integrity, and good name of
twelve honorable jurors, by a decision that never could be justified
by the simplest rules of sound judgment, reason, truth, and common
sense.”
As for Daley’s affidavit charging Ripley with the remark, “Damn
them, they ought to hang them anyway!” Thayer ruled that he “was
not bound to believe him,” nor was he “required to give the reasons
for his action. Furthermore, before being sworn as a juror, it must
be assumed that Ripley had answered in the negative ... whether he
had expressed or formed an opinion or was sensible of any bias or
prejudice.” Even if Daley had no reason for lying, it was still
hearsay evidence—and Ripley was long since dead.
In denying the second motion Thayer expressed doubt that the
itinerant Gould could “have carried a correct mental photograph in
his mind of Sacco for practically eighteen months, when he had only
a glance in which to take this photograph on the day of the murder.”
Gould, however, had merely claimed that the man who had put a bullet
through his lapel, the man he had seen in that frozen instant of
terror when the gun flashed in his face, was not the stocky Italian
he had seen eighteen months later in the Dedham jail.
Thayer held that Gould was just one more witness in the crowd, and
that his evidence, if presented, would have had no effect on the
jury—“For the evidence that convicted these men was circumstantial
and was evidence that is known in law as ‘consciousness of guilt.’”
For a dozen pages Thayer continued this theme with variations, coming
back again to the question of whether the defendants had lied because
of their consciousness of being radicals or their consciousness of
being murderers. This, Thayer maintained, was a matter of fact that
had been settled once and for all by the jurors. In passing, he could
not resist an aside at those bothersome dissenters “who ever stand
ready, through sympathy, prejudice, or some other unaccountable
reason, to criticize and assail the verdicts of juries when, in fact,
they never have heard a single word of evidence, nor observed a
single witness on the stand.”
As far as Louis Pelser was concerned, he had admittedly been drinking
on the day he signed Moore’s affidavit, and a few days later, when
sober, he had retracted it. Thayer accepted the counteraffidavits of
Katzmann and Williams that they had not tried to influence Pelser,
and ruled that Pelser’s statement provided no justification for a new
trial.
Often while Judge Thayer sat on his porch at Falmouth preparing his
findings he found himself thinking of Moore, and the thought of that
“damned anarchist” lawyer was enough to cloud the brightest summer
day. There, for example, was the whole Goodridge business. Goodridge
had been discredited at the trial. That was obvious to anyone. Yet
here was Moore chasing him all over Maine, locking him up in jail,
blackmailing him with indictments ten years old. “It is perfectly
manifest,” Thayer wrote, with a cloud-dispersing mental picture of
Moore’s discomfort, “that here was another bold and cruel attempt to
sandbag Goodridge by threatening actual arrest, to blacken the name
of the district attorney’s office of Norfolk County, by compelling
Goodridge to testify as he did on account of the influence of said
district attorney’s office. He did not succeed simply because
Goodridge would not be intimidated. Was this conduct on the part of
Mr. Moore performed in furtherance of public justice, or was it a
cruel and unjustifiable attempt to scare Goodridge into swearing to
something that was false against the District Attorney’s office?” For
Thayer the question was rhetorical. “I have tried to look at this
conduct of Mr. Moore with a view of finding some justification or
excuse of it,” he concluded. “I can find none.”
He was equally severe with Moore in denying the Andrews motion.
Perhaps smiling to himself, he wrote, “My relationship with [Moore]
has been very pleasant, although at times it would seem, as was
very natural, that he was quite unfamiliar with our trial evidence
and practice in this state.” Then he let the Californian have both
barrels: “Mr. Moore, judging him by his conduct as disclosed under
his own motion, signed by him, seems to be laboring under the view
that an enthusiastic belief in the innocence of his clients justifies
any means in order to accomplish the ends desired.” He accused Moore
of a “more intense desire to procure a confession of perjury from
Mrs. Andrews than a profound desire to seek the truth.”
When Thayer came to the Hamilton motion, he was undoubtedly convinced
by the episode of the switched gun-barrels that the self-styled
doctor from Auburn was a sharper. He did not elaborate, but in each
instance he ruled that Hamilton’s claim was not sustained.
Captain Proctor’s affidavit was more of a problem, for there were
no two ways about it. Proctor had signed his name to his own
impeachment, and Katzmann and Williams had never denied the substance
of it. Nevertheless, it was Thayer’s opinion that Proctor had
meant what he said in court, and that the jury had so understood
it. “If Captain Proctor found no facts to believe that the mortal
bullet passed through the Sacco pistol, why, when he had a perfect
opportunity so to do, did he not say that his opinion was then, as
it is now, that it was not _consistent_ with it?” Thayer did not
feel there had been any conniving by Katzmann and Williams to shape
the question in advance. He did not try to explain why Proctor had
afterward made the refuting statement.
“If I have erred in my judgment (and I fully realize I am human),”
Thayer concluded with a sense of relief at freeing himself from the
burden, “let me express the assurance that the supreme judicial court
of this Commonwealth in due time will correct such error.”
Neither Moore nor Thompson had expected any other outcome, but the
motions had served their purpose. They had postponed the defendants’
execution, and they had provided questions of law to be ruled on
by a higher court. With the Goodridge, Pelser, Andrews, and Daley
affidavits Thompson felt there was nothing more to be gained, that
these were to a degree liabilities, but he appealed the denials of
the Ripley, Gould, and Hamilton-Proctor motions.
After he had filed his findings with the clerk of court, Thayer felt
he deserved a holiday, and for him a holiday in the autumn meant
Hanover, New Hampshire. The Dartmouth-McGill football game that
Saturday was only an excuse for the trip, since the Big Green was the
odds-on favorite. But to get back to Dartmouth gave Thayer a sense of
renewing himself, as if when he walked across the campus he was again
for one miraculous moment Bobby Thayer, the baseball captain who
could not quite make up his mind whether he wanted to be a big-league
player or a lawyer. He felt that he belonged in Hanover. There was
his familiar table by the window in the dining room of the Hanover
Inn, the waiter who knew him, the faces of old friends as they came
through the doorway. Much had changed, much had been added, but there
were still the white buildings of Dartmouth Row, the Senior Fence
where he had carved his initials over forty years ago, the arching
elms, still looking just as they had when he arrived as a freshman.
Each autumn brought him back, almost as if he had never left.
Thayer was cutting across the College Green in the long-edged
sunlight after the game when he saw James Richardson, Dartmouth’s
Professor of Law and Political Science, walking just ahead of him.
Jim Richardson was Class of 1900, twenty years after Thayer, but the
two men often met at alumni gatherings. As the judge drew abreast of
the professor he nodded and they continued together toward the Inn.
“Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other
day?” Thayer asked affably, by way of conversation. He did not notice
the shocked look on the other’s face as he continued, “I guess that
will hold them for a while. Let them go to the Supreme Court now and
see what they can get out of them!”
* * * * *
The denial of the supplementary motions was no more than Sacco had
expected, but the decision left Vanzetti sunk in discouragement.
“While hope is still alive in me,” he wrote, “disperation is growing
powerful.” His fantasies of violence expanded:
_My native me is drearing for what it is becoming. I have cut down
trees with a sense of sympathy for them, and almost a sort of
remorse; while now thinking of my axe, a lust seizes me to get a
mad delight and exaltation by using them on the necks of the men’s
eaters; on the necks of those who seem to have the evil in their head
and on the trunks of those who seem to have the evil in their breast._
In the weeks before Christmas his mental balance began to waver. He
told the guards of having feelings in his head and chest that meant
earthquakes were coming. He noticed a sensation of electricity in
the air. Each night he barricaded the door of his cell with a table
for fear that his enemies might overpower the guards and kill him.
The day before Christmas he threatened another prisoner who, he
said, was laughing at him. Six days later he smashed a chair. Joseph
McLaughlin, the prison physician, and Charles Sullivan, the state
expert for insane criminals, spent some time questioning him. He told
them that everyone had forsaken him; that at his trial “perjurers,
fascists and others” had been “out to get him,” and that he needed
to carry a gun for protection. The doctors diagnosed him as in a
dangerous hallucinatory and delusional state of mind, and recommended
his committal to the Bridgewater Hospital, where Sacco had been sent
twenty-one months before.
Vanzetti arrived manacled the day after New Year’s. When the
admitting doctor asked him routinely why he was there, he replied,
“I don’t know, I am not crazy. Perhaps they think I need a rest.”
Although for the next two months he seemed a model prisoner, quiet
and controlled, his inner turbulence persisted. He told the doctors
of a fascist plot against him being prepared through certain Italian
prisoners in Charlestown who could kill him “any time any day they
want to.” Even in Bridgewater there were such fascists. “I more than
feel it,” he told the doctor.
The records of Vanzetti in Bridgewater are scanter than those of
Sacco. On February 23 the attendant noted that he spent the day
sitting in a chair pretending to have his eyes closed, but watching
the other prisoners. At the evening meal he looked at his food
suspiciously, then took potatoes from another prisoner’s plate and
ate them, saying nothing. He was kept in his room except for two
periods a day that he could play ball in the yard. When Thompson
spoke to the doctors about this, they told him they could not give
Vanzetti more freedom because he was dangerous. On the arrival of a
new Italian prisoner Vanzetti was removed to a more secluded wing
of the hospital, a change he resented deeply. Like most patients in
mental institutions, he had the feeling that the doctors were working
against him. In April his physical symptoms had begun to abate, and
by May he could write, “Yes, my heartburn is gone, and I am quite
well—so well that I feel to write a treaty on sociology—wich I have
not yet begun, because I wish to hear some friends in its regards.”
On May 28, 1925, he was certified as not insane and returned to
Charlestown.
* * * * *
The disorganization of the Defense Committee that Moore had watched
was followed about the time of his departure by a reorganization
and an opening up of the membership to non-Italians. Lopez had been
inflexible in excluding outsiders, but Amleto Fabbri, the gentle,
softspoken shoe-worker who had replaced him as secretary, welcomed
them. Many of the new members came over from the dissolved New
Trial League, but the influx that really broke through the Latin
limitations of the old committee came from the James Connolly
Literary Society.
That society was made up of a group of forty or fifty dissidents
from the local branch of the Gaelic League. They called themselves
a literary society because in Boston they could not say what
they really were—Irishmen of the indeterminate left, socialists,
associates of the Socialist Labor Party, some of them even Wobblies.
Most of them had turned against the church and were anathema to their
pious majority compatriots. More concerned with day-to-day problems
of economics than with theoretical Marxism, their only literary
activity was the distribution of pamphlets. The name Connolly was
really a cover—who in such an Irish city could say a word against the
martyr of 1916?
The James Connolly Literary Society had become interested in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case during the Dedham trial. As it now drew closer to
the Italian nucleus of the Defense Committee, three of its members
became officers, with John Barry, a quiet, conciliatory Irishman
taking over as chairman. Barry, a steelworker, would never play
a conspicuous role. His retiring nature made him acceptable to
everyone, and in fact he was so accepted as a symbol of intergroup
unity.
Michael Flaherty, a painter and member of the Boston Labor Union
named vice-chairman, took a much more active part. Flaherty and his
associates brought a lighter spirit to the ordained seriousness of
the anarchists. An Aran Islander, Flaherty possessed an underlying
humor that the darkest situation could never quite down. If he
had stayed in Ireland he would undoubtedly have played his part
in the Easter Uprising. In America he gravitated naturally to the
Sacco-Vanzetti case.
Mary Donovan, who came with him from the Society, was both a
more practical and a more pugnacious type, a lank, raw-boned,
sharp-featured woman in her thirties. Emotional, opinionated,
suspicious, generous, and devoted, she was not an easy person to
get along with, but she made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti so
much her own that she became possessed by it. So much of her time
did she spend at the Hanover Street headquarters, where she took
charge of correspondence and communications, that she soon became
the committee’s recording secretary and lost her State House job as
industrial inspector for the Department of Labor.
With Moore gone, the McAnarneys in turn resigned, leaving the defense
temporarily without counsel. Most of the committee by now felt that
Moore had been an unfortunate choice, that what was needed was an
outstanding local lawyer, someone with authority and position.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, after consulting with the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Workers’ Defense Union, came on from New
York to talk the matter over with the committee. “I then had long
conferences,” she wrote with the customary exaggeration of her own
role, “in which I interviewed every element—from conservative trade
unionists, Socialists, Anarchist, Communists, and Liberals including
Professor Frankfurter at Harvard University. The universal opinion
was that a new, distinguished local counsel was imperative.”
Frankfurter recommended that the committee try to get William
Thompson. That had been John McAnarney’s idea from the beginning, and
many of the committee had come to feel the same way after listening
to Thompson’s arguments on the supplementary motions. The question
was whether he would be willing to take on such an unpopular case.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Donovan, Barry, Felicani, and Mike
Flaherty called at the Matthews, Thompson & Spring offices in the
Tremont Building to see what they could do. Thompson received them
in his austere office, looked at them through his rimless glasses,
and listened noncommittally. Finally he told them, in a tone that
suggested he expected to hear no more of the matter, that he would
take the case for a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars, paid in
advance.
In two days they were back with the money. “I thought sure you
couldn’t raise it,” Thompson told Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. “I
can’t say that I’m glad.” In a quick trip to New York, she had
borrowed twenty thousand dollars from the American Fund for Public
Service—popularly known as the Garland Fund—on the security of the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the International Ladies Garment
Workers’ Union. Felicani, in a stupendous burst of energy, had
managed to raise the additional five thousand dollars locally through
the harder way of individual contributions.
The moment Thompson received the certified check was, although he did
not then know it, the turning point in his life. After that the world
of Boston, his incorporated world, would never be the same for him
again.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Katzmann’s successor. Katzmann was retained as special assistant
in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE CONFESSIONS
It is not unusual for a notable murder case to have several
confessions as a by-product. Where these are false, they are either
the notoriety-seeking of a psychopathic misfit or the effort of some
criminal to obtain a pardon for a crime he has committed in order to
stand trial for one he has not. In the latter case he can plan, once
safely pardoned, to repudiate his confession.
Such was, no doubt, the motive of Augusto Pasquale, under life
imprisonment in New York for kidnaping, when in May 1922 he confessed
to being one of the South Braintree gunmen. According to his story
he had met two strangers in a Bowery saloon who asked him if he
wanted to pull a job with them in a factory in South Braintree. He
agreed, and they went from New York to Boston by train to pick up
a car. Pasquale did not know the make of car nor did he seem to be
familiar with the geography of South Braintree. He said that he and
the others held up an auto with the payroll in it. When the paymaster
and guard drew their guns, they shot them, took over the auto, drove
a quarter of a mile, then hopped a train to New York. His story was
so obviously concocted that the police did not even pretend to take
it seriously.[15]
The confession of Frank “the Winker” Silva to being a member of
the gang that staged the Bridgewater holdup was a matter of more
substance. Silva did not make his confession until Sacco and Vanzetti
were dead—and then only after he was paid for it—but Moore had been
aware of some of its details as early as 1922.
Jack Callahan, an ex-bank burglar turned journalist, who still kept
his underworld contacts, was the go-between who persuaded Silva to
sell his story to the _Outlook and Independent_, where it appeared in
1928.
Silva, at the time of the Bridgewater holdup, was thirty-five years
old. He had come to Boston from Italy at the age of ten, and still
spoke English with an accent, although his close-set face with
its clipped mustache looked more American than Italian. Sensual,
indolent, usually down on his luck, as readily a pimp as a mugger,
Silva was the petty-criminal type not uncommon in the North End,
where the brown, wrinkled-faced old women would draw their shawls
tighter in contempt as he passed.
When the police seemed too active Silva would take a job, but never
for long. In 1916, he told Callahan, he had worked briefly in the
L. Q. White factory in Bridgewater, but soon returned to Hanover
Street. His favorite hangout there was Jimmy “Big Chief” Mede’s
shoeshine parlor and cigar stand, where a few of the boys were always
talking about easy money, figuring things out. Jimmy was a dark-eyed,
heavy-browed Sicilian who asked questions and let others do the
answering.
According to Silva, he had told Jimmy it would be easy enough to go
down to Bridgewater the day before Christmas and snatch the payroll.
He figured it would amount to twenty or thirty thousand dollars.
Several times in the autumn of 1917, Silva said, he and Mede and Joe
Sammarco, a nineteen-year-old Italian corner boy known as Joe Nap
because he had come from Naples, went to Bridgewater to look over
the factory, the bank, and the connecting streets. Then on November
14, 1917, Mede and some of his boys were caught after robbing the
paymaster of the American Net & Twine Company in Cambridge, and the
Big Chief found himself doing a seven-to-ten-year rap in Charlestown.
Silva, left to himself, joined the Army. After his discharge in 1919
he returned to the North End and ran into Joe Sammarco. They were
both broke. Silva remembered the L. Q. White payroll, waiting there
in Bridgewater like a Christmas turkey. The job would need two more
to pull it off. Sammarco said he knew just the two. Next day he
appeared with “Doggy” Bruno, a chunky fellow with a short mustache
like Silva’s, and “Guinea” Oates, who owned a touring car.
Silva told Callahan that the four of them had driven to Bridgewater
several times to check the roads. They had walked around the town,
shot a little pool in the parlor under the post office, and taken a
long look at the Bridgewater Trust Company, where the White truck
picked up the payroll. Because Christmas would fall on Thursday, they
knew the delivery would be made on Wednesday.
Monday of Christmas week, Silva told Callahan, Guinea had driven them
to Needham and at a garage near the police station Silva asked a
man about license plates. When the man walked away for a moment, he
spotted an old car that had dealer’s plates tied on with string. He
untied them, tucked them under his coat, and cleared out to meet the
others. From Needham they drove to Bridgewater for another rehearsal.
On Tuesday they made their final dry run. Wednesday morning they
arrived in Bridgewater at about half past six and parked on Hale
Street, not far from a lunch stand. Silva said, “Boys, let’s go down
and have something to eat because this is liable to be our last meal.”
He and Doggy finished eating ahead of the others and walked up to
the square opposite the bank to watch for the truck. Suddenly Silva
noticed that it had slipped in from the side street and was parked in
front of the bank.
They returned to the car and Doggy got in, leaving Silva outside as
look-out man. Guinea Oates was at the wheel. At Silva’s signal, he
was to back the car into the street and block the truck.
Silva called out “Let’s go” and Guinea shoved the car into Broad
Street while the other two piled out. What they had not counted on
was a trolley car coming down the street right behind the truck. They
shouted at the men in the truck, now almost on top of them, and Doggy
leveled his shotgun, but, as Silva told it:
_When we said, “stick ’em up,” instead of the driver sticking up his
hands, and the rest of them they kept on going, and all of a sudden
shots were fired from both sides. Most of us were behind some trees
or posts, a few feet from Hale Street. I seen this man that was
sitting on the side seat, I don’t know who it was, but it was a big
man. He got up from his seat and grabbed the driver’s wheel and while
he was grabbing the driver’s wheel, the street car comes down and
cuts us off from seeing the truck. All of a sudden I heard a noise.
We heard some glass breaking. We couldn’t see the payroll car any
more. We all got on our car and we shot straight through Hale Street
into Plymouth Street.... No cars followed us._
They stopped near a cemetery to change license plates, and Doggy
threw the stolen ones into a pond. Back in the North End Silva and
Bruno shaved off their mustaches. “I was broke and desperate,” Silva
told Callahan. “There was some Jew from New York that was hanging
around Boston and I got acquainted with him. He was way worst off
than I was.” The man, a down-and-outer named Jacob Luban, was full
of plausible talk about easy money in New York. Calling himself Paul
Martini, Silva set out with him. His easy money turned out to be
nothing more than working the combinations of post-office boxes and
stealing letters that might contain money. In this paltry venture
Silva and Luban were joined by another floater, Adolph Witner.
Hanging around New York post-office lobbies, they were soon noticed
and arrested. Witner turned state’s evidence. Luban and Silva
received terms in the United States penitentiary in Atlanta.
Doggy Bruno and Guinea Oates vanished. Only Joe Sammarco stayed on
in Boston. Three weeks after the Bridgewater failure a policeman
was killed during a dance-hall brawl in City Square, Charlestown.
Sammarco was convicted for this crime in 1920 and sent to Charlestown
State Prison for life. There he found himself with Big Chief Mede.
In August, 1920, Vanzetti was taken to Charlestown. Mede, with an
eye to parole, was conducting a weekly English class for those who
did not know the language, and Vanzetti became one of his students.
Mede never forgot him. Forty years later he was still scornful of
the idea that anyone could ever have considered the bookish Vanzetti
capable of committing a holdup.
By the end of 1921 Moore’s investigators had picked up rumors
connecting Mede and Silva with the Bridgewater affair, and
in January, February, and March, 1922, Moore visited Mede in
Charlestown. The Big Chief would neither deny nor affirm anything,
but intimated that if he was given help in getting a parole, plus
certain other favors, he would disclose a lot. Moore wrote to
Governor Channing Cox, explaining Mede’s situation and asking for
assurance that no statement Mede made would hurt his chances for
parole. Cox replied that inasmuch as Mede was not going to be paroled
anyhow, he should feel perfectly free to tell what he knew. The Big
Chief did not think much of the governor’s answer and refused to talk.
Mede’s counsel was James Vahey, the brother of Vanzetti’s Plymouth
lawyer. As soon as Vahey heard that Moore had been seeing his
client, he paid a visit to the Charlestown prison and asked Mede
point-blank just what he had said to Moore. When Mede denied that he
had told Moore anything, Vahey—according to Mede’s sworn statement
in 1928—warned him: “Don’t you dare say anything in regard to the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. You know, my brother defended Vanzetti, and you
will only be putting my brother in Dutch.”
Mede agreed to say nothing, but shortly afterward he broke with Vahey
and on receiving the guarantee of an unrevealed sum of money from
Moore told a story of the Bridgewater holdup similar to that later
told by Silva. Mede had got together with Sammarco and said the
latter would corroborate him, but although Moore talked with Sammarco
several times, he could get no admissions out of him.
Meanwhile, Adolph Witner, who had been let off with a token sentence
for helping to convict Silva and Luban, found himself extradited to
Boston on charges of forgery and mail robbery. Moore ran into him at
police headquarters, overwhelmed by his new troubles. He told Moore
that he could open up the Sacco-Vanzetti case if Moore, in turn,
would help him. Somehow the adroit Moore arranged to get the charges
against Witner dropped, and late in April the two men, accompanied
by an ex-convict named John Jocomo, then working as an investigator
for the Defense Committee, headed for Atlanta to interview Luban and
Silva.
Luban, envious of Witner’s freedom, decided to turn a little state’s
evidence on his own and proceeded to write a long, garbled account
of these interviews to William J. Burns, the Director of the Bureau
of Investigation of the Department of Justice. Burns sent an agent
to Atlanta to interview Luban and Silva. Receiving a report of the
interview, Lawrence Letherman of the Boston Bureau sent a copy to
the attorney general of Massachusetts. A few days later one of the
attorney general’s assistants, Albert Hurwitz, arrived in Atlanta to
take affidavits from the two men.
Luban told Hurwitz that on April 18 he had been called to the
warden’s office to find Silva and an outsider whom Silva introduced
as John Jocomo already there. Jocomo said he had come down from
Boston to investigate the Bridgewater holdup “committed by Sacco and
Vanzetti.” Although he knew that Silva really had had nothing to do
with it, Jocomo said he was in Atlanta for two reasons—first because
he was being paid; second, to cover himself and his brother, who had
deposited some of the money taken in the South Braintree holdup.
The next day Luban and Silva were brought to the office again; this
time Moore was there with Jocomo, who asked if they would like to
talk to Witner. Moore had Witner brought in. Witner confronted his
two former pals as if he were doing them a favor.
_During my conversation [Luban explained to Hurwitz] I was
interrupted by Moore who said to me, “There is no use talking,
Martini [Silva] don’t know the first thing about Bridgewater or
about Braintree, but is willing to help along and take the blame
providing Mr. Moore will keep the promise that he made him.” I forgot
to state that when Mr. Moore came to Atlanta he told me he was in
Washington, that he seen William J. Burns and Attorney General
Dougherty, and that they told him they would be glad if this case
would be disposed of in any way at all, as long as Sacco and Vanzetti
go free. He also told me he had a conversation with Attorney General
Allen of Massachusetts, a man I never heard of or never seen in my
life before and that Mr. Allen told him that if he can find a way
how to free Sacco and Vanzetti, “we don’t care whether legitimate
or unlegitimate” that he, Mr. Allen, would help him in any shape or
form.... He says ... Mr. Allen wants to dispose of this case in the
worst way, and he don’t care how it is disposed of as long as these
two men are free, because the Governor and everybody else is sick and
tired of it._
_The promises made to me were these, first that Mr. Moore will use
his influence to get Martini and myself out of prison, and second
that Witner would go to New York and confess to his part of the
perjury which would show my innocence automatically. Third, that we
would receive $5,000 apiece before Martini takes the stand, $5,000
apiece after he goes off the stand; fourth, that Martini will get
a good lawyer who will instruct him while Martini is on the stand
testifying, this lawyer will instruct him to refuse to answer
questions on the grounds of incriminating and degrading himself, that
will create an impression with the judge that he did not want to
commit himself, but it is true that he is the one and not Sacco who
committed the holdup in Bridgewater, and he believes on these grounds
Sacco and Vanzetti will get a new trial. Later on Martini will be
able to defend himself by telling the truth and showing that really
while this murder and attempted murder was committed Martini was in
New York._
When Hurwitz asked Luban what Moore wanted Martini-Silva to do, Luban
replied: “He wanted Martini to confess that he together with another
man named Joe Napp and Jas Meade committed the attempted robbery at
Bridgewater. He said these two men were willing to take the blame for
it, and was also willing to testify that Martini was along with them,
providing Martini will consent to it, not otherwise.”
Witner, according to Luban, said that he was working as an
investigator for Moore and being paid fifty dollars a week and
expenses by the Amalgamated Garment Workers’ Union. He suggested
that Silva also should admit that he and two other convicts now dead
committed the Braintree murders. Later it would be easy to prove that
he was in New York on both days.
_He also stated they had two witnesses [Luban continued], one by
the name of Louis Pelser has already been fixed up to change his
testimony so it will be in favor of the defendants._
_He said they had another witness by the name of Roy Gould who
previously did not testify, but will testify now and will identify
Martini, but should they want to prosecute Martini for murder Gould
will retract his original testimony against Martini._
_One of the man’s witnesses, a certain woman whose name I don’t
remember, has already changed her testimony. From Mr. Moore’s
statement to me I first understood she first testified in favor of
the prosecution, and now she is ready to testify for the defense,
that the prosecuting attorney had coached her and induced her
when she identified Sacco, but she will switch over to Martini if
necessary, because they look so much alike, and Witner told me in
Jewish that it cost a good many thousand dollars to get the woman
to change her testimony, and they are ready to spend a good many
thousand more._
Luban gave a complicated account of Witner’s going to Moore’s office
and seeing a picture he recognized as Silva’s only to have Moore tell
him it was Sacco’s.
_Then Moore thought for a minute that maybe Martini is the one who
committed the crime in Bridgewater and Braintree and they mistook
Sacco for Martini. Witner in his heart knew that Martini had nothing
to do with it, because Martini was with Witner together in New York
at the time these robberies and murders were committed._
Luban’s rambling affidavit was of course as suspect as his character.
Sacco was never accused of participating in the Bridgewater attempt,
although Luban seems to have got it into his head that he was the
leader. Nor did Sacco in the least resemble Silva. Luban called Sacco
and Vanzetti good union men, but the two had never belonged to a
trade-union and as anarchists were opposed to them. Nor, of course,
was there ever any indication that Massachusetts officials were
interested in finding a way to free Sacco and Vanzetti.
Witner, safe behind the shield of language, undoubtedly told Luban
some story about Silva in Yiddish, and it is apparent from Luban’s
confused accounts of Pelser, Gould, and Lola Andrews that he had
heard something about the witnesses. Moore made no further attempts
to get in touch with Luban.
Silva, too, made an affidavit for Hurwitz in which he admitted he had
known Jocomo for sixteen years and claimed that the latter’s brother
Joe, who lived in Mattapan, “had come in possession of $12,000 of the
money that was stolen at Braintree holdup, and an investigation was
started to find from where he got that money.”
He stated that he told Moore he had nothing to do with either the
Bridgewater or the Braintree holdups and knew nothing about them
since on both dates he was living in a house belonging to Luban on
West 46th Street in New York. It was on Luban’s advice that he had
agreed to play along with Moore and pretend he had taken part in the
Bridgewater business. Moore, Witner, and Jocomo had coached him on
the dates of the holdups, and Moore had promised to show him maps of
Bridgewater and Braintree.
Nothing more was to be heard from Silva until after Sacco and
Vanzetti were dead. As soon as Mede was let out of Charlestown in
1923, Moore tried to persuade him to make a statement about the
Bridgewater attempt. Mede, with the shadow of Charlestown still
large behind him, refused, but agreed for a salary to go to New York
and see what he could find out about the Braintree affair from the
underworld there. A few weeks later Moore’s investigator Tommy Doyle
had a talk with him in the Hotel McAlpin, and Mede agreed again that
he had planned the Bridgewater job and that Sammarco and Silva had
miscarried it.
Doyle made notes of this conversation. They remained among Moore’s
papers until Thompson dug them out in the desperate spring days of
1927 and decided to ask Mede for an affidavit. Mede was then a boxing
promoter in Massachusetts, doing a little bootlegging on the side. He
still hesitated to say anything, for fear that his athletic license
might be revoked, but finally agreed to tell what he knew to Governor
Fuller if the governor would promise not to pass the information
on to the State Police or take away his license. Six weeks before
the executions the Big Chief, accompanied by Tommy Doyle, told the
disbelieving governor his story of the Bridgewater holdup; of how he
had planned it originally with Silva and later learned the outcome
from Sammarco at State Prison. At the end of the interview Fuller
called in Captain Blye of the State Police and told Mede to repeat
his story. Mede refused.
As August arrived, with the execution date set for the tenth, a
Hanover Street lawyer of clouded reputation, Joseph Santosuosso,
urged Mede to make one more attempt to save the two men’s lives.
Mede finally agreed to make a sworn statement about the Bridgewater
affair to the State Police. With Santosuosso he went to Captain
Blye’s office. Blye now refused to listen to him. And Mede’s earlier
apprehensions turned out to be only too well justified, for his
license was revoked soon after he talked with Fuller.
* * * * *
There were other echoes from Moore’s visit to Atlanta. On November
1, 1923, an envelope arrived in Boston addressed “The Sacco-Vanzetti
Case.” It was delivered to the Boston Bar Association and turned
over to Moore. Inside was a to-whom-it-may-concern letter from Emil
Moller, a Dane awaiting deportation in a Washington, D.C., jail.
“I have information about the Sacco-Vanzetti Case,” Moller wrote.
Through his friendship with Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, Moore
managed to get Moller’s deportation postponed, and sent Carpenter,
his investigator, to talk with him.
A petty criminal, Moller had made the tactical mistake of breaking
into a house within the District of Columbia, thus making a minor
crime a federal offense that sent him to the penitentiary in
Atlanta. There he had shared a cell with one Joe Morelli, the leader
of a Providence, Rhode Island, gang who was serving twelve years
for robbing interstate shipments from freight cars. Moller had a
typewriter in his cell and used to write letters and appeals for
Morelli as well as for two other acquaintances, Luban and Silva.
Sometimes in the long evenings after the lights were out Morelli
would tell Moller of the things he had done “that would make your
hair stand on end.” Once, according to Moller, he boasted that his
gang had pulled off the South Braintree robbery. Morelli told about
it in detail: how the gang had started out before sunrise from a
Providence saloon, how they had driven up Pearl Street in a stolen
Buick, how afterward as they were changing cars in the woods they
had almost been caught when the wheels of the second car got stuck
in the mud. Looking for an alibi in case any of this ever came to
light, Morelli asked Moller to swear that during April 1920 he had
been living at the American Lodging House in East Side New York—a
place run by Luban’s wife—and that on the night of the fifteenth he
had been playing poker with Morelli, Silva, and Luban. Moller had
pretended to go along.
Telling this story to Carpenter and later to Moore, Moller was the
first to mention the name—Morelli—that would run like a dark thread
through the fabric of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Moore considered that
much of what Moller had to say was hearsay. Not for another two years
would his story receive any corroboration, and by that time Moore
would no longer be connected with the case, and Moller himself would
have been deported.
* * * * *
On November 18, 1925, Edward Miller, a trusty in the Dedham jail,
stopped at Sacco’s cell, handed him a magazine, and told him to look
inside it. A few minutes later Miller passed Sacco’s cell again and
found him leaning against the wall trembling, a slip of paper in his
hands, his eyes full of tears. “What is this?” he asked, his voice
barely under control.
“Can’t you read English?” Miller returned.
The note read:
_I hear by confess to being in the south Braintree shoe company crime
and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime._
_Celestino Madeiros_
The writer was a sallow, stoop-shouldered twenty-three-year-old
Portuguese who had shot and killed the cashier of a Wrentham bank
during a gang holdup in November 1924. He was being kept in the
Dedham jail while his conviction for murder was appealed. Several
times Madeiros had sidled up to Sacco in the washroom and said under
his breath: “Nick, I know who did the South Braintree job.” Once he
had sent Sacco a crude map of Oak Street in Randolph, with a house
marked “Thomas” and the scrawled notation that Sacco should look up
this Thomas.
Sacco had thrown the paper away, deciding that Madeiros was cracked
or else another spy, like that Carbone they had put next to him four
years ago. But this note in the magazine seemed to be another matter.
Sacco sent it to Thompson, who came at once to the jail to talk with
Madeiros. The three men talked together in the reception room for
an hour, Madeiros answering Thompson’s questions while the lawyer
made notes on the back of an envelope. The Portuguese was quite
willing to tell about what he claimed was his part in the South
Braintree holdup, but he said he would not identify any of his
companions. Sacco, sitting beside him, shaking with excitement, kept
interjecting: “For Jesus’s sake, tell the truth!”
Madeiros’ story was that on April 15, 1920, he was picked up at 4
A.M. at Zack’s Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island, by four Italians
who arrived in a five-passenger Hudson touring car. They drove to
some woods near Oak Street in Randolph, Massachusetts, where they
found another Italian waiting with a Buick. Changing cars, they drove
to South Boston, where they stopped at a saloon in Andrews Square.
Then, after returning to Providence, they headed for South Braintree,
where they arrived about noon. They killed a few more hours in a
speakeasy a few miles from the shoe factories and then, just before
three, left for South Braintree.
During the holdup Madeiros said he sat in the back seat “scared
to death” with a Colt .38, which he did not use, in his hand. The
payroll money, he said, had been in a large black bag.
“These four men,” he told Thompson, “persuaded me to go with them
two or three nights before when I was talking with them in a saloon
in Providence. They talked like professionals. They said they had
done lots of jobs of this kind. They had been engaged in robbing
freight cars in Providence. Two were young men from twenty to
twenty-five-years old, one was about forty, the other thirty-five.
All wore caps. I was then eighteen years old. I do not remember
whether they were shaved or not. Two of them did the shooting—the
oldest one and another. They were left on the street. The arrangement
was that they should meet me in a Providence saloon the next night to
divide the money. I went there but they did not come.
“They had been stealing silk, shoes, cotton from freight cars and
sending it to New York. Two of them lived on North Main Street, in
lodging houses. I had known them three or four months. The old man
was named Mike. Another was called Williams or Bill. I don’t remember
what the others were called.”
Madeiros said that he knew their last names but he refused to give
them. After Thompson had his notes typed up into an affidavit,
Madeiros signed it without hesitation. A year and a half later he
elaborated on this story when he was examined jointly by Thompson
and an assistant district attorney, Dudley Ranney. In this dual
examination Madeiros said that one of the men in the South Braintree
murder car was not Italian but “Polish or Finland.” He still claimed
that the payroll money had been in a black bag that had been tossed
in the back of the car and a blanket thrown over it. As to how South
Braintree had looked on that spring afternoon, he could not remember.
He had been drinking and, huddled half-drunk in the back seat with
shots echoing round him, he noticed no landmarks. However, he
remembered that just before they got to the Stoughton turnpike they
came to a fork in the road and stopped at a house where there was a
woman in the yard. They asked her how to get on the Providence road.
From the back seat Madeiros could not see her. At the Randolph Woods
hideout they had changed back to the Hudson, and the Italian who had
been waiting there had driven away alone in the Buick. They drove
very fast in the Hudson through Randolph, where they were seen by a
boy named Thomas who lived on Oak Street. Madeiros became acquainted
with the boy four years later when he went to live on the same
street. Thomas told him then that he had seen the South Braintree car
go whizzing by.
There were parallels between the Wrentham and South Braintree
holdups, as Thompson soon learned, that made it seem as if the
Wrentham gang had used the earlier holdup as a model. Two stolen
cars had again been used at Wrentham, a Buick and then a Hudson. The
rear window of the getaway car had been removed and the bandits had
carried a shotgun in the rear seat to discourage pursuit.
Madeiros was captured a few days after the Wrentham crime, and
shortly afterward two of his associates were picked up—Jimmy Croft,
usually known as Weeks, and Alfred Bedard, the driver of the car. The
fourth bandit, Harry Goldenberg, got away.
Bedard, on arraignment, was represented by Katzmann—now in a law
partnership with John Vahey—while Madeiros’ counsel was the same
Francis Squires who had been involved with Angelina DeFalco in the
bribery trial.
Katzmann went to District Attorney Winfield Wilbar, who had
succeeded Harold Williams, to see if he could make a deal. Bedard
had been waiting in the car when the holdup killing took place, and
Katzmann argued that his client should be allowed to plead guilty to
manslaughter. Wilbar refused. “Second degree murder or go to bat” was
his ultimatum.
Bedard and Weeks pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received
life sentences. Madeiros, who had done the actual shooting,
always maintained that Detective Lieutenant Joseph Ferrari of the
State Police had promised him a second-degree murder sentence if
he confessed. Left alone to stand trial for his life, he felt
double-crossed.
His trial began on May 11, 1925, before Judge Henry Lummus, a
waddling three-hundred-pounder with a black Van Dyke beard. Scarcely
more than a formality, it lasted only a few days. The car used in the
holdup, a conspicuous blue Hudson speedster, was traced to Bedard
in Providence. Madeiros himself had been picked up in Providence at
Zack’s Hotel, where he was found in bed with two other Portuguese
floaters, Mingo and Pacheco. Under his pillow was the gun he had used
at Wrentham. The most that Squires could do for his doomed client was
to question his sanity. It took the jury less than an hour to decide
that Madeiros was sane and to bring in a verdict of guilty. There the
case would have ended with a short walk to the electric chair except
for a crotchet of Judge Lummus’. The bulky judge had long wondered
why it was considered necessary at the outset of any criminal trial
to instruct the jury that a defendant was presumed to be innocent.
Deliberately he omitted the banal phrase, and because he did so
Squires appealed the verdict. It was while this appeal was pending
that Madeiros had written his note to Sacco.
The question was soon raised as to whether Madeiros had done this
because, in his version, “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the
kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” or whether he thought that the
confession might be of help to him in his second trial. He already
knew that the Defense Committee had spent a quarter of a million
dollars defending Sacco and Vanzetti. According to Oliver Curtis, the
deputy jail master, Miller, the trusty, had come to him one afternoon
to ask if Madeiros might borrow a pamphlet from Sacco containing the
committee’s financial report. Thirty or forty minutes later Miller
returned it to Curtis with a scrawled note:
_I hear by confess to being in the shoe company crime at south
Braintree on April 15 1920 and that Sacco and Vanzetti was not there_
_Celestino F. Madeiros_
Curtis kept the note but did nothing about it. After waiting three
days Madeiros sent the second note to Sacco. The Portuguese did not
deny he had read the financial report but claimed he had read it
after he had written the two notes, not before.
A liar, thief, murderer, Madeiros was a man whose uncorroborated word
would be worth nothing. His sister and friends testified that he
had the mind of a child of ten, and like his parents was subject to
epileptic fits. Even before he had quit school at age fifteen he had
been arrested a dozen times. In Providence, Rhode Island, in January
1920, he emerged resplendent in the blue-gray uniform of a lieutenant
in the American Rescue League and proceeded to solicit money. The
League existed mostly in the imagination of one Arthur Tatro, who
wore more elaborate insignia on his Salvation-Army style uniform and
called himself captain. He and Madeiros bivouacked in the four-story,
bathless, threadbare Zack’s Hotel—its ground floor conveniently
a saloon—Tatro sharing a room with Madeiros’ sister Mary, who
was given the rank of second lieutenant for her services, while
Madeiros bedded in with a young red-headed girl, the sole private of
their little army. For some months they drummed the streets in Fox
Point—the Portuguese section of Providence—and in neighboring Fall
River, Taunton, and New Bedford. On May 1 Tatro’s private army was
outflanked by the police and arrested for fraud and impersonation.
Madeiros was picked up at his rescue work in New Bedford’s Bristol
House, a combination cabaret and brothel. While he was out on bail
the Providence police caught him breaking into a shop on May 25.
In July, beginning his term in the House of Correction, he apparently
had no money. Yet five months later he left Providence with
twenty-eight hundred dollars of unknown origin in his pocket. Not
until 1923 did he return. Then for a time he set himself up as a
contractor and built several garages, none of which made him a
profit. However, with a little hijacking on the side he managed to
keep himself in funds. In March 1924, he went to work for Barney
Monterios, a Cape Verde Island Brava, who ran the Bluebird Inn at
Seekonk, about four miles from Providence.
Conveniently just over the Massachusetts line, this rural haven
combined the features of a roadhouse, dance hall, and speakeasy, in
which Providence gangsters could relax undisturbed by thoughts of the
police. Upstairs there were always a few girls available. Barney ran
the place with the help of a brass-blonde companion, Mae Boice, who
was sometimes thought to be his wife.
Madeiros helped build a dining annex at the end of the dance floor,
drove Mae around on errands, acted as bouncer in the evenings when
the boys got a little too steamed, and spent much of his spare time
upstairs with a new girl, Tessie, a plum-smooth little Italian. He
had two revolvers with him, a .38 and a .45, and sometimes as he lay
on the bed he used to scare Tessie by shooting the flies off the
ceiling. Once when he was in the yard amusing himself by shooting at
trees, he picked off Mae’s cat as it passed with its three kittens.
Mae was furious, although she later forgave him and with time
developed a certain affection for him.
One July evening, Bibber Barone, a trigger man associated with the
Morelli gang of Providence, pulled up in front of the inn with a
Cadillac full of his pals and announced loudly that he had come for
Tessie. Madeiros went out on the porch with his revolver and Bibber
stood on the grass, his hand in his pocket, staring at him. Mae Boice
and Jimmy Weeks, who often used to drop in at the Bluebird, watched
them through the open window. Weeks heard Madeiros tell Bibber “that
he and his gang had double-crossed him once on the job, and that he
might forgive them for that, but if they took the girl he would bump
them all, and that it would be sure death.” Bibber wilted back to the
Cadillac.
By autumn Madeiros had grown tired of Tessie’s olive plumpness
and more attentive to the blonde Mae. Once he flashed a roll of
thirty hundred-dollar bills in Mae’s face and tried to persuade
her to run off with him. This was too much for Barney, who fired
his carpenter-bouncer at the point of a revolver. Some time after
Madeiros had left the inn he drove back with Weeks and picked a
gunfight with Barney in the front yard. Madeiros hit nothing except
the house, but as he and Weeks drove off Barney managed to shoot out
the taillight of their car.
* * * * *
Although the Madeiros confession was signed and ready in November
1925, Thompson did not make it public while his death-sentence appeal
was pending, since both he and the district attorney felt that if it
became known that Madeiros had admitted to a second murder the fact
would damage him in any new trial. Then, too, Thompson was optimistic
about the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s pending decision on the
defense’s appeal from Judge Thayer’s denial of the supplementary
motions—he had argued the appeal before Chief Justice Arthur Rugg in
the Pemberton Square Court House through three bleak January days.
Four months later, on May 12, 1926, the court ruled against the
defense on all points.
Madeiros had better, if brief, luck. His conviction was reversed by
the Supreme Court in March 1926, thus demonstrating to Judge Lummus
and other whimsically inclined judges that the formula must not be
tampered with. Madeiros went on trial again in May. During most of
the proceedings he slumped in his chair with his feet on the rail and
his eyes shut as if he were asleep. The jury took less than two hours
to find him guilty.
On the second day of the Madeiros trial, Thompson drove down to Oak
Street in Randolph to locate the house Madeiros had marked on his
crude map and see if there was any trace of the boy called Thomas.
He found the house more easily than he had expected. It was occupied
by a Thomas Driver, who regretfully admitted knowing both Weeks and
Madeiros. Weeks, in fact, had been arrested in the house, and the
publicity that followed had caused the Drivers much humiliation.
For six months before the Wrentham holdup, Weeks with his wife and
children had lived in a shack on Cedar Street a half-mile down the
road. A friendly neighbor, he used to run small errands for the
Drivers in his Ford, often gave a lift to young Tom, then in high
school, and even promised to teach the boy how to drive.
Driver scarcely knew Madeiros in the brief time that the latter lived
with Weeks, but shortly before their arrest he had begun to wonder if
the pair might not be bootleggers. He could not say whether his son
had seen the holdup car on the day of the South Braintree murders.
The boy himself was away at sea, working for the United Fruit
Company. Thompson saw him later when he returned from his voyage.
Young Driver told him that he had not personally seen the car go past
but that his mother had, and that after she had read about the crime
in the paper she thought the men must have been the South Braintree
bandits.[16]
Thompson, faced with increasing demands on his time, found the added
complications of the Madeiros confession too much for him. He needed
an energetic young lawyer to devote all his time to investigating
Madeiros’ story. In search of one he turned to Dean Roscoe Pound
of the Harvard Law School. Pound mentioned Herbert Ehrmann, then
in his thirties, a lawyer who had come to Boston from Louisville,
Kentucky, via Harvard College and the Law School. Four years
before, Pound and Felix Frankfurter had edited a survey, _Criminal
Justice in Cleveland_, and Ehrmann had contributed a chapter on the
city’s courts. It seemed to Pound that Ehrmann, with his Cleveland
experience in investigating civic scandals, would be just the man to
track down the intricacies of Madeiros and the Providence gang.
At the outset Ehrmann did not have the conviction he came to
share later so burningly with Thompson that Sacco and Vanzetti
were innocent. When, on May 22, 1926, two days after Madeiros had
been found guilty for the second time, he set out for Seekonk and
Providence, he did not expect much.
The Bluebird Inn, on the shabby outskirts of Seekonk, had been
closed by the police. It looked a traditional New England farmhouse
gone to seed. A few chickens were wandering about the dusty front
yard, and at the side an open kitchen door sagged on its hinges.
Going up to the door, Ehrmann found a wrinkled Brava woman in a red
bandana sitting just inside, plucking a fowl. She said she was Barney
Monterios’ mother. When Ehrmann asked about her son, she slipped
into the next room and returned with Mae Boice, who told him curtly
that her husband was not at home. Ehrmann got nowhere with her until
he mentioned that he had just talked with Madeiros. At the name the
hard face beneath the brass hair softened and the voice was full of
concern as she asked about the surly Portuguese. Did Ehrmann think it
fair to execute a man who was not really sane? As she talked she led
him out of the kitchen, across the dance floor, and past the piano
to the dining alcove. He told her of Madeiros’ confession. At first
she said it could not be true because on April 15, 1920, he had been
in Mexico, but after thinking it over she agreed that he had not
left New England until the following January. Mae remembered that he
had said he had twenty-eight hundred dollars with him. Ehrmann knew
that when Madeiros was arrested in June 1920 he had no money at all.
Yet six months later and just out of the house of correction he had
acquired a sum, it struck Ehrmann at once, equal to just about a
fifth of the South Braintree payroll. That was all the Boston lawyer
found out at the Bluebird Inn. Nevertheless, he felt he was on the
track of something tangible.
Turning south from the inn, he drove to the dingy Providence police
headquarters on Fountain Street. What he now needed to know was
whether there had been, as Madeiros said, a local gang of Italians
engaged in robbing freight cars.
Ehrmann put his questions to Chief Inspector Henry Connors. The
answers were more of a corroboration than he would have dared hope.
Yes, there had been a gang in Providence robbing freight cars who had
finally been arrested on October 18, 1919. They were American-born
Italians, known as the Morell or Morelli gang from the five brothers
who formed its nucleus. Joe, Fred, and Pasquale Morelli had been
tried in May 1920, but during April they had been out on bail.
Connors had no tangible reason for suspecting that the Morellis had
been in on the South Braintree holdup, but he suggested that Ehrmann
see Captain Ralph Pieraccini of the New Bedford police, who might
know something of the doings of Frank and Mike Morelli in that city,
and John Richards, who had been a United States marshal at the time
the Morellis went on trial.
On the way back to Boston Ehrmann reflected on the South Braintree
robbery. It was apparent to him that someone must have scouted the
factories in advance and learned all about the day and time of
the payroll deliveries.[17] If he could now find some connection
between the Morellis and South Braintree, that would show too much
coincidence for Madeiros to have invented his story.
Three days later, Ehrmann drove the fifty miles down to Providence
again with his wife Sarah. While he interviewed the Morellis’ former
defense lawyer, Daniel Geary, she spent the afternoon looking up
the indictments of the Morellis in the clerk’s office of the United
States District Court. Geary reminded Ehrmann that he could not
ethically disclose confidential communications from his clients, nor
would he in any way implicate the Morellis in the South Braintree
murders, but he would be glad to help in collecting any information
that had been made public during their trial.
The Morellis had been systematic in their freight-yard robberies,
confining their thefts to shoes and textiles which they disposed
of through fences in New York. Ehrmann wanted to know how the gang
received information on the shipments of merchandise. Geary thought
that they sent spotters to adjacent industrial towns to watch
shipments being loaded and get the numbers of the cars. Joe Morelli
had taken a railroad detective, Robert Karnes, who had been gathering
evidence against the gang, to various towns in Massachusetts and
shown him where the shipments were spotted. Probably this was
a maneuver of Joe’s to divert suspicion from himself, for the
individualistic Joe did not follow the gangster’s code of loyalty.
Ehrmann asked whether Karnes had mentioned any specific places, and
Geary recalled his having said something about Rice & Hutchins. The
name had no particular significance for him until Ehrmann exclaimed:
“That’s in South Braintree where the murders occurred.”
Geary whistled. “That brings it home, doesn’t it!” he said.
Geary could not find the portion of the trial record containing the
detective’s testimony—although the court stenographer remembered
the reference—and later when he signed an affidavit he referred
less specifically to “Taunton, Attleboro and other places in
Massachusetts.” In the battle of affidavits that followed, Assistant
District Attorney Ranney got Karnes to deny that he had ever gone
or said he had gone with Joe Morelli to South Braintree. He did not
deny, however, having gone with Joe to towns in that general vicinity.
When, after the interview with Geary, Ehrmann met his wife in the
lobby of the Providence-Biltmore he found her as full of information
and as excited about it as he was about what he had discovered. She
had learned in the clerks’ office that the first four counts of the
Morelli indictment covered the theft of 611 pairs of ladies’ shoes
from Rice & Hutchins, while the eighth count was for 78 pairs of
men’s shoes from Slater & Morrill. For Ehrmann that was proof enough.
There must have been a spotter for the Morellis in South Braintree
who had studied the two factories and noted when the payroll arrived
and how it was delivered. He was certain that when he told this
to his Harvard classmate, Dudley Ranney, the district attorney’s
office would want to investigate the whole matter of the Morellis and
probably arrange a new trial. But when Ehrmann telephoned the next
day, Ranney was not at all interested in the discovery and his voice
had an edge to it as he told Ehrmann so.[18]
While Ehrmann was in Providence on Tuesday, May 25, Thompson was
interviewing Jimmy Weeks in Charlestown. He had talked with him five
days before, but Weeks had then said no more than that Madeiros’
confession was true. Thompson asked Deputy Warden Hoggsett to try to
persuade him to make a statement, and several days later he learned
that Weeks was willing to talk.
Weeks, a deceptively mild-mannered man, gave Thompson much the same
information about the Morellis that Ehrmann was to bring back from
Providence. He had been familiar with that large and notorious family
when the brothers were living near Eagle Park, Providence. Once he
had helped Joe steal a load of whisky out of a warehouse on Smith
Hill, but Joe had claimed that the whisky was vinegar and refused to
pay him off. It was true, Weeks said, that the Morellis worked on
tips. They always had plenty of money and they liked to flash it at
the races and at ball games.
Weeks said he had known Madeiros for six years. A short while before
the Wrentham holdup, the two of them had talked over their plans in
a barroom in Andrews Square, South Boston, Madeiros remarking that
it was strange he should be in the very same bar he had been in four
years before on the way to South Braintree. The men concerned in that
job, whom Madeiros in his first confession had called Mike and Bill,
he had called by their real names in talking to Weeks. They were,
according to Weeks, the Morellis of Providence. Madeiros had often
talked about the South Braintree crime. The four who had been with
him there were Joe, Mike, Bill, and Butsy Morelli.
In the Wrentham job Madeiros had used a Hudson as a getaway car. He
told Weeks he had enough of Buicks after South Braintree, where they
had used a Buick and switched to a Hudson afterward. Joe Morelli, he
said, had double-crossed him on his cut of the payroll.
As soon as Weeks had signed the statement, Thompson drove to the
Dedham jail to see Madeiros. Sheriff Capen telephoned Assistant
District Attorney William Kelley to ask permission for the interview.
Then Thompson himself took the telephone and explained to Kelley that
he hoped to clear up the Sacco-Vanzetti case in a few days and that
he wanted to question Madeiros about the confession that Weeks had
just made to the South Braintree holdup.
Kelley gave his permission, then left at once for Charlestown with
State Detective Michael Fleming, who knew Weeks, and Lieutenant Henry
Plett of the State Police to act as a stenographer. They met Weeks in
the rotunda and moved to a small side room where they sat around a
table.
“Jimmy, did you make a full confession in regard to the holdup in
South Braintree?” Fleming asked him with professional sternness.
“Jesus, no,” Weeks answered fearfully. “I didn’t make any confession
like that.”
Fleming said he heard otherwise. “Well, I did not!” the other
insisted. The detective warned him that he would be very foolish to
try to help someone else out of a scrape by making statements like
that. Kelley then asked Weeks what he had told Thompson.
Weeks said that Madeiros had told him in 1924 “that Sacco was not in
the stick-up at South Braintree.” Madeiros admitted that he himself
had been in on the South Braintree job but never went into details or
said how much of the money he received.
Fleming at this point turned paternally reproachful: “Now all the
time we used to ride up to see you here you told us nothing about
this. If a man is innocent I want to get him out of it. Joe and I are
the first fellows you should have told. You don’t know whether you
believe Madeiros?”
Weeks did not know. He had seen Bibber Barone at the Bluebird Inn, he
said, and he knew Frank Morelli, and he remembered Joe Morelli’s name
as well as the others in his gang: “Joe, Butsy, Patsy and a fellow
called Gyp the Blood.”
With further questioning Weeks grew confused, talking in the same
sentence about the shooting in South Braintree and the gunfight
with Barney Monterios at the Bluebird Inn, speaking also of an
unidentified holdup where Madeiros had been double-crossed and that
“he told me many times that it was the one that Sacco was in on.”
Kelley left Weeks to his confusion, warning him he was at liberty to
talk all he wanted but if “anyone comes here to see you and wants
information, you have to look out for yourself. If they write out
what you say and want you to sign papers, you yourself have to decide
what you want to do.”
With the salvo of Weeks’ counterconfession, accompanied by a triple
volley of sworn statements from Kelley, Fleming, and Plett, there
began the battle of the affidavits. Relations between Assistant
District Attorney Ranney—now in charge of the post-trial developments
in the Sacco-Vanzetti case—and the defense lawyers remained alertly
decorous. Any asperity was after all tempered by the fact that they
were all Harvard men as well as lawyers in the same city.
As soon as Ehrmann or Thompson produced an affidavit, Ranney felt
obligated to come up with a counteraffidavit. Thompson suggested to
Attorney General Jay Benton that all important witnesses connected
with Madeiros should be interviewed jointly by representatives of the
defense and the Commonwealth in order that the case “not degenerate
into a contest of affidavits in which each party’s trying to offset
the affidavits of the other party, or to contradict affidavits
already obtained.” District Attorney Wilbar would not agree to any
such combined operation, and the battle was on. During June and
July eighty-seven affidavits were filed—in addition to forty-six
miscellaneous statements, depositions, and letters—the engagement
reaching the ultimate point where affidavits were being filed about
affidavits.
During the afternoon of May 25 Thompson returned to Weeks with
a typewritten affidavit based on the notes he had made of their
morning conversation. Weeks signed it without saying anything of
the assistant district attorney’s noontime visit. The next day
Thompson assembled the affidavits he and Ehrmann had ready and
filed a motion with the clerk at Dedham for a new trial based on
Madeiros’ statement. Not until two days later did he learn of Weeks’
maunderings. He went at once to Charlestown.
Weeks, shuffling into the rotunda in his prison denims, quivered when
he saw Thompson’s set face. Thompson asked about his conversation
with Fleming and Kelley. Weeks said that they threatened him about
what might happen to him if he signed an affidavit for Thompson.
Kelley had taken out a package of Camels and given him one, asking
him if anything had been offered him to make a statement in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case. Weeks told Thompson he had replied, “No, Mr.
Kelley, you have just offered me this cigarette, and not so much as
this cigarette had been offered to me by anyone concerned in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case.”[19]
He had admitted to Kelley that Madeiros told him and a since-murdered
gangster named Steve Benkosky about taking part in the South
Braintree holdup. For Thompson he now added several new details. Joe
Morelli before his arrest had owned a Cole touring car and had given
him rides in it several times. There was a second Mike, called Mike
the Rug, in the Morelli gang; his real name was Cameron O’Connor.
Weeks knew him as well as he knew Gyp the Blood, Fred Morelli, and
Bibber Barone. They would sometimes come to the Bluebird Inn in an
open Cadillac. Weeks claimed that some of his conversation with
Kelley and Fleming had not been taken down by the stenographer. Both
men had warned him about talking too much if he ever hoped to have
his sentence commuted, adding that Madeiros was only eighteen at the
time of the South Braintree affair and they knew he had nothing to do
with it.
When Assistant District Attorney Ranney read the copy of the Madeiros
confession that Thompson sent him, he arranged to have the Portuguese
examined as to his sanity. Madeiros, sullen and challenging, stuck to
his statement about having taken part in the South Braintree crime.
He had admitted being in on it “because it was true,” although he had
“done no shooting.” Beyond this he would say little. Whatever the
doctors who examined him may have thought of his story, they at least
concluded that he was sane.
* * * * *
While the battle of affidavits grew warmer in Boston, Ehrmann was
making daily shuttle runs across the placid countryside to Providence
and New Bedford. He had become convinced that the Morelli gang alone
was at the bottom of the South Braintree crime, and each trip he made
seemed to him to make this more certain.
The same day that Thompson was having his second session with Jimmy
Weeks, Ehrmann questioned the New Bedford police captain, Ralph
Pieraccini. The captain listened quietly to the lawyer’s request
for information about Mike Morelli, but came to life when Madeiros’
confession was mentioned. “We’d better have Jake in,” he said.
Jake turned out to be Sergeant Ellsworth Jacobs, who in 1920 had
been a department inspector. When he heard Ehrmann’s request he
slipped out and came back with his 1920 notebook which he opened to
the entry: “R.I. 154E, Buick touring car, Mike Morell.” This, he
explained, meant that a few day before April 15, 1920, he had seen
Morelli driving what looked to be a new Buick touring car. Knowing
Mike, he suspected the car was stolen and wrote down the license
number. On the afternoon of April 15 he caught a glimpse of the same
car sometime between five and five-thirty. The license plate was the
same, _R.I. 154E_.
On the afternoon of April 12 he saw a Cole Eight touring car with the
license plate _R.I. 154E_ parked in front of Joe Fiore’s restaurant
at the comer of Kempton and Purchase streets. “The whole thing looked
fishy,” Jacobs told Ehrmann, “so I went into the restaurant to
inquire, although I was not on duty at the time. At a table inside
I saw four men who looked like Italians, one of whom was Frank
Morell. The men at the table were extremely nervous when they saw me
come in. I can’t say just what it was, but they acted apprehensive
of something. One of the Italians whom I remember distinctly was a
short heavy-set man with a wide, square face, high cheekbones, smooth
shaven and dark brown hair. I can never forget that man’s face.
As I approached the group, this man made a movement with his hand
towards his pocket and I thought he was going to draw a gun. As I was
unarmed at the time I was badly scared, but tried not to show it.
Fortunately, Frank spoke up and relieved the situation somewhat.
“‘What’s the matter, Jake?’ he said quickly. ‘What do you want with
me? Why are you picking on me all the time?’
“‘Look here, Frank,’ I said, ‘there’s a Cole car downstairs with
a number-plate that I’ve seen on your Buick car that Mike’s been
driving. How did that happen?’” At that the bunch eased up somewhat.
“‘Oh,’ said Frank, ‘that’s a dealer’s plate. You see, I’m in the
automobile business and we just transfer plates from one car to
another.’
“At that time I had no way of contradicting Frank, so I left the
restaurant and talked the matter over later with Ralph Pieraccini.
At the time of the South Braintree murders and payroll robbery he
and I had suspected the Morells, especially on account of Mike and
the Buick car so that the actions of that bunch at Fiore’s made us
more suspicious. Shortly after that, however, Sacco and Vanzetti were
arrested and as I had no definite evidence, I dropped the matter. I
never saw Frank again since approximately that time, but Mike hung
around New Bedford for possibly a year afterwards.”
Ehrmann fitted another piece to his puzzle when he visited John
Richards, now adjutant general of Rhode Island. Richards, a big-boned
solid man with slate-colored eyes and a yellow mustache, had been in
his youth a soldier of fortune, and even as a middle-aged United
States marshal he had not lost his taste for excitement. Several
times he had shot it out with the Morelli gang in the shadows of the
Providence freight yards.
Listening to Ehrmann, Richards became instantly sympathetic to this
young, dark-eyed lawyer, so different from him in temperament and
physique and racial background. Ehrmann showed him Weeks’ affidavit
and Richards agreed that the composition of the gang was as Weeks
had made out: Joe, the oldest and the leader; Pasquale or Patsy;
Frank; Fred or Butsy; Bibber Barone; Gyp the Blood. They had owned a
Cole touring car and also a Reo truck. In a later affidavit Richards
admitted that, like Weeks, he had confused Fred Morelli with Frank
and that it was the latter who had been nicknamed Butsy. Richards
recalled two other gang members, Paulo Rosso and Tony Mancini. There
had also been a pair of young hijackers who were handy with cars: a
light-complexioned man named Raymond McDevitt and another known as
Steve the Pole. Both had since been killed in gunfights.
From the stories of Weeks and Sergeant Jacobs and Richards, and
from the various court, police, and jail records, from his pokings
about in Providence and New Bedford, Ehrmann now began to assemble
a hypothetical cast of characters for the South Braintree affair.
Madeiros had admitted to Ranney that he had shaped his story to
Thompson to shield a gang. For Ehrmann, Madeiros’ Mike was an obvious
transplant. The leader, “the oldest of the Italians,” must, in
Ehrmann’s opinion, have been Joe, a gangster capable of just such
careful planning as had gone into the South Braintree holdup. Butsy,
the most dangerous of the brothers, was another who seemed to qualify
for South Braintree. When Gyp the Blood showed signs of informing,
Butsy in open court had threatened to kill him. The milder-mannered
Mike was, as Sergeant Jacobs had noted, merely a car thief to whom
would probably have fallen the job of guarding the second car in the
woods. Madeiros crouched in the rear fitted the assistant district
attorney’s trial reference to the “man we cannot describe in the back
seat.” As for the gunman called Bill who, Madeiros said, had got out
of the car with the leader to do the actual shooting, Ehrmann thought
at first he might have been Bibber Barone, until it turned out that
Bibber had provided himself with the perfect alibi of being already
in jail. Gyp the Blood, though out of jail, was not the shooting
type. Richards had mentioned two other members of the gang, Paulo
Rosso and Tony Mancini, but soon advised Ehrmann later to eliminate
Rosso. That left Mancini, and the more Ehrmann learned about him the
more he seemed to fill the bill.
Mancini, besides being Joe Morelli’s close friend, was a nerveless
killer. In February 1921, in New York City, he had shot down Alberto
Alterio on Broome Street, almost across the street from police
headquarters. When the police captured him they found in his pocket
a Star 7.65-millimeter automatic—a type of gun that takes American
32-caliber cartridges. James Burns, Moore’s ballistics expert, had
testified at Dedham that five of the South Braintree bullets could
have been fired from a Steyr, and one of the few things that Dr.
Hamilton had been able to demonstrate to Van Amburgh’s satisfaction
was that three of the shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel
bore the marks of a foreign-make ejector claw. A Steyr was an
Austrian gun, a Star Spanish, but both were of the same caliber and
both were common in the United States in 1920.[20]
Ehrmann at once sensed the possibility that Mancini’s gun might have
been used at South Braintree. If Mancini himself could be set down
tentatively as Berardelli’s killer, that left only the driver to be
accounted for—the man who (even Katzmann finally admitted) had been
pale and fair-haired.
Both McDevitt and Benkosky, the dead hijackers, answered the
description, but Ehrmann found no witnesses who would identify
McDevitt’s picture. However, when he confronted the two Slater
& Morrill workers, Minnie Kennedy and Louise Hayes, with a
rogues’-gallery photograph of Benkosky, Minnie felt it “looked more
like the driver of the car than any photograph I have ever seen,” and
Louise found that “the picture very much resembles him.”
It seemed to Ehrmann that an encompassing pattern was beginning to
emerge. Still, he realized, his hypothesis could be destroyed by a
single granite fact. Joe Morelli could provide the key piece—if he
could be induced to tell the truth.
Truth and Joe Morelli, however, were scarcely on intimate terms.
Joe’s one steadfast quality was an exclusive loyalty to himself. At
the Providence trial he had been quite willing to let his brothers
take the rap for him. In fact, the day after he and his gang had been
robbing freight cars he had tipped off Marshal Richards, with the
idea of diverting suspicion from himself, that the same thieves would
be at it the following night. When the Morellis, minus Joe, returned
to the yard that evening they walked into a trap.
Joe liked to maintain whimsically that he was in the piano business.
He lived with Pauline Gray, who appeared in the police court
records as “a common night walker,” and used his house as a depot
in supplying girls for out-of-town roadhouses and as a distribution
center for drugs and counterfeit money. A few months before his
arrest he had persuaded his invalid widowed mother to deed over
her house to him, then had her confined as a pauper in the state
almshouse. Even gangsters tended to disapprove of Joe’s morals. He
liked to drop the names of big New York gangsters and boast that
he had been mixed up in such headline events as the 1912 Herman
Rosenthal murder. Years later he was to come forward to offer his
services for making contact with the kidnapers of the Lindbergh baby.
This was the man from whom the young Boston lawyer hoped to extract
the truth about the South Braintree crime when, on June 1, 1926, he
and Richards went to the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas.[21] What struck Ehrmann at once, what would have struck
anyone who saw both men, was Joe Morelli’s singular resemblance to
Sacco—the identical cheekbones, thin hairline, jutting chin, heavy
eyebrows, and nose almost the same except that Joe’s had a Cyrano tip.
To all explanatory statements and questions Joe replied with denials.
He had never heard of South Braintree or Rice & Hutchins or Slater &
Morrill. He had never known Madeiros or any other Portuguese. Weeks’
name meant nothing to him. As for Mancini, which Mancini did they
mean? There were a lot of Mancinis. When Richards countered with
references to the Morellis’ activities in Providence, Joe cut him off
with the whine: “You are trying to spoil my record with my warden, my
good warden!” As for Sacco and Vanzetti, Joe had read something about
their case in the paper. He repeated the name Sacco several times,
then, as if he were thinking aloud, said “See Mancini about that.”
Then he wound up in a flurry of indignation. If the Massachusetts
people thought he committed the South Braintree crime, let them prove
the charges against him and send him to the electric chair!
On returning to Boston, Ehrmann provided himself with a
rogues’-gallery photograph of Joe Morelli and tried it on several of
the witnesses. Some of the Italian laborers who had been digging in
the excavation exclaimed “Sacco!” when they saw the likeness. Mary
Splaine also thought it was Sacco. Lewis Wade, after reluctantly
examining it, admitted that it was “strikingly like” the man he had
seen. Frank Burke took one look, slapped the face of the photograph,
and exclaimed: “That’s the fellow who snapped his pistol at me and
yelled ‘Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!’”
Each step Ehrmann took reinforced his feeling that he was on the
right path. Joe Morelli’s giveaway remark, “See Mancini,” sent
Ehrmann to the penitentiary at Auburn, New York, where Mancini was
serving his life sentence. Mancini had none of Morelli’s Uriah Heep
quality. He seemed much more the big-time gangster: a square-set
impervious face, an on-and-off smile, glazed gray eyes that looked
through rather than at anyone. Ehrmann told him that Joe Morelli had
said to see him about Sacco and Vanzetti. “He must have been eating
something,” was Mancini’s noncommittal reply. Ehrmann pointed out
that Joe was a coward at heart who might be able to plan a big job
but would need someone like Mancini along to give him courage.
_At this point_ [_Ehrmann wrote later_], _Mancini gave his estimate
of Joe Morelli, deliberately, his gaze turned toward the window and
the scene beyond._
_“Unless you know that a man has killed, you can’t judge what he is
capable of doing.” There was a long pause. “Take me for instance. If
I hadn’t been caught, I would not be known as a murderer. At that,
they gave me too stiff a sentence. The cops disappointed me, for I
relieved them of a man who was worse than I am. The man I killed
had killed others.” Mancini paused, then added, “It was his life or
mine.”_
_Then very quietly, almost gently, he condemned people who tell on
others. “I have first-hand knowledge of Joe’s trial in Providence.
Gyp and Joe got nothing by blaming each other. They’d have been
better off, or just as well off if they hadn’t given each other up.
But if you’re going to tell, why not tell the whole truth? Why didn’t
Madeiros tell a whole-story instead of a half-story? He might as well
come clean if he started. If Madeiros wanted to tell a half-truth he
might have named as his confederates men who had died and then let
the State believe it or not.”_
Mancini claimed not to have heard of Benkosky or Weeks. He studied
the photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti that Ehrmann handed him, then
pointed to Vanzetti’s and announced: “They’re not stick-up men.
That’s not a stick-up man. Of course, you can’t judge only by a
man’s appearance—you can’t be always right on that. But the type of
Sacco and Vanzetti—they’re radicals, not stick-up men.” He could
see no resemblance, though, between Joe Morelli and Sacco. As the
interview came to an end he shook hands, saying he was sorry he could
not be more helpful. “I hope they won’t execute Sacco and Vanzetti,”
he concluded. “Killing them won’t bring the dead to life.”
Whether Mancini had anything more to tell remained his own secret.
There was, however, something else that might tell Ehrmann much—the
7.65-millimeter gun Mancini had used to kill Alterio. Tests could
soon show if it had fired the five unclassified South Braintree
bullets. Ehrmann went straight to New York City to his old friends
Henry Epstein, the assistant attorney general. Epstein was able to
locate the report on the gun in the files without any trouble. But
the weapon itself, like a tantalizing mirage, had vanished.
* * * * *
Everywhere that Ehrmann went, the Commonwealth investigators went
too. Lieutenant Ferrari was dispatched to Leavenworth to see Joe
Morelli. Joe swore that he had never seen Jimmy Weeks in his life
and accused Ehrmann of trying to bully him into signing a confession
for the South Braintree crime. Wilbar and Ranney followed up in
Providence with an interrogation of the Morelli trio of Patsy, Fred,
and Butsy. Fred had an alibi similar to Bibber Barone’s—he had been
in jail on April 15, 1920—and tried to maintain that Joe had shared
the same accommodations, although Joe was actually out on bail. The
other two swore that they had been living in quiet innocence in
Providence all that April, that they had never known either Weeks or
Madeiros, and that they had never been to the Bluebird Inn. After
their remarks had been taken down and transcribed the three were
seized with scruples and declined to sign on the grounds that they
feared for their personal safety.
The clerk’s office at Dedham became inundated with affidavits and
counteraffidavits from Georgia, Kansas, New York, New Bedford,
Providence, Fall River, Charlestown; from police officials, wardens,
jailbirds, streetwalkers, and citizens interested, disinterested, and
uninterested.
Manuel Pacheco, one of the floaters found in bed with Madeiros at his
arrest, signed an affidavit in the Charlestown prison, where he was
serving eight to ten years for a holdup, stating that Madeiros and
he had known each other from 1919 to 1921 and that Madeiros had once
told him he was “working with a good mob in Providence,” which to
Pacheco meant the Morellis.
Even Barney Monterios managed to forget his old grudge long enough
to visit Madeiros at Dedham, bringing Mae with him. Madeiros again
complained to them that he had been double-crossed on the South
Braintree job, and insisted that Sacco and Vanzetti had had nothing
to do with it. As Mae later related in an affidavit, she asked
Madeiros:
_“Is it really true, the statement you made about the South Braintree
murders, and were you really in it?” and he said, “Yes, it is the
truth, I was in it.” He didn’t give me any more particulars. He said
that he would like to save Sacco and Vanzetti because he knew they
were perfectly innocent, and he felt sorry for Sacco because he had
seen his wife and two children go by, but he said he hated to bring
others into it where there were more than two; and he said “If I
cannot save Sacco and Vanzetti by my own confession, why should I
bring four or five others into it?” I said “It is an awful thing to
see two innocent men lose their lives and the guilty escape.” He
said, “Yes I know it.”_
Each side in this battle of paper used its affidavits like pieces on
a chessboard. On the whole, Thompson played a more skillful game. But
it was a game, as he realized, in which a checkmate was not possible.
Finally a measure of sense was brought into the proceedings when
Ranney proposed that they take a joint deposition from Madeiros.
On June 28 Thompson, Ehrmann, Ranney, and Ferrari and Fleming of
the state police spent the day at Dedham interviewing the convicted
Portuguese. Madeiros was brought to the sheriff’s office in his blue
prison denims, his rheumy eyes full of challenge.
As he had before, but in more detail, he told of taking part in the
South Braintree holdup. He still declined to give the real names of
the men who had been in the car with him, but he admitted that he
had known them in Providence and said they had been in a lot of jobs
there robbing freight cars. When Thompson showed him photographs of
Joe, Patsy, and Fred Morelli he refused “for private reasons” to say
whether he recognized them. He also refused to identify Bibber Barone
and Jimmy Weeks, although finally he picked out the latter, saying
“It doesn’t make much difference. It is Weeks, I guess.”
He stuck to his story that the payroll money had been in a black
bag. There should, he thought, have been over four thousand dollars
apiece in the division of the payroll, but he would not say directly
whether he had considered himself double-crossed. Indirectly, he
agreed that he did not feel he had been used right. He admitted that
he had known Steve the Pole, but would not say whether he had ever
mentioned the South Braintree holdup to him. He also admitted that
he had confronted Bibber Barone in the yard of the Bluebird Inn when
they quarreled about Tessie. However, he refused to tell where he had
met Bibber or if Bibber had ever double-crossed him.
Ranney, cross-examining, asked Madeiros if it was true, as his mother
had sworn, that when she visited him he had told her: “You think I am
tough because I am in this case, but there is a man in here for five
years who killed two men.” Madeiros could not remember saying any
such thing. It was Ranney’s contention that Madeiros had made up his
confession out of whole cloth after reading the Defense Committee’s
financial report, that he was hoping to tap some of this money for
his own defense and that he knew nothing about the South Braintree
crime beyond the casual gossip he had picked up. The assistant
district attorney kept trying to pin Madeiros down. What kind of
a place was South Braintree? Had he seen any factories? Was there
a water tank? A railroad crossing? Madeiros did not recall any of
these things, nor any stores or excavations. All he remembered was
the car going up the slope after the shooting and that “there were
houses there. I don’t know how thickly populated it was. It was not
country.” He did not deny that the money he used on his Mexican jaunt
came from the South Braintree loot, but to any queries about the
details he gave the set reply: “I ain’t saying anything about it.”
After the holdup, he said, he and his gang had changed from the Buick
to the Hudson in the Randolph Woods and from there driven over the
back roads to Providence. Yet an hour and a quarter had elapsed from
the time the getaway car left South Braintree until Reed saw it at
the Matfield crossing. Desperate men in a high-powered car would
certainly not have taken so long to cover twenty-two miles. Even
allowing the car a modest average speed of twenty-five miles an hour,
there was still a time-lag of nineteen minutes. The question remained
whether the lag occurred in the Randolph Woods, as in Madeiros’
story, or in the Manley Woods a dozen miles south where the Buick was
found.
The getaway car was seen at 3:12, before it reached the Randolph
Woods, by the tobacco salesman, Walter Desmond. Seven or eight
minutes later the Farmers spotted it on the other side of the woods
moving at about twenty miles an hour. Although the distance between
these points was less than two miles, there would not have been time
enough for the bandits to drive a hundred yards into the underbrush,
change cars and license plates, transfer the payroll boxes, and drive
out again.
When the car passed Clark, the bakeryman, twenty minutes after the
Farmers had seen it, he noticed the first two digits of the license
plate 49783 that had been identified at South Braintree. Julia
Kelliher, going home from school at Brockton Heights, had missed the
first digit but scratched the last four in the sand by the road.
If, as Madeiros claimed, the bandits had switched cars in Randolph,
then they must have taken the license plates from the holdup car and
attached them to the second car that Clark and Julia Kelliher noted.
From Brockton Heights to where the abandoned Buick was found is 3.2
miles, and it is 5.3 miles further to the Matfield crossing. When the
Kelliher girl saw the oncoming car at 3:45, its speed of fifty miles
an hour scared her. Half an hour later it arrived at the crossing.
Yet even if the driver had slowed down to forty he should have made
the distance in twelve minutes or less. By any reckoning there was
a lag of almost twenty minutes in the running time of the getaway
car between Brockton Heights and the Matfield crossing. It was a lag
easily accounted for if the car shift had taken place in the Manley
Woods. Nor was it merely a matter of time. Even the trail to the
woods ran directly off the route that the driver must have taken to
get to Matfield.
Madeiros’ confession just did not fit into the time sequence. His
claim that the gang had driven back and forth twice from Providence
to Boston before the holdup seemed as unlikely as his account of the
getaway, for if the gang had spent so much time driving, no one in
South Braintree would have had a glimpse of them or their cars that
morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Certain other leads, neglected at the time, are tantalizing in
their possibilities. One such concerns a professional car thief,
William Dodson, who worked in a Needham garage from 1917 to 1919 and
who in February 1921 was arrested in Providence after stealing Judge
Thayer’s car in Worcester. When, a year later, Dodson’s wife sued him
for divorce, she testified that in the spring of 1920 he had given
her eight hundred of the thousand dollars he had received for driving
the bandit car in South Braintree. Another concerns the Randolph
Savings Bank holdup of November 17, 1919. Although the bandits were
never identified, the robbery was apparently planned by four men and
a woman in a Brockton lodging house. Afterward a phial of cocaine was
found in their empty room. The plates of the car they used had been
stolen from Hassam’s Garage in Needham. According to the Brockton
_Enterprise_ of five days after the South Braintree holdup, “Thomas
Finnegan of Braintree picked up a small bottle said to have been
thrown from the murder car as it sped away. This leads police to
believe that dope played a part in the crime?” Needham again crops up
in the suspicion that the never-traced South Braintree payroll money
may have been hidden there. Two days after the holdup, Fred Lyons
passed a car that had stopped in the middle of an isolated road near
the Working Boys’ Home. A short, slightly built man was walking up
and down beside the car as Lyons drove by. Then, as Lyons continued,
the other car started up and followed him a mile to his home. There
it turned around and drove away. Next morning Lyons notified the
police. They found a freshly dug hole about two feet deep in a clump
of brush not far from where the strange car had stopped. After
digging down three more feet they struck rock. Several weeks later
it was discovered that someone had dug the hole several feet deeper,
removing two boulders to uncover a shelf of rock with a pocket
scooped out under it large enough to hold a suitcase.
[16] It may have been the mother rather than the son who saw the car
go by, but Driver then had a good position with United Fruit Company
and obviously did not want to become involved in a notorious case,
especially after his family’s embarrassing experience with Weeks.
[17] In his book _The Untried Case_ Ehrmann maintained that there was
no link between Sacco and Vanzetti and the South Braintree holdup
except for the negligible one that Sacco had worked a week at Rice
& Hutchins in 1917. He was apparently not aware that their friend
Coacci was working at Slater & Morrill until early in April 1920.
[18] Years later Ehrmann happened to meet his old classmate in the
Pemberton Square Courthouse, and for some reason Ranney began to talk
about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, speculating as to how he would have
felt if he had been on the jury. “I think,” he told Ehrmann finally,
“I should have considered the Commonwealth’s case not proven.”
[19] Kelley, in his affidavit, denied that any such conversation had
taken place.
[20] Boda’s gun, examined by Chief Stewart at Coacci’s house, was a
Spanish-type automatic. Stewart did not report the make.
[21] Joe had been moved from the Atlanta penitentiary after tipping
off the Atlanta warden to an inmates’ drug-smuggling ring—for which
he received a letter of commendation.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MORE HISTORY, WRITTEN AND OTHERWISE
The sea-change decades of depression and war did little to alter
the pattern of Joe Morelli’s life. On his return from Leavenworth
he moved from Providence to the scarcely more scenic environment of
adjacent Pawtucket. In that gray three-decker jungle city he was
to spend the rest of his days—when not in prison—in a house at 70
Toledo Avenue, a convenient half-mile beyond the attentions of the
Providence police.
In 1928 he was picked up by the Pawtucket police in connection
with a clothing theft, the next year for smuggling liquor into the
Providence county jail. In 1932 Secret Service agents arrested him
for possessing counterfeit bills and engaging juveniles, including
a thirteen-year-old female state ward, to pass them. He managed to
get himself acquitted. Later that year the Secret Service raided his
house and uncovered a cache of bogus five-dollar bills. The agents
also found parts of a book he was writing about his gangland career.
At his trial Joe tried but failed to put the blame for the
counterfeit money on his son, John. Sentenced to five years in
the new federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Joe had the
distinction of being the first Rhode Islander to arrive there.
In 1941, he was arrested for keeping a house of prostitution in his
home, setting up slot machines, and selling liquor without a license.
A neighbor, James Prete, who had complained to the police about the
goings-on at 70 Toledo Avenue had his house wrecked by dynamite.
While Joe was out on bail he was again arrested for counterfeiting.
Not until March 1946 was he paroled. Nine months later he was picked
up for running a house of prostitution. In March 1947, he was seized
for violating his parole and sent to the Danbury Federal Penitentiary.
The following year he was released, only to be arrested on the old
prostitution charge. In moments of self-pity Joe liked to predict
that he would one day die in jail.
In 1931 Joe boasted to Morris Ernst, a New York lawyer connected with
various civil liberties committees, that he and his gang had staged
the South Braintree holdup and that he had ridden in the murder car.
Ernst had taken no part in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense nor until the
execution of the two men had he formed any fixed opinion as to their
guilt or innocence, although he had concluded that there had been a
lack of due process. Reading the six volumes of the case record as
they were published in 1928 and 1929, he was struck by the amorphous
Morelli hypothesis appearing in Volume V. “Being what I am,” he
explained at the Massachusetts Judiciary Committee hearing in 1959,
“and for no sensible reason probably, I went on the trail of Joe
Morelli. I have had talks with Joe Morelli. I have had letters with
him. I have seen him with his counsel. I am told that I am the only
person who had examined the man who really did the job for which
Sacco and Vanzetti went to the chair.”
Ernst started his private investigation by arranging a meeting in the
Providence office of Joe Morelli’s lawyer, Louis Jackvony, a former
Rhode Island attorney general whom Joe had known as a boy. After
being introduced to Ernst Joe did not sit down, but stood for several
minutes by the window while the latter talked. Finally he gave a
signal to someone in the street, explaining then that he had decided
Ernst was “jake.”
Ernst had prepared a list of detailed questions about the South
Braintree holdup: Were there two cars or one? Were they open or
closed, and where did they go? Where did the license plates come
from? Who was in the car? Were the payroll boxes metal or wood?
Who picked them up? How much money was in them and how many people
divided it? Was there anyone leaning against the fence? Was there a
team of horses? An excavation? A water tower? Why did they double
back at the Matfield crossing? For two hours Joe answered all
questions affably and correctly.
_No person of this man’s make-up_ [_Ernst wrote later_] _would have
read the minutes of the trial with enough precision to fit all his
answers into the known facts, down to the description of the flapping
of the side curtains on the murder car. Nor could any human being
have guessed the answers as to time and place of the many details
of the shooting day about which I confronted him. I left completely
satisfied that the gang chieftain was in the murder car and knew
all the details of the planning of the robbery, the details of the
shooting, and the technique of escape._
Joe was even willing to sign a statement—for a price—but he became
angry when Ernst let slip that an underworld intermediary had been
promised fifteen hundred dollars for his assistance in the case. Joe
hinted that his price would be ten times that. Ernst finally offered
him twenty-five hundred if he would produce the metal payroll boxes.
“You couldn’t get them out of Canapa Pond,” Joe told him.
Later, while Morelli was doing his stretch at Lewisburg, Ernst said
he learned that Canapa Pond was the local name for a body of water
on the route of the escaping murder car, but he made no effort to
recover the boxes.
During his three years at Lewisburg Joe continued writing his life
history, accumulating almost six hundred pages by the time of his
1936 parole. Back at Toledo Avenue, he made various attempts to cash
in on the manuscript. For some time he corresponded with Silas Bent,
a friend of Jack Callahan, the journalist who had brought Frank
Silva’s confession to the _Outlook_ in 1928. Bent was impressed
enough to get in touch with the _Outlook_ and with Upton Sinclair, to
whom he wrote:
_Joe Morelli has asked me to write you about his autobiography, which
he has completed. I have not seen it, and do not know whether he goes
fully into the South Braintree holdup; but I have talked to him more
than once about it, and if he is free to tell the whole story, the
book should be a smash._
When Bent asked Joe’s price for a sworn confession that he had
organized and committed the South Braintree holdup, Joe, apparently
with an author’s vanity, insisted that his whole book appear, not
just a chapter. After some further dickering, the deal fell through.
Meantime Joe had been angling Ernst, promising him “the real truth
and not baloney” about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and when Ernst again
met him in Jackvony’s office, Joe had the manuscript with him. His
price was twenty-five thousand dollars, and he would not allow the
pages to be inspected even briefly. All Ernst managed to see was the
cover. Subsequently, with the help of Oswald Garrison Villard, Ernst
raised an initial five thousand dollars. Joe still held out for his
twenty-five thousand, which in Ernst’s court-hardened mind meant he
would settle for ten thousand.
Some time in 1939 Ernst took Joe to lunch in Boston with Robert
Lemond, an editor of Little, Brown & Co., to discuss publishing the
confession-autobiography. Joe had his sealed manuscript with him,
but he still refused to turn it over for less than his price. He and
Ernst were not to meet again.
With the shadow of World War II moving across the landscape, interest
in the Morellis faded. The only person still concerned with them was
Ben Bagdikian, a reporter on the Providence _Journal_. In August
1950, he learned that Joe was dying of cancer. Hopeful of getting
some last statement from him, Bagdikian went to Jackvony, one of the
few men Joe trusted. Jackvony in turn went to Joe’s bedside and told
him that a friend wanted to see him about the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
At first Joe refused to see anyone, but a few days later he whispered
to the lawyer: “All right, tell him to come. I’ll tell him the whole
story.” Jackvony reminded Joe that he did not have to say anything,
but if he had something to get off his chest, this was the time.
“Tell him to come,” Joe said again.
On August 25 Jackvony and Bagdikian drove to the house on Toledo
Avenue. Jackvony went in alone, arranging to signal from the porch
when Joe was ready. Bagdikian waited in the car for twenty-five
minutes. A man in a large yellow convertible pulled up behind him,
watched him suspiciously for fifteen minutes, then drove away.
Bagdikian learned later that he was Joe’s brother Frank.
As soon as Jackvony entered Joe’s bedroom he was aware of the death
smell. The white face on the pillow gave him one frightened appealing
glance of recognition, the blue lips moved slightly, then Joe slipped
into a coma. Jackvony stepped to the bed, tapped Joe’s knee, and
called out his name, but there was no reply. He bent down, put his
mouth to Joe’s ear, and shouted, “Sacco and Vanzetti!” There was no
response. The secret still hovered inside Joe’s skull, but it was to
remain there. Early next morning he died.
* * * * *
On a summer morning in South Braintree, just forty years after the
holdup, I started off with Bob McLean of the Boston _Globe_ to
retrace the route of the 1920 getaway car. The day was heavy even
at nine o’clock. Bob just managed to squeeze his amiable bulk into
the driver’s seat of his ten-year-old Buick. I sat beside him as
navigator, with map board, green and red pencils, and the topographic
sheets of the U.S. Geological Survey—as I used to do with the survey
maps in the Army in what we called _tewts_—tactical exercises without
troops.
Suburban developments were sprouting up all round the Braintrees.
The hard little core of industrial South Braintree had also seen
changes. Opposite the station the mansarded Hampton House had been
torn down and the space was now a parking lot. The Romanesque
granite-and-sandstone station itself was boarded up and year-old
signs in the windows of the empty waiting room announced the
suspension of passenger service on the Old Colony Line. Rice &
Hutchins’ brick building was still standing, as was the wooden Slater
& Morrill factory, but both had been taken over by the Atlantic
Abrasive Corporation, whatever that was. South Braintree’s shoe
industry had long since disappeared. Where the Italians had been
excavating on April 15, 1920, there stood a brick building, no longer
a restaurant, occupied by a lamp firm and the Braintree _Observer_.
One afternoon in February I had dropped in at the _Observer_ office
to ask what Sacco-Vanzetti material they might have in their files.
The woman at the desk did not know, but she went in back to the
presses and returned with a man in his sixties wearing a printer’s
apron. As soon as he heard the words _Sacco_ and _Vanzetti_ his face
mottled. “Why do you people still come round writing sweet stuff
about those two gangsters?” he shouted at me. “Why are you wasting
your sympathy on them when you got none at all for that poor Mrs.
Parmenter that lost her husband? They raised thousands of dollars
for those two Eyetalians, and she got nothing. Afterward she had no
money, she lost her house. No one ever gave her a thought. Why don’t
you write about her? Why don’t you?” There was no arguing with him,
but I was surprised, as I was to be on other visits, that the old
emotions could still smolder beneath the small-town tranquillity and
be brought suddenly to a flame by some casual word.
Almost every inhabitant of South Braintree over fifty seemed to
have his own pet bit of gossip about the case. One story is that
Mrs. Sacco was seen early on the morning of the murders at a South
Braintree filling station. Another has it that Sacco and Vanzetti
were observed wandering about town several days before April 15.
The retired express agent tells of a local Italian who knew Sacco
before the crime and saw him do the shooting, but was too scared to
go to court to testify. Sacco is said to have confessed to one of
his lawyers, and Jerry McAnamey is said just before his death, to
have told a friend they were guilty. Amid the distortions of gossip
there is the more coldly remembered fact that those who testified for
the defense lost their jobs. Among others, Brenner and McCullum, who
contradicted Pelser in court, were discharged soon afterward, as was
Lewis Wade, who disappointed the prosecution by not identifying Sacco
positively. All South Braintree still firmly believes that Sacco and
Vanzetti were guilty.
“Criminal exercise without criminals,” McLean announced as we pulled
away from the curb where Berardelli’s body had lain. Pearl Street
still kept its underlying pattern even though the spindle-legged
water tower had gone, along with the gate-tender and his shack.
Cain’s livery stable had been replaced by the Pearl Street
Ramblertorium, and Schrout’s Bakery was now Adel’s Pizza Parlor. But
the outline was the same, the wooden two- and three-decker workers’
houses still kept their old gray ranks, the barber shop was still
there, and Torrey’s Drugstore—duly modernized—still hugged the corner.
“Here’s where they threw out the tacks,” McLean said as we turned
left into Washington Street. At the Plain Street railroad crossing we
made the sharp right turn and went up the hill past the white wooden
grotesqueries of the South Congregational Church, then dipped down,
skirting the edge of Sunset Lake.
Joe-pye weed spread in mauve masses along the roadside. There
were smaller white patches of boneset, and the first spatterings
of goldenrod. Most of the elms we passed were dying of the Dutch
elm disease, and even the leaves of the other trees looked frayed
and weary. I sensed the pause of the season, like the turn of the
tide—that short breathing space between summer and autumn. Somehow
it seemed more apparent in this flat browning landscape. Before
World War II such sandy outlying acres had been scarcely more than
squatters’ land. Now they had become dear to the heart of the
developer, with his flat-topped regular rows of pastel ranch houses.
The Randolph Woods were flat as a punctured tire.
We missed the right turn at Oak Street and drove almost to Randolph
before we realized our mistake. One thing was already clear to us:
The getaway driver and his crew must have been familiar with the
back roads. I had a hard enough time keeping on course even with my
map. And from the map it was plain how well they had known how to
avoid every center of population. The reason they had gone astray on
Orchard Street was apparent enough when we arrived there, for we made
the same mistaken left turn ourselves.
Down Chestnut Street and along the old turnpike the way still runs
straight and empty, the old pastoral landscape emerging as the ranch
houses recede. We found the lane into the Manley Woods where the
Buick had turned off, a scarcely visible dirt path branching to
the right between an empty shingled cabin and a derelict cemetery.
Two hundred yards from the highway we came to a field of stumps
surrounded by speckled alders, the earth bulldozed away at one corner
as if preparations were being made for another clutch of ranch
houses, but still empty and deserted enough to hide a car there all
day long without anyone being the wiser. It looked, in its accessible
isolation, much the most logical place on the escape route to shift
cars.
Ehrmann’s version seemed scarcely plausible—that Mike Morelli had
driven back from New Bedford that same night in a car with the
telltale missing rear window, a car for which by this time all the
local police had been alerted, just to leave it in the Manley Woods
when there were thirty-four miles of barren country lying between. As
we looked at the opening of the lane, it seemed to us it would have
been impossible to find it in the dark on the way north. McLean and I
agreed that the car must have been abandoned in the Manley Woods on
the way down and that the time lag had taken place there.
Why the escape car had returned after going over the Matfield
crossing became clear to us only when we had gone over the route
ourselves. Obviously the car had headed that way to avoid the
five-cornered traffic center of West Bridgewater, half a mile to the
south. But then, once beyond the railroad crossing, the driver had
found himself on the road to thickly populated East Bridgewater, and
had circled back.
Morris Ernst had said at the State House hearing in 1959 that Joe
Morelli told him he had thrown the empty cashboxes into Canapa Pond
and had even pointed out the spot. But when I had written to ask
Ernst about the location, he replied that he had no idea where Canapa
Pond was. As we traced our way from South Braintree I could find no
appropriate body of water, large or small. Sunset Lake would have
been too near, and anyhow I knew its original name had been Little
Pond.
After the Matfield crossing, the last point where the getaway car
was seen, we were on our own. We drove toward Providence, through
Bridgewater and over Route 44 by way of Taunton. Just before
Providence we stopped at Seekonk for whatever trace might remain
of the bullet-scarred Bluebird Inn. We found that unappreciated
landmark had long since been tom down. There were only the barest
traces of its foundations in an empty corner lot overgrown with
ragweed and tansy. Next to the corner was a white bungalow with
children swarming on the front steps and a zinc mailbox lettered _B.
Monterios_.
The air seemed to get heavier as we approached Providence, or perhaps
it was just the sad wooden decay of those submerged streets below the
anachronistic graciousness of Brown University’s island-hill.
I had pictured Ben Bagdikian as the dean of Providence reporters, a
Rhode Island Frank Sibley, perhaps wearing old-fashioned spectacles
on a ribbon, but when we met him in the city room of the _Journal_
he turned out to be a small gray-haired man in his forties, with the
long nose and dark animated eyes of his Armenian inheritance. He had
come to the _Journal_ from Stoneham, Massachusetts, after World War
II. Before he began writing his pieces on them, he had never heard of
the Morellis. I asked him if he knew anything about Canapa Pond and
told him of the uncommunicative Morris Ernst.
“That sounds like Ernst,” Bagdikian said, at the same time making
a note on a scratch pad. “I worked with him on the Morelli angle,
and I never could get anything really definite out of him. As for
Canapa, he mentioned it in a book and I asked him about it, too, and
got about the same answer you did. There isn’t any Canapa Pond. What
I think Joe said was _Canada_ Pond—and Ernst may just have changed
a letter to throw us off the track. Canada Pond’s only a couple of
miles north of here, half in Providence, half in Pawtucket. You can
see it from the new Woonsocket highway. It’s in an Italian district,
not very far from Joe’s old house. As I remember there aren’t many
houses right near it; lot of bushes and things, just the place
to throw old boxes. As a matter of fact they tossed a couple of
gangsters in there a few years back. But whether Joe threw any boxes
in there or not, Canada would probably be the first name that would
come into his mind.”
I asked Bagdikian if he had any idea what had become of Joe’s
autobiography.
“I never followed it up,” he told us. “Perhaps I should have. But
I have the feeling that if you should dig it up you wouldn’t find
much in it. It’s like Joe and the Lindbergh baby. Joe made contacts
with Jafsie Condon, and he was going to get to the bottom of the
kidnapping, but first of all he needed five thousand dollars. That
was Joe. Cash down!
“I’m not as sold on the Morelli theory as Ehrmann is” he went on,
“but I always meant to look up Mancini when I was working on this.
He was around here up till a few years ago. He was the toughest and
brightest of the gang, and if he decided to talk why he’d talk. But I
got off onto something else, and now he’s gone. Old Jackvony’s gone
too. His son could probably tell you a lot, but he won’t. The old man
was a criminal lawyer, and young Jackvony wants to get away from it
all. Once I saw his garage with the back of it all piled up with his
father’s papers. That autobiography might even be somewhere among
them. It would be odd now if you found the key after all these years.
Let me know if you get hold of it.”
McLean had copied down Frank Morelli’s address from the _Journal’s_
files. It was on Mount Pleasant Avenue, a boulevard cutting through
one of Providence’s many Italian districts. The house was easy enough
to find: a garish cube of red-and-yellow mottled tapestry brick, the
largest on the avenue. When we rang the bell a woman in her forties
came to the door. Her expression turned sour when we mentioned the
Morellis, and she announced with an equally sour voice that she knew
nothing about them except that a year or so before her husband had
bought the house from Frank. She did not know Frank’s address; she
did not know who might know it.
Pawtucket is like Providence without the green university enclave,
a brooding wooden decay of massed streets. It took us an hour to
find Joe Morelli’s Toledo Avenue house. This was a different avenue,
a still unpaved street on the outskirts, and Joe’s was the kind of
shapeless wooden house perched on granite foundations common in the
early 1900s. The layout would be routine—three rooms downstairs, four
smallish bedrooms upstairs, and a room or two on the top floor. I
walked up the steps to the long front porch. Everything looked neat,
freshly painted. The aluminum combination screen door had a scrolled
S on it.
No one answered when I rang, but as I looked over the porch rail I
saw a woman by the garage emptying garbage into a can. I waited until
she returned. When I mentioned the name Morelli, she winced. She
said she knew nothing about the family except Joe’s reputation. Some
years ago she and her husband had bought the house when it was in bad
shape, and since then they had fixed it up. It looked too neat and
too mild, really, for the place where Joe had kept his wenches and
stored his counterfeit money and hidden his stolen goods and at last
uncommunicatively died.
The chief of detectives at the Pawtucket police headquarters shook
his head when McLean offered him a cigarette, and picked up a cigar
with the end chewed so that it looked as if it were sprouting roots.
He was a tanned heavy man in a sport shirt and summer trousers, his
hair close-cropped almost to baldness, his only symbol of authority
the automatic strapped to his belt. The walls of his office were bare
of everything but the daily list of arrests and a safety calendar
contributed by Pawtucket firms to warn motorists to look out for
children at school crossings.
“Thank God I haven’t seen that crowd in a long time,” he said
when McLean mentioned the Morellis. “That Joe was one of the most
troublesome sons of bitches I ever had. I’d keep raiding his place
and he’d keep coming back for more. Why, when he was dying he still
had a couple of broads hustling upstairs.”
That might have ended our conversation if Bob had not somehow
mentioned bass fishing. A night light seemed to glow behind the
pupils of the chief’s smoky eyes. He picked up the cold cigar again
and for ten minutes they talked about hula lures with double wiggles,
ponds on Cape Cod that nobody knew about, and bluefish in the Canal
at Bourne turning the water red when they attacked other fish. The
chief had just come back from his vacation and the more he talked
about it, the mellower he grew.
“Come to think of it,” he said finally, “Joe Morelli’s granddaughter
was in here just a couple months ago. Her boy was up on some driving
charge. She was married to some Italian, then to a fellow named
Dunne. She’s married again. I don’t know his name, but here’s her
address.” He flipped open a file. “On Douglas Avenue, Providence.”
Douglas Avenue, when we returned to Providence, proved to be a line
of three-decker wooden tenements broken by an occasional barroom. The
top floor of the three-decker we were looking for was empty, a FOR
RENT sign in the blank center window. The second floor, too, looked
empty, though it had Venetian blinds at the windows. We almost turned
away, then decided to try the bells. A penciled card over the middle
button read _D’Agostino_. I rang, but the rumble of trucks was so
heavy anyone could have bawled down through the speaking tube without
my hearing it. Finally, through the wavy glass of the door, I had a
glimpse of a pair of legs that seemed to be walking by themselves in
the shadow of a dim stairway. Then a woman with frizzed metallic hair
opened the door. Long-chinned, with bright agate eyes, she seemed to
be in her late thirties. When I mentioned Joe Morelli she relaxed and
appeared almost amiable.
“Yes,” she replied, “I’m Helen Morelli. Joe Morelli was my
grandfather.” Still expecting that the door might shut in my face, I
said there were a few things about Joe I hoped I might talk over with
her.
“I guess I got a little time,” she said. She turned and led us
upstairs to an apartment that was being refinished: the paper off
the walls, the floors scraped but not yet varnished. The room had
a gypsy-like atmosphere, as if everything could and might be moved
out in ten minutes flat. We sat on maple chairs with plastic chintz
covers.
McLean said we were from the Boston _Globe_. At that she became
animated, telling us she had once studied journalism in New York. “I
used to know Walter Winchell there,” she went on. “My grandfather
had a restaurant there for a while and sometimes Winchell would
come in for a cup of coffee. My grandfather knew him, knew lots of
people—James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston. You knew him? I
used to see him at Danbury. Remember how he got himself re-elected
mayor when he was in jail there? I got letters from him.”
When I could slip in a word, I told her that what we were really
interested in was the whereabouts of her grandfather’s autobiography.
She looked at me coldly. “You know, I had a feeling that’s what you
might of come for. Yes,” she went on, her full lips twisting down,
“I have it and it’s in a good safe place. As a matter of fact I’m
rewriting it myself.”
“I don’t know whether you could let us see it or not”—I tried to make
my voice sound matter-of-fact, watching her smile derisively and
shake her head—“but could you let us know what’s in it in relation to
Sacco and Vanzetti?”
I realized suddenly what the cliché about a veiled look coming over
someone’s face really meant. The derision became vocal. “Do you think
you’d get that out of me? A fat chance! But I can tell you this much,
the whole secret’s there. Why, if it ever came out I guess millions
of people would jump. Did you see that TV show? I had to laugh.
Making those two ditch-diggers make speeches like that! Maybe people
all over the country will fall for that stuff, but I had a good laugh
because I know the truth. Silas Bent and Sinclair Lewis offered ten
grand for that document. I could get big money for it. I know that,
all right. Don’t think I’m green.
“Look.” Her voice sharpened. “How do you think it felt to be a
Morelli when I was a child? When I was at school, any time I wanted
to do anything, people would whisper behind my back I was one of
them. Now I’m the last one. My Uncle Frank, he’s dying of cancer of
the throat and he never had kids. My father’s in California. So I’m
the last of the Morellis, the last legitimate one anyhow. Do you
think I’m going to let that come out against my own kids, have all
that stuff brought up again? No, sir!”
“Why bother to rewrite it then?” McLean asked her softly. “Why don’t
you just burn the thing?”
Again her veiled look. “No, I’m going to keep it. Maybe when I’m
gone. I don’t know. But I’m going to keep it.”
While we were talking her husband came into the room, naked to the
waist, a dark hairy-chested man, still damp from the shower. He shook
hands cordially enough, then turned to his wife.
“They want the document?”
She nodded. “I told them we’d never let it go.”
Her husband grinned knowingly.
“But did your grandfather know Sacco and Vanzetti?” I asked.
“Sure he knew them. I’ll tell you that much. You’d be surprised.
They’ve made such a big mystery of the whole thing, and underneath
it’s all very simple. They made them on TV like they had haloes. If I
ever told what I know there’d be an explosion.”
Bob had his try. “Won’t you at least tell us whether your grandfather
said they were guilty or not?”
She shook her head. “Sure they were guilty, but I’m not giving away
the secret. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” she added
enigmatically.
“Of course,” said Bob quietly, “there’s always a court order.”
She laughed. “What can they order me? It’s my property.”
I had a try at persuading her that the Sacco-Vanzetti case was part
of the history of our times, that it had all happened too long ago
for anyone to be hurt any more, and that if there really was anything
in her grandfather’s autobiography that would settle the unsettled
question, she had an obligation to reveal it. That was no good either.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I’m not changing my mind. There
isn’t any money would make me, either. Nobody’s going to see it. Some
things better stay a secret, I guess, and this is one of them.”
Not until a year after this interview did I finally manage to learn
the contents of Joe Morelli’s document. When he wrote it, Joe was
apparently still smarting from the remarks Ehrmann had made about him
in _The Untried Case_. Joe’s opening pages are full of jeers about
“smart Mr. Ehrmann,” “Ehrmann who thinks he knows so much.”
According to the manuscript the five men in the South Braintree
murder car were Sacco, Vanzetti, Coacci, Boda, and Orciani. Coacci
was the driver. Joe had known all five for several years, and in
fact they had been with him in a Pawtucket holdup in 1918, one never
solved by the police. He himself had planned to pull off the South
Braintree job with them. Any number of times he had driven over the
route to plan the getaway. He was familiar with South Braintree
because, with the help of Coacci, who was working in one of the
factories, he had occasionally stolen truckloads of shoes from there.
Berardelli, the guard, was another of his confederates.
Joe’s explanation of the actual holdup was that the others had
double-crossed him. He had set the job for April 22. They pulled it
themselves a week earlier to cut him out, and they killed Berardelli
because he recognized them. During the getaway Coacci had got lost
because he did not know the roads as well as Joe did.
Throughout his manuscript Joe refers to Madeiros as the Blind Pig—no
doubt a reference to his poor eyesight. Neither Madeiros nor Mancini,
according to Joe, had anything to do with the South Braintree affair.
Madeiros was just a small-time crook who made a fake confession
about South Braintree to try to beat his murder rap. There was not
even a house, just a vacant lot, at the place on North Main Street,
Providence, where Madeiros said he had started out on the morning of
April 15. As for the business of Canada Pond and the money-boxes,
that was simply a hoax to take in Morris Ernst, for whom Joe seemed
to have as much contempt as he did for Ehrmann.
Such, in its truth or untruth, was the confession of Joe Morelli.
* * * * *
On September 1, 1927, Alfred Foote, the Commissioner of Public
Safety, wrote to District Attorney Wilbar:
_As a finale to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, it appears to me that
it would be well to gather and secure certain of the exhibits,
particularly the firearms, bullets, cartridges and fired shells._
_I trust you will agree that these important objects should be placed
in our vaults for all time where they will be safe from opportunists
as well as enemies._
_The ample facilities of the State Police Laboratory will be
utilized to obtain a photographic record in the most graphic form
of each of the exhibits. The work contemplated will constitute an
important addition to the record in this great case._
Yet when I asked to examine these “important objects” thirty-three
years later, they were nowhere to be found. I tried first at the
clerk of court’s office in Dedham. The clerk, Willis Neal, a nephew
of the South Braintree express agent, said that from time to time
someone would drop in to ask about the exhibits, but that he had
never been able to locate them. He admitted he had never looked very
hard. Together we went down to the storage files in the basement and
spent several dusty hours going through the records. Finally he found
a 1927 memorandum that the guns and bullets had been forwarded to the
Lowell Committee.
I asked about them at the State Police ballistics laboratory on
Commonwealth Avenue. Lieutenant John Collins, in charge there, was
interested in the case, in fact had a private file on it that he had
put together himself, but he had no idea what could have become of
the exhibits.
I wrote to Governor Foster Furcolo about the missing exhibits,
explaining my belief that they had never been tested properly and
might still have much to reveal. After several weeks I received a
reply routed from the governor’s office to some subordinate of the
attorney general, who informed me that “we have no record in this
office of ever having had the exhibits or as to any disposition of
them after they were viewed by the Lowell Committee.” On reading this
I again wrote to Governor Furcolo to say that I did not think this
was good enough and that someone in the State House should look a
little harder. I received no reply.
By chance I came on the trail of the missing exhibits when I happened
to be in the Boston police headquarters talking to one of the men in
the laboratory there.
“Why,” he said, “Van Amburgh’s son has those things. I thought
everyone round knew. They were in the State Police lab for years, and
then one of the Van Amburghs—I don’t know whether it was the old man
or the son—took them away with him when he retired. That’s where they
are. Young Van Amburgh has them down at Kingston.”
I wrote Van Amburgh twice, received no reply, and finally telephoned
him to ask if he had possession of the exhibits in the Sacco-Vanzetti
case.
“I have a lot of things around here,” he said.
“But do you or do you not have the pistols and the bullets that were
examined by the Lowell Committee?”
His voice grew frostier. “I’d have to go through everything to know
that.”
I did not have a very good hand but I dealt another card. “I have
been told that you do have them.”
“I might,” was all he would answer.
I tried to explain why I wanted to see the bullets. The question had
never been settled, I said, as to whether Bullet III might have been
substituted for the one found in Berardelli’s body.
The voice cut me off. “You and I seem to be working along the same
lines. I’m writing a book on the evidence in the case myself. I’m
not going to let you see my private material. Why should I?” The
telephone clicked at the other end.
Van Amburgh became singularly more communicative when Bob McLean
drove down to see him. He told McLean that he regarded himself
merely as a custodian of the exhibits “to be kept inviolate.” His
custodianship lasted until the following week end when the Sunday
_Globe_ ran McLean’s front-page feature story of his discovery.
The Commissioner of Public Safety, J. Henry Goguen, was one of the
_Globe’s_ early Sunday readers.
“He hit the roof,” McLean told me afterward. “They say he was
shouting in his office, ‘How did they get out of here? Who let Van
Amburgh take them? Send two men down to Kingston with a warrant and
if he doesn’t give them up, arrest him!’ But Van Amburgh turned them
over without a bleat. After all, if you’re getting a state pension
you can’t fool around. The stuff was in a big package that looked as
if it hadn’t been opened in years.”
I saw the exhibits on their return in the State Police ballistics
laboratory, a room with a grille in the front like a cage and a
metal door that opens by an electric button. It is a macabre room,
the walls hung with the confiscated evidence of old crimes—a Heinz’
variety of pistols, rifles, submachine guns, even a grenade-thrower,
dirks, switchblade knives, a Malayan _kris_, brass knuckles with
inch-long prongs, blackjacks, homemade zip guns.
Sacco’s Colt, Vanzetti’s revolver, and the bullets were spread out on
Lieutenant Collins’ desk next to a china ashtray in the shape of a
revolver.
“The way they handled these exhibits from the beginning makes my
hair stand on end,” Collins said. “The way I do is to impound any
exhibits, then call in the defense, the prosecution, make whatever
tests I have to make in front of them, and ask them if they’re
satisfied. I’ve testified now in over sixty murder trials and nobody
on either side has ever disputed my findings. But these things”—he
swept his hand toward the display on the desk—“I don’t know whether
you could prove anything with them now or not. I wouldn’t touch them
myself. No matter what tests might show, somebody would be bound to
accuse me of cooking the results. There ought to be some expert from
outside Massachusetts to run the tests. That’s the way it should
be handled.” He picked up one of the bullets. “You think that this
Number III might have been switched from the one they cut out of
Berardelli?”
“Some of the defense lawyers claimed it was,” I told him.
He cupped it in his hand. “The markings on the base do look somewhat
different. Those scratches—it’s hard even to be sure if there are
three of them. There’s so much muck on it you can’t really tell. They
ought to clean them, but first of all they ought to make blood tests.
Had you ever thought of that?”
I said I had not. He explained that it might still be possible to
detect residual blood with proper tests and even to determine the
blood type. Forty years were nothing. They could even blood-type
mummies. If bullets I, II, and IV showed traces of blood when tested,
while III showed none, it would be fairly conclusive that the mortal
bullet was a substitute. If, on the other hand, all four showed
blood, then it would be practically certain that all of them came
from Berardelli’s body.
“Of course it’s possible that there won’t be any blood traces on any
of the bullets,” said Collins.
I had thought that once the ballistics exhibits were back in the
hands of the State Police, I should have no difficulty in having
tests run on the bullets. When I went to see Commissioner Goguen,
a gray, diminutive man, sharp-eyed as a chameleon, I soon learned
otherwise. Instead of being grateful to me for recovering the
material, he seemed aggrieved. “Why don’t you just forget the whole
thing?” he asked me querulously. “I’m not going to allow any of your
tests. No, sir, I don’t want any of that Sacco-Vanzetti business
stirred up again.”
He wore a silver tie-pin engraved with the seal of Massachusetts, and
in the buttonhole of his sharkskin suit I noticed the rosette of the
Legion of Honor. Someone at the _Globe_ told me he had been awarded
it ex officio as president of L’Union St. Jean Baptiste d’Amérique,
the largest French-Canadian fraternal-insurance association in the
United States—from which he still received his salary while serving
as Commissioner of Public Safety.
“No tests!” he announced, but a week after I had coaxed an editorial
from the _Herald_, “Do Not Let Sleeping Bullets Lie,” he said I
had quite misunderstood him. He would have no objection to tests
made by properly qualified experts; he just did not want amateurs
fooling with the exhibits. I thought my difficulties were over when
I returned with the names of the honorary curator of the West Point
Museum and of an internationally known hematologist. But I still
could not get a straight answer from the commissioner. This time
he said that before any tests could be made, he must first have
permission from the attorney general’s office. Undoubtedly he thought
this would not be forthcoming, but after a delay of several months I
managed to turn up with it.
Goguen’s eyes darted at me as if I were a fly on the wall while he
explained that he would have to consult with the members of his
department. It was a consultation that took two more months. Then
he told me that although he personally would be happy to allow
such tests, his term of office was coming to a close and he did
not want to commit his successor. The governor’s council, that
archaic colonial survival, delayed month after month confirming the
successor, and the gray little commissioner stayed on.
On my last visit to him, a year after the exhibits had been
recovered, he had finally evolved what no doubt seemed to him the
ideal politician’s formula—to say yes and to mean no. He now told me
that if the American Academy of Forensic Sciences wanted to appoint a
committee of experts to examine all the ballistics evidence, he would
allow them to do so; but he could not allow any examination, even by
experts, merely at the request of a private individual.
Not until Goguen was out of office did I finally get my permission.
His successor, Frank Giles, raised no objections at all. A few weeks
later Dr. William Boyd of the Boston University School of Medicine
made the blood tests, although he said in advance he doubted whether
after so many years and so much handling the bullets would still
indicate anything. So it turned out. Dr. Boyd tested the four bullets
taken from Berardelli’s body and the two taken from Parmenter. The
result with all six was negative: no longer any trace of blood on any
of them.
* * * * *
Frank Silva was dead, as was Guinea Oates. Of the other two mentioned
in Silva’s confession of the Bridgewater attempt, Doggy Bruno had
long since vanished, but in 1960 I was surprised to discover that Joe
Sammarco was no farther away than Everett, where he was working as
a janitor. He had been parolled in 1953 after thirty-three years in
prison. At sixty-two, I thought, he should not have much to lose or
be afraid of. If I could get him to admit that he had been one of the
four in the Bridgewater holdup, that would corroborate Silva and go a
long way to proving finally that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
“I don’t know about Joe,” the parole officer told me in the
department offices on Tremont Street, appropriately opposite
Brimstone Corner. “Sometimes he comes in here and acts as if I were
his uncle. He’d tell me anything. Then the next time he’s as cold as
a brick. I’ll ask him about this Bridgewater business, but I can’t
promise he’ll give out anything.”
Two months later I got a call from a Somerville lawyer, Anthony
DiCecca, who said Joe might talk to me but that he himself wanted
to talk to me first. I drove over the following afternoon. The law
office was on Broadway, a lower-middle-class neighborhood, in a
remodeled three-story house that had been transformed by plate glass
and concrete until it stood out against its drabber surroundings with
the glitter of a funeral home.
DiCecca, a bustling, determined man, shook my hand in his paneled
office, then sat down behind a vast desk on which a pastel-green
telephone kept flashing a warning light. He stared at me for a
moment, his eyes calculating in his grave Latin face.
“Now,” he said, as if he were satisfied. “I want you to understand
I know nothing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case. I have no opinion and
don’t want to have one. When I was watching that TV show in the
spring I began to feel myself getting an opinion so I got up and shut
it off. I understand you want to ask Joe about the Bridgewater holdup
he was supposed to be in on that they later hung on Vanzetti. I want
the details of that.”
I gave him a summary of Silva’s confession, while he took notes.
“Joe can either confirm this or not,” I told him finally, “but it
will blow a big hole in the Sacco-Vanzetti conviction if he does
confirm it.”
He sat there, indifferent to the flashing telephone light. “If it’s
true, Joe could have spoken thirty-five years ago. It’s a terrible
thing if he kept quiet and let an innocent man die. Maybe he won’t
want to admit anything because of that, even though there’s nothing
anyone could do to him now. Let me have a talk with him and then
the three of us can get together here Sunday night. Just one thing,
though,” he went on as I rose to go. “There’s no money going to enter
into this. I need it like I need a hole in the head. If Joe has any
idea that he’s going to make a little on a deal, then I want nothing
to do with it or with him.”
The following Sunday I again drove to Somerville. I kept thinking
of Joe Sammarco and his thirty-three years in state prison, all the
years back to when I was a schoolboy in corduroy knickerbockers. I
felt depressed, half wishing I were not going to see him.
As I walked upstairs and into DiCecca’s long anteroom I had my first
glimpse of Joe. Squatting on a leather couch before a television
set, he was watching the Ed Sullivan show. He was a slight, stooped
man with an elongated, almost bald head, cheeks creased against high
cheekbones, and eyes that seemed incongruously blue in his wasted
face. When we shook hands I could feel his misshapen fingers. He told
me DiCecca was out but would be right back. We sat there half an hour
in silence. For once I was grateful for the sight of Ed Sullivan’s
jacked-up shoulders and melon face.
Finally we heard drum-tap footsteps on the stairs. DiCecca brushed
in, apologized, and we moved to the inner office, he to his desk, I
to the seat I had taken before, and Joe to sit by the window, partly
in the shadows.
“Now, Joe,” DiCecca began quietly, “I just want you to tell us what
you told me here the other night—about Bridgewater, Silva, Jimmy
Mede—just as it comes to you.”
“Mede is a rat,” Sammarco said without anger, his face set like a
barrier between himself and the outside world.
“Wait,” DiCecca said. “We’ll get to that. Now as I read through that
article of Silva’s—remember, I knew nothing about the case—it seemed
pretty convincing. According to that, Silva and you and Doggy Bruno
and Guinea Oates drove down to Bridgewater to try to steal the L.
Q. White payroll. You’d cased the joint two years before with Jimmy
Mede.”
Sammarco shook his head, laughed silently, and then spoke again.
“It’s a pack of lies, every bit of it. Silva got some fellow to write
that piece after he got out of jail, and he got paid plenty for it. I
know, because he told me.” He looked at me quizzically, as if he were
wondering whether I believed him. “Not a word of truth in it, not a
word.”
“Wait a minute!” DiCecca interrupted him. “Let me just ask you these
questions in order. Before you went to jail, did you know Jimmy Mede,
Frank Silva, Guinea Oates, and Doggy Bruno?”
“Sure I knew them. I was just a kid then and we was all brought up
in East Boston together. I knew them since I was that high. We used
to hang around Nick’s Restaurant just across the street from Jimmy
Mede’s shoeshine parlor. Frank Silva met this guy Luban in jail or
somewheres and cooked up all this story. Why, Silva was too yellow
to pull a real holdup. He’d roll some drunk sailor down on Atlantic
Avenue, he’d steal when it was safe, but nothing dangerous, not him.
Bruno wasn’t yellow. He was in dope, robberies, everything, and he
got his own living. He never would of worked with Silva or anyone
like that. And Guinea Oates, he was younger than the rest of us and
never got in no kind of trouble.”
Again DiCecca interrupted him. “Did you ever ride in a car with Silva
and Mede to plan a holdup?”
“Yes, I did. In 1917 Silva and Mede and me and a guy named Gargalino
and someone else went to Braintree. We was going to get a payroll
from the factory there when the paymaster come out with it.”
“You went down there several times to case it?”
“Yes. Then when we went to pull the job, Mede and Silva got cold
feet, so we turned round and come back.”
“How do you know it was Braintree?”
“We called it Braintree, where two railroad lines crossed.”
“Couldn’t it have been Bridgewater?”
“No, it was nearer than that.”
I could see the shrug of DiCecca’s shoulders. “A matter of a few
miles one way or the other. You didn’t know any of those places well.
It could have been Bridgewater.”
“I don’t think so,” Sammarco said reflectively. “They kept saying it
was Braintree. Anyhow, nothing happened. I went into the Navy after
that. I was overseas. When I come out they said Jimmy was in jail for
holding up a factory in Cambridge. After I took the rap for killing
the cop I see Jimmy in Charlestown. He tells me that story about him
and Silva. All Jimmy did was take the Braintree trip we made before
the war and make it sound like it was Bridgewater afterward. He asked
me to string along with his story, so I was dumb enough I says at
first I’d go along for a gag. All the Big Chief wanted was to see
what he could shake out of Moore. Moore said he’d help him get a
pardon and gave him some money. Moore had a lot of money. After he
got out Moore was paying him to investigate things in New York until
they drove him out of there.
“Ferrari, the state detective, when he heard it, give it to me good.
He’s still alive, down at the track now. Talk with him and he’ll
tell you about me and Jimmy Mede. When that piece of Silva’s in the
_Outlook_ come out he come and hit me in the face with it. ‘What
are you holding out on me for?’ he says. ‘I never had nothing to do
with it,’ I told him. Afterward I wrote a letter to Commissioner of
Correction Sanford Bates and told him so.”
“Now,” said DiCecca, steering him back, “were you offered any money
by anyone to say you had taken part in the Bridgewater holdup?”
“Yes, Moore come to see me a couple times in Charlestown. He says if
I’d confess to the Bridgewater job he’d give me ten thousand and he’d
see I got a gun and a getaway car on the way to court.”
DiCecca’s voice crackled with annoyance. “Look, Joe, a story like
this is too stupid for anyone to believe. A sharp lawyer like Moore
offering you a gun and a getaway car. That’s plain silly. No one
would swallow that. Moore wasn’t a fool.”
“That’s what he said,” Joe persisted. “I told him I wouldn’t. Even if
he meant it, what the hell could I have done with a bunch of guards
round me with shotguns!”
DiCecca turned to me. “It sounds crazy, all right. But Joe told me
exactly the same story the other night when he was here. That’s why I
say you need a lie detector on this thing.”
“All I can think,” I told him, “if it’s really true—and it certainly
sounds fantastic—is that Moore would have said anything, promised
anything to get Joe to talk. Moore was a brilliant man, but he
thought this whole thing was a frame-up from beginning to end, and
he was willing to do or say anything to get his clients off.” Then I
asked Joe, “Did Thompson ever offer you money?”
“Him? No. He just talked legal. I guess in the end he knew I had
nothing to do with it. He never bothered me none. Jimmy brought him
in with some other lawyers one day and said in front of them, ‘Joe,
I want you to give this man the real lowdown on Bridgewater—and then
kind of under his breath he says quick, ‘_No dice nienta questa no
bon paga_’—‘Don’t say nothing, they won’t pay.’ I never see Mede
again in jail after that. The Big Chief looks tough but he’s yellow.
After I got out in fifty-three I went to see him in his joint in
Revere and I told him what he was to his face. Afterward I see Silva
in a bar on Hanover Street and he says ‘You should of stuck with us,
you could of made ten or fifteen grand!’ I told him what I thought of
him right to his face. He’s dead now.”
“But why,” I asked him, “would Mede go to the governor afterward with
his story and lose his boxing license?”
Joe’s voice was scornful. “Ah, that’s not why he lost it. He lost it
for stealing a load of booze. He was never on the level in nothing he
done.”
“Vanzetti,” I said. “You knew him in prison. If Mede and Silva were
lying, do you think he was part of the Bridgewater gang?”
“No,” said Joe emphatically, “he wasn’t any stick-up guy. I was in
the next cell to him awhile. I used to work in the number plate shop
with him. People always coming to see him, old Boston ladies bringing
him books and candy and things. He’d give me some. He used to read
all the time. I always knew he wasn’t guilty.”
“The other prisoners, how did they feel about him?”
“They all felt the same way,” Joe said in his faded far-off voice.
“Most of the guards thought he was innocent too. The night they was
executed we made a hell of a row. It used to be the lights went dim
at an execution for a couple seconds, but this time they wasn’t using
Edison current and nothing happened, but we all knew when it was
midnight just the same.”
His mind groped back to that August night thirty-three years before
and he was silent for several seconds before he continued. “I
remember Vanzetti come to me once, he was crying. He says, ‘You know
I’m innocent. Tell them if you had anything to do with Bridgewater.’
I told him I would if I had—but I hadn’t nothing to do with it. Even
my sisters and my cousins come in before the execution and asked me
and I says ‘I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it.’ Sometimes I used to
think, maybe that fellow Weeks had something to do with both the
robberies. He was smart, he was. But Vanzetti never had nothing to do
with them. He wasn’t that kind.”
DiCecca swung toward me in his swivel chair as if to call an end to
the interview.
“Joe says he’s willing to take a lie-detector test along with Mede to
see who’s telling the truth.”
“Or I’ll take it all by myself,” Joe broke in. “You’ll never get the
Big Chief to take no test like that. He might try to con some money
out of you, but he’d never take the test.”
“That’s the size of it,” said DiCecca. “Whether we believe Joe or not
doesn’t matter until we give him a lie-detector test.”
“I’ll take it any time,” Joe said. We stood up. Joe and I left
DiCecca there, walking out together through the echoing anteroom and
down the stairs. The pinched and hostile face I had first encountered
had now become relaxed, softened, the face of a human being.
“I was a dumb kid, no education,” said Joe reflectively. “I took that
rap for thirty-three years because I didn’t know no better.” It was
the second time he had used the word _rap_. I stopped on the stairs
where the arc lamp shone through the doorway. “You’re telling me,
then, that you didn’t kill that policeman?”
His voice was low, quite passionless. “Him or anyone else. I never
did. Maybe you won’t believe that neither, but I never did. It was my
gun all right, but if I’d of said at the trial who pulled the trigger
I’d of got a bullet through my head. The one who done it got killed
in a gunfight four years later. Back in thirty-one I come up before
the parole board and his widow come and told them he done it, but
they wouldn’t listen to her, just asked her why she didn’t tell it
before. And she says, ‘I got to live too.’”
I remembered that Vanzetti in his speech to the court had said that
no human tongue could say what he and Sacco had suffered in seven
years’ imprisonment. Yet if what Joe had just told me was so, he had
suffered over four times as long, unknown, inarticulate, without
friends and partisans to speak for him, without the satisfaction of a
well-advertised martyrdom, and yet no tongue could truly say—not even
his own—what he had suffered.
“Would you be willing to trust that to a lie detector, too, whether
or not you killed the policeman?”
“Yes,” he said simply. We continued to the bottom of the stairs. Then
at the door he held out his maimed hand to me and smiled slightly.
* * * * *
On January 30, 1961, John Conrad, an expert with many years of
experience in operating the polygraph lie detector, conducted an
examination on Joe Sammarco to verify the truthfulness of the answers
to the following questions:
Q. _Were you ever in a holdup attempt in Bridgewater with Doggy
Bruno, Guinea Oates, and Frank Silva?_
A. _No._
Q. _Were you ever in a car with Bruno and Oates?_
A. _No._
Q. _Did you ever tell Jimmy Mede at Charlestown that you had
participated in the Bridgewater holdup?_
A. _No._
Q. _Did Silva tell you that he and Mede received money from Moore to
invent a story on the Bridgewater holdup?_
A. _Yes._
Q. _Did Moore offer you ten thousand dollars if you would confess
that you had participated in the Bridgewater holdup?_
A. _Yes._
Q. _Have you any knowledge of who did take part in the Bridgewater
holdup?_
A. _No._
Q. _Did Frank Silva later admit to you that his confession was false?_
A. _Yes._
As a result of this examination Conrad certified that in his opinion
Sammarco had told the truth.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1926
After the flare-up in 1921, the Sacco-Vanzetti case smoldered
obscurely for five years. Occasional sparks were thrown up, as when
Ettor and Giovannitti returned to Boston in 1925 to speak for their
imprisoned comrades and Eugene Debs visited Vanzetti in Charlestown,
but for the most part the issues seemed lost in a lawyer’s maze.
Across the Atlantic the case had become overlaid by other events and
other conflicts. If the average demonstrator of 1921 had suddenly
been asked in 1926 whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, he
would probably not have known.
In the United States, except in restricted circles of urban liberals
and radicals, the names aroused no more response. The Defense
Committee continued its Boston meetings. In December 1925 it
published the first number of the _Official Bulletin_, a four-page
booklet containing a message from Debs, a review of the ballistics
evidence by Mrs. Evans, and an appeal to Governor Cox signed by
George Lansbury, Ellen Wilkinson, James Maxton, and other members of
the English Labor Party.
Sacco, in Dedham, resumed his English lessons with Mrs. Jack. In
Charlestown, Vanzetti’s literary activities expanded. He contributed
articles to the New Jersey anarchist journal, _L’Adunata del
Refratti_, wrote his short autobiography as well as the booklet
_Background to the Plymouth Trial_, began to translate Proudhon’s
_The War and the Peace_ into English, and completed a novelette,
_Events and Victims_, about his experiences in a factory before
the United States entered the war. Both men were much heartened by
Thompson’s taking over as their counsel. Sacco, in spite of his
class-conscious rigidity, trusted the Boston conservative lawyer
as he had never trusted Moore, and wrote enthusiastically of the
“splendour defense” that Thompson and Hill had made in their first
appearance. Vanzetti was even more enthusiastic.
_Permit me to express my gratitude and my appreciation to you_ [_he
wrote Thompson in February 1926_]. _I understand that your work in
our behalfe is underpaid; the must difficult test of you; the noble
sentiments and impulse by which you were decide to take the side
of two underdogs; this I understand. And I also hope to understand
a little the brave, learned, beautiful fight that you are fighting
in our behalfe, paying of it in peace, rest, interest and other
universally desired things._
_Ha! to have known you 6 year ago! I would never have been a convict._
Thompson, in turn, as the months went on, found himself drawn closer
to the two men he had reluctantly elected to defend. In May 1927 he
could write:
_I went into this case as a Harvard man, a man of old American
tradition, to help two aliens who had, I thought, been unjustly
treated. I have arrived at a humbler attitude. Not since the
martyrdoms of the sixteenth century has such steadfastness to a
faith, such self-abnegation as that of these two Italians been seen
on this earth._
_The Harvard graduate, the man of old American traditions, the
established lawyer, is now quite ready to say that nowhere in his
soul is there to be found the faith, the splendid gentility, which
make the man, Bartolomeo Vanzetti._
Thompson later admitted that the case had been something of a
catastrophe for his firm: that by taking it he had lost friends,
clients, and a great deal of money. But it was a choice he never
regretted. He told Felicani that if he had understood the situation
better at the beginning, he would not have taken a fee.
While the jail years for Sacco and Vanzetti passed with unrelenting
sameness, Rosina moved from the Stoughton bungalow to an old
farmhouse near Milford. Here Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Jack aided her, and
in addition she received a small monthly allowance from the Defense
Committee. Ines was now almost old enough to go to school; Dante had
reached the seventh grade. Even before Rosina left Stoughton she had
living with her as a companion Susie Valdinoce, the grave, sad-faced
sister of the man killed in the dynamiting of Attorney General
Palmer’s house.
* * * * *
The rejection of Thompson’s appeal by the Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial Court on May 12, 1926, marked the second stage of the
case. With the court’s decision, affirming the convictions, came
the realization that the affair was now moving toward a foreseeable
climax. For the prisoners it was as if they had been walking down a
long corridor of months and years, and now at last at the far end
they could glimpse the door of the execution chamber.
To those familiar with the formalisms of Massachusetts legal
procedure the court’s negative decision was expected. According to
the statutes of the Commonwealth it was not the function of the
higher court to review the facts of a case in an appeal but merely to
consider questions of law. That in Madeiros’ first trial Judge Lummus
had neglected to mention the presumption of innocence was an error
sufficient to overthrow an obviously justified verdict. Judge Thayer
had committed no such errors. Whatever his feelings, he had kept the
written record straight just as Thompson, at the beginning of the
trial, had predicted he would. In regard to the denied motions, the
Supreme Court ruled that as long as Judge Thayer had given these
consideration according to the prescribed legal forms, there would
be no review of his decision. These were matters for his discretion,
beyond the compass of any higher court.
The Supreme Court’s decision was like the tolling of a bell. In
the next fifteen months the case would become a passionate issue,
the linked Italian names a battle cry in all comers of the globe.
Millions of men in dozens of countries, most of them with only a hazy
and often erroneous notion of the facts, would identify themselves
with the condemned Italians with such binding emotion that the fate
of the two men would come to seem the very symbol of man’s injustice
to man. For many European radicals the case loomed up as the most
important occurrence since the Russian Revolution. Stalin, at the
1927 Party Congress, spoke of the recent Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration
as evidence that “we are on the threshold of new revolutionary
events.” The American Communist Max Shachtman asked rhetorically:
“Since the Russian Bolshevik revolution, where has there yet been a
cause that has drawn into its wake the people, not of this or that
land, but of all countries, millions from every part and corner of
the world; the workers in the metropolis, the peasant on the land,
the people of the half-forgotten islands of the sea, men and women
and children in all walks of life?”
That the renewed European agitation was conceived and directed by
the Communist International is beyond dispute—a fact proclaimed with
equal stridency by both Communists and their enemies. Moscow gave the
signal and the International Red Aid set the well-oiled machinery
in motion. But the Communists themselves must have been startled
by their own quick success. Their calculated gesture loosed an
avalanche, elemental and overwhelming, that spread beyond the bounds
of any political party or dogma. Men of good will everywhere rose up
to challenge the course of Massachusetts justice. There were protests
from the Vatican; from ex-Premier Caillaux of France; from Paul
Loebe, the president of the Reichstag; from Count Bernstorff, who had
been ambassador to the United States in 1917; from John Galsworthy,
Fritz Kreisler, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Albert
Einstein, and scores of other international figures.
Why was it that in the fifteen months between the Massachusetts
Supreme Court’s adverse decision and the executions the case of
Sacco and Vanzetti became the most widely known and bitterly felt
of its generation? They were not conscious martyrs. Nor, if it be
assumed that they were innocent, were they uniquely so. It was
already a cruel commonplace of the century for innocent men to die
ignominiously and obscurely for their beliefs under red, black,
white, or varicolored flags. In an era of bloodshed, violence, and
injustice, why should the names of these two obscure Italians stand
out, enduring over the years in literature, in art, in the theater,
and even in that newest of media, television?[22]
Perhaps it is that when any celebrated or notorious trial becomes
encrusted with doubts as to its justice, it becomes a focus for the
raging social passions of the moment. Certainly, in the grim weeks
before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the hundreds of thousands
of militants demonstrating in the world’s cities found their own
resentments and anger objectified in these two comrades whom they
considered victims of class justice. Frustration and the envy of
America’s callous wealth undoubtedly stirred them too, and the hope
that through such potent symbols of martyrdom the hated system could
be overthrown.
Among many Europeans unswayed by the more primitive emotions of
hate and revenge, there was the feeling that, beyond any question
of the fairness of the trial, the years under the shadow of death
were themselves torture enough to demand the commuting of the death
sentences. “We wish to see the lives of these men spared, whether
they are innocent or guilty,” said _Le Temps_ in Paris. The London
_Times_ felt that it was not the wrongs of the trial that had so
stirred the public’s imagination but the fact that any man should be
kept so long in suspense. The suspense was particularly aggravated
by Massachusetts’ means of execution: Far more than the traditional
noose, the electric chair was a horror symbol to the European.
If—regardless of the question of their guilt or innocence—Sacco
and Vanzetti had been executed within a few months of their
conviction (as would have happened had they been tried in most
European countries), their names today would be almost unknown.
To non-Americans the pettifogging byways of American justice, the
complications and contradictions and the time entailed in appealing
from state to federal courts, the to them astonishing fact that
even if injustice is being done by the judicial system of an
individual state, so long as it is being done within the limits of
the Constitution the national government can do nothing—such things
were outrageously incomprehensible. And the years of delay seemed to
presume doubt. “It is impossible for us on this side to feel that
execution would have been so long deferred,” George Bernard Shaw
wrote, “if the case were clear enough to justify this infliction.”
Anticipating the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s adverse decision, the
Red Aid’s Central European Headquarters in Berlin began in February
1926, to flood Europe with Sacco-Vanzetti propaganda and plans for a
united front of artists, writers, actors, scholars, and teachers.
The anarchists had never ceased their sporadic and individualistic
action, but international anarchy no longer rivaled Marxism as a
world movement, as it had in Bakunin’s day, and it persisted mostly
in the Latin countries. The Sacco-Vanzetti case contained, among
many other things, the last gesture of international anarchism. Yet
the anarchists by themselves could have accomplished little. It was
the executive committee of the Communist International, with its
tight organization and intricate networks, that was able to stir the
streets. By the autumn of 1926 the groundwork had been laid for the
world-wide agitation to come.
The year 1926 brought a belated stirring of interest in the case
throughout the United States, partly as a reaction to the renewed
agitation overseas as reported in such mass-circulation journals
as the _Literary Digest_, partly because of the Supreme Court’s
decision in May, and partly from the labors of the Defense Committee.
In Massachusetts there was a quickening of emotions lying dormant
since 1921, a xenophobic reaction by the community to criticism from
outsiders that would rise to hysteria as world agitation rose.[23]
Robert Lincoln O’Brien, the half-Irish half-old-Yankee editor of the
Boston _Herald_, whose reaction to the Sacco-Vanzetti case remained
essentially neutral, observed that “a surprising number of groups
and elements of the community came to regard leniency for Sacco and
Vanzetti as an assault upon the honor of the Commonwealth.” That
feeling, still amorphous in the spring of 1926, hardened under the
impact of hostile gestures from overseas and was suddenly exacerbated
in June when the house of Samuel Johnson in West Bridgewater was
demolished by a bomb. Whoever planted the bomb apparently mistook
Johnson’s house for that of his brother Simon, who with his wife
had received a reward of several hundred dollars after their court
testimony. No one was ever apprehended in this or any other bombings
connected with the case, and the Defense Committee at once repudiated
the act, but to the community it seemed a confirmation of its worst
fears in regard to radicals. Guards were at once placed around the
houses of Judge Thayer and of Chief Justice Arthur Rugg. District
Attorney Wilbar announced that he would ask for the immediate
imposition of the death penalty on Sacco and Vanzetti.
The Commonwealth was coming to feel that reviews enough had been
made, the matter had been discussed long enough. Doubts expressed
from outside, either in the United States or overseas, merely
sharpened the edge of Massachusetts majority opinion. The Boston
architect C. Howard Walker, on returning from Europe at the height
of the agitation, declared himself “enough of a Machiavellian to
rejoice in the electrocutions whether the accused are innocent or
guilty.”
Stubbornly the Massachusetts community, the articulate, rooted
middle-class community, closed ranks. Granville Hicks, teaching at
Smith College, helped organize a clemency meeting in Northampton in
the spring of 1927. So strong was the feeling of the townspeople
against Sacco and Vanzetti that it broke up in bedlam. It was not,
Hicks had to admit, just the rich and powerful who were against the
two Italians: “It was also the doctors, the lawyers, the shopkeepers,
the farmers, the workers. It was practically all my neighbors in
Northampton except for the other members of the college faculty. The
battle was between the intellectuals and everybody else.”
There was, however, a thoughtful minority made uneasy by the
slow steamroller of Massachusetts justice. Liberals like Edward
Filene, John Moors of the brokerage house of Moors & Cabot, and
Professor Felix Frankfurter joined with conservatives like Joseph
Walker, a former Republican speaker of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives, and Richard Washburn Child, a former ambassador
to Italy, in questioning the legal proceedings. Names old and
distinguished were added to the list of protesters—the historian
Samuel Eliot Morison, the philosopher William Hocking, William Allan
Neilson, the president of Smith College, and the Harvard economist
Frank Taussig.
* * * * *
In June 1925 the American branch of the International Red Aid was set
up in Chicago as the International Labor Defense. For the Communists
the Sacco-Vanzetti case was an issue ripe for manipulation. By
exploiting it, the Party hoped to confirm its pose as the champion
of the oppressed and for the first time develop into an American
mass movement. After his expulsion from the Party, James Cannon,
the International Labor Defense’s executive secretary, was to admit
privately—much as Moore did—that he felt Sacco was guilty. But to the
Communists guilt or innocence was immaterial. What mattered was the
inflammability of the cause.
For Cannon and his lieutenant Max Shachtman, editor of the monthly
_Labor Defender_, the efforts of the Boston Defense Committee
were naïve, self-defeating, contaminated by “the slow poison of
middle-class treachery.” Thompson, the aloof upper-class lawyer, had
announced that he would not tolerate “pressure from the outside,”
meaning in Shachtman’s view “the mass movement of labor that could
surround Sacco and Vanzetti with a wall of iron against the attacks
of their enemies.” That the Defense Committee could replace a class
fighter like Moore with a reactionary like Thompson was merely
another demonstration of the liberal fallacy—belief in the law, in
justice above class, in all the paraphernalia that concealed the
claws of capitalist society. Abstract justice could play no role,
in Shachtman’s pronouncement as echoed by the _Daily Worker_, since
“Sacco and Vanzetti were being legally assassinated because of their
political and economic views and activities.”
Johnnies-come-lately though they might be, the Communists took the
attitude that it was they who were the organizers of the protest
movement. The Sacco-Vanzetti case was now theirs by right of Marxist
eminent domain. And, here as abroad, they were able to bring about
immediate sensational results. The International Labor Defense poured
out posters and buttons and press releases, organized meetings all
across the country, and collected large sums for what Cannon called
“the protection” of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Of the millions collected by the Red Aid in various parts of the
world for the defense of the convicted men, less than six thousand
dollars ever found its way to the Defense Committee. There was
no accounting for the balance. Felicani, who had so scrupulously
recorded each dollar he received, was outraged. In July the Defense
Committee warned in its _Official Bulletin_: “We are absolutely
opposed to the collection of funds and the use of this cause to
further special political or economic interests.” The _Daily
Worker_ and the International Labor Defense replied by calling the
Defense Committee and its counsel ineffectual liberals who relied
on bourgeois legal proceedings rather than the direct action of the
workers.
Yet, whatever the Communists might claim, whatever self-advertising
actions they might take, the shabby two-room headquarters at Hanover
Street still remained the center of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. The
yeast of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision worked as actively
there as outside. Fabbri was succeeded as secretary by Joseph Moro,
an Italian shoe-worker with a family, who gave up a job at forty
dollars a week to work full time for the committee at ten dollars
less. Eugene Lyons had left Boston at the end of 1922 to work for the
New York branch of Tass, the Soviet news agency. Until 1926 no one
took his place. As long as Moore remained in charge of the defense,
Lyons continued to contribute articles and support, but Thompson’s
advent was too much for him. Still wearing his Communist heart on
his sleeve, still at the beginning of his long arc from left to
right, he held to his opinion that the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti
should be a class defense.
Through the quiescent years the members of the Defense Committee,
working doggedly, had kept both the case and the defendants alive.
As the tempo rose in 1926, so did the activity in Hanover Street.
The headquarters developed into a small publishing house. Tables and
typewriters and filing cabinets were wedged in by bales of pamphlets
that served as seats for volunteer workers and visitors.
The moody, indefatigable Mary Donovan seemed always to be at her
desk. Mrs. Evans appeared regularly, bringing with her such friends
as Mrs. William James, the widow of the philosopher. Professor
Frankfurter often trudged up the dark stairway accompanied by one
or two of his sympathetic Harvard colleagues. In June a young Globe
reporter, Gardner Jackson, gave up his newspaper job to take over
where Lyons had left off. With the publicity under his enthusiastic
control, the _Official Bulletin_—only one issue of which had appeared
before this—now came out monthly.
Except for their energetic youth and their devotion to the same
cause, the wealthy liberal “Pat” Jackson and the East Side Marxist
Morris Gebelow, who wrote under the name of Eugene Lyons, had little
in common. Jackson’s mother was the third wife of William Jackson, a
Colorado banker and railroad owner whose second wife had been Helen
Hunt Jackson, the author of _Ramona_. Starting at Amherst College,
Pat joined the Army in 1917. After the war he studied at Columbia,
took a turn at selling bonds, then worked in a Denver enterprise of
his father’s before becoming cub reporter on the _Globe_, the paper
that was reputed to print the name of every inhabitant of Greater
Boston, and, if possible, his picture, at least twice a year.
Jackson had been gathering such neighborhood news for the _Globe_
during the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. At the end of many an afternoon he
would see Frank Sibley stalking into the city room on his return from
Dedham. Sibley’s indignation expanded by the day, the more so since
he was confined to factual reporting and unable to write his personal
reaction to the Dedham goings-on. Sometimes he would stop by the
tall, shock-haired young reporter to let off steam.
It was through Sibley that Jackson met Felicani. Never before had the
tweedy, rather elegant young man met anyone like this philosophical
anarchist. Evening after evening now found Jackson working in the
upstairs rooms on Hanover Street. Then, in the summer of 1926,
Felicani persuaded him to give his full time to directing the
Sacco-Vanzetti publicity.
As it would for many others in the year to come, the cause brought
Jackson’s being into focus. Independent financially, vaguely liberal,
he had never really known what he wanted to do until he found his
goal in the struggle for the two Italians’ lives. Though later he
would become a minor New Deal administrator and a friend of Franklin
Roosevelt’s, this was to be the high spot of his life. Journalistic
talent, energy, honesty, and dedication—these he brought to the cause
with the fervency of a convert.
By August 1926 it was clear to James Cannon that the Defense
Committee could be neither dislodged nor superseded and that the
only other possibility was infiltration. To mark this change in tack
the International Labor Defense sent two thousand dollars to the
Hanover Street headquarters while the _Labor Defender_ announced in
conciliatory tones that it was no longer making a general appeal for
funds: All future donations for the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti
should be sent direct to the Boston committee. In addition, Cannon
sent Charles Cline to Boston to try to arrange an amalgamation of the
committee with the International Labor Defense.
Cline, one of the Party’s so-called Texas martyrs, had just been
released from prison after serving thirteen years of a life sentence
for murder. In 1911 he had been the sole American among a band of
Mexicans who had organized an expedition in Texas to join the Mexican
revolutionaries in their fight against the government of Porfirio
Díaz. When Texas Rangers found a dead Mexican spy tied to a tree,
they pursued and captured Cline and a dozen of the expedition. Cline
maintained that he was innocent of the spy’s death, and the American
Federation of Labor had frequently demanded his liberation. He was
finally freed by Governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson.
Cline’s long imprisonment for a revolutionary cause was expected to
make him attractive to Sacco and Vanzetti. The real object of his
visit was to persuade them to let the International Labor Defense
take charge of their fight. Cline explained persuasively that the
Boston Defense Committee was run by amateurs who were unable to grasp
the class significance of the case. Even so, Cannon would be willing
to form a united front organization with certain members of the
Defense Committee on condition that the headquarters was moved to
Chicago. There the Communist International would be able to bring an
overwhelming force into operation that would compel the Massachusetts
reactionaries to stay their hand. As a final glittering attraction
Cline promised Sacco and Vanzetti that Clarence Darrow would take
over from Thompson as their chief counsel.
* * * * *
Running through the letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, unaltered in the
alterations of their moods, is their sense of outraged bewilderment
at their predicament. What had brought them behind bars? What had
taken Sacco from his neat Stoughton bungalow, his red-haired wife,
the light-long summer evenings in his vegetable garden? What had
taken Vanzetti from the Plymouth streets overlooking the harbor? What
had ended the brightness of their years of freedom?
To each man the insistent answer was that they had been radicals,
that however small they may have seemed to the men of state, the
latter had nevertheless banded together to crush them. The owners of
the Cordage works, of the Lawrence mills, those who lived in the big
houses on the hill, who controlled the government and the police,
who lived at the expense of the workers, this gross capitalistic
world, this dying order would kill to preserve its insecure position.
District Attorney Katzmann’s taunting phrases, the dry words that
rustled from Judge Thayer’s set lips—these were the voices of
executioners.
After the Supreme Court’s rejection of Thompson’s appeal on May 12,
Vanzetti wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
_Yesterday we got the last struck. It end all. We are doomed beyond
any kind of doubts. I am sorry for myself. It is creuil to be
insulted, umiliated, wronged, imprisoned, doomned, under infamous
charges, for crimes of which I am utterly innocent in the whole
sense of the word. But more for myself, I am sorry for my father, my
sisters and my brothers, and for poor Rosi and her two children._
Both prisoners had been heartened by the renewed demonstrations in
Europe and felt uncritically grateful to the International Labor
Defense for its belligerent propaganda. Both felt at times that—as
the Communists had said all along—only direct revolutionary action
by the masses could save them. Both were divided between the
class-struggle interpretation of their dilemma and their attachment
to bourgeois partisans like Mrs. Evans. Both were inconsistent in
their attitudes—as who might well not be after seven years in the
shadow of the electric chair.
Sacco, in particular, with his more dogmatic mentality and limited
outlook, tended to distort the possibilities of justice that could
transcend class.
_Let us tell you sincerely, dear comrade_ [_he wrote a member of the
International Labor Defense_], _that for hereafter I will never fall
into another new delusion again, if I don’t see first the day of my
freedom. Even when Mrs. Elizabeth G. Evans—that through all these
struggle years she has been kind to me as kind as good mother can be,
come to tell me “Nick! you again.” No! No! Six long torment years
gives me enough experience because it is a great masterpiece for me
and to anybody else not to be disappointed any more. Poor mother! She
is so sincere and faithful to the law of the man that she has forgot
very early that the history of all the government it were always and
everytime the martyrdom of the proletariat. But, however, we will
stick like a good Communard soldier to the end of the battle and
looking into the eyes of our enemy, face to face, to tell them our
last breath—which I had always faith—that you, the comrades and all
the workers of the world solidarity, would free Sacco and Vanzetti
tomorrow._
Yet in spite of such sentiments he would continue to prefer the
conservative Thompson to the radicals.
Vanzetti, in his enthusiasm for the éclat of the International Labor
Defense activities, could write to Cannon in an almost similar tone:
_The echo of your campaign in our behalf has reached my heart. I
repeat, I will repeat to the last, only the people, our comrades, our
friends, the world revolutionary proletariat can save us from the
powers of the capitalist reactionary hyenas, or vindicate our names
and our blood before history._
Nevertheless, Vanzetti was as harsh in his judgments of the new
Russia as he was of the old America. To his mind all governments were
oppressive, whether they ruled in the name of proletariat, king, or
constitution. His frequently expressed disbelief in the progress of
the Russian Revolution, his contrary belief that “the Bolsheviki
leaders’ dictatorship is an increased perfectioned exploitation
of the proletariat,” constantly embarrassed the editors of the
_Daily Worker_ and the _Labor Defender_. The anti-revolutionary,
anti-Marxist individualistic anarchist, Proudhon, remained his ideal,
and the Frenchman’s ringing words: “Liberty of conscience, freedom of
the press, freedom of labor, of commerce, and of teaching, the free
disposal of the products of labor and industry—liberty, infinite,
absolute, everywhere and forever,” are often echoed in Vanzetti’s
letters.
The first reaction of Sacco and Vanzetti to Cline’s proposal was to
accept it and let the International Labor Defense see what it could
do. However they might differ theoretically from the Communists,
such potent help was not to be spurned. And for all the Defense
Committee’s efforts, they were still in jail after six years.
Clarence Darrow—the untidy colossus who had slipped the noose from so
many necks—appeared as a sudden new hope, a more certain guide than
Thompson out of their legal labyrinth. Even though their trust and
confidence in the Boston lawyer remained intact, they felt that they
had nothing to lose by the change and much to gain.
Felicani, with whom they talked it over, felt otherwise. His distrust
of the Communists was innate, and he, as the organizer of the Defense
Committee, had a much clearer view of the Party’s reasons for taking
up the case than did his two comrades. Darrow himself, in Felicani’s
opinion, could do no more than Thompson had done and would do.[24]
Sacco and Vanzetti finally agreed to reject Cannon’s offer. When
Cline reported this to Chicago, the _Labor Defender_ struck back at
the Defense Committee savagely, accusing it of “trying to represent
the martyrdom of Sacco and Vanzetti as an ‘unfortunate’ error which
can be rectified by the ‘right’ people proceeding in the ‘right’
way.” When Shachtman claimed that it was the Communists’ “campaign
for international solidarity that has so far saved Sacco and Vanzetti
from the death chair,” Jackson’s _Bulletin_ announced angrily that
“the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee has no official relationship
with the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party, or the
Sacco-Vanzetti Conferences, which we understand were organized
through the ILD.”
* * * * *
During the summer and autumn of 1926 a whole new aspect of the case
was opened up by the defense’s belated discovery that Pinkerton
Detective Agency reports had been filed on both the South Braintree
and the Bridgewater holdups. The existence of these primal documents
became known largely through the efforts of Tom O’Connor, a State
House News Service reporter who had first become interested in the
case in 1920 after reading about it in the _New Republic_.
O’Connor kept in touch with developments after the trial, dropping
in from time to time at Moore’s office and at the Hanover Street
headquarters. Making his own investigations in Providence and
elsewhere, he finally became so engrossed in the case that he gave up
his State House job to work for Thompson without pay.
O’Connor was aware—it was common newspaper knowledge—that the
Travelers Insurance Company had insured the South Braintree
payroll. Searching the back numbers of _Protection_, the Travelers
publication, he found what he had assumed—an account of the South
Braintree crime and a statement that the company had hired the
Pinkerton Agency to investigate it. O’Connor realized that the agents
must have made day-by-day reports of what they found, but what
interested him even more was the obvious fact that these reports,
which would have been submitted long before Sacco and Vanzetti were
arrested, would be uncolored by preconceptions. If they could be
located, O’Connor was certain they would prove to be the raw material
of the case.
A week after the May Supreme Court decision O’Connor went to
Thompson, then preoccupied with the Madeiros confession. Just what
had occurred, he asked—well aware that Thompson did not have the
answer—between the evening the Buick was stolen in Needham and the
evening almost six months later when Sacco and Vanzetti were picked
up on the streetcar? How did it happen they were arrested? All
Thompson could do was to gesture helplessly and answer that he did
not know. O’Connor then told him about the South Braintree Pinkerton
report. Thompson, who had not heard of it before, banged his desk in
his excitement.
Some days later, following Thompson’s request, a copy of the report
arrived at the Travelers Boston office. Thompson was then away, but
O’Connor managed to borrow the report and copy it. As he had hoped,
it gave a picture of the case as it appeared before and just after
Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up. O’Connor was particularly struck
by Henry Hellyer’s notes on the fair brown-haired man Jenny Novelli
had seen in the murder car who, by the time Hellyer testified at
Dedham, had become black-haired with a dark complexion.
After this report came to light, O’Connor, while going through the
files of the Bridgewater _Independent_, discovered references to a
Pinkerton report on the Bridgewater holdup. But this second report,
with its even more glaring discrepancies between the immediate
impressions of witnesses and the evidence subsequently offered at the
Plymouth trial, was not to come to light until 1927.
* * * * *
It had been common knowledge at the Dedham trial that the United
States Department of Justice and District Attorney Katzmann’s office
had cooperated in getting evidence for the prosecution. What was
still not known was the degree of cooperation, for when Thompson
raised the issue, the Bureau of Investigation followed its customary
policy of refusing to open its files. Thompson increasingly came to
feel that there might be evidence in the files indicating that Sacco
and Vanzetti were innocent, and in any case he was outraged when he
learned that the Bureau had placed spies in the Dedham jail and on
the Defense Committee and had even planned to introduce one into
Rosina Sacco’s house. He wrote to United States Attorney General
John Sargent requesting that William West of the Boston office
show him whatever documents and correspondence he had covering the
investigations made before, during, and after the trial. In indirect
answer to this, Thompson received a call from the Boston Bureau
asking what information he was after. When he said that he wanted to
go through whatever files the department had on Sacco and Vanzetti,
West informed him that this would not be allowed.
If one can judge by a memorandum now in the National Archives and
prepared by the Department of Justice at the request of the State
Department on October 17, 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti, before their
trial, were known merely as subscribers to Galleani’s _Cronaca
Sovversiva_ and a New Jersey anarchist paper, _La Jacquerie_. In the
files Thompson particularly wanted to see there were of course the
reports of the agents attending the trial, as well as the reports
of Harold Zorian, who had infiltrated the committee, and Anthony
Carbone, who had been planted in the Dedham jail.
Although he was unable to see the files, Thompson discovered that
two former Bureau agents, Lawrence Letherman and Fred Weyand, were
willing to sign affidavits as to what had taken place in the Boston
office in regard to Sacco and Vanzetti during 1920 and 1921. Weyand
explained quite frankly that the purpose of the Boston agents in
going to the trial was to obtain enough evidence there to deport the
accused as anarchists in case they were not convicted of murder.
Letherman, in his affidavit, corroborated Weyand:
_The Department of Justice in Boston was anxious to get sufficient
evidence against Sacco and Vanzetti to deport them, but never
succeeded in getting the kind and amount of evidence required for
that purpose. It was the opinion of Department agents here that a
conviction of Sacco and Vanzetti for murder would be one way of
disposing of these two men. It was also the opinion of such of the
agents in Boston as had any actual knowledge of the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, that Sacco and Vanzetti, although anarchists and agitators,
were not highway robbers, and had nothing to do with the South
Braintree crime. My opinion, and the opinion of most of the older men
in the Government service, has always been that the South Braintree
crime was the work of professionals._
The words are ambiguous. Thompson took them to mean that the
Department of Justice, if it could not get Sacco and Vanzetti
deported as radicals, would cooperate in getting them executed for
a crime they had not committed. As a matter of fact, Sacco and
Vanzetti, if they had been acquitted at Dedham, would through their
own courtroom testimony have then been subject to deportation as
anarchists. West’s attitude in cooperating with Katzmann, may have
been a callous one, but it seems clear that there was nothing in the
Bureau of Investigation files tending to prove either the guilt or
the innocence of the two Italians.
* * * * *
On September 13 Thompson again appeared before Judge Thayer in
the Dedham courthouse to argue that the verdict against Sacco and
Vanzetti should be set aside because of the Madeiros confession and
the Weyand and Letherman affidavits. Thayer denied Thompson’s request
to have Madeiros examined and cross-examined in open court, but aside
from this the judge’s manner was courteous if impassive. From time to
time he would even unbend enough to come out with a small witticism.
For five days affidavits were read and Thompson argued for, while
Assistant District Attorney Ranney argued against, the motion.
Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the courtroom. Rosina was there with
Mrs. Evans as well as Mrs. Rantoul, Jerry McAnarney, and Professor
Frankfurter.
Thompson maintained that if Sacco and Vanzetti had never come into
the case, the evidence he had assembled in Providence would have been
sufficient to indict the Morellis. Under these circumstances he felt
that Judge Thayer should order a new trial. Thompson’s attack on the
Department of Justice and his interpretation of its role caused
much more of a sensation in Boston than did the twice-told tale of
the Madeiros confession. One of his incidental revelations was that
a Bureau agent named Shaughnessy who had investigated Sacco and
Vanzetti had subsequently been sent to prison for highway robbery.
Assistant District Attorney Ranney admitted that if Madeiros had
participated in the South Braintree holdup, Sacco and Vanzetti
were innocent, but he considered Madeiros’ confession worthless.
The district attorney’s office would “answer, but not investigate,
because we know or believe that the truth has been found.” As
for Letherman and Weyand, Ranney took the position that the two
ex-agents were traitors. “In all police departments, in all
detective departments,” he told the court, “secrecy is a watchword,
a byword—‘Do not betray the secrets of your departments.’ And if
the secrets were broadcast, what would be the result? There would
be no crime detected and punished. And yet Letherman and Weyand
give their affidavits to these defendants and betray the secrecy of
their department. We say on the face of it that there is a breach of
loyalty, and we wonder if we cannot conscientiously and logically
find that these men, not now in the department, did not leave there
with honor but dishonor.”
Thompson flared up at Ranney’s mention of secrets: “I will say to
your Honor that a government which has come to value its own secrets
more than it does the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny,
whether you call it a republic, a monarchy, or anything else.
Secrets! Secrets! And he says you should abstain from touching this
verdict of your jury because it is so sacred. Would they not have
liked to know something about secrets? The case is admitted by that
inadvertent concession. There are then secrets to be admitted!”
After studying the documents and affidavits for five weeks Judge
Thayer, on October 23, rejected the motion. He could have done so
without giving his reasons, but apparently feeling the need for
self-justification, he issued a twenty-five-thousand-word opinion.
_Being controlled only by judgment, reason and conscience [he wrote],
and after giving as favorable consideration to these defendants as
may be consistent with a due regard for the rights of the public
and sound principles of law, I am forced to the conclusion that the
affidavit of Madeiros is unreliable, untrustworthy and untrue. To
set aside a verdict of a jury affirmed by the Supreme Judicial Court
of this Commonwealth on such an affidavit would be a mockery upon
truth and justice. Therefore, exercising every right vested in this
Court in the granting of motions for new trials by the law of the
Commonwealth, this motion for a new trial is hereby denied._
In his years on the bench Thayer must have told hundreds of juries
that it was for them to determine the facts. Yet here, where his
function was merely to determine whether the Madeiros evidence was
weighty enough to warrant presentation to a jury, he had taken
over the jury’s function of determining its truth. But beneath his
formalism on the bench and his outward courtesy to Thompson, Judge
Thayer was nettled. Why any respectable lawyer should attempt to
stretch the law for two properly convicted anarchists was beyond him.
He concluded:
_Since the trial before the Jury of these cases, a new type of
disease would seem to have developed. It might be called “legopsychic
neurosis” or “hysteria” which means: “a belief in the existence of
something which in fact and truth has no such existence.”_
_This disease would seem to have reached a very dangerous condition,
from the argument of counsel, upon the present Motion, when he
charges Mr. Sargent, Attorney-General of the United States and his
subordinates, and subordinates of former Attorney-General of the
United States Mr. Palmer and Mr. Katzmann and the District Attorney
of Norfolk County, with being in a conspiracy to send these two
defendants to the electric chair, not because they are murderers but
because they are radicals.... In these cases, from all the developed
symptoms, the Court is rather of the opinion that the disease is
absolutely without cure._
Until Thayer’s decision was published, the only Massachusetts
newspaper to take the side of Sacco and Vanzetti was the Springfield
_Republican_, a paper that, though conservative in outlook, never
altered its outraged opinion that “a dog ought not to be shot on
the weight of the evidence brought out in the Dedham Trial.” As
the waning months of 1926 whetted the issue, the Boston newspapers
at first reacted predictably. The independent _Globe_ kept to its
traditional wary policy of not taking sides on divisive issues.
Frank Sibley, in spite of his standing, was taken off the case,
and on the day of the executions found himself covering a flower
show. Federalist pre-immigrant Boston spoke with two voices: the
McKinley-minded _Herald_, the breakfast voice of State Street; and
the genealogical _Transcript_, the teacup voice of Beacon Hill.
The _Transcript_ held and would continue to hold that Sacco and
Vanzetti had been given a fair trial, that the verdict was just,
the defendants had been given every opportunity of appeal, and
any further delay was an unworthy concession to foreign radicals,
long-haired men, and short-haired women. But doubts had begun to
creep into the editorial rooms of the _Herald_. They crystallized in
the editorial “We Submit” that appeared three days after Judge Thayer
denied the Madeiros motion. It was written by the chief editorial
writer, F. Lauriston Bullard, with editor-publisher O’Brien neither
suggesting nor objecting, and it is indicative of the national
interest the case was now arousing that it was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize. The paragraphs that appeared on October 26 must have goggled
eyes at many a Back Bay breakfast table:
_In our opinion Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti ought not to be
executed on the warrant of the verdict returned by a jury on July 14,
1921. We do not know whether these men are guilty or not. We have
no sympathy with the half-baked views which they profess. But as
months have merged into years and the great debate over this case has
continued, our doubts have solidified slowly into convictions, and
reluctantly we have found ourselves compelled to reverse our original
judgment. We hope the supreme judicial court will grant a new trial
on the basis of new evidence not yet examined in open court. We
hope the Governor will grant another reprieve to Celestino Madeiros
so that his confession may be canvassed in open court. We hope, in
case our supreme bench finds itself unable legally to authorize a
new trial, that our Governor will call to his aid a commission of
disinterested men of the highest intelligence and character to make
an independent investigation in his behalf, and that the Governor
himself at first hand will participate in that examination, if, as a
last resort, it shall be undertaken. We have read the full decision
in which Judge Webster Thayer, who presided at the original trial,
renders his decision against the application for a new trial, and
we submit that it carries the tone of the advocate rather than
the arbitrator. At the outset he refers to “the verdict of a jury
approved by the supreme court of this commonwealth” and later he
repeats that sentence. We respectfully submit that the supreme court
never approved that verdict. What the court did is stated in its
own words thus: “We have examined carefully all the exceptions in
so far as argued, and finding no error the verdicts are to stand.”
The court certified that, whether the verdict was right or wrong,
the trial judge performed his duty under the law in a legal manner.
The supreme court overruled a bill of exceptions but expressed no
judgment whatever as to the validity of the verdict or the guilt of
the defendants, Judge Thayer knows this._
Bullard went on to object to Thayer’s innuendoes, to say that the
files of the Department of Justice should be opened, and to charge
that Captain Proctor’s affidavit stood as a condemnation of the
Dedham verdict. He concluded:
_If on a new trial the defendants shall again be found guilty we
shall be infinitely better off than if we proceed to execution on
the basis of the trial already held; the shadow of doubt, which
abides in the minds of large numbers of patient investigators of this
whole case, will have been removed. And if on second trial Sacco and
Vanzetti should be declared guiltless, everybody would rejoice that
no monstrous injustice shall have been done. We submit these views
with no reference whatever to the personality of the defendants, and
without allusion now to that atmosphere of radicalism of which we
heard so much in 1921._
Here was the first breach in the Commonwealth’s fortifications. The
defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti now pressed forward in the paper war
that thundered through the correspondence columns of the _Herald_ and
the _Transcript_.
Bullard’s attack received formidable support. Dr. Morton Prince,
the internationally famous Harvard professor of psychiatry, wrote
to the _Herald_ that, after reading the evidence, he “had come
to the conclusion that the trial was a miscarriage of justice,
that the government had not proved its case and probably Sacco
and Vanzetti had not committed the murder charged.” Dr. Prince
particularly questioned a verdict to which Mary Splaine’s evidence
had substantially contributed:
_I do not hesitate to say that the star witness for the government
testified, honestly enough, no doubt, to what was psychologically
impossible. Miss Splaine testified, though she had only seen Sacco at
the time of the shooting from a distance of about 60 feet for from
1½ to three seconds in a motor car going at an increasing rate of
speed at about 15 to 18 miles an hour; that she saw and at the end
of a year she remembered and described 16 different details of his
person, even to the size of his hand, the length of his hair as being
between two and 2½ inches long and the shade of his eyebrows! Such
perception and memory under such conditions can easily be proved to
be psychologically impossible. Every psychologist knows that—so does
Houdini. And what shall we think of the animus and honesty of the
state that introduces such testimony to convict, knowing that the
jury is too ignorant to disbelieve?_
_How came Miss Splaine to become acquainted with these personal
characteristics of Sacco?_
_The answer is simple. Sacco had been shown to her on several
occasions. She had had an opportunity to study him carefully. More
than this, he sat before her in court. At the preliminary hearing in
the police court she was not asked to pick Sacco from among a group
of other men. Sacco was shown to her alone. Everyone knows that under
such circumstances the image of a person later develops, or may
develop, in an observer’s mind and becomes a false memory. Such a
memory is produced by suggestion. Every lawyer knows the unconscious
falsification of memory due to later acquired knowledge, though
ignorant of the psychology of the phenomenon. And yet Miss Splaine’s
testimony was offered by the state to the Jury._
_Why was not Miss Splaine asked to pick out Sacco from among a group
of men? If this had been done, this unconscious falsification of
memory would have been avoided._
In Morton Prince the genealogy of the Back Bay combined with the
intellectualism of Cambridge across the river, and while the _Herald_
editorial might jar Boston, his letter would cause the greater
explosion. Even if the Supreme Judicial Court should rule against
Thompson’s appeal from Thayer’s last decision, it was now clear to
the more knowing Bostonians that the matter would not rest there.
Many felt that Governor Fuller would commute the death sentence to
life imprisonment.
* * * * *
When Judge Thayer brushed aside the Madeiros evidence, Sacco felt
that nothing could now save him from his fate, neither lawyers nor
appeals nor—hardest of all to face—the embattled proletariat. “I
don’t care how it all ends, if it only ends,” he told one of his
visitors.
At Christmas Mrs. Jack’s daughter Elizabeth brought Sacco apples and
candy and—what moved him much—a present for his “dear darling Ines.”
He wrote to Mrs. Jack in an afterglow of optimism that he hoped
from the bottom of his heart “that the new year would bring us a
freedom and in the embrace of mine and in the grant human family.”
But it was something he had given up believing, and he had already
requested Thompson to take no more legal steps on his behalf. The two
prisoners’ joint Christmas message to their supporters sounded much
more like Sacco than Vanzetti:
_We are convinced that our murderors are determined to burn us within
this, 1927, and that it is most probable that they will succeed. And
our hearts move is that the new year may give us liberty or death—but
menwhile we are ready to bear our cross to the last._
Vanzetti’s moods alternated. There was a black period in the autumn
when he considered going on a hunger strike. Close to his cell
he could hear workmen constructing a new prison electric plant,
following the Boston Edison Company’s refusal to provide the
Commonwealth with current for executions. But even in his darkest
moods, when he thought of himself as a vanquished man, the shadow
would in a few days be overcome by his basic optimism, just as he
could forget the jangle of the electric-plant construction when he
learned that Mrs. Corl, the wife of the Plymouth boatbuilder, had
kept a vigil lamp lighted before the statue of the Virgin for the
last six years for the grace of his liberation. Something in her
naïve faith gave strength to his disbelieving heart. At times he
would attend the prison’s Christian Science services, not out of
any belief but merely to be able to sit in the spacious, almost
empty chapel and glimpse the sky again through the barred windows
and the sunshine reflecting on the gilt dome of the State House.
To the chaplains he remained generally hostile. Unlike Sacco, he
could still be hopeful of the higher court and of Governor Fuller
as an independent-minded man. Even so, he refused to apply for a
pardon. “Why should I,” he said, “when I am innocent?” Nevertheless
he was still willing to cooperate with his lawyers and the Defense
Committee. He began to translate Thompson’s brief into Italian for
distribution in Europe.
In one and the same letter Vanzetti could announce that he was
doomed, and then turn with lyric nostalgia to his father’s garden at
Villafalletto:
_It takes a poet of first magnitude to worthly speak of it, so
beautiful, unspeakably beautiful it is ... the singing birds there;
black merles of the golden bick, and ever more golden troath; the
golden oriols, the gold-finches, the green finches, the chaf-finches,
the neck-crooking, the green ficks; the unmachable nightingales, the
nightingales over-all. Yet, I think that the wonder of my garden’s
wonders is the banks of its path. Hundreds of grass, leaves of
wild flowors witness there the almighty genios of the universal
architecture—reflecting the sky, the Sun, the moon, the stars, all of
its lights and colors. The forgetmenot are nations there, and nation
are the wild daisies._
Christmas—his seventh behind bars—brought a cold snap, etching the
jail windows with frost. Among Vanzetti’s letters and Christmas cards
were a number of books—_The Life of Debs_, Jack London’s _Essays on
Revolt_, and, accompanied by a necktie from Mrs. Evans, Emerson’s
_Essays_. Emerson he found “so exquisitely anarchist,” delighting “at
the lecture of _Politics, Nature and New England Reformers_.”
Just after Christmas he wrote to Alice Stone Blackwell:
_I know perfectly well that within four month the Massachusetts will
be ready to burn me._...
_So every hope to get reparation and freedom having been killed in me
by each and all the words and deeds of Massachusettes black gowned,
puritanic, cold-blood murderors, on the first day of the 1927, I
formulated the wish, the wove, that I am get out within this year, no
matter if alive or death. And I hope with all my force that this will
come true. By it, I do not mean suicide._
As the short and frigid days moved toward the final year, the
clamor from overseas echoed more loudly within the United States.
The obscure foreigners who had stood up in court that sultry summer
evening of 1921 to hear the foreman, Ripley, pronounce the verdict
against them could at least console themselves that their names
had been blazoned round the world. They who had traveled on the
swaying Brockton trolley talking of a Sunday meeting of a few dozen
immigrants, now could conjure up hundreds of meetings in dozens
of countries. Proudly they accepted the fact that they had become
symbols.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] In June 1960 the National Broadcasting Company presented
Reginald Rose’s television play, _The Sacco-Vanzetti Story_. For
those unfamiliar with the case it may have seemed an entertaining
melodrama. As a balanced presentation of facts it was a failure.
Eugene Lyons turned off his television set in disgust. Harry King,
one of the four surviving jurors, and the only one who saw the
presentation, commented: “Well, I laughed. Quite a show. My only
reaction is that it is hard to reconcile anything I saw with the
actual trial.”
[23] G. B. Shaw understood this xenophobia well. “Americans must
decide for themselves” he wrote to Upton Sinclair, “whether they will
slaughter their Saccos and Vanzettis and Mooneys; for the moment
a foreigner interferes, to yield to him would be an unbearable
humiliation; perish a thousand Saccos first.”
[24] This was also Darrow’s own opinion when some time later he came
to Boston and talked with Thompson and Felicani.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1927
The state prison’s new electric plant went into use five days after
New Year’s, when three young men known as the Carbarn Bandits were
executed. Following executions the warden customarily served a buffet
supper to the witnesses and the press, so when on January 4 Vanzetti
noticed three hams being cooked in the kitchen for the warden’s
house, he knew it was the bandits’ turn.
The three—Edward Heinlein, John Devereaux, and John McLaughlin—had
held up the night cashier at the Waltham carbarn on October 4, 1925;
while escaping, Devereaux had shot and killed an elderly night
watchman who tried to stop them. They were caught the same night, and
by next day the press had already labeled them the Carbarn Bandits.
At their trial Devereaux admitted that he had fired the fatal shot
but said he had meant to fire at the ground. He told the court that
he did not see why his two friends should suffer for what he had
done. Nevertheless, all three were found guilty of first-degree
murder and sentenced to death. As faithful if erring Catholics they
walked to the chair accompanied by a priest, and their last look was
at a crucifix held before their eyes.
In the six months between their conviction and their execution,
their fate caused more of a stir locally than did the postponed fate
of Sacco and Vanzetti. All three had served in the Army during the
war, and Devereaux had been wounded. They were Irish by descent, and
whatever their faults, they had remained true to their church. The
mothers of the three organized a Massachusetts Clemency Committee and
presented the governor, Alvan Fuller, a petition of 120,000 names
that included those of three ex-governors. Protest meetings were
held all summer and autumn. In a desperate last appeal the mothers
visited Fuller in his office and got down on their knees in front of
him to pray for their sons’ lives. But the governor was adamant. As
he had often publicly stated, he believed in the death penalty as a
deterrent, in less sentimentality about murders, in modernization of
the law, and more religion in life.
If Fuller had been a politician rather than a businessman he
would not have hesitated about commuting the sentences, for no
Massachusetts politician in his senses would have let three
Irish-Catholic ex-servicemen go to the chair. To the astute it had
long been clear that the descendants of the Famine immigrants, who
had taken over Boston in 1902 with the election of Mayor John F.
“Honey” Fitzgerald, would before long take over the Commonwealth.
That Fuller’s belief in the salutary effects of capital punishment
could overrule his concern for this powerful voting bloc would make
it that much more difficult for him later to consider clemency
for two anarchist atheist alien slackers. The execution of the
Carbarn Bandits filled the Boston Irish with resentments that were
transferred with accrued bitterness to Sacco and Vanzetti.
Fuller prided himself on not being a politician. His favorite maxim
was Calvin Coolidge’s “More business in government, less government
in business,” and he had forty million dollars to prove his point.
Never had he bothered to conceal his contempt for the Republican
bosses of Massachusetts with their well-established escalator system
of advancement that he was rich enough to disregard. In fact, his
contempt for them and his successful defiance of their candidates had
made him seem outside the Commonwealth something of a La Guardia-type
liberal. In 1912 he had broken with the Republican State Committee
to support Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party. In 1916, again
in disregard of the state committee, he had run for Congress as an
independent, defeating the regular Republican candidate.
During two terms in Congress he distinguished himself chiefly by
attacking abuses of the franking privilege and the mileage allowance.
However, he did not hesitate to defy Massachusetts’ senior senator,
Henry Cabot Lodge, by supporting the League of Nations. In 1920 he
again frustrated the state Republican bosses by taking the nomination
for lieutenant governor away from their designated candidate. He
served the conventional two terms as lieutenant governor before
defeating James Michael Curley for the governorship in 1924. In 1926
he was easily re-elected.
As he approached his fiftieth birthday he could take satisfaction
in being both the leader of his state and the richest man in
Massachusetts. His granite-faced neo-Renaissance mansion on the water
side of Beacon Street occupied the site of two brownstone town houses
that had belonged to Mrs. Jack Gardner. Old ladies might shrug their
shoulders and whisper behind his back at the Longwood Cricket Club,
but no one could deny him entree anywhere. The lean bicycle mechanic
had become portly in middle age, his confident asymmetrical face
plumping over his stiff collar. His lobeless ears clung close to his
head, his thinning hair clung to his scalp, and he had curiously
amber-tinted eyes that many found disconcerting. His mouth looked
like a dollar sign set sideways. On the stubby little finger of his
left hand with its moonless nail he wore a gold signet ring with the
resurrected Fuller crest. When in an affable mood he used to say he
would like to run a newspaper and teach Sunday school.
The unspoken image that fluttered in his mind during his final term
as governor was the Republican National Convention of 1928 with its
shimmering prospect of the Vice-Presidential nomination. It was
not an impossible thought after all, for mousy Calvin Coolidge had
managed it eight years before from the same governor’s chair on the
strength of one of his copybook maxims pronounced during the Boston
police strike: “There is no right to strike against the public safety
by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
* * * * *
On January 27 and 28, 1927, in Boston’s Pemberton Square Courthouse,
Thompson, assisted by Ehrmann, appeared before the Massachusetts
Supreme Court to argue against Judge Thayer’s denial of the Madeiros
motion. It was the coldest weather in two years, with a high wind
curling up State Street and the fringes of the harbor beginning to
freeze. The courtroom was almost empty as Thompson developed his
thesis. Not until he mentioned Judge Thayer could one sense the
restrained passion behind the quiet voice:
“I must refer to a thing I am almost ashamed to mention. The judge,
having spent a page and a half of his decision in vituperation of
myself, suggested that my belief in the innocence of these defendants
was due to a mental disease. He also suggested that there had been
fraud and deceit in the methods used in procuring this evidence.”
Thompson then pointed out various misstatements in Thayer’s
decision—such as that the Supreme Court had approved the jury’s
verdict, when it had done nothing of the kind—and accused him
of being so overwrought by the case that he was not capable of
reasoning “with a calm mind free from impartiality.” Beyond all the
renewed arguments about Madeiros, the Department of Justice, and
other points, Thompson’s chief contention was that the defendants
were entitled to a new trial because there had been an abuse of
judicial discretion.
In the thin winter light of the musty echoing courtroom the stiff
faces of the five justices looked like Copley portraits of a century
and a half earlier. Chief Justice Arthur Prentice Rugg presided,
flanked by Henry King Braley, William Cushing Wait, John Crawford
Crosby, and Edward Peter Pierce—New England names, bloodless New
England features. To Thompson they seemed as chill as the city
streets outside.
Vanzetti was pessimistic about the appeal:
_We know that in a case of such nature as ours, legallity alone
is insufficient. Mr. Thompson has known to place the case in such
perfect manner before the Supreme Court, that if the justices wish,
they can give us justice now.... Therefore, if they are going to a
refusal, it would unmistakably prove that they have prostituted their
consciences, their intellect, and will to a categoric order of an
invisible and trascendental master or class._
The appearance of Felix Frankfurter’s article, “The Case of Sacco and
Vanzetti,” in the March issue of the _Atlantic Monthly_ initiated the
final world-shaking stage of the case. The _Atlantic_ still remained
the voice of conservative intellectual America. For seventy years
its staid ocher cover with the oval intaglio cut of Poseidon and
his sea horse had borne the names of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier,
Emerson, Hale, Holmes, James, and Howells. That it should now
feature an article by a Harvard Law School professor attacking the
trial, the jury, the witnesses, the verdict, and the Massachusetts
judiciary, gave the affair at once a national significance. The
stirrings in Europe, the mutterings in New England had now become
articulate. Frankfurter’s article was like a lighted fuse leading to
a powder magazine. Sacco and Vanzetti became familiar names in all
the forty-eight states, not just among the urban left-liberals but in
the suburbs and the small towns and the women’s clubs and the little
brick Carnegie libraries.
For most of those who read it, Frankfurter’s attack was their factual
introduction to the background of a case they had heard about only
vaguely. Deftly and concisely the law-school professor explained
how the two men had come to be arrested, described the method of
selecting the jury, Katzmann’s harrying cross-examination of Sacco,
Judge Thayer’s patriotic rhetoric, and the later discrediting of
various witnesses. Accepting the hypothesis that the Morelli gang
committed the South Braintree murders, he asserted “with deep regret”
that Thayer’s ruling on the Madeiros motion was “a farrago of
misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions and mutilations.”
The weakness in Frankfurter’s article was that basically the
prosecution had a more formidable case against the two men than
readers of the _Atlantic_ would have gathered. Of the expanded book
version that appeared the same month, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
wrote to Harold Laski:
_My prejudices were all with Felix’s book. But after all, it’s simply
showing, if it was right, that the case was tried in a hostile
atmosphere. I doubt if anyone would say there was no evidence
warranting a conviction._
With the appearance of the _Atlantic_ article, Frankfurter became the
moving spirit of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. Even Thompson turned
to him. His were the final decisions as to tactics and action.
Lithe, dark, youthful in manner but obviously the professor, the
forty-five-year-old Frankfurter was as intense as he was opinionated,
the picture of academic intellectualism without its self-deprecatory
pose. Whenever he appeared at the Hanover Street headquarters he
always managed to look as brisk as if he had just walked over from
Cambridge—as he sometimes had. He and Governor Fuller shared a common
start from nothing and were both driven by the same fierce will to
succeed, but the governor saw success as the power of money while the
professor saw it as the power of the mind.
Felix Frankfurter had been sure of himself from the day he arrived
in New York from Vienna as a twelve-year-old immigrant, bookish and
eager, speaking no English yet shortly afterward leading his classes
in the Lower East Side’s Public School 25. At the Harvard Law School,
which he entered more or less by chance in 1903, he stood for three
years first in his class, receiving the highest honor of becoming an
editor of the _Law Review_. After graduation he served as assistant
to Secretary of War Henry Stimson in the Taft administration,
continuing briefly into Wilson’s first term. Just ten years after the
unknown Frankfurter had entered the Harvard Law School, Professor
Edward Warren enticed him back with an invitation to join the faculty.
Frankfurter had not concerned himself with the Sacco-Vanzetti case
during the trial or immediately following it. Only when he saw
the headlines in the autumn of 1923 that Thompson had accused the
prosecution of a frame-up in regard to Captain Proctor’s testimony
did he begin to take an interest. After he read that Proctor had
sworn that when he said “consistent with” he did not really think the
bullet had gone through the gun, his neutrality evaporated. And when
Katzmann, in reply to Proctor, said he had not “repeatedly” asked the
question, that settled it. Frankfurter wrote his _Atlantic_ article
with, as he himself boasted, the intention of jolting minds.
* * * * *
On April 5, in the Pemberton Square courthouse, the Supreme Court
handed down its decision. Guards took their places all through the
cavernous building; deputy sheriffs and court officers patrolled
the corridors. Guards were also placed in front of the railings of
Governor Fuller’s Beacon Street mansion and sent to Judge Thayer’s
home in Worcester.
The decision upheld Judge Thayer at every point. Through the late
afternoon the news, first chalked up on the bulletin boards of
Newspaper Row on Washington Street, spread through the business
district like wildfire. Everyone wanted to know just one thing: What
could the two Italians do now?
According to Massachusetts law the court was limited to determining
whether the trial judge had committed any errors of law or abuses of
discretion. These were the limitations rigidly held to by Justice
Wait in his opinion. Could Thayer conscientiously, intelligently,
and honestly have reached the result he has reached? the court asked
itself collectively, and answered, through Justice Wait, that he
could have.
_The granting or the denial of a motion for a new trial of an
indictment for murder rests in the judicial discretion of the trial
judge, and his decision will not be disturbed unless it is vitiated
by errors of law or abuse of discretion._
The question of the guilt or innocence of the defendants was not a
matter for consideration. Citing a civil case, Davis _v._ Boston
Elevated Railway, as precedent, the court ruled:
_It is not imperative that a motion for a new trial of an indictment
for murder based on newly discovered evidence be granted, even though
the evidence is newly discovered, and, if presented to a jury, would
justify a different verdict._
The Massachusetts tradition, sternly enforced by Chief Justice Rugg,
was that Supreme Judicial Court decisions were unanimous, but that
behind the ruling of April 5 there may have been some suppressed
stirrings of doubt was indicated by an incident related by Herbert
Ehrmann. In 1938, as he was addressing a Boston Bar Association
memorial meeting in honor of Thompson, he noticed Justice Pierce in
the audience. Pierce had been a member of the Massachusetts Supreme
Court during the entire period of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and
Ehrmann felt uneasy over the critical remarks he was about to make.
When, however, the meeting was over, the justice came forward with
tears pouring down his cheeks, grasped Ehrmann’s hand, and said in a
broken voice, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”
* * * * *
Following the Supreme Court’s decision, District Attorney Wilbar
asked for imposition of sentence, and a special session was called
at the Dedham courthouse for Saturday, April 9. In Charlestown,
meanwhile, Warden Hendry transferred Vanzetti to the state prison’s
grim and ancient Cherry Hill section “to protect him from the
unwelcome attention of curious visitors.”
Outside Massachusetts the protests were immediate. A Committee for
the Defense of Victims of Fascism and the White Terror sent a wire
from France to President Coolidge, signed by Henri Barbusse, Romain
Rolland, and Albert Einstein, requesting the liberation of Sacco
and Vanzetti. From Berlin the International Red Aid cabled Governor
Fuller demanding “pardon and release in the name of half a million
members.” The Regional Federation of Labor in Buenos Aires called a
forty-eight-hour strike to protest the court’s decision. Letters,
telegrams, and cables poured in on Governor Fuller, at whose ornate
wrought-iron gate the problem had now been left. Privately, Fuller
considered that the court’s word should be the last word, but
publicly he announced that the evidence in the case had never been
presented to him and that consequently he had not formed any opinion.
On April 7, as if to emphasize his detachment, he bought another
Gainsborough portrait, “Master Heathcote,” from Sir Joseph Duveen.
The day of the sentencing broke cold and damp and gray. At
Charlestown, Vanzetti was waked at five o’clock. He ate his breakfast
of frankfurts, baked potatoes, bread, and coffee, then—since he
would not be returning immediately to the state prison—wrapped his
belongings in brown paper. After he had finished he went to the
rotunda where he sat calmly smoking his pipe until the car came to
take him to Dedham. As he left he waved a friendly good-by to Warden
Hendry.
He rejoined Sacco in the library of the Dedham jail. Again they
embraced gravely. Shortly before ten a bus took them to court. They
left surrounded by a dozen deputies and three policemen with shotguns.
The courthouse was again surrounded by police with rifles. Admission
was by ticket, obtainable only by those connected with the defense
or the prosecution, plus the curious-minded with political pull.
Felicani, Mary Donovan, and Mrs. Evans’ secretary Anna Bloom arrived
at the courthouse a little after nine only to find the iron gates
locked. A janitor refused to let them in until ordered to by a state
trooper. Mrs. Evans, who had broken her ankle recently, limped up the
steps in the company of Sarah Ehrmann and Mrs. Gertrude Winslow, the
secretary of the Community Church. Rosina Sacco did not appear. The
prosecution was represented by Albert Brouillard and state detectives
Fleming and Ferrari.
When Sacco and Vanzetti stepped from the bus they were handcuffed
together, and Vanzetti was handcuffed to Deputy Sheriff Caldwell.
Both prisoners wore shabby overcoats with velvet collars. Sacco had
on a dark suit, a dark necktie, and a felt hat. Vanzetti was wearing
a bow tie and a full light-brown cap that seemed to exaggerate the
droop of his mustache. They stood for a few minutes by the granite
steps, smiling and self-possessed in spite of the guards. At the
request of the photographers and newsreel men they took off their
hats and faced in various directions. The two men had aged much in
six years.
After several minutes they were marched through the iron gate and
upstairs. At the door to the courtroom the jail chaplain, William
Beal, chatted with them briefly. Just as their handcuffs were being
removed before they entered the cage, Mrs. Evans caught their eye
and tried to get to her feet. A deputy ordered her to sit down. The
quiet in the waiting courtroom was broken only by the ticking of
the marble-faced clock. One of the reporters had the feeling that
everyone present was holding his breath.
Judge Thayer got out of his car just as the clock of the First
Church across Court Street was striking ten. He was wearing a
derby, as was the ham-faced state detective who accompanied him,
and though he skipped up the steps briskly enough he looked frail.
The years, culminating in this moment, had brought about a curious
transposition that was sensed by everybody in the waiting room.
For it was as if somehow the defendants had become the prosecutors
and the judge the defendant. Thayer himself seemed to sense it
as he strode into the courtroom, preceded by a deputy and Clerk
Worthington’s warning cry. He sat down, smoothed his gown, but did
not look at the men in the cage thirty feet in front of him. The
preliminaries were so brief that they were over before they could
make an impression. District Attorney Wilbar in an almost inaudible
voice asked that sentence now be imposed on the two defendants
convicted of murder in the first degree, the sentence to be executed
during the week of July 10. Clerk Worthington then asked: “Nicola
Sacco, have you anything to say why sentence of death should not be
passed on you?”
Sacco stood up, stared at Judge Thayer, then began slowly to speak:
“Yes, sir. I am not an orator. It is not very familiar with me the
English language, and as I know, as my friend has told me, my comrade
Vanzetti will speak more long, so I thought to give him the chance.”
After the halting beginning his words began to flow more freely as he
felt himself stirred by the impassioned moment. He held a small piece
of paper in one hand, and every now and then he slapped the railing
of the cage with the other.
“I never know, never heard, even read in history anything so cruel
as this Court. After seven years prosecuting they still consider us
guilty. And these gentle people are arrayed with us in this court
today.
“I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class
and the rich class, and there will be always collision between one
and the other. We fraternize the people with the books, with the
literature. You persecute the people, tyrannize over them and kill
them. We try the education of people always. You try to put a path
between us and some other nationality that hates each other. That
is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed
class. Well, you are the oppressor.
“You know it, Judge Thayer—you know all my life, you know why I have
been here, and after seven years that you have been persecuting me
and my poor wife, you still today sentence us to death. I would like
to tell all my life, but what is the use? You know all about what
I say before, and my friend—that is, my comrade—will be talking,
because he is more familiar with the language, and I will give him
a chance. My comrade, the man kind, the kind man to all children,
you sentence him two times, in the Bridgewater case and the Dedham
case, connected with me, and you know he is innocent. You forget all
the population that has been with us for seven years, to sympathize
and give us all their energy and all their kindness. You do not
care for them. Among that peoples and the comrades and the working
class there is a big legion of intellectual people which have been
with us for seven years, but to not commit the iniquitous sentence,
but still the Court goes ahead. And I think I thank you all, you
peoples, my comrades who have been with me for seven years, with the
Sacco-Vanzetti case, and I will give my friend a chance.
“I forgot one thing which my comrade remember me. As I said before,
Judge Thayer know all my life, and he know I am never been guilty,
never—not yesterday nor today nor forever.”
In five minutes it was over, and for an instant the atmosphere of
the courtroom loosened with a rustling and shuffle of feet and a few
coughs, then tightened as Clerk Worthington called on Vanzetti.
As he stood up, Vanzetti appeared calm, almost cheerful, and his
voice at the beginning was deceptively gentle. He held a few penciled
notes.
“Yes. What I say is that I am innocent, not only of the Braintree
crime, but also of the Bridgewater crime. That I am not only innocent
of these two crimes, but in all my life I have never stole and I have
never killed and I have never spilled blood. That is what I want to
say. And it is not all. Not only am I innocent of these two crimes,
not only in all my life I have never stole, never killed, never
spilled blood, but I have struggled all my life, since I began to
reason, to eliminate crime from the earth.
“Everybody that knows these two arms knows very well that I did not
need to go in between the street and kill a man to take money. I can
live with my two arms and live well....
“Now, I should say that I am not only innocent of all these things,
not only have I never committed a real crime in all my life—though
some sins but not crimes—not only have I struggled all my life to
eliminate crimes, the crimes that the official law and the official
moral condemns, but also the crime that the official moral and the
official law sanctions and sanctifies—the exploitation and the
oppression of the man by the man, and if there is a reason why I am
here as a guilty man, if there is a reason why you in a few minutes
can doom me, it is this reason and none else.”
Judge Thayer stared at his bench as if he were unaware of the man
addressing him. The judge’s impassivity nettled Vanzetti and as he
continued his voice showed it. His eyes seemed to flash at the bent
figure whom he had once called a black-gowned cobra.
“Is it possible that only a few on the jury, only two or three men,
who would condemn their mother for worldly honor and for earthly
fortune; is it possible that they are right against what the world,
the whole world has say it is wrong and that I know that it is wrong?
If there is one that I should know it, if it is right or if it is
wrong, it is I and this man. You see it is seven years that we are in
jail. What we have suffered during these seven years no human tongue
can say, and yet you see me before you, not trembling, you see me
looking you in your eyes straight, not blushing, not changing color,
not ashamed or in fear.
“Eugene Debs say that not even a dog—something like that—not even a
dog that kill chickens would have been found guilty by American jury
with the evidence that the Commonwealth have produced against us. I
say that not even a leprous dog would have his appeal refused two
times by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts—not even a leprous dog....
“We know that you have spoke yourself and have spoke your hostility
against us, and your despisement against us with friends of yours
on the train, at the University Club of Boston, on the Golf Club of
Worcester, Massachusetts. I am sure that if the people who know all
what you say against us would have the civil courage to take the
stand, maybe your Honor—I am sorry to say this because you are an old
man, and I have an old father—but maybe you would be beside us in
good justice at this time.”
The record of Vanzetti’s first trial is incomplete, and though
the phrase does not appear in the transcript or in the newspaper
accounts, Thayer was said by members of the Defense Committee
who were in the courtroom to have instructed the jury that the
defendant’s beliefs were “cognate with the crime.” Vanzetti now threw
that in Thayer’s face, as well as the fact that his sentence for
attempted robbery was double that of other prisoners in Charlestown
convicted of actual robbery. At the recollection he struck angrily
against the rail of the cage with his notes.
“You know if we would have Mr. Thompson, or even the brother
McAnarney in the first trial in Plymouth, you know that no jury
would have found me guilty. My first lawyer has been a partner of
Mr. Katzmann, as he is still now. My first lawyer of the defense,
Mr. Vahey, has not defended me, has sold me for thirty golden money
like Judas sold Jesus Christ. If that man has not told to you or to
Mr. Katzmann that he know I was guilty, it is because he know that I
was not guilty. That man has done everything indirectly to hurt us.
He has made long speech with the jury about things that do matter
nothing, and on the point of essence to the trial he has passed over
with few words or with complete silence. This was a premeditation
in order to give the jury the impression that my own defender has
nothing good to say, has nothing good to urge in defense of myself,
and therefore go around the bush on little things that amount to
nothing and let pass the essential points either in silence or with a
very weakly resistance.
“We were tried during a time that has now passed into history. I mean
by that, a time when there was a hysteria of resentment and hate
against the people of our principles, against the foreigner, against
slackers, and it seems to me—rather, I am positive of it, that both
you and Mr. Katzmann has done all what it were in your power in order
to work out, in order to agitate still more the passion of the juror,
the prejudice of the juror, against us.... But the jury were hating
us because we were against the war, and the jury don’t know that it
makes any difference between a man that is against the war because he
believes that the war is unjust, because he hate no country, because
he is a cosmopolitan, and a man that is against the war because he
is in favor of the other country that fights against the country in
which he is, and therefore a spy, and he commits any crime in the
country in which he is in behalf of the other country in order to
serve the other country. We are not men of that kind. Katzmann know
very well that. Katzmann know that we were against the war because we
did not believe in the purpose for which they say that the war was
done. We believe it that the war is wrong, and we believe this more
now after ten years that we understood it day by day—the consequences
and the result of the after war. We believe more now than ever that
the war was wrong, and we are against war more now than ever, and I
am glad to be on the doomed scaffold if I can say to mankind: ‘Look
out; you are in a catacomb of the flower of mankind. For what? All
that they say to you, all that they have promised to you—it was a
lie, it was an illusion, it was a cheat, it was a fraud, it was a
crime. They promised you liberty. Where is liberty? They promised you
prosperity. Where is prosperity? They have promised you elevation.
Where is elevation?’”
He accused Katzmann of breaking the agreement not to mention the
Plymouth trial, he accused the Commonwealth of being more responsible
than the defense for the delays, he accused Thayer of deliberately
handing down his Plymouth decision on Christmas Eve “to poison the
heart of our family and of our beloved,” for even though they did not
believe in “the fable of the evening of Christmas,” nevertheless “we
are human, and Christmas is sweet to the heart of every man.”
The marble-faced clock had ticked off forty minutes. Vanzetti
disregarded his notes now. In his long-deliberated conclusion he had
no need of them. His deep-set eyes took on the searing quality that
Chief Stewart had remarked on seven years before.
“Well, I have already say that I not only am not guilty of these two
crimes, but I never commit a crime in my life—I have never steal and
I have never kill and I have never spilt blood, and I have fought
against the crime, and I have fought and I have sacrificed myself
even to eliminate the crimes that the law and the church legitimate
and sanctify.
“This is what I say: I would not wish to a dog or to a snake, to the
most low and misfortunate creature of the earth—I would not wish to
any of them what I have had to suffer for things that I am not guilty
of. But my conviction is that I have suffered for things I am guilty
of. I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical;
I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian;
I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for
myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute
me two times, and if I could be reborn again two other times, I would
live again to do what I have done already.
“I have finished. Thank you.”
He stood there, a spare, slightly stooped figure, his face pale
behind the screen of the swooping mustache, eyes still glittering
with suppressed emotion. Judge Thayer’s precise arctic voice broke
the silence, moving on in a few phrases to the sentencing. There was
a hushed tenseness as everyone leaned forward to catch the ritual
words:
“First the Court pronounces sentence of Nicola Sacco. It is
considered and ordered by the Court that you, Nicola Sacco, 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.”
Except for Thayer’s voice there was only the muffled sound of a few
women sobbing.
“It is considered and ordered by the Court that you, Bartolomeo
Vanzetti—”
Vanzetti’s interrupting voice was like a stone shattering thin ice.
“Wait a minute, please, your Honor,” he called out. “May I speak with
my lawyer, Mr. Thompson?”
Thompson, within the bar enclosure, was so taken aback that all he
could do was to mutter to the court, “I do not know what he wants to
say.”
Judge Thayer brushed aside the interruption. “I think I should
pronounce the sentence. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, suffer the punishment of
death—”
Sacco broke in, shrill and furious, and as he stood he stretched
his arm and pointed at Judge Thayer. “You know I am innocent!” he
shouted, his facial muscles bunched in fury. “That is the same words
I pronounced seven years ago! You condemn two innocent men!”
For a moment it seemed as if the long sustained decorum of the
neoclassic room was dissolving, but Thayer’s impervious voice
continued with the regularity of the ticking clock—“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. This is the sentence of
the law.” He paused, gathering his gown about him in a preliminary
gesture before he announced: “We will now take a recess.” Without a
glance at the men he had sentenced he stood up and walked slowly down
from the bench and out into the corridor that led to his chambers.
As Sacco and Vanzetti were again being handcuffed, their friends,
Italian and American, crowded round them trying to touch them, to
clasp their hands. Mrs. Evans hobbled up close enough to call out
cheerfully, “There’s lots to hope for yet.” There were tears in
Vanzetti’s eyes. Mary Donovan pushed forward, her cheeks wet. “Do not
cry, Mary,” he told her. “Keep a brave front.” Then the guards and
deputies intervened.
* * * * *
Vanzetti, brooding in his cell, thought less of the sentence than
of the words he had not been allowed to speak. Next day, with the
eloquence of death on him, he wrote out his eulogy of Sacco, telling
Thompson that it was “the most important thing” he had to say, and
that “I would have given half my blood to be allowed to speak again.”
_I have talk a great deal of myself but I even forgot to name Sacco.
Sacco too is a worker from his boyhood, a skilled worker, lover of
work, with a good job and pay, a bank account, a good and lovely
wife, two beautiful children and a neat little home at the verge of a
wood, near a brook. Sacco is a heart, a faith, a character, a man; a
man lover of nature and of mankind. A man who gave all, who sacrifice
all to the cause of Liberty, and to his love for mankind; money,
rest, mundain ambitions, his own wife, his children, himself and his
own life. Sacco has never dreamt to steal, never to assassinate.
He and I have never brought a morsel of bread to our mouths, from
our childhood to today—which has not been gained by the sweat of
our brows. Never. His people also are in good position and of good
reputation._
_Oh yes, I may be more witfull as some have put it. I am a better
babbler than he is, but many, many times in hearing his heartful
voice ringing a faith sublime, in considering his supreme sacrifice,
remembering his heroism I felt small, small at the presence of his
greatness and found myself compelled to fight back from my eyes the
tears, and quanch my heart trobling to my throat to not weep before
him—this man called thief and assasin and doomed. But Sacco’s name
will live in the hearts of the people and in their gratitude when
Katzmann’s and yours bones will be dispersed by time, when your name,
his name, your laws, institutions, and your false god are but a deem
rememoring of a cursed past in which man was wolf to the man._
Over the week end Thompson told reporters that he felt Sacco and
Vanzetti could derive no benefit from further proceedings in the
Massachusetts courts, and that he was not prepared to take steps
designed merely to delay their execution. Moore would have acted
very differently, would in fact have taken any steps, scrupulous or
otherwise, and two at a time, that he thought might prolong the men’s
lives. But to Moore justice was a class shell game that he was ready
to operate as trickily as his opponents. “At least I have kept them
alive,” he was able to say as he left Boston. Thompson still kept his
faith in the traditional impartiality of the law. He would not play
tricks with it.
Anticipating the adverse decision of April 5, Thompson, a few days
earlier, accompanied by John Moors, Dr. Morton Prince, and Professor
Frank Taussig, had called on the Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts,
William Lawrence, to ask his help in persuading Governor Fuller to
appoint a commission to review the whole proceedings. It struck none
of these Boston-bred men as strange to turn to a bishop in a matter
of law. On the contrary, it seemed to them the most obvious step to
take, for during a third of a century the voice of Bishop Lawrence
had become the ethical voice of Massachusetts.
Bishop Lawrence combined uniquely in his person the dominant strands
of the community. Descended from the founders of the Bay Colony, he
could walk through Boston along streets named for his ancestors.
As successor to Phillips Brooks, who had preached before Queen
Victoria, he concluded the reconciliation of upper-class Boston
to Episcopalianism after the disestablishment of the Revolution.
His income came from the textile industry that his relatives the
Lawrences, the Lowells, and the Abbotts had established. Though
he was a second-generation Episcopalian, the blood of ancestral
Calvinism still coursed in his veins. By and large, he observed to
his acquaintances, it had been his experience that the more godly
members of the community were the more financially successful. As a
young curate in industrial Lawrence he would cheerfully give up an
afternoon to visit a crippled spinner of his congregation, yet not
think it strange that the man was earning eighty cents a day. As a
bishop and member of the Corporation of Harvard University he would
undertake to raise five million dollars for the new Harvard Business
School and also not think it strange.
A stocky man with a glowing face, Bishop Lawrence looked a cherubic
Puritan. He eschewed rings, miter and crozier, pectoral crosses,
black suits, and clerical collars, preferring English tweeds and gray
felt hats. He received Thompson’s delegation, representative of the
law, medicine, State Street, and the academy, as a matter of course.
He knew at once what his duty was.
_Sent to Governor_ [_he noted in his diary_] _a letter saying that in
Sacco-Vanzetti sentence thousands of citizens felt that they had not
had a fair trial and asking the Governor to call leading and trusted
men to his advice._
As both the sender and the recipient were aware, the letter, dated
April 11, was more nearly a command:
_Your Excellency_,—
_Two men, having been tried by the Courts of Massachusetts for
murder, have now been sentenced to death. Upon you falls the
heavy and responsible duty of carrying out the sentence unless
you are moved to take other action. Confidence in the Courts of
Massachusetts, which has justified itself for generations, leads its
citizens to assume the sentence given is just and should be carried
out._
_There are, however, we believe, thousands of citizens of the
Commonwealth who, having read or studied such parts of the
proceedings in the Superior Court as have appeared in the public
press, have serious doubts as to whether these two men have had a
fair trial._
_They were, as the law requires, tried by a judge and jury and found
guilty. Motions for a new trial on grounds of newly discovered
evidence were heard by the same judge and denied. Exceptions on
points of law were taken to the Supreme Court and unanimously
overruled. But the Supreme Court could not under our law reconsider
and revise the findings of fact of the trial court or the exercise
of the trial judge’s discretion. Hence have arisen the doubts of the
citizens for whom we venture to speak._
_Knowing well your sense of justice, your integrity of purpose, and
your courage when assured of the rightness of your position, we ask
with great earnestness that you call to your aid several citizens of
well known character, experience, ability, and sense of justice to
make a study of the trial and advise you. We believe that it is due
to the exceptional conditions of the case, to yourself, and to the
State that these doubts be allayed and that it be made evident to
all citizens that the Commonwealth has done full justice to herself
as well as to these men, and also that you may have strong and
intelligent support in whatever decision you may make._
_Rt. Rev. William A. Lawrence_
Additional signatures were superfluous. Nevertheless, as if to
underline his position, the Bishop took care to have his letter
signed by three most proper Bostonians—fellow Harvard Corporation
member Charles Curtis, Jr.; Hernan Burr, as well known in the city as
a lawyer and financier as he was unknown elsewhere; and Roland Boyden
of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins, a law firm whose name was said to
have such magic force that it was seldom mentioned; one only thought
it.
The letter was not immediately made public. Meanwhile, on April 12,
Representative Roland Sawyer, a Congregational minister who for
fourteen years had represented Ware and several other small western
Massachusetts towns in the state legislature, drew up a resolution
which he presented in the House of Representatives to provide for a
special commission “to examine and review the proceedings of the
Commonwealth against Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” Sawyer
realized that the measure had no chance of passing but he felt that
a public hearing on it would be the informal equivalent of a trial,
and that additional evidence there presented would undermine the
prosecution’s case to such an extent that it would make the carrying
out of the death sentences impossible. Thompson favored Sawyer’s
plan, but Frankfurter, after meeting with the Defense Committee in
a downtown law office, decided against it. He told Sawyer that he
had confidence in Fuller. Sawyer’s resolution was rejected in the
legislature by a rising vote of 146-6.
The next move was Governor Fuller’s. He who a few weeks before had
announced that he had not formed an opinion had now become the court
of last appeal. In a few more weeks a stroke of his pen would have
to decide whether it would be freedom for the two men, commutation
of their sentences to life imprisonment, or death. To Thompson,
who visited him privately, he announced that he could make no
investigation unless he was requested to do so by Sacco and Vanzetti.
Thompson promised to see that such a request was made.
The written and telegraphed appeals, requests, and suggestions
now reaching the governor by the hundreds were signed with such
nationally known names as Rabbi Stephen Wise, novelist Gertrude
Atherton, President Emeritus David Starr Jordan of Stanford
University, and biographer Ida Tarbell. A Massachusetts communication
was signed by author and doctor Richard Cabot; John Hays Hammond,
the North Shore millionaire industrialist; Harvard philosopher
William Ernest Hocking; Harvard teacher and essayist Bliss Perry;
and historians Samuel Eliot Morison and Arthur Schlesinger. The name
of Dean Pound of the Harvard Law School headed a petition signed by
Francis Sayre, the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson.
The tone of most of these appeals was conciliatory, not to say
flattering. That most tirelessly—some thought tiresomely—liberal
of clergymen, John Haynes Holmes of New York’s Community Church,
expressed his strong faith in Governor Fuller’s fairness. Fiorello La
Guardia, who had served with Fuller in Congress, wrote optimistically
to the New York _World_ that the governor was “free from bigotry
and prejudice and will investigate fairly and fully.” The _Nation_
believed, in an open letter, that the governor would fearlessly
face the great issue that had aroused not only masses of Americans
but millions all over the world. Only the Communists, seeing no
advantage from their point of view in conciliating anybody, kept up
a counterpoint of invective, the _Daily Worker_ denouncing Fuller as
“that toothless troglodyte and flunky of the mill owners.”
Cardinal O’Connell, as urbane and adept a weigher of words as could
be found in the Commonwealth, suggested an investigating commission
indirectly when he urged that the governor reach his decision “by
making use of every human aid that he can possibly gather.” Fuller
himself, in an unexpected interview with Joseph Lilly of the Brooklyn
_Eagle_, said that he did not know whether to appoint a commission or
go over the case himself.
There were rumors that Charles Evans Hughes would soon head a
Sacco-Vanzetti commission, then contrary rumors that there would be
no commission after all. The _Transcript_ continued to denounce the
substitution of “public opinion in place of judicial conclusions.”
Nine out of ten of the city’s lawyers were agreed that when the
courts had spoken, contrary voices should become mute. Robert
Goodwin and Joseph Proctor, Jr., of the august firm of Goodwin,
Proctor, Field and Hoar, felt it their civic duty to try to offset
the unaccountable aberration of Ropes, Gray, Boyden and Perkins by
declaring that for Fuller to appoint a fact-finding commission would
be an abdication of the powers of his office.
Although the Massachusetts Supreme Court could not reply directly
to its critics, it managed to find a semiofficial defense in the
pamphlet “Sacco and Vanzetti in the Scales of Justice,” written and
published by its Reporter of Decisions, Ethelbert Vincent Grabill.
For the reporter, the Massachusetts legal structure was a parthenon
inherited from the Puritans, and he claimed that he had been moved
by the spirit of his ancestors to attempt to “bring a wandering
citizenry back to confidence in our courts, in their proceedings,
and in our Governor, and fortify and strengthen those who have not
wandered.” Grabill was untroubled by the proceedings at Dedham. For
him it was “doubtful if Judge Thayer’s charge was ever equalled for
clearness, completeness and fairness.” He considered it presumptuous
for anyone to ask the governor to appoint a review commission, and
complained that “having persons passing around ... petitions on the
subject tends to stir up opposition to our Constitution and laws.”
Not until two weeks after the sentencing did Fuller finally ask
District Attorney Ranney for the Sacco-Vanzetti records. On May 4
Thompson brought the governor a formal petition in which Vanzetti
asked to be set free from his sentence. Carefully Vanzetti avoided
the word _pardon_ with its connotation of admitted guilt; he
emphasized that he was asking for justice, not mercy. He pointed out
to the governor that it would be unlikely for robbers to linger near
the scene of a crime “in order to address public meetings in behalf
of persecuted radicals.” Beyond this, the lengthy presentation was
mostly a recapitulation of points that had been made in the various
motions—Proctor’s equivocations, the dubious character of the chief
witnesses, Judge Thayer’s prejudice, and the issue of radicalism.
The petition came from Vanzetti alone. True to his resolve to take no
further part in the defense, Sacco refused to sign it. As a result,
he was again examined to determine whether he should be considered
mentally responsible. Dr. Abraham Meyerson, who conducted the
examination, reported that:
_There is no question that the seven years of his incarceration,
mainly without employment and entirely preoccupied by his situation,
have helped bring about an abnormal state in which his fanaticism
has been intensified to an obsession. Though he is not insane, his
inaccessibility to all reasoning and his emotional reactions are
pathological. His mind has lost the flexibility which enables a man
to adjust normally to situations._
Governor Fuller received the petition without comment. On May 8 he
tripped going upstairs and tore a tendon in his left leg. While he
was confined to his Beacon Street house, reporters noted that among
his visitors were the McAnarney brothers and ex-District Attorney
Katzmann.
The first real inkling of what was going on behind the wrought iron
gates of 150 Beacon Street was provided on May 12 when Will Rogers,
the gum-chewing lariat-swinging comedian-philosopher, appeared
in Boston for a one-night benefit at the Opera House. Before the
performance he had visited Governor Fuller. “I don’t know anything
about this murder case that is interesting you in Massachusetts,”
Rogers told his Opera House audience, “but I want to tell you that
your governor is working on it. I stopped in on my way here to sit
with him for a few moments and I found him in his room with crutches
by his side. He had three or four pistols, and he had a big pile of
books, the record of the case, and he is working away at it. I don’t
know what he is going to decide, of course, but I do know that he
isn’t going to be skeered into deciding it, and I do know that when
he makes his decision, it’s going to be a decision he believes right
down through him. He’s terribly anxious about it, but he is going to
get all the facts.”
It was clear at last that Governor Fuller was going to do his
own investigating. Day after day now the newspapers recorded the
appearance of witnesses old and new, first at 150 Beacon Street and
then at the executive chambers in the State House. Through the late
spring weeks the governor interviewed the eleven surviving Dedham
jurors and the twelve from Plymouth, Judge Thayer, and as many of the
original witnesses as could be located, as well as the “suppressed”
witness, Roy Gould. One day it was observed that he took Beltrando
Brini to lunch. Another day he spent several hours with Lola Andrews’
son, now Corporal Hassam of the U.S. Marine Corps. Assisting him were
his sharp, bald, thin-lipped private counsel, Joseph Wiggin, his
confidential secretary, Herman MacDonald, and Lieutenant Governor
Frank Allen. Reporters could get no information from the gruff
MacDonald, whose function was to act as a buffer between the governor
and the external world. This function he exercised with a gusto that
earned him the nickname of Hard-boiled Herman and the dislike of
newspapermen and State House employees generally.
When the Defense Committee protested against the secrecy of the
governor’s hearings, Fuller began consulting with Thompson and
Ehrmann. He refused, however, to allow representatives of the defense
to confront witnesses in his presence.
Vanzetti was convinced that the governor must have had him and
Sacco in mind when he wrote his article “Why I Believe in Capital
Punishment,” for the December 1926 issue of _Success Magazine_. He
wrote Mrs. Evans not “to expect that Fuller will stand against the
judiciary, the middle class, the big money in behalf of two damned
dagos and anarchists.”
Nevertheless, as the weeks wore away with their succession of
witnesses, Fuller appeared uneasy and uncertain. Robert Lincoln
O’Brien, sitting next to him at a Boston University commencement
dinner, hesitantly brought up the subject of Sacco and Vanzetti. Far
from objecting, Fuller seemed eager to talk about it. He said he felt
it was abhorrent that one man should have the decision in a capital
case, that O’Brien would be surprised at the way much of the trial
testimony had collapsed. According to O’Brien’s later account, Fuller
then told him he was going to settle the case in such a way that he
could live with his conscience.
* * * * *
As in Elizabethan tragic drama, there now occurred a clown’s
interlude, furnished by Edward Holton James, the bearded pipe-smoking
son of William and Henry James’ black-sheep alcoholic brother,
Robertson. James was a dilettante with a town house on Mount Vernon
Street and a country estate in Concord that had two houses, one for
his wife and one for himself, where he built and repaired musical
instruments. He described himself variously as a musician and as
a lawyer—though whether he practiced either law or the violin was
questionable. “The millionaire pacifist,” as the newspapers tagged
him, had written a shrill pamphlet on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, a
counterblast to Grabill’s effort, in which he announced:
_You had a crazy judge and jury in Plymouth. You had the same crazy
judge with another crazy jury in Dedham. You had a crazy Supreme
Court of Massachusetts, sitting in the Court House in Boston, saying
it was all right. The whole lot of them ought to be sitting in the
insane asylum._
On April 15 James drove to South Braintree to re-enact the crime and
demonstrate the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. He had planned to
recruit his cast from members of the Harvard Liberal Club but at the
last minute found himself speeding through the Blue Hills with only
a solitary lawyer friend, Abraham Wirin, to play a bandit’s part.
At South Braintree their efforts to pick up local volunteer actors
drew a blank, and Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent,
refused to let them into the factory. They glimpsed a moment of
martyrdom when the chairman of the board of selectmen, Edward Avery,
tried to stop their two-man show, but the new police chief, John
Heaney, waved Avery back and told them to go ahead. A few days later
James returned alone to make some pencil sketches and this time,
while heads gawked from all the factory windows, Avery gave him
fifteen minutes to leave town. After telling Avery to go to hell,
James at last had the satisfaction of being arrested and charged with
disturbing the peace. He left twenty dollars as bail money—which
he later forfeited—and returned triumphantly to Boston in time for
lunch.
The pigmy sparrings of Grabill and James were succeeded by a battle
of giants when on April 25 Dean John Wigmore of the Northwestern
University Law School commandeered the front page of the _Transcript_
to answer Frankfurter’s _Atlantic_ article. Wigmore was one of
the great scholars of his day, and his monumental treatise _The
Law of Evidence_ remains one of the classics of Anglo-American
law. A Harvard graduate of the class of 1883, he was furious that
Frankfurter should have so influenced intellectual and university
opinion. He did not once mention Frankfurter by name but referred to
him with surly pedantry as the “plausible pundit.”
“To vindicate Massachusetts Justice, I crave the opportunity of
your pages to address the lawyers of the Commonwealth,” he wrote
the _Transcript_, and that paper obliged by giving his article the
largest headlines since those announcing the 1918 armistice. Calling
the Frankfurter article “neither fair nor accurate nor complete,”
Wigmore protested that the “insinuation of a ‘picked’ jury was
baseless and worthy only of unscrupulous yellow journalism.” He
drummed on the fact that it was the defendants who had first brought
up the subject of radicalism at the trial, asked why Frankfurter had
not mentioned Sacco’s cap, accused him of saying nothing about the
passport found on Sacco’s person the night of his arrest, proof in
itself that the latter did not need to lie from fear of deportation.
He asserted that if the Supreme Court had had any doubts of the
defendants’ guilt it would have been “astute enough to lay hold of
some point of pure law as a ground for ordering a new trial,” and
pointed out that the defense at the time had taken no exception to
Judge Thayer’s charge. Finally, he set off a series of rhetorical
questions that streaked like red rockets across the _Transcript_’s
staid pages:
_Is Massachusetts subject to dictates of international terrorists?
Where has the like ever been known in modern history? The thugs
of India, the Camorra of Naples, the Black Hand of Sicily, the
anarchists of czardom—when did their attempts to impose their will by
violence ever equal in range of operations and vicious directness,
the organized efficiency of this cabal to which Sacco and Vanzetti
belong?_
Frankfurter received a copy of the _Transcript_ in the early
afternoon and sat down at once to write his answer. Frank Buxton,
the _Herald_’s editor, held up the presses so that his reply could
appear in the next morning’s edition. In spite of the speed at which
he had to write, Frankfurter had the advantages of a controlled
temper and a deeper knowledge of the case. With mock mildness he
began by suggesting that Wigmore could not have read the record or
the opinions of Judge Thayer with care. He pointed out that the
prosecution knew all about Sacco’s radicalism before the trial
began—that the prosecution’s excuse for the cross-examination did
not hold. In his _Atlantic_ article he had challenged Judge Thayer’s
statement that the Supreme Court had “approved” the verdict. Wigmore
having denied that Thayer had used the word, Frankfurter now pointed
to the passage where it occurred in the decision on the Madeiros
motion. He also showed that Wigmore had accepted as genuine an
erroneous passage about Sacco’s passport. He admitted not having
mentioned Sacco’s cap in his article, adding that he had dealt with
it in his book.
Two weeks later Wigmore came charging back with another piece
for the _Transcript_ in which he accused his opponent—this time
referred to as the “contra-canonical critic”—of violating Canon
20 of the American Bar Association’s Code of Professional Ethics,
which condemns “newspaper publication by a lawyer as to pending or
anticipated legislation,” and of being behind-the-scenes counsel for
Sacco and Vanzetti. He had also determined that while Judge Thayer
used the word _approved_ once, he had on eight other occasions used
_affirmed_ or some similar neutral word. Insisting that the real
issue was whether the trial had been unfair—“a riot of political
passion” through the misconduct of the district attorney and the
judge—Wigmore held that it had not been. “If the Bar of Massachusetts
should take this body-blow lying down,” he concluded, “they would
deserve to suffer their profession polluted and their bench
bolshevized by agitators financed and led as this case has been.”
In writing to William Howard Taft some months after the executions,
President Lowell of Harvard commented that “Wigmore’s ridiculous
article looked as if there was nothing serious to be said on the side
of the courts.”
Frankfurter was not to be drawn out by Wigmore’s name-calling. His
second reply in the _Herald_ was as detached and temperate as before.
He observed that Wigmore had answered nothing at all about Judge
Thayer’s mistaken interpolation about Sacco’s passport. And it was
still a fact, however Wigmore might feel about it, that Thayer had
used the word _approved_. Frankfurter denied that the Massachusetts
Supreme Court had the power the Northwestern dean attributed to it,
and he concluded with the statement that “in no sense in which
lawyers responsibly use the term have I ever been of counsel for
Sacco and Vanzetti.”
* * * * *
Through May Governor Fuller continued his investigation to the
exclusion of all other state business, sometimes spending twelve to
fourteen hours a day interviewing witnesses and reading documents.
Since the imposition of the death sentences he had received over
17,000 protesting letters and telegrams. Whatever he decided, he knew
there would be an uproar. It was too much for one man.
On June 1, when rumor had all but settled the matter the other way,
Secretary MacDonald announced that the governor had named a three-man
advisory committee to go over all the aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti
case. The three were President Lowell; Robert Grant, a retired
probate judge; and President Samuel Stratton of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Several weeks before this appointment Lowell—possibly at the
suggestion of his cousin, Bishop Lawrence—had written Fuller to the
effect that men with no sympathy for anarchists were troubled by the
charges that the Sacco-Vanzetti trial had been unfair and the verdict
unwarranted by the evidence. But even if the president of Harvard
had not so written, he would have seemed to the governor the logical
first choice for any such committee. Lowell incarnated to Fuller
what he most admired: status, family, academic learning, inherited
assurance—the things his Packard money could not buy.
Abbott Lawrence Lowell—the Massachusetts spindle cities of Lowell
and Lawrence were named for his forbears—was the tenth-generation
descendant of the Bristol merchant-trader Percival Lowle who in 1639
at the age of sixty-seven had protested against the ship-money tax
by sailing for America with his family of fifteen. Second of the
two armigerous families in early New England, the Lowells became
one of the few truly dynastic families in America. Abbott Lawrence
was a worthy if not extraordinarily distinguished member of his
clan. Although in his early middle years he had written the solid,
pedestrian _The Government of England_ and been appointed Professor
of the Science of Government at Harvard, without the prestige of his
family name he would never have succeeded Charles W. Eliot in 1907 to
the presidency of America’s oldest university.
He was born in 1856, but his mind was a throwback to a decade earlier
than that—before the Irish invasion—when Boston was still a mellow
self-contained brick town to which he and his sisters and his
cousins and his aunts belonged, and which in turn belonged to them.
To Lowell the mass newcomers—the Famine Irish and the later Italians
and Jews—were an intrusion on the Athens of America that Boston might
have been. Dismayed at the appearance among his undergraduates of
increasing numbers of Polish-born Jewish day students, he at one time
planned to limit their admission to Harvard to a small fixed quota.
Yet Lowell, whatever the limitations of his outlook and sympathies,
inherited a rectitude impervious to external pressures. When, during
the Boston police strike of 1919, Harold Laski—then a temporary
lecturer in political science at Harvard—spoke out in favor of the
strikers, many local Harvard graduates denounced him as a traitor
and a Bolshevik and demanded his dismissal. Lowell himself had
opposed the policemen and even helped furnish strikebreakers from
the undergraduates, but at the hint that the governing boards were
considering getting rid of Laski he announced that if they exercised
this undoubted legal right his own resignation would immediately and
irrevocably follow. In that same year he took the side of United
States entry into the League of Nations in a debate at Boston’s
Symphony Hall with the irreconcilable Henry Cabot Lodge.
When Lowell agreed to serve on Fuller’s committee he did so
reluctantly. From what he had read of the case in Frankfurter’s
_Atlantic_ article, he told Judge Grant, he rather expected to find
that injustice had been done.
Whatever the criticisms that dogged Lowell afterward, he would always
feel that he had done his duty. No man would ever be able to accuse
him of temporizing with what he thought was right. The only question
centered in that qualifying word _thought_. Ferris Greenslet, the
well-disposed chronicler of the Lowell generations, remarked that
although President Lowell had shown all his life an open mind,
“it was perhaps closed at one point only, against any action or
consideration tending to show a flaw in the administration of
justice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” John Moors, Lowell’s
Harvard classmate, was blunter; he told Frankfurter that Lowell was
“incapable of seeing that two wops could be right and the Yankee
judiciary wrong.”
At the time Lowell acceded to the governor’s request he was in his
seventy-second year, still briskly vigorous in walk and manner,
although his Lowell features had begun to droop. It has been said
that people as they grow older tend to resemble their dogs. Lowell,
with his paunched and brooding face, seemed more and more to take on
the look of the sad-eyed cocker spaniel that was the companion of his
walks.
At the outset of the committee deliberations he assumed, as did
everyone else except Judge Grant, that his was to be the controlling
voice, and indeed the officially designated Governor’s Advisory
Committee became known almost at once as the Lowell Committee. Each
day when the three men returned together to the State House after
lunch, Grant and Stratton would head for the basement elevator while
Lowell would spring up the forty-one granite steps leading to the
porticoed entrance to the executive chambers. By the time the other
two arrived they would find him already seated at the head of the
table preparing the agenda.
Grant and Lowell had played together as children on Beacon Hill,
and Grant for all his self-effacing manner resented the automatic
assumption of authority by his younger playmate. Alphabetically his
name had come first on the governor’s list and he had, he felt,
more right than Abbott Lawrence to head the committee even if the
latter had suggested his name to the governor. For thirty years
Grant had been Judge of the Suffolk Court of Probate and Insolvency.
From the cut of his mustache to the cut of his voice he was a wispy
man, with shoe-button eyes and an English accent once removed, part
of the genteel desiccated Boston that after its brief literary
flowering had been withering away for two generations under the
cloud of immigrants. A light versifier and wit, in hours filched
from his not-too-arduous judicial duties he had written unreadable
novels about Boston that were at one time much read in the city.
In 1908, while he was traveling in Italy, some of his luggage was
stolen, whereupon he sent outraged appeals not only to the American
ambassador but to the State Department in Washington; several years
later in his autobiographical _The Convictions of a Grandfather_ he
was still spluttering about Italian thievery. Before accepting his
place on the committee he did have the common sense to ask Fuller
what he would do if he got a divided report. The governor replied
that he would then consider that there was ground for doubt.
Stratton, chosen by Fuller at Lowell’s suggestion so that the
committee would not seem too much of a Back Bay family affair, was
an Illinois farm boy who had made himself into a mathematician,
physicist, and engineer. As president of one of the country’s great
scientific schools he inhabited a Cambridge divorced from the old
literary associations. It was predicted that he would be of great
help in evaluating the ballistics evidence and other technical
points. So far as can be determined he never opened his mouth during
the sixteen days that the committee met.
* * * * *
When it turned to the ballistics evidence, the Lowell Committee
was undoubtedly greatly influenced by the findings of Major Calvin
Goddard, a New York expert who came to Boston at the end of May on
his own initiative, bringing with him a comparison microscope and
offering to make what he maintained would be conclusive tests on the
shells and bullets offered in evidence at Dedham. He was accompanied
by William Crawford, a reporter from the New York _World_, who called
on Thompson to ask if he would cooperate in the holding of the tests.
Resentful of Crawford’s contemptuous remarks about Dr. Hamilton,
Thompson declined but said he would put no obstacles in Goddard’s
way. Ranney, for the district attorney’s office, had no objections.
When, in preparation, Goddard demonstrated his double-image
microscope to Hamilton’s supporting expert, Professor Gill, the
latter was so taken with “the simplicity and accuracy of its
findings” that he not only recommended its use to the governor but
announced that he himself would abide by the results.
With Gill, Ranney, and Ehrmann present, as well as a stenographer and
Frank Buxton and Thomas Carens of the _Herald_, Goddard examined the
evidence in the clerk of courts’ office at Dedham on the afternoon of
June 3. Comparing Bullet III with a test bullet fired from Sacco’s
pistol, he suggested that Gill make the same comparison. “Well, what
do you know about that?” Gill muttered to himself as he looked into
the microscope. Goddard’s conclusion was that the mortal bullet
taken from Berardelli’s body had been fired through Sacco’s pistol
and could have been fired through no other. Gill, too, now became
convinced of this, despite his earlier findings to the contrary.
Ehrmann, examining the identifying scratches on the base of Bullet
III, remarked that they were irregular and almost indecipherable
compared with the scratches on Bullets I, II, and IV.
Looking at the shells through his microscope, Goddard concluded that
Shell W had been fired in Sacco’s pistol and could have been fired in
no other. Ehrmann, Buxton, and Carens did not find the comparison of
the shells conclusive.
Soon after these tests, Gill told Thompson that he now doubted his
original findings and wished to sever all connection with the case.
His disavowal was followed by one from James Burns, another of the
defense experts, who had recently become convinced, after studying
certain microphotographs made earlier for Captain Van Amburgh, that
the Fraher shell had been fired in Sacco’s gun.
Goddard’s report was forwarded without comment to Governor Fuller and
to the Lowell Committee. Goddard claimed afterward that his tests
would have been even more satisfactory if a sticky substance coating
the bullets could have been removed. Ranney had been willing to have
the bullets cleaned but Thompson refused to approve of this under any
circumstances, adding that he believed there had been trickery and
that the prosecution had made a substitution of bullets and shells
among the exhibits. Goddard in turn said he had no opinion as to the
genuineness of the exhibits, although he agreed that the scratches on
Bullet III were less clear than on the others.
Before leaving Boston, in a deflating interview with Thompson,
Goddard admitted that he had come to town with an adverse opinion
about Sacco already formed, the result of studying Van Amburgh’s
microphotographs. When he went on to express doubts about Hamilton,
Thompson produced a letter that the aspiring Goddard had written the
druggist-expert in 1924, asking his advice about starting a career
in ballistics identification. Goddard’s reply was that he knew more
about Hamilton now than he had known in 1924, and the interview ended
with Thompson angrily defending Hamilton as a man of honor.
The uncertainty that eventually clouded the reputations of all the
ballistics experts in the case enveloped Goddard three months after
he left Boston. In Cleveland, several weeks after a bootlegger,
Ernest Yorkell, was shot to death, the police arrested a Frank
Milazzo with a revolver in his possession similar to the murder
weapon. Two bullets from Yorkell’s body and several test bullets
from Milazzo’s gun were submitted to Major Goddard in New York. When
Goddard reported that one of the murder bullets and one of the test
bullets had been fired from the same gun, Milazzo was charged with
the murder. Unfortunately for Major Goddard, though not for his
comparison microscope, Milazzo was able to prove that he had bought
the revolver new a month after the shooting. Goddard attributed
his mistake to a bullet mixup by the Cleveland police. Although it
was never determined whether the fault was his, he had apparently
compared the two murder bullets.
* * * * *
In the unconfessed course of events, Madeiros, following his second
trial, would have been electrocuted during the week of September
5, 1926, but the motion and appeal based on his confession brought
him a series of reprieves. Not until late in Governor Fuller’s
Sacco-Vanzetti investigation did he see Madeiros personally and then
for only fifteen minutes.
_In his testimony to me_ [_the governor reported_] _he could not
recall the details or describe the neighborhood. He furthermore
stated that the Government had double crossed him and he proposed to
double cross the Government. He feels that the District Attorney’s
office has treated him unfairly because his two confederates who were
associated with him in the commission of the murder for which he was
convicted were given life sentences, whereas he was sentenced to
death. He confessed the crime for which he was convicted. I am not
impressed with his knowledge of the South Braintree murders._
Madeiros gave a different interpretation of the interview to Thompson
when the lawyer next visited him. Over a year later in connection
with another case Thompson related on the witness stand what Madeiros
had told him:
“Madeiros said that Governor Fuller began the interview by saying
that he understood that Madeiros said that he thought he had been
given—I think the expression was, ‘a raw deal,’ or something
indicating double-dealing or improper dealing by the Government, and
that Madeiros said that Officer Ferrari of the State Police had given
him a promise of second-degree murder if he confessed the murder....
The Governor said if he was satisfied that any such promise had been
made he would do something for Madeiros. The Governor then said,
before waiting for any reply from Madeiros, according to Madeiros’
statement to me, ‘You do not know anything about the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, do you?’ And Madeiros said he did, and the Governor asked him
if he was in the car with the other men who committed the murder in
South Braintree, the South Braintree murder, and Madeiros said that
he was, and the Governor then said, ‘So you are a double murderer; I
will do nothing for you.’”
Fuller unquestionably said something of the kind to Madeiros,
although the meaning remains double-edged. Defenders of Sacco
and Vanzetti have interpreted it as an offer to trade Madeiros a
commutation for a recantation of his South Braintree confession.
Others have maintained that the governor would not have been foolish
enough to risk his reputation by making any such offer to an admitted
liar like Madeiros.
But there is still another possible explanation. From the governor’s
attitude to the later witnesses appearing at his investigation, it
seems fairly certain that at this stage he had come to believe Sacco
and Vanzetti were guilty. And if he felt they were guilty, Madeiros’
confession could only have seemed a fraud. When Fuller talked with
Madeiros and the latter still stuck to his story, the governor might
well have snapped back that he would do nothing for him. If so, it
was a remark spoken in anger rather than a premeditated offer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PUBLIC AND THE LOWELL COMMITTEE
Not only in Europe but around the world—in Shanghai, Tokyo,
Melbourne, Calcutta, Buenos Aires—the names Sacco and Vanzetti were
by now familiar syllables and the image had become fixed of two
dissenters from the American way of life being done to death for
their dissent. Where scores and then hundreds had demonstrated in
isolated groups, now in the approaching climax thousands thronged to
vast and passionate assemblies that somehow, the participants felt,
by their very vastness and passion might force the Massachusetts
executioners to stay their hands. There was a fierce joy, too, in
such protests, a tensing of muscles, a sense of unity and a feeling
among the urban masses that in their increasingly turbulent protests
against the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti they were protesting against
their own isolation and their own fate.
To Continental intellectuals disillusioned by the collapse of
Wilsonian idealism, the Sacco-Vanzetti case was one more devastating
example from postwar America, to be set beside Prohibition, Chicago
gangsters, the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan, and the Tennessee monkey
trial. The fate of the two men was what one might expect from the
heartless materialism of the transatlantic republic that had won a
war with its money and the blood of others and now wanted the money
back.
In July, Mussolini wrote to the American ambassador in Rome “not as
the head of the Italian Government but as a man who is sincerely your
friend,” asking for a commutation of sentence as an “act of humanity
so much more noble as it is less delayed.” Shrewdly the Duce pointed
out that
_The agitation of the elements of the left throughout the world is
increasing in intensity, in these last days, as is shown by the bombs
thrown in Buenos Aires against the Ford establishment and the statue
of Washington._
_Now if the act of clemency is held back still longer it may give
the impression that the American authority may have yielded to the
pressure of this world-wide subversive activity and this impression
can injure the prestige of the United States._
_I hope that His Excellency Governor Fuller may give an example of
humanity. The example will brilliantly demonstrate the difference
between the methods of Bolshevism and those of the great American
republic as well as strike from the hands of the subversive elements
an instrument of agitation._
In the last pitched months conservatives determined to show that
they, no less than the radicals, were concerned with human rights as
exemplified by the fate of the two Italians. The royalist _Action
Française_ now protested the course of Massachusetts justice in
as shrill a tone as the Communist _L’Humanité_. The conservative
_Frankfurter Zeitung_ spoke out with the vehemence of the liberal
_Berliner Tageblatt_. Even the shadowy Alfred Dreyfus emerged from
his seclusion to announce that he was willing to go to America to
plead for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Communist propaganda continued, bizarre and embracing. The day after
Judge Thayer pronounced sentence, _Pravda_—remembering Edgar Allan
Poe but apparently confusing Charlestown with Charleston—reported
that Sacco and Vanzetti had been held for several years in a torture
prison in South Carolina where they had been confined “in a specially
constructed padded room having a mirrored ceiling on which appeared
at intervals a spot which gradually took the form of a terrifying
open-jawed creature. Meanwhile, a human voice shouted: ‘Tell the
names of your accomplices!’”
H. G. Wells, after reading Frankfurter’s _Atlantic_ article, became
so indignant that he proposed the word _Thayerism_ to describe “the
self-righteous unrighteousness of established people.” Millions read
his angry statement in the London _Sunday Express_ for June 5, 1927:
_I do not see how any clear-headed man, after reading the professor’s
summary, can have any other conviction than that Sacco and
Vanzetti are as innocent of the Braintree murder, for which they
are now awaiting death, as Julius Caesar, or—a better name in this
connection—Karl Marx._
Within the United States Italians generally were behind the two
prisoners because they were _paisani_. Their anarchism did not
matter. The same North Enders who first came to support the
Defense Committee would a few years later support Mussolini’s
African campaign and fill the windows of Hanover Street shops with
photographs of Ethiopian atrocities. Other foreign groups, like the
Jewish enclaves in New York and Boston, would find themselves drawn
sympathetically to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti out of their
socialist tradition and their own bitter experiences of race hate.
American union members never came to identify themselves with the
cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as did their counterparts in Europe.
Moore had had enough contacts to engineer resolutions asking for a
new trial through the American Federation of Labor conventions of
1922 and 1924, but such resolutions would not be presented again
until the winter of 1926-1927. In the last months of the case
President William Green of the American Federation of Labor added
his protest against the impending executions, but in the Indian
summer of the Coolidge prosperity the rank and file union members
were at best lethargically sympathetic. When, the week before
the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Defense Committee sent
out an appeal for a hundred thousand trade-union members to come
to Boston in protest, less than two hundred showed up. Elsewhere
than in the big cities with their heavy foreign populations the
American worker was not class-conscious enough to see Sacco and
Vanzetti as his representatives. He found the erotic enticements
of the New York trial of Ruth Snyder, a suburban housewife, and
her corset-salesman lover Henry Judd Gray for the murder of Ruth’s
husband more enticing than the brief final scene in the Dedham
courtroom. He took Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic on May
20, 1927, much more to heart than the erosive progress of Sacco and
Vanzetti toward the electric chair. He was more concerned with the
second Dempsey-Tunney fight, scheduled for September, than with the
Massachusetts executions scheduled for July.
In the six years since John Codman, Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Jack, and other
members of the New England Civil Liberties Committee had appealed
for defense funds, the New England Committee and the parent American
Civil Liberties Union in New York had remained steadfast in their
support. Frankfurter’s article was in a sense a culmination of their
efforts. They had by their prolonged and reiterative publicity made
the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti intellectually fashionable. Those
whose names rang the changes in the last months of the case, now made
their rather flamboyant appearance. Officially the civil-liberties
groups kept their distance.
When Moore was in charge of the defense, publicity was oriented
toward the radicals, but with the coming of Thompson and Gardner
Jackson the appeal was directed much more to what the class-conscious
Lyons would have considered “handwringing” liberals. Thompson
disapproved of pamphlet wars, of the case being tried in the streets.
Both he and Frankfurter wanted to avoid further antagonizing the
Massachusetts community. Sometime in July 1927, when the Defense
Committee had arranged to hold a protest meeting at Faneuil Hall,
Frankfurter discreetly vetoed the idea.
Those who (in that jagged term that had emerged with the Russian
Revolution) considered themselves the intelligentsia accepted the
innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti and the guilt of Massachusetts as
a matter of faith. It became a shibboleth of the liberal academic
mind, just as within Boston their guilt had become a conservative
shibboleth—in both cases a hotly held nonrational belief. Academic
conformity, which—though usually opposed to—is even more rigid
than middle-class conformity, belatedly took up the Sacco-Vanzetti
cause, in part with sincere deliberateness but more often as a
fervent avant-garde gesture. The 381 protesting petitioners from
Mount Holyoke, the 326 from Bryn Mawr, the 203 from Wellesley, the
faculty and 650 students from the University of California, the 36
Amherst faculty members, the hundreds of bloc names from so many
other American colleges and universities, knowing only a smattering
of the case, were making a reflex response to an appeal to themselves
as an elite. In May, 61, members of assorted law faculties that
included Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and the Universities of Kansas,
Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Alabama, and Texas,
petitioned Governor Fuller for a commutation on grounds of reasonable
doubt. Dean Robert Hutchins of the Yale Law School, one of the
minority who had read the record, wrote an open appeal in which he
castigated Katzmann’s cross-examination of Sacco. Three-quarters of
the graduating class of the Harvard Law School, in defiant contrast
to the State Street alumni majority just across the river, signed
a request for a new trial. Professor Glenn Frank of Wisconsin, Dr.
Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, Mount Holyoke’s
Professor of English Jeannette Marks, and President Ellen Fitz
Pendleton of Wellesley added their academic pleas.
As the New England spring slipped into summer, the roster of those
opposing the impending execution and demanding a new trial added
names as diverse as Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Alfred Landon,
Senator Robert La Follette, the Right Reverend Chauncey Brewster
of Washington Cathedral, Sherwood Eddy, John Dewey, the Reverend
Harry Emerson Fosdick, Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton, H. L.
Mencken and Dean Edward Devine of the American Catholic University.
Congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn announced that he would
introduce a measure in the next session of Congress to compel the
attorney general to open the Department of Justice files concerned
with Sacco and Vanzetti. On June 22 Joseph Moro, Gardner Jackson, and
Mary Donovan appeared at the State House on behalf of the Defense
Committee with a giant rolled petition for a public investigation,
containing 474,842 names from all countries. Two weeks later the
committee forwarded 153,000 additional names collected by the Swiss
Union of Workers.
Within Massachusetts the reaction of the general public to such
high-placed outside criticism was one of embittered, unreasoning
hostility. A former district attorney said that it would be better
even for two innocent men to be electrocuted than for public
confidence in the established order of judicial procedure to be
broken down. John C. Hull, the Speaker of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives, received prolonged applause when he announced at a
banquet that the Commonwealth’s demand of outsiders was this: “We
would respectfully ask you to mind your own business.”
Such was the reaction of the well-born and the well-to-do. The
reaction of what William Butler Yeats called “the little streets”
was even more savage. In the massed streets of South Boston and
Charlestown and Brighton and Ashmont there was a virulent hatred
of Sacco and Vanzetti, coupled with a social jealousy of the
better-known colleges and universities, a smoldering distrust of the
professorial stance, a suspicion of academic attainments as being
tainted with subversion. If the wiser-than-thou professors from
Harvard and Yale were now taking it on themselves to proclaim that
Sacco and Vanzetti should be freed—then so much the worse for Sacco
and Vanzetti!
Sans-culotte anti-intellectualism echoed in a speech of Registrar of
Motor Vehicles Frank Goodwin to the Lawrence Kiwanis Club:
_It is impressive fact that the nearer we get to the scene of
this murder the more convinced are the people that these men are
guilty.... The citizens of Norfolk County know these men are guilty.
On the other hand, in those domains where foreign and un-American
principles are in vogue, such as Russia, Harvard, Argentine,
Wellesley, China and Smith, they are sure these men are innocent....
The leader of the movement to set these two murderers free is Felix
Frankfurter._
Professor Hocking might announce with urbane indignation from the
platform of Boston’s Community Church that he believed Sacco and
Vanzetti “as innocent of that murder as you or I.” Bishop Lawrence
and the Dean of Washington Cathedral might entertain refined
Episcopal doubts. But for the Reverend Billy Sunday—the preacher of
the little streets—hoarsely saving the city from the fate of Sodom at
Tremont Temple, no doubts existed. “Give ’em the juice,” he rapped
out from the pulpit. “Burn them, if they’re guilty. That’s the way
to handle it. I’m tired of hearing these foreigners, these radicals,
coming over here and telling us what we should do.”
* * * * *
For five weeks after their sentencing Sacco and Vanzetti occupied
adjoining cells in the Dedham jail. It was the first time since
their arrest that they had been together for any length of time.
Those shadowed weeks turned out to be the most serene of their
imprisonment. Everyone who met Vanzetti remarked on his composure.
Sacco, having decided not to struggle further against the fate
he considered inevitable, attained a tranquillity that gave the
surface appearance of cheerfulness. “As you know,” he wrote with wry
unaccustomed humor to Mrs. Henderson, “I am still living at the same
hotel, the same room, and also at the same old number 14—but on the
first of July probably, they will bring us to the death house, and
from there to the—eternity.”
A friend had brought Sacco a _boccie_ set, and the two prisoners were
allowed to bowl in the yard each afternoon for an hour and a half.
Vanzetti began to take morning exercises and wrote Mrs. Winslow that
he felt a new man. His cell was always filled with flowers from Mrs.
Evans and other friends. As he described it:
_My window here is peopled of recipients, it is a riot of blissing
colors and beauties forms: a giranium plants a tulipan plant from
Mrs. Evans. White flowers, pink carnations, roseate peaches, buds,
and flowers, bush-yellow flowers from Mrs. Jack, and a boquet of May
flowers from Mrs. Winslow._
Flowers he asked for instead of sweets, though as for tobacco—as
he himself admitted—he smoked like a Turk. Being under sentence of
death, and so exempt from prison work, he now had much more time to
read and write. For Mrs. Jack he translated the last stanza of Gori’s
revolutionary hymn, “May First”:
_Give flowers to the rebels failed
With glances revealed to the aurora
To the gayard that struggles and works,
To the vagrant poet that dies._
Even the free jail days were too short for him. After nine when the
lights went out he would prop himself up with a pillow against the
wall, a blanket over his shoulders, using the corridor light coming
through the bars to read some book that Mrs. Evans had just given him.
During the visiting periods Rosa came daily with the children for
the allowed half-hour, and Sacco noticed lovingly how big Ines was
growing and that Dante’s face was burned from the spring sun. Mrs.
Evans came almost as regularly to see Vanzetti.
On June 11, Vanzetti’s thirty-ninth birthday, the two were visited by
Georg Branting, a well-known lawyer and son of a former Swedish prime
minister, who had crossed the Atlantic to make his own investigation.
The Defense Committee had planned a parade to welcome Branting,
and even though the police refused permission some fifteen hundred
sympathizers met him at the South Station and escorted him to Boston
Common. After ten days of on-the-scene study Branting announced that
he was persuaded the two men were innocent, and sent a telegram to
Sweden informing the press that “according to my best judgment, no
conviction would have been pronounced if case tried under normal
judicial conditions.”
Phil Stong, a young reporter for the North American Newspaper
Alliance, was another outsider who came to Boston to develop his
opinion of the case. One afternoon he visited the prisoners in the
jail library, later writing:
_Both men expect to die. They say so, and the conviction is written
in grave, serene characters on Vanzetti’s face.... A ferocious
mustache covers an expressive, smiling mouth. The stamp of thought
is in every feature; the marks of the man whom strong intelligence
has made an anchorite._
It was at the conclusion of this visit that Vanzetti casually made
his utterance that has been so often quoted in anthologies. They sat
there with Vanzetti doing most of the talking, Sacco breaking in
only occasionally. Yet as these Italians talked in their imperfect
English, even joked at times, the effect of their personalities gave
Stong an overwhelming conviction of their innocence. He had brought
a newspaper with him containing an account of some college students’
suicides, a sensational topic of the last few days. “I think Dr.
Frood wrong,” Vanzetti remarked on glancing at it, “when he says
student kill himself to make someone sorry. It is when he cannot
make someone sorry, he kills himself in anger at world which pays
him not attention—in despair—” Sacco disagreed, maintaining that if
he himself were dead it would be the best way to free his wife and
children. Vanzetti observed that “only sick mind kill himself.” Then
he spoke of a Charlestown inmate who had murdered his wife when he
had caught her with another man. “You know what he says to me once?
‘Vanzetti, you know what I think of all night? My wife—my home. Every
night—all time. Now—all gone.’”
A bell rang, a gray line of prisoners began to file past on the way
from the workshops to the cells, blank-faced men, their arms folded.
Seeing them, Sacco grew bitter about his own enforced idleness.
“We’re capitalists,” Vanzetti jollied him. “We have home, we eat,
don’t do no work. We’re nonproducers—live off other men’s work; when
Libertarians make speech, they calling Nick and me names.”
Sacco’s mood changed and he seemed amused. Then a deputy approached
as a sign that Stong’s time was up. He had managed so far to cover
his feelings by a forced cheerfulness but, as he rose to go, Vanzetti
spotted the lurking dismay in the other’s feature. He then began to
speak very quietly and simply as if to comfort the young man, and as
he spoke Stong jotted down the words in shorthand on the margin of a
newspaper:
_If it had not been for this thing, I might have live out my life
talking at street comers to scorning men. I might have die, 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 joostice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do
by an accident._
_Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives
of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all!_
_That last moment belong to us—that agony is our triumph._[25]
Neither Sacco nor Vanzetti had expected Fuller to appoint his review
commission. “That would impose freedom,” Vanzetti told Mrs. Winslow,
“and the men of the judiciary and of the executive want save America
by dooming us.” As for Governor Fuller’s own private investigation,
Vanzetti’s conclusion was: “He may give us justice—I expect nothing.”
At times, when he was temporarily overcome by a mood of obsessive
frustration, Vanzetti would crudely appropriate the symbolism of
the Passion to express his dilemma. In such a mood he first learned
of Fuller’s appointment of the Lowell Committee. “His this double
investigation,” he wrote Mrs. Evans, “going to be another mockery?
spitting on our face? sponge of vinager and bitterness on the top
of a lance? the last stubbing between our ribles?” As the sun moved
higher in the sky, as the elms again arched their spring greenery
over the High Street, the two Italians behind the jail walls sensed
their lost freedom in all its urgency. “Oh! that Sea, that sky,”
Vanzetti wrote, “those freed and full of life winds of Cape Cod!
Maybe I will never see, never breath, never be at one with them
again.”
On June 29 Governor Fuller gave Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros a stay
until August 10, to allow his Advisory Committee time to review the
evidence and examine Madeiros’ confession. The Dedham interlude ended
abruptly and finally at midnight on July 1 when the prisoners were
waked, manacled to deputies, packed in a car followed by a second
car with armed guards, and driven along the empty Dedham streets
and across the drab brick outskirts of Boston to Cherry Hill. In
this midnight scurrying Vanzetti lost some of his books and papers.
Both men saw the hurried transfer as another example of deliberate
spitefulness on the part of the authorities. Actually it was a strict
following of the rule that a condemned man must be sent to Cherry
Hill ten days before the date set for his execution. Sheriff Capen,
anxious to get rid of his notorious prisoners, interpreted the rule
to the letter. Even though the executions had been deferred, their
official date as set by the court was still July 10.
Sacco accepted the transfer with shoulder-shrugging indifference
as no more than he had expected. Vanzetti could not get over his
depression at the ominous change from the casual Dedham jail with
“some air, light, a slice of land and of sky to contemplate, and a
daily blass of an hour of sunshine and free air in the yard” to the
“windowless, airless, lightless ... malebolgic of the State Prison.”
* * * * *
The Defense Committee took a more optimistic view of the Lowell
Committee than did Sacco and Vanzetti. They were content with Lowell,
neutral about Stratton, and objected only to Grant. Not only were the
petulant paragraphs of _The Convictions of a Grandfather_ exhumed,
but Grant was accused of having told John Moors and Samuel Eliot
Morison that he disapproved of anyone’s taking issue with the trial,
the verdict, and the subsequent decisions.
When Fuller questioned him about this, Grant explained with
characteristic prissiness that he had not read the evidence in the
case and knew nothing of the merits of the subsequent proceedings,
but thought it “indecorous and contrary to the bonos mores for a
professor at the Harvard Law School to rush into print while the case
was _sub judice_.”
The _Herald_ and that section of State Street less intransigent
than the _Transcript_ were pleased by the appointment of Fuller’s
committee. Privately the more sedate Boston legal circles had always
been dubious about Webster Thayer, and with the recent disbarment of
the district attorneys of Suffolk and Middlesex counties, Democratic
Joseph Pelletier and Republican Nathan Tufts, who could say what
might not have been going on in neighboring Norfolk? Bishop Lawrence
was another who had long been troubled by the thought, but now he too
was satisfied. With Cousin Abbott in the State House, all would be
well with the world!
Although the Advisory Committee appointment had been announced at
the beginning of June, President Lowell was too occupied with his
Harvard commencement activities to take any action until the end of
the month. Finally, on the thirtieth, the three members met briefly
in the governor’s council chamber to discuss procedure and to receive
typewritten transcripts of the trial record. Two days later they
drove to South Braintree to inspect the murder scene. On July 8 they
opened their hearings by examining seven of the Dedham jurors. The
next day they spent two hours talking with Sacco and Vanzetti. Of
that meeting Vanzetti wrote Mrs. Henderson:
_From the Commission interview of us I got the impression that
President Lowell and President Stratton are honestly intentioned and
not hostile to us by predetermination. Yet it seemed to me that in
spite of their great scholarship, they had not understood certain
most vicious actions of the prosecution and the iniquity of Thayer’s
conduct. As for Judge Grant he is but another Thayer._
Meanwhile Governor Fuller was continuing his own daily sessions in
his high-ceilinged office with the portraits of Sam Adams and John
Hancock staring down from the walls. Secretary MacDonald kept his
watchdog position at the Governor’s right, while the bald quizzical
Wiggin sat at his left. In spite of repeated objections by the
defense, Fuller insisted on complete secrecy for whatever the
witnesses might wish to tell him. Otherwise, he explained, his office
would be turned into a bear den. Day by day the reporters noted the
parade of faces up the State House steps—the ballistics experts,
including the disillusioned Professor Gill; the star witnesses from
both trials. There was no way that either the governor or the Lowell
Committee could compel anyone to testify. Pelser, Lola Andrews, and
Goodridge did not appear, either because they refused to or because
they had disappeared.
Philip Cox, the brother of Alfred Cox, the Bridgewater paymaster,
wrote to Fuller that his brother “alone had an opportunity to see the
man who held him up, and he declined to identify his assailant as
Vanzetti.” This, it seemed to Philip Cox, “should have afforded good
reason for hesitating to accept the verdict of guilty.” But what the
Bridgewater paymaster had come to think in 1927, and what he said
in the private interview he had with the governor, remained a tight
secret.
Yet, in spite of the imposed secrecy, signs here and there made it
apparent that Fuller’s mind was hardening against the two Italians.
When John Richards, who, as marshal, had arrested the Morellis for
their freight-yard thefts, talked with the governor, he was amazed
to hear him say he discounted Madeiros’ confession. “I am convinced
it was a fair trial,” he told Richards finally. When Robert Benchley
came from New York to tell of his conversation with Loring Coes in
which Coes—according to Benchley—had repeated Thayer’s clubhouse
remark that he would “get those bastards good and proper,” Fuller
asked Benchley to point out a single place in the record that
indicated the trial was not fair.
“Why didn’t Vanzetti take the stand at Plymouth?” It was a question
that the governor threw at defense witnesses with increasing
frequency. “Why didn’t Sacco testify at Plymouth for his friend
Vanzetti?” Fuller demanded of Tom O’Connor, who was trying to explain
how the case originated in Chief Stewart’s mind. Each point that
O’Connor made, whether it concerned Proctor’s ambiguous testimony
or the Department of Justice files, Fuller and his counsel Wiggin
brushed aside. O’Connor in a flash-tempered parry accused the
governor of prejudging the investigation, and the two men shouted
at each other until their voices reached the newspapermen in the
corridor. Fuller, red-faced and furious, stood up to indicate the
interview was over. Stalking from the room, he snapped at O’Connor,
“Why did Boda skip?” Later O’Connor told a friend, “His hand is on
the switch.”
* * * * *
A new volunteer defense lawyer now arrived from Pittsburgh,
young Michael Angelo Musmanno, bringing a petition in behalf of
the two men from the half million members of the Sons of Italy.
Dramatic, impulsive, abounding in cheerful energy, with a bronze
ex-serviceman’s pin in his buttonhole and wearing a poet’s brown tie,
Musmanno had quit the promising beginnings of his law practice to
offer all his talents to the Defense Committee. Sometimes his zeal
would trip him, as when he drove down to the New Haven slum where
Berardelli’s widow was living. She would not talk about the events
at South Braintree and refused to sign an appeal. The most Musmanno
could bring her to say was that she did not want to see innocent men
punished. That was enough, however, for the poetic-minded Musmanno,
who dashed to the telegraph office and sent a telegram to Fuller that
echoed across Europe as far as Moscow:
_I am one of the two who suffered most from the Braintree murders.
I lost my husband and the father of my two children, but I would be
sorry to have two innocent men put to death. I have always doubted
that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and I hope that you will free
them and let them go home to their families._ Several days later
Sarah Berardelli denied that she had ever written or sent such
a telegram. Musmanno had hoped that an appeal by Berardelli’s
widow would help counteract the recent news that Parmenter’s
fourteen-year-old son had been caught in South Easton, breaking and
entering the railroad station. The newspapers had blamed the poverty
and lack of direction of young Parmenter’s fatherless household.
* * * * *
Thompson forwarded to the governor a thirty-three-page analysis of
the discrepancies between the newly discovered Bridgewater Pinkerton
report and the Plymouth trial record. When this was not acknowledged,
John Moors finally went to ask Fuller about it. Apparently nothing
concerned with either the South Braintree or the Bridgewater
Pinkerton reports had ever reached the governor’s desk, for he
at once turned blankly to MacDonald. The secretary shrugged off
Thompson’s analysis as “just a lot of stuff about a cropped mustache.”
Hard-boiled Herman’s job was to cull the governor’s Sacco-Vanzetti
mail, most of which he threw away. In 1926 the Defense Committee
had forwarded a protest signed by a group of English M.P.’s. When
no reply came back, Gardner Jackson stormed up to the State House.
His complaint got no farther than the anteroom obstacle of the
secretary’s broad-topped desk. “Oh, those goddam crooks!” MacDonald
told him. “Do you think we pay any attention to this stuff? It comes
in here by the barrelful and we shoot it right into the fire!”
Rosina, when she appeared at Fuller’s office on July 11, quickly
sensed the hostility behind his superficial politeness. He told her
that Vanzetti had been asked by his lawyers to take the stand at the
Plymouth trial but had refused. Young Brini, as the chief defense
witness, had, he felt, merely learned an alibi by heart. After Rosina
left the governor she spent some time with the Lowell Committee in
the council chamber next door, then went on to Charlestown where,
much troubled, she repeated Fuller’s remarks. Only she and Thompson
were allowed to see the prisoners now, since according to regulations
condemned men in Cherry Hill could have visits only from close
relations and counsel.
Sacco brooded over what Rosina told him. On July 17, after
deliberating for several days, he began a hunger strike in protest
against what the Defense Committee called the “veil of secrecy that
encourages the bias—economic, racial, political and religious—which
has been shown all through this case.” Vanzetti joined with him to
protest “the whispers of nameless informers,” explaining to Mrs.
Evans:
_But my hungry strike is progressing because I knew that both the
Governor and the commission have ill-treated our witnesses, wrongly,
and that they believe nothing of what our witnesses say. They
believe, and treat well those handful of criminals, harlots, and
degenerated who perjured against us._
His stomach, he complained after a few days, affected his mind and
heart. He found difficulty even in writing letters. As he saw his end
drawing closer he felt a longing for his own blood, for that far-off
family in Villafalletto he had not seen in almost twenty years. The
day after he began his strike he asked Felicani to send a telegram to
his sister Luigia. Even though it might be too late now, he wanted
above all to see her again before he died.
Sacco could at least see his wife, who came daily with Ines and
Dante, now grown taller than his mother. The children were not
allowed to see their father but waited in the warden’s office.
Seven-year-old Ines wrote her first large-scrawled letter to her
father, and he was so moved that even in the lassitude of his hunger
strike he sat down at once to reply:
_I will bring with me your little and so dearest letter and carry it
right under my heart to the last day of my life. When I die, it will
be buried with your father who loves you so much, as I do also your
brother Dante and holy dear mother.... It is the most golden present
that you could have given to me or that I could have wished for in
these sad days._
As he wrote he found himself caught up in an imagined idyll:
_It was the greatest treasure and sweetness in my struggling life
that I could have lived with you and your brother Dante and your
mother in a neat little farm, and learn all your sincere words and
tender affection. Then in the summer-time to be sitting with you in
the home nest under the oak tree shade—beginning to teach you of life
and how to read and write, to see you running, laughing, crying and
singing through the verdent fields picking the wild flowers here and
there from one tree to another, and from the clear, vivid stream to
your mother’s embrace._
_The same I have wished to see for other poor girls, and their
brothers, happy with their mother and father as I dreamed for us—but
it was not so and the nightmare of the lower classes saddened very
badly your father’s soul._[26]
When Fuller came for the first time to Charlestown to interview the
three condemned men he talked only briefly with the sullen Madeiros
and not at all with Sacco, who shook hands but told him courteously
that they had nothing to say to each other. With Vanzetti Fuller
spent over an hour and a half, breaking off only to dash back to a
State House reception for Lindbergh, who had arrived in Boston that
afternoon on his triumphal tour of the country. Vanzetti and Fuller
were open with each other. Fuller pointed out what he considered the
most damaging facts against Vanzetti: his failure to take the stand
at Plymouth, the revolver found on him, his quick convictions by two
juries. Vanzetti gave his interpretations of these things and then
quite typically began to talk of other matters unrelated to himself.
As they sat together in the warden’s office the two men found each
other curiously sympathetic. When Fuller broke off the interview he
promised to return later. “What an attractive man!” he observed to
Warden Hendry as he hurried away. Reporters noticed that the governor
appeared nervous as he headed down the walk to his waiting Packard.
His nervousness was probably not so much because of the interrupted
interview as at the thought of keeping America’s hero waiting.
Getting into the car he knocked his hat off.
Thompson wanted Vanzetti to break his fast so that he would be better
able to talk with Fuller on his next visit. Vanzetti finally agreed
to drink a cup of tea, and later took some coffee and milk. Fuller
spent most of July 26 in South Braintree inspecting the scene of the
shootings and driving over the escape route with Chief Stewart. In
the evening he again interviewed Vanzetti, arriving at Charlestown
just after nine and staying two hours. It was not time enough for
Vanzetti. He asked if he might write Fuller at length, and Fuller,
with salesman’s affability, agreed. In this second interview Vanzetti
felt a growing confidence in the governor that he showed in his
letter next day to Alice Stone Blackwell:
_He make me the impression of being just as you say of him; an honest
man, as he understand it, and sincere, courageous, stubborn man but
well intentioned at bottom and in a way, clever. And I like to tell
you that he gave me a good heartfull sake hand, as I lef. I may be
wrong, but I don’t believe that a man like that is going to burn us
on a case like ours._
A heat wave seared the city. Through two weeks the Lowell Committee
interviewed its witnesses. Thompson again and in vain asked for
public hearings. The committee agreed, however, that with the
exception of Judge Thayer, Chief Justice Hall, the district attorney,
and the jurors, all of whom would be examined privately, counsel for
both sides might suggest witnesses and be present to question them.
Most of the witnesses the committee examined had already been
interviewed by the governor. Sometimes, as Rosina had, they merely
stepped from the governor’s office to the council chamber.
Day after day the three old men in coats and stiff collars sat at
their wedge-shaped mahogany desks while the witnesses filed damply
by and Thompson and Assistant District Attorney Ranney struck sparks
from each other. Lowell dominated the sessions, with Stratton silent
and Grant fretting at his subordination. In the city four people died
of the heat. The grass on the Common where the derelicts sprawled
in alcoholic stupor—impervious to Prohibition—had turned to cocoa
matting. Through the open windows of the council chamber came the
summer hum of the city, broken faintly by the yelps of urchins
in the Frog Pond. Within that Federalist room dominated by the
spaniel-featured autocrat it was hard to realize that the matter of
debate was two men’s lives.
Katzmann, after testifying privately, voluntarily submitted to being
cross-examined by Thompson. Thompson accused the district attorney
of having arranged the Plymouth trial first so that Vanzetti would
appear in Dedham as a convicted felon. Katzmann said it was merely
the chance that there happened to be a June term in Plymouth and none
in Dedham. In the matter of Captain Proctor he would not positively
deny that the captain thought Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, but
doubted he ever said so.
Katzmann was followed—at Lowell’s request—by Professor Guadagni and
Bosco, the editor of _La Notizia_. Lowell particularly wanted to ask
them about their Dedham testimony that they, along with Dentamore,
had met Sacco in Giordani’s Café on the day of the crime and had
remembered the date afterward because a banquet had been given at the
Franciscan Priory for the editor of the _Transcript_ that same day.
In reading over the trial record Lowell had noticed that although
Dentamore had said he had just come from the banquet, Guadagni
said it was to be held in the evening. Struck by the discrepancy,
Lowell had gone through the files of the _Transcript_ and discovered
that a group of Italians had given a dinner for Editor Williams
at Frascati’s on May 13, eight days after Sacco and Vanzetti were
arrested. Thinking that there might possibly have been two banquets,
Lowell telegraphed Williams, who happened to be in Washington.
Williams replied that there had been only one.
With this information concealed like a time bomb, Lowell faced
Guadagni while Bosco waited outside. Guadagni now appeared uncertain
whether the banquet had been held before or after the talk in
Giordani’s Café. When Lowell showed him the account of the banquet
in the _Transcript_, he concluded that it must have taken place the
night before and added ruefully, “I was so sure of that day.” Then
Lowell set off his bomb, pointing out that the paper was dated May
14. The banquet had taken place May 13! How, then, could Guadagni
have discussed it a month before? Lowell felt he had the proof in his
hand that the story was a fraud, concocted by Guadagni, Bosco, and
Dentamore to create an alibi for a fellow anarchist.
Thompson was shattered in his dismay. Guadagni’s lie seemed too
flagrant, too utterly exposed. “If it was deliberate I do not think
you would see me around here very much longer,” he told Lowell. “If
I did not think these men were innocent I should not be fooling away
my time. And I would not resort to any means to justify an end, just
because I was convinced these men were innocent, any more than if I
thought they were guilty.”
“Of course not, Mr. Thompson,” the other assured him urbanely.
Guadagni stood there, beaten down, admitting now that the banquet had
had nothing to do with his meeting Sacco, that he had accepted the
idea from Dentamore, that it was a mistake.
Bosco was of sterner fiber. When he appeared, not only did he insist
to the aroused and hostile committee that there had been a banquet
for Commandante Williams on April 15 but that he had printed an
account of it on the sixteenth in _La Notizia_. Lowell stared at him
with contempt. “It is perfectly obvious that is not so,” he remarked
coldly. Thompson could scarcely control himself as he turned on the
still-defiant Italian:
“You can trust Mr. Lowell for that. He has investigated it. He knows
there was no banquet on the fifteenth.”
When Bosco remained adamant, Lowell ordered him to bring in the files
of _La Notizia_ for April and May 1920. Next morning Bosco and a
revived Guadagni appeared with the paper of April 16, 1920. There on
the front page was the vindicating notice:
_Yesterday the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street gave a
luncheon in honor of the new Commandante Williams, editor of the_
Boston Evening Transcript.
Lowell sent the Italians out of the room and put a telephone call
through to Williams. This time the _Transcript_ editor recalled the
earlier luncheon. Lowell turned to the stenographer, who had begun to
record the conversation, and told him not to take down “colloquies.”
He summoned Bosco and Guadagni back, shook hands with them, told them
he believed them to be honest, and that he regretted his mistake.[27]
Thompson tried to impress on the committee that since the alibi had
been reestablished, it must again be taken seriously. Lowell did not
reply. Grant remarked that “You are just back where you were before.”
Lottie Tatillo, though presented to the committee a few days later as
a new witness, could scarcely be considered new by either side. Both
prosecution and defense had been aware of her and her story since the
summer of 1920, when she made a statement to Brouillard and Stewart
that on the morning of April 15 she had seen Sacco and Vanzetti in
South Braintree.
Everyone in South Braintree knew Lottie by her maiden name of
Packard. In 1901, when she was fourteen, she had gone to work in the
stitching room of Rice & Hutchins. Pretty and wayward, full of wild
stories, she would take the path down behind the millpond evenings
with any good-looking young fellow from the factory. “Twelve ounces
to the pound,” Frank Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, described
her. “A nut. She is crazy and has been for years,” was Police Chief
Gallivan’s opinion.
After Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Lottie told Jackson that
she had seen Sacco in South Braintree the day of the murders and
remembered he used to work in Rice & Hutchins. Later she elaborated
on this story to John Shea, the local policeman, who passed her on
to Stewart and Brouillard. She claimed she had recognized Sacco’s
picture in the paper after his arrest because she had known him in
1915; when he was working in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins.
On the morning of April 15 on her way to lunch she had passed him on
Pearl Street standing near a shiny Buick touring car. She noticed him
bite his lip and then all of a sudden it came back to her that he was
the fellow named Sacco who used to work in the factory as a laster.
She would never forget him because once in a temper he had thrown a
last across the room at a boy and it had struck her in the foot.
If Lottie’s story was true, she would stand out as the most important
witness of the murder day, the only one who had known Sacco
previously and had then seen him at the scene of the crime. And if
she had told her story to Jackson or Shea the day after the holdup,
when no one in South Braintree had even suspected Sacco, that would
indeed have made an almost watertight case for the prosecution. But
Lottie had said nothing, nothing to Carlos Goodridge or anyone else,
until after Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and their pictures
had appeared in the paper. Stewart could find no record of Sacco’s
ever having worked at Rice & Hutchins. It is of course possible that
Lottie had seen Sacco during the week or so he worked in the factory
under the name of Mosmacotelli in October 1917, and if before the
arrests she had identified the man she had seen in the stitching room
then with the man she claimed she saw standing by the Buick on April
15, 1920, this would have come close to being conclusive. Even after
the arrests such an identification from a more stable person might
have carried weight. But, as LaBrecque, the Quincy reporter, later
explained to the committee, Lottie would tell one story one night and
another the next and make so many irresponsible statements there was
no use believing her. Stewart and Brouillard had long ago made the
same discovery. Whenever they tried to check up on her account, she
would take each question as an insult, denouncing both them and Sacco
and Vanzetti incoherently. Finally Stewart gave up. “A blister,” he
decided, as he struck her off his list of witnesses.
In the autumn of 1920 Moore had got wind of Lottie’s potentially
dangerous testimony and sent down a Joseph Mina from East Boston to
see what he could find out about her. Mirra, under the name of Joseph
Meyers, got himself a job as a vamper in the finishing room of Rice &
Hutchins and found it easy enough to strike up an acquaintance with
the accommodating Lottie. He made several dates with her, taking her
to the pictures at Gordon’s Olympia in Boston and to the amusement
park at Revere Beach. Each time he took her out he tried to pump her
about Sacco and Vanzetti. One night when he took her to his house in
East Boston for supper and felt he had broken the ice sufficiently,
he asked her if she would tell what she knew to a lawyer friend of
his. She agreed, and the two of them went to Moore’s Tremont Row
office.
Moore and several others were waiting with a stenographer when Lottie
and Mirra arrived. Lottie was voluble. She again said that she had
known Sacco in 1915. The morning of the murders when she passed him
on Pearl Street he was standing near the Buick wearing a derby,[28]
and looking as if he were in a hurry. Vanzetti, whom she had never
seen before, was standing on the other side of the street and called
across to Sacco as she passed: “I wish you would hurry up and get
this over. I have an appointment at 3:30 this afternoon in Providence
to dig clams.” After Sacco was arrested she said she had seen his
picture and asked the other girls in the factory: “What has Sacco
done?” They told her he was being held for murder.
Lottie told Moore she had informed Shea, the day after the crime,
that one of the men by the car was the one who had thrown the last
at her. But, she told Moore, she did not want to testify in court.
She had not come to ask him for money, but she saw no way of avoiding
going on the stand except to leave the state for a while. She
continued, according to the stenographic record, “I am pretty sure
that Mr. Sacco was the man who done the murder. It is his wife that
holds me back. I think she needs him.... I’ll tell you the truth. I
am not a girl crazy for money or anything like that.”
“How much are you willing to suggest that you want?” Moore asked her
finally.
“I don’t know,” she told him calculatingly. “I just came to help you
on the defense case.”
Lottie’s story as she presented it to the Lowell Committee had
altered singularly since that November evening, seven years earlier,
at Tremont Row. Whenever Thompson challenged her, she stormed at
him until her voice rang down the corridors. “I don’t remember,”
she replied at one point to a question of Lowell’s, “my head is too
full of music and things like that, to remember.” She now insisted
that Sacco had worked for Rice & Hutchins in 1908 at the time of a
strike—it was then and only then she had known him. That was the
time when he had struck her with the last, and she had thought to
herself: “That man will do something before he dies.” She denied
ever having told Moore she had known Sacco in 1915, or that when she
saw him on the street in 1920 he was wearing a derby. He was, she
told Lowell, bareheaded. When Lowell first asked her whether she
had seen Sacco on April 15 she replied: “I don’t say I saw him. I
will never say I saw him, and I don’t think it was him now.” A few
minutes later, however, she revived her story of seeing him by the
car with Vanzetti across the street talking about clams, this time
with Parmenter, the paymaster, standing in the background. After she
came back from lunch she had told Frank Jackson she had seen Sacco.
She did not tell Shea about this until after the men’s arrest.
When Thompson produced her 1920 statement that she had told Shea
about Sacco the day after the crime, she raged: “No, I did not
tell it to John Shea. How many times do you want me to answer that
question? I will tell the truth at the Divine bar of Justice, and
that has got more power than you have got. You have got a witness
here that you cannot make waver.”
Judge Grant, trying to calm her, brought her a glass of water and
accidentally spilled some down her back. Still trying to be helpful,
he suggested she might have lunch now. “I don’t want any lunch,” she
snapped, glaring at Thompson. “I have got enough lunch listening to
this man here, he’s good enough lunch for anybody.”
When Thompson remarked that she had gone to Moore voluntarily, her
voice rose to a shriek: “Who came to Moore voluntarily? You lie,
I did not; I was brought to Moore, for Sacco and Vanzetti to do a
dirty, rotten, nasty thing! I will make you prove your statement.”
She now insisted that Moore had offered her five hundred dollars to
leave the state, an offer she had indignantly refused. Thompson sent
her into another tantrum when he suggested she was trying to get
money from Moore. When Lowell finally dismissed her, she left the
room still spluttering.
A few days later Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, made his
appearance in the council chamber. He admitted that Lottie had told
him of seeing Sacco, but only after Sacco was in jail. Before his
arrest she had never mentioned Sacco to anyone. Only afterward had
she come out with her story of talking with him on the street the
morning of April 15. Jackson had no memory of Sacco’s working in the
factory, and there was no record of his having worked there.
Lottie, following her turbulent session with Thompson, swung round
again a few hours later and told a sympathetic _Post_ reporter that
she was now convinced that the man she had seen was not Sacco and
that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
* * * * *
One of the new discoveries claimed by the defense concerned the cap
found by Berardelli’s body—the cap that the prosecution had tried
to prove belonged to Sacco. Williams had pointed out the tear in
the lining, implying that Sacco had made it by hanging his cap on a
nail at the factory. It was a corroborative point mentioned several
times during the trial and later by Judge Thayer in his ruling on the
Madeiros motion.
Not until shortly before the Lowell Committee began its meetings was
the point again raised. Then Tom O’Connor, combing South Braintree
for new evidence, had the thought that he might pick up something
from the now-retired Chief Gallivan. He found him weeding in his
garden and quite willing to talk. The first thing they talked about
was the cap Loring had picked up.
Gallivan said that the Saturday after the murder Fraher called him
from Rice & Hutchins to say he had a cap found on the street after
the murders. That evening Gallivan went to pick it up. The autumn
before, he had been able to identify the remains of a man who had
hanged himself in the Braintree woods by the name inked into the
lining of the man’s cap. With that identification in mind, he ripped
a hole in the lining of the cap Fraher gave him. Finding neither name
nor marks, he tossed the cap under the seat of his car. There it
stayed for a week or two until John Scott of the State Police asked
him for it.
For O’Connor the tear in the cap seemed a tear in the very fabric
of the prosecution’s case. He gave his information to Thompson, and
Gallivan was summoned before the Lowell Committee. The ex-chief
readily admitted that there was no hole in the cap’s lining before
he got his hands on it, and said he told Scott he himself had made
the tear. Tampering with evidence was a concept alien to his naïve
mind; he still could see nothing wrong in what he had done. Katzmann,
when the tear in the cap was brought to his attention, insisted that
this was the first time he had ever heard of it—that if he had known
about it during the trial, he would have explained it to the jury.
Although Thompson argued that an important piece of evidence relied
on by the prosecution had now turned out to be false, and that this
alone should be sufficient grounds for a new trial or for clemency,
the committee members did not appear impressed.
The confidentially verbose Dr. Hamilton again came from Auburn to
defend his ballistics theses before the committee and to repeat his
conversation with the conscience-stricken Proctor. Whether or not
the committee had read the Dedham file on Hamilton, Ranney obviously
had, for he ticked off the ex-druggist’s extraordinary expertise and
ended with a reference to the Stielow case that made Hamilton jump.
Major Goddard’s apparently definitive report had been read, and the
committee was also much more aware than the jury had been that the
six obsolete Winchester bullets found on Sacco were similar to Bullet
III.
Thompson now produced Wilbur Turner, a self-designated criminologist,
who had just examined the four Berardelli bullets at Dedham and found
“a tremendous difference” between the markings on the base of Bullet
III and the others, “as though they were made with a different tool
or scratched with a different instrument.” And Thompson spelled
out for the record his bitter conviction that Captain Proctor had
substituted a fake bullet test-fired from Sacco’s gun for the genuine
bullet taken by Dr. Magrath from Berardelli’s body.
The hot days slipped by, the old autocrat met his two colleagues
with austere condescension each morning, and the parade of witnesses
continued. Lowell felt—he would feel this way for the rest of his
life—that he was performing a disagreeable civic duty because such
was the obligation of a Lowell. In essence the committee bearing
his name was conducting a second trial, but it had without his
conscious awareness become a trial in which the Commonwealth was the
defendant. What the Lowell Committee was taking on itself to decide
was not whether Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial and were
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but whether the presumably innocent
Commonwealth had beyond a reasonable doubt erred. In the beginning
Thompson and Ehrmann, as Harvard graduates, had pinned their hopes
on Lowell, but after the Guadagni-Bosco episode Lowell began to seem
more the challenger than the judge. The two lawyers had the uneasy
feeling that evidence and argument were becoming useless, and even
considered whether or not they should boycott the hearings.
_The doom of our clients seemed as inevitable as that of Socrates_
[_Ehrmann wrote afterward_], _and we were unwilling to continue in
the farce of fair treatment. We were diverted from this course,
however, by two outstanding jurists_ [_Dean Pound and Professor
Frankfurter_], _who inspired us with some semblance of hope. Theirs
was perhaps the greater wisdom, since, had we withdrawn, it would
have been said that we had lost faith in the cause of our clients._
By Saturday, July 23, the committee members had run through their
witnesses, from Cox the paymaster to Rosen the peddler, Gould, the
Hayes and Kennedy girls—everyone they thought might add anything new
to the case. Lincoln Wadsworth, still working for Iver Johnson, and
afraid that his Dedham testimony had been misinterpreted, told the
committee that although the revolver found on Vanzetti might have
been Berardelli’s, “there are thousands of times more chances that it
was not than that it was.”
Lowell spent the week end writing a report of the proceedings, which
in token deference to his colleagues he referred to as an abstract.
Monday the committee spent listening to the closing arguments of
Thompson and Ehrmann, followed by Ranney for the Commonwealth.
Then, when the humid council chamber was at last empty, Lowell
handed typewritten copies of his abstract to his colleagues, saying
off-handedly that it was just a suggestion, of course, but would they
look it over?
The next day the three met privately in the Faculty Room of Harvard’s
University Hall. The autocrat of the faculty table having made up
his mind in writing, all he wanted from the silent physicist and the
garrulous poetaster was confirmation. They spent that day and the
next discussing minor details of the abstract. “So fully did we find
ourselves in agreement,” Grant admitted later, “that though many
alterations were made in it, they were chiefly of phraseology and
shades of expression rather than the substantive point of view.”
On the afternoon of July 27 at ten minutes past five Lowell,
Stratton, and Grant, sphinx-faced, entered the executive offices of
the State House, each carrying a brown manila folder with a signed
copy of the revised abstract-report.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] An English writer, Edward Shanks, thought that these paragraphs
compared with the _Gettysburg Address_ but doubted that Vanzetti had
ever uttered them. Stong defended himself by saying that he could not
write that well, that he had supplied only the exclamation marks,
and that these would have been better left out. “It seems to me,” he
wrote, “that the internal evidence of that interview is sufficient
to convince any honorably disposed person of its authenticity. The
change of number in the pronoun was beautifully characteristic of
Vanzetti. ‘I’ unmarked, unknown, a failure—but ‘Our’ career, triumph,
work for tolerance and justice.” This version that Stong gave in the
New York _World_ of May 13, 1927, differs, nevertheless, in several
places from the one he printed in 1949 in his essay on the case in
_The Aspirin Age_.
[26] The original of this letter is not available. The published
version has undoubtedly been edited.
[27] The transcript of the committee hearings merely states that
Bosco appeared as requested on July 15 with editions of _La Notizia_.
The omission from the record of what followed has been much
criticized by defenders of Sacco and Vanzetti.
[28] A photograph of Sacco reproduced in the papers after his arrest
showed him wearing a derby.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
AUGUST 1927
Governor Fuller continued hearing witnesses until the end of July.
Obviously he was not going to draw his own conclusions or even appear
to have drawn them before taking his cue from the Lowell Committee.
In an interview with Jackson and Felicani he asked them flatly how
he could be expected to believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling
eels on December 24. “I am a businessman,” he told them. “I am used
to proof before I decide anything. There isn’t a single document in
the case proving that Vanzetti sold eels. There’s only the word of
his Italian friends.”
Spurred by the governor’s disbelief and furnished with a sketch map
by Vanzetti, Felicani and Ehrmann made the rounds of the waterfront
wholesale fish dealers. Finally, at 112 Atlantic Avenue, they found
that one of the partners of Corso & Gambino remembered shipping
fish to Vanzetti in 1919. The firm had then been Corso & Cannizzo.
Ehrmann and Felicani dug away for hours among Corso’s dusty account
books until at last they uncovered what they had almost given up
hope of finding, an American Express Company receipt showing that on
Saturday, December 20, 1919, a forty-pound barrel of eels had been
shipped with C.O.D. charges of $21.79 to B. Vanzetti, Plymouth.
The eels must have been delivered either on Monday or Tuesday. Mary
Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, had testified they arrived “either
the twenty-second or the twenty-third, I do not remember exactly.”
She said the expressman had brought the barrel at about half-past
nine in the morning, when Vanzetti was out, and as she had no money
to pay him he had taken it away and come back later. “After one
Monday Vanzetti and the express came back” was the awkward way the
interpreter translated her explanation. Ehrmann took “after one
Monday” to mean “the following day.” Vanzetti would have received
his eels on Tuesday, spent Tuesday night cleaning them, and on
Wednesday—the morning of the Bridgewater holdup attempt—he would have
been busy making his deliveries. Ehrmann thought at last he had found
the key to unlock the doors of the state prison. He and Felicani took
the yellowed express receipt to Thompson who, in Fuller’s absence,
handed it over to the governor’s secretary—and that was the last they
heard of it.
* * * * *
Sunday, the last day of July, the heat wave broke in drizzling rain.
A crowd of three thousand, divided between sympathizers and the usual
Sunday afternoon floaters, attended a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting
on the Charles Street Mall of Boston Common. Alfred Baker Lewis,
the wealthy pince-nezed perennial Socialist candidate for governor,
introduced the speakers: Gardner Jackson, Harry Canter, Mary Donovan,
and Professor Guadagni. Canter called for a general strike, and Mary
Donovan shouted in a trembling voice that if they executed those two
innocent men they could execute her too. The fiery words spluttered
out damply in the rain; the crowd remained inert.
Fuller spent the week end at his summer estate at Little Boar’s Head,
Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Two days before, his son Alvan, Jr., had
to be operated on suddenly for appendicitis, and for a day or so the
governor thought he might have to delay his decision. However, just
before leaving the city he promised reporters that he would make it
known Wednesday evening. The feeling in the corridors of the State
House, in State Street, on Newspaper Row, among those in the know was
that the governor would end up by granting a new trial. Louis Stark’s
dispatch to the New York _Times_ concluded:
_Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the chair on
the date set. Neither will they be pardoned. Further reprieve pending
steps by the Massachusetts Legislature looking to a new trial was
indicated as the solution which Governor Fuller will place before the
Executive Council when it meets tomorrow night._
Whatever the rumors of a reprieve, there was no sign of it as August
began. Imperturbably the clockwork mechanism of the law advanced
another notch as, on the night of August 2, Sacco, Vanzetti, and
Madeiros were moved to the isolation of the death house. The day
before that move, Vanzetti had tried to persuade Sacco to give up
his hunger strike, but the other refused, saying there was no use in
making himself fat to be killed.
The transfer was made secretly, the guards waiting until ten minutes
after lights out before coming to the cells to take the condemned
men away. Down the short flight of iron stairs guards and prisoners
clattered to the darkness of the outer yard and then diagonally
across the inlaid brick to the narrow passage between the north wing
extension and the license-plate shop. “In coming, I got a glance to
the nighty, starry sky,” Vanzetti wrote. “Hit was so long I did seen
it before—and thought it was my last glance to the stars.”
There were only three cells in the blank-walled death house. The
white-tiled floors had a black line painted six feet in front of
each cell beyond which no visitor might step. Sacco and Vanzetti,
locked up there, could not see each other, but they could talk
back and forth. Each cell was lit by a lamp outside the bars and
contained a cot, a chair, a table, and a toilet. The perspective of
the antiseptic room concluded in a small gray door leading to the
execution chamber.
Sacco’s reaction to the death house was to pace up and down, his
energy undiminished even though he had not eaten for over two weeks.
Vanzetti, who again refused food, tried to immerse himself in _The
Rise of American Civilization_. Only Madeiros seemed unaffected by
the change. Torpid, outwardly indifferent, he ate enormously but gave
scarcely any other sign of life. When Warden Hendry offered to pay
his mother’s way to Boston, he said he did not want to see her.
Sunday’s rain continued into Monday, leaving the city and the State
House streaked with fog. Fuller returned from New Hampshire early in
the morning and again told the waiting reporters his decision would
be ready on Wednesday. During the morning he talked with Jackson,
Moro, and other members of the Defense Committee. In the afternoon he
spent several hours with the Brockton policemen, Connolly and Vaughn,
and after they left he conferred with John McAnarney. During the day
he sent for Judge Thayer, who was spending his vacation at Ogunquit,
Maine. Thayer arrived at the State House a little after six. The
reporters noted that the governor’s mood seemed genial. They thought
it a good omen for the prisoners.
Tuesday morning the governor was closeted with Assistant District
Attorney Ranney. At lunch time he informed reporters that he had
seen 102 witnesses besides those from the Plymouth trial. That day,
however, the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti was overshadowed by the
noontime news from the Summer White House in the Black Hills of South
Dakota where Calvin Coolidge had just announced: “I do not choose to
run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.” Boston political gossips
at once recalled how the vacillating governor had made himself
nationally known as Law and Order Coolidge by what seemed, at least
outside Massachusetts, to have been his firmness in handling the 1919
police strike. Perhaps there would be a Law and Order Fuller now,
another President from the Bay State.[29]
The week between the submission of the Lowell Committee’s report
and the governor’s decision was one of vexing suspense that added
to the growth of Sacco-Vanzetti militancy all over the world. Even
the apolitical sports-minded newspaper readers in America, who had
remained so far indifferent, could no longer restrain their curiosity
as to the outcome of this mortal contest. Life and death, the
seven-year issue with all its implications, now lay in the stubby
hands of the ex-bicycle mechanic.
Correspondents from the various newspaper services had come to Boston
and set up their headquarters in the State House press gallery next
to the balcony entrance of the House of Representatives. For the
first time in Massachusetts history permission was given to run in
telegraph wires from outside. The news for the first three days,
however, was scant: the names of a few last witnesses, the rare
glimpse of the governor, a brush-off remark from Hard-boiled Herman.
Time seemed out of focus. The newsmen waited in the corridor outside
the executive chambers, wandered through the Hall of Flags, made
notes in the House balcony under the suspended Sacred Cod totem.
Wednesday, August 3, broke fair in Boston, with the fog bank receding
along the line of harbor islands. Fuller put in a brief appearance at
the State House, told the reporters he would give them the news at
8:30 that night, then announced he was leaving town to put the last
touches on his decision. Actually he went no farther than a suite at
the Ritz-Carlton at the other end of the Public Gardens, where he
shut himself up with a Boston newspaperman, Edward Whiting, who did
the actual writing, since the self-made governor was not capable of
such sustained literary effort.
Just after dusk a crowd of several hundred gathered across the street
from the State House, looking up at the five lighted windows in the
left wing of the otherwise darkened building until dispersed by the
police. At the Hanover Street defense headquarters the two littered
rooms were filled with tense silent figures. Mary Donovan sat by the
telephone to answer calls in English, Moro took over when the caller
was Italian. Frankfurter, in his shirtsleeves, squatted on a bale of
papers. Gardner Jackson kept dashing to and from the State House.
Most of the others were Italians from the North End. The thin light
from an unshaded fixture drew out the lettering on the wall posters
in bas-relief: JUSTICE IS DEAD in German; CALVARY OF SACCO AND
VANZETTI in Italian; a Mexican poster demanding LIBERTY AND JUSTICE.
At the State House a score of reporters were waiting at the
double-doored entrance to the executive chambers when Fuller finally
reappeared at 8:26, his plump face set and unsmiling above his
starched collar. He brushed past, impervious to questions. At 8:50 he
reappeared, and read out a statement he had scribbled on the back of
an envelope:
“I am very sorry not to oblige you with an interview. I can
truthfully say that I am very tired and I trust the report will
speak for itself. I would prefer not to indulge in any supplementary
statement at this time.” He promised that copies of the decision
would be distributed at 9:30.
Nine-thirty passed into ten, with still no sign from behind the
closed doors. There was the same impersonal sense of tension as
when a jury is out, the same unreality of the immediate moment. The
reporters walked up and down the darkened echoing corridors, talking
and smoking. Most of the crowd driven away from the State House had
drifted downtown to Newspaper Row. Hundreds gathered in front of the
_Globe_ and _Post_ buildings to watch the blackboard bulletins. It
was a strangely quiet crowd. A _Globe_ reporter looking down from
the second floor at the upturned heads wondered how anyone could
tell what they were thinking. The director of Station WEEI had held
an announcer ready all evening to go on the air with a special
bulletin; now that the closing hour of eleven was approaching, he
debated whether he should shut down. Mary Donovan and Moro at defense
headquarters kept repeating over the telephone, “No news, Nothing
yet.” Louis Stark, pacing the State House corridor, began to doubt
whether he would be able to meet the _Times’_ 11:30 deadline.
Finally at 11:25 the double doors opened and Hard-boiled Herman
appeared with several clerks who carried copies of the decision
in sealed envelopes, each addressed with the name of a newspaper.
Stark sprinted for the marble stairs, ripping open his envelope and
flipping through the pages:
_I believe ... Sacco and Vanzetti ... had a fair trial._
The telegraph operator was still holding the wire open to the Times
city room. “_Bulletin_,” Stark shouted as he reached the door of the
press gallery. “They die!”
The words flashed across the world from the ten telegraph wires.
Within minutes they were chalked up on the _Globe_ bulletin board,
broadcast to New England by the waiting WEEI announcer, headlined on
the morning editions that would shortly whip off the presses.
The morning papers carried the full text of the decision. Fuller
announced that he had set himself three tasks: to see whether the
jury trial was fair, whether the accused were entitled to a new
trial, and whether they were guilty or not guilty. Of Thayer he wrote:
_I see no evidence of prejudice in his conduct of the trial. That
he had an opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the accused after
hearing the evidence is natural and inevitable._
The governor did not consider that any of the supplementary motions
presented valid reasons for granting a new trial. He gave no weight
to Madeiros’ confession, nor was he impressed with the latter’s
knowledge of the South Braintree crime. His conclusion and, he added,
the unanimous conclusion of his advisory committee was that Sacco and
Vanzetti were guilty.
Warden Hendry kept the news from the prisoners until the next morning
when Thompson arrived with Rosina and Felicani. While the other two
stood behind him with bent heads, Thompson quietly told the prisoners
that they must die. Sacco appeared unruffled. “I told you so,” he
called to Vanzetti in the next cell. Vanzetti seemed stunned. “I just
can’t believe it,” was all he said. Madeiros said nothing at all.
After Rosina had left, Sacco sat down and wrote an open letter to his
“Friends and Comrades.” Over the years his neat script had become
increasingly stylized, and in this moment the copperplate regularity
of his lines could have served for a formal invitation:
_From the death cell we are just inform from the defense committee
that the governor Fuller he has desede to kill us Ag. the 10th we our
not suprised for this news because we know the capitalist class hard
without any mercy the good soldiers of the rivolutions. We are proud
for death and fall as all the good anarchist can fall. It is up to
you know o, brothers comrades! as I have tell you yesterday that your
only that can save us because we have never had faith at the governor
for we have always know that the gov. Fuller—Thayer and Katzmann are
the murders._
Vanzetti’s blasting reaction found its outlet in a scarcely legible
scrawl, the direct opposite of Sacco’s passive acceptance:
_Governor Alvan T. Fuller is a murderor as Thayer, Katzmann, the
State perjurors and all the other. He sake hand with me like a
brother, make me believe he was honestly intentioned and that he had
not sent the three carbarn-boy to have no escuse to save us._
_Now, igoring and denia all the proofs of or innocence and insult us
and murder us we are innocent._
_This is the way of plutocracy against liberty, against the people.
Revenge our blood. We die for Anarcy. Long life Anarcy._
Yet by afternoon Vanzetti had so recovered himself that he was able
to give Mrs. Evans a remarkably detached view of Fuller.
_We are his opposite all at all and all in all, while our enemies are
affines to him in all-most everything. Consciousely, subconsciousely
and unconsciousely he cannot escape to be tremendously influenced and
predisposed against us. But he gave me the impression he is sincere;
had made great efforts to learn the truth and was not settled, at
least deliberately, against us, before to begin his inquiry._
_If he is sending us to death, it does not matter how honestly the
Governor can be convinced of our guiltiness, his conviction will not
make us guilty—we are and will remain innocent._
Fuller’s adverse decision was for Thompson the end of the road. There
might be hasty appeals to the state and federal supreme courts, all
the delaying paraphernalia of certiorari and habeas corpus, with at
best the addition of a few extra weeks to lives he was convinced
were forfeit. Thompson felt a profounder sense of failure than
Moore’s, for his world had failed—that pleasantly circumscribed
world of Boston into which he had fitted so easily. He had believed
that the venerable institutions of Massachusetts to which he gave
his allegiance would render justice even to two obscure foreigners,
would rectify the aberrations of a prejudiced trial and the blind
partisanship of a bigoted judge. Instead, the institutions had
savaged these men, and now were preparing to annihilate them. In
these institutions and in the comfortable society they guarded he
could no longer believe. A Harvard class day would never seem the
same to him again, a Sunday sermon at the sedately familiar Church of
the Redeemer would never sound the same. The brick fronts of Beacon
Hill would have lost their mellowness. A traditionalist still, in
the years that followed he faced Boston and complained of the lack
of a responsible aristocracy that could restrain what he called “the
shopkeeper’s mentality.” He tried to compensate for his disbelief in
his class by participating in liberal causes, taking the stump at
elections, speaking at legislative hearings and in the Massachusetts
Judicial Council. But the gesture had lost its meaning, the spark had
gone from his life.
He had already told Frankfurter that he would not continue. On
receiving the news of the governor’s decision, he and Ehrmann sent
the Defense Committee their formal resignation, explaining:
_We feel that the defendants are now entitled to have the benefit of
the judgment of counsel who can take up the case untrammelled by the
commitments of the past and less disturbed than we are by a sense of
injustice._
Frankfurter at once telephoned Arthur Hill to say that he had a most
serious matter to discuss with him. They lunched at the Somerset
Club, then crossed Beacon Street and sat on a bench on the Common
overlooking the Frog Pond. Frankfurter asked Hill if he would
undertake the final appeal of the Sacco-Vanzetti case to the Supreme
Court. Hill did not share Thompson’s belief in the men’s innocence,
but he did believe they had not had a fair trial. He felt he could
not refuse to make the effort on their behalf.
First of all he persuaded Elias Field and Richard Evarts to join
him as junior counsel. Then on the morning of August 5 he called
a conference in his office of Frankfurter, Ehrmann, and Musmanno.
It was a conference of desperation, as Hill, beneath his assured,
impervious exterior, was well aware. So it was felt by everyone
present except for the buoyant Musmanno. There were only a few legal
maneuvers left, and time was running out like quicksilver from a
broken thermometer. Hastily they evolved a program. They would file
a motion in Dedham for a new trial and revocation of sentence on the
grounds of Judge Thayer’s prejudice. They would request Chief Justice
Hall of the Superior Court to assign a judge other than Thayer to
hear the motion. They would petition Governor Fuller for a stay of
execution. They would file a motion in the Supreme Court for a writ
of error, a writ of habeas corpus, and a stay of execution.
Musmanno arrived next morning at the clerk of court’s office with a
sheaf of affidavits from Mrs. Bernkopf, Mrs. Rantoul, Frank Sibley,
George Crocker, Robert Benchley, Professor Richardson, and Chief
Gallivan. He had also dug up a new witness of the South Braintree
crime, Candido Di Bona, whose peculiar version of the event was
that the driver of the Buick had been a gray-haired man, the two
men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence had been about
eighteen years old, and that there had been a fourth man wearing a
soldier’s uniform and carrying a rifle. Hill and Field, arguing on
Thayer’s unsuitability, got nowhere at all with Chief Justice Hall,
who retired into legal phraseology to observe that “precedent and
established practice require that the said motions in the said cause
should be heard by the judge who had presided at the original trial
thereof.” He then directed that the motions should be heard before
Judge Thayer on Monday, August 8.
* * * * *
Musmanno had more to think of than his affidavits as he drove to
Dedham on that August Saturday, for the morning papers were splashed
with accounts of a series of bombings that had wrecked four New York
subway and elevated stations the night before. Between 11:17 and
11:37 tremendous explosions had occurred at Times Square, and on
Fourth Avenue at Thirty-third, at Twenty-eighth and at Twenty-third
streets, destroying surface kiosks, blowing sidewalks into the
air, and shattering windows a hundred yards away. Only one person
was killed, but numbers were injured. The same night the Emmanuel
Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was bombed, as was the house of
the mayor of Baltimore. None of the bombers was ever discovered—in
that respect the police kept their record unblemished.
Two days later bombs did heavy damage in Utica, New York. News
came—undoubtedly exaggerated—of a wave of bombing overseas. Whether
or not the bombings were the result of Governor Fuller’s decision,
a renewal of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, most Americans
thought that they were. That week Massachusetts businessmen took
out two hundred million dollars’ worth of bomb and riot insurance.
Boston police were placed on a bomb alert, all leaves and vacations
were canceled, and the police commissioner ordered three hundred
rapid-fire guns for the riot squad. Filene’s sent John Dever away on
an indefinite paid vacation.
* * * * *
The full text of the Lowell Committee report was published in the
Sunday papers of August 7. Those concerned with the case spent the
better part of the day analyzing it. It was a curiously ambiguous
document. In regard to Sacco it concluded:
_The Committee are of the opinion that Sacco was guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt. In reaching this conclusion they are aware that it
involves a disbelief in the evidence of his alibi at Boston, but in
view of all the evidence they do not believe he was there that day._
As for Vanzetti:
_The alibi ... is decidedly weak. One of the witnesses, Rosen, seems
to the Committee to have been shown by the cross-examination to be
lying at the trial; another, Mrs. Brini, had sworn to an alibi for
him in the Bridgewater case, and two more witnesses did not seem
certain of the date until they had talked it over.... Four persons
testified that they had seen him.... His face is much more unusual
and more easily remembered, than that of Sacco. On the whole, we are
of the opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt._
What had the Committee meant by the phrase “on the whole” which
seemed in itself to imply reservations about “reasonable doubt”? Did
the Committee still feel some residual doubt in regard to Vanzetti?
That was just one of the enigmas of the report. As for Madeiros:
_His ignorance of what happened is extraordinary, and much of it
cannot be attributed to a desire to shield his associates, for it had
no connection therewith.... Indeed, in his whole testimony there is
only one fact that can be checked ... his statement that after the
murder the car stopped to ask the way at the house of Mrs. Hewins. As
this house was not far from ... where Madeiros subsequently lived, he
might very well have heard the fact mentioned._
With Grant a judge and Lowell a historian, the committee’s ignorance
of the law was at times astonishing:
_The impression has gone abroad that Madeiros confessed committing
the murder at South Braintree. Strangely enough, this is not really
the case. He confesses to being present, but not to being guilty of
murder.... If he were tried, his own confession, if wholly believed,
would not be sufficient for a verdict of murder in the first degree._
According to the law, of course, an accessory to a murder is equally
guilty.
As for the trial:
_The Committee have seen no evidence sufficient to make them believe
that the trial was unfair. On the contrary, they are of the opinion
that the Judge endeavored, and endeavored successfully, to secure
for the defendants a fair trial; that the District Attorney was not
in any way guilty of unprofessional behavior, that he conducted
the prosecution vigorously but not improperly; and that the jury,
a capable, impartial and unprejudiced body, did, as they were
instructed, “well and truly try and true deliverance make.”_
However, in a measured way, the committee censured Judge Thayer:
_From all that has come to us we are forced to conclude that the
Judge was indiscreet in conversation with outsiders during the trial.
He ought not to have talked about the case off the bench, and doing
so was a grave break of official decorum. But we do not believe that
he used some of the expressions attributed to him, and we think that
there is exaggeration in what the persons to whom he spoke remember.
Furthermore, we believe that such indiscretions in conversation did
not affect his conduct at the trial or the opinions of the jury, who
indeed, so stated to the Committee._
Judge Grant felt more troubled than his colleagues, as he indicated
later in his autobiography:
_It had fallen to me, at the request of my two associates, to examine
Judge Webster Thayer when he appeared before us at the State House.
The evidence that he had been grossly indiscreet in his remarks
off the bench was cumulative. I was amazed and incensed that any
Massachusetts Judge could have been so garrulous. That he had talked
he did not deny, but he declared under oath with convincing emotion
that several of the accusations against him—notably that of having
rehearsed a part of his charge to the jury—were untrue. When we came
to consider the language of our Report, I was asked, as the one who
ought to know how a judge should conduct himself, to suggest the
words of censure. They were used, and if my associates felt a shade
less outraged than I by his unseemly conduct, it was from a due sense
of perspective._
Most of the new evidence that the defense had unearthed appeared
to the committee inconsequential. The cap with the lining Gallivan
had torn was dismissed as a trivial matter. Gould’s evidence added
nothing new. Whatever affidavits Proctor may have signed later, “It
must be assumed that the jury understood the meaning of plain English
words, that if Captain Proctor was of the opinion that the bullet had
been fired through Sacco’s pistol he would have said so, instead of
using the language which meant that it might have been fired through
that pistol.” This, of course, was an assumption Judge Thayer himself
failed to make in his charge to the jury.
The committee did not mention Major Goddard’s report, but from
an inspection of the Van Amburgh parallel photographs they were
“inclined to believe” that Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol.
They were impressed by its similarity to the obsolete cartridges
found on Sacco. Thompson’s contention that this bullet was a
substitute they considered preposterous:
_Such an accusation, devoid of proof, may be dismissed without
further comment, save that the case of the defendants must be rather
desperate on its merits when counsel feel it necessary to resort to a
charge of this kind._
They found it a telling fact that the two men were armed when they
were arrested. “Carrying fully loaded firearms, where they can be
most quickly drawn,” they observed, “can hardly be common among
people whose views are pacifist and opposed to all violence.” That
Sacco could have put his pistol in his belt and forgotten about it
they found incredible.[30] Nor did they feel that the defendants’
radicalism explained all their lies. Lottie Packard’s whirlwind
remarks, for all their flights, impressed them. “The woman is
eccentric, not unimpeachable in conduct,” they concluded, “but the
Committee believe that in this case her testimony is well worth
consideration.”
* * * * *
To the militants in Europe the reports of Governor Fuller and of the
Lowell Committee set the official seal on what even the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_ now referred to as a “political judicial murder.” Letters
and cables to Fuller, to the Secretary of State, to the White
House, poured in from overseas, a certain lack of information and
spontaneity apparent in the fact that some of them were addressed to
President Harding, four years dead. The Vatican expressed its hope
that an appeal to the United States Supreme Court “may open the way
to justice or clemency.” Former French Premier Edouard Herriot asked
for a “measure of clemency.” _Le Soir_ reacted to the decisions “with
a sentiment of profound horror.” A past era echoed dimly when the
Veterans of the Commune forwarded their protest. In Paris the police
had forbidden all meetings, but in the Bois de Vincennes just outside
the city a group of five thousand bannered militants paraded with
linked arms behind Luigia Vanzetti. Luigia, passing through on her
way to America, carried a banner reading: PARISIAN PEOPLE, SAVE MY
BROTHER AND SACCO. THANKS.
The new wave of explosions caused alarm all over the United States.
Extra guards were dispatched to the Summer White House in the Dakota
hills. Federal buildings were placed under guard. The Army announced
plans to move troops from Fort Meyer, Virginia, to Washington.
Machine guns were posted around Fuller’s summer home at Little Boar’s
Head. Harvard’s buildings were guarded. Yet Boston, on the Sunday
the Lowell Report was made public, seemed calm, almost indifferent.
Alfred Baker Lewis for the Defense Committee and Harry Canter for the
Communists had each obtained a permit to hold a meeting at designated
trees on the Charles Street Mall. On the Tremont Street side a band
in the Parkman Bandstand offered rival attractions. Between five and
ten thousand persons gathered on the Common that afternoon, no great
number for a city with a surrounding population of over two million.
Some were there who made a habit of sauntering on a summer Sunday
afternoon, others came from curiosity or to listen to the band. The
genuine sympathizers, mostly from the North End, were probably in
a minority. Nevertheless Superintendent of Police Michael Crowley
disapproved of any such meetings, and his feelings were reinforced by
the bombings of two days before. A plump set-faced man in a panama
with a turned-down brim, he waddled up the Mall to warn both Baker
and Canter that if any disparaging remarks were made about Governor
Fuller or the Lowell Committee, that would end the meetings.
In no time at all, Mary Donovan, standing on a platform with a banner
reading “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS?”—JUDGE
THAYER, proclaimed that Governor Fuller was a murderer. Crowley,
raising his fat hand, announced that the meeting was suspended. Four
mounted police edged their horses in and began scattering the crowd.
Mary Donovan protested wildly: “This meeting must go on. I will speak
for Sacco and Vanzetti. They are innocent men! They must not be
murdered!” Crowley, in an attempt to be fatherly to a fellow Celt,
observed that _bastard_ was no word for a lady to use. It was no word
for a judge to use either, Mary Donovan snapped.
As the core of the crowd began to mill about the speakers’ stands,
while the others moved away, the bearded Edward James bobbed up,
scarlet with indignation, to stutter: “Down with the police! Get at
them, men!” After a scuffle four men were arrested, including Canter
and a bloody-nosed James. Next day in police court James, in the true
revolutionary tradition, refused to recognize the judge or reply to
charges. He was fined seventy-five dollars, which he refused to pay
until the judge offered him the alternative of ninety days on Deer
Island. At first James announced that he was going to be a martyr.
Then, as the glow of the barricades faded, he paid up.
With the executions only three days off, the Defense Committee now
appealed for a hundred thousand Americans to march on Boston and take
part in a death watch at the State House and at the State Prison:
_We call the leaders of American letters, science, art, education and
social reform to lead the peaceful demonstration at the Charlestown
jail. Come by train and boat, come on foot or in your car! Come
to Boston! Let all the roads of the nation converge on Beacon
Hill! Come armed with a black band on your sleeve, come armed with
inextinguishable faith that Sacco and Vanzetti must and shall live._
Few people in Massachusetts failed to read the Lowell Report the
Sunday of its appearance. The Defense Committee denounced it at once,
the Communists derided it, but its effect—with the potency of the
Lowell name behind it—was to settle the matter for a large number of
Back Bay and Cambridge middle-of-the-roaders. “Most of the serious
and earnest-minded people who had misgivings as to the original
verdict in Judge Thayer’s court,” the _Herald_ editorialized, “have
had these dissipated by the calm and dispassionate recital of the
evidence by President Lowell and his associates.” Dr. Morton Prince
said he could see no escape from the report’s conclusions. Bishop
Lawrence, who was not bashful about treading with angels, wrote to
Fuller:
_You will, I am sure, allow me to express to you my admiration of the
way in which you have done your duty in the Sacco-Vanzetti case._
_You have been wise, patient, dignified and courageous, worthy of the
highest traditions of the Commonwealth._
Medical Examiner Magrath announced that he was now “morally certain”
of the two men’s guilt, an opinion he had undoubtedly held from the
beginning.[31]
Chief Justice of the United States William Howard Taft, whose
knowledge of the case was slight but whose Wigmorish opinion was that
the propaganda “had been created by large contributions of female and
male fools and had been circulated through all the communistic and
criminal classes the world over,” sent congratulatory notes to Lowell
and Grant later in the year, writing to the latter:
_Now that all is over I can properly ... thank you for accepting the
task of serving on the Governor’s committee of advisors in that case.
It was a thankless task and required courage and sacrifice to do it.
You and your colleagues did it and did it well. It concerned the
welfare of society and the world in an unusual way. It is remarkable
how Frankfürter with his article was able to present to so large
a body of readers a perverted view of the facts and then through
the world-wide conspiracy of communism spread it to so many, many
countries. Our law schools lent themselves to the vicious propaganda.
The utter lack of substance in it all is shown by the event. It was a
bubble and was burst by the courage of the Governor and his advisors._
Robert Lincoln O’Brien regarded the Lowell report in the light of an
umpire’s decision at a Longwood Cricket Club tennis match:
_To those of us who felt that the need of some further inquiry
existed, even after the Supreme Judicial Court had ruled that
the case had been properly concluded, it seemed the part of
good sportsmanship to accept the findings of Mr. Lowell and his
associates, particularly since we could find no three men in all the
world—were we to select them ourselves—in whose findings we would
have more complete confidence._
But there were others, conservatives like Waldo Cook, the editor
of the Springfield _Republican_, who found the report staggering.
Speaking of its mention of Thayer’s grave breach of judicial decorum,
Cook wrote: “If it was grave, it must taint irretrievably in the
record the Sacco-Vanzetti case for all time.” The New York _Times_
questioned the phrase “on the whole” and wondered “whether the
ends of justice could not better have been obtained in some other
way.” Pulitzer’s New York _World_, which under its chief editorial
writer, Walter Lippmann, had consistently taken the side of Sacco
and Vanzetti, gave its entire editorial page to an editorial “Doubts
That Will Not Down.” Heywood Broun, as columnist for the _World_,
announced bitterly that “if all the venerable college presidents in
the country tottered forward and pronounced the men guilty they would
still be innocent.” Broun—reacting to what he considered the general
apathy about the case in the United States—became so violent in his
comments on President Lowell’s throwing the switch and Harvard as
Hangman’s House that Pulitzer finally suspended his columns.
On opinion overseas, even conservative opinion, the Lowell Report had
almost no effect.
* * * * *
On Monday morning, August 8, in the Pemberton Square Courthouse,
Supreme Court Justice Sanderson listened to Thompson—now merely a
witness—testify that the right of the defendants had been violated
by Judge Thayer’s prejudice. The justice denied the application for
a writ of error and stay of execution. At Dedham in the afternoon,
when Judge Thayer opened his special session he found himself in the
anomalous position of ruling on his own prejudice. The courthouse
was again heavily guarded and the public barred from the courtroom,
although Sheriff Capen made no difficulties about admitting Rosina,
Mrs. Evans, Mrs. Henderson, and other friends. The prisoners
themselves were not present.
Thayer remained stubbornly vulnerable and Hill did not spare him. To
the latter’s passionate request that he step down from the bench he
observed impassively that the chief justice had assigned him and he
was there to hear the motion.
Hill’s anger vibrated through the open-windowed courtroom: “Do you
think you can sit on the case and consider the issues? It is beyond
human power to do. No man is so wise, clear-headed and dispassionate
that he can sit on the question whether he was actuated by prejudice,
and it is not fair to ask him. It should be before some other man,
not only because of the welfare of the defendants, the welfare of the
bench, the welfare of the administration of justice, but the welfare
of Your Honor himself.”
In answer to the motions for a new trial, Thayer ruled that according
to Massachusetts law he had no jurisdiction to grant one, once
sentence had been passed. As to the motion for a revocation of
sentence and stay of execution, he agreed to accept Hill’s affidavits
and listen to his arguments. With chill and condescending politeness
Hill, enumerating the affidavits, pointed out that Judge Thayer’s
state of mind at the trial and afterward disqualified him from acting
as a judge. Hill insisted that in all the judge’s rulings as well as
in his actions off the bench he had shown prejudice.
Thayer stared fixedly at Hill, his eyes hard and bright, a thin glow
behind his waxen pallor. When the lawyer had finished he began to
speak, his voice more charged with feeling than ever it had been
before in that familiar room:
“I agreed and always insisted with the full force of my nature that
no matter what race or religion, conservative or radical, conformist
or nonconformist was entitled to a fair and impartial trial and as my
mind goes back over seven years of lawyers contesting every point, I
recall that the case was taken on two occasions to the Supreme Court
and the court dealt with two hundred sixty exceptions and ... did not
leave one exception.
“That I am willing to be judged by—but prejudice—there isn’t any now
and there wasn’t at any time. I do this now as it is the only way
a judge can plead his own case. For seven years I have been in a
position where I could not say a word. This is the only time I could
say anything.”
The arguments were brief. Attorney General Arthur Reading for the
Commonwealth characterized Hill’s as “the most preposterous ever
heard from a learned lawyer.” Thayer at the end of the afternoon
announced that he would reserve his decision on the second motion.
Then, early Tuesday morning, he telephoned in from his home in
Worcester that the revocation of sentence and stay of sentence
were denied. From this and from Justice Sanderson’s ruling, Hill
at once filed exceptions. Privately, however, he admitted he had
given up hope. Only the young inexperienced Musmanno could find any
encouragement in the further manipulation of the bastard Latin legal
phrases. Certiorari, coram nobis—they were like the last moves in a
chess game when a player has only a pawn to interpose between his
king and his opponent’s queen.
That afternoon for the first time pickets appeared before the State
House, a half-dozen at the start, men in shirtsleeves and women in
work dresses, wearing black armbands and carrying placards denouncing
the imminent executions. Defiantly they marched back and forth,
their numbers growing to a dozen, a score, and finally to over a
hundred, watched with jeering curiosity by a much larger crowd from
the other side of the street near the Shaw Memorial. News of the
picketing spread through the State House. Governor Fuller stepped
into the council chamber briefly to look down from the oval-topped
window on the sweaty marchers. The picketing was the beginning of
the legend that in the last days of the case the Massachusetts State
House was zoned by a constantly replenished line of writers, artists,
and intellectuals. Some such did find their places in the line—John
Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others—and
were arrested and taken to the Joy Street Station on the other side
of Beacon Hill, but most of the picketers were foreign-born men and
women from the garment district.
Harry Canter led the pickets the first day, encouraged by Alfred
Baker Lewis. The Defense Committee, increasingly angry at the
Communists’ infiltrating efforts, held aloof. Fred Beal, a young and
dedicated Communist whose radicalism dated from the Lawrence strike,
was astonished at the coldness of his reception when he turned up
at Hanover Street. “Why can’t you leave Sacco and Vanzetti alone?”
Secretary Moro asked him bitterly. “Why can’t you let them die in
peace? You people don’t care for Sacco and Vanzetti. Let them burn;
it will be better for the cause.”
As the picketing continued and the watching crowds increased, Police
Captain James McDevitt was sent down from the Joy Street station. In
the pattern that would be followed in dealing with the subsequent
picketings of the State House, he approached the marchers and gave
them seven minutes to disperse. When they did not, he carted off
thirty-nine of them to the station. Thirty-one of those arrested were
named in the Boston papers. So far as their names are any indication,
twenty were Jews and three Italians.
The general strike called for that afternoon brought out only a few
hundred men and women in Boston, most of whom found their way to the
line in front of the State House. In New York almost 100,000 walked
out, the majority of them garment workers. Overseas there was an
almost hushed expectancy. Sacco and Vanzetti dominated the European
headlines. The Atlantic cables continued to be weighted with protests
that included such noted names as that of Lafayette’s great-grandson.
At the Charlestown prison Western Union and Postal Telegraph
installed eighteen wires, four for direct communication overseas. The
area within half a mile of the prison was declared a dead zone. The
streets were barred and Prison Point Bridge closed.
Early in the evening Vanzetti sent for Thompson, who spent two hours
in the death house talking with the prisoners. Sacco was now in the
twenty-third day of his hunger strike. Vanzetti had not eaten for
five days. Thompson, on leaving, met a group of reporters at the
prison gate and told them that the prisoners “continue to assert
their innocence, do not express any hope, remain courageous, and feel
they are dying for a principle.”
Would Governor Fuller grant the prisoners an additional respite
to give Justice Sanderson and Thayer time to decide on Hill’s
exceptions? That was the question on the morning of August 10. Fuller
reached his State House office at 9:30 and at once summoned the
members of his council.
At almost the same time the executioner for New York, New Jersey,
and Massachusetts, Robert Elliott, arrived with his famous black
bag at the South Station. When Musmanno went to the prison later in
the morning with a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, he noticed
guards setting up machine guns on the brick ramp running along the
top of the prison wall. As he reached the death cells and began to
talk to the men through the bars, he could hear the workmen tinkering
with the electric chair in the next room, and he sensed the sudden
vibration of the floor as they switched on the current. Vanzetti told
him not to mind, that the men had been working on it since the day
before. Sacco again refused to sign any petition, telling Musmanno:
“They are going to crucify me, crucify both of us. They have been
driving nails into us for seven years. Let’s have it over.” Vanzetti
signed willingly enough, then inscribed his copy of _The Rise of
American Civilization_ and offered it to Musmanno, who refused
it, saying he would wait until Vanzetti got out. From Charlestown
Musmanno drove with Hill—as did Thompson and a Washington lawyer,
John Finerty, later in the day—thirty miles north to Beverly where
United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had his
summer home. All four men knew that if Fuller failed to act, the only
other hope for Sacco and Vanzetti was in an appeal to the federal
courts. Holmes met his visitors on the porch, listened to them
gravely, even regretfully, but held that he had not the legal right
to intervene in the internal judicial processes of Massachusetts.
“You don’t have to convince me that the atmosphere in which these men
were tried precluded a fair trial,” he told them, “but that is not
enough to give me as a Federal judge jurisdiction. If I listened to
you any more I would do it,” he continued. “I must not do it.” With
that the old justice turned on his heel and went into the house.
Hill, following his rebuff, went on to hunt out Judge George Anderson
of the United States Circuit Court. After the 1920 Palmer raids Judge
Anderson had released the Boston aliens rounded up by the Bureau of
Investigation and had castigated the Department of Justice. But this
time Judge Anderson, like Holmes, held that he could not interfere in
state affairs.
Fuller, determined to expand the collective responsibility for his
decision, sent for all the Commonwealth’s former attorneys general.
Seven of them arrived before midday at his office for consultation.
His council began its own deliberations after lunch and continued
all afternoon. Meanwhile the pickets with their black armbands and
placards, chanting their slogans, again marched in front of the State
House. Captain McDevitt gave his dispersal warning, and after seven
minutes the police moved in. Those pickets who did not scatter were
taken to the Joy Street Station. This time the watching crowd showed
itself much more hostile. There were mocking shouts of “Hang ’em!”
as the pickets were hustled up Joy Street. They were booked at the
station, and those who did not have the twenty-five dollars bail
money were bailed out by Mrs. Evans and her friends.
A solid blue line of police extended along the cobbled paving in
front of the Charlestown prison. Prison police, State Police,
Metropolitan Police, Boston and Cambridge police, had all been called
out—the largest force ever assembled in Boston’s history. On Prison
Point Bridge a platoon of firemen uncoiled hoses and stood ready to
water down any mob trying to force the barriers. Below the bridge, in
the slimy tidal inlet known as the Miller River, the police launch
_Argus_ chugged up and down with a machine gun at its bow.
Inside the blank-walled death house Madeiros and Sacco lay on their
cots in listless inanition. Some days earlier Sacco had begun a
letter to his son, but he no longer felt the strength to continue
with it. Vanzetti wrote brief farewell notes to Mrs. Winslow, Mrs.
Codman, Mrs. Henderson, and Mrs. Evans, whom he now addressed as
“Comrade.” His one enduring regret as the hours slipped away was that
he would not be able to see his sister Luigia again. Late in the
afternoon Madeiros’ mother and sister arrived from Providence, but
he received them indifferently. The old Portuguese woman collapsed
on the threshold of the death house and had to be helped from the
building.
At the cluttered Hanover Street rooms there was the same penumbral
atmosphere that there had been the night of Fuller’s decision, but
with the tenseness giving way by almost imperceptible degrees to
lassitude. Mary Donovan answered the telephone, the shaggy Jackson
scribbled notes, Felicani bent forward under the poster proclaiming
JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE, Rosina Sacco sat in a corner, silent except
for an occasional dry cough while from time to time she abstractedly
crumpled bits of paper. During the evening Frankfurter bustled in and
out on obscure errands, his eyes deep and compassionate behind his
rimless oval pince-nez. Hill and Joseph Moro appeared briefly and
spoke a few encouraging words.
After spending the afternoon with his council, Fuller broke off for a
meal, then resumed the sitting at 7:30. An hour later Hill appeared
in the Council Chamber and pleaded and argued for two hours, begging
the councilors and the governor not to destroy the subject matter
of litigation while it was still in the hands of the courts. After
he left, the councilors buzzed among themselves. Still the governor
could not make up his mind.
Meanwhile the slim, gray-haired, twisted-mouthed executioner arrived
at the prison with the official witnesses. As usual, refreshments had
been prepared. The prison officers’ clubroom now held the largest
group of reporters ever assembled in Massachusetts for an execution.
By ten o’clock the three prisoners had been notified that they were
to die at midnight.
At defense headquarters Rosina suddenly fell forward in a faint. Mary
Donovan picked her up, took her away in a taxi, and left her at a
friend’s house in the neighborhood. When she returned she sat down
again by the telephone, and, as if she were thinking aloud, suddenly
said: “What if the finger of God should stay this execution tonight!”
Then she picked up the receiver and in a broken voice called Thompson
to ask what steps should be taken to claim the two men’s bodies.
It was 11:24 before Fuller finally made up his official mind. With
the concurrence of his council he decided to grant the prisoners a
twelve-day respite “to afford the courts an opportunity to complete
the consideration of the proceedings.” Captain Charles Beaupré of
the State Police gave the word to the reporters outside the council
chamber. Secretary William Reed telephoned the news to Warden Hendry.
Hendry was pleased, and showed it. Despite his meaty butcher’s face,
he was a good-hearted man who hated executions. With the copied
reprieve in his hand he hurried down the long cement corridor to the
death house, calling out as he reached the threshold: “It’s all off,
boys!” The three men rose from their cots. Vanzetti gripped the bars
of the cell until his knuckles turned white. “I’m damn glad of that,”
he said shakily. “I’d like to see my sister before I die.”
Back at his office Hendry passed around cigars to the reporters and
witnesses while an unheeded assistant read out the formal wording of
the respite with all its whereases and know-ye-alls.
Not until a few minutes before midnight was the news of the respite
telephoned into the Hanover Street offices, yet when the announcement
came it caused no tremor, no babble of voices, only a relieving
quiet. Mary Donovan left without saying a word to go to Rosina.
Someone, who seemed to speak for everyone in the room, remarked: “We
have until the twenty-second. Well, that is something.”
Across the ocean it seemed for a moment as if the protesting voices
had won. _Pravda_ proclaimed:
_The mighty roar of protest from the Soviet Union, together with
the voice of the working classes the world over, forced even the
plutocratic American bourgeoisie to hesitate and maneuver._
In Berlin, _Die Rote Fahne_ announced triumphantly:
_The working millions and only they in the forefront of the battle
against class injustice have won the first victory. Sacco and
Vanzetti are provisionally rescued._
_L’Humanité_ rallied its readers with militant confidence:
_Now let us exact the liberty of the two martyrs._
In the United States there was a feeling that Fuller would now
commute the death sentences to life imprisonment, a course
recommended by the Springfield _Republican_. The New York _Times_
shared this opinion, observing four days after the respite:
_Honest and fair-minded people are still disputing about certain
aspects of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but on our part there is virtual
unanimity of opinion. This is that the long delay in determining
the fate of the two men is a reproach to American justice. It is
something that is almost impossible to explain to foreigners._
Outside opposition and criticism had long since contracted the mood
of the Massachusetts community beyond reason. With each external
attack the community ranks closed in an emotional need—masquerading
as justice—to see Sacco and Vanzetti dead. This feeling was
reinforced by the bombing on August 15 of the East Milton home of
Dedham juror Lewis McHardy. The charge placed on the porch of his
two-story frame house at 463 Pleasant Street, exploded at 3:30 in the
morning. So great was the blast that little was left of the house but
the frame. Windows were shattered a quarter of a mile away. McHardy,
his wife, and three grown children were asleep on the second floor.
They were hurled out of bed and covered with debris, but somehow
managed to escape with only minor bruises.
If before the blowing up of the McHardy house there had been the
slightest chance of a commutation of sentence for Sacco and Vanzetti,
afterward there was none.[32]
The twelve days of respite were marked by dramatic defense efforts
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.
Then of course there was Edward Holton James, now engaged in running
daily sightseeing tours to South Braintree for newly arrived
sympathizers. Outstanding among the characters drawn to the scene
was Zara du Pont, aunt of most of the living du Pont dynasty. Her
singularly squashed hats, tweed suits that never wore out, and brass
ear trumpet identified her a hundred yards away. She had come from
Cambridge to indulge in her passion for picketing, for she made it
her habit to join any line she saw, often with no idea of what or why
she was picketing and—because of her deafness—with no way of finding
out. Less well connected if no less obvious was William Obey of New
York, who arrived at Parlor D with a certificate of release from
a mental hospital. When his individualism became too flagrant and
Tom O’Connor at last had to ask him to leave, he seated himself on
the curb at Bowdoin Street with his portable typewriter in his lap,
pecking away and telling the bystanders that the rush was so great at
headquarters that he had to do his work outside.
On that final Sunday, August 21, Police Superintendent Crowley was
taking no chances. For the first time anyone could remember, no
permits were given out and no meetings on the Common were allowed.
The Defense Committee had held its final meeting the night before at
the Scenic Auditorium. By the middle of the overcast afternoon there
were about twenty thousand people scattered over the forty-eight
acres of Boston Common. Some watched the baseball games being played
in the diamonds beyond the old Central Burying-Ground. Others
listened to Stone’s Band at the Parkman Bandstand playing excerpts
from _The Bohemian Girl_. Still others—the flotsam of the city—lay
asleep on the grass. Perhaps a third of those wandering on the
Common had come there out of a sense of curiosity, a feeling that
something exciting was going to happen. For most of the afternoon
nothing happened. Then shortly after four o’clock Paula Holladay in
her red slicker walked up from Charles Street and across the Common
toward the bandstand. On the back of the slicker was lettered: SAVE
SACCO AND VANZETTI. IS JUSTICE DEAD? As she walked along the mall
a crowd began to fall in behind her. Most of those following her
were indifferent if not hostile, but a few sympathizers produced
Sacco-Vanzetti placards from under their coats. She continued her
Pied Piper walk, gathering several thousand in her wake by the time
she reached Tremont Street. The police did not interfere until the
crowd spilled over into the roadway and blocked traffic. Then a squad
of bluecoats surrounded her and carried her off, along with William
Patterson and several other placard-wielders, to the Joy Street
Station. Here she was told she might go free if she would promise to
take off the slicker and not to return to the Common. Superintendent
Crowley came in person to the station to warn her paternally that
Boston was “full of Irish Catholic boys, young hoodlums, who will
be sure to try to do you harm if you go on the streets wearing that
slicker.”
Within the Charlestown prison the customary Sunday afternoon bustle
of visits continued, even though the whole area was cordoned off
by the police. The prison band played its limited selections in
the octagon anteroom, and prisoners sat in their usual rows at the
oak tables facing their visitors. So damp was the air that drops
of moisture kept dripping from the skylight struts. Because of the
humidity Warden Hendry allowed the door of the death house to be left
open. Luigia and Rosina came and stayed their hour. Rosina had not
brought the children; she did not want them to see their father in
his death cell. Sacco had been for some time occupied with a letter
to Dante and spent the day, except for the visiting hour, working on
it. He told Vanzetti that he did not want it made public for five
years. Although Sacco had planned to have its contents kept secret,
the Defense Committee persuaded him to allow them to release it
immediately for its propaganda effect, to sway every ounce of opinion
possible in the last hours.
Facing extinction, Sacco achieved the slow-moving dignity that came,
as a rule, more easily to Vanzetti:
_Much have we suffered during this long Calvary. We protest today as
we protested yesterday. We protest always for our freedom._
_If I stopped hunger strike the other day, it was because there was
no more sign of life in me. Because I protested with my hunger strike
yesterday as today I protest for life and not for death._
_I sacrificed because I wanted to come back to the embrace of your
dear little sister Ines and your mother and all the beloved friends
and comrades of life and not death. So Son, today life begins to
revive slow and calm, but yet without horizon and always with sadness
and visions of death...._
_But remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you
use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step, at your
side and help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted
and the victim, because that are your better friends; they are the
comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and
fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all and the
poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and
you will be loved...._
_Much have I thought of you when I was lying in the death house—the
singing, the kind tender voices of the children from the playground,
where there was all the life and the joy of liberty—just one step
from the wall which contains the buried agony of three buried souls.
It would remind me so often of you and your sisters Ines, and I wish
I could see you every moment. But I feel better that you did not come
to the death-house so that you could not see the horrible picture of
three lying in agony waiting to be electrocuted, because I do not
know what effect it would have on your young age._...
_Dante, I say once more to love and be nearest to your mother and the
beloved ones in these sad days, and I am sure that with your brave
heart and kind goodness they will feel less discomfort. And you will
also not forget to love me a little for I do—O, Sonny! thinking so
much and so often of you._
_Best fraternal greetings to all the beloved ones, love and kisses to
your little Ines and mother. Most hearty affectionate embrace._[35]
Vanzetti also wrote a long letter to Dante. Like Sacco’s, it was more
a testament than a farewell to a thirteen-year-old boy. Even more
explicitly than Sacco, Vanzetti reaffirmed his revolutionary faith:
_I still hope, and we will fight until the last moment, to
rivendicate our right to live and be free, but all the forces of the
State and of the Money and reaction are deadly against us because we
are libertarian or anarchist._
_I write little of this because you are now a yet to little-boy to
understand this things and other things of which I would like to
reason with you._
_But if you do well, you will grow and understand your father’s and
my case and your father’s and my principles, for which we will soon
be put to death._
_I tell you that for and of all I know of your father, he is not
a criminal, but one of the bravest men I ever knew. One day you
will understand what I am about to tell you: That your father has
sacrificed everything dear and sacred to the human heart and soul for
his fate in liberty and justice for all. That day you will be proud
of your father; and if you come brave enough, you will take his place
in the struggle between tyranny and liberty and you will vindicate
his (our) names and our blood._
_If we have to die now, you shall know, when you will be able to
understand this tragedy in its fullness, how good and brave your
mother has been with you, your father and I, during these eight years
of struggle, sorrow, passion, anguish and agony._
_Even from now you shall be good, brave with your mother, with Ines,
and with Suzy[36]—brave, good Suzy—and do all you can to console and
help them._
_I would like you will also remember me as a comrade and friend of
your father, your mother, Ines, Suzy and you, and I secure you that
neither I have been a criminal, that I have committed no robbery and
no murder, but only fought modestily to abolish crimes from among
mankind and for the liberty of all._
_Remember Dante, each one who will say otherwise of your father and
I, is a lier, insulting innocent death men who have been brave in
their life._
_Remember and know also, Dante, that of your father and I would have
been cowards and hypocrits and rinnegetors of our faith, we would
have not have been put to death. They would not even have convicted a
lebbrous dogs; not even executed a deadly poisoned scorpion on such
evidence as that they framed against us. They would have given a new
trial to a matricide and abitual felon on the evidence we presented
for a new trial._
_Remember, Dante, remember always these things; we are not criminals;
they convicted us on a frame-up; they denied us a new trial; and if
we will be executed after seven years, four months and 17 days of
unspeakable tortures and wrongs, it is for what I have already told
you; because we were for the poor and against the exploitation and
oppression of the man by the man._
_The documents of our case, which you and other ones will collect and
preserve, will proof you that your father, your mother, yourself,
Inez, I and my family are sacrificed by and to a State Reason of the
American Plutocratic reaction._
_The day will come when you will understand the atrocious sense of
the above-written words, in all its fullness. Then you will honor us._
_Now Dante, be brave and good always. I embrace you._
Not until Monday morning did Hill reach Rockland, Maine, and board
the leisurely excursion steamer that finally brought him through the
shredding fog to the granite-edged Isle au Haut. Justice Stone,
sitting on his front porch in his shirtsleeves, received him curtly.
He said he would listen to Hill’s arguments but he could grant no
stay. Another justice might perhaps feel differently.
In Boston, Monday broke sallow and heavy. The still-empty Common
looked frayed and untidy. By nine o’clock the first busloads of
sympathizers began to arrive from New York. The air was lighter
by the time Governor Fuller arrived at his office from Rye Beach
a little before eleven. “A beautiful day,” he said, smiling and
nodding affably to the reporters. One of his first visitors was Edna
St. Vincent Millay, whose poem “Justice Denied in Massachusetts”
had appeared in the New York _Times_ that very morning. Fiorello La
Guardia had come by chartered plane from New York to make a last
appeal to his old congressional colleague, but when he emerged from
the executive chambers he shook his head and told reporters that
there was only one chance in a thousand.
On this last day the governor was willing to keep open house for
any delegation that chose to visit him. To nearly all who so chose
he listened with stiff politeness. Just before lunch the newly
installed state commander of the American Legion appeared to assure
the governor that the Legion stood four-square behind him. Almost
a thousand letters and telegrams arrived at the executive offices
during the day, two thirds of them asking for suspension of the death
sentence.
Late in the morning Luigia and Rosina arrived at Charlestown for
a tear-blurred hour in the death house. Sacco talked to his wife
about Ines and Dante; Vanzetti again recalled the old days in
Villafalletto. Madeiros, who had been lying indifferently on his cot,
chain-smoking, received an unexpected visit from his sister Consuelo.
When she told him that their mother was too overcome to make the
trip, he for the first time showed emotion.
On Saturday there had been a tentative attempt to renew the State
House picketing, and Captain Hibben, Powers Hapgood, James Rorty,
and Katherine Anne Porter had been arrested. Now, as the morning
advanced, pickets with armbands and banners appeared again. The
Scenic Temple served as a supply depot; there pickets assembled,
were grouped in dozens, and sent on to the State House with their
signs, JUSTICE IS CRUCIFIED TODAY, JUSTICE IS DEAD IN MASSACHUSETTS.
All afternoon the line grew, the pickets forming fours as their
ranks increased. The line became an endless chain, its links made
up of girls and sweaty shirtsleeved men from the garment district,
self-conscious intellectuals, a scattering of adolescents welcoming
the chance to challenge authority, and a rank and file of friends
and sympathizers of every class and description. Mrs. Evans was
there. She had aged much since the trial, but with her solid figure
and rimless glasses she still looked the transcendental grandmother.
One of the younger policemen on duty complained that there was not a
good-looking girl in the bunch.
During the course of the afternoon and evening 156 pickets were
arrested. Isaac Don Levine and Mrs. Evans bustled about raising bail
money. Edward Holton James showed up at the Joy Street Station with
his pockets full and bailed away for several hours until he ran out
of both funds and patience, then found himself booed when he returned
to the Scenic Temple to announce that he would bail no more.
The garment workers in the station’s close-packed guardroom sang the
“Internationale,” and afterward everyone joined in the more singable
“Solidarity Forever.” Police Captain McDevitt had long had his eye on
Powers Hapgood. The other pickets might with luck be out on bail in
an hour or so, but McDevitt made a point of turning Powers over to
the State Police, who, instead of arresting him, hurried him off to
the Psychopathic Hospital where he was held for four days.
Crowds formed on the Common side of Beacon Street to stare at the
picket parade. Occasionally someone would dart across the street
to join the line. Superintendent Crowley, with memories of the mob
rising in the police strike of 1919, was determined there would be
no rising today. Halfway down the mall a police company with rifles
was drawn up like a detachment of infantry. Mounted police wove their
horses in and out of the gathering throngs. There were more blue
uniforms on Boston Common than there had been since the Civil War
encampments.
The day wore on. All the public buildings were garrisoned by police.
A squad even occupied the roof of Fuller’s Packard salesroom.
Yet except for the State House picketing and the unusual numbers
crowding the Common there were no incidents in the city. None of the
anticipated bombs went off.
* * * * *
With Hill delayed in Maine, the last-minute legal efforts became a
confusion of volunteer lawyers. Field appealed for a stay to Judge
Sisk—most liberal of the Superior Court judges. Sisk, for all his
obvious sympathy, maintained that he lacked jurisdiction. Surrounded
by the clicking typewriters of Parlor D, Tom O’Connor worked with
John Finerty on a new inclusive habeas corpus motion. Finerty,
former assistant general counsel for the United States Railroad
Administration, was probably the ablest lawyer to take part in the
final proceedings. This thin, long-jawed man in a white linen suit,
who resembled Woodrow Wilson, had dropped in at Parlor D on his way
to spend two weeks by the sea at Cohasset. O’Connor managed to arouse
his interest so that he never went on. He and O’Connor were convinced
the new motion stood its best chance with Federal Judge Anderson.
Unfortunately, Anderson was at Williamstown, in the Berkshires.
O’Connor arranged to have a plane waiting at the East Boston airport,
and all the afternoon he kept trying vainly to get to Anderson by
telephone.
At 2:30 Musmanno brought a copy of the completed Finerty motion to
Charlestown. Vanzetti signed it. Sacco again refused. Both condemned
men were now convinced that nothing could save them. Vanzetti gave
a message to Musmanno for Thompson, whom he asked to see once more.
Thompson, worn out physically and mentally, had left Boston shortly
after the August 10 reprieve for his summer place in South Tamworth,
New Hampshire, but as soon as he received the message he set out at
once for Charlestown.
It was six o’clock before he arrived at the prison. As he entered the
death house, Vanzetti, who had been sitting at his table writing,
stood up at once as if he had been expecting him, smiled warmly, and
reached through the bars to shake hands. Then Thompson took a chair
from one of the guards and sat down just behind the painted warning
line.
They talked tentatively at first. Thompson had heard a rumor that
Vahey and Graham knew Vanzetti was guilty of both crimes and could
prove it if only they were released from their lawyers’ obligation of
secrecy. Vanzetti emphatically and without anger said he had never
told Graham or Vahey anything that would link him to either crime.
Thompson beckoned to a guard to be a witness to their conversation.
For both men it was the most solemn moment of their lives. There was
the quality of a Socratic dialogue to their questions and answers.
The American lawyer’s low, controlled tones were a counterpoint to
the more musical voice of the Italian. As Thompson recalled the scene
afterward it struck him in its more humble way as a recreation of the
_Phaedo_.
_I told Vanzetti that although my belief in his innocence had all
the time been strengthened, both by my study of the evidence and by
my increasing knowledge of his personality, yet there was a chance,
however remote, that I might be mistaken; and that I thought he
ought for my sake, in this closing hour of his life when nothing
could save him, to give me his most solemn reassurance, both with
respect to himself and with respect to Sacco. Vanzetti then told me
quietly and calmly, and with a sincerity which I could not doubt,
that I need have no anxiety about this matter; that both he and Sacco
were absolutely innocent of the South Braintree crime, and that he
was equally innocent of the Bridgewater crime; that while, looking
back, he now realized more clearly than he ever had the grounds of
the suspicion against him and Sacco, he felt that no allowance had
been made for his ignorance of American points of view and habits of
thought, or for his fear as a radical and almost as an outlaw, and
that in reality he was convicted on evidence which would not have
convicted him had he not been an anarchist, so that he was in a very
real sense dying for his cause. He said it was the cause for which he
was prepared to die. He said it was the cause of the upward progress
of humanity, and the elimination of force from the world. He spoke
with calmness, knowledge, and deep feeling. He said he was grateful
to me for what I had done for him. He asked to be remembered to my
wife and son. He spoke with emotion of his sister and of his family.
He asked me to do what I could to clear his name, using the words
“clear my name.”_
Vanzetti, after bringing up the cruelty of his seven years in prison,
spoke of the history of movements for human betterment, among them
early Christianity. Thompson remarked that the essence of the appeal
of Christianity was the supreme confidence shown by Jesus in the
truth of his own views by forgiving, even when on the cross, his
persecutors and slanderers. Many times in his letters Vanzetti had
made comparisons between his own fate and that of Jesus. It was at
these words of Thompson’s that their dialogue, as he recorded it,
reached its climax:
_Now, for the first and only time in the conversation, Vanzetti
showed a feeling of personal resentment against his enemies. He spoke
with eloquence of his sufferings, and asked me whether I thought it
possible that he could forgive those who had persecuted and tortured
him through seven years of inexpressible misery. I told him he knew
how deeply I sympathized with him, and that I had asked him to
reflect upon the career of One infinitely superior to myself and to
him, and upon a force infinitely greater than the force of hate and
revenge. I said that in the long run, the force to which the world
would respond was the force of love and not of hate, and that I
was suggesting to him to forgive his enemies, not for their sakes,
but for his own peace of mind, and also because an example of such
forgiveness would in the end be more powerful to win adherence to his
cause or to a belief in his innocence than anything else that could
be done._
_There was another pause in our conversation. I arose and we stood
gazing at each other for a minute or two in silence. Vanzetti finally
said that he would think of what I had said._
Thompson, the believer, then referred to the possibility of
immortality, saying that he understood the difficulties of such a
belief, yet that if there was personal immortality Vanzetti might
hope to share it. The other did not reply, but spoke briefly of the
evils of present-day society—and the two men parted.
_In this closing scene [Thompson wrote] the impression ... which
had been gaining in my mind for three years, was deepened and
confirmed—that he was a man of powerful mind, and unselfish
disposition, of seasoned character, and of devotion to high ideals.
There was no sign of breaking down or of terror at approaching death.
At parting he gave me a firm clasp of the hand, and a steady glance,
which revealed unmistakably the depth of his feeling and the firmness
of his self-control._
As he was about to leave, Thompson exchanged a few words with Sacco,
who shook hands firmly through the bars, thanked the lawyer for what
he had done, and said he hoped their differences of opinion had not
affected their personal feelings. Like Vanzetti, he showed no sign of
fear.
* * * * *
However darkly anticipated by public officials across the United
States, the day passed off lightly with scarcely more than a few
token strikes. The underlying fear was of another series of bombings.
Police blanketed all the larger cities. In Washington guards with
riot guns patrolled the Capitol. Police used clubs to break up a
meeting of three thousand sympathizers in Philadelphia. The Communist
Sacco-Vanzetti Emergency Committee in New York had called for a
general strike and a mass meeting in the afternoon at Union Square.
Other organizations, such as the American Federation of Labor, the
Central Trades and Labor Council, and the Defense Committee, refused
to participate, and only a few hundred responded to the strike
appeal. Late in the afternoon a crowd of ten thousand gathered in
Union Square under the eyes of five hundred police, some of whom
manned machine guns on the rooftops.
The afternoon and early evening were marked by a frenetic dashing
about of volunteer lawyers. Shortly before three Musmanno filed the
Finerty motion in the Federal Building, and at five o’clock Judge
James Lowell of the United States District Court held a hearing on
it. After listening for over an hour to Finerty, William Schuyler
Jackson, and Benjamin Spellman, a New York lawyer who had aided in
the defense of Harry Thaw, Judge Lowell ruled that nothing had been
brought out to justify his issuing a writ or stay of execution. “The
only question before this court is whether these men were deprived
of their constitutional rights,” the judge snapped at Spellman, who
seemed to irritate him. “Don’t tell me about the public. Stick to the
law. I am sorry to see these two men executed, but it is a question
of law, and it doesn’t make any difference whether ten persons or ten
thousand persons are sorry for them.”
On leaving the courthouse, Finerty drove at once with Jackson for
a third appeal to Justice Holmes. It was twilight by the time they
reached Beverly. The old man listened to them for two hours, said
he appreciated the force of their arguments, but felt—as he had
before—that he had no right to intervene. With this rebuff the legal
side of the case ended. From Beverly, Finerty and Jackson drove to
East Boston in a last attempt to reach Judge Anderson, only to be
told at the airport that the chartered plane could not take off after
dark.
Luigia and Rosina had visited the death house again in the afternoon.
At seven the warden allowed them a farewell visit of five minutes.
Luigia walked up the prison steps, supported by Rosina. The two women
had exhausted their tears. Dry-eyed, they kissed the prisoners for
the last time through the bars.
Meanwhile the indefatigable Musmanno made his way to the executive
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.
Wednesday at midnight he brought the corpses to his workroom,
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.
Then, too, there is the matter of motive. When the case first came to
trial it was no earth-shaking issue for District Attorney Katzmann or
for the State Police. Katzmann, if he had lost, would still have been
re-elected district attorney. The case could not have been worth the
risk of detection and disgrace for him or for Proctor to forge the
evidence for a conviction.
After examining Bullet III, Weller and Jury concluded that it had
been fired into a body—though whether a human or animal body, whether
living or dead, they could not say. They did not think it possible
that the slightly flattened side of the bullet could have been
produced in a test firing. In contrast to Ehrmann and Wilbur Turner,
Thompson’s expert, Weller and Jury did not find that the identifying
scratches on the bullet’s base varied noticeably from the scratches
on the other three bullets.
The inquest record of April 17, 1920, bears out these findings.
Eighteen days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Dr. Frederick
Jones testified that the bullet which lodged against Berardelli’s
hip bone and was subsequently marked III had been slightly flattened
as it came to rest against the bone. Dr. Magrath, who performed the
autopsy, identified the bullet at the trial a year later by the three
scratches he had made on it:
_As I found it, it lay sideways against the flat surface of the hip
bone, and in my opinion the flattening of the bullet was due its
striking that bone side on. The bone is curved at that point, and a
very slight amount of impact from the more pointed part of the bullet
would bring its side against the bone, if it had not force enough
at that point to perforate the bone and go through it, which it did
not._
The cumulative evidence is overwhelming that the Colt automatic found
on Sacco the night of his arrest was one of the two pistols used to
kill Berardelli. Even if one accepts the possibility that someone
other than Sacco fired the Colt, Sacco knew who that someone was.
Vanzetti’s innocence is, at least for me, confirmed by my talks
with Brini and by Tresca’s admission to Eastman, as well as by the
contradictions to the court testimony brought out in the Pinkerton
reports. Yet it would have been like Vanzetti to go to the chair
rather than betray a friend. He had once remarked that it was an evil
to be arrested, but a still greater evil to desert a comrade. When
Moore was preparing his closing argument at Dedham, he felt that if
he sacrificed Sacco he had a fighting chance of persuading the jury
to acquit Vanzetti. “So I put it up to Vanzetti,” he later wrote;
“‘What shall I do?’ and he answered, ‘Save Nick, he has the woman and
child.’”
Both men died bravely, undoubtedly fortified by the thought,
expressed by them many times, that they were dying for the working
class of the world. Vanzetti, in the death chamber, calmly reasserted
his innocence. Yet it is noteworthy that Sacco, who had refused to
sign all pleas for clemency, chose rather in his last moment to
proclaim his vindicating belief in anarchy.
It is possible that Sacco, whatever his guilt, may have considered
himself innocent in the sense that he was serving a higher cause. His
dreams were of violence. He was, as he told Thompson, at war with
the government. To defend anarchy in the persons of his comrades
Elia and Salsedo may have seemed to him to justify Parmenter and
Berardelli sprawled in the gravel. The paymaster and his guard would
merely be soldiers on the other side of the barricades, their deaths
insignificant in comparison with the triumph of the cause. Vanzetti
could express his anarchistic beliefs and then say, “Of course, I may
be wrong.” Sacco could not qualify himself. His was the iron belief,
one that has caused so much slaughter in the world, that the cause
is more important than the individual. So he turned with fanatic
hatred against Moore; so he applied the imagery of the Passion to his
dilemma; so he died.
Over forty years have passed since the convictions of Sacco and
Vanzetti. Their case was the American case of the century, one
that became all things to all men. So divisive was it, that only
now is it possible to see it in perspective. The accusations and
counteraccusations fade, those who played their roles in it die, but
the tragedy—however one may define it—remains.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In spite of the great amount of material that may be found in print
about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, important new information came to
light during the writing of _Tragedy in Dedham_, much of it from
the following persons. While many of them hold opposing views, I am
grateful to them all for giving me of their knowledge and time:
Ben Bagdikian, Dr. William C. Boyd, Alfonsina Brini, Beltrando Brini,
Paul J. Burns, Frank W. Buxton, Albert L. Carpenter, John Conrad,
Anthony W. DiCecca, Barbara B. Dolliver, John Dos Passos, Michael
J. Dray, Max Eastman, Herbert B. Ehrmann, Aldino Felicani, Michael
C. Flaherty, Frank S. Giles, the late James M. Graham, Alden Hoag,
John Hurd, Frank J. Jury, Suzanne La Follette, Isaac Don Levine,
the Reverend Donald G. Lothrop, Eugene Lyons, Charles A. McCarthy,
Robert A. McLean, Robert H. Montgomery, Mary DeP. Murray, Shelley A.
Neal, Willis A. Neal, Tom O’Connor, James Rorty, Joseph Sammarco,
Charles E. Sands, the late Dr. Warren Stearns, Michael E. Stewart,
the Reverend Hillyer H. Stratton, Upton Sinclair, Jac Weller, Otto
Zausmer.
For permission to quote passages from their writings about the case I
am indebted to Dr. Ralph Colp, Jr., Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Robert
H. Montgomery, and Upton Sinclair. Permission to quote from the
manuscript of John F. Dever was granted by his executor; permission
to quote from two letters in _The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti_ was
granted by the publisher, The Viking Press, Inc.
I wish also to acknowledge the help of the Braintree Public Library,
the Boston Public Library, the libraries of the Boston _Globe_ and
the Providence _Journal_, the Boston Athenaeum, the Dartmouth College
Library, and the Harvard Law School Library.
Among the many sources I consulted, the following were the most
pertinent:
Colp, Ralph, Jr. “Sacco’s Struggle for Sanity.” _The Nation_, Vol.
187, No. 4 (August 16, 1958).
——. “Bitter Christmas: A Biographical Inquiry into the Life of
Bartolomeo Vanzetti.” _The Nation_, Vol. 187, No. 22 (December 27,
1958).
Dr. Colp consulted the files of the Massachusetts Department of
Mental Health in writing these accounts of the periods when Sacco
and Vanzetti were confined in mental institutions.
Dever, John F. _Memoirs of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case._ Manuscript,
estate of John F. Dever.
Presents the Dedham trial from the jury’s point of view.
Dos Passos, John. “Facing the Chair.” Boston, Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee, 1927.
Eastman, Max. “Is This the Truth about Sacco and Vanzetti?”
_National Review_, Vol. XI, No. 16 (October 21, 1961).
Eastman’s account of Carlo Tresca’s assertion of Sacco’s guilt;
incorporates the essence of Upton Sinclair’s “The Fishpeddler and
the Shoemaker.”
Ehrmann, Herbert B. _The Untried Case: The Sacco-Vanzetti Case and
the Morelli Gang._ Second edition, New York, The Vanguard Press,
Inc., 1960.
A brilliant working-out of the hypothesis that the South
Braintree crime was committed by the Morelli Gang of Providence,
Rhode Island. It remains, however, only a hypothesis.
Frankfurter, Felix. _The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti._ Boston,
Little, Brown & Co., 1927.
Frankfurter, Marion D., and Jackson, Gardner. _The Letters of Sacco
and Vanzetti._ New York, The Viking Press, Inc., 1928.
The manuscript originals of most of these letters, plus others,
are in the Harvard Law School Library. The published versions
have been edited as to spelling and grammar, a number of
class-war and anticlerical passages have been suppressed, and in
some cases meanings have been altered.
_The Good Shoemaker and the Poor Fish Peddler._ Four reels of
documentary motion picture film. Thought to be lost, discovered
in Rockport, Massachusetts, in 1960 by Tom O’Connor, Donald G.
Lothrop, and Francis Russell. Now in possession of Brandeis
University.
Joughin, G. Louis, and Morgan, Edmund M. _The Legacy of Sacco and
Vanzetti._ New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc., 1948.
At the time of its publication the most balanced and
comprehensive study. Morgan wrote the chapters on the two trials
and their legal aftermaths; Joughin dealt with the historical,
sociological, and literary aspects of the case.
Lyons, Eugene. _Assignment in Utopia._ New York, Harcourt, Brace &
Co., Inc., 1937.
Montgomery, Robert H. _Sacco-Vanzetti—The Murder and the Myth._ New
York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1960.
The first book attempting to prove that the trial and subsequent
proceedings were fair and that the men were justly convicted.
While arid in style, it offers a careful analysis of the evidence
and presents many telling points requiring detailed answers from
those who think otherwise.
Morelli, Joseph. _Autobiography._ Manuscript, 574 pages.
Copies are said to be in the possession of the author’s
granddaughter, a Providence criminal lawyer, and Louis V.
Jackvony, Jr., son of the one-time counsel for the Morellis.
Musmanno, Michael A. _After Twelve Years._ New York, Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1939.
An account, by one of the younger defense lawyers, of the last
legal maneuvers.
_Pinkerton Report on the South Braintree Holdup._ Manuscript,
Travelers Insurance Company, Hartford, Connecticut.
This report does not appear in _The Sacco-Vanzetti Case:
Transcript of the Record_....
_Record of Public Hearing Before Joint Committee of the
Judiciary of the Massachusetts Legislature on the Resolution of
Representative Alexander J. Cella, Recommending a Posthumous Pardon
for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti._ Boston, Committee for
the Vindication of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1959.
_The Sacco-Vanzetti Case: Transcript of the Record of the Trial of
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the Courts of Massachusetts
and Subsequent Proceedings, 1920-1927._ New York, Henry Holt & Co.,
Inc., 1928-1929.
The five volumes and supplemental volume include the complete
record of the Dedham trial, a nearly complete record of
Vanzetti’s Plymouth trial, the various appeals and their
outcomes, affidavits concerning Madeiros and the Morellis, a
partial record of the Lowell Committee hearings, the minutes of
the Parmenter-Berardelli inquest, and the Pinkerton report on the
Bridgewater holdup.
Sinclair, Upton. “The Fishpeddler and the Shoemaker.” New York,
_Institute of Social Studies Bulletin_, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer,
1953).
Article expressing Sinclair’s doubts of Sacco’s innocence and
reporting Fred Moore’s similar doubts.
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo. “The Story of a Proletarian Life.” Boston,
The Sacco-Vanzetti New Trial League, 1924.
Zelt, Johannes. _Proletarischer Internationalismus im Kamp um Sacco
und Vanzetti._ East Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1958.
Drawing on records in Moscow, this book contains valuable
information about the Communist-controlled development of
the protest movement in Central Europe and the directed
demonstrations inside the Soviet Union. Its balancing of facts,
however, cannot always be relied on. Typical of its distortions
is Zelt’s quotation from _Putj MOPR_, the organ of the
International Red Aid, to the effect that “in 1926 the students
of the University of Brockton, in spite of a ban by reactionary
professors, unanimously chose as their graduation thesis ‘The
Case of Sacco and Vanzetti.’” There is, of course, no college or
university in Brockton, but according to the Boston _Herald_ of
June 3, 1927, “discussion of the Sacco-Vanzetti case by the class
in current events in the local high school has been banned by the
history teacher, Miss Sarah McGrory, on the theory the students
are not old enough to understand it. The action was taken by the
teacher after the class, in its usual manner of selection of a
subject for discussion, voted in favor of the Sacco-Vanzetti
case.”
INDEX
Adrower, Giuseppe, 124, 173-174, 193
Affe (Afa), Carlos, 183, 196-197
Aiken, John, 127, 128, 216
Anderson, George, 423, 443, 446
Anderson, Maxwell, 8, 13
Andrews, Lola, 12, 32-33, 146-151, 153, 224, 230-232, 390
Andrews motion, 221, 264, 265
Arrogni, Harry, 155
Atwater, Eldridge, 161
Atwood, Alfred, 136, 212
automobile, getaway:
at Bridgewater, 49, 50, 51-52
at Dedham trial, 156, 204-205
in Madeiros’ confession, 281, 300, 301, 461
in Manley woods, 56-57
at Plymouth trial, 99
route checked by Francis Russell, 306, 307-308
at South Braintree, 38, 39, 41, 44-46
stolen from Francis Murphy, 51
Bagdikian, Ben, 305, 309
Baker, Alta, 44
Balboni, Carlo, 102
Balboni, Rosa, 102
Barone, Bibber, 290, 292, 299, 300
Barr, C. A., 52-53, 56
Barry, John, 267, 268
Bastoni, Enrico, 102
Beal, Fred, 421, 448, 452
Bedard, Alfred, 282
Beffel, John Nicholas, 113, 115, 116
Behrsin, Hans, 34-35, 37, 69, 146
Benchley, Robert, 391, 412
Benkosky, Steve (Steve the Pole), 294, 295, 297, 300
Bent, Silas, 304, 312
Berardelli, Alessandro, 35, 36, 37-38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 46, 314, 462
autopsy on, 47, 158
revolver of, 26, 142, 160-162, 163, 176
Berardelli, Sarah, 162, 176, 391-392
Bernkopf, Elizabeth, 246-247, 412
Blackwell, Alice Stone, 253
Bloor, Ella Reeve, 436, 448, 451
Boda, Mike, 54, 55, 57-59, 60-61, 70, 88, 91, 92, 96-97, 101, 140,
156, 166, 178, 180, 181, 183, 190, 197, 314, 462
pistol of, 58, 295 fn.
Boice, Mae, 284, 286-287, 299
bombings, 17, 84-85, 117, 121, 219, 331, 412, 426
Bongiovanni, Adeladi, 103
Borsari, Emma, 103
Bosco, Albert, 172, 182, 193, 395-397
Bostock, Jimmy, 37, 38, 40, 42, 47, 48, 69, 142, 159, 162, 224
Bowles, Benjamin, 49-50, 69, 94, 99
Boyd, Dr. William, 318
Brandeis, Louis, 114, 435
Branting, George, 386
Brenner, William, 39, 146, 307
Brini, Alfonsina, 77, 104, 169-170
Brini, Beltrando, 21-23, 78, 103-104, 369, 392, 466
Brini, Vincenzo, 77, 93, 95, 104
Brooks, Edward, 152
Brooks, Georgina, 95, 99-100
Brouillard, Albert, 51, 52, 57, 58, 118, 148, 356
Broun, Heywood, 419
Bruno, “Doggy,” 272-273, 319, 320, 321, 324
Bullard, F. Lauriston, 344-345
bullets, 13, 47, 158-160, 201, 202, 205, 209, 212, 233, 234-235,
242-244, 314-318, 376-377, 402, 415, 461, 464-465
Burgess, Henry, 105
Burke, Frank, 40, 69, 164, 224, 225, 297
Burns, James, 158-159, 160, 163, 295, 376, 464
Cahoon, Dr. Charles, 238
Callahan, Jack, 271, 304
Callahan, William, 68, 93, 94, 139, 164, 166
Campbell, Dr. C. MacFie, 239
Campbell, Julia, 31-33, 149, 151
Cannon, James, 332, 333, 335
Canter, Harry, 253, 405, 416, 421
cap, found near Berardelli, 42, 47, 125, 157, 183, 190, 194, 197,
401, 415
Carbarn Bandits, 349-350
Carbone, Antony, 122, 340
Carpenter, Albert, 224, 231, 253, 278, 279
Carrigan, Mark, 36, 40, 69, 142
Carter, Edward, 164
Casey, Richard, 52, 101
Cellucci, Joseph, 167
Cerro, Henry, 167
Chase, Elmer, 41, 168
Chisholm, George, 44
Christophori, Esther, 103
Cicchetti, Beniamino, 118, 120
Citizens National Committee for Sacco and Vanzetti, 427
Clark, Francis, 45, 301
Cline, Charles, 335-336, 338
Coacci, Ferruccio, 54, 55-56, 57, 96, 97, 112, 140, 287 fn., 462
pistol of, 58
Codman, John, 114, 253, 382
Coes, Loring, 194, 391
Colarossi, Vincent, 177
Colbert, Maurice, 40
Cole, Austin, 62, 101, 152-153
Collins, John, 315, 316-317
Colp, Dr. Ralph, 241
Communists, and Sacco-Vanzetti case, 6-7, 217-218, 328-329, 330,
332-333, 335-336, 338, 366-367, 454
Connolly, Michael, 62-63, 100, 156, 406
Conrad, John, 324, 325
Constantino, Dominic, 146
Cook, Waldo, 419, 427
Coolidge, Calvin, 406-407, 435
Corl, Melvin, 170, 177
Cox, Alfred E., 49-50, 69, 94, 99, 390, 403
Cummings, Homer S., 250-51
Daley, William, 244, 263
Damato, Nicola, 41, 155
Darroch, Lola, 111, 224, 232, 253
Darrow, Clarence, 336, 338
DeBeradinis, Louis, 41, 69
Debs, Eugene, 326
DeFalco, Angelina, 118-121
Defense Committee, 107, 141, 219, 222, 267, 326, 333-334, 335, 338,
417, 427
and conduct of defense, 125-126
DeForest, Ralph, 34
Dentamore, Antonio, 182, 196, 395, 396
Department of Justice, 121-123, 340-341, 426-427, 433
Desmond, Walter, 44, 168, 300
Dever, John, 13, 133-136, 137, 138, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153,
155, 159, 163, 164, 170-171, 174-175, 180, 211-212, 233, 413
Devlin, Frances, 35, 36, 40, 69, 143, 144, 165
Di Bona, Candido, 412
DiCarlo, John, 102
DiCecca, Anthony, 319-323
Dodson, William, 270 fn.
Dolbeare, Harry, 31, 151-152
Donato, Narciso, 89-90
Donovan, Mary, 268, 334, 356, 362, 384, 405, 408, 416-417, 424, 425,
436, 451, 454, 456
Dorr, Wilson, 45, 168
Dos Passos, John, 421
Doyle, Tommy, 224, 225, 228, 278
Dray, Michael, 24-26
Dreyfus, Alfred, 381
Driver, Thomas, 285
Duval, Clement, 86
Eastman, Max, 463
eels, delivery from Corso & Cannizzo, 404-405
Ehrmann, Herbert, 3, 286-289, 292-298, 308, 314, 355, 369, 376, 402,
404-405, 411, 461, 465
Elia, Roberto, 12, 88-91
Emerson, Marion, 108
Ensher, Napoleon, 101, 156
Ernst, Morris, 303-305, 308, 309, 310, 314, 462
Ettor, Joe, 109, 326
Evans, Elizabeth Glendower, 114, 139, 157, 165-166, 190, 207, 223,
237-238, 240, 244, 252, 258, 327, 334, 336, 337, 341, 356, 362,
382, 385, 419, 423, 452
Evarts, Richard, 411, 431, 433, 435
Fabbri, Amleto, 267, 333
Falcone, Emilio, 166
Falzini, Luigi, 160, 161
Farmer, Albert, 44, 300, 301
Farnum, George, 433
Faulkner, John, 152, 153
Felicani, Aldino, 14, 15, 16-18, 82, 107, 108, 113, 139, 172, 177,
252, 253, 268, 269, 334-335, 338, 356, 404, 405, 409, 424, 432,
434, 458
and DeFalco episode, 118, 119, 120
and defense funds, 223, 333
Ferguson, Lawrence, 165
Ferrari, Joseph, 282, 298, 299, 322, 356
Field, Elias, 242, 243, 411, 412, 433, 442
Finerty, John, 422, 428, 443, 446
Fiochi, Margherita, 103
Fitzemeyer, George, 162-163
Fitzgerald, J. Henry, 160, 163
Flaherty, Michael, 268, 459
Fleming, Michael, 290-291, 299, 356
Florence, Aldeah, 176
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 108, 109, 113, 116, 268, 269
Flynn, William J., 87, 88, 89
Foley, William, 166
Fortini, Mary, 102, 404
Fraher, Thomas, 47, 48, 370, 401
Frankfurter, Felix, 8, 87, 268, 286, 332, 334, 341, 353-354, 366, 383,
408, 411, 424, 435, 459
_Atlantic Monthly_ article, 352-353
_vs._ John Wigmore, 371-372
Frantello, Albert, 36, 48, 69, 165
Frazer, Dr. John Chisholm, 46, 141
Fuller, Alvan T., 20, 23, 278, 346, 347, 349, 353, 355, 363, 366-367,
368, 389, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426-427, 441, 446-447
character of, 5-6, 350-351
investigation by, 369-370, 373, 390-391, 392, 404, 405, 406, 407,
408-409
and Madeiros, 378-379, 388
and Vanzetti, 394
Fuller, Charles, 56-57, 156
Gaines, Mary, 198
Galleani, Luigi, 78, 80, 84, 86, 87, 88
Gallivan, Jeremiah, 43-44, 47, 118, 397, 401, 412, 415
Ganley, John, 131, 212
Gatti, Nicola, 167
Geary, Daniel, 288
Gerard, George, 136, 175, 212
Gill, Augustus, 234, 376, 390
Giovannitti, Arturo, 78, 80, 109, 326
Goddard, Calvin, 376-377, 402, 415, 464
Goodridge, Carlos, 12, 41, 154, 155-156, 224, 228-230, 390
Goodridge motion, 221, 228, 246, 264, 265
Gould, Roy, 36-37, 224-225, 369, 403, 415
Gould-Pelser motion, 221, 224, 263, 265
Govoni, Doviglio, 93, 94, 102
Grabill, Ethelbert Vincent, 367, 371, 431
Graham, James, 94, 95-96, 97, 98, 105, 443
Grant, Robert, 373, 375, 389, 400, 403, 413, 414
Graves, Earl, 49-50, 51, 52, 94
Greenslet, Ferris, 374, 451
Guadagni, Felice, 93, 119, 120, 171-172, 173, 182, 193, 253, 395-397,
405
Guerin, Lieutenant, 198, 199
Guidierris, Sibriano, 167
Guidobone, Angelo, 170
Hamilton, Albert, 233-235, 242-243, 262, 295, 377, 402
and switched pistol barrels, 247-249
Hamilton-Proctor motion, 221, 233, 244, 247, 264, 265
Hapgood, Powers, 436, 441, 442
Harding, Frank (“Slip”), 50, 52, 69, 70, 94-95, 99
Hassam, George, 51, 69, 100
garage of, 96, 271 fn., 462
Hassam, John, 232, 369
Hassam, Lola, 31. _See also_ Andrews, Lola
Hawley, Frank, 198, 199
Hayes, James, 195-196
Hayes, Louise, 36, 39, 69, 295, 403
Hays, Arthur Garfield, 428, 433
Hellyer, Henry, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 167-168, 198, 339
Henderson, Jessica, 238, 419, 432, 434
Heron, William, 33, 154, 155
Hersey, Wallace, 131, 221
Hewins, Mabel, 45
Hicks, Granville, 332
Hill, Arthur Dehon, 235-236, 244, 245, 327, 411, 412, 419-421, 422,
424, 430-431, 432, 433, 435, 440
Holladay, Paula, 436, 437
Holmes, John Haynes, 366, 427, 452, 460
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 84, 353, 423, 433, 446
Hunting, Dr. Nathaniel, 46, 141
Hurwitz, Albert, 275-277
Iacovelli, Henry, 197, 198
Iscorla, Pedro, 166
Israel, Harold, 249-250, 251
Jack, Cerise Carman, 139, 166, 238, 258, 326, 327, 346, 382
Jackson, Frank, 397, 398, 400
Jackson, Gardner, 334-335, 338, 383, 384, 392, 404, 405, 406, 408,
424, 451, 456, 457, 460
Jackson, William Schuyler, 428, 433, 446
Jackvony, Louis, 302, 305, 310
Jacobs, Ellsworth, 292-293
James, Edward Holton, 370, 371, 417, 436, 442, 455
Jesse, Frank, 170, 177
Jocomo, John, 274-275
Johnson, Ruth, 60-61, 66, 100, 106
Johnson, Samuel, 57, 331
Johnson, Simon, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 100, 106, 178, 181
Jones, Dr. Frederick, 47, 141, 465
Jury, Frank, 464, 465
Kane, Francis Fisher, 428, 433
Kane, William, 69, 95, 97, 98, 124
Karnes, Robert, 288
Katzmann, Frederick Gunn, 8, 20, 22, 24, 68, 93, 96, 114, 118, 121,
122, 282, 340, 353, 354, 395, 401, 465
character of, 4-5, 25-26, 66-67
cross-examination of Sacco, 184-186, 188-191
cross-examination of Vanzetti, 179-181
at Dedham trial, 130, 133, 136, 138, 139, 142, 145, 146, 149, 151,
158, 161, 178, 418 fn.
and DeFalco episode, 119, 120
and Orciani, 162, 190
at Plymouth trial, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106
summation at Dedham trial, 202-205
Katzmann, Percy, 119, 120, 124
Kelley, George, 82, 92, 125, 157, 174, 190, 194
Kelley, Michael, 72, 73, 79, 82, 173, 191
Kelley, William, 290-292
Kelliher, Julia, 45, 301, 461
Kennedy, Minnie, 36, 39, 69, 295, 403
King, Harry, 136, 329 fn.
King, John, 52, 100
Kurlansky, Harry, 150-151
LaBrecque, Alfred, 150, 298
La Guardia, Fiorello, 366, 441, 452
Langlois, Edgar, 39, 144
Laughton, Warren, 61, 62, 64
Lawrence, Bishop William, 363-365, 389, 418
LeBaron, Frank, 55-56, 64
Letherman, Lawrence, 275, 340, 341, 342
Levangie, Mike, 29, 40, 48, 69, 151
Levine, Isaac Don, 426, 427, 428, 442
Lewis, Alfred Baker, 405, 416, 421, 458
Lippmann, Walter, 419
Liscomb, Barbara, 39, 167
Lloyd, John, 45
Longhi, Vincent, 103
Lopez, Frank, 113, 197, 216, 224, 252, 253, 267
Loring, Fred, 42, 47, 157
Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 2, 5, 372, 373-375, 389, 402, 403, 413
and Bosco-Guadagni alibi, 395-397
Lowell Committee, 315, 373, 376, 388, 389, 395, 402
report of, 407, 413-415, 417, 419
Luban, Jacob, 273, 274-277, 279, 321
Lummus, Henry, 282, 285, 328
Lyons, Eugene, 110, 111-112, 114, 216, 222, 225, 226, 253, 329 fn.,
333, 334, 383, 452, 462
Lyons, Fred, 271 fn.
McAnarney, Jeremiah, 25-26, 126, 127, 129-130, 131-132, 135, 139,
140, 147, 153, 155, 171, 174, 176, 179, 185, 192, 200, 220, 221,
307, 341
summation at Dedham, 201-202
McAnarney, John, 126, 127, 132-133, 179, 268, 406
McAnarney, Thomas, 126-127, 130, 159, 164, 213, 215, 245-246
McCullum, Peter, 39, 146, 162, 307
MacDonald, Herman, 369, 373, 390, 392, 407
McGlone, Jim, 37, 42, 144
McHardy, Lewis, 136, 426
McLaughlin, Dr. Joseph, 266, 430, 449, 450
McLean, Bob, 305, 307, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 316
MacMechan, Virginia, 258, 259
McNamara, Frank, 136, 221
McNaught, Henry, 152
Madeiros, Celestino, 279-285, 286-287, 289-290, 294, 298, 299-300,
301, 314, 341-342, 377-379, 388, 405, 406, 409, 413, 423, 441,
449-450, 455, 456, 461
Magazu, Peter, 41, 154, 155
Magrath, Dr. George Burgess, 47, 141, 158, 418, 449, 455, 465
Mahoney, Margaret, 31, 35, 142, 162
Malaguti, Terese, 102
Mancini, Tony, 294-295, 296-298, 314
Marden, Frank, 135, 221
Marks, Jeannette, 384, 451
Mede, Jimmy, 271-272, 273-274, 277-278, 320, 321-323, 324
Meyerson, Dr. Abraham, 238, 239, 368
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 421, 428, 441
Minor, Robert, 116
Moller, Emil, 278-279
Monello, Angelo, 172-173, 182
Monterios, Barney, 284-285, 290, 299, 309
Moore, Fred H., 13, 16, 109, 119, 120, 123, 125-126, 127, 220, 246,
251, 327, 333, 363, 382, 383, 463, 466
and Albert Hamilton, 233-234, 249
and ballistics evidence, 159, 201
and bombings, 219
and Carlos Goodridge, 228-230, 264
as creator of Sacco-Vanzetti case, 108, 110-111, 112-114, 124-125,
252
at Dedham trial, 129-133, 135, 136-137, 139, 140, 144, 145, 153,
154, 164, 166, 191
and defendants’ guilt or innocence, 12, 17, 256-257, 462-463
and defendants’ radicalism, 179, 221
and Emil Moller, 278-279
and Frank Lopez, 224
and Jimmy Mede, 274, 278, 321
and Joe Sammarco, 322, 325
and Lola Andrews, 146-151, 230-232
and Lottie Tatillo, 398-399, 400
and Louis Pelser, 225-227
and Luban and Silva, 274-277
money problems of, 222-223
and New Trial League, 252-253
relationship with Sacco, 241, 254-256
and Roy Gould, 225
summation at Dedham, 200-201
Moors, John, 332, 363, 374, 392, 427
Morelli, Frank, 293
Morelli, Helen, 312-313
Morelli, Joe, 279, 288, 289, 292, 295-296, 297, 298, 302-303, 308, 311
autobiography of, 304-305, 309-310, 312-314, 461-462
Morelli, Mike, 292, 308, 461
Morelli Gang, 3, 284, 287-288, 289, 290, 293, 294, 341, 461
Moro, Joseph, 333, 384, 406, 408, 421, 424, 451
Mucci, Leon, 112, 196
Murphy, Dr. John, 50, 100
Musmanno, Michael, 15, 391-392, 411-412, 421, 422, 428, 430, 431,
432-433, 435, 443, 446-447, 448
Mussolini, Benito, 380-381
Neal, Shelley, 28-31, 35, 43, 117, 141-142
New Trial League, 252-253, 254, 267
Nichols, Annie, 39, 166
Novelli, Jenny, 34, 69, 167-168, 339
Oates, “Guinea,” 272-273, 318, 320, 321, 324
O’Brien, Robert Lincoln, 331, 344, 369-370, 418
O’Connell, William Cardinal, 367, 434
O’Connor, Tom, 338-339, 391, 401, 443, 452
Orciani, Ricardo, 13, 19, 65-66, 69-70, 88, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 140,
156, 161, 162, 178, 181, 183, 190, 197, 314, 462
Packard, Lottie, 229, 415. _See also_ Tatillo, Lottie
Palmer, A. Mitchell, 91, 123
bombing of house, 84-85, 88
Red raids of, 53, 82, 87-88
Papa, Vittorio, 102
Parker, Dorothy, 421, 432
Parker, Seward, 136, 212, 221
Parmenter, Frederick, 35-36, 37-38, 40, 42-43, 46
Pelser, Louis, 39, 145-146, 224, 225-227, 263, 307, 390
Pieraccini, Ralph, 287, 292
Pierce, Edward Peter, 352, 355
Pierce, Wilfred, 165
Pinkerton reports, 168, 338-340, 392, 466
Pool, Elmer, 45
Pound, Roscoe, 87, 286, 366
Prince, Dr. Morton, 345-346, 363, 417
Proctor, William, 2, 47, 100, 158, 160, 164, 242, 244, 345, 395, 402,
464-465
testimony re Bullet III, 159, 243, 247, 264-265, 354, 415
Quintiliano, Luigi, 91, 193, 197
Ranney, Dudley, 281, 288, 289, 291, 292, 298, 299, 300, 341, 367, 376,
377, 395, 402, 403, 406
Rantoul, Lois, 139, 157, 194, 341, 412
Ravachol, François, 86
Reading, Arthur, 420, 431, 447
Reed, Austin, 45-46, 152-153, 212
Reid, Robert, 145, 224, 225
Ricci, Angelo, 40, 198
Ricci, Dominic, 174
Richards, John, 287, 293-294, 296, 390
Richardson, James, 265, 412
Ripley, Walter, 135, 140, 163, 212, 214, 221, 244
Ripley motion, 221, 262-263, 265
Robinson, Merton, 235
Rose, Reginald, 329 fn.
Rosen, Joseph, 168-169, 177, 403
Ross, Joseph, 166, 190, 191, 192
Rugg, Arthur Prentice, 285, 352, 355
Ruzzamenti, John, 122
Sacco, Dante, 211, 327, 393, 431
Sacco, Ines, 130, 237, 244, 327, 393
Sacco, Nicola:
alibi of, 171-174
anarchism of, 86, 260-261
arrest of, 63-65
break with Moore, 254-255
cap of, 97, 157, 183, 190, 194, 197, 199, 415
character of, 72-73, 81-82
and departure for Italy, 91-92
early life of, 78-80
and Fuller’s decision, 409
guilt of, 466
hearing on South Braintree crime, 94 fn.
hunger strike of, 237, 238
identifications of, 69, 143-145, 147-148
indicted, 116
interpretation of case, 336, 337
and James Graham, 94, 96
last words of, 450, 466
letter to son, 438-439
and Madeiros confession, 279-280
mental breakdown of, 239-242
in Mexico, 81
in Morelli confession, 314
pistol of, 8, 64, 73, 139, 158, 183, 189, 203, 233, 234-235,
247-249,
314-316, 415, 464-465, 466
speech at sentencing, 357-358
as symbol, 1, 348
testimony, 181-192
Sacco, Rosina, 72, 80, 91, 92, 97, 112, 125, 211, 214, 238, 240, 244,
306, 327, 341, 356, 386, 392, 409, 419, 424, 425, 430, 432, 434,
438, 441, 446-447, 458, 460
and Fred Moore, 113, 130, 132, 178, 207
testimony at Dedham, 197-198
Salsedo, Andrea, 87, 88-91
Sammarco, Joe, 272, 273, 274, 278, 319-325, 461
Sargent, John, 340, 426, 433
Sawyer, Roland, 365-366
Shachtman, Max, 328, 332-333, 338
Shaw, George Bernard, 330, 331 fn.
Shaw, Maynard, 100
shells, 42, 47, 159, 212, 234, 314, 315, 376-377, 464
Shields, Art, 113, 116, 222
Sibley, Frank, 12, 154, 185-186, 211, 233, 334, 412
Silva, Frank, 271-273, 274-278, 279, 318, 320, 321, 322, 324-325, 461
Sinclair, Upton, 17, 256, 304, 463
Sisk, James, 109, 127
Slater, Rexford, 161
Splaine, Mary, 35, 36, 40, 47, 48, 69,143-144, 165, 297, 345-346
Squires, Francis J., 119, 120, 121 fn., 282
Stearns, Warren, 19-21
Stewart, Michael, 18-19, 50-51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58-59, 60, 62,
64-65, 69, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101, 118, 125, 148, 158, 198, 199,
394, 398, 418 fn.
Stone, Harlan, 435, 441
Stong, Phil, 386-387, 388 fn.
Stratton, Samuel, 373, 375
Sullivan, Simon, 105-106
Supreme Judicial Court, Massachusetts, 328, 351-352, 354-355, 431
Taft, William Howard, 418, 435
Tatillo, Lottie, 397-400
Thayer, Webster, 4, 5, 13, 54, 123-124, 127-128, 261, 328, 344, 346,
354, 369, 389, 406, 419-420, 460
and Mrs. Bernkopf, 246-247
character of, 97-98
charge to Dedham jury, 8, 205-210
at Dedham trial, 129-133, 134-135, 136-137, 140, 141, 148, 149,
150,
154, 157, 178-179, 192, 193-194, 199, 210-211
and Lowell Committee, 414
and Madeiros motion, 341, 342-343, 351, 353
at Plymouth trial, 101, 105, 106
sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti, 356-359, 361-362
and supplementary motions, 244-246, 262-265
and switched pistol barrels, 248-249
Thomas, 280, 281. _See also_ Driver, Thomas
Thomas, Dr. Albert, 238
Thompson, William G., 17, 108, 132-133, 235-236, 243, 244, 245, 247,
257, 265, 268-269, 278, 322, 326, 328, 333, 337, 338, 347, 353,
354, 362, 363, 366, 367, 369, 378, 383, 395, 401, 403, 409, 410,
414, 415, 419, 422, 426
and Bosco-Guadagni alibi, 396-397, 402
and Calvin Goddard, 376, 377
and Department of Justice, 340-342
and Jimmy Weeks, 289, 291-292
last talk with Vanzetti, 443-445
and Lottie Tatillo, 399-400
and Madeiros, 280, 281, 285-286, 290, 299, 339, 346, 351-352
opinion of Vanzetti, 73, 327
and Wilbur Turner, 402
Thorndike, Herbert, 94, 95
Totty, Warren, 51
Tracey, William, 33, 154
Tresca, Carlo, 16, 78, 80, 85, 90, 91, 107-108, 109, 110, 115, 432,
463, 466
Turner, Wilbur, 402, 465
Vahey, James, 274
Vahey, John, 93-94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 282, 443
Valdinoce, Carlo, 88
Valdinoce, Susie, 327
Van Amburgh, Charles, 2, 158, 159-160, 235, 248, 249-251, 295, 460,
464-465
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo:
alibi for Bridgewater crime, 101-104
alibi for South Braintree crime, 168-170
anarchism of, 86, 260
arrest of, 63-65
and Back Bay women, 258
character of, 71-72
clemency petition of, 367-368
development in prison, 257, 259-260, 261
early life of, 73-78
eulogy of Sacco, 362-363
and Fuller’s decision, 409-410
identifications of, 69, 94-95, 99-100, 151, 152-153
indicted for South Braintree crime, 116
innocence of, 466
interpretation of case, 336, 337
and James Graham, 95-96
and Jimmy Mede, 273-274
and John Vahey, 93-94, 95, 359, 429
last interviews with Thompson, 422, 443-445
last words of, 450, 466
letter to Dante Sacco, 439-440
and Lowell Committee, 390
mental breakdown of, 266-267
in Mexico, 81
moods in prison, 347
in Morelli confession, 314
revolver of, 8, 15, 19, 26, 64, 68, 139, 142, 160-162, 163, 203,
209, 233, 235, 314-316, 403
speech at sentencing, 358-361
statement for United Press, 428-430
as symbol, 1, 259, 348
testimony at Dedham, 176-181
tried for Bridgewater crime, 97, 98-106
Vanzetti, Luigia, 393, 416, 424, 432, 434, 438, 441, 446, 458, 460
Vaughn, Earl, 62-63, 156, 406
Ventola, Angelo, 66
Ventola, Joseph, 54, 55, 57, 66, 97
Vernazano, John, 104, 105
Vorse, Mary Heaton, 114-115
Wade, Lewis, 34-35, 38, 48, 69, 142-143, 162, 297, 307
Wadsworth, Lincoln, 162, 403
Wait, William Cushing, 352, 354
Walsh, Frank, 428, 433
Waugh, Frank, 131
Weeks, Jimmy, 282, 284, 285, 289, 290-292, 296, 297, 298, 299
Weller, Jac, 464, 465
Wells, H. G., 381
West, William J., 121, 340, 341
Weyand, Fred, 121, 122, 340, 342
Wiggin, Joseph, 369, 390, 391, 446
Wigmore, John, 371-372
Wilbar, Winfield, 282, 291, 298, 331, 355, 357
Williams, Harold, 215, 227, 247, 248, 249
at Dedham trial, 138, 139-140, 142-143, 144, 147, 150, 156, 157,
163
and DeFalco episode, 118, 119
Williams, John, 171-172, 182, 193
Wind, Max, 56, 156
Winslow, Gertrude, 238, 356
Witner, Adolph, 273, 274-277
Zagroff, Segris, 123-124
Zelt, Johannes, 217
Zorian, Harold, 121, 340
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Francis Russell has contributed historical and critical articles
to such periodicals as _American Heritage_, _Horizon_, _The Yale
Review_, _The Antioch Review_, _The Christian Science Monitor_, and
abroad to _Irish Writing_, _The Observer_, _The Countryman_, _Time
& Tide_, and others. It was while serving on a jury in Dedham,
Massachusetts, thirty-two years after Sacco and Vanzetti had been
tried and condemned in the same courtroom, that he began his
investigation of the written and unwritten history of the case that
resulted in _Tragedy in Dedham_.
Born in Boston in 1910, he attended the Roxbury Latin School.
Following several undergraduate years in France and Germany, he
returned to New England and graduated from Bowdoin in 1933. In 1937
he received an A.M. from Harvard. During World War II he served in
the Canadian Army as a captain in the Intelligence Corps. After the
war he was a political intelligence officer with the British 30th
Corps in Hildesheim, Germany. In 1955 his volume of critical essays
on Joyce, Kafka, and Gertrude Stein was published in England as
_Three Studies in 20th Century Obscurity_. He is co-author of _The
American Heritage Book of the Pioneer Spirit_. He lives in Wellesley
Hills, Massachusetts.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 172 Changed: Felicani than asked him if he realized this
to: Felicani then asked him if he realized this
pg 186 Changed: anger of frustation pulsing through him
to: anger of frustration pulsing through him
pg 193 Changed: He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 abili
to: He confirmed Sacco’s April 15 alibi
pg 194 Changed: frustations of the past week
to: frustrations of the past week
pg 197 Changed: dark one with the earlaps
to: dark one with the earflaps
pg 200 Changed: agreed to divide their alloted morning
to: agreed to divide their allotted morning
pg 226 Changed: bought a dinner cigars & cigaretts
to: bought a dinner cigars & cigarettes
pg 227 Changed: finaly had my whole story
to: finally had my whole story
pg 254 Changed: shympaty and forgiveness the poor Nick is
to: sympathy and forgiveness the poor Nick is
pg 290 Changed: with Barney Monteiros at the Bluebird Inn
to: with Barney Monterios at the Bluebird Inn
pg 293 Changed: but they acted apprenhensive of something
to: but they acted apprehensive of something
pg 309 Changed: get to the bottom of the kidnaping
to: get to the bottom of the kidnapping
pg 389 Changed: State Street less instransigent
to: State Street less intransigent
pg 393 Changed: degenareted who perjured against us
to: degenerated who perjured against us
pg 428 Changed: By truths I mean the real condictions
to: By truths I mean the real conditions
pg 454 Changed: In England forty protestors were injured
to: In England forty protesters were injured
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