Chapter THIRTEEN: Post-Trial: II (2)

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.