One Summer: America, 1927

elected official, he never took a paycheque.
    On 10 May 1927 – just at the time that Nungesser and Coli went missing – a bomb was mailed to Fuller, but luckily was intercepted and defused. In the same month, Fuller appointed a commission of three worthies – Abbott Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard; Samuel Stratton, president of MIT; and Robert Grant, a retired judge – to consider formally whether Sacco and Vanzetti had been given a fair trial and should be executed. They were not young. Grant was seventy-five, Lowell seventy-one and Stratton sixty-six.
    Fuller at the same time made a private study of the case. He read every word of the transcript. He had all the physical evidence – pistols, bullets, articles of clothing – sent to his house so that he could examine them. He called in and personally questioned all of the eleven surviving jurors (one had died) as well as witnesses from both trials. He several times devoted twelve- to fourteen-hour days to doing nothing else but studying the Sacco–Vanzetti case.
    He twice interviewed Sacco and Vanzetti and even the hapless Celestino Madeiros, as well as members of their families. Fuller found himself particularly taken with Vanzetti. In prison Vanzetti had studied English by correspondence course and his language skills had improved enormously. In his later years in prison he wrote many moving and articulate letters and essays, and struck everyone with his sensitivity and intelligence. Vanzetti’s lawyer, Fred Moore, said he had never met a man of such ‘splendid gentility’. Governor Fuller, after their first meeting, came out gushing, ‘What an attractive man!’
    On the day of Lindbergh’s visit to Boston in July, Fuller went first to Charlestown Prison to meet with the convicted men. He spent fifteen minutes each with Sacco and Madeiros, but a full hour with Vanzetti. It was clear to everyone that Fuller wished not to execute the men, Vanzetti in particular.
    At about the time of Lindbergh’s visit, the Lowell Commission, as it was known, revealed its findings. It concluded that Sacco was guilty beyond any doubt, Vanzetti probably so, and that there wereno grounds for a reprieve. Anger among liberals was almost immeasurable. Heywood Broun called it ‘legalized murder’ and wrote: ‘It is not every prisoner who has a president of Harvard University throw the switch for him.’
    That was that for Sacco and Vanzetti. On 3 August, Fuller announced with implicit regret that he could find no grounds for clemency and that the executions must proceed. Sacco and Vanzetti would be taken to the electric chair the following week.
    The news did not cause quite the stir that might have been predicted, and this was almost entirely because President Coolidge in far-off South Dakota had just dumbfounded the nation with an unexpected announcement of his own.
     
    fn1 In fact – and this can’t be said quickly enough – Italians were not unlawful. Italians in 1910 constituted 11 per cent of the immigrant population but accounted for just 7 per cent of foreign-born people in prison. As John Kobler notes, in terms of imprisonment rates per 100,000 of population, the Italians came twelfth out of seventeen nationalities.

C HAPTER 21
     

     
    THE SECOND OF August was a cold, wet day in South Dakota. The thirty or so members of the presidential press corps were surprised to find themselves summoned to Rapid City High School for a special announcement at noon. Ushered into a classroom, they were even more surprised to find President Coolidge sitting at a teacher’s desk. It was the fourth anniversary of Warren Harding’s death and so also of Calvin Coolidge’s assumption of the presidency. Coolidge looked inscrutably pleased about something.
    The reporters were instructed to form a line. As each man filed past the desk, Coolidge handed him a two-inch by nine-inch strip of paper bearing the message: ‘I do not choose to run for President in nineteen twenty-eight.’ That was all. The decision caught everyone by surprise. ‘A bolt from the blue would not be too extravagant a term to describe the Coolidge cryptogram,’ wrote Robert Benchley in the New Yorker . Even Grace Coolidge, the first lady, was apparently unaware of her husband’s decision, and learned the news afterwards from one of those present.
    Coolidge spoke just five words at the press conference: ‘Is everyone here now?’ before it started and ‘No’ when asked if he would comment further