One Summer: America, 1927

1921, Judge Webster Thayer presiding once again. Thayer was a gaunt, pale figure in his sixties. He had a hawk nose, thin mouth and white moustache. He was only five feet two inches tall, but had been a star athlete in his youth and had nearly become a professional baseball player. He went through life with a small chip on his shoulder because he was a butcher’s son in a state where pedigree counted for a lot.
    The trial lasted almost seven weeks, heard from about a hundred and sixty witnesses and produced over two thousand pages of testimony. According to the state’s case, Sacco and another, unidentified man did the hold-up and shooting. No attempt wasmade to track down or identify the other gunman, or any of the other participants in the robbery. The state seemed oddly content to pin the whole thing on Sacco and Vanzetti. Vanzetti, even in the worst scenario, was merely a passenger in the getaway car, and only one witness confidently put him there. Forty-four others swore they saw him elsewhere that day – selling fish in Plymouth, for the most part – or declared him not to have been among the culprits. A group in Providence, known as the Morelli gang, actually had a history of robbing shoe factories, but the police did not investigate them. None of the robbery money was ever found or in any way connected to Sacco or Vanzetti. The prosecution offered no theories as to what had become of it.
    Much of the testimony against the accused was pretty dubious. Lewis Pelzer, a factory worker, testified that he saw Sacco shoot Berardelli, but he had originally told police that he had dived under a table when he heard gunfire and hadn’t seen anything. Three of his co-workers testified that he had never looked out of the window.
    Mary Splaine, a key witness, said she looked out of a window just as the getaway car sped away. Her view lasted for no more than three seconds and was from a distance of between sixty and eighty feet, yet at the trial she was able to recount sixteen details about Sacco’s appearance, including the shade of his eyebrows and the length of his hair at the neck. She even stated with certainty Sacco’s height, even though she had only ever seen him seated in a moving automobile. Thirteen months earlier, she had failed to identify Sacco at all when viewing him in person from close range. Sacco had once briefly worked at the Rice and Hutchins factory, and several of its employees remembered him, but none except Mary Splaine said that Nicola Sacco was one of those present.
    Just one witness placed Vanzetti at the scene at the time of the murder – as a passenger in the getaway car. None suggested that he fired a gun or was otherwise directly involved.
    In his summing-up to the jury, Judge Webster Thayer laid greatstress on what the legal profession called ‘consciousness of guilt’ – Sacco and Vanzetti’s suspiciously evasive behaviour under questioning. Innocent people, Thayer stressed, did not need to fabricate answers. Ergo, they were guilty. The jury agreed. After five and a half hours of deliberation on 14 July 1921, it pronounced Sacco and Vanzetti guilty. The sentence was death by electrocution.
     
    It cannot be said that the state rushed to execute them. Appeals went on for six years. Sacco and Vanzetti’s defence team submitted seven motions for retrial on the grounds that Judge Thayer was biased and the trial not fair, and lodged two further appeals with the Massachusetts Supreme Court. All were denied. In 1925, Celestino Madeiros, a native of the Azores who was on death row for another crime, issued a confession. ‘I hear by confess to being in the South Braintree shoe company crime and Sacco and Vanzetti was not in said crime,’ he wrote. Under questioning, Madeiros proved vague about crucial details of the Braintree robbery – the time of day it took place, for instance – and Thayer dismissed the confession as untrustworthy, which in fact it was. Thayer also issued a detailed 25,000-word statement explaining why he had rejected all calls for a retrial.
    The first signals of angry dissent arose not in America, but in France. On 20 October 1921, a bomb was sent to Ambassador Myron Herrick in a package disguised to look like a gift. By remarkable good fortune the package was inadvertently activated by one of the few people in Paris who could recognize it for what it was and had the forbearance to respond accordingly. Herrick’s English valet, Lawrence Blanchard, had worked