Michael Flaherty, a painter and member of the Boston Labor Union named vice-chairman, took a much more active part. Flaherty and his associates brought a lighter spirit to the ordained seriousness of the anarchists. An Aran Islander, Flaherty possessed an underlying humor that the darkest situation could never quite down. If he had stayed in Ireland he would undoubtedly have played his part in the Easter Uprising. In America he gravitated naturally to the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Mary Donovan, who came with him from the Society, was both a more practical and a more pugnacious type, a lank, raw-boned, sharp-featured woman in her thirties. Emotional, opinionated, suspicious, generous, and devoted, she was not an easy person to get along with, but she made the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti so much her own that she became possessed by it. So much of her time did she spend at the Hanover Street headquarters, where she took charge of correspondence and communications, that she soon became the committee’s recording secretary and lost her State House job as industrial inspector for the Department of Labor. With Moore gone, the McAnarneys in turn resigned, leaving the defense temporarily without counsel. Most of the committee by now felt that Moore had been an unfortunate choice, that what was needed was an outstanding local lawyer, someone with authority and position. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, after consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Workers’ Defense Union, came on from New York to talk the matter over with the committee. “I then had long conferences,” she wrote with the customary exaggeration of her own role, “in which I interviewed every element—from conservative trade unionists, Socialists, Anarchist, Communists, and Liberals including Professor Frankfurter at Harvard University. The universal opinion was that a new, distinguished local counsel was imperative.” Frankfurter recommended that the committee try to get William Thompson. That had been John McAnarney’s idea from the beginning, and many of the committee had come to feel the same way after listening to Thompson’s arguments on the supplementary motions. The question was whether he would be willing to take on such an unpopular case. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Donovan, Barry, Felicani, and Mike Flaherty called at the Matthews, Thompson & Spring offices in the Tremont Building to see what they could do. Thompson received them in his austere office, looked at them through his rimless glasses, and listened noncommittally. Finally he told them, in a tone that suggested he expected to hear no more of the matter, that he would take the case for a fee of twenty-five thousand dollars, paid in advance.