The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (20 page)

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 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
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 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
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 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
The
New
York
Times
.