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its own secrets more than the lives of its citizens has become a tyranny whether you call it a republic or a monarchy or anything else,” but there was nothing he could do to change Thayer’s mind. As the journalist Heyward Broun would later point out, Thayer was acting out of a genuine commitment to what he saw as the public interest. His belief in Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt was that of a “solid and substantial” citizen, and it chimed “with all our national ideals and aspirations.” Whether as ungrateful, un-American immigrants, common criminals, dangerous radicals or godless anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti could not be allowed to triumph. A woman in the courtroom cried out, “It is death condemning life!”

“There could not have been another Judge on the face of this earth more prejudiced and more cruel than you have been against us,” said Vanzetti later. “We know, and you know in your heart, that you have been against us from the very beginning, before you see us. Before you see us you already know that we were radicals, that we were underdogs, that we were the enemy . . .”

Vanzetti spoke proudly in court after Thayer had passed sentence. “My conviction is that I have suffered for things that I am guilty of. I am suffering because I am a radical, and indeed I am a radical; I have suffered because I am an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian; I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved country than for myself; but I am so convinced to be right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already.” Sacco echoed him, but with a more overtly political tone. “I know the sentence will be between two class, the oppressed class and the rich class, and there will always be collision between one and the other . . . That is why I am here today on this bench, for having been the oppressed class.”

After sentencing, the two men were moved into the same prison for the first time. Between April and July they were held in Dedham, and for the final six weeks before their execution they were moved to Charleston. Still both refused to renounce the political ideals they had held so dear and for which they believed they were being punished. “Both Nick and I are anarchists—he radical of the radical—the black cats, the terrors of many, of all the bigots, exploiters, charlatans, fakers and oppressors,” said Vanzetti in May. “Consequently we are also the more slandered, misrepresented, misunderstood and persecuted of all.”

He proudly rejected a suggestion that they recant in order to sue for pardon. “We cannot make it [a refutation of their ideals], because it is a thing against our understanding and conscience…I cannot explain you why . . . But we too have a faith, a dignity, a sincerity. Our faith is cursed, as all the old ones were at their beginning. But we stick to it as long as we honestly believe we are right . . . We have renounced voluntarily to almost all of even the most honest joys of life when we were at our twenties. Lately we have sacrificed all to our faith. And now that we are old, sick, crushed, near death: . . . should we now quack, recant, renegate, be vile for the love of our pitiable carcasses? Never, never, never . . . We are ready to suffer as much as we have suffered, to die, but be men to the last.”

Interviewed by the New York World at about the same time, Vanzetti expressed the strange sense of vindication that accompanied their final defeat. The newspaper chose to emphasize his foreign accent and imperfect English. “If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life, talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for joostice, for man’s onderstanding of man as now we do by accident.”

Despite the efforts of their Defense Committee and a vocal international group of prominent supporters including Eugene Debs, H. G. Wells, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein