The three McAnarneys drove over to Dedham and spent the better part of an afternoon in the jail’s reception room talking with Sacco and with his wife, who happened to be there on a visit. Sacco was forthright. The McAnarneys felt satisfied with the answers they received. After leaving the jail John McAnarney met Moore and the two of them walked the back streets of Dedham for an hour, discussing the matter. McAnarney said he had put Sacco through every test he could think of and his answers—in fact everything about him—convinced him that the man was innocent. His brothers felt the same way. His office could work for Sacco’s acquittal with a clear conscience. The McAnarneys would accept the brief. * * * * * The measure of Moore’s success in building up the Sacco-Vanzetti case was sensed by the legal profession some time before the rest of Massachusetts became aware of it. Judge Thayer, stimulated by the prospect (and with a blindness to proprieties that would later become increasingly apparent), wrote to his fellow Dartmouth alumnus, Chief Justice John Aiken, requesting that he be appointed presiding judge at the Dedham trial. Thayer apparently saw nothing improper in the request. In fact he may well have visioned himself as a judicial Peter plugging the American dike against the flooding seas of radicalism. Years later at a Dartmouth reunion, he told a friend that if he knew the Reds were outside the door and he could save his country by walking through it to be shot down by them he would be glad to sacrifice his life. Apparently the impropriety of Thayer’s approach to the chief justice was offset by their Dartmouth kinship. Aiken, too, must have been sniffing the wind when he wrote in reply: “I am assigning you to hear the most important murder case tried in Massachusetts since the last century, if not in all time.” FOOTNOTES: [5] Like Sacco a native of Torremaggiore, Mucci had spent some time in America and had been one of the defending counsel in the Ettor-Giovannitti trial at Lawrence. [6] Shields would end up a Communist. Minor, already one, visualized even that early the propaganda possibilities in Sacco and Vanzetti. He became a cartoonist for the _Daily Worker_ and later its editor. By the time of the Bridgewater crime he had written a savage attack on anarchism in which he defended the recent suppression of the Russian anarchists by the Bolsheviks. [7] Francis J. Squires was clerk of the district court in Dedham; Percy, a lawyer, was Fred Katzmann’s brother.