President Lowell and the Sacco-Vanzetti Case

From new on, I want to knew, will the institution of learning in Cambridge, which once we called Harvard, be known as Hangman's House? --Heywood Brown   August 6, 1927

If Heywood Broun was not the least vitriolic commentator on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, neither was he the most impassioned. The conviction of the poor fish-peddler and the good shoemaker in 1921 shocked the liberals of the '20's to such an extent that it became their cause; hundreds of thousands of them picketed, wrote letters, gave money, and pleaded desperately for acquittal.

And when those who believed in the defendants learned that they were to die, they turned their wrath towards the mean who had brought about their death, and on none more strongly than A. Lawrence Lowell, then President of Harvard.

Lowell, had he wished, could have stopped the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; he was the leading member of a committee to advise the governor of Massachusetts on the case, and had he or any member of his committee failed to find the defendants guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, they would have been spared.

But the committee let the men be executed and the wrath of the Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers descended upon Lowell with incredible force. Vituperations flowed to him through the mail and over the telephone; bomb threats came daily. Every year, as long as he lived, Lowell knew he could expect a new pile of abuse to arrive on August 23, the anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Report and Reprisals

These reprisals may seem harsh but almost no one can read the report of the "Lowell Committee" without realizing that some facts have been misstated, others puzzlingly omitted, and still others accepted or rejected without any explanation whatever. The report of the Lowell Committee is not a convincing document.

The case had begun on April 15, 1920, when Fred Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli were shot down while carrying the payroll of a South Braintree shoe factory from the company offices to the plant. Their assailants grabbed the $15,000 payroll, leaped into a car which drew up alongside, and sped away.

Nicola Sacco and Bartholomeo Vanzetti were arrested when they fell into a trap laid for another Italian, Michael Boda, a bootlegger whom police suspected of being involved in the robbery. Both men were carrying guns at the time of their arrest; each told a number of lies to the arresting officer, who quizzed them about their associates and about their activities on the day of the Braintree murder.

Neither proved to have an ironclad alibi for the day. Sacco, a worker in a shoe factory, had taken the day off to go to Boston and get a passport for his trip to Italy. Vanzetti was a fish-peddler and could only rely on the word of his customers for an alibi.

The Trial in May

The men were indicted and brought to trial in May, 1921. The prosecution produced a number of eyewitnesses who said the men had been among the holdup gang; the defense produced a larger number who said they were not, and several others who attacked the reputations of the prosecution witnesses.

The Commonwealth introduced a cap found at the scene of the murder, which Sacco's employer said was similar to a cap Sacco often wore to work. Sacco said the cap was not his, and it did not appear fit him.

The state also tried to prove that a revolver found on Vanzetti when he was arrested was the same one that had been taken from Berardelli by one of the gunmen. Mrs. Berardelli testified that Vanzetti's gun looked like her husband's, and a ballistics expert testified that the gun had a new hammer; Berardelli had bought a new hammer for his gun shortly before the crime.

The lies Sacco and Vanzetti told on being arrested were brought out as evidence of "consciousness of guilt." The defense agreed that the men were conscious of guilt, but claimed they believed they were being arrested for their politics and not for murder. Their interrogation took place during the "Red Scare," when alien radicals were being deported and fear of "bomb-throwers" and foreigners was rampant in the East.

Finally, the prosecution brought a ballistics expert who said he was "inclined to believe" that Sacco's pistol fired the bullet that killed Berardelli, and another who said that the bullet was "consistent" with having been fired through the pistol. Two defense ballistics experts testified that the bullet could not, in their opinion, have been fired by Sacco's gun.

There was a little more ballistics evidence; the bullet that killed Berardelli was of a rare type, no longer being manufactured. A defense expert and two assistants were unable to find any such bullets in a search through Massachusetts. Sacco had six of the rare bullets in his pocket when he was arrested.

The Alibis

The defendants offered their alibis. A number of men testified that they had bought fish from Vanzetti at hours that made it impossible for him to have been in Braintree at the time of the murder; some became confused on cross-examination and made contradictory statements. The Italian consul in Boston and a number of others testified that Sacco had been in Boston getting his passport on the fifteenth, just as he had told his employer.

On the basis of the evidence presented, the jury convicted both Sacco and Vanzetti. After their trial, however, the case became even more complicated. Walter R. Ripley, foreman of the jury, was found to have brought some cartridges of his own into the jury room and to have compared them with Vanzetti's, a violation of the rules of evidence. More seriously, Ripley allegedly told a friend before the trial that the "guineas" should be hanged whether they were guilty or not. A policeman testified that the foreman was known to be strongly prejudiced against Italians.

Judge Webster Thayer, a garrulous and somewhat simple man, engaged in frequent indiscreet conversations outside the courtroom, according to the testimony of five witnesses. On one occasion he rehearsed a portion of his charge to a friend, asking every so often, "That will hold them, don't you think?" Another time he asked an acquaintance, "Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?"

Captain William Proctor, a Commonwealth witness who had said at the trial that the bullet which killed Berardelli was "consistent" with having gone through Sacco's pistol, admitted after the trial that he and the district attorney had framed his answer in order to sway the jury. All he meant by "consistent" was that the bullet was fired from a 32 caliber Colt--there were some 300,000 in existence at the time. Proctor died before he could testify on the matter in court, but the affidavit he had filed was made the basis of a motion for a new trial by the defense.

Finally, a Portuguese jailbird named Celestino Madeiros, who had just appealed his own conviction for murder, passed a note to a prison guard: "I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime."

The motions for new trials were heard by Judge Thayer, who summarily denied them all. The motions, after all, were in part concerned with charges against Thayer's own discretion.

The First Appeal

The case was appealed to Governor Alvan T. Fuller, who knew well that the decision of any one man would be unlikely to satisfy the extreme partisans of either side. He determined to appoint an advisory committee and immediately decided on A. Lawrence Lowell for one member. Lowell recommended the president of M.I.T., Samuel W. Stratton, for a second member, and retired Judge Robert Grant was eventually named to round out the group.

Although no chairman was appointed, Lowell was so obviously in command that the newspapers quickly came to call the group "the Lowell Committee." Grant interrupted the hearings only rarely; Stratton, so far as can be ascertained, never said a word during the entire time the committee met. It was Lowell for the most part who questioned the witnesses, and it was Lowell who acted as spokesman for the committee.

It also seems to have been Lowell who decided over the strenuous objections of the defense that the hearings were not to be held in public. Defense counsel was allowed to be present at the examination of most witnesses, but not at those of Judge Thayer and the jury. This was a great handicap to the defense; so much of the case depended on the question of Judge Thayer's prejudice, and so much of the committee's report was based on the jurors' simple statement that they were not prejudiced by the judge's attitude, that defense counsel, not knowing what the judge and jury had said, was at a severe disadvantage in making his case.

In another instance Lowell attempted to break Sacco's alibi by showing that a dinner which Sacco and his witnesses said they had discussed in Boston on April 15 had really not taken place until May 13. He was shown to be mistaken, but peevishly kept the correction of his error out of the official record of the case. More importantly, Lowell broke a rule of the committee by accepting evidence and investigating on his own without Stratton and Grant.

As the hearings wore on, the attorneys for Sacco and Vanzetti gradually became convinced that the committee was irrevocably prejudiced against them. "The doom of our clients seemed as inevitable as that of Socrates, and we were unwilling to continue in the face of unfair treatment, one defense attorney said.

A Disappointing Document

The committee's report, filed with the governor just two days after final arguments were made on July 25, is a disappointing document. It is a conglomeration of unsupported conclusions, and each conclusion seems to be the same: prosecution witnesses were believed, defense witnesses were not. It finds the trial to be just and fair, since although the judge was "indiscreet in conversation with outsiders," he had not communicated his predisposition to the jury; this is based on the jurors' statements that the judge did not prejudice their outlook.

The evidence concerning the foreman's bias is met with a statement that his friend "must have misunderstood" his remark that the "guineas" "ought to hang anyway." The statement of the policemen to the effect that the foreman was prejudiced against Italians was ignored.

As for Captain Proctor, who swore that he and the district attorney had framed a question to deceive the jury, the committee says the jury "must have understood the plain English words." This is discernibly false. Not only did the judge instruct the jury that Proctor's testimony meant that "the fatal Winchester bullet . . . was fired through the barrel of the Colt Automatic pistol found upon the defendant Sacco at the time of his arrest." The newspapers of the day also failed to understand "the plain English words." "EXPERTS PICK MURDER PISTOL; Declare Bullet from Sacco's Gun Caused Death of Berardelli," read the headlines of the Boston Herald.

The Committee threw out Madeiros's confession, finding that his knowledge of the facts of the crime were insufficient to provide any proof that he was present at the murder.

Finally, the report concludes that the weight of the eyewitness testimony, the evidence of the cap, the "consciousness of guilt" evidence, and the ballistics testimony proved that Sacco was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Then it weights the evidence and comes to the frustrating conclusion that "On the whole, we are of opinion that Vanzetti was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." "On the whole" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" simply do not seem compatible.

The report went to Governor Fuller, who agreed with its findings. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on August 23, 1927, while men continued to debate their guilt or innocence. But whether or not Sacco and Vanzetti actually murdered Parmenter and Berardelli, there can be little question that the Lowell Committee failed in its objective--an honest overall evaluation of the case.

It would be foolish to suggest that President Lowell's decision in the case was reached solely because of a prejudice against Italians or against radicals. Lowell had stood out against his own class before and would do so again. When alumni were calling for the resignation of Felix Frankfurter, who aided the defense during the Sacco case, Lowell would have nothing of it. He supported the League of Nations when that was an unpopular cause and refused to fire Harold Laski when alumni pressure for the socialist's dismissal was intense.

Yet is would be equally foolish to say that the decision of the Lowell Committee was in every way a logical one. Its evaluation of the evidence of Proctor, and of the charges against Ripley, the foreman, and in several other cases show a constantly repeating pattern: an intuitive decision that the prosecution was correct and the defense in error.

The committee seems to have first reached the judgment that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and then to have interpreted the evidence so that it would best support this conclusion. But there can be no question that Lowell and the other members of the committee felt their decision to be a correct one. This is the real tragedy of Sacco-Vanzetti: that the best of people with the best intentions managed to do the worst of deeds--kill two men who did not deserve to die