One Summer: America, 1927

with bombs in the First World War and recognized the whirring sound within the package as a Mills hand grenade. He hurled the package into the ambassador’s bathroom an instant before it detonated. The explosion destroyed the bathroom and felled Blanchard with a piece of shrapnel to the leg, but he was otherwise unhurt. Had Herrick opened the package himself, another ambassador would have greeted Lindbergh in Paris in 1927.
    A few days later, another bomb (possibly an accidental detonation) at a Sacco–Vanzetti rally killed twenty people. In the following two weeks bombs exploded at American embassies or consular offices in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Zurich and Marseilles.
    In America, writers and intellectuals were the first to protest the convictions – notably the novelists Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos, the short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter, the poet Edna St Vincent Millay, the critic Lewis Mumford, the newspaperman Heywood Broun, and several members of the Algonquin Round Table, including Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. Most of them were at one time or another arrested and charged with ‘loitering and sauntering’ – an offence peculiar to Boston, it seems. Benchley additionally swore that he had overheard Thayer boasting in the golf club at Worcester, Massachusetts, that he would ‘get those bastards good and proper’, which agitated liberal opinion further.
    Petitions appealing for a retrial poured in from abroad. One had almost half a million signatures, another more than 150,000. Streets and cafés throughout the world were renamed for the two Italians. In Argentina, a brand of cigarettes was called Sacco y Vanzetti, as was a popular tango.
    The involvement of intellectuals and foreigners stirred sharp resentment in some quarters. Working men, mostly Irish, held counter-demonstrations in Boston, calling for the swift execution of the two Italians. According to the writer Francis Russell, who lived through the period as a boy in Boston, public opinion was mostly against Sacco and Vanzetti. In particular, middle-class Republicans believed in their guilt. Senator William Borah of Idaho, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, said ‘it would be a national humiliation, a shameless, cowardly compromise of national courage, to pay the slightest attention to foreign protests’, which he called ‘impudent and wilful’.
    The real turning point for many was when future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, then a law professor at Harvard,looked into the case and became convinced that Sacco and Vanzetti had been railroaded. Frankfurter detailed his objections in the March 1927 issue of the Atlantic Monthly . ‘I assert with deep regret, but without the slightest fear of disproof, that certainly in modern times Judge Thayer’s opinion stands unmatched for discrepancies between what the record discloses and what the opinion conveys,’ he wrote. ‘His 25,000-word document cannot accurately be described otherwise than as a farrago of misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions, and mutilations … The opinion is literally honeycombed with demonstrable errors, and a spirit alien to judicial utterance permeates the whole.’
    Frankfurter systematically and persuasively demolished the case against Sacco and Vanzetti, but his findings were not welcomed by the Boston establishment. Many Harvard alumni demanded that he be fired. Colleagues and old friends snubbed him. He found that when he walked into a room or restaurant some people would get up and leave. The article, it was said, cost Harvard $1 million in donations.
    But elsewhere anger and a sense of injustice seemed to be on the increase. Among those who asked for a new trial were Berardelli’s widow. The conservative Boston Herald , which had previously supported execution, reversed its opinion after reading Thayer’s statement.
    No one gave more attention to the case than Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller. Fuller appears to have been a thoroughly decent man. He began adult life as a bicycle salesman, then went to Paris and brought back two of the first automobiles ever imported into North America. Eventually he became sole New England distributor for Packard at a time when Packards were the best cars in the country. The relationship made him a millionaire many times over. He lived in a Boston mansion and collected eighteenth-century English paintings – Gainsboroughs and Romneys in particular. In fourteen years as an