Part 10

Sacco confirmed Vanzetti’s testimony that both men had told falsehoods because they were afraid that they had been arrested for their radical activities. Since the police had not informed them of the nature of the charges against them, he had been convinced that he and Vanzetti had been picked up because they had been working “for the movement for the working class, for the laboring class.” In fact, one of the first things Stewart had asked him was whether he was a Socialist.

Q. When he asked you what you were in Bridgewater for, did you give him a true reason for being there?

A. No, sir, because I was afraid to arrest us, they arrest somebody else of the people....

Like Vanzetti, he freely admitted that he was a Socialist who did not believe in war. After the United States entered the war in 1917, both he and his co-defendant had run away to Mexico to avoid the draft. Sacco had returned to Massachusetts several months later under an alias and had not resumed his real name until after the war ended. As he put it, “What right do we have to kill each other? I don’t believe in no war. I want to destroy those guns.” He loved his adopted country, but his hatred of war was greater than his devotion to an abstraction.

As far as April 15th was concerned, he maintained that he had spent the entire day in Boston. In the middle of March, he had received a letter informing him that his mother had died in Italy. He had decided to take his family back to the old country and had gone to Boston on the day of the murders to have his passport validated at the Italian Consulate. He had taken the 8:56 train from Stoughton and, after arriving at South Station, had walked to Hanover Street where he had met Angelo Monello, a Roxbury contractor. Then he had gone to Boni’s Restaurant for lunch with Felice Guadagni, the editor of an Italian journal. The two men were later joined by John D. Williams, a space salesman for several foreign-language newspapers, and Albert Bosco, a _La Notizia_ editor.

Sacco had left Boni’s at 1:30 and gone to the consulate. He was told by some man there that the photograph he had brought was much too big to fit on a passport. Then he had dropped in at a nearby coffee house where he had again met Guadagni and Antonio Dentamore, a former newspaperman. At 3:20, after buying some groceries at a nearby store, he had paid a debt of fifteen dollars to a man named Affe. Then, he had caught the 4:12 train back to Stoughton, arriving home shortly after six o’clock.

Katzmann was remorseless in his cross-examination. Why hadn’t the defendant gone to the consulate in the morning and taken the noon train back to Stoughton? “Well, I think to pass all day when I been in Boston,” was the reply. Hadn’t he lied to George Kelley, his foreman, when he had told him “that there was such a crowd in there you could not get your passport and the place closed and you missed the noon train for that reason?” Yes, he had lied to Mr. Kelley. He also hadn’t told the truth at Brockton when he claimed that he had worked on the fifteenth. “I was not sure,” he explained, “There was not interest to me very close to find out the date I have been out.”

A bevy of witnesses paraded to the stand to buttress Sacco’s alibi. Dominick Ricci said that he had seen the shoemaker early on the morning of the fifteenth at the Stoughton railroad station. At eleven a.m., Angelo Monello had passed the time of day with him in East Boston. Guadagni, Williams and Bosco verified the lunch at Boni’s. According to an affidavit submitted by Guiseppe Andrower, the former passport officer at the Italian consulate, Sacco had come to his window at two p.m. and shown him a photograph which the official had said was too large for a passport. “April 15th, 1920, was a very quiet day,” he swore, “and since such a large photograph had never been before presented for use on a passport, I took it in and showed it to the Secretary of the Consulate. We laughed and talked over the incident.”

At 2:45, at Giordani’s coffee house, the defendant had complained to Dentamore that he would have to go to the expense of having another picture taken for his passport. Carlos M. Affe remembered that Sacco had dropped in at his grocery store between three and four o’clock to pay an outstanding bill of $15.50. Mrs. Sacco, who testified through an interpreter, knew that her husband had gone to Boston on the 15th because that was the day she had been visited by Henry Iacovelli, a friend from Milford. Mr. Iacovelli confirmed that he had indeed called at the Sacco home that day.

As for their guns, each defendant had an explanation. Vanzetti claimed that he had bought his for five dollars from a friend named Luigi Falzini in early 1920 because “it was a very bad time and I like to have a revolver for self defense.”

Q. What do you mean ‘It was a bad time?’

A. Bad time, I mean it was many crimes, many holdups, many robberies.

Sacco maintained that he had gotten into the habit of carrying a gun when he had worked as a night watchman at the 3-K Shoe Factory. On the day he was arrested, he and Vanzetti had planned “to go to shoot in the woods” but had not done so because “we started an argument and I forgot....”

On July 14th, after Judge Thayer had delivered his charge from a flower-bedecked bench, the jury retired. Some seven hours later, it filed back into the courtroom. When Clerk Worthington asked if it had reached a verdict, Foreman Walter R. Ripley announced that it had. He and his colleagues had found each defendant guilty of murder in the first degree. Thayer was happy to express the Commonwealth’s gratitude for “the service that you have rendered. You may now go to your homes, from which you have been absent for nearly seven weeks.” As the twelve men hurried to take his Honor’s welcome advice, Sacco shouted, “They kill an innocent man! They kill two innocent men!”

His prophecy was somewhat premature. On November 5th, a motion for a new trial on the ground that the verdict was against the weight of evidence was argued before Thayer. It was denied on the day before Christmas. As far as the judge was concerned, he would not “announce to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor, judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust reposed in them by the law as well as the Court.” If any errors had been committed during the trial, no one would be happier than he if the Supreme Judicial Court corrected them. “But until that time comes,” he said, “so far as these motions are concerned, the verdicts of the jury must stand.”

Before Thayer’s decision, Jeremiah McAnarney had learned that, during the trial, Foreman Ripley had exhibited some .38-caliber cartridges to other members of the jury. Unfortunately, Ripley died before the lawyer could obtain a statement from him. However, two of his fellow jurors admitted that they had seen the bullets and, on the strength of this, the defense attorneys filed the first of six supplementary motions for a new trial. In their briefs, they argued that it was improper for the jurors to have considered any but legitimate exhibits.

To buttress their position that Ripley was hopelessly prejudiced against the defendants, their lawyers submitted an affidavit by William H. Daly, a good friend of the ex-foreman, who stated that he had run into him at a railroad station several days before the trial. When Daly had expressed some doubt as to whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, Ripley had replied, “Damn them, they ought to hang them anyway.” The prosecution offered no evidence to contradict the Daly affidavit.

In early October of 1921, Frank J. Burke, the glassblower who had testified for the defense, ran into Roy E. Gould in Portland, Maine. The razor paste peddler had never been called as a witness despite the fact that he had given his name to the police. When the black Buick had driven by him, he had gotten a good look at its occupants. According to his sworn statement, which Moore used as the basis of his second supplementary motion, “the man that he saw at South Braintree on April 15, 1920, at or about the hour of three o’clock in the afternoon, riding in the bandit car, front seat, on the right-hand side of the driver, is not the man that he saw in the Dedham County Jail, and who was pointed out to him as Nicola Sacco.” As far as Vanzetti was concerned, he had seen photographs of the condemned man and “he in no sense resembles the man affiant saw at South Braintree on April 15th, 1920.”

On February 4, 1922, Lewis Pelser admitted in writing to Moore that he had perjured himself at the trial. His original statement to a defense investigator that he hadn’t seen anyone in the bandits’ car because he had been huddling under his workbench was, he now admitted, the true story. Pelser’s retraction was made part of the Gould motion. However, several days later, he wrote a letter to Katzmann in which he claimed that he had been drinking “pretty heavy” when Moore interviewed him. “He asked me one question and other,” he wrote, “and finally had my whole story contradicted what I had said at the Dedham Court.” He had decided to write to the District Attorney because he was “worried at the way they have framed me up and got me into trouble.”

Moore’s third motion was based on the fact that Carlos Goodridge, the Victrola salesman who had rushed out of Magazu’s poolroom just as the Buick drove by, had not used his right name at the trial. Furthermore, the lawyer alleged that Goodridge had twice been convicted of theft in New York and that, when he testified, he was a fugitive from a third indictment. In opposing Moore’s motion, Katzmann introduced an affidavit from the salesman, admitting most of the defense’s contentions, but insisting that his testimony had been accurate.

On September 11, 1922, Moore filed a fourth motion. Two days earlier, Lola Andrews had signed an affidavit in which she repudiated the testimony she had given at Dedham, claiming that she had been coerced by the District Attorney and the police. Now, she was prepared to state that “each and every part of her testimony ... wherein she identified the said Nicola Sacco as the person that she had seen on April 15, 1920, is false and untrue.” To the best of her knowledge, she had never seen the defendant until he was pointed out to her in the Dedham County Jail.

Four months later, Mrs. Andrews retracted this repudiation. She told Katzmann that Moore and his associates had threatened to prosecute her and her son if she did not sign a statement which indicated “that I had told a lie, that I did not at any time see Sacco at South Braintree.” She would never have signed the paper if her son hadn’t put his arm around her and said, “Mother, sign this paper and have an end to all this trouble, for you did not recognize these men, and you will be doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.” She now maintained that she had told the truth at Dedham.

In April of 1923, Albert H. Hamilton, a well-known criminologist, who had testified in more than 165 murder trials, examined all the exhibits in the case. He came to the conclusion that the fatal bullet had not been fired from Sacco’s gun. He was supported in his thesis by a member of the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In opposing this motion--the defense’s fifth--Katzmann submitted affidavits by several arms experts, disputing Hamilton’s claims.

As an adjunct to the Hamilton motion, William G. Thompson, who had come into the case in 1923, filed an affidavit by William H. Proctor. Captain Proctor, who had testified for the Commonwealth that Bullet III was “consistent with” having been fired from Sacco’s pistol, now explained that he had meant to say only that it was “fired from a Colt automatic pistol of .32-caliber.” He insisted that he had “repeatedly” told Katzmann that he could not swear that the “so-called mortal bullet ... passed through Sacco’s pistol.” “Had I been asked the direct question,” he stated, “whether I had found any affirmative evidence whatsoever that this ... bullet had passed through this particular Sacco’s pistol, I should have answered then, as I do now without hesitation, in the negative.”

After hearing argument on all these motions, Thayer denied each one on October 1, 1924. He did not feel that the “mere production” of Ripley’s cartridges in the jury room had in any way prejudiced the defendants and, besides, he was unwilling to “blacken the memory” of the dead juror. As far as Gould was concerned, he was convinced that the razor paste salesman must have been mistaken. He disposed of the Pelser retraction by blaming it on an excess of liquor. The motion attacking Goodridge’s veracity because of a previous criminal record was a “bold and cruel attempt to sandbag Goodridge by threatening actual arrest” which he could only attribute to Mr. Moore’s “over-enthusiastic interest in his client’s cause.” Lastly, Mrs. Andrews’ repudiation had been procured by duress, Hamilton’s opinion was unconvincing, and, if Captain Proctor had really believed that the fatal bullet did not come from Sacco’s gun, he had had ample opportunity at the trial to make himself clear.

After Judge Thayer’s decision, all of the defense attorneys except Thompson withdrew from the case. On May 12, 1926, the five-judge Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in a sixty-page opinion, affirmed the trial judge’s denial of the various motions. Two weeks later, Thompson filed another application for a new trial, this time based on the admission by one Celestino F. Medeiros, a convicted murderer, who had sent a note to Sacco in jail in which he confessed that he had participated “in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime.”

Although Medeiros would not name the men who had been associated with him in the Slater & Morrill holdup, he was willing to reveal every other aspect of the crime. He had met the four other members of the gang in a Providence saloon and they had driven to Randolph in a Hudson which they exchanged for a Buick in some woods outside of town. Then they proceeded to South Braintree, killed Parmenter and Berardelli, and drove back to the woods where they abandoned the Buick and raced back to Providence in the Hudson. Medeiros’ role during the holdup was to sit in the rear of the Buick with a gun and “help hold back the crowd in case they made a rush.”

Despite all of Thompson’s astuteness, Medeiros would not name any names. The most the lawyer could get from him was the fact that the gang had been composed of Italians who “had been engaged in robbing freight cars in Providence.” At the time of the South Braintree murders, a group of criminals known as the Morelli gang had been hijacking freight cars throughout New England. In fact, on April 15, 1920, several of its members were out on bail awaiting trial for stealing shoes which had been consigned by both Slater & Morrill and Rice & Hutchins. Medeiros’ descriptions of his confederates fitted the known members of the Morelli group.

Although Felix Frankfurter was convinced that Medeiros, who maintained that he had confessed because “I seen Sacco’s wife come up here with the kids and I felt sorry for the kids,” was telling the truth, Judge Thayer felt otherwise. As far as he was concerned, Medeiros was unworthy of belief because he was “a crook, a thief, a robber, a liar, a rum-runner, a ‘bouncer’ in a house of ill-fame, a smuggler, and a man who has been convicted and sentenced to death for ... murder.” If Medeiros was so eager to save two men whom he claimed were innocent, why didn’t he reveal the names of the other men who had supposedly participated in the Slater & Morrill caper? Furthermore, he felt that Medeiros’ haziness as to certain details of the crime clearly indicated that he had not been there.

On April 5, 1927, Thayer’s denial was affirmed by the appellate court. Four days later, the two defendants were brought before him for sentencing. After both men had made statements affirming their innocence, Thayer ordered that they “suffer the punishment of death by the passage of a current of electricity through your body within the week beginning on Sunday, the tenth day of July, in the year of our Lord, one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven.” As the judge was intoning the death sentence, Sacco interrupted to shout, “You know I am innocent. That is the same words I pronounced seven years ago. You condemn two innocent men.”

On May 3rd, Vanzetti wrote to Governor Alvan T. Fuller, on behalf of Sacco and himself, requesting clemency. Fuller’s response was to appoint an Advisory Committee composed of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, President Samuel W. Stratton of M. I. T. and Probate Judge Robert Grant, to investigate the evidence against the condemned men. Because the three-week hearing didn’t begin until July 1st, the executions were postponed for one month. On July 27th, the committee’s members reported to the governor that they had “seen no evidence sufficient to make them believe that the trial was unfair.” One week later, Fuller stated that he had found “no sufficient justification for executive intervention.” “I believe with the jury,” he said, “that these men, Sacco and Vanzetti, were guilty and that they had a fair trial.”

Since the executions were scheduled for August 10th, a variety of petitions and motions were filed with everyone from Judge Thayer to Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, all without success. In order to give the defense time to appeal several of these denials to the Supreme Judicial Court, Fuller granted a reprieve until August 22nd. Two days earlier, petitions for certiorari were filed with the clerk of the United States Supreme Court but Justices Holmes, Brandeis, Stone and Taft refused to halt the executions. As Holmes put it, “I cannot say that I have a doubt and therefore I must deny the stay.”

At 12:19 on the morning of August 23, 1927, Sacco died in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison. Seven minutes later, he was joined in death by his friend Vanzetti who wished “to forgive some people for what they are doing to me.” Perhaps the several thousand people who milled around the prison that torrid August night could take some small measure of comfort from Vanzetti’s remarks to a newspaper reporter on the seventh anniversary of the South Braintree shooting: “If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now, we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by an accident. Our words, our lives, our plans, 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.”

5

_He Defied the Bible_

The State of Tennessee

_versus_

John Thomas Scopes

Macon County was, in 1925, one of Tennessee’s most rural areas. Without a single mile of railroad track, its almost unbroken stretches of farmland were tilled by a God-fearing, Bible-reading population whose sole contact with the outside world consisted of weekly visits to LaFayette, the tiny county seat. Its representative in the lower house of the state legislature was one John Washington Butler, a combination farmer-school teacher, who worked 120 acres just outside of LaFayette.

Butler had first run for election in 1922 on a platform that stressed the need for a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools of Tennessee. During his first term, he was evidently much too engrossed with finding his way around Nashville to do any legislating, but he assured his constituents that, if they sent him back for a second stint, he would find the time to push an anti-evolution bill. The good people of Macon County believed him and, in November of 1924, he was resoundingly reëlected to the House of Representatives.

When he returned to the capital the following January, he lost no time in living up to his campaign promise. He drafted a statute that would make it unlawful for any public school teacher “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The penalty was a fine ranging between one hundred and five hundred dollars. Butler threw his bill into the legislative hopper, saw that it reached the floor of the House, and then promptly washed his hands of it.

By all odds, the proposed legislation should have died aborning. But with surprisingly strong Baptist support, it carried the lower house on January 28, 1925 by a vote of 71 to 5. The next day, Williams Jennings Bryan, who had been fighting Darwinism up and down rural America, roared into Nashville with his rhetorical “Is the Bible True?” harangue. Every word of it was, he assured his enthusiastic audience, some of whom were so carried away by his oratory that they printed his speech and sent it to each member of the legislature. Six weeks later, the Butler Act skipped handily through the Senate by a vote of 24 to 6. On March 21st, a skeptical Governor Austin Peay signed it into law because he was convinced that it would never be “an active statute.” He couldn’t have been more mistaken.

Up in New York, Roger Baldwin, the director of the struggling American Civil Liberties Union, read a report of the new statute in a Tennessee newspaper. He sent a press release to the Memphis, Chattanooga and Knoxville papers, announcing that the ACLU would gladly finance a test case against the Butler Act if only it could find a Tennessee teacher with enough gumption to violate the law. A month later, a mining engineer named George W. Rappelyea, who managed the Dayton mines of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company, informed Baldwin that he was in a position to arrange a test case. His offer was promptly accepted.

Rappelyea, who had been raised on New York’s Third Avenue, was, in the words of one observer, “an untidy little person with rather ill-tended teeth.” But, from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, he looked out at the word with alert, questioning eyes and the ACLU’s challenge was more than he could resist. On May 5th, with Baldwin’s offer of financial support in his pocket, he headed downtown to F. E. Robinson’s drugstore where he promptly became involved with three members of the Dayton bar in an argument over the constitutionality of the Butler Act.

At this fortuitous moment, John Thomas Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Kentucky, who had been doubling as science teacher and football coach at Dayton’s Central High School, came into Robinson’s for his usual afternoon soda. Here, in this bespectacled, towheaded biologist, whose father was, according to Clarence Darrow, a man who “brought up his family to have their own opinions and to stand by them,” Rappelyea saw his chance to make good on his rash promise to the ACLU. It took the rest of the afternoon to persuade Scopes to go along with the idea but, before the drugstore conclave broke up that evening, Rappelyea was able to telegraph the ACLU that he had found his prospective defendant. The next morning, he received a wire from New York: “We will cooperate Scopes case with financial help, legal advice and publicity.” The State of Tennessee _versus_ John Thomas Scopes was under way.