JUSTICE IN BOSTON TOOK BEATING

Radio Record, Volume XIII, Issue 11, 21 August 1939, Page 7

JUSTICE IN BOSTON TOOK BEATING

12 Years Ago, Wednesday, Sacco And Vanzetti Were Executed To Terminate A Case That Rocked The World —

"What | wish more than all in this last hour of agony is that our case and our fate may be understood in their real being, and serye as a tremendous lesson to the forces of freedom, so thet our suffering and death will not have been in vain."--Bartolomea Vanzctti.

a ® Twelve years ago this Wednesday, shortly after midSgnight, the climax to a case that rocked the world tack place in the execution chamber of Massachusetts State Prison, Boston, United States. _A humble fish-pedlar, Bartolomeo Yanzetti, and a poor, unknown shoemaker, Nicola Sacco, were electrocuted that day for a holdup and murder, committed seven years before, to terminate one of the most. extraordinary cases in American jurisprudence, ® A case in which lawyers, philosophers, Harvard professors, authors, judges, jailers, and men renowned the world over interested themselyes in two philosophical anarchists whose guilt is questioned to this day.

[N Boston, every anniversary of the execution, the doubts arising out of that case are rehearsed at various meetings attended by Liberals and Tories, men of every political shade and conscience, united in the one belicf that American justice took a terrific beating when it turned down every appeal for a new trial and demanded that these two dreamy, contemplative, radicals be legally executed. . Originally, Saeco and Vanzetti were arrested in a police drag-net that pulled in a number of Massachusetts radicals and anarchists known to poliee, and charged with unlawful possession of weapons, pistols having been found on them. The original crime was committed on April 15, 1920, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, and the two men were arrested on May 5, of the same year. Convicted of murder in the first degree on July 14, 1920, these two men put into mo--tion 3 movement that became a great army, whose tramping feet were heard all over the world, and whose bombardment is still felt in some parts of the United States. today. Sacco and Vanzetti beeame symbols, almost a religion, and in the crusade that continued after their execution, riots, indignation meetings, and publications fanned the flames of tolerance until it became _cer-

tain that the words of Vanzetti, the fish-pedlar, were not in vain,

Intolerance

S UPERIOR Court Justice Webster Thayer, Boston, who tried the case, all during the years when the stigma of intolerance lay like a stultifying cloud over the courts of Massachusetts, repeatedly voiced his opinion that the men were anarehists and deserved to be hung for that, if no other reason. This same judge refused eight motions for new trials in the face of the most overwhelming evidence that such a trial should be granted. Refusing to consider new evidence, which apparently

cleared both Sacco and Vanzetti of guilt, he stuck to his first decision. He refused to admit prejudice, which automatically would have thrown the case into another court for a new trial, spilled his opinions on the ¢ase all over his club, his dinner table, his golf links, /-everywhere he went. As one reporter who covered the trial from its. begin-. ‘ning said, ‘‘Judge Thayer lacked judicial

temperament im the case. .e . wherever he went, something impelled him to denounce the prisoners before him. He sought to sway an observer for the Boston Federation of Churches to disbelieve Sacco’s employer, who had. given him a fine character."* . The judge was unable to keep his violent language out of the record of the trial. In his charge he went out of the way to compare the duty of the jurors with the United States soldiers in France. Another man whose action has been subject for controversy was Governor Fuller, of the State of Massachusetts, who could have either pardoned the men or commuted the sentence, had he so desired. His actions have been most suspect because of two happenings after the case. On August 3, 1927, the Governor made known his decision, -based. upon the report of.a special investigating body of his own choosing, that the men would die in the electric chair. Prior to 8 pm. on the afternoon of the 3rd, the Governor had all but admitted that the men would be granted clemency.

Quick Chanae

B UT between that time and shortly before midnight of the same day, when the decision was given to the Press, President Calvin Coolidge informed Press correspondents that he did not ‘‘choose to run for President in 1928,’’ Whether the Governor changed his mind in order to make himself a more likely Presidential candidate ig unknown. But it is known that he had Presidential aspirations; that two days after the decision a supporting paper put forward Fuller’s name as possible presidential timber; and that at the Republican National Convention ‘the follawing year there was a concerted effort to nominate Fuller as the Republican candidate. The head of the committee appointed by Governor Fuller, Harvard President A. lLawrence Lowell, is the third man in the ease whose. actions have been indicted. He signed the committee’s unanimous report that there was no new testimony, or any discrepancy in the case when first tried, of sufficient importanee to warrant a new trial. _ Lowell’s position was a peculiar one, As president of a large university, it was his duty to solicit contributions to the school’s endowment fund. Because Professor Felix Frankfurter, now a Supreme Court justice of the United States but then a member of the Harvard

law faculty, had written a book in defence of the two radicals, alumni of Harvard were refusing to contribute to the school. Why did Lowell accept the appointment when he knew the strong feeling against Saeco and Vanzetti by potential contributors? It had been reported that an offer of 100,000 dollars had been made to the fund on condition Mr, Frankfurter resigned from the defence counsels’ advisers, Wags Lowell willing, for the sake of truth and justice, to take the risk of jeopardising these contributions if he found the two men innocent? Tt is possible that Dr. Lowell’s mind intertwined the convicted men with their defender, Professor Frankfurter, and that his feeling against the latter overflowed into the Saceo-Vanzetti ease when he and his associates, a former probate judge, and the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reviewed the ease and called for new testimony that might be presented at a new trial, —

"J'Accuse 11

AMONG: other things, this commission ruled as ‘"‘merely cumulative" a statement, to be presented at the new trial if one was granted, by an eye-witness of the actual crime. The eyewitness said positively that Saeco had not fired the shot. In its report, the commission said, ‘‘There seems to be no reason te think that the statement... would have any effect in changing the mind of the jury."’ H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, ‘Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw and others were among the eminent men who enlisted to aid the defenee. During the month of August, 1927, French papers devoted more columns to the case than (Continued on page 12.)

Justice Took A Beating (Continued from page 7.) they did to local news. There were bombings in Prague, Mos- (x cow, Berlin. Uprisings and de> ~ monstrations took place before United States consulates in Geneva, East Indies and South America. And from San Francisco to the Bronx there were meetings, and more than one bomb explosion. The State of Massachusetts at the same time was enveloped with a miasma of hate, fear and suspicion. Boston itself, described as ‘‘a witch -hunter’s paradise,’’ was seized with a mass hysteria. Among those arrested in Boston for publicly demonstratine were Edna 8t. Vincent Millay, John Dos Passos, and ‘‘Mether’’ Ella Reeve Bloor, The tragedy of the SaceoVanzetti ease is the tragedy of three men-Judge Thayer, Goyernor Fuller, end President Lowell, and their inability to rise above the obseene battle that raged "for seven years around the heads ef the shoemaker and the fish-pedlar.