Boston a novel
Governor--if the story of a prison employee may be credited:
“Madeiros, I understand that you are sore because you didn’t get a
square deal from the government.”
“Yes, sir, that is so.”
“The district attorney double-crossed you, I understand.”
“Yes, sir, he did.”
“Well, if that is so, I might do something for you. Of course, there is
nothing in this South Braintree story of yours.”
“What I told about South Braintree is the truth.”
“Oh! In that case I won’t do anything for you. You are guilty of two
murders!”
X
On the 25th of July the Lowell Commission heard arguments of counsel.
For five hours William G. Thompson analyzed every aspect of the case,
and if his speech could have been listened to by the thinking people of
America, it would have saved the lives of his clients. But the speech
was heard only by three elderly autocrats, one of whom had a tendency
to appear to be dozing, while another had great respect for what the
third was thinking. We may imagine the third thinking as follows: “You
are an able lawyer, and are performing an intellectual feat, but I do
not need you to tell me what to think.”
Not all the evidence in the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been discovered;
the defense would keep on finding it, up to within a few hours of the
execution. But most of it was now available, and it seemed as if the
Great Novelist who makes up history had been concerned to take every
item of evidence produced by the prosecution at the Dedham trial,
and wipe it out by a later discovery. Even to that cap picked up at
the scene of the crime, which the district attorney had striven so
hard to fit onto Sacco’s head, and which “Web” Thayer had striven so
unjudicially to force a witness to identify as Sacco’s!
The main point about this cap had been that it had holes in the lining,
and the “theory” was that the holes had been due to Sacco’s habit of
hanging the cap on a nail in the factory. There had been a great amount
of testimony on this point, and Katzmann had made the most of it in his
speech to the jury. In his later arguments before Thayer he had gone so
far as to say: “that alone was enough to warrant the conviction of the
defendant Sacco.” The issue had been carried to the Supreme Judicial
Court, and made the subject of a special ruling; after which Judge
Thayer had made both cap and ruling the subject of special emphasis. In
rejecting the last bill of exceptions, he had summed up the proposition
as follows:
“In the lining of that cap there were nail-holes, which the
Commonwealth claimed were made by the nail upon which this cap had been
hung. Now the Supreme Judicial Court has said, in the decision of these
cases, that that evidence was competent, because it tended to prove
that that cap belonged to Sacco; and if the jury should find such to be
the fact, then Sacco was present at the time of the shooting.”
Such had been the word of Supreme Justice on the matter of a ragged
and dirty “pepper-and-salt” colored cap with earlaps! A man’s life
had depended upon it, and depended upon it still! And now, before the
Lowell Commission came ex-Chief of Police Gallivan of South Braintree,
telling the true story, never before revealed. The cap had been handed
to him by the shoe company superintendent, and the chief had carried
it under the seat of his automobile for at least ten days, possibly
twice as long; he had made the holes in the lining, while looking for
some mark of identification; then he had passed the cap on to police
officer Scott; and neither Gallivan nor Scott had been put upon the
witness-stand, to tell the jury how those holes had come to be!
Why Chief Gallivan had been passed by as a witness for the prosecution
was obvious enough--he was too plain-spoken a man. To the Lowell
Commission he summed up the Dedham trial in one pungent formula; and if
the three old gentlemen had thrown out the whole record, and confined
themselves to Gallivan’s one formula, they would have earned the thanks
of posterity. Said the Chief: “The Government would put on a witness
and then the defense would rush in to offset it, and I guess Katzmann
was just as wise; he would dig up one to offset him. The case appeared
to be to see who could get the biggest crowd. In other words, to see
who could tell the biggest lies.”
XI
Also the matter of Vanzetti’s revolver, which was supposed to have
belonged to Berardelli, the slain paymaster. According to the “theory,”
Berardelli had dropped it, and Sacco had picked it up, carried it off,
and given it to Vanzetti. There was no evidence that Berardelli had
had his revolver with him at the time of the shooting--he had taken
it to a repair place, and there was no record to show he had got it
back. No one had seen him with a revolver at the time of the crime. The
sole basis of the “theory” was that Vanzetti’s revolver happened to
be of the same make as the one Berardelli had owned. The prosecution
had put on the stand an expert from the factory, who had been a former
federal agent, and had led the jury to believe that he thought the
two revolvers were identical. But now, before the Lowell Commission,
he admitted that he had felt prejudice at the trial, and that his
testimony had been misconstrued. Said the witness Lincoln Wadsworth:
“But I have felt that I had created the impression that there
was a possibility that that was the pistol. Well, that is just a
possibility.... There is just the one possibility in the number
of pistols a factory of that kind happens to make. There was no
distinguishing number so that you could tell that that was the pistol.”
The witness went on to tell about his interviews with the assistant
district attorney, and how the latter had failed to be interested in
having the truth made clear:
“But Mr. Williams did not seem to want to have that at all, so that
I just let be on it. And then in the court-room I felt sure I would
have a chance to say the same thing that I have said here, but when
the time came to be cross-examined I simply was not, that was all, and
I went down on the records, as I thought, and still think, that while
not a direct statement that that was the pistol, it might lead to the
impression that that was the pistol.” And then, summing up the whole
matter: “There are thousands of times more chances that it was not than
that it was.”
So it went, with detail after detail; impossible to find a single one
that stood the test of time! Every one of the prosecution’s “star”
witnesses was ruined. Mary Splaine had told Henry Hellyer twice that
she did not see the faces of the bandits, and the detective had written
it down at the time--for use of the shoe company and the insurance
company, and their allies, the police and the district attorney.
Goodridge was a horse thief, his very name a perjury; he had sent two
men to the electric chair to escape a jail-sentence, and the district
attorney and the judge had refused to allow this to be brought before
the jury. Pelzer had told many persons that he did not see the bandits;
so had “Fainting Lola” Andrews. Both of them had made affidavits to
this effect--and then taken them back, so that you might believe them
either way, or neither.
Not one rag of evidence to cover the naked prejudice of three elderly
autocrats! The collapse became so complete that it was a matter for
jesting; there was even a haberdasher, to visit the prison and measure
the left hand of Sacco! Mary Splaine had based her identification
of the bandit upon his “good-sized left hand”--seen at a distance
of eighty feet for a period of one or two seconds. Now came the
haberdasher, testifying that Sacco’s left hand was smaller than normal.
Governor Fuller’s way of meeting that detail was to take Mary Splaine
out on the street and invite her to describe a man in an automobile
at the proper distance. But, alas, he did this in front of the State
House with the golden dome, and there was not any cobbler-shop to cut
off Mary’s view at the end of one or two seconds; nor was Mary up in
the second story, looking down amid the wild excitement of a bandit
raid, in imminent peril of shots.
There had been a million words of the Dedham trial testimony, and few
persons had ever digested it all; Cornelia Thornwell, who had been
studying it for six years, knew how hard was the task. Certainly the
Dedham jury had not done it, much as they might assure the Governor
and his commission that they had given a fair trial. Certainly the
Governor had not digested it, for when you referred to witnesses by
name, Mary Splaine and Lola Andrews were about the only ones he could
remember. Certainly the three old gentlemen had not done so, for they
made pitiful slips and asked helpless questions. But now came a great
lawyer, William G. Thompson, having sat up nights with those volumes
for several years, and presenting to the Commission a summary of their
contents.
For example, a study of Sacco’s sartorial career in South Braintree
on the 15th of April, 1920, as presented by the government witnesses.
At half-past eleven Lola Andrews had talked with him lying under an
automobile, wearing a dark suit. Five minutes later, a hesitating
witness thought he had seen him in front of a drug-store, dressed
“respectably.” Less than an hour later, according to another uncertain
witness, he was smoking a cigarette in the depot, wearing dark
“ordinary wearing apparel” and a soft black hat. When he actually shot
Berardelli, he had changed into dark green pants and a brown army
shirt, according to Pelzer. A few seconds later, he passed within Mary
Splaine’s vision, having changed to a gray woolen shirt, and wearing no
hat or coat at all; but having lost a cap at the scene of the murder,
although he had made his first appearance in a soft felt hat. A few
yards further on, Sacco had resumed his dark suit--if one could believe
the witness Goodridge.
There were many thousand words like that in Thompson’s argument; and
who could dispute the lawyer’s final statement, that Sacco and Vanzetti
had “never had the kind of trial required by English tradition and by
American constitutional law as a prerequisite to taking away their
lives”?
XII
Anguish in the hearts of all friends of the defense; they knew that
the decision was going against them--even while they would not admit
it to themselves. Pitiful the plight of hard-working and law-abiding
lawyers, who had made all the proper moves, and won the chess-game a
dozen times over--and now their opponents would dump the board and
throw the chessmen into their faces! While Vanzetti sat in his cell and
wrote memories of his mother, and Sacco composed a farewell letter to
his son, men and women whose hearts were too tender for this grim world
thought up frantic new schemes to move public opinion, and raced about
like ants in a nest which has been stepped on.
Jessica Henderson motored Cornelia Thornwell to New Haven, where lived
Mrs. Berardelli, the widow of the slain guard. With them went Musmanno,
and a Mrs. Florence, who had testified at the Dedham trial, that Mrs.
Berardelli had said to her that the hold-up would never have succeeded
if her husband had had his gun with him. (It was the gun Vanzetti was
supposed to have picked up after the murder.)
The group now appealed to the woman’s sympathies, and she agreed that
it would not help either her dead husband or his widow and orphans to
take the lives of two men who might possibly be innocent. She consented
to send a telegram to the Governor, appealing for clemency. “Write it
now,” said Mrs. Florence; but the woman said for Mrs. Florence to write
it, she would be satisfied with whatever they sent. So Mrs. Florence
and the party drove to the nearest railroad depot, and wrote a message
and sent it, and it made a front-page story in the newspapers next