On the same day The Boston Herald 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 The Boston Herald 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 The Boston Herald 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 p
olice 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 The Boston Herald 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 The Maiden News, 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 worldwide 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 Action Française 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 doome
d 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 The New York Times.
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 The World), and Mr Burlingham to make him analyse the report to its roots. When he did so, he took the entire editorial page of The World 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—Walled in This Tomb—comprising “questions left unanswered by the Lowell Committee and their pertinence in understanding the conflicts sweeping the world at this hour”.
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Page 15