Webster Thayer
Webster Thayer (July 7, 1857 – April 18, 1933) was a judge of the
Background
Thayer was born in
In 1920, Thayer gave a speech to new American citizens decrying Bolshevism and anarchism's threat to American institutions. He supported the suppression of radical speech and rebuked a jury that failed to return a conviction because they believed that an overt act was required rather than speech alone.[2]
Sacco and Vanzetti trials
In the same year, two Italian immigrants,
Thayer's behavior both on and off the bench during the trial drew criticism. A
In 1927, as the scheduled executions approached, Massachusetts governor
Sacco and Vanzetti both denounced Thayer. Vanzetti wrote, "I will try to see Thayer death (sic) before his pronunciation of our sentence" and asked fellow anarchists for "revenge, revenge in our names and the names of our living and dead."[6]
Afterwards
Fellow Galleanists retaliated violently over the next several years in revenge, placing bombs at the residences of trial participants, including a juror who had served in the Dedham trial, a prosecution witness, the official executioner, Robert G. Elliott, and Judge Thayer. On September 27, 1932, a dynamite-filled package bomb destroyed Thayer's home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thayer was unhurt, but his wife and a housekeeper were both injured.[7] Thayer lived for the remainder of his life at his club in Boston, guarded around the clock by his personal bodyguard and police sentries.
Thayer died of a
Notes
- ^ a b c d New York Times: "Judge Thayer Dies in Boston at 75", New York Times, April 19, 1933. Accessed December 20, 2009
- ^ Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (NY: Viking Press, 2007), 116–8; Herbert B. Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1969), 460; William Young and David E. Kaiser, Postmortem: New Evidence in the Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 21–3; Francis Russell, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 111
- ISBN 0-691-04789-8(1991), pp. 58–60, 97
- ^ New York Times: "Advisers Hold Guilt Shown," Aug. 7, 1927, accessed Dec. 20, 2009
- ^ Robert Grant, Fourscore: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934), 372
- ISBN 978-0-670-06353-6, 264
- ^ New York Times: "Bomb Menaces Life of Sacco Case Judge," September 27, 1932, accessed Dec. 20, 2009
- ISBN 0-275-97891-5(2003) p. 168
References
- Avrich, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton University Press, 1991
- Obituary, Time Magazine, May 1, 1933, issue
- Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders, and the Judgment of Mankind (NY: Viking Press, 2007), ISBN 0-670-06353-3