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Sacco and Vanzetti . . . tell you that only increased demonstrations of protest may save them in the end. . . . Act quickly and with fervor. •Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, August 11, 1927 15|Groundswell Governor Fuller made the advisory committee report public on Sunday, August 7, 1927. That same day some five thousand people gathered on Boston Common to demand justice for Sacco and Vanzetti.1 Thousands more demonstrated in cities across the United States�Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Detroit; and around the world�Paris and London and Moscow and Rio; also in Morocco and Uruguay, South Africa and Sweden. The approaching execution date was triggering a desperate endgame in the streets as well as in court. The defense committee was divided. Should sympathizers lie low and let the lawyers continue working within the system, a tactic that so far had failed? Or should sympathizers stir up as much protest as possible, in the vague hope of convincing the governor that reasonable people still had reasonable doubts, and that commutation to life imprisonment would allow for development of new evidence and possibly avoid a fatal mistake? Defense lawyers had squelched street protests a year earlier, when the case was before the Supreme Judicial Court. Thompson and Frankfurter were “opposed to any demonstration or meetings. . . . They feared it would ‘prejudice the court,’” Mary Donovan recalled. “We were between two forces, Sacco and Vanzettiurgingaction,[and]thelawyersurgingrestraint.”2Inthespring,when the case went to the governor, the lawyers continued urging restraint. Once the governor denied clemency and Thompson severed his official ties to the defense committee, the anarchists saw nothing left to lose. Felicani rented a hall, lined up speakers, and distributed flyers for a mass meeting. And still he was pressured into calling it off.3 The lawyers were orchestrating a frantic round of last-minute appeals. Conflicted on the matter, Bartolomeo had long wanted it both ways. “Only the will and the action of the people .. . could . . . give us freedom,” he told Alice Blackwell. “This is not to say that the legal defense and the reason are useless. 246 | in search of sacco & vanzetti They are useful, if . . . accompanied by action, extra-legal action.” But, while he wanted the defense committee to organize demonstrations, “of course, the committee should not appear as the initiator.”4 Nick was not conflicted. “[You are] the only hope that can save us from the electric current. . . . Give us freedom,” he urged the “International Proletariat” in May, and he reiterated this belief often. “[I]f the voice of our comrades and friends does not become a mighty one and is not backed with the will to do whatever is necessary,” then, he said, he was doomed.5 Plans to storm Charlestown State Prison and liberate the two anarchists were supposedly in the works.6 No such plans materialized but, as peaceful protests multiplied, so, too, did acts of violence. Bombs went off in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore on August 6; a bomb exploded and another was defused in Chicago on August 8 and 9; and a powerful explosion destroyed the home of Dedham juror Lewis McHardy on August 16. Governor Fuller reportedly declared that Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers “should be held jointly responsible ” for the McHardy bombing, but no suspects were arrested.7 • Arthur Hill held a strategy session on Friday, August 5. Ehrmann sat in, along with Felix Frankfurter, Pittsburgh lawyer Michael Musmanno, and other sympathetic attorneys who would help out in the final push. They decided to zero in on one issue: judicial prejudice. On Saturday, August 6, the defense filed a motion in Norfolk County to revoke the death sentence and grant a new trial because, in violation of the United States Constitution and the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, “the Honorable Webster Thayer . . . was so prejudiced . . . that the defendants . . . have never had such a trial . . . as constitutes due process of law.” The lawyers requested that a judge other than Thayer be assigned to hear the motion. The request was denied by Chief Justice Hall of Superior Court, citing “precedent and established practice [requiring] that the said motions . . . should be heard by the judge who had presided at the original trial.”8 This set the stage for one of the most controversial episodes of the entire case, the moment when, on Monday, August 8, Judge Thayer sat in judgment on Judge Thayer. “[T]here is not any [prejudice] now and never was at any time,” he reportedly said. In open court he denied the request for a...

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