After seven years of premeditation, blood was shed beside a so-called cradle of American liberty, Boston. The shedding of blood causes restlessness. The restlessness caused by this particular bloodshed was exceptionally widespread, gloomy and violent because, in seven years, a seed of doubt can grow into a harvest of sincere conviction; and because this particular harvest of conviction had been fertilized by the animus of two irreconcilable philosophies of life, SOCIALISM and CAPITALISM.
Execution. Guilty or not, justly or not, Nicola Sacco, clean-shaven factory worker and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, mustachioed fish-peddler, were informed last Monday evening that they must die that midnight for the murders— which to the end they denied committing—of a paymaster and guard at South Braintree, Mass., in 1920. Celestino Madeiros, confessed murderer of a bank cashier in Wrentham, Mass., was notified to the same effect. Prisoner Madeiros, in a stupor from overeating at his last meal, preceded his world-famed neighbors to the electric chair.
Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti refused last rites from the prison priest. They would die as they had lived, they said. Faith in a communistic order of mankind was enough for them.
Five guards took their posts in the death house, two to adjust electrodes, one at the blue lethal door, two to call at the cells. One newsgatherer, W. E. Playfair of the AssociatedPress, was included among the seven official witnesses of man killing man.
Prisoners Sacco and Vanzetti died in the order that their names had long been coupled, seven minutes apart.
Last Efforts. As last week opened, counsel for the defense, led by Lawyer Arthur D. Hill redoubled their activities. Their clients had been subjected to a shock which, psychologically and philosophically speaking, was easily the equivalent of any crime they might have committed against society. Society, through its legal machinery in Massachusetts, had started to bare the skins of Prisoners Sacco, Vanzetti and Madeiros for the touch of Death and then, with a reprieve of which the melodrama was a cheap insult to whatever dignity human life may have, virtually mumbled: ". . . Live on for twelve days longer. Our mind is not quite made up."
Something of the horrid dismay their clients must have felt in the face of such fatal flippancy was reflected in the renewed efforts of Lawyer Hill and associates last week.
They went to the highest Massachusetts court, pleading error and prejudice at the original trial. The highest Massachusetts court replied, in five typed page's, that it could not act.
They docketed the case for review by the highest court in the country hoping a) to give Governor Fuller of Massachusetts grounds for a further reprieve since the case was still, technically, before a court; and b) to give any one of the nine Justices of the U. S. Supreme Court opportunity to request a review of the case, which request would have given Governor Fuller broader grounds for a reprieve.