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“[C]harges are never made frivolously, and . . . the Court, once it has brought a charge against someone, is firmly convinced of the guilt of the accused and can be dislodged from that conviction only with the greatest difficulty.” “The greatest difficulty?” cried the painter, flinging one hand in the air. “The Court can never be dislodged from that conviction.” •Franz Kafka, The Trial 14|Clinging to Razor Blades Once upon a time, at the dawn of the twentieth century in the town of Torremaggiore , a child known as Nando gathered fresh vegetables in his father’s sunny fields and picked wild roses for his mother. Likewise, in Villafalleto a boy called Bartolo swam in the river and listened to the sounds of beating insect wings and trilling nightingales. As 1927 began, those days were long ago and far away, and memories of happier times flickered ever more faintly for Bartolomeo Vanzetti, now 38, and Nick Sacco, 35. Locked away for more than six years, they felt grim fate closing in. “[O]ften I feel numb and blunt as if dying,” Vanzetti wrote from Charlestown . Sacco described life in Dedham as “living death.” Their sympathizers hoped that public pressure for a new trial would finally sway decision makers. To think in such a delusional way, Bartolo warned Mary Donovan, is “‘to cling to rasors’ blades.’” His pessimism grew when three prisoners on death row were executed at Charlestown at the beginning of the year. “Now, after that,” Bartolo recounted, “everybody said that Sacco and Vanzetti will go. Most of my fellow prisoners were glad of it, and . . . [t]he friendly ones have not had the courage to look into my face.”1 • Defense lawyers William Thompson and Herbert Ehrmann were still fighting for their clients. On January 27, they appeared before the Supreme Judicial Court to appeal Judge Thayer’s October denial of the Madeiros motion. Assistant district attorney Dudley Ranney represented the Commonwealth. Thayer’s lengthy decision gave the defense plenty of ammunition for argument . Not only had the judge’s rulings been “so erroneous and injurious as to Clinging to Razor Blades | 221 entitle the defendants to a rehearing of the motion,” Thompson contended, but the rehearing should take place “before another judge” because Thayer had become “incapable of dealing either logically or impartially with this motion.” The judge had misstated facts. A “particularly dangerous” misstatement was his assertion, “made eleven times,” that the Supreme Judicial Court had put its stamp of approval on the jury verdict; that court had reviewed the judge’s work, not the jury’s. Thayer had ignored “every statement in any affidavit tending to establish the truth of [the Madeiros] confession or the contention of the defendants with reference to the Federal agents.” The judge’s reasoning showed “that his mind was moved by irrational, hostile, and unjudicial considerations.”2 On the other side of the adversarial divide, Ranney argued that Thayer’s decision “not to believe Madeiros was entirely natural and logical,” that the failure of the defense to get access to pertinent files of the Department of Justice was due to Thompson’s own “complete lack of tact and diplomacy, amounting to obstinacy,” and that Thayer had committed no abuses of judicial discretion.3 The justices of the court listened to arguments for two days, then took the appeal under consideration. • Heading for its last chance within the Massachusetts court system, the case was getting a big break in a different court, the court of public opinion. This was due in large part to two men: Gardner Jackson and Felix Frankfurter. Jackson had been a cub reporter at the Globe in 1921. He did not cover the Dedhamtrial,buthecametobelieveithadbeenaframe-up,andbeganhelping thedefensecommittee.“AldinoFelicaniandMaryDonovangotholdofmeand pleaded with me . . . to think up a campaign so that we could [get] public opinion more aroused and have some recourse other than through legal processes,” Jackson later recalled. His idea�“a very obvious simple thing,” as he described it�was to get hundreds of thousands of Americans to sign petitions asking the governor of Massachusetts to review the case. The committee approved the plan, and from then on Jackson devoted his life to saving Sacco and Vanzetti . He “worked unceasingly,” said Mary Donovan. “He knew every reporter in Boston, he knew about publicity, the things of which we knew nothing.”4 Jackson himself believed that someone else had a greater impact on public opinion: Felix Frankfurter, who, he said, aroused “intellectuals all over the world.”5 AnAustrianimmigrantandHarvardLawSchoolgraduate,Frankfurterwasa...

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