The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

A CASE THAT ROCKED THE WORLD by Louis Stark

The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchists accused of murder in the course of an armed payroll robbery, convulsed the American political and penal systems during the 1920s. The two men, Italian immigrants drawn together by their radical politics, were indicted as members of a gang of five who killed the paymaster and guard of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in April 1920, escaping with nearly $16,000 in wages. Identification evidence was strong, but the prosecution argued for a conviction mainly on the two men’s“consciousness of guilt”. Defence lawyers for Sacco and Vanzetti countered that Attorney General Mitchell Palmer campaigned for the deportation of alien radicals during 1920-21 and argued that their clients’ “consciousness of guilt” related to politics and not armed robbery. The case became entangled in political as well as legal issues. After a lengthy trial, both men were convicted of first-degree murder, but the verdict triggered an unprecedented campaign to establish their innocence. Among those signing petitions for clemency were the British playwright George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein and the authors H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy. A review of the case ordered by the state governor pointed to grave political bias on the part of the trial judge, but failed to question the verdict. Accordingly, in 1927, Sacco andVanzetti went to the electric chair. Doubts about their guilt continued to rankle, and half a century later their names mere cleared in a special proclamation signed by the governor of Massachusetts. The author, Louis Stark, was a young reporter on the New York Times at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and later became the paper’s labour correspondent.

“What do you know about the Sacco-Vanzetti case?”

This question was addressed to me one evening in February 1922, by Ralph Graves, then Sunday editor of TheNewYorkTimes.

I said I had read a few newspaper articles on the case.

“Are the men guilty?” asked Mr Graves.

“I don’t know,” was my reply.

“You’re just the man I want,” he said. “Take a week off, go to Boston, get both sides of the case and then write a piece giving the facts in impartial review. We want the pros and cons and let the reader make his own decision.”

That was my introduction to the celebrated case which rocked the world and whose echoes still reverberate every August upon the anniversary of the execution of the two Italians in Charlestown State Prison.

I went to Boston. In due time a 4,000-word summary appeared in the Times. Five years later I was in Boston again for the final three weeks of the case, weeks marked by riots all over the world, picketing of the State House, scores of arrests, feverish investigations, desperate eleventh-hour moves on behalf of the two men. All elements of drama were present. Condemnation, suspense, last-minute reprieve, more suspense, appeals, uncertainty, doubts. Then the seven-year climax-execution!

The Sacco-Vanzetti case!

Never had there been one like it in the annals of American jurisprudence, possibly excepting the Mooney case. A seven-year Golgotha for the fish peddler and the shoe worker. The focal point of worldwide discussion of “American justice”; agitation and propaganda that flared into extraordinary demonstrations at home and abroad, all to one purpose, stay of execution, mercy.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case!

The “American Dreyfus” affair in which the sympathies of eminent men from Europe to Asia were enlisted. Anatole France, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Romain Rolland.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case!

A judicial drama enacted in the golden-domed State House in Boston, in the severely plain Dedham courthouse, in Harvard’s august halls, in jails, on street corners, in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Buenos Aires.

The characters-humble working people, labourers, shoemakers, railroad workers, storekeepers, salesmen, lawyers, doctors, pistol experts, prosecutors, judges, jailers, Harvard professors. All interested in the two principals-those philosophical anarchists, draft dodgers, convicted murderers, two humble Italians, one a shoe worker who had scarcely missed a working day in seven years, thrifty, home-loving; the other a gentle man, loved by children and neighbours.

What was the Sacco-Vanzetti case?

On 15 April 1920, Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, and Alexander Berardelli, his guard, were fired upon and killed on the main street of South Braintree, Massachusetts, and the payroll of Slater and Morrill’s shoe factory, amounting to $15,776.51, was stolen. The two murderers threw the payroll boxes into a car which contained several other men and were driven off at breakneck speed.

At that time the police were on the lookout for men who had taken part in an unsuccessful payroll holdup in Bridgewater on the previous 24 December. Suspicion rested on Italians, as eyewitnesses told the police the holdup men seemed to be of that race. The Morelli gang of Providence was suspected.

On 5 May 1920, Nicola Sacco, steadily employed as an edge trimmer in a shoe factory, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fish peddler, self-employed, were arrested. They were not questioned concerning the two holdups for several days. The “Red raids” instigated by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had created a stir against radicals and the men were cross-examined as to their political beliefs. They were charged with carrying weapons unlawfully, pistols having been found on them, and they offered certain explanations for the weapons.

The arrest of the men, caught in a dragnet for radicals, placed their feet on the road which led to the electric chair seven years later. Vanzetti was a philosophical anarchist, dreamy and contemplative. He had assisted in some strikes. So had Sacco, whose radical beliefs were vague but socialistic.

Vanzetti was a friend of Salsedo, a follower of Galleani, well known among Massachusetts anarchists. Salsedo, under arrest by agents of the Department of Justice in the Red dragnet and held incommunicado on the fourteenth floor of the Park Row Building in New York was found dead on the pavement below, on 3 May, two days before the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. Vanzetti had interested himself in the Salsedo case and had gone to New York late in April to consult Salsedo’s counsel. In New York Vanzetti was told that more government raids might be expected and to hide all radical literature possessed by him and his friends. It was while on that mission that he and Sacco were arrested.

Both the Bridgewater and South Braintree crimes were charged to the two men. Sacco proved a time-clock alibi for the first holdup. Vanzetti was indicted, tried for the Bridgewater holdup, and convicted on 22 June, before Superior Court Justice Webster Thayer who sentenced him to twelve to fifteen years in prison. It was later shown that defense counsel bungled the case miserably.

The trial on the lesser charge was in contrast to the usual legal procedure and was obviously part of a “build-up” against both men, for some of the stigma of the Vanzetti conviction spilled over against Sacco when the two were tried together.

On 11 September, 1920, the two were indicted for the South Braintree crime and tried before Judge Thayer the following May. They were convicted of murder in the first degree on 14 July. Eight appeals for a new trial followed, as new evidence was uncovered year after year, and the case became a causecélèbre. Men of intellectual probity and all shades of political belief in many nations, convinced of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, enlisted in what became a great army, whose tramping feet were heard in all the capitals of the world. Sacco and Vanzetti became symbols, beliefs, almost a religion-and a crusade for their release swept the earth; a crusade which gained in intensity as the two men neared the shadow of the chair seven years after the shoemaker and the peddler were first arrested as dangerous “Reds”.

During my week’s investigation in 1922 of the background of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, I saw the men of the defense committee who had already set the worldwide army on the march. Three men were the leaders in this vast movement. One was Aldino Felicani, Italian journalist and printer, who, almost single-handed, began the agitation. Felicani was a linotype operator at the time on LaNotizia, an Italian daily in Boston and he began the publicity by pouring forth dozens of letters to Boston newspapers. He had once been a close associate of Mussolini in the days when Il Duce was a Social Radical and had spent six months in the same Italian jail with him when both paid that penalty for their radical activities. A second chief figure was Frank Lopez, a jovial, thickset young man who became secretary of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee in Boston. It was from this bare Hanover Street office of the committee that the pamphlets and circulars and letters emanated that gained almost immediate worldwide repercussions, some not at all to the liking of members of the committee who believed that bomb explosions and riots would not help their cause.

The publicity was handled by Morris Gebelow, a slender, dark-haired student who wrote under the pen name of Eugene Lyons and who later went to Soviet Russia as correspondent for the United Press.

I also talked to newspapermen who had covered the case, impartial observers, state officials who had taken part in the trial, and Judge Thayer. It was my purpose to review the evidence on both sides.

The newspapermen, I found, with one exception, felt that the trial had been unfair because of the atmosphere surrounding the case. The men were tried in a steel cage, part of the equipment of Massachusetts courts. An unnecessary show of police force was exhibited when they were led to and from the courtroom. There were needless “searchings” of those entering the courtroom. Newspapermen were “patted” for weapons. The newspapers printed stories of threatening letters sent to the court and the jury. It had been difficult to get jurymen to serve because of the atmosphere of hysteria that preceded the trial. Frank P. Sibley, dean of Boston newspapermen who covered the trial, told me he had never seen anything like it. Four years later he put this in the form of an affidavit in which he told how Judge Thayer had solicited the attention of reporters during the trial, had discussed the case against Sacco and Vanzetti freely, and had even asked Sibley to print a story that he was conducting the trial fairly and impartially.

Sibley’s standing in the newspaper fraternity was so high that it was presumed that his affidavit would carry considerable weight. Well over six feet, Sibley, with his sombrero type hat and his flowing Windsor tie, was an outstanding figure wherever he went. As war correspondent with the Yankee Division in France he chronicled the deeds of the New Englanders and their commander in their history-making moments.

From the beginning of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial Sibley saw the gratuitous injection of “patriotism” in the case by the presiding judge and state attorneys. The Globe, for which he worked, was one of the most influential of New England’s dailies, and its management strongly opposed the idea that their star reporter make an affidavit as to his observations. Sibley, too, was reluctant to take himself out of the role of disinterested spectator and align himself on one side of the case. His perplexities on the ethics of such action tormented him for a long time but finally he felt that in signing the affidavit he was yielding to the highest sentiment of justice and fair play. Incidentally, this star reporter found himself covering trivial assignments such as flower shows for some time after he had made the affidavit.

“What impressed me more than anything else was his [Judge Thayer’s] manner,” said Sibley. “It is nothing you can read of in the record. In my thirty-five years I never saw anything like it… His whole manner, attitude, seemed to be that the jurors were there to convict the men.”

After I had had an opportunity to acquaint myself with the facts in the case and the testimony for and against the two Italians, I wired Judge Thayer for an appointment. He replied on 22 February, and a few days later I called on him at his home, 180 Institute Road, Worcester. After greeting me cordially the Judge said, “I hope the NewYorkTimes is not going to take the side of these anarchists.” He pronounced the first syllable of the word “anarchist” as if it were spelled “on”.

While I was rather taken aback that he should think the Times would be interested in “crusading” for two convicted radicals, I soon realized his remark was merely an introduction to a denunciation of all radicals. My reply to his question was that the Times was not concerned with taking either side of the case but that it was interested in having prepared a fair and impartial summary of the evidence on which the convictions were returned.

Judge Thayer then launched into a detailed discussion of the case, making no attempt to conceal his aversion for economic and political dissenters and particularly foreigners. His lips trembled with emotion and his yellow and deeply wrinkled face darkened as he spoke of the need for the defense of American institutions. It was obvious that to him a philosophical anarchist was the same as a murderer. He went on in this way for an hour, jumping from the trial testimony to criticism of aliens, anarchists, and radicals. They all seemed to be lumped together in his mind.

The Judge stipulated that I was not to quote him. But the measure of his extraordinary prejudice against Sacco and Vanzetti was obvious.

When I left Judge Thayer that night I was deeply discouraged. To witness at firsthand such expressions of antipathy for aliens and radicals as a group, from one who was called upon to judge his fellow man was disheartening. But Judge Thayer’s attitude was quite mild compared to that of citizens of Boston five years later when I covered the events of the three weeks leading up to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The next five years were marked by a quickening of interest in the case due to the publicity that followed every attempt to obtain a new trial and to the propaganda of the little group of men and women who assisted the defense committee.

New evidence was uncovered year after year to prove that the two men were innocent, to prove that they had not had a fair trial, that Judge Thayer had denounced them as “bastards” and anarchists in conversation outside the courtroom. The Judge was begged to allow another member of the Supreme Court to pass on appeals since he was charged with prejudice. He ruled that he was not prejudiced. Affidavits to prove that important witnesses whose testimony helped convict the men had lied were submitted to Judge Thayer. He turned them down. The head of the State Police, who had told the jury that one of the fatal bullets was “consistent” with being fired from Sacco’s pistol, said that the question which elicited this answer had been framed by him and the prosecutor but that if he had been asked directly if the so-called mortal bullet had passed through Sacco’s pistol, “I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative.”

Celestino Madeiros, a young Portuguese, convicted of the murder of a Wrentham bank cashier and confined in the same jail as Sacco in 1925, signed a “confession” that he had taken part in the South Braintree killing and that Sacco was innocent. In further questioning by the defense he made some admissions that implicated the Morelli gang, well known for freight-car robberies and holdups, but Judge Thayer also rejected this “confession” as ground for a new trial.

To hear these various motions, sentence was postponed from time to time but finally, on 9 April 1927, Judge Thayer announced that the two men would “suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through” their bodies.

Asked by the court clerk whether they had “anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed,” the two men addressed the court, and protested their innocence. Sacco spoke briefly, preferring to have Vanzetti, whose English was better, speak for him. Vanzetti, a vibrant figure with drooping walrus mustaches, reviewed the case. His words stirred the courtroom-and the world.

“I am not only not guilty of these two crimes,” he said in conclusion, “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 that 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 two other times I would live again to do what I have done already.”

Later he dictated this statement:

“If it had not been for these things, I might have live out my life talking at street corner 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 could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of men as now we do by 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 belongs to us-that agony is our triumph.”

The sentencing of the men called for another review of the case, and I wrote a piece for the Sunday section bringing the facts up to date. It was published on 27 April 1927. Fabian Franklin, formerly an associate editor of TheNewYorkEveningPost and ex-contributing editor to TheIndependent, a man of conservative views, read my article and wrote a letter to the Times commenting on it. He was “forced to the conclusion”, he wrote, that the men were convicted “upon utterly inadequate evidence, that this result was brought about in large part by deliberate exploitation of the anti-radical passions dominant at the time… That the conduct of the trial in many respects violated the first principles of justice and that in denying a new trial when new evidence of a most vital and substantial nature was offered, Judge Thayer failed to live up to the duty of a just and impartial judge.”

Mr Franklin was not alone in his doubts of the way the case was handled. As the days went by the doubts grew. The force of these doubts compelled Governor Fuller to appoint a commission headed by President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University and comprising former Probate Judge Robert Grant and Dr Samuel Stratton, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Many questions have been asked concerning President Lowell’s part in the case. Some have been addressed to him directly but he has made no answers to any of the queries.

During the Sacco-Vanzetti hysteria, alumni and other potential contributors to the Harvard Law School Endowment Fund were refusing to make contributions because of Professor Felix Frankfurter’s written defense of the two radicals in his widely read book, TheCaseofSaccoandVanzetti. It was reported that an offer of $100,000 had been made to the fund on condition that Mr Frankfurter resign.

Why did Mr Lowell accept the appointment at the hands of Governor Fuller when he knew the strong feeling against Sacco and Vanzetti by many potential contributors? Was he willing, for the sake of truth and justice, to take the risk of jeopardizing these contributions if he found the two men innocent? If that is so, how could he have failed to be impressed by those of his associates who denounced Mr Frankfurter for what they considered the effect of the latter’s writings on the endowment fund?

Is it possible that in Dr Lowell’s mind the convicted men were intertwined with their defender of his Law School faculty and that his feeling against the latter somehow overflowed into the Sacco-Vanzetti case?

Judge McAnarney, one of the original defense attorneys, told the Lowell Commission that Joe Rossi, Italian interpreter at the trial, had made incorrect translations. The defense attorneys did not know Italian, and Vanzetti occasionally caught one of the mistranslations, but his command of English was such that he hesitated to pick up Rossi every time.

Before the Lowell Commission Judge McAnarney, discussing this phase of the case, said that Vanzetti accused the Italian interpreter of helping the government by his misinterpretations.

President Lowell, at this juncture, said that Rossi had been “pretty careless”. However, he added that Rossi’s attention was usually called to his misinterpretations.

“I couldn’t see that it did any harm to anybody,” he said; he wasn’t helping the government “very much”.

Yet at least one of these “slips” was concerned with Sacco’s alibi which was obviously of great importance, and in 1926 Rossi was convicted of larceny and also pleaded guilty to an attempt to bribe a judge.

During the trial Rossi frequently drove Judge Thayer in and out of Dedham in his car. The Judge was on very familiar terms with him, calling him “Joe” and telling the District Attorney that he was “going riding with Joe today”.

Rossi named one of his children Webster Thayer Rossi, and District Attorney Katzmann, who prosecuted Sacco and Vanzetti, acted as godfather.

The Lowell Commission explored the trial events and the post-trial developments. In considering a motion for a new trial based on a statement of one Gould, bystander at the scene of the South Braintree crime, who was within a few feet of one of the bandits and whose coat was pierced by one of the gunman’s bullets, the Commission discarded Gould’s testimony as “merely cumulative”.

Now Gould positively declared that Sacco had not fired the shot. He had had an excellent opportunity to view the man with the weapon. Even the Lowell Commission said that Gould “certainly had an unusually good position to observe the men in the car”.

Yet the Commission discarded this affidavit because it was “merely cumulative”. How did they know what the effect of such testimony would have been at the trial? Gould had not been called as a witness, though he had given his name to a police officer and the officer had passed on the name to the State Police. The defense found him after the trial.

In considering the Gould affidavit filed in connection with the motion for a new trial, the Lowell Commission did a strange thing. It said, “There seems to be no reason to think that the statement of Gould would have had any effect in changing the mind of the jury.”

Such omniscience calls for no comment.

A witness, Daly, swore that Ripley, the jury foreman, had said, prior to being called as a juror:

“Damn them, they ought to hang anyway.”

The Commission said: “Daly must have misunderstood him [Ripley] or his recollection is at fault.”

To supplement the Lowell Committee’s report, the Governor also made a personal investigation of the case. In this connection the dramatic and significant incident of the “eel” story is worth telling.

The Governor closed his inquiry on 1 August 1927. The last witnesses were Gardner Jackson and Aldino Felicani of the Defense Committee.

“If all the witnesses in the case had been as honest as you two gentlemen are there would have been no trouble in settling it,” he told them. “I know you have been telling the truth.”

Jackson and Felicani almost leaped with joy as they heard these words. The Governor shook them by the hand and as they turned to go he said to Jackson, “You know I’m a businessman and I’m used to having documentary evidence. You have never produced any paper proving that Vanzetti was selling eels on the day of the Bridgewater crime.”

The visitors’ hearts fell. Jackson argued that eighteen witnesses had testified that Vanzetti had sold them eels on 24 December 1919. Eels are an Italian delicacy for consumption on the day before Christmas, and the witnesses remembered the man who sold the eels that day, continued Jackson, but the Governor waved aside this testimony with the words, “Oh, but Mr Jackson, they were all Italians,” and asked for documentary proof.

The Governor wanted “a paper” before he could believe Vanzetti’s alibi that he was selling eels on the day of the Bridgewater holdup. The defense felt it would be impossible to obtain such proof. But perhaps a receipt could be found for the eels. The next day, 2 August, Herbert H. Ehrmann, associate counsel for the defense, and Felicani combed the fish concerns on Atlantic Avenue for record of a shipment of eels to Vanzetti. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. All day they rummaged through old and frayed papers in cellars, garrets, and lofts. But life is sometimes stranger than fiction. If this were a short story I would have them find the receipt, rush to the Governor in triumph, and then be rewarded with a new trial or commutation of sentence. Strangely enough, part of this actually happened. The receipt was actually found, almost eight years after it had been filled out, showing a shipment of eels by the American Express to Vanzetti on 20 December 1919. These were the eels he received two days later, prepared and sold the day before Christmas. It is on record that the receipt was found in a box of old papers in the wholesale fish market of the Corsoa and Gambino Company, 112 Atlantic Avenue.

Elated with the find, Ehrmann, Felicani, and Jackson rushed the receipt to the Governor’s office. They embraced each other with joy. This would be the proof demanded by the Governor. Surely he would see that the alibi witnesses were not liars.

On the day Governor Fuller closed his private inquiry in the case, I went to Boston to cover the story. The Governor was due to give out the result of his inquiry and that of the Lowell Commission on 3 August 1927.

Albert J. Gordon, for years a reporter on TheBostonHerald, was assigned to assist me because of his knowledge of the city and its leading personalities. Later, when so many angles developed that we required help, Jonathan Eddy, then a reporter on the Times and now secretary of the American Newspaper Guild, was sent to assist us.

In Boston we found newspapermen from all parts of the country. The Sacco-Vanzetti drama was about to reach a climax. Wherever you went there was but one topic of conversation, the Sacco-Vanzetti case. What would Governor Fuller do? The air was electric with excitement. On the streets, in restaurants and shops-wherever men gathered-they talked of the two Italians.

Boston three weeks before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was a vast whispering gallery. All sorts of rumors were afloat.

The subject was discussed in Boston’s clubs, where the overwhelming judgment was that the men should be executed. In the east end, where the poor people lived, the prayer was for clemency. “Hope clemency” was the cable received by the Governor from Robert Underwood Johnson, former American ambassador to Italy.

Gordon and I canvassed the situation. We spoke to nearly everyone available to discuss the case intelligently, secretaries to the Governor, the lawyers in the case, state officials in a position to know what was going on, newspaper editors close to the Governor and to his associates. As a result we came to a conclusion which we embodied in a dispatch to the Times on 2 August. This is what we said in part:

“Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti will not die in the electric 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 at the State House today as the solution of the historic case of the Italian radicals which Gov. Fuller will place before the Executive Council when it meets tomorrow. The Governor will make known the decision tomorrow night…

“Since yesterday the idea of a further reprieve and action by the Legislature in January has gained ground, according to information available in authentic quarters. No details are revealed but the meager news that has leaked out is to the effect that Gov. Fuller will propose to the Council that the Legislature be requested to pass an enabling act permitting a new trial for the condemned men. In the meantime they would be reprieved.”

On the same day TheBostonHerald said the indications were that Sacco and Vanzetti would not die and that the Governor would ask his Council to approve another respite “in order that the doubts which still remain after his exhaustive inquiry may be removed.” It began to look as if the men’s long fight was won; that the tramp of the marching armies had been heard in the Massachusetts State House.

On 3 August, Boston was restless. The air was charged with suppressed excitement. The guards at the State House seemed uneasy. Everybody knew that the Governor would announce his fateful decision in the evening. The city was a vast guessing contest. Rumors, whispers, hints, doubts, hopes.

The Governor’s offices opened at nine o’clock. An army of newspapermen greeted Secretary Herman A. MacDonald on his arrival. MacDonald picked up some papers and went to see the Governor at a nearby hotel.

By noon the Executive Offices were filled with reporters, officials, curiosity seekers, and hangers-on. Mr Jackson, secretary of the defense committee, appeared later with an account of the detailed expenditure of $325,000 in seven years to gain freedom for the convicted men.

Elaborate preparations were made for sending out the decision. The press gallery in the House of Representatives, a floor above the Executive Offices, was converted into a telegraph room. Direct connections were established with newspaper offices.

The afternoon passed slowly. At the Charlestown State Prison where the convicted men were confined additional police took up their grim task of patrolling the prison. Mrs Rose Sacco visited her husband during the morning but for the nineteenth day he refused food and insisted on continuing his hunger strike. Vanzetti appeared a little more cheerful but ate nothing after breakfast. The homes of Governor Fuller in Boston and at Rye, New Hampshire, of Chief Justice Arthur P. Rugg, and of Justice Thayer were put under guard. Luigia Vanzetti, sister of the convicted fish peddler, left Italy for the United States, having been delayed ten days before she could obtain a passport. Judge Thayer played eighteen holes of golf in 84 at the Cliff County Club in Ogunquit, Maine, where he was summering.

Crowds waited restlessly before newspaper bulletin boards. But the reporters were just as restless. We gathered at the State House early in the evening but there was a hitch. Finally, sheet by sheet the Governor’s decision was rushed to him for inspection and revision and then rushed back for mimeographing.

Governor Fuller arrived at the State House at eight twenty-five and was surrounded by reporters. He promised to give us a fifteen-minute interview. Half an hour later he emerged, pale and drawn. Instead of making the expected announcement he read from an envelope on which he had scribbled these words:

“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 to have the decision in our hands at nine-thirty, well in time for most of our deadlines. But last-minute changes were made and nine-thirty came and went. We walked restlessly up and down the corridors, talking, smoking, nervous, quite different from the picture of gay, nonchalant reporters shown on the screen.

At the bare defense-committee offices on Hanover Street a group of men sat on rickety chairs, tables, boxes, and bundles of pamphlets. Professor Frankfurter was there in his shirt sleeves. The night was warm. Over and over again, the visitors read the posters on the walls. One, urging clemency, was signed by members of the French Cabinet. A Mexican poster read “Liberty and Justice”. Alongside it was a manifesto by a former member of the Italian Parliament. The telephone bell rang incessantly. Was there news? No. When would the decision be given out? Soon, maybe. Hurried telephoning to the Executive Offices. No news. Gardner Jackson was everywhere, at the State House, one minute, dashing to the Hanover Street offices the next.

Outside Governor Fuller’s office the suspense was painful. We paced the corridors like wolves. Hours went by. Then, shortly before eleven-thirty, attendants appeared with copies of the decision. Two copies were placed in each envelope. The name of each newspaper or press association was on the outside of each envelope. We crowded around Secretary MacDonald like animals. As our papers were called we snatched the envelopes and ran down the long corridor. We tore the envelopes open as we ran, dashing up a flight of marble stairs to our wires. I had five minutes to make the deadline, yet I did not know what the decision was as I ran. As I reached the telegraph operator who had the wire open into the Times office I flung the Governor’s decision open to the last page and gathered its import.

“Bulletin,” I shouted to the operator. “They die!”

The news was flashed to the Times by one of the speediest telegraph operators I have ever known. Only a few minutes remained to get a crisp lead into the paper, and I had no time to write it. Glancing hurriedly over the report, I dictated to the operator a lead of about 250 words. I had sent 400-500 words earlier that had already been set in type. A three-column heading was written in the New York office in short order and a previously prepared 1,500-word summary of the case was rushed into the paper.

By this time the press gallery was a veritable madhouse. Reporters were pounding their typewriters like demons. Telegraph operators, peering over the reporters’ shoulders, clicked the stories out without waiting for the sheets to be placed before them.

“They die,” was the verdict that flashed to all corners of the globe. Street crowds in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and scores of cities caught the flash. Cable-office operators in Tokyo and London, Shanghai and Paris caught the electrical impulses that winged under the ocean beds. Messengers dashed in and out of the press gallery. For me there was little time for reflection as I had to begin immediately on a more comprehensive story of the decision for the later editions. Gordon ran to the office of TheBostonHerald with the second copy of the decision, and the full text was transmitted to the Times from that office.

“God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” cried Felicani on hearing the verdict.

Orders from the Times office were to give everything we had. We did. Gordon returned to the State House from TheBostonHerald office, and we sent a complete story of the Governor’s decision and of the unanimous verdict of the Lowell Commission against the men for the later editions. About two o’clock in the morning, we left the building, completely fagged out. Boston Common was dark and forbidding. A few homeless men skulked about. On the way back to the Statler Hotel where we were staying we talked of the Fuller decision. Had we been too optimistic? What had happened? Had the Governor changed his mind in a few hours after the news came from South Dakota?

The next day the decision was the only topic of conversation in Boston. We talked it over with Robert Lincoln O’Brien, with Frank Buxton, his associate, and with all our other sources of information. My dispatch to the Times that day read: “The decision announced late last night stirred certain important men in Boston to private discussion of the case. These men, it may be stated on excellent authority, were taken into the Governor’s confidence. They are declaring emphatically tonight that the Governor gave them every indication that he would pardon Sacco and Vanzetti or extend clemency to them… They put the change in the Governor’s decision as apparently made between three p.m. Tuesday and that midnight.”

Between three p.m. Tuesday and midnight Calvin Coolidge, President of the United States, vacationing in South Dakota, had handed out slips of paper to newspaper correspondents on which were typed these words: “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”

Was there a connection between the two stories? Did Governor Fuller change his mind at the last minute when he learned that President Coolidge would not run for office again? That the Governor had high political ambitions everybody knew. The Boston police strike had catapulted Governor Calvin Coolidge into the Vice-Presidency and the death of President Harding had landed him in the White House. Governor Coolidge’s issue was “law and order”. The Boston police strike was the peg on which he hung the issue. The strike had made the Governor of Massachusetts a national figure.

Whether or not Governor Fuller made a volte-face when he learned of the news from Rapid City is a secret still locked in his breast. Two facts are known, however.

(One). Persons close to the Governor expected clemency up to the last minute. One of these was Robert Lincoln O’Brien, until recently Chairman of the United States Tariff Commission, then editor of TheBostonHerald and friend of Governor Fuller. Another was a secretary to the Governor who told the same story to Mr Gordon, my associate.

Before me is Mr O’Brien’s letter to Mr Gordon, which says in part:

“… I expected clemency, probably in the shape of a pardon, up to the last minute, and thought I had reason for this belief from what Gov. Fuller himself had voluntarily told me. I sat next to him at the dinner of Boston University commencement, on the day when we both received honorary degrees. What the Governor told me then I repeated in confidence to a former attorney-general of the State who said it was compatible with no other theory than that of clemency; the governor said the lodgment of responsibility in one judge was ‘abhorrent’ to him. I carefully noted the word ‘abhorrent’ and told him this was Bentley W. Warren’s argument.

“He told me that a son of one of the leading witnesses for the prosecution had been to him to tell him that his mother was utterly irresponsible and mentally incapable of telling the truth. Fuller said I would be surprised at the way much of the testimony collapsed. He led me out to the elevator, delayed its movement, to explain to me that he was going to settle this case in such a way that he could live with his own conscience. He did say that he took no stock in the Madeiros confession and that he was not impressed with the flowing necktie of Frank Sibley. But aside from these two observations his point of view was wholly on the clemency side. I continued to hear things pointing in the same direction although it is fair to say not from the Governor…”

(Two). Friends and political associates of Governor Fuller did use the “law and order” argument at a Republican convention conference in Kansas City in the following June of 1928, to push his candidacy for the vice-presidency. But his aspirations were killed by Senator Borah, who announced he proposed to fight Fuller’s nomination to the limit.

Senator Borah voiced his views at a conference in the suite of Secretary of the Treasury Mellon in the Muelbach Hotel. A drive was on to nominate former Governor Channing H. Cox of Massachusetts, but Cox took the position that if any Massachusetts man was to go on the ballot it should be Governor Fuller. At the Bay State caucus Fuller was favoured by a powerful group including Chairman William M. Butler of the Republican National Committee, Louis K. Liggett, and Senator Frederick H. Gillet. It was unanimously voted to enter Fuller’s name in the convention and to support him as a unit, and former Speaker Benjamin Loring Young was chosen to make the nominating speech.

John Richardson of Boston, Hoover manager for Massachusetts, had been in favor of Fuller, and Mr Liggett, the new National Committeeman, was also a Fuller supporter. So well did the Fuller boom go that Chairman Butler wired the Governor concerning the situation. Later, at another conference in the Mellon suite, Senator Borah said that he would not stand for Fuller, and that the party could not afford to go to the country on the Sacco-Vanzetti case as an issue, as it would be a false issue. He had nothing against Fuller personally but felt he would be a political liability. Not only would the party be burdened by the platform’s plank on the equalization-fee program, but it would have to assume the burden of defending Fuller’s action in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which was “political dynamite”, the Idaho Senator argued. He had doubts about the guilt of the two Italians.

Borah went so far as to declare that he would take the convention floor on a point of personal privilege if Fuller’s name was placed before the delegates. This was an unprecedented course that the leaders were hardly prepared to face. Congressman Theodore E. Burton of Ohio attacked Fuller’s Congressional record and spoke of his unpopularity with his Congressional associates. This determined attack completely eliminated the Bay State executive.

But we did not know these things on that August day in 1927, and the apparent change of mind by Governor Fuller became the more mysterious as we made further inquiries. We learned that not only had the Governor told confidants that the idea of sending the men to the electric chair on “flimsy” evidence was “abhorrent” to him, but he also said he did not approve of having one judge as the sole arbiter of the men’s destinies.

A day or two later indication that the Governor might be groomed for Presidency appeared in TheMaidenNews, published in Mr Fuller’s home town. This editorial stated that “the effect of the decision upon the political fortunes of His Excellency will be to make him the most talked-of man in our country for the President of the United States. The decision, in our judgment, surpasses that of Governor Coolidge in the Boston police strike. No other man mentioned for the Presidency has any such record for courageous public service and for sustaining law and order.”

The Governor received messages hoping he would “choose to run” for high office in 1928.

When Gordon and I saw Defence Counsel Thompson the next day he told us that after four years he and Mr Ehrmann were stepping out of the case, which “is now remitted to the judgment of mankind”. Their efforts had come to naught. They had been unable to break through the secrecy with which the Governor had conducted his star-chamber inquiry.

They had not been permitted to be present, they told us, during the examination of all witnesses. In the Lowell Commission hearing defense counsel were not allowed to hear the testimony of Judge Thayer or Chief Judge Hall of the Superior Court, and they were excluded during part of the examination of District Attorney Fred Katzmann. What took place at these sessions was not made known to them, and they had no opportunity for cross-examining these witnesses. Counsel for the convicted men were handicapped in being ignorant of what Judge Thayer said in defending himself against the charge that he was prejudiced. Nor could counsel inquire of the jurors the effect on them of the Judge’s attitude.

It was too much for Mr Thompson, former president of the Massachusetts Bar Association and head of its grievance committee. He had sacrificed a lucrative private practice to handle the case and now his practice was gone; he was socially ostracized by Boston’s “Cabots” and “Lodges” and even by old associates, and his health was impaired. But not his faith in the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Arthur D. Hill, former District Attorney of Suffolk County and a distinguished member of the Boston Bar, succeeded Mr Thompson as chief counsel. The new legal pilot was assisted among others by Francis D. Sayre, son-in-law of President Wilson, and a new phase of the case was opened-the last battle to free the Italian radicals.

By this time the world-wide interest in the case was unprecedented. On 5 August, twelve Paris dailies devoted four times as much space to the Sacco-Vanzetti case as to the breakup of the Geneva Naval Conference. From the Royalist ActionFrançaise on the Right, to the Communist Humanité on the Left, there were pleas for clemency.

When the cables carried messages from abroad we would go to the State House for some word of the next possible move. In Governor Fuller’s entourage the pleas made by Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and other distinguished men and women in Europe and America were regarded as “unwarranted interference”. This view was expressed to us without reservation by State officials and by “substantial citizens”. The atmosphere became murky indeed. Knots of men gathered on the Common, and Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers never failed to evoke hostile remarks from those who damned the Italians as “anarchists and foreigners”.

Staid Boston flinched whenever anybody suggested that “Massachusetts justice was on trial”. Bomb explosions in New York, Baltimore, and abroad heightened the tension in Boston. We could almost feel the wave of local resentment that flared up so swiftly against the doomed men when the reports of violence were published. The pleas for mercy by distinguished men were resented.

We were enveloped in a miasma of hate, fear, suspicion.

Boston in August 1927 was seized with mass hysteria. It was a witch-hunter’s paradise.

But doubts arose and would not down. Then the Lowell Committee published its report. The prestige of this committee was so enormous that its “thumbs down” verdict was accepted virtually as gospel by vast numbers, particularly of middle-class groups.

The Lowell report was regarded by most newspapers as final. But upon review by eminent lawyers, there were “indications of error.” Some of these were pointed out by Charles C. Burlingham, distinguished member of the New York bar, in TheNewYorkTimes.

Walter Lippmann, editor of the New York World and a Harvard alumnus, had at first taken the Lowell report as “the last word”. In common with so many others, he had not analysed it critically, but had accepted the judgment and decision of those holding high position. It took a great deal of persuading by Felix Frankfurter, Charles Merz (then an associate on TheWorld), and Mr Burlingham to make him analyse the report to its roots. When he did so, he took the entire editorial page of TheWorld on 19 August for a strong editorial on “Doubts That Will Not Down”, which discussed at great length discrepancies in the testimony and the doubts that still remained.

Even as late as 1936, during the Harvard Tercentenary Celebration, a group of Harvard alumni published a pamphlet-WalledinThisTomb-comprising “questions left unanswered by the Lowell Committee and their pertinence in understanding the conflicts sweeping the world at this hour”.

Were the distinguished members of the Lowell Committee so unaware of their own bias that they unconsciously permitted it to dictate what they should believe and what they should not believe? What would explain the otherwise inexplicable omissions and commissions of this committee? Was it class feeling, instinctive distrust of a certain class of “foreigners”, lack of sympathy with working-class types represented by Sacco and Vanzetti, their natural antipathy as “patriots” to draft dodgers?

The committee members had enormous prestige yet-

(1) They believed a woman whom they said was “eccentric” and “not unimpeachable in conduct”, whom the Commonwealth had refused to call because she was unreliable, whose testimony Governor Fuller rejected, whose son said she was not to be believed, whom a police chief-he had known her all his life-said was “crazy, imagines things-has pipe dreams…”

(2) They believed that a rent in a cap, alleged to be Sacco’s and found near the scene of the South Braintree crime, was a “trifling matter” and did not warrant a new trial. Yet, Judge Thayer had denied motion for a new trial on the ground that the rent was a vital part of the proof against Sacco. This, too, in the face of new testimony by the Braintree Chief of Police, who told the committee that he had made the rent in trying to find a name inside the cap.

(3) They omitted all reference to the important “eel” testimony and the receipt that tended to exculpate Vanzetti. (Nor was there any reference to this important incident in the Governor’s report.)

We followed the new counsel Mr Hill from one legal step to another in his attempt to save the men from death in the electric chair, set for 10 August. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts refused a writ of error. The day before the date set for the execution, Mr Hill, in one of the frankest statements ever made in the State courts, told Judge Thayer in open court that because of prejudice he could not fairly decide the motions before him. He pleaded that Thayer withdraw to allow another judge to be appointed for the final appeal. He pointed out that even the Lowell Committee had found Thayer guilty of a “grave breach of official decorum” in speaking of the case off the bench. He urged that it was an insuperable task to try a case under such circumstances.

Hill filed a new affidavit of a witness who saw the South Braintree shooting and who told the police Sacco and Vanzetti were not in the murder party but who had not been called at the trial.

Hill’s appeal was rejected. It was the eighth time in six years that Judge Thayer had denied a new trial.

Judge Thayer completely lacked judicial temperament in this case. His prejudice overflowed to reporters, acquaintances, and friends whom he sought out during lunch, whom he invited to his chambers. In a Boston club, on the golf links, wherever he went, something impelled him to denounce the prisoners before him. He sought to sway an observer for the Boston Federation of Churches to disbelieve Sacco’s employer, who had given him a fine character.

Robert Benchley, then dramatic editor of Life, whose family knew the Judge well, said that in the summer of 1921 his friend Loring Coes told him “that Web [Thayer] has been saying that these bastards down in Boston were trying to intimidate him. He would show them that they could not and that he would like to get a few of those Reds and hang them too.”

The judge was unable to keep his violent language out of the record of the trial. In his charge he went out of the way to compare the duty of the jurors with that of our soldiers in France.

His lack of restraint and judicial temper even led him to exclaim to a friend after he had turned down a plea for a new trial:

“Did you see what I did to those anarchist bastards?”

What drove this New England judge to such extraordinary breaches of judicial decorum? Apparently, his obsession against “Reds” completely deprived him of all unbiased consideration of the case and led him to hang onto it with bulldog insistence, through eight appeals in six years, even going so far as to be a judge of his own prejudice and ruling that he had had none.

While the argument was under way, the American flag was burned in front of our consulate in Casablanca, Communists called a protest strike in Prague, British labor leaders cabled appeals to Governor Fuller, and President William Green of the American Federation of Labor asked for commutation of sentence.

August 9 was to have been the last day of life for Sacco and Vanzetti. The execution hour was set for three minutes after midnight, 10 August. That morning Boston was the center of an influx of radicals, trade-union leaders, liberals, and sympathizers from all over the country. We spent hours watching them try to picket the State House. They wore mourning bands on their sleeves. As rapidly as they appeared they were arrested.

Extraordinary police arrangements were made for the execution. Eight hundred armed men guarded Charlestown State Prison. They were prison police, State Police, and Metropolitan Boston and Cambridge police.

Gas and tear-gas squads were held inside the prison gates. A machine-gun detachment was stationed near the gates.

The nerves of Bostonians were “jumpy”. They called up the police and complained of the activities of “foreign-looking men”.

On Boston Common I ran into Michael Angelo Musmanno, a vivacious young man with flowing brown hair and streaming black Windsor tie. Musmanno, who had been sent from Pittsburgh to Boston by the Sons of Italy to present to the Governor a resolution expressing that organization’s doubts about the case and voicing the hope for some form of clemency, was on his way to get Sacco and Vanzetti’s signature to an appeal. We rode to the prison in a taxicab and I waited for Musmanno. When he reappeared I asked Musmanno how Vanzetti felt about the day that was to end with the short walk to the electric chair.

This is what I wrote at the time:

“VANZETTI: Ah, Musmanno, the trouble with the world is that there is no responsibility. You see it is this way. In the court the District Attorney says it is not his fault that we are there. He is paid to prosecute men and he can’t help himself. The judge says he has nothing to do with the case except to charge the jury on the law. He says the jury brings in the verdict. The jury says it looks to the judge for guidance so they are not responsible. Then you ask the governor and he says it is up to the Advisory Committee. But the committee says it is the witnesses that make the case. The witnesses say they couldn’t help being where they are. They didn’t ask to be called. And then there are the guards before our cells. They say they are sorry for us but they can’t do anything about it. Then, when they come to strap us in the chair they will say they had nothing to do with it as that is how they earn their living. Well, Musmanno [with a smile], I guess only Nick and I are responsible.”

Sacco, who was on the twenty-fifth day of his hunger strike, would not sign the appeal paper placed before him by Musmanno. Vanzetti did so on condition that it cover both cases. Vanzetti autographed Charles A. Beard’s TheRiseofAmericanCivilization for Musmanno and wrote a farewell message on a flyleaf. Musmanno refused to take the two volumes with him at the time as that would mean he had given up hope.

Mr Hill appealed to the governor for a stay of execution pending a final appeal to the full bench of the Supreme Judicial Court. The governor called a special meeting of his Council. He asked seven of the eight living attorneys general to help him consider the request for a respite.

While these meetings were in progress in the State House Mr Hill sped to the home of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes at Beverly Farms, thirty miles away. The justice held he could not stay the execution as he had no jurisdiction in the case.

In the last desperate days a second appeal was made to Justice Holmes. Those who undertook this mission were Mr Thompson and John Finerty, a Washington lawyer. They talked to him on the porch of his Beverly Farms home. The jurist was deeply moved by the lawyers’ recital and told them that there was nothing he would rather do than to grant their request, but he saw no legal way in which he could act.

“You don’t have to convince me that the atmosphere in which these men were tried precluded a fair trial,” said Justice Holmes. “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.”

He turned on his heel and went into the house.

To Justice Holmes preservation of the fabric of Federal-State relations was a principle higher than life. It was what he had fought for as a lad in the Civil War.

Mr Hill flung himself into his car and hurried to Circuit Court Justice George W. Anderson, who also found he could not intervene. There was but one hope for a stay, that was Governor Fuller. At eight-thirty p.m. Mr Hill poured his appeal before the governor and the Council. They were reluctant to act. Hill argued and pleaded, summoning every argument he had. His effort was successful and a respite for ten days was granted at eleven-twelve p.m., less than an hour before the men were to have met their death.

Captain Charles R. Beaupre of the State Police rushed the reprieve to the Charlestown State Prison.

It was at eleven-forty that Warden William Hendry, the reprieve in his hand and a smile on his face, walked down the long cement corridor leading to the death house. Sacco, Vanzetti, and Madeiros had been prepared for the electric chair.

“It’s all off, boys,” the warden sang out as he approached the three cells. The men slowly rose from their cots. Vanzetti gripped the bars of his cell. “I’m damn glad of that,” he said, “I’d like to see my sister before I die.” Sacco and Madeiros made no comment.

The warden returned to his office, passed around cigars to the reporters and witnesses, and smiled with satisfaction as an assistant read the respite with all the “whereases” and “know ye alls”.

Now began the ten last days of mental torture for the convicted men and their friends. Robert Morss Lovett, of the University of Chicago, formed a Citizens’ National Committee. Glenn Frank, President of the University of Wisconsin, Dr Felix Adler, of the Society for Ethical Culture, and many well-known men and women accepted membership on the committee.

The police refused to allow Sacco-Vanzetti meetings on Boston Common. Powers Hapgood, nephew of Norman Hapgood, tried to make a “free speech” test and was sent to the psychopathic ward for observation.

A week after the reprieve the full bench of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts heard the last appeal in the case. The same day a bomb explosion wrecked the home of Lewis McHardy, who had been a juror in the case six years previously. This and other events fanned Massachusetts opinion to fever heat. Sacco, under threat of forcible feeding, broke his self-imposed fast on the thirtieth day, six days before he was to die. Four days later he bade a pathetic farewell to his fourteen-year-old son Dante.

August 19. The State Judicial Court denied the final appeal. Preparations were made for an appeal to the Federal courts.

From Cotuit President Lowell told TheNewYorkTimes he would not discuss the case and declined to say why he would not make public the record of examination of witnesses.

Extra police were placed on duty to protect all public officials and public property.

Luigia Vanzetti, in a faded travelling cloak and grasping in her hand a gold medallion of the Madonna, stepped off the Aquitania in New York in time to hear that the highest legal tribunal in Massachusetts had shut the door against hope for the brother whom she had not seen in nineteen years.

August 20. Luigia arrived in Boston at four-thirty a.m. At eleven-thirty Mrs Sacco took her to Charlestown State Prison. Every day for a week Mrs Sacco had passed the electric chair on the way to visit her husband in the death house. This day she tried to save Luigia from the gruesome sight by appealing to Warden Hendry. The bluff Scot who had come to respect his two prisoners yielded, and the women were permitted to enter the death cells from another direction.

The warden opened the door for Miss Vanzetti.

“Barto,” she murmured, sinking into her brother’s arms.

The defence suffered three setbacks in the Federal courts.

Behind the scenes strong pressure was exerted to have the Department of Justice’s files opened. Affidavits of former Department of Justice agents indicated that the state and the Federal governments had exchanged information on the case and that the Federal authorities were certain that Sacco and Vanzetti were radicals but not murderers.

August 21. Governor Fuller remained silent on the request that he ask for the Federal files. The acting attorney general had announced he would submit the files if the governor made the request.

Justice Brandeis declined to intervene, as members of his family had been personally interested in the case. (Mrs Sacco had lived in a house in Dedham placed at her disposal by the Brandeis family, and Mrs Brandeis and her daughter Susan had become interested in the case.) They also discussed it with Mrs Elizabeth Glendower Evans of Boston, who assisted the defence committee.

Large crowds gathered near the State House and police stopped a parade of pickets, forbidding all public demonstrations. They called it a “death watch”. More than 150 persons were arrested for picketing, including Edna St Vincent Millay, Lola Ridge, John Dos Passos, Professor Ellen Hayes of Wellesley, John Howard Lawson, and “Mother” Ella Reeve Bloor.

Paula Halliday, who used to manage “Polly’s” restaurant in Greenwich Village, walked on the Common wearing a red slicker. On her back in black paint were the words: “Save Sacco and Vanzetti. Is Justice dead?”

Police dragged her to the nearest patrol wagon.

Musmanno returned from Washington where he had filed papers for a writ of certiorari, which could not be argued until October.

Lawyers, in a final desperate attempt, dashed off to call on Supreme Court Justice Stone, vacationing on rock-bound Isle au Haut, off the Maine coast.

A telegram imploring Justice Taft to confer on American soil with counsel was sent to him at Point au Pic, Quebec.

Senator Borah, from Portland, Oregon, wired that he would volunteer his legal services if a new trial were obtained.

August 22. Turmoil and street fighting in Paris such as had not been witnessed since the World War. Hundreds arrested and scores hurt.

Forty hurt in a Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration in London.

A riotous demonstration before the American Consulate in Geneva.

Delegations of citizens visited Governor Fuller all day. Frank P. Walsh and Arthur Garfield Hays of New York, and Francis Fisher Kane, former US Attorney in Philadelphia, begged for a respite pending examination of the Department of Justice files.

They said that Acting Attorney General Farnum had at last agreed to have the files opened, and pleaded with the governor not to rush Sacco and Vanzetti to the chair in “indecent haste” while the files were still locked.

Mr Hill begged the Governor to delay the case until the appeal, docketed in the Supreme Court, had been argued.

Congressman LaGuardia flew to Boston to see the Governor and emerged saying the condemned men had one chance in a thousand.

Justices Taft and Stone refused to intervene.

Again Sacco and Vanzetti were prepared for the short walk to the electric chair.

Boston was in a veritable state of siege. Police precautions of 10 August were augmented. Three hundred policemen were thrown around the State House, while pickets marched up to the front door only to be bundled into patrol wagons. Legionnaires shouted and hooted and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

A New York labor group headed by Julius Hochman, Luigi Antonini, A. I. Shiplacoff and Judge Jacob Panken saw the Governor. President Green wired again asking for commutation. The governor received 900 telegrams during the day. Two-thirds asked for clemency.

A group of liberals added their appeals. I watched them leave the governor’s office without hope. It was no use, they said. They felt an air of unreality about the whole thing. Never have I seen a more dejected lot. Among them were John F. Moors, a member of the Harvard Corporation; Paul Kellogg, of TheSurvey; Waldo Cook, of TheSpringfieldRepublican; Dr John Lovejoy Elliott, and Dr Alice Hamilton.

Police charged a crowd near the Bunker Hill Monument. The prison area was an armed camp. Searchlights swept glaring fingers over rooftops, revealing whole families gazing at the prison. All streets leading to the prison zone. Police horses stamped restlessly in the yellow glare of street lamps.

Mrs Sacco and Miss Vanzetti paid three visits to the prison on the last day and made their final appeal to the governor in the evening.

Reporters were given special passes to the prison. Those of us who were to do the execution story were asked to present ourselves at the prison by ten o’clock if possible. Eddy remained on the streets observing the police and the crowds, and Gordon covered the last hours at the State House.

When I arrived at the prison, I found that telegraph wires had again been strung into the Prison Officers’ Club. From ten o’clock we filed details of the preparations for the execution. The windows had been nailed down by a nervous policeman “because somebody might throw something in”. The shades were drawn. The room was stuffy, and in an hour the heat was unbearable. We took off our coats, rolled up our shirt sleeves, and tried to be comfortable. The Morse operators were the coolest of the fifty men and women in the room. The noise of the typewriters and telegraph instruments made an awful din. Our nerves were stretched to the breaking-point. Had there not been a last minute reprieve on 10 August? Might there not be one now? We knew of the personal appeal then being made by Mrs Sacco and Miss Vanzetti to the governor.

W. G. Thompson, counsel for the two men, saw them for the last time. In an extraordinarily moving account of his final talks, later published in TheAtlanticMonthly, Thompson described the attitude of the two Italians, their calmness in the face of death, their sincerity, their firm belief in their ideals:

“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 the 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 [Vanzetti] was equally innocent of the Bridge-water 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 a 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.

“I was impressed by the strength of Vanzetti’s mind, and by the extent of his reading and knowledge. He did not talk like a fanatic. Although intensely convinced of the truth of his own views, he was still able to listen with calmness and with understanding to the expression of views with which he did not agree. In this closing scene the impression of him which had been gaining ground in my mind for three years was deepened and confirmed-that he was a man of powerful mind, of 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…

“My conversation with Sacco was very brief. He showed no sign of fear, shook hands with me firmly and bade me goodbye. His manner also was one of absolute sincerity.”

At quarter past eleven, Musmanno burst into Warden Hendry’s office with a plea for a last talk with Vanzetti. The warden, whose heart was touched by the young lawyer, had to refuse. It was too close to the hour set for the three executions.

Musmanno was on the verge of collapse.

“I want to tell them there is more mercy in their hearts than in the hearts of many who profess orthodox religion,” he said. “I want to tell them I know they are innocent and all the gallows and electric chairs cannot change that knowledge. I want to tell them they are two of the kindest and tenderest men I have ever known.”

At the State House in the meantime, Governor Fuller talked with Mrs Sacco, Miss Vanzetti, Dr Edith B. Jackson and her brother Gardner, and Aldino Felicani of the Defense Committee.

The governor was sorry. Everything had been done, the evidence had been carefully sifted. To prove it he called in State Attorney General Arthur K. Reading, whose legal explanations were lost on the three women. Reluctantly they left the governor. Hope vanished.

Shortly after midnight, Warden Hendry rapped on the door leading to the interior of the prison and the death house. Musmanno, still in the warden’s office, laid a hand on Hendry’s arm. “Please, one last request.”

“No, no.”

Hendry, followed by the official witnesses, solemnly filed into the death chamber. The only reporter present at the execution was W. E. Playfair of the Associated Press. The rules limited the Press to one representative, and Mr Playfair had been handed the assignment when the men were convicted in 1921.

Madeiros was the first to go. His cell was the nearest the chair. A messenger hurried to us with a bulletin.

Sacco walked the seventeen steps from his cell to the execution chamber slowly between two guards. He was calm.

“Long live anarchy,” he cried in Italian as he was strapped in the chair.

In English: “Farewell my wife and child and all my friends.”

This was a slip probably due to his imperfect command of English. He had two children: Dante, fourteen, and Inez, six.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.

Then his last words.

“Farewell, Mother.”

Vanzetti was the last to die. He shook hands with the two guards.

To Warden Hendry, he said, speaking slowly and distinctly: “I want to thank you for everything you have done for me, Warden. I wish to tell you that I am innocent and that I have never committed any crime but sometimes some sin. [Almost the same words he had used when sentenced by Judge Thayer the previous April.] I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime not only of this, but all. I am an innocent man.”

A pause.

“I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”

The warden was overcome. The current was turned on, and when Vanzetti was pronounced dead Hendry could scarcely whisper the formula required by law-“Under the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been carried out.”

Mr Playfair lived up to his name. He dashed into our room with all the details of the last Sacco-Vanzetti story most of us were to write.

Governor Fuller remained at the State House until twelve minutes past twelve, a minute after Executioner Elliott had thrown the switch that ended the earthly existence of Sacco. Until a few minutes before midnight, Francis Fisher Kane had begged Governor Fuller for a respite. Thompson, former attorney in the case, remained with the governor until eleven forty five, making his final heart-rending plea for mercy.

When the governor left the State House he knew that the Supreme Court had, on 22 August, docketed two appeals for writs of certiorari. He had a request pending before him that alienists be permitted to examine Sacco and Vanzetti, that execution be delayed until the matter of the Department of Justice’s files had been cleared up. He had before him five new affidavits made by new witnesses found by the defense in the closing days. He had, or was presumed to have received from his secretary, the receipt for the eels which Vanzetti had purchased.

So that when the two men died in the electric chair the legal battle to save them was still under way and there was, in the opinion of many of the best minds in America, more than a “reasonable doubt”. In the last hour a three-or four-hour reprieve was asked by Defense Attorney Hill so that he could fly to Williamstown in a chartered plane to consult Circuit Court Judge Anderson again.

At the naval airport Hill tried to get in touch with the governor or the attorney general, but without success. When a naval officer found out who Hill and his companions were, he ordered them off the grounds and told William Schuyler Jackson, a former New York attorney general, that “it would give me pleasure to shoot you”. Finally a reporter at the State House told them over the telephone that Sacco was in the death chamber. The long battle had ended.

On the way back to the Statler Hotel after the execution, Gordon, Eddy, and I picked up a copy of TheBostonHerald.BACK TO NORMALCY the leading editorial was captioned.

“The chapter is closed,” it said. “The die is cast. The arrow has flown. Now, let us go forward to our duties and responsibilities of the common day with a renewed determination to maintain our present system of government and our existing social order.”

The Italians were presumed to have been done to death by the State for murder. Yet, in their death, as at their trial, they had been bound up with their radicalism. Divesting the men of their radicalism and their foreign birth, their innocence of the murders would have been shown to the world, in the opinion of many capable lawyers and commonsense laymen. Therefore, in a real sense the men gave up their lives for their beliefs. They were foreigners, slackers, and radicals, and were thus stigmatized during the unfortunate, hysteric days of their arrest.

Many thousands followed the bodies of the two men to Forest Hills Crematory on 27 August. The rain poured on the funeral throng, and when it was all over a policeman wiped his brow and remarked with a sigh, “Well, I hope to Christ it’s over now.”

But it was not over.

A year later a committee of lawyers (John W. Davis, Elihu Root, Bernard Flexner, Charles C. Burlingham, Newton D. Baker) sponsored publication of the legal records in the case. A cryptic reference in the Lowell Committee’s report led the lawyers to ask both President Lowell and the defense counsel for an explanation. It was disclosed that the Lowell Committee, by private inquiry, had convinced itself that it had destroyed Sacco’s alibi, which was that he was in Boston applying for a passport to Italy on the day of the South Braintree crime. Witnesses recalled seeing him because on that day an Italian group gave a dinner to Editor Williams of the Transcript. The Lowell Committee insisted that the dinner date was 13 May. When a file of LaNotizia showed that the witnesses were correct, and it transpired that Williams had been tendered dinners on both dates, the Lowell Committee omitted reference to the rehabilitation of the Sacco alibi, though the thirty-two pages of examination apparently demolishing it remained. President Lowell privately apologized to the witnesses. He refused, however, to permit them to publish the incident in LaNotizia. No mention of this incident appears in the Lowell record, but the defence counsel’s version has never been disputed. The only reference that appears is the cryptic statement which mystified the lawyers’ committee sponsoring the record, that those present “look in the books produced by the witness”.

This incident is one of the high watermarks of the entire case. In fact, when President Lowell said he had ascertained that Mr Williams had been tendered a dinner on 13 May and not on the Sacco alibi date, Attorney Thompson threw up his hands. His dejection was complete, but it was then suggested that the witnesses bring the LaNotizia files to Thompson’s office. This was done, and Thompson with his own eyes read the account of the Williams banquet on 15 April. From the depths of despair Thompson’s spirits rose to transports of ecstasy. His witnesses were telling the truth! The Sacco alibi, apparently so important when destroyed by President Lowell, would surely now be equally important to the defense, for it had been rehabilitated by the newspaper item.

Why was this important alibi testimony omitted?

The stenographer said that Dr Lowell had instructed him not to take colloquies.

This interesting correspondence may be found as an appendix on page 5256a of TheSacco-VanzettiCase, published by Henry Holt and Company. President Lowell’s reply is there given to Mr Flexner. He says that the files of LaNotizia showed that the Italians had tendered a luncheon to Mr Williams on 15 April (the date of the South Braintree murders), and that the Committee subsequently assumed in its deliberations there had been two affairs for Williams.

When the record was printed and the correspondence made public many newspapers referred to it editorially and TheNewYorkWorld, TheSpringfieldRepublican, and TheBaltimoreSun regarded the correspondence as disquieting. They viewed it as a challenge to Dr Lowell. TheSpringfieldRepublican of 2 March, 1929, ended its editorial with these words:

“To this day Mr Lowell has taken no action whatever to clarify his attitude in dealing with the Sacco alibi and he leaves the public in the face of the record as now amplified, to wonder how he could have viewed the alibi as ‘serious’ when he thought he had destroyed it, but apparently as not ‘serious’ after it had been rehabilitated.”

An interesting and hitherto unpublished sidelight on developments subsequent to the execution was concerned with an inquiry into the relation of the Morelli gang of Providence, freight-car thieves and bandits, to the South Braintree robbery. Madeiros had “confessed” that he had been with the gang that did the South Braintree job. There was reason to believe that it was the work of the Morellis. An enormous amount of material was gathered by the defense on this phase of the situation. In 1929 a meeting of liberals was held in the New York home of Oswald Garrison Villard, and $40,000 was pledged to pursue this inquiry. One of the Morellis appeared to be willing to make a clean breast of the case. It was planned to drain the pond where the holdup men were supposed to have thrown the empty money boxes. But the stock market crash came and pledges were not collected; the pond was never drained.

“Doubt that will not down,” said Walter Lippmann in his full-page editorial in the New York World on 19 August 1927.

On each anniversary of the execution of the two men these doubts arise again-they are rehearsed at the meetings in Boston where those who believe Sacco and Vanzetti innocent gather once a year.

A bronze plaque sculptured by Gutzon Borglum, bearing the images of Sacco and Vanzetti, was offered to the State of Massachusetts on 22 August 1937, ten years after their death. The offer kicked up a row, and Governor Charles F. Hurley, Democrat, rejected the plaque which bore these words of Vanzetti:

“What I wish more than all in this last hour of agony is that our case and our fate may be understood in their real being and serve as a tremendous lesson to the forces of freedom so that our suffering and death will not have been in vain.”

The tragedy of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is the tragedy of three men-Judge Thayer, Governor Fuller, and President Lowell-and their inability to rise above the obscene battle that raged for seven long years around the heads of the shoemaker and the fish peddler.