XIII. TRIAL BY JURY

“Court!” shouted the bailiff, and pounded on the floor with his “wand.” It was the court-room at Dedham, in Norfolk County, instead of Plymouth, so it was a different bailiff, but he looked exactly like the other, and so did his wand and uniform. There entered the same thin, shrunken old gentleman with white mustache and face like parchment, wearing the same voluminous black silk robe. The lawyers and spectators rose with the same show of reverence, and the bailiff pounded the floor again and repeated the ancient formula: “Hear ye! Hear ye! All persons having anything to do before the Honorable, the Justices of the Superior Court, now sitting within and for the County of Norfolk, draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard! God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”

Also there was the same district attorney, Fred Katzmann, blond hair and bursting red face, round, pulpy and smooth-shaven, his plump figure and manner of elaborate cordiality to his equals and Prussian sternness to his inferiors. There were three assistants; one of them was a “ticquer,” like Judge Thayer, and presently they were to put on a witness who was a “ticquer,” and there would be three of them in solemn confrontation, all blinking away, but not keeping time. There was Lee Swenson, his lanky western figure outtowering the rest, his face haggard from long nights of work, his black clothes hanging loose about his frame--but he had made the concession to Massachusetts sentiment of getting his hair cut. There was Fred Moore, from California, alert and aggressive; and the McAnarneys, associate counsel, two Irish Catholic brothers, retained in a vain hope of contributing respectability to anarchist wops accused of murder.

The court-room was crowded: a great number of “veniremen,” to be questioned as possible jurors, and many spectators, more than could find seats. The newspapers had been full of the case, the desperate character of the criminals, the radical agitation concerning them, the precautions taken by the government to protect the court. The judge and the district attorney had a bodyguard day and night. Picked men from several police departments of Norfolk County were on duty; fifteen armed men scattered about the court-room, and three more at each door. Male spectators were searched thoroughly as they entered the court-room, and women had their handbags opened. An atmosphere of tension, almost of war.

Vanzetti was brought by armed guards in an automobile from Charlestown Prison, “where he is serving a sentence of from twelve to fifteen years for the Bridgewater hold-up”--so said the papers, and the veniremen read it and talked about it; when they became jurors, they were assumed to be ignorant of Vanzetti’s previous conviction, and all persons who respected the legal system of the Commonwealth would solemnly pretend to accept this fiction. Almost in the center of the court-room was the steel “cage,” shaped like a piano box with fancy grillwork, open in front, a psychological device for overcoming the legal presumption that a wop is innocent until he is proved guilty. The jurors gaze at him locked in throughout the trial, and by the time they are ready to vote they know him as a creature who belongs in a cage. Near the jury box was a tall standard, with an American flag.

A stir in the audience; the bandits were coming! A side door of the court-room opened, and there entered several policemen and then a guard with a handcuff on his wrist, and then a wop made safe with the other handcuff on his wrist, and another handcuff on his other wrist, and another wop chained to that; this second wop with a handcuff on his other wrist, and another guard chained to that: in short, four men chained together, the two on the outside being guards and the two on the inside being alleged bandits; all four symbolizing the fundamental human fact, that slavery enslaves masters as well as servants. It was glorious spring sunshine outside, and here were some hundreds of people who might have been walking in the woods, picking mayflowers, or sitting on the beach engaged in high philosophic discourse; but they were crowded in between four white-washed walls, breathing foul air and shortening their lives, fastened to their seats by manacles of hate, fear and greed.

A few others, held by love and a sense of justice! “Society matrons and college girls,” as the newspapers described them, they sat in silence, watching the procedure, sometimes pretending to be busy with their “fancy work”; doing their refined best to be unaware of being the cynosure of all eyes. These were the “Red sympathizers,” or “pinks,” as patriotic orators derisively called them: women who left homes of luxury to come and meddle with the course of justice, lending encouragement to bomb throwers and assassins, and making things harder for brave officials. Their presence was a continual irritant to the police, who would have liked to lock such troublemakers up, along with their anarchist pets.

And yet, mixed with this anger was awe; for some of these were “blue-bloods,” the wonderful, almost supernatural beings whose names appeared in the society columns of the papers. To Judge Thayer they represented everything in the world to which he aspired, and every now and then he would steal a glance at Mrs. Lois Rantoul--who was a Lowell--or at Mrs. Cornelia Thornwell or Mrs. Elizabeth Glendower Evans, as if to see what they were thinking about him; presently his curiosity would get the better of him, and he would invite one of them to his chambers, and try to convince her that she was mistaken in believing these desperate anarchists to be innocent. He, the judge on the bench, would do that; and little by little the news of it would spread among lawyers and judges up in Boston, who were under the necessity of pretending to hold the dogma of judicial infallibility.

Between “Web” Thayer and Lee Swenson there existed an antagonism of temperament, which showed itself the very first hour. In order to practice in Massachusetts the lawyer should have complied with some formality. He had not known this, and now Judge Thayer proposed to bar him from the case. There were hasty conferences among the “blue-blood” ladies, and they kept the telephone wires to Boston busy; with the result that next morning when Lee Swenson renewed his application for judicial courtesy, there were several leading lawyers of the city lined up in a row behind him. Too bad these great ones could not have stayed all through the trial, and restrained “Web” Thayer from making their community a byword throughout the world!

The veniremen, fresh from two days of patriotic celebrations, sat under the shadow of the flag and heard the black-robed old gentleman explain to them what patriotic celebrations are for. “You must remember the American soldier had other duties that he would rather have performed than those that resulted in his giving up his life on the battlefields of France, but he, with undaunted courage and patriotic devotion that brought honor and glory to humanity and the world rendered the service and made the supreme sacrifice. So I call upon you to render this service here with the same spirit of patriotism, courage and devotion to duty as was exhibited by our soldier boys across the seas.”

Such was the mood in which the men of Norfolk County approached this trial. These were the wops who had sent bombs through the mail two years ago--so it was whispered--and the Wall Street explosion had been revenge for their arrest. Now, whoever voted them guilty would never sleep safe in bed. Wives had hysterics at home, and husbands promised to “lie out of it” at any cost; so, one after another, they took the stand and swore to a disbelief in capital punishment, or to an invincible conviction regarding the case. After three days a panel of five hundred veniremen had been exhausted, and still five jurors were lacking. Such a thing had never been known in the history of the county, and newspapers made “streamer heads” out of the desperate dangerousness of the situation.

It happened that on the night of June 3rd, Representative Samuel Wragg was being made the worshipful grand master of the Masonic Lodge of the town of Needham. Fred Katzmann, the district attorney, was a Mason, and the slain paymaster of the shoe company had also been a Mason. His worshipful brothers would not shrink from their duty to his memory. The father of Representative Wragg, a deputy sheriff, appeared without warning at the ceremony, and notified the members of the lodge to appear in court next morning. That surely seemed to violate the law, which specifies that in such an emergency special veniremen shall be summoned “from among the bystanders.” But Judge Thayer overruled the objections of the defense--just as he overruled Lee Swenson’s efforts to question the veniremen.

One of the jurors selected over the protest of the defense was Walter Ripley, an old man who had been chief of police of the city of Quincy. For many years Ripley had watched juries file in and out of court-rooms, but never had he seen one stand and salute the flag. But now, when he was made foreman of the jury, he set a new precedent for the Commonwealth; every time he entered the jury box, he faced the flag and solemnly saluted it. That was his way of “telling the world.” These anarchists--the male population of New England made an obscene word out of it--were trying to “tear down the flag,” and he was going to show them. On his way to court he had met an old friend in the railroad station, and said that he was going to act as a juror in the trial of two “guinneys.” “Damn them, they ought to hang anyway!” said Ripley, according to the affidavit made by his friend several months later.

III

Joe Randall was attending the trial as a newspaperman, representing some labor papers. Also there was John Nicholas Beffel, representing the Federated Press. These two mixed with the other reporters, and sat at lunch with them in the Dedham Inn, and so got all the “inside dope.” This was irritating to Judge Thayer, who naturally assumed that all the newspapermen were on his side, and was accustomed to join them at lunch in their private dining room, and tell them what he wanted to have published. It happened that the Italian Government had sent a representative to attend the trial, to make sure that two Italian citizens received fair play; this gentleman, the Marquis Ferrante, naturally did not understand that there could be such a thing as a “radical” newspaperman, so he talked freely to Beffel, and gave him a carefully worded statement, intended as a broad hint to Judge Thayer. “The Italian authorities are deeply interested in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, and this trial will be closely followed by them. They have complete confidence that the trial will be conducted solely as a criminal proceeding, without reference to the political or social beliefs of any one involved.”

Beffel made carbon copies of this statement, and gave it to the other men. The judge came in, and after he had finished his lunch and was ready to leave, one of the reporters handed him a copy of the statement. He read it, and did not fail to get its hidden meaning. His face flushed, and with a gesture of anger he said, “Why, that fellow came clear out to my home in Worcester and assured me that the Italian Government had no interest in this case!”

The reporters, seeing that he was in a mood for talk, gathered round. One of them spoke of Fred Moore, with whom the judge had been arguing all morning over the selection of jurors. The old man’s face showed that there was still life in it; his yellow parchment skin became suffused with blood. “What do you suppose that fellow wanted me to ask those veniremen? ‘Are you a member of a labor union? Are you opposed to union labor? Are you a member of a secret society?’”

“Web” went on, his conversation turning into a stump speech, as it always did, in a dining room or a railroad train, on a football field or a golf green, whenever he could get an audience. “Did you ever see a case in which so many leaflets have been broadcast saying that people couldn’t get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts?” He looked at Joe Randall, for he knew that Joe was the wicked author of these leaflets. His voice rose high and shrill, and his hands shook as he waved them. John Nicholas Beffel, annoyed at the turn of events, stepped closer and said, “I wish to inform you, Judge Thayer, that the statement of the Marquis Ferrante was given out at his express request. He asked me to copy it and give it to the other newspapermen.” But the old man brushed him aside and as he went out, shook his fist, exclaiming to the group of men: “You wait till I give my charge to the jury. I’ll show ’em!”

The reporters stood, dumbfounded. A judge, actually then sitting on the case, going back to court in that mood, to deal with men on trial for their lives! Manifestly, it was a “big story,” and if the newspapermen could have had their way, unhampered by owners, it would have taken the front page of every newspaper in Massachusetts. But newspapermen do not have their way; they do have owners, and have to practice what is known as “taking policy.” The representative of the Associated Press, Jack Harding, advanced the classic formula of his organization, that the matter was “controversial,” and therefore not to be handled. “Controversial,” in the sense of the Associated Press, means anything detrimental to the ruling class of America. It is manifest that members of this class, being all in office or high station of some sort, can speak, and have their utterances count as news of an important and dignified character. It is when their enemies attack them that the “controversy” begins.

The other reporters from the capitalist papers agreed to hush up the incident. Beffel and Joe Randall might break step if they wanted to; but they could only publish the story in a few labor and socialist papers, where it would count for nothing; and they would get themselves barred from the private dining room, and from the precious “inside dope.” The defense counsel agreed that nothing could be done; but of course the story went up to Boston, and caused several lawyers and judges of the city to say that “Web” had gone mad, and that something ought to be done about it--only, alas, nothing could be done, because all the judges, and even the court employees of Massachusetts are appointed for life, and if you were to try to impeach “Web” in the midst of this case, you might just as well turn the Commonwealth over to the Reds and be done with it.

The prisoners sat in their steel cage, gazing about with anxious eyes, trying to understand the complex procedure in a strange tongue: Bart with his heavy drooping mustaches, his melancholy face now deeply lined; Nick, restless-eyed, impatient; both of them pale with a year away from sunshine. They were neatly shaved, brushed and washed, dressed in new suits, with black silk ties and clean collars--doing their best to look like Americans, to impress an American jury. They gazed at the elderly stern-faced men who were to decide their fate: not one foreigner among them, all English names, old Yankee ancestry. Every one on that jury had had a son or near relative in France--and those relatives who were not dead or crippled had been marching in the patriotic celebrations of the last few days.

Assistant District Attorney Williams arose and made a speech to the jury, telling what his side intended to prove. Once more Cornelia listened to that story about a bandit gang, about Boda and Orciani and Coacci, the bandit house and the little shed behind it, the Buick car with the bullet hole in the side, the little Overland car in which the bandits had escaped, after they had “thrown away” the Buick car in the Manley woods. The jury would be taken downstairs to inspect the Buick; they would be taken on a tour, Judge Thayer accompanying, to see the shack and the shed. Cornelia had heard all this at Plymouth, and had seen the prosecution fail to produce any evidence whatever. She had not yet learned about Mike Stewart and his “theory,” derived from the “detective machine”; the whole procedure seemed to her a lunatic’s dream, and she watched in a daze to see what would happen in the course of this second trial.

Exactly the same thing happened as at Plymouth; no evidence appeared. The farce became so apparent that even Judge Thayer could not stand for it. As to Boda he said, late in the trial: “But he is not connected in any way with the murder. Anybody else driving a Buick car, if it was a seven-passenger car, would stand almost in the same relationship.... But there is not one identifying feature.” He forced the prosecution to admit that “Neither Orciani nor Boda was in South Braintree at the time of the murder and there was no concert of action between them and Sacco and Vanzetti as to the murder.” He ordered that “all evidence obtained by the jury on the view at the Coacci barn or shed be entirely disregarded.” But of course it wasn’t disregarded, and the prosecution knew what it had fixed in the jury’s mind. Even after the district attorney had expressly admitted that Orciani was not one of the murderers, he brought him up before the jury as a dark and sinister mystery, challenging the defense to explain why they had not put him on the stand.

Physicians described the wounds of the dead men; and then came the identification witnesses. Lewis L. Wade, a shoe worker, had thought in the Brockton police station that Sacco was one of the bandits; but now he said he was not sure. It was a blow to the police, and as Wade left the stand, one of the officers called him a “piker,” and another muttered, “We are not through with you yet.” A few weeks later Wade lost his job--after seventeen years’ service with the shoe company. Two others who testified for the defense met the same fate. Not all the dangers were on one side!

There came Mary Splaine, bookkeeper of the shoe company, who had run to the window and looked out. Mary was one of the victims of that process of suggestion which prosecuting officials understand well. She had looked at Sacco so many times that she saw him as the bandit; she sat and looked at him once more and described him in minute detail, height, weight, square shoulders, high forehead, hair brushed back and between two and two and a half inches long; “dark hair, dark eyebrows, thin cheeks and clean-shaven face of a peculiar greenish-white.” No one could have asked a better identification--until you considered the opportunity which Mary had had to see the bandit. Then you realized that she was claiming a physical impossibility. She was in a second-story window, eighty feet from the car, and she saw the bandit for the length of time it took the car to travel thirty-five feet at eighteen miles per hour--one or two seconds, amid the wildest excitement and shooting.

The defense confronted Mary with the record of what she had said at the preliminary hearing, after three different examinations of Sacco, “I do not think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.” Now, surprised and confused, she said, “That is not true. I never said it.” Having a day to think it over, and to be warned that stenographer’s notes are not to be so easily waved aside, she took the stand and corrected her testimony, admitting that she had said what was in the record, but claiming that she had changed upon “reflection.”

The defense tried desperately to break Mary Splaine; but she was one of those covered by the tragic phrase, too late! For her they needed the Pinkerton reports--the evidence of the operative Henry Hellyer, who was in court, and whose knowledge was in possession of the prosecution. He and Captain Proctor, of the state police--another witness, also in court--had shown Mary Splaine a photograph of a criminal called “Tony the Wop,” and Mary had positively identified him as one of the bandits; so the police had set out to get him--and learned that he had been in jail at the time of the crime! Also Mary Splaine had told Hellyer a long story about two men in the factory who had plotted and carried out the banditry. Mary gave their names, and Hellyer made “discreet inquiries” of the owner of the factory, who said the accusation was baseless; the superintendent told him to pay no attention to Mary Splaine, “because she is one of the most irresponsible persons he ever came in contact with.” So read the report of “H.H.,” hidden from the defense until five or six years later.

Next came Louis Pelzer, not bright, son of two mutes: the Jewish boy, haunted by the memory of pogroms, and in terror of the police. He had peered out through a window, and amid flying bullets had written down the number of the bandit car, and made note of the bandit so exactly that he could describe even the pin in his collar. The defense lawyers took this pitiful creature in hand, and soon had him mopping the sweat from his forehead. It became evident that he could not understand simple questions, and tangled himself in lie after lie. Yes, he had lied to Robert Reid, investigator for the defense; he had said he did not see anything, because he did not want to be a witness. The defense put on three fellow-workmen of Pelzer’s, two of whom testified that instead of putting up the window to look, he had dived under a bench when he heard the shooting. The third testified, “I heard him say that he did not see anybody.” The district attorney did the best he could in defending Pelzer to the jury. “He was frank enough here, gentlemen, to own that he had twice falsified before to both sides, and he gave you his reason.... He is big enough and manly enough now to tell you of his prior falsehoods and his reasons for them.”

And then the Lola Andrews circus. Three days of the expensive time of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was given up to Lola. She told her tale of how, four hours prior to the crime, she had seen two men with a car drawn up by the curb, and how she had talked to them, and the one under the car was Sacco. When the defense began to go into the details of her past life, she fainted impressively, and Judge Thayer ordered the court-room barricaded, so that when Lola was restored, she might pick out the man who had assaulted her in a toilet in a Quincy rooming-house. But that man was apparently an adept in the occult lore of the Hindoos, and possessed the power to dematerialize his body and disappear through the walls of court-rooms; the police could not catch him--but Lola won time to think, and also she won the jury, and Judge Thayer to keep the defense from asking her bad questions. When Fred Moore spoke of her testimony as “hopelessly confusing,” the judge gave him a stern rebuke. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness.”

When the defense had its chance, it put on Mrs. Julia Campbell, who had accompanied Lola on that visit to the shoe factory to look for a job, and testified that Lola had spoken to no man in or near an automobile. A policeman and a reporter testified that she had told them she had not seen the bandits. Harry Kurlansky, a small shopkeeper of Quincy, had talked with her on his doorstep and heard her tell how the police were hounding her to testify against Sacco and Vanzetti. “‘The government took me down and they want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them.’”

That testimony looked so bad for Lola, it was one of the times when Judge Thayer felt it necessary to jump to the rescue. He began to cross-question the witness: why hadn’t he set to work as a good citizen to find out who it was that was trying to make Lola give false testimony? Such an obvious thing for a small shopkeeper, a foreigner in a New England town, to tackle the police and the district attorney’s office, and make them stop framing a witness! Said the judge, “Did you attempt to find out who this person was who represented the government who was trying to get her to take and to state that which was false?” Naturally Kurlansky was taken aback by such a question, and could only say, “Well, it didn’t come into my mind. I wasn’t sure, you know. It didn’t--” The judge pinned him down, as to why he didn’t think of it, why he didn’t do it--thus leaving him completely discredited before patriotic jurors, who gave all their spare time to supervising the work of police chiefs and district attorneys.

Presiding over a murder trial is a complicated and exacting business. Common sense and humanity have nothing to do with the procedure; it is a matter of rules and decisions, millions of intricate and subtle details, the interwoven and organized history of the trials which have been held in New England for three hundred years, and in Old England for twice as long. All this you have to have at your finger-tips, for each decision must be rendered immediately, you cannot take it under advisement and look up the precedents overnight. Your reputation depends upon your decisions being such that the highest court, reviewing your work, will sustain you. The strain is incessant, and may last for many weeks; the rules allow ten days’ rest to a judge after each ordeal.

“Web” Thayer had been playing this game for many years, and knew all the tricks; including the one of favoring his own side while seeming to be impartial. His spoken words would go into the record, to be studied by the higher judges; but his manner would not go in--so the art was to keep his words fair, and do the damage otherwise. Every time Swenson or Moore would make an objection, “Web” would turn and look at him over his spectacles with a kind of ironical curiosity. “What is this that has come out of the wild west to teach us how to conduct a court in Massachusetts?” Then his eyes would turn to the jury, and give half a wink; with a bored drawl, he would say, “Objection overruled,” and jury and court officials would be all one grin.

Within its narrow limits the judge’s mind was quick and cunning. He was instantly on the alert to spoil any advantage his enemies were gaining, and ingenious to find reasons to interrupt, to block questions, to bar out evidence and confuse witnesses. Frequently he sat with some of the prosecutors in public places, and he always knew what the prosecutor was aiming at, and if he missed a point, would prompt him. Once, realizing that he had gone too far, he apologized blandly: “I am always telling the district attorney what to say.” The naïve court reporter put that into the record!

And later came the incident of the cap which had been picked up at the scene of the crime, and which the prosecution sought to identify as Sacco’s. It was too small for him, but the jury would overlook that. When the son of Sacco’s employer was on the stand, Judge Thayer tried to get him to say that this cap resembled Sacco’s. Naturally, when a man runs a factory with many workers, he can’t remember the details of all the caps they wear; young Kelley was embarrassed, not liking to displease a great judge, but he had to say, “I can’t answer it when I don’t know right down in my heart that that is the cap.” “Web” was determined to get something more damaging than that; and at the same time he tried to fix it so that his questions would seem to be coming from Assistant District Attorney Williams. Said the judge, “I would like to ask the witness one question: whether--” then he turned to Mr. Williams: “I wish you would ask him, rather.”

The defense lawyers tried to break up this game, but “Web” stuck to it: “I would rather it came from Mr. Williams. Will you put that question?” The somewhat slow Mr. Williams--“Web” came to hate him bitterly for this and other faults--asked the witness whether the cap was “alike in appearance to the cap worn by Sacco.” The witness replied, “In color only,” which would seem clear enough; but “Web” refused to be defeated. Said he, “That is not responsive to the question”--meaning, of course, that it wasn’t what he wanted. He went on, telling the witness what to say: “In its general appearance it is the same.” Those words came from the just and upright judge, and the witness would have had to be very rude indeed to contradict them. “Yes, sir,” he said. When the defense objected to this singular method of “framing” evidence in open court, the judge made it all right by directing the court reporter to falsify the record. “You may put the question so it comes from counsel rather than from the Court.” Mr. Williams then obediently put the question, and the witness obediently answered again. But the court reporter, whether from stupidity or malice, failed to take the judge’s instructions, and copied out the whole dialogue, and there it stands in cold print, to be handed down to the scorn and fury of all future times.

And this partisanship and cunning combined with the cheapest vanity and craving for display! The photographers were constantly making pictures of Judge Thayer, and he was never too busy to pose for them. On the front page of the papers you saw Judge Thayer sitting on the bench with a legal tome open before him; Judge Thayer with a palm leaf fan standing in front of the court-house; the twelve gentlemen of the jury being entertained by a victrola, with Judge Thayer in the center of the picture.

And then, sitting in his chambers, spitting on the floor, and talking about the case with Tom, Dick and Harry; with court officials, interpreters, policemen, newspaper reporters, photographers--incredible as it might seem, even with ladies of social prominence who were there as friends of Sacco and Vanzetti. So furious was his hatred against these “anarchistic bastards,” he was not content to send them to the electric chair, but must throw mud at them on their journey. To Cornelia Thornwell it seemed that the poor old man had literally gone out of his mind; so also it seemed to dignified “blue-bloods” when she told them what was happening. But what could be done about it? The Commonwealth makes the proud boast that no judge has ever been impeached. Were they going to break that record, tarnish that scutcheon, for the sake of two Italians who were anarchists, infidels and draft-dodgers, even if they were not bandits and murderers?

VII

Carlos E. Goodridge to the stand: the man who had managed to exchange a jail sentence of several years for aid in sending Sacco to the electric chair. Judge Thayer knew all about that situation; and just as Swenson had predicted, he refused to permit any questions to be asked of Goodridge, to reveal the fact that he had pleaded guilty to larceny in Massachusetts. Moreover, the judge called the lawyers to the bench while he was discussing the matter, so that the jury might have no hint that they were listening to the testimony of a crook. Thayer would not even permit the discussion to get into the record, and when he saw the court reporter starting to take down his words he exclaimed, “Get the hell out of here!” So the proprieties were preserved, and the glib and plausible Goodridge took the stand, and told the trusting jury how he had run out of the pool-room, and seen the bandit car go by, close to the curb, and how a bandit “poked a gun over towards” him, and this man was Sacco and nobody else.

The defense was hog-tied and helpless. Concerning the rest of Goodridge’s record, the fact that his very name was an act of perjury, they had no evidence. The court-room rang with the cries of the several fine women whom Erastus Corning Whitney had married and betrayed, of the owners of horses he had stolen, of others whom his glib tongue had swindled; but the fates which held Sacco and Vanzetti at their choice allowed no sound to be heard. When later these sounds had been duly transcribed upon legal paper, and sworn to before notaries, and laid before Judge Thayer in the form of a motion for a new trial, that Daniel come to judgment would repeat his deadly formula: “Motion denied!” When the matter was carried before the Supreme Judicial Court, that august body would apply its vast learning to the problem, and decide, first, that the failure to let the jury know of Goodridge’s record was not ground for reversal, and second, that the discovery of new facts about Goodridge was not basis for a new trial. “Decision sustained.”

Blocked and thwarted at every turn! Police officers took the stand to tell how witnesses had identified Sacco and Vanzetti in the Brockton police station immediately after their arrest; but when the defense tried to ask them about witnesses who had refused to identify, “Web” Thayer held up his mighty hand and cut him short. No witness could be asked about what any other witness might have said! By this device the defense would be kept from using the trial proceedings to fish for evidence. The bare idea that they should try to do it was so preposterous that both the judge and the jury burst out laughing.

Again the voices shrieked. Roy Gould, the salesman of shaving paste, the man with the bullet hole in his overcoat, who had been within ten feet of the bandits, and would swear that Sacco was not the man! Mrs. Kelly and Mrs. Kennedy, the only persons who had had an extended view of the driver of the car, and whose written statements that he was not Vanzetti were in the hands of the district attorney! All those witnesses who had been taken to the police station by Henry Hellyer and Captain Proctor, and had identified photographs of other bandits, but had refused to identify Sacco and Vanzetti--in spite of the posing, and pulling down of caps over the eyes, and pretending to aim pistols! So many voices crying warnings, filling the court-room with their clamor--in vain!

VIII

In the papers Cornelia read news of great concern to her family; the demurrer to the suit of Jerry Walker had been overruled; the last bar was down, the tremendous case was to be tried out before a jury. “Fifteen Million Dollar Conspiracy Charge!” said the newspapers. To Cornelia it meant a family agony; all three of her sons-in-law, two of her nephews-in-law, two or three cousins, were going to have to take the witness stand, and be questioned for weeks and months as to the details of their business procedures. Jerry Walker’s lawyers had not minced words in setting forth what they expected to prove: the great bankers, headed by Rupert Alvin and Henry Cabot Winters, had “entered into a secret combination and conspiracy to carry into effect by their combined power and influence, by duress of the plaintiff, by fraudulent concealments, false representations and by wrongful, illegal and fraudulent means which are hereinafter stated with certainty and particularity, to deprive the plaintiff of his shares in the above-named companies.” The “yellow” newspapers smacked their lips over the promised feast, while the dignified ones put the news away in the financial columns, as if to say that these abusive words were used in a technical sense, and did not mean what the ordinary reader would suppose.

Already families had been broken up over this issue, and wives were not speaking to one another. Mrs. John Quincy Thornwell, wife of the president of the Fifth National Bank, was telling everybody that Rupert Alvin had drawn her husband into the mess without his knowledge. Mrs. Rupert Alvin, wife of the president of the Pilgrim National, was outraged because her sister, Mrs. Henry Cabot Winters, was taking the affair with flippancy, having said to her intimates that it would be an excellent thing if some of these gentlemen were sent to jail, so that their wives would know where they were! Slanders and recriminations--bitter feuds starting--a whole kettle of Back Bay codfish!

In the Sacco-Vanzetti trial one of the lawyers fell ill, and Judge Thayer put off the trial over the week-end. Cornelia was planning to write a lot of letters and raise some money which was badly needed; but Deborah telephoned from her place at the North Shore, her mother must meet her in Boston at once, something about Alice, very serious. Cornelia assumed it was more of the Jerry Walker quarrel. “You know, Deborah, I consider the Walkers as my friends, and I am not going to have anything--”

But Deborah broke in: “It has nothing to do with that, Mother. It is something personal, something desperate--I can’t give you any hint over the telephone. Come to the house at once.”

So Betty drove her grandmother to Boston. Betty had work to do at defense headquarters. She was going to get out a rush circular about events at the trial, and she wasn’t going to let Joe have anything to do with it. Under the very strict laws of Massachusetts, Judge Thayer had the right to call it contempt of court, and if he tried to, the defendant was going to be a young lady with the very bluest blood in New England; old “Judge Fury,” as Betty had taken to calling him, would get a sure enough front-page story if he tried it! Joe was going to stay in Dedham and write newspaper and magazine articles, which would be published outside the state, and so beyond “Judge Fury’s” reach.

“I know what you’ll find,” said the young lady Bolshevik--“another of Aunt Alice’s geniuses gone wrong. I hear she’s going wrong with him.” And so it proved. Alice had got the love of art and the art of love mixed up. A chaotic Bohemian pianist had cast temperamental glances at her, and she proposed to accompany him to Europe, and had notified Henry that she expected to get a divorce. “And right now!” cried Deborah--“while Rupert and Henry are driven nearly to death with this Jerry Walker affair, and the Elevated Railway business, too--and Betty, and you--Mother, we simply cannot have another scandal now!”

So the family phalanx must gather about the frantic woman, and guard her with their spears, and frighten away “that impossible man,” as Deborah called him. Cornelia, the mother, and only woman member of the old generation, must take most of the burden. She must face her second daughter’s hysterics yet again--she had lost count of the times, it had been more than twenty years of melodrama; first frantic jealousy of Henry, then bitter hate, then indifference, with various stages of romantic thrills for this, that and the other great or some-day-to-be-great poet or painter or musician. This time was the most terrible of all; this time all bars were down, all reserves thrown away--it was most decidedly not “Boston,” not to be believed.

For twenty years Alice had sought something, and the women and the men of the family had formed the phalanx about her, and held her captive. “Now look at me!” she cried. “I am an old woman! My skin will soon be parchment, and my chance is nearly gone!”

“Your chance at what?” asked Cornelia, quietly.

“Love!” cried the other, with unaccustomed clarity.

The mother felt a sudden uprush of pity. “Does love depend on complexion?”

“What else?” cried Alice, wildly. “And look at me!”

Cornelia looked, and realized. It was true that her vain and beautiful daughter was showing her years; no longer the wild rose complexion, the girlish charm, the serenity and security of young matronhood. Alice’s skin was getting dry, there were lines that no beauty doctor could take away, those fatal tight strings under the chin which nothing can hide. Deborah’s neck had been like that for years, she had worn a black velvet band about it. But such a device would make Alice “look a fright”--she grabbed up a ribbon and wound it into a halter, to show her mother what she would be like!

She loved Franz Cezak! He was not a “strolling Bohemian,” as Deborah had basely insinuated; he was no common musician at all, but the younger son of a great family, who had been received as a house guest in Back Bay homes. Alice loved him, and she didn’t love Boston, and she was going to be happy!

Would she really be happy? asked the mother, and began the brutal task of undermining poor Alice’s castle in Bohemia. Did this love-artist know that she had very little money in her own right, and that it is not the custom for American husbands to subsidize the art-romances of their wives? Was it true that the man was some years younger than Alice, and if so, did art-lovers behave like other men in the matter of women’s age? Was Alice expecting to come back to Boston, the morning after her nuit d’amour?

Clara Scatterbridge, the youngest daughter, came in; having all the future of her many sons and daughters, coming one by one to marriageable age, to weep and plead for. Rupert Alvin came, leaving all his cares of state. He had put into action the machinery which the ruling classes have established for the quick and efficient collection of scandal; just as he could tell his mother-in-law all the gossip of the “Italian colony” concerning the anarchist “gruppo” of East Boston, so he could tell his sister-in-law about a Bohemian pianist, who had an art-love in every concert town. He had been knocked down and almost killed by a well-known cricket player of Philadelphia, and in Paris he had run away from a duel with the exiled Russian Prince Dolgorovitch, “or whatever it is,” said Rupert, with Anglo-Saxon contempt for a name with such termination.

And then young Josiah Thornwell Winters, Alice’s only son, who was to get his “sheepskin” from Harvard in a few days. Young Josiah’s own behavior didn’t give him much standing in court, he admitted, but he was promising to settle down and make a man of himself, and it would certainly be easier if he had a mother in blameless Boston, rather than following a pianist about Bohemia. The rest of the family withdrew while this intimate episode in the drama was played out.

Cornelia went to see the husband, and found that Henry was taking a most un-Bostonian attitude. “Mother,” he said, “it seems to me Alice had better have it out, and see whether there’s anything in this romance business for her. You, as a Bolshevik, ought not be shocked by that.”

“Mine has been a revolt with a purpose,” said Cornelia; “and if Alice has a purpose I don’t know what it is.”

“Well, I have said for years that Alice ought to have a divorce. If she had a husband, she might settle down--”

“But this man won’t be a husband, Henry!”

“I know; but something has got to pull her loose from the family. I haven’t said it to them, because after all, it’s a Thornwell affair. But it’s been plain to me, ever since I realized that I wasn’t the man for Alice. The misery has been because the family couldn’t make up its mind to face a divorce; they’d rather have a fit of hysterics once a month for twenty years. I don’t want to talk about Alice, for she’s your flesh and blood--”

“Go on, Henry, say what you think. I’ve got to understand you all.”

“Well, Mother, fundamentally it’s that Alice hasn’t got any brains. Why didn’t you teach her some of your sense of fun?”

“You forget, Henry, I didn’t do the teaching. The house was full of Josiah’s sisters and aunts, who knew what ought to be done always. I waited too long before I fought.”

“Yes, Mother, we’ve all made mistakes. I ought to have given more time to my son. I left him to his mother, while I made the money, and now I’ve got too much money, and no wife, and a son who has the structure and constitution of a marshmallow. That’s my reward for hard work--not much reason for going to the office in the morning, is there?”

“I know, Henry, you’ve talked like that before; but you go to the office in the morning, and go on doing what you did the day before. We’re all of us like so many ants--we do what the others do. Because I have tried to think for myself, you decide I am cracked in the head.”

“No, Mother, not at all!” Henry’s gallantry came to the rescue. “I really have a great admiration--you should hear me boasting about you in the clubs--nobody can sport such an exciting mother-in-law! Truly, you’re the talk of the town--they tell me you have assumed the moral leadership of all the Bolsheviks at the trial.”

“They tell you something very foolish, like all the other tales about the Sacco-Vanzetti defense. What became of the evidence you promised to get me, Henry? Have you forgotten it?”

“No, Mother--”

“You didn’t find it so easy as you thought?”

“Not that; but fifteen million dollars is a lot of money, and Rupert is terrified as to what he has to admit in the Jerry Walker case. Also he’s had to take charge of the Bar Association--the job they are planning, to oust our district attorney. I suppose you’ve heard about that?”

“No, Henry, I’ve been out of touch with the criminal world of late.” She laughed, and he laughed, too--they always had a good time. If only Alice had had her mother’s ability to laugh!

“It’s a long story, I’ll tell you about it some day. When the blackmail ring got after the Thornwell family, Rupert insisted that we had to put them out of business; he’s a sterner moralist than I, you know. We started work through the Bar Association--you are reading about this Mishawum Manor case, of course.”

“Did you and Rupert start that?”

“The episode happened four years ago. Didn’t it strike you as peculiar that it should be taken up now?”

“To tell the truth, I’ve been too busy to think about it.”

“Well, so has the public! The fact is, I got detectives and got the story for Rupert.”

“Why did you start in Middlesex County?”

“Well, you see, the district attorney there happens to be an American, and we thought it would be good policy to show impartiality. After we have put Tufts out, nobody can kick if we come over here to Suffolk and tackle Joe Pelletier!”

“I see!” said Cornelia. She knew that she was being admitted to the inside of Boston public life--the center of the center and hub of the hub! “Joe” Pelletier, district attorney of Suffolk County, comprising Boston proper, was a leading Catholic orator and hero, National Advocate of the Knights of Columbus, knighted by the Pope for his services to the holy cause. Incidentally he was one of the tools of the “blackmail ring,” and may have got a share of that seventy-five thousand dollars which Henry had “pungled up” to pay for the flashlight picture of his son in the hotel room with a woman. So now the Thornwells were out to “get him”!

It was one more crisis in the unending struggle between the blue-blood and the Irish-Catholic elements of the city. Cornelia had watched it all her life, so she did not have to ask many questions. “It seems unfortunate,” she commented, “that Rupert has to be mixed up in this Elevated scandal right now.”

“But that is part of the fight,” said Henry; he explained that Joe Pelletier had taken up the scandal and was threatening prosecutions, as a means of frightening Rupert and the rest of the Pilgrim National crowd. Something like half the patriotic legislators of Massachusetts had been borrowing money from the banks, and speculating in Elevated stocks, before they passed the bill which boosted these stocks on the market; and now Pelletier was trying to fasten it on Rupert. It was a question which would “beat the other to it.” “Make your bets!” said Henry Cabot Winters.

“Your smile is a sufficient betting tip!” replied his mother-in-law; and he said yes, it was coming out all right, only Rupert was the worrying temperament, and getting worse. The doctors tried to get him to stop, but they hadn’t chosen a very helpful way. They took x-ray pictures of his veins and showed how they looked like white ribbons, which meant deposits of lime and other minerals; they had given the poor fellow such a list of things he mustn’t eat that when he dined out he picked around in his plate like a chicken. His rosy and purple bulges would soon be turned into hollows.

Alice’s castle in Bohemia collapsed. Did one of the Thornwell men convey to the tempestuous genius the information that the Thornwell ladies had no money of their own? Anyhow, the celebrated artist discovered a series of concert engagements in California, and wrote Alice a letter of great wisdom and sympathy. The tormented woman died a score of soul-deaths, and retired to a fashionable sanatorium to try a rest cure with “stuffing.” A little later she would be trying a fasting-cure, and after that a diet of grapes exclusively, and then she would be paying thirty dollars an hour to have her troubles listened to by a psychoanalyst.

Meantime Cornelia had hurried back to Dedham, where the trial had reopened, regardless of Thornwell family troubles. Again she sat all day on a hard bench in the court-room, and wrote memoranda in a notebook, and in the evening conferred with the lawyers and the committee and the journalists until late at night. Each afternoon, after court, she went by special favor of the sheriff, to say a few words to Bart, and hear his advice about the procedure, and comfort him with affection.

The prosecution had come now to the identification of Vanzetti as one of the bandits. They put on the stand a man named Levangie, gateman at the railroad tracks across which the bandit car had passed immediately after the shooting. This old man told how a train was coming when the car drove up, and he started to put down the gates, but the bandits forced him at the point of a revolver to raise them and let the car cross ahead of the train. He identified Vanzetti as the driver of the car.

When the defense had its turn it put on a locomotive fireman, not a Red but an Irishman, who testified that three-quarters of an hour after the shooting he talked with Levangie, who said that he did not see the bandits, all he saw was the gun, and he “ducked into the shanty.” Three other witnesses gave the same testimony. As it happened, Levangie had told one of the defense lawyers that he could not identify the bandits, and first he admitted having said this; later he contradicted himself, and said he did not remember any such interview. He was a loose-jointed fellow, shifty of eye, and did not seem at all abashed when he was caught in false statements; rather he took the whole affair as a joke.

It became a joke to all the world, when the district attorney came to discuss Levangie’s testimony in his address to the jury. Mr. Katzmann was in a dilemma, because the gateman had identified Vanzetti as the driver of the car, whereas Mr. Katzmann’s other witnesses agreed upon the driver as young, small, light-haired and sickly looking. The district attorney managed very ingeniously to repudiate Levangie while at the same time asking the jury to accept him. The gateman thought he had seen Vanzetti driving the car, but really he had seen him in the rear seat!

That was all the real evidence they had. But to cover the weakness, they put on some more that looked like evidence. A man named Dolbeare, who thought he had seen Vanzetti in an auto full of foreigners in South Braintree, some five hours before the crime. He had seen a car going past him, and what had attracted his attention was one man leaning forward talking to another, and that it was a “tough-looking bunch.” He did not know Vanzetti, had never seen him before, and never saw him again until after the arrest. He admitted that carloads of workmen drove through the town all the time, on the way to the shipyards. He could not identify any other man in the car, nor give a single detail about any one; all he could do was to identify Vanzetti as one man who had been in that car.

And then a man who claimed to have seen Vanzetti on a train the morning of the crime, coming from Plymouth to East Braintree. This man was completely refuted by the conductor and three ticket-agents--no ticket had been sold for such a journey. Also the prosecution put on another crossing-tender, who had noted a car at his crossing, near the Manley Woods, an hour after the crime, and thought it was Vanzetti in the front seat of the car. And that was all the identification! That was the main part of the evidence upon which the august Commonwealth of Massachusetts proposed to send a man to the electric chair!

When Cornelia examined her notes, and questioned others in her party, to see if her memory was playing her false, she was appalled by the thing she saw happening before her eyes. They were actually attempting to convict Bart of murder without one real item of identification; solely upon such facts as that he had been with Sacco the night of the arrest, and had a gun and cartridges, and had told lies to the police about himself and his doings! So farcical was the identification of Bart, and so completely were the identifications of Nick shot to pieces in the course of time, that three years later Judge Thayer found himself backed against the wall, and forced to admit that “these verdicts did not rest, in my judgment, upon the testimony of the eye-witnesses.” This news would certainly have surprised the gentlemen of the jury, who had spent a week or two listening to these eye-witnesses, and had been solemnly assured by the district attorney himself that never in his eleven years of office had he “laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews!”

Almost three weeks it took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to present its case against the two anarchist wops. Thirty times the prisoners emerged from the county jail--at a quarter to nine every morning except Sunday, and again at a quarter to two every afternoon except Saturday and Sunday--and marched from the jail to the court-house: chained to a deputy on each side, with ten or twelve policemen marching in front, and as many in the rear. They always walked in the street, not on the sidewalk, for greater safety against surprise attack. Small boys would gather to stare, and the deputies would command, “Stand back!” It was their only chance to justify the expense to the county.

Seated in the cage, side by side, the prisoners would gaze straight before them. They could not see the spectators, nor was any one permitted to speak to them, except their lawyers. After a time the stern guards learned to make an exception of Mrs. Sacco, who would go to the cage and chat with her husband until court opened. Poor little woman, she had to bring a nursing baby with her, and her face, usually bright and eager, was worn and lined. She would sit all day, silent and rigid, trying to understand long words in a language that was still partly alien to her.

Her husband also would try, and the more he understood, the hotter became his revolutionary fury. Several times he and his companion boiled over--impossible to sit in silence while lies were told and rascality committed under the forms of law. When the policeman who had arrested them swore that Bart had several times started to reach for his gun, Bart cried out, “You are a liar!” A terrible breach of decorum--the guards seized him and shoved him into his seat, commanding, “Shut up!” When Lola Andrews was in the midst of her identification, Sacco rose in his seat and cried, “Am I the man? Take a good look! I am myself!” Again a great shock, and a sensational story for the papers. Nick’s picture took the front page.

Later, when the defense was having its innings, there were more scenes. The interpreter provided by the court was an Italian by the name of Rossi; he belonged to the Norfolk County “ring,” and was a friend of Mrs. DeFalco’s, and of Judge Thayer’s--he had a child named Webster Thayer Rossi, and he used to drive the judge up to the University Club in Boston; if the judge did not discuss the case with him on the way, it was the only chance “Web” ever lost.

Either this Rossi did not know how to interpret correctly, or he did not wish to; at a critical point in the testimony of Alfonsina Brini, he misstated in English what she had said in Italian. Bart knew enough to catch the error, and insisted upon calling attention to it, and would not let the guards silence him. Again and again he saw these errors, and to Cornelia, when she came to see him in the jail, he insisted, “That fellow is a crook!” Over and over he said it, “He is a crook! Crook!” Cornelia thought it was Bart’s prejudice against everybody in power; but it was another of those things that were to be proved too late. Before five years had passed, Rossi was to get a two year jail sentence for trying to sell his influence with judges.

Such misfortune appeared to dog the patriots who were prosecuting Sacco and Vanzetti; so many of them got into trouble with their own laws--but always after the verdict, when it was too late to count! There was an agent of the Department of Justice, named Shaughnessey, who had had the job of watching Red meetings and had supplied a mass of information concerning Sacco and Vanzetti. This ardent patriot stole a carload of hogs--a rather difficult object to get away with, one would think. Later he got twelve years for a holdup. But when in the course of later appeals, the defense had occasion to suggest the possibility of improper conduct by Department of Justice agents, “Web” Thayer was outraged by this, and delivered a stern rebuke.

XII

And then Captain Proctor, head of the state police. The Proctor story was so atrocious, that naïve old ladies like Cornelia Thornwell thought it would only have to become known in order to split the community wide open. But in fact, it hardly made a ripple. Massachusetts was so used to official knavery that it had lost the power to react, even with surprise.

Captain Proctor had been in the police service of the Commonwealth some thirty-six years, and was an old hand at the “frame-up”; among other jobs, he had “made” the Ettor and Giovannitti case. When Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, he was called in by Mike Stewart, and interviewed all the witnesses, and tried to help out Mike’s “theory.” But in the end he told Mike, “You’ve got the wrong men,” and withdrew from the case.

But still, gang loyalty held him, and when Fred Katzmann called on him to identify the so-called “mortal bullet,” which had been extracted from the body of the dead guard, he came. This bullet was the crucial issue in the whole case; it was what tied Sacco and Vanzetti to the case, because the other five bullets found in the dead bodies were of such a size and make that they could not have come through either Sacco’s pistol or Vanzetti’s. The prosecution claimed that the “mortal bullet” had been fired from Sacco’s pistol, and could have been fired from no other pistol. They put on an “expert” who swore to that; and then they put on Proctor, who backed up the “expert.”

At least, that is what everybody thought he did, and the trial was concluded on that basis; the prosecution laid the utmost emphasis upon it, because Captain Proctor had qualified at great length as an authority upon bullets and revolvers, who had been studying the matter for twenty years, and had been a witness in more than a hundred capital cases. Said Katzmann, in his closing argument to the jury, “You might disregard all the identification testimony, and base your verdict on the testimony of these experts.” And Judge Thayer put the weight of his judicial authority behind that; he explained to the jury what the testimony meant, that “it was Sacco’s pistol that fired the bullet that caused the death of Berardelli. To this effect the Commonwealth introduced the testimony of two witnesses, Messrs. Proctor and Van Amburgh.”

Nothing could be more positive; and so the matter went to the jury; so it stood in the minds of all students of the case for two years. But then Captain Proctor was near death, and his conscience troubled him; two men whom he believed to be innocent stood in the shadow of the electric chair, because of a conspiracy into which he had entered with the prosecution, to misrepresent his testimony to the jury. So he made an affidavit in which he set forth what had happened. Repeatedly he had been asked by the prosecutors to testify that the particular mortal bullet had been fired through the particular pistol belonging to Sacco. He had made many tests and measurements in the effort to convince himself that this was so, but he could not get the proof, and refused to give such testimony. “The district attorney desired to ask me that question, but I had repeatedly told him that if he did I should be obliged to answer in the negative.” At the trial the questioning had been done by the assistant district attorney, later to become a learned judge. His question had been framed very carefully, and Proctor’s answer no less carefully: “My opinion is that it is consistent with being fired by that pistol.”

A verbal trick, you see; the witness meant that the mortal bullet might have been fired through that pistol; but the district attorney represented to the jury that his words meant something entirely different--that it must have been fired through that pistol, and could not have been fired through any other pistol in the world. That was how Judge Thayer passed it on to the jury in his charge; and in after years, with the printed words of his charge before him--preserved immutably, to be handed down to the scorn and fury of all future times--the embittered old man rendered a decision in which he ingeniously twisted the defense contentions concerning the meaning of the Proctor affidavit and the answering affidavits of Katzmann and his assistants, which really did not answer at all.

It was “Web’s” way, shown in almost every decision he rendered. You would state something in plain words, as explicitly as the language permitted; you would wait patiently, a year or two, while the old gentleman had an appendicitis operation and an attack of pneumonia; and finally he would hand down a decision in which he accused you of having said many things you had never thought of. He would set up a whole regiment of straw-men, and in a valiant duel chop off their heads; he would fill pages in the stately law-books with refutations of arguments which had never been heard anywhere save in his own hate-tormented head. And then at the very end, sitting upon his throne with the whole world for an audience, he would solemnly declare: “With reference to the question of prejudice, there is not any now and there never was any.”

XIV. JUDGE FURY

Four times each day the prisoners made their march down the middle of the street, accompanied by military escort. Four times each day the jury made a march, from their hotel to the court-house, at noon to a restaurant and back, then to the hotel in the evening: twelve “good men and true,” with court officers preceding and following, the aged foreman toddling at their head--he was to die within three months. It was a heavy strain upon old men, to sit for six hours a day in a crowded court-room, in suffocating midsummer heat. The judge mercifully said they might take off their coats, but their Puritan consciences required most of them to be uncomfortable!

Seven weeks their semi-imprisonment lasted; the bored victims got to know one another too well, and when they were tired of playing cards they sought refuge in the daily newspaper. They were not allowed to read, about their own case--the sheriff cut it all out of the papers; but they read about a court up in Boston, where Charles Ponzi was being punished for having made five million dollars without permission of the Federal Reserve Board. The financial wizard’s digestion had been wrecked by the ordeal of law, so the papers explained, and he had to be taken out to a restaurant each day, to get his diet of little neck clams and cream of tomato soup.

And then the story of Mishawum Manor, where the emperors of the moving picture world had been entertained by naked young ladies dancing the highland fling! Who could have invented more delicious material for the beguiling of bored jurymen? The Hearst newspaper put it on the front page each day: the romantic life story of “Brownie” Kennedy, the “madame” of this roadhouse; the number of husbands she had deserted, the millionaires she had plundered and ruined; details about the “champagne and chicken supper,” the hugging and the dancing, and how the guests had disappeared to the rooms upstairs, so that at one time there was nobody to eat the chicken or drink the champagne. Later they were reassembled, much in déshabille, and the young ladies--names, addresses and prices all given--were flinging their very highlandest, when a flashlight went off and a photograph was taken of the scene. Most of the guests were too drunk to know what this meant; when they woke up next afternoon, they paid a thousand dollars for “entertainment and breakage,” and thought that would be the end of it--just as if they had been at home in Hollywood.

But no, this was a pious Puritan community; and presently the emperors of moving pictures were receiving letters informing them that several of the young ladies who had been hired for the party had husbands, and these husbands were threatening suits for the desecration of their wives; furthermore, some indignant moralist had carried the story to the district attorney of Middlesex County, and that official was greatly shocked. Middlesex is sacred territory, because it contains the city of Cambridge, home of Harvard, the center of the center and hub of the hub. It would take no less than half a million dollars to wipe out the stain which these Hebrew and Babylonian emperors had put upon New England culture.

After much dickering, and threats and counterthreats, the dispute was settled by the payment of a hundred and five thousand dollars, which, according to the newspapers, had been divided among the chiefs of the political “ring,” including the Middlesex district attorney--no Irish-Catholic “mick,” but a blue-blood of registered pedigree, a gentleman with two hobbies, Red-baiting and college athletics. Only a year ago he had led a spectacular raid against “Red headquarters” in Cambridge, with a patrol wagon, cops, reporters and camera men, and had confiscated a load of literature. He was engaged in umpiring the Yale-Princeton football game, when the newspaper reporters came to inform him that the Supreme Judicial Court had removed him from office. Being a good sport, he went on with the game.

Middlesex County lies immediately to the north of Norfolk, and at its nearest point is only four or five miles from Dedham; so it might occur to some jurymen to wonder, could this corruption have crossed the border, and affected those in charge of the present trial? The authorities deemed it wise to provide automobiles, with bailiffs for chauffeurs, to keep the jury entertained. On holidays the twelve good men and true were escorted to the beach to picnic, and Sundays they went to church in the morning, and in the afternoon they motored to witness some of the patriotism rampant in the community.

On Sunday, twelve days after the trial started, the bodies of three dead soldiers, dug out of the ground in France, were buried in the city of Brockton, in Plymouth County, and the whole town turned out for the ceremonies. On the same day at Whitman, in the same county, two bodies were buried. On the following Sunday another one at Hingham, in Norfolk County. The day before that was the anniversary of the Battle of Belleau Wood, celebrated by veterans all over both counties; the day before that was a great New England holiday, Bunker Hill Day, celebrated in every town. On June 25th, just as the defense was getting under way, the sacred Plymouth Rock was restored to place with a new shrine over it, and there was a great celebration in Vanzetti’s old home, reported in all newspapers and read about by all jurors. A week later five thousand veterans of the “Yankee Division” assembled in Plymouth, and held their exercises over the Fourth of July, the great American patriotic holiday. On that day the town of Quincy, in Norfolk County, witnessed the greatest parade of veterans in its history; the whole countryside echoed with the sounds of firecrackers and bells and military exhortations. “Never shall America forget the brave boys who died for her!”--so said the orators.

And then the college commencements! There are a score of colleges and universities in Massachusetts, to say nothing of two hundred and forty-nine high schools; and all of them celebrated their exercises while the Sacco-Vanzetti trial was in progress. All had eminent persons to deliver orations, and few were the orators who did not refer to the enemy within our midst, and the need for good citizens to stand together. These exhortations would be quoted in the next day’s newspapers, and read by the twelve good men and true in their legal quarantine.

Cornelia took a day off and went up to the Harvard exercises. Impossible to refuse, for it was the crisis of the effort to hold Alice in line, and this was an occasion that would never come again, the graduation of her only son; the public appearance of Alice with Henry, and with all the family about her, would set forth their solidarity to the world, and repudiate malicious gossip. Such was the requirement of propriety. The three sisters might quarrel ever so bitterly among themselves, but the world must see them side by side, going through the formalities with dignity.

So now Clara spent the night in the Winters home in Boston, to keep Alice from taking poison or running away. Deborah came early in the morning, and the two of them worked with moral exhortations, and cups of strong coffee, and an expert hairdresser, to get their distracted sister into shape for exhibition. Clara rode in the car with Alice and Henry, to relieve them of the necessity of talking--Clara could always tell a thousand stories about the progress of her brood.

Deborah sent her car early in the morning to bring her mother; and there they were, three middle-aged ladies and one old one, dressed with the restrained and dignified but none the less expensive elegance of the Brahmins; Henry in tall silk hat and frock coat, braided trousers and spats; Quincy Thornwell, gentleman of leisure, escorting Priscilla Alvin Shaw, returned from her honeymoon in Florida. They took their appointed places in Sander’s Theater, bowing right and left, greeting their friends, exchanging compliments with the nearest. All the conventions were satisfied.

The academic procession moved through the “Yard”; all the dignitaries in their gorgeous-colored silk hoods and gowns, led by the university marshal, and followed by thirteen hundred graduates-to-be, all in caps and gowns. It was a special occasion, because Harvard was making an innovation; for the first time in its two hundred and eighty-five years, women were to be awarded regular Harvard degrees--not just Radcliffe degrees signed by President Lowell. There were thirty-six of these intruding females, but they were not permitted to leave the sacred yard with the men, they had to join the procession near Lawrence Hall.

In Sander’s Theater the sheriff of the county called the meeting to order; the dean of the divinity school offered a prayer, three graduates delivered orations, and the Governor of the Commonwealth made a speech. A curious moment for Cornelia Thornwell, with ghosts walking upon the platform, in costumes much out of style. How many years since she had sat up there, and heard Josiah’s stern dry voice? The fashion in speeches had not changed a particle; they still talked about the responsibility of educated men for citizenship; they still rebuked disturbers of the public thought. Said Governor Cox: “We ought to stop complaining about the wrongs other men are doing until we are sure each one of us is doing his part honorably and well.”

President Lowell arose to confer the degrees; an old gentleman with a brown mustache and full red cheeks and proper coldness of manner. He belonged to the inner circle of the sacred caste, enjoying an income of not far from a million dollars a year from the family cotton mills and real estate. He had been a lawyer on a small scale, when the great financial interests of Boston had selected him to take charge of their university. Under his direction there had been established a Graduate School of Business Administration, to put a gloss of culture upon the crudities of commercialism; the institution had grown with such speed that it was turning matters about, and taking a lot of the gloss off Harvard.

There was a slow procession of thirteen hundred young men in black gowns and mortar-boards, walking across a stage, putting out a hand and taking a roll of sheepskin; listening to a little speech, if it happened to be a “cum laude,” with an extra sentence if it happened to be a “magna cum laude,” and several sentences if it happened to be a “summa cum laude.” It seemed symbolical of New England hypocrisy that these were not real diplomas, but merely blanks; next day the graduates had to go rooting in tubs, in the basement of the theater, to get their own!

The only thrill in the ceremony is when one of the young men happens to be known to you; then you make a decorous little noise with the palms of your hands--the relic of enthusiasm among the blue-bloods. Cornelia looked at the young faces, grave and pale, mostly, but still clean and alive. She looked at the sheriffs and mayors and politicians and lawyers and bankers--masks of cynicism, hardness and dullness. What evil power presided over the lives of men, to work this transformation from youth to age?

It came the turn of Josiah Thornwell Winters; and Cornelia hoped that not many of these graduates were hiding a tragedy like his. She had heard from Quincy Thornwell the end of the story: the woman from “Larry Shay’s stable,” who had succeeded in making Young Josiah think she was only nineteen, and innocent, was in reality twenty-five, a victim of drugs, and also of a disease. This latter she had passed on to her victim, so now he was paying several visits a week to leading specialists, and his pale set face as he walked across the platform was due to the fact that walking hurt him. But all over Sander’s Theater, members of the audience nudged one another, whispering, “The grandson of Governor Thornwell--the tall one.” They thought about his blue blood, and mothers with marriageable daughters pondered ways to meet him.

There was an elaborate banquet at the close of these ceremonies; and also a series of class banquets, at which the “old boys” got together and listened to patriotism and jokes. At one of these revelries the orator was that courageous patriot, District Attorney Frederick G. Katzmann, of Norfolk and Plymouth counties. The chairman introduced him as one who had set out to rid Massachusetts of the Reds, and the orator accepted the stern duty, and talked about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and what he was going to do to those anarchists. Tumultuous applause from the assembled banqueters, and toasts from their hip-pocket flasks, and singing of “Fair Harvard” and “He’s a Jolly Good Fellow!”

III

Back to Dedham courthouse with its high white dome, with a ring of port-holes like an ocean liner; the jury making its daily marches, and the foreman saluting the flag; the manacled prisoners parading down the middle of the street with their military escort; the guards keeping watch, searching the spectators, even the handbags of the ladies; the newspapers reporting sensations.

The defense was having its innings. Frank Burke, a man in his fifties, formerly sealer of weights and measures for the city of Brockton, and now giving demonstrations of glass-blowing, had been on the street in South Braintree, where the bandit car crossed the railroad tracks. The car had passed within ten feet of him, and the bandit in the right front seat had leaned out and snapped a gun at him--it had failed to explode. The man supposed to be Sacco had been in the right rear seat, and Burke got a good look at him and described him, a flat, full face, with broad heavy jowl--no resemblance to Sacco. There had been so much patriotism in the trial that Burke thought a little would be welcome from him, so he tried it, and there resulted a curious dialogue between him and the district attorney:

“What was the color of the gun you saw?”

“Blue.”

“You have seen them, haven’t you?”

“Yes, my boy brought one home from the war.”

“Did you think I asked about your boy bringing one home?”

“No, but you were asking me about automatics, and I told you when I seen one.”

“You thought you would tuck that in, did you?”

“I am not attempting to tuck anything in, Mr. Katzmann.”

“Did you do it inadvertently?”

“Yes, sir, I am trying--”

“And have all your answers made heretofore that have not been called for been done inadvertently? I want you to tell the truth.”

Five laborers took the stand, men who had been digging an excavation, and had witnessed the murder. These men all swore that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti were in the bandit car; but they were Italians and Spaniards, having to talk through interpreters, and it was easy for Katzmann to discredit them. One laborer estimated that he was forty or fifty feet from the shooting; Katzmann very cunningly got him to answer a complicated question--that he was as sure of the distance as he was that the bandits had not been Sacco and Vanzetti. Then he measured the distance on the map, and said it was ninety-five feet; and that finished Pedro Iscorla. In his closing speech Katzmann attacked all these laborers as cowards, because they had stood by with picks and shovels and failed to attack bandits who were shooting guns.

Two gun experts testified for the defense. Experts always balance one another--if you have as much money as the other side. One was a champion pistol shot and department head in a cartridge company; the other was superintendent of the testing department of the Colt Automatic Pistol Company, which had made Sacco’s gun, and he should have known more about it than Captain Proctor, who had found himself on the witness stand vainly trying to take the weapon apart. Both the defense experts testified that the “mortal bullet” could not have come from Sacco’s gun; nor did they, like Proctor, take back their testimony later on.

Witnesses appeared to counter the testimony of the gateman Levangie, and say how he had told them he did not see the bandits. The same for Goodridge, the ex-convict; four men swore that he had made statements contradicting his present testimony. Too bad these poolroom gentlemen were not named Jones, Smith, Brown and Robinson, instead of Magazu, Arrigoni, Manganio and D’Amato!

And then the witnesses to answer “Fainting Lola”: her friend, Mrs. Campbell, a white-haired old woman who broke down and wept because she did not like to call Lola such a liar; the policeman and the reporter to whom Lola had admitted that she could not identify the bandits; and then Kurlansky, the storekeeper, who got his rebuke from Judge Thayer for having failed to tackle the police and prosecuting authorities of Norfolk County, all by his valiant self!

And then poor Joseph Rosen, the Jewish peddler of cloth, who had sold Vanzetti a piece of suiting at a great bargain because it had a hole in it. He had gone with Vanzetti to show the goods to Mrs. Brini, and they had had a long talk. Three weeks later he had read of Vanzetti’s arrest for banditry, and had seen his picture and recognized him, and realized that it was the day he had sold the cloth. He told his story to the jury, and Katzmann provided a four-hour circus for bored jurymen by kidding Rosen’s Yiddisher dialect, and asking where he had been on a certain day a year ago, and where he had been three weeks ago. Poor Rosen tried to protest that if he had a little time he could remember some of that; which of course Katzmann and the jury took to mean that he could have the lawyers’ help in remembering it.

As a matter of fact it would have been easy for the prosecution to have verified Rosen’s story if it had cared to, for he said he had sold cloth to many persons in Plymouth that day, including the wife of the chief of police. But it was as Lee Swenson had told Cornelia--hardly any use at all to put on foreign witnesses; the jury took it for granted that their stories were “built,” and whether they were all “built,” or only a few of them “built,” made no difference in the result. Of course no jury would ever dream that the cultured gentlemen who represented the Commonwealth would do such a thing as tell a witness what to say! Never in a thousand years could they be made to realize that of the five identification witnesses upon whom the case against Sacco rested, one was a many times convicted crook, one a hysterical prostitute, one a halfwit, one a disordered fantast, and one a feeble victim of police pressure; all five of them persons who had made statements identifying other men as the bandits, or else saying that they could not identify any one. And all this known to the prosecution, and some of it to the judge on the bench--so that the procedure represented a conspiracy between the district attorney and the judge, to deceive the jury, to hide the essential facts from them, and persuade them that white was black.

The great day of the trial: Bartolomeo Vanzetti taking the stand in his own defense! He looked neat and proper in his new black suit, clean white collar and little black silk tie. He had grown bald about the temples during his long confinement, but he still had his heavy droopy mustache; his earnest, deeply lined face was that of a student and thinker.

They took him out of the “cage” to give his testimony, and stood him in the prisoner’s dock, with a little low railing before him, where for hours he answered the questions of his lawyers. His manner was quiet and courteous, and his command of English remarkable; he had profited by his year of study to drop most of his Italian peculiarities, and the newspapers commented upon his education, so that Cornelia was proud of her pupil. Only once did he let himself be goaded by Katzmann into a flash of “redness”; when he had occasion to refer to the place where some of his friends lived, working on the railroad near Springfield: “Yes, in a shanty, you know, the little house where the Italian live and work like a beast, the Italian workingman in this country.”

He told the jury the story of his life: his childhood in Italy, his slavery to a pastry cook, the breakdown of his health, the death of his mother. He told about coming to America, his work in the great rich club in New York City--he no longer called it a “clooba”--and then in the smart restaurant; his work in the brickyard, the stone quarry, on the railroad, the Worcester reservoir--near the home of Judge Thayer; then in a wire mill, then for the Plymouth Cordage Company. He told about his going to Mexico, because he did not believe in war; he had learned by now that he had not been liable to the draft, and he mentioned it, but apparently without result.

He told about his fish-selling business--and the defense counsel showed his license to dig clams, and the receipts for his fish. All the morning of the South Braintree crime he had been selling fish in Plymouth--in Cherry Street, Standish Avenue, Cherry Court, Suosso’s Lane, Castle Street. A little after the noon hour he had met Rosen, and bought from him the piece of suiting with a hole in it; Vanzetti still had the cloth, and it was introduced in evidence. He had taken Rosen to Mrs. Brini, because she worked in a woolen mill, and was a judge of cloth. In the afternoon he had left his cart in the yard of Melvin Corl, the fisherman, and had gone down to the shore, where Corl was painting a boat, and at the actual moment of the South Braintree murders he had been chatting with Corl. The owner of the boat-yard, Gessi, had come along during the talk, and another man, Holmes. Later Bart had dug clams and bait, and had gone home and had his supper at six o’clock, and had spent the evening in Plymouth.

He told about his doings from that April fifteenth to the day of his arrest three weeks later. He had gone to the club in East Boston, and had been asked to go to New York to see about Salsedo and Elia. But there Katzmann and Thayer stopped him; it was the intention of the district attorney to argue that the defendants had no reason to be afraid on the night of their arrest, and to tell lies to the police. Katzmann wanted to argue that the worst that anarchists had to fear was getting a free trip to Italy; that as Sacco was going anyhow, the claim of fear was obviously silly. The entire ruling class of Massachusetts was going to maintain that argument for six years; so the jury must be kept from realizing that sixty-seven hours prior to the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, their friend and comrade Salsedo had jumped, or had been thrown to his death from the fourteenth story of the Park Row Building in New York! The defense came back to it, again and again, but they were blocked here and blocked there, and the real meaning of the matter was never made clear to the jury.

It was the aim of the prosecution, not so much to refute the testimony of Vanzetti, as to rouse the prejudices of the jurors against him; to fill them with emotions of hatred and fear, so that they would be incapable of thinking; to make them see an anarchist infidel draft dodger as a depraved wretch, deserving to die many deaths. When the time came for cross-examination, Mr. Katzmann’s first question had nothing to do with the problem whether Vanzetti had sat in a bandit car and pointed a shot-gun out of the rear window; it had to do with the problem whether the jury was going to find him guilty, regardless of whether he had sat in the bandit car or not. Said Mr. Katzmann: “So you left Plymouth, Mr. Vanzetti, in May, 1917, to dodge the draft, did you?”

Mr. Katzmann of course knew perfectly well that Vanzetti had not been liable to the draft; but he went on to rub in the sneer, with that mock indignation acquired in the course of eleven years’ service for the Commonwealth: “When this country was at war, you ran away, so you would not have to fight as a soldier?” The district attorney was not interested to question Vanzetti about the South Braintree crime, and try to prove that he was there; the district attorney was not interested in trying to break Vanzetti’s alibi; he was only interested to prove that Vanzetti had lied to the police, and that he was unpatriotic.

He took up the prisoner’s effort to organize a meeting, and the pitiful circular he had drafted: “You were going to advise in a public meeting men who had gone to war? Are you that man?” “Yes, sir,” answered Bart, quietly, “I am that man, not the man you want me, but I am that man.” The newspapers made much of this scene; it was what their readers were hungry for. “A tensely dramatic moment,” said the Boston Traveler, and described how the prosecutor “thundered.” Said the American, “The district attorney’s voice was vibrant with emotion. It thrilled the spectators.”

But it was during the cross-examination of Sacco that the great official’s vibrations did their heaviest thundering, and the spectators, and readers of newspapers, got their choicest thrills. Nicola Sacco had a poor command of English, and had to call for the aid of the interpreter-crook; also he had poor command of his emotions, and could be jeered at and goaded, provoked into saying things that would ruin him. The district attorney asked him seventeen hundred questions; and more about patriotism than about anything else. Said Mr. Katzmann: “Did you leave this country in May, 1917?”

Said Sacco: “I can’t answer in one word.”

“Please answer my questions, Mr. Sacco”--“in thundering voice,” the newspapers said. “One week before the day of the first draft in May, 1917, did you leave this country?” There followed a long dialogue, a scene which made Cornelia think of a deer in the forest, when a wolverine or lynx or other fierce creature drops upon him from a tree, and chews into his neck as he runs. That is a common event in nature; but in this case appeared a phenomenon unknown to zoology--another animal running alongside the fleeing deer, to keep any one from interfering with the neck-chewing process. This creature went by the name of a webthayer.

“Did you say yesterday you love a free country?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you love this country in the month of May, 1917?”

“I did not say,--I don’t want to say I did not love this country.”

“Did you love this country in that month of 1917?”

“If you can, Mr. Katzmann, if you give me that,--I could explain--”

“Do you understand that question?”

“Yes.”

“Then will you please answer it?”

“I can’t answer in one word.”

“You can’t say whether you loved the United States of America one week before the day you enlisted for the first draft?”

“I can’t say in one word, Mr. Katzmann.”

“Did you love this country in the last week of May, 1917?”

“That is pretty hard for me to say in one word, Mr. Katzmann.”

“There are two words you can use, Mr. Sacco, yes or no. Which one is it?”

“Yes.”

“And in order to show your love for this United States of America when she was about to call upon you to become a soldier you ran away to Mexico.”

That question was, obviously enough, not intended to elicit any information of use to the jury; that question was, purely and simply, a sneer. And Katzmann hammered and hammered upon it; eleven separate times he repeated the word “love.” First, did Sacco run away for love of his country? Then, did he run away for love of his wife? “Would it be your idea of showing your love for your wife that when she needed you, you ran away from her?”

Said Sacco: “I did not run away from her.”

Said Sacco’s lawyer: “I object.”

But the webthayer said: “He may answer,”--and added, with his usual cunning: “Simply on the question of credibility, that is all.”

So the wolverine or lynx went on with the neck-chewing. “Would it be your idea of love for your wife that you were to run from her when she needed you?”

Said Mr. McAnarney: “Pardon me. I ask for an exception on that.”

The webthayer excluded the question; but obligingly indicated to the neck-chewer how he might go on. “He had not admitted he ran away.”

So, of course, the torture was resumed. “Then I will ask you, didn’t you run away from Milford so as to avoid being a soldier for the United States?”

“I did not run away.”

“You mean you walked away?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t understand me when I say ‘run away,’ do you?”

“That is vulgar.”

“That is vulgar?”

“You can say a little intelligent, Mr. Katzmann.”

“Don’t you think going away from your country is a vulgar thing to do when she needs you?”

“I don’t believe in war.”

“You don’t believe in war?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you think it is a cowardly thing to do what you did?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you think it is a brave thing to do what you did?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think it would be a brave thing to go away from your own wife?”

“No.”

“When she needed you?”

“No.”

The prosecutor kept at the wife question until he had got all the hate out of it he could, and then he took up the sneer that “wops” come to America to make money. “Is it because,--is your love for the United States of America commensurate with the amount of money you can get in this country per week?”

“Better conditions, yes.”

“Better country to make money, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Is your love for this country measured by the amount of money you can earn here?”

“I never loved money.”

This went on, until the defense broke in again. Said Mr. Jeremiah McAnarney: “No, if your Honor please. And I might state now I want my objection to go to this whole line of interrogation.”

Said the webthayer: “I think you opened it up.”

Said the lawyer, very humbly: “No, if your Honor please, I think I have not.”

Said the webthayer: “I think you have,”--and went on to give an argument which for prejudice-carrying capacity exceeded anything the fertile mind of the district attorney had been able to conceive. It was the contention of the defendants that on the night of their arrest they had been going with Boda and Orciani to visit some of the anarchist comrades, and collect the dangerous literature from their homes, and hide it until the storm of persecution had blown over. And now here was the webthayer, elaborating an even more complicated sneer than the one about love of country and of wife. Said he: “It seems to me you have. Are you going to claim much of all the collection of the literature and the books was really in the interest of the United States as well as these people and therefore it has opened up the credibility of the defendant when he claims that all that work was done really for the interest of the United States in getting his literature out of the way?”

Said Mr. McAnarney: “That claim is not presented in anything tantamount to the language just used by the Court, and in view of the record as it stands at this time I object to this line of inquiry.”

There followed upon this a phenomenon never observed in any forest; the wolverine or lynx desisting from his neck-chewing, and letting the webthayer take his place on the victim’s back! The webthayer liked his mockery so well that he repeated it five separate times, in detail, and several other times by implication. “Are you going to claim that what the defendant did was in the interest of the United States?” And each time with a broader wink at the jury, a broader grin from the jury in response. When the defense lawyer objected, “Your Honor please, I now object to your Honor’s statement as prejudicial to the rights of the defendants and ask that the statement be withdrawn from the jury”--then instantly the webthayer was on the alert to protect the record and make everything look all right. “There is no prejudicial remark made that I know of, and none were intended. I simply asked you, sir, as to whether you propose to offer evidence as to what you said to me.”

After which he went on to repeat the sneer and rub it in; and closed, as usual, by telling the wolverine or lynx how to get back to the neck-chewing: “I will let you inquire further as to what he meant by the expression.” So, of course, Katzmann took the hint, and went on, exactly as if there had been no interruption: “What did you mean when you said yesterday you loved a free country?”

VII

Poor Nick! He was a talkative, eager young fellow, a propagandist; and for fourteen months and two days they had had him behind steel bars. He had boiled, he had seethed, he had all but exploded. And now suddenly he saw a hope! “Give me a chance to explain,” he pleaded; and the cunning prosecutor said: “I am asking you to explain now.” Actually, the great Mr. Katzmann asked him to explain! The great Judge Thayer said it would be all right for him to explain! The jury, the spectators, everybody was ready to listen--while he told what he thought about America, about Italy, about liberty, about the workers and their rights, the rich and the poor, good food and vegetables, schools, free speech, Debs, the capitalist class, Harvard College, D. Rockefeller, Morgan, working people, war, socialism, Abraham Lincoln, Abe Jefferson, the Irish, the Germans, the French, governments, devilment and robbery--everything! Perhaps he could not convert them, but at least he could make them understand him!

Forgive him if his stump-speech is long--he has all the conclusions of a lifetime to state! Forgive him if it is jumbled--he has no time to arrange it, he does not know at what moment they may shut him off again and lock him up for another fourteen months! Forgive him if it is incoherent--he is groping desperately for words in a strange tongue, stammering, halting, starting again, tripping himself up with his excitement, the intensity of his convictions. And meantime the bland prosecutor stands silent, smiling--why should he trouble to work, when his victim will hang himself with his own rope? The judge is content, for he knows it will look well in the record--the defendant has had a chance to express himself, no possible claim that he was misrepresented. Most content of all are the jury-men--because they have power to punish a wop who is insulting and defiling all their most sacred Yankee prejudices.

Said Nicola Sacco, in defense of his life:

“When I was in Italy, a boy, I was a Republican, so I always thinking Republican has more chance to manage education, develop, to build some day his family, to raise the child and education, if you could. But that was my opinion; so when I came to this country I saw there was not what I was thinking before, but there was all the difference, because I been working in Italy not so hard as I been work in this country. I could live free there just as well. Work in the same condition but not so hard, about seven or eight hours a day, better food. I mean genuine. Of course, over here is good food, because it is bigger country, to any those who got money to spend, not for the working and laboring class, and in Italy is more opportunity to laborer to eat vegetable, more fresh, and I came in this country. When I been started work here very hard and been work thirteen years, hard worker, I could not been afford much a family the way I did have the idea before. I could not put any money in the bank; I could no push my boy some to go to school and other things. I teach over here men who is with me. The free idea gives any man a chance to profess his own idea, not the supreme idea, not to give any person, not to be like Spain in position, yes, about twenty centuries ago, but to give a chance to print and education, literature, free speech, that I see it was all wrong. I could see the best men, intelligent, education, they been arrested and sent to prison and died in prison for years and years without getting them out, and Debs, one of the great men in his country, he is in prison, still away in prison, because he is a Socialist. He wanted the laboring class to have better conditions and better living, more education, give a push his son if he could have a chance some day, but they put him in prison. Why? Because the capitalist class, they know, they are against that, because the capitalist class, they don’t want our child to go to high school or college or Harvard College. There would be no chance, there would not be no,--they don’t want the working class educationed; they want the working class to be a low all the times, be underfoot, and not to be up with the head. So, sometimes, you see, the Rockefellers, Morgans, they give fifty,--I mean they give five hundred thousand dollars to Harvard College, they give a million dollars for another school. Every day say, ‘Well, D. Rockefeller is a great man, the best man in the country.’ I want to ask him who is going to Harvard College? What benefit the working class they will get by those million dollars they give by Rockefeller, D. Rockefellers. They won’t get, the poor class, they won’t have no chance to go to Harvard College because men who is getting $21 a week or $30 a week, I don’t care if he gets $80 a week, if he gets a family of five children he can’t live and send his child and go to Harvard College if he wants to eat everything nature will give him. If he wants to eat like a cow, and that is the best thing but I want men to live like men. I like men to get everything that nature will give best, because they belong,--we are not the friend of any other place, but we are belong to nations. So that is why my idea has been changed. So that is why I love people who labor and work and see better conditions every day develop, makes no more war. We no want fight by the gun, and we don’t want to destroy young men. The mother been suffering for building the young man. Some day need a little more bread, so when the time the mother get some bread or profit out of that boy, the Rockefellers, Morgans, and some of the peoples, high class, they send to war. Why? What is war? The war is not shoots like Abraham Lincoln’s and Abe Jefferson, to fight for the free country, for the better education to give chance to any other peoples, not the white people but the black and the others, because they believe and know they are mens like the rest, but they are war for the great millionaire. No war for the civilization of men. They are war for business, million dollars come on the side. What right we have to kill each other? I been work for the Irish. I have been working with the German fellow, with the French, many other peoples. I love them people just as I could love my wife, and my people for that did receive me. Why should I go kill them men? What he done to me? He never done anything, so I don’t believe in no war. I want to destroy those guns. All I can say, the Government put the literature, give us educations. I remember in Italy, a long time ago, about sixty years ago, I should say, yes, about sixty years ago, the Government they could not control very much those two,--devilment went on, and robbery, so one of the government in the cabinet he says, ‘If you want to destroy those devilments, if you want to take off all those criminals, you ought to give a chance to Socialist literature, education of people, emancipation. That is why I destroy governments, boys.’ That is why my idea I love Socialists. That is why I like people who want education and living, building, who is good, just as much as they could. That is all.”

VIII

July 7th was the date of this oration. Three days previously all patriots had celebrated the Declaration of Independence, with its opening assertion that “all men are created equal.” If the author of that document, “Abe Jefferson,” could have been present in the Dedham court-house, he would have been able to understand the blundering protest of an uneducated foreigner, chained for life to an edge-trimming machine in a shoe-factory. But not so this jury, not this judge nor this prosecuting attorney! To them it was treason; and the moment the orator ceased, the wolverine or lynx was on his neck again. “And that is why you love the United States of America? She is back more than twenty centuries like Spain, is she?”

Worse yet, the presumptuous wop had dared to insult Harvard College! The district attorney waited until after lunch, to refresh himself and gather his energies to deal with such insolence. “Did you say in substance you could not send your boy to Harvard? Don’t you know Harvard educates more boys of poor people free than any other university in the United States of America?”

The defense lawyers objected, but were overruled, and poor Sacco had to answer. If he had been an authority on educational statistics, his answer would have been that Harvard was educating free something over one hundred students, while the University of Wisconsin had educated free in that year five thousand, eight hundred and ninety-five, and the University of California had educated free eleven thousand, three hundred and forty.

But alas, poor Nick was not an authority on educational statistics, and could only say that he didn’t know; thereby confessing to a more serious crime than first degree murder. Said the outraged Mr. Katzmann: “So without the light of knowledge on that subject, you are condemning even Harvard University, are you, as being a place for rich men?”

More argument, more interruptions; the defense lawyers protesting, Judge Thayer overruling them--he and Katzmann like two skillful basket-ball players, keeping the ball in play between them and working it down the field to the goal. “Did you intend to condemn Harvard College?” (Objection overruled.) “Were you ready to say none but the rich could go there without knowing about offering scholarships?” (Objection overruled.) “Does your boy go to the public schools? Are there any schools in the town you come from in Italy that compare with the school your boy goes to?” (Objection.) And then, free nursing in the town of Stoughton! The number of children in the schools of Boston, and what did Sacco know about it! Said Mr. McAnarney: “I object to that answer. I object to the question and the answer.” Said Judge Thayer: “The question may stand, and the answer also.”

To Cornelia Thornwell, watching this scene, listening to these interminable wrangles, this was not a real procedure in a court; this was some kind of crazy dream, a world of cross-questions and crooked answers, another Alice in Wonderland. Yes, that was it--Cornelia was in the home of the White Rabbit and the March Hare, the Mock Turtle and the Queen of Hearts! “He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!” A world where things changed their form suddenly, where they grew enormously big and terrifying and then shrunk to littleness, so that you had to laugh at them! A world in which a blond and genial gentleman with bursting red pulpy face turned suddenly into a wolverine or lynx, chewing a deer’s neck--and then into a basketball player, romping down a field with a judge! Anything but a responsible public official, conducting a judicial procedure involving human life!

I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, Said cunning old Fury; I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death!

They got onto the question of the literature which Sacco and Vanzetti claimed they had been intending to gather up. “Books relating to anarchy, were they not?” “Not all of them.” “How many of them?” “Well all together. We are Socialists, democratic, any other socialistic information, Socialists, Syndicalists, Anarchists, any paper.” They discussed for a while what had been intended with the literature, whether it was to be destroyed or only hidden for a while. Sacco admitted it was to be hidden. “Certainly, because they are educational for book, educational.” Said the prosecutor: “An education in anarchy, wasn’t it?” Said the witness: “Why, certainly. Anarchistic is not criminals.” This greatly incensed the district attorney. “I did not ask you if they are criminals or not. Nor are you to pass upon that, sir.” What a light this threw upon his purpose! And upon the argument which Cornelia was to hear in future years from the whole of official Massachusetts--that the purpose of this cross-examination had been to prove that Sacco and Vanzetti had not been genuine “Reds,” but were merely making a pretense at it!

On and on, with no end in sight. Presently the wolverine or lynx was back at his neck-chewing--though you would think his victim must by now be bled to death. “And you are a man who tells this jury that the United States of America is a disappointment to you?” Again an objection of the defense, and the webthayer telling the wolverine or lynx how to proceed. The judge pointed out that Katzmann had made the mistake of “assuming” that Sacco was the man. So of course Katzmann took the hint, and framed it as a question; was Sacco the man? The lawyers again objected, and the judge overruled, and the lawyers asked an exception, and then the victim couldn’t understand the phrase, “passed judgment upon the United States of America,” and it had to be explained to him: “Well, tell us about how disappointed you were, and what you did not find and what you expected to find. Are you that man?” Yes, Sacco admitted, he was the man; and the jury was greatly enlightened.

The ordeal was over at last, and a court official came to Cornelia Thornwell, saying that His Honor would like to see her in his chambers. Another interview with the judge--the third during the trial! It was intolerable to him that members of the aristocracy which he reverenced should be sitting there in court day by day disapproving of the procedure; he must argue with them, he must explain and defend himself, he must bring the great ones to appreciate his services. He meant it for a compliment to them; but unfortunately he paid the same compliment to newspaper reporters and photographers, and other persons whom the aristocracy does not recognize.

He had taken off his black silk robe and hung it on a hook, and was now a quite ordinary little old man, small, narrow-shouldered, with white hair and a feeble chin and bloodless complexion. He rose from his chair and bowed her to a seat, and she saw that his hands were trembling, and his blinking worse than usual--he was a tired old man, who had been through a severe ordeal and was wrought up and suffering. He was fussy in his manner, over-cordial and lacking in repose; he repeated himself, saying the same words several times: “Now, Mrs. Thornwell, you see, you see! You see what I told you about those men!”

“How do you mean, Judge Thayer?”

“You heard the testimony that fellow Sacco gave? You see he admits it, he admits the worst--they are arnychists, of the most desperate character--they say it, defiantly--they defy the court and all society!”

“But, Judge Thayer, I have always known they were anarchists. I don’t understand they are on trial for anarchism.”

“No, but it shows their character, their ideas. They have no respect for the law--they are men who would commit crimes.”

“But I heard Sacco’s employer testify that he was a good workman, that he had not been absent from his machine but one day in a long time--he was trusted with the keys to the factory--he had been a night-watchman--”

“Oh, but Mrs. Thornwell, you should hear what Kelley says outside!”

“What do you mean, what Kelley says?”

“I cannot tell you his words, they are not fit for a lady’s ears; the substance of it is that Kelley is afraid to tell the truth about what he thinks of Sacco.”

“Judge Thayer, you appal me!”

“How do you mean, madame?”

“You are going outside the testimony of the case, considering gossip that people bring you, things that the witnesses are unwilling to say under oath!”

“I am dealing with people who are terrorized. You cannot imagine the condition in this community, the time we have had getting men to come forward and testify at all. Think of the situation, Mrs. Thornwell--what it means, where it was necessary to summon nearly seven hundred veniremen in order to get a jury!”

“And so you think that our legal system has broken down, and you throw it overboard! I have read that men were executed upon the gossip of spies in Turkey under the sultans, and in Russia under the tsars, but I did not know we had come to that in Massachusetts.”

The old man’s face showed that he had blood in him after all. He held up a shaking hand to stop her. “Mrs. Thornwell, it is a grave impropriety for you to address such words to a judge who is presiding over a trial!”

Cornelia rose. “You well know that I did not seek this meeting, Judge Thayer. If it is your idea that you are free to say what you please in condemnation of these men, and that impropriety begins when you hear what you do not wish to hear, then I would advise you to confine your talks to your social inferiors, for I have not been brought up to carry on conversation on that basis.”

The pitiful old man had risen, trembling so that he had to hold onto the back of the chair to sustain himself. His voice became shrill--it was like a thin strip of steel. “Mrs. Thornwell, I deeply regret having to say such a thing to you, but it amounts to contempt of court, what you have said to a judge while he is sitting upon a case.”

“I will leave your chambers,” said Cornelia, haughtily, “and trust that you will refrain from troubling me with further invitations. But I will not fail to tell you what is the opinion of every disinterested person in the court-room--that the scenes witnessed to-day constitute a travesty upon justice, the worst I have ever heard of in my life!”

She started to the door. But even then the old man could not give up. He came hurrying behind her, stretching out a hand that seemed to be palsied. “Mrs. Thornwell! I warn you! You are letting yourself be deceived! You are being used by unscrupulous persons! We are surrounded by criminals, by desperate and embittered enemies of our institutions! You owe it to your ancestry and your heritage to stand behind us--we are trying to protect the community--a public service--patriotic duty--a desperate danger--arnychists--assassination--conspiracy--” they were snatches of words that Cornelia heard, while she was going down the corridor, not yet out of sound of the shrill metallic voice.

Frank P. Sibley was a star reporter of the Boston Globe, covering this trial in a special effort to be fair. The Globe aims to be what is known as a “family newspaper,” and has become one of the wealthiest in America upon a policy of publishing the name of everybody in Eastern Massachusetts not less than twice every year. It gives pages of local gossip from every town and village: “For the Friday evening meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church a delicious walnut cake was provided by Mrs. Amanda Lubb, who is visiting her niece, Mrs. Peter Bobbs of Scrugham Corners,” and so on. Sibley, who contributed to a column of sentimental comment signed “Uncle Dudley,” was an old-fashioned Bostonian, having notions of honor and dignity now going out of fashion. He was covering this murder trial as a high civic duty, signing his daily articles, and taking them very seriously.

And here he saw the judge on the bench, forcing himself upon newspapermen, insisting upon talking about the case with them, such an impropriety as had never been heard of. Judge Thayer joining reporters walking back to the court-house from lunch, asking them what they thought of his conduct of the case; telling them of other murder trials he had conducted, and of compliments he had received from justices of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth for his skillful handling and exact rulings! Sibley could not tell such things in his paper, for that was not what several hundred thousand families of Eastern Massachusetts wanted to read with their morning cod-fish balls. But he thought it his duty to write a letter to the attorney-general of the Commonwealth--to which that blue-blood gentleman thought it his duty to make no reply!

Did a rumor come to Judge Thayer? Or was there something in the attitude of the newspapermen which conveyed, even to his obtuse mind, that he was not “making a hit”? Anyhow, he was anxious; and now in that private dining-room of the Dedham Inn where the reporters lunched and discussed their stories, comparing notes so as to protect one another from error, they were surprised to have the judge come up to them without warning and announce: “I think I am entitled to have a statement published in the Boston papers that this trial is being conducted in a fair and impartial manner.”

Naturally, the group of men at the table were taken aback. Even a newspaper reporter must respect somebody, and who should it be if not the learned judge of the Superior Court, presiding at a trial which involved the attendance of some two hundred persons, and was costing the county of Norfolk some two thousand dollars per day?

Thayer turned to the star reporter of the Globe. “Sibley, you’re the oldest. What do you think? Is this trial being fairly and impartially conducted?” And Sibley had to think in a hurry. “Your Honor, I have never seen anything like it.” His Honor stood and pondered that compliment. Some little bird must have whispered to him that it would be better to take it at face value; he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

And now came the cross-questioning of Sacco, with the judge on the bench delivering his elaborate sneer at the defense: “Are you going to claim that your client, in collecting this literature, was acting in the interest of the United States?” The question revealed such an obvious effort to distort Sacco’s meaning, and expose him to the prejudice and hatred of the jury, that Sibley quoted the sentence in his story; with the result that during the recess he found himself summoned into the judge’s chambers. His Honor took him to task for having quoted such a sentence; no such question had been asked, and the judge had verified it by getting the transcript of his remarks. He presented to Sibley a typewritten record, upon which the question did not appear.

Sibley, of course, was embarrassed, and said that he had written the sentence down as he heard it; he could only assume that his hearing had played him false. He was about to ask if the judge wished him to publish a retraction, when the bailiff entered, announcing that the jury had arrived. The judge entered court, and so did Sibley. Next day, when the actual record of the case was available, the reporter consulted it, and found that it showed Judge Thayer’s question, in the exact words quoted in the Globe! Five times the old man had asked that question explicitly, and several times more by implication; but now he had got frightened, and in an effort to cheat the public and hide the truth, he had gone to the extreme of preparing a doctored version of the record, and trying to palm it off on a reporter!

The funds of the defense had run out. A collection was taken among the sympathizers at the trial, and six hundred dollars raised; but that was not enough. Cornelia wrote letters and sent telegrams; then, in one of those moods of mischief which had always been incomprehensible to the Thornwells, she called up her daughter, Deborah, at the North Shore place. “Deborah, there is some trouble, very serious--something I must see you about at once. No, I can’t talk about it over the telephone, you must come here to Dedham.” She used, as nearly as she could remember, the words by which Deborah had summoned her to Boston. The daughter, of course, thought instantly of Betty and Joe, having always this scandal hanging over her head.

It was a drive of two or three hours, and she arrived about lunch-time. Her mother was waiting at the Dedham Inn, and there was Betty, looking very lovely, though pale and tired--no visible trace of a scandal. But there was a trace of tears in the child’s eyes--one does not so easily sever family ties--even during the class struggle! “What is it?” asked Deborah, of her mother.

Cornelia replied that they couldn’t talk about it here. “Wait until the afternoon session is over.”

“You mean of the court?”

“Yes, my child, I cannot miss this afternoon, there is to be some important testimony. You come with me.”

“To a murder-trial, Mother!”

“Surely, if I can stand a murder-trial, my daughter can!”

Mrs. Rupert Alvin had never done such a thing in her life. She regarded courts as vulgar places, and attending them as evidence of sensation-seeking. She might get her name into the papers; she looked around for reporters, in the same spirit as her ancestors in this neighborhood had looked for wild Indians with tomahawks. She met some of the ladies, old and young, who were aiding the defense, and managed to find something wrong, either socially or sartorially, with every one of them--though she kept her thoughts to herself. “Mother, is there anything wrong about Betty?” she whispered. Cornelia said no, it wasn’t that.

They sat in the court-room: Deborah straight as a ramrod, motionless for three hours. Her manner said, Do not assume that I have any interest in this, or that I give it my sanction. She heard Guadagni, journalist and lecturer, telling the story of his lunch with Sacco in Boston on the day of the South Braintree crime. The murders had been committed at a little after three; and from one to two, or later, Guadagni had been chatting with Sacco, discussing the banquet being given by a group of Italians, in honor of the editor of the Boston Transcript, who had been decorated by the King of Italy in recognition of his services in getting America into the war. The affair took place that same day--which was how Guadagni fixed the date; Fred Katzmann strove in vain to make him admit that it might have been some other day.

“You know, Mother,” said Deborah, when it was over, “those Italians don’t think anything at all of telling lies to help one another out of trouble.”

“Yes, my dear, I know,” said Cornelia. “It’s just like the men of our own family, sitting up nights fixing their stories for the Jerry Walker case.”

And when they were outside again, apart from the crowd, and the danger of reporters, “Well, what do you think of our boys, Deborah?”

“You mean those two prisoners? Mother, I don’t see how you can force yourself to tolerate such people! Dark, sinister-looking--”

“Most Italians are dark; but that doesn’t make them murderers.”

Deborah shuddered. “I feel the hate in them--something frightful! Those set, intent faces--”

“My child, they are intent upon the question of whether they are going to the electric chair. It seems really important to them.”

XII

They went to Cornelia’s room in the hotel, and she lay down to rest. Deborah sat up straight. “Now, Mother, what is it?”

So Cornelia told her: “My dear, I have to pain you, I must sell my jewels.”

“Mother! What do you mean?”

“The defense has run out of funds, and I am not going to let those boys lose the chance for their lives. I must have some cash, and there is nothing I can think of but to sell my jewels.”

“But Mother, how dreadful!” Deborah was shocked into incoherence. The family heirlooms--they were priceless--treasures with spiritual associations--surely the children had some rights!

“You miss the point, my child,” interrupted Cornelia. “I want to sell them to you.”

Deborah said, “Oh!” She looked at her mother--no trace of a smile on the little round face, no twinkle in the soft brown eyes! Deborah said, “Oh!” again, and began to realize that this was another manifestation of that sense of humor which her father had found so untimely. A bit of maternal whimsy had brought a big limousine rolling its stately way from the North Shore to Dedham!

Cornelia proceeded with entire gravity. “Of course I know that some day you will have these jewels, you and Clara and Alice. But meantime, I have to have money for this case. You know Queen Isabella sold her jewels to finance Christopher Columbus--at least, the legend says so. I want to sell mine in a still worthier cause, and I offer you a third share.”

“How much money do you have to have, Mother?”

“Five thousand dollars. I have no idea what those jewels are worth--it must be thirty or forty thousand--”

“We are not going to give up our family jewels, Mother, you know that, so don’t be foolish. If the money was for you, none of us would hesitate a moment; but it seems so dreadful to us to have you throwing everything away on these anarchists--men who hate our country--”

“Now, my daughter, let us not go into that. I am making you a strictly business proposition. I offer to sell you one-third of my jewels for five thousand dollars. I will give you a formal receipt, and go to the bank and get them the first day I am in town.”

“You know I don’t care about that, Mother.” Deborah sat, gazing in front of her for a minute. It was clear that she was in a trap, no way out. So with no more ado she went to her handbag, took out her checkbook and fountain-pen, sat at the desk, and created five thousand dollars.

She possessed the power to do that magical thing; she did it frequently--at the board-meetings of orphan-asylums, in homes for the halt and the deaf and the blind, in vestry-rooms and parish-houses of Episcopal churches. The fact that she had such power, and was willing to exercise it, caused a kind of halo of glory to exist about her; it affected the souls of charity workers and superintendents of institutions, of curates and clergymen, so that a trembling seized them when the great Mrs. Alvin swept into the room, their knees went weak under them and almost gave way. Deborah knew of this, and while she pretended to be unaware of it, the pretense was highly artificial; in reality this sense of power was what she lived for and by, and she watched the persons with whom she dealt, and expected them to pay her exactly the right tribute of deference and excitement, and if any one of them failed, then Deborah was incensed against that person--though she always found some other reason for it, the person was too talkative, self-assertive, overdressed or underdressed, anything that wasn’t “Boston.”

Betty, shrewd little minx, had learned to analyze these manifestations: a fascinating study in psychology, a mingling of worldly glory with Christian humility, a checker-board pattern, black and white, in a woman’s soul. To be proud of your money and what you did with your money was the very acme of vulgarity, it was the thing which marked you as the wife of a “lumberman,” or a “Pittsburgh millionaire.” So you were never proud of your money, you were proud of your lack of pride, of the distance which an assured breeding put between you and your money. You associated yourself with the poor and lowly, because that was your Christian duty; and if the poor and lowly looked up to you, it was because of your Christian virtue, and not because you had the power to turn them out to starve and freeze. If they were really refined and worthy poor, they understood this, and so everything was upon a high plane; it was God who had appointed all things, and assigned to each his station and form of conduct, and each did what God wished, and felt the emotions which God inspired. Such was the collective soul of Trinity Church in the City of Boston.

XIII

Other witnesses testified to the alibi of Sacco, supporting Guadagni. Dentamore, a bank department manager, had joined them in Boni’s restaurant, and taken part in the talk about the banquet which the Italians were giving to the editor of the Boston Transcript. A Boston grocer testified that Sacco had paid him a bill on that day; he had his notebook, with the payment entered. Also there was a deposition of a clerk in the consulate, now in Italy, telling how Sacco had applied for a passport on that day; Eugene Lyons had gone to Italy to get that evidence.

There was more alibi testimony for Vanzetti. His friend Alfonsina Brini took the stand and told how he had sold her fish that morning, and brought Rosen to sell her cloth that afternoon. The district attorney was so angry in his cross-questioning that he made her cry; it seemed to him unpardonable that she should have made an alibi for Bart on two separate days, for two separate crimes; he would not realize that Bart had been practically a member of the Brini family, ever since his coming to Plymouth nine years back, and that all the Brinis saw him every day. The district attorney made Mrs. Brini stand up while he read into the record a stipulation to the effect that she had testified to an alibi for Vanzetti on another occasion. The jury was not supposed to know anything about the Plymouth trial and conviction, but of course they did know all about it, and smiled to one another while this statement was read. The lawyer fellows were trying to tie red tape over their eyes, but they would not be blinded!

Another legal hocus-pocus: in order to avoid having the Plymouth conviction brought into evidence, the defense had had to agree not to introduce character witnesses for either defendant. Now the prosecution came forward with a demand that the jury be instructed to disregard all evidence as to the good character of either defendant. So Cornelia Thornwell heard one of those voices which had cried to her in vain in Plymouth county-jail: not the voice of a ghost, but of the far-seeing Vanzetti! The very trick he had explained to her--his enemies had made a convict of him, and now were using his conviction to cast a cloud over both him and Nick, to send them to their deaths. Mr. Katzmann put on his sternest manner and read to the jury the stipulation:

“The Commonwealth assents to the request of both the defendants that all evidence heretofore offered in the course of this trial to the effect that one or both of said defendants bore the reputation of being peaceful and law-abiding citizens, be stricken from the record of this trial, and that such evidence heretofore offered be entirely disregarded by the jury so that the result of striking same from the record there is no evidence before the jury that either or both of said defendants bore the reputation of being a peaceful and law-abiding citizen.”

All in vain the years that Nicola Sacco had worked for the Three-K Shoe Company, earning from forty to sixty dollars a week as expert edge-trimmer, with extra pay as night-watchman for long periods! All in vain those annual gardens full of ripe red tomatoes, and the surplus given to Mr. Kelley, the boss! All in vain the ten dollars a week Rosina had put by, till they had fifteen hundred in the savings-bank, with the record of deposits to show that it had been got by labor, not by holdups! All in vain the hard toil which Bartolomeo Vanzetti had performed for the owning class of New England, in stone-quarries and brickyards, on railroads and reservoirs! In vain his years as fish-peddler, the friendship of hundreds of Italian housewives, of little Italian children, so that when they heard of his dreadful fate, they wept and wrung their hands, and would never cease to talk about him all the days of their lives! In vain his plea, “Save Nick, he got the wife and kids!” Again the lawyers made their demands for separate trials, but Judge Thayer stood firm to save the funds of Norfolk County. Ten thousand dollars a week for seven weeks was all two wops were worth!

XIV

A bell rang in the soul of Cornelia Thornwell: last call for witnesses! She knew what was coming, and was not surprised when Lee Swenson asked her to have lunch with him; nor when he got a table apart from others, and looked about to make sure there was no listener. “Well, Nonna, what do you think of our chances?”

“I don’t know what to think, Lee. I have no experience. You must tell me.”

“Well, I think that speech of Sacco’s finished us.”

“Oh, Lee!” Something went weak inside Cornelia, and she lost interest in lunch. She sat, staring before her, while the lawyer went on, lowering his voice.

“One last chance, Nonna. Do you really want to save those boys? In two hours I can fix you a story; you go on the stand and tell it, and it’ll cinch the case. You can’t imagine how easy it will be--Katzmann won’t dare be rough with you--if he did, I could rip him to pieces with this jury. They’ll have no time to investigate; they can’t take more than a day with their rebuttal witnesses, and that is the end--the case is closed, and anything that comes out afterwards is a joke.”

“Lee--don’t ask me! Don’t ask me!” That was all she could say; he saw the pain in her face, and dropped it. “All right, I won’t worry you.”

But she could not drop it; she had to argue with him about the case. “Lee, how can they convict men on such evidence? I have kept a record: thirty-one witnesses have said Vanzetti was not the man; twelve others, put on by the prosecution, ought to have known him for the bandit if he really was, and they didn’t.” She went on, clamoring her protest. Not one of the witnesses who identified Bart or Nick had ever known them before, or claimed to have seen them before; in every case it was a question of remembering strangers; and to American eyes half the Italians in the world looked like Sacco!

“Yes, Nonna,” said Lee, patiently.

“And the least time afterwards was three weeks--everybody had three weeks to forget what the bandits looked like! Some, like Goodridge and Pelzer, had nearly a year!”

“It’s the jury you have to convince, Nonna--not me!”

“But you must make that clear to them, Lee!”

“I’ll do so, never fear. But I can’t deny that they are anarchists; I can’t deny that our principal witnesses are Italians. Those are the fatal facts.”

They sat, with the food on their plates growing cold; something that had happened to them many times. Life or death was in the balance. Should Lee Swenson, in his speech to the jury, stress the lack of evidence against Vanzetti? If he did so, he might get Vanzetti off. But if Lee knew anything about this Yankee jury, they would “soak” Nick all the harder; and Bart had positively forbidden it to be done. Once again he commanded, “Save Nick, he got the wife and kids!”

They groped in the dark, and beat bare hands against stone walls; they heard in imagination those warning voices which were to haunt the rest of their lives. If only they had known this, if only they had done that! They went back to the courtroom, and the case for the defense was closed. And next day the prosecution put on its rebuttal witnesses--one of them Henry Hellyer, the Pinkerton operative “H. H.”! He came to discredit one of the defense witnesses, and the bland Katzmann questioned him, serenely sure about those secrets, locked in his head, which would have blown the case of the prosecution higher than a kite. Actually, Hellyer had in his hand the reports he had turned in on his investigations; when he was uncertain, he said, “I can find out”--and he examined his notes, right there before everybody. And the defense had no idea what was in the notes, no suspicion of the chance they were losing! The bland Katzmann turned the witness over to Mr. McAnarney, and that gentleman said, “No questions, if your honor please.” The voices of all the future, shouting into the ears of the defense, were heard by no one. Not a single “hunch,” not a dream, not a spirit-voice or a telepathic message!

Next morning Lee Swenson and Fred Moore pleaded the case of the defense, and then the bland prosecutor rose to close the arguments. He had four hours in which to apply those arts he had learned during eleven years’ service to the Commonwealth; four hours in which the minds of these twelve good Yankees and true belonged to him, to mold and shape as he would.

For seven weeks they had listened to testimony, most of it dull and soporific, obscurely related to the main issue. Lawyers had wrangled, using long technical terms beyond the grasp of uneducated men. The total amount of testimony was thirty-five hundred typewritten pages, more than a million words. To study them, and analyze their meaning and relationships, to digest them and evaluate them, would occupy a brilliant legal mind several months; and here were two real estate men, two machinists, a grocer, a mason, a stock-keeper, a clothing salesman, a mill-operative, a shoemaker, a last-maker and a farmer. They could not assimilate the evidence, and they would not have either time or opportunity to try. They must make some sort of guess; and one who understood their prejudices could determine what that guess would be.

The wops and most of their lawyers were “furriners”; but the genial and friendly prosecutor was their county official, whom they had elected. For purposes of this trial he called himself “the Commonwealth,” and in that guise he could say pompous and magnificent things without sounding foolish. He was honest, and he was conscientious--he told them so himself, in grave and weighty words:

“Gentlemen, there is some responsibility upon the Commonwealth. There is some responsibility upon a prosecutor who produces witnesses whose evidence tends to prove murder. He may think well. He should think long, and he should always have his intelligence and his conscience with him before he puts the stamp of approval of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts upon him as a credible witness before he takes the stand seeking to prove the guilt of men and if proven will result in their death.”

From the point of view of prosody that statement could have been improved: but the jurors knew what it meant. This was Fred Katzmann, the prominent and successful, and he would tell them what to think. For example, about Lola Andrews--a distracted, hysterical female, who had stultified herself several times in Mr. Katzmann’s presence. Now he told the jury what to think about her: “I have been in this office, gentlemen, for now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too long service for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews.” Concerning Pelzer he told them that the witness had twice falsified, but was “big and manly enough now to tell you of his prior falsehoods and his reasons for them.” (The reasons were cowardice.) Concerning Levangie, who had identified Vanzetti as driver of the bandit car, he asked the jury to believe that Levangie had seen Vanzetti in the car, but thought he had seen him driving when he wasn’t!

And then the amazing incident of the cap. There were two caps in evidence--one which had been picked up at the scene of the crime, and the other which had belonged to Sacco, and which the police had taken from his home, after he had been arrested. This latter cap Nick had not seen for fourteen months. While he was on the stand it was suddenly held up, and he was asked if it was his.

Of course the poor fellow did not know what to think; the prosecutor might be playing some trick upon him, getting him to recognize a cap which was not his cap, and then accusing him of lying. All he could say was, “It looks like my cap,” and again, “I think it is my cap, yes.” Badgered about it, and told to put it on, he finally was brought to say, “I don’t know. That cap looks too dirty to me.... It look like, but it is probably dirt--probably dirty after”--meaning that it was dirty after the police had kept it for a year and shown it about.

That was what Nick said; and now behold the outraged Mr. Katzmann, storming before the jury: “But that is not all, gentlemen. He has falsified to you before your very faces ... he would not admit, gentlemen, that the cap was his!” Fred Moore interrupted, on behalf of the defense, declaring that this was not a fair account of what was in the record. But Judge Thayer failed to make the facts clear to the jury, and Katzmann went right ahead: “Why, gentlemen, deny the ownership of that cap?”

And then the Proctor incident; a long, detailed argument to the jury, to the effect that two experts had testified that the “mortal bullet,” taken from the body of Berardelli, had come from Sacco’s revolver. Said Katzmann: “You might disregard all the identification testimony, and base your verdict on the testimony of these experts.” And all the time Katzmann knowing that he had framed a trick question, to which Captain Proctor could answer yes, and fool the jury as to what he really believed. Two years later, when Proctor made affidavit to this trick, both Katzmann and his assistant, Williams, made answering affidavits--and they were trick answers, seeming to deny Proctor’s statements, but in reality not denying the essential one!

From half past two in the afternoon until seven in the evening a court-room packed solid with human beings listened to the district attorney deal with witness after witness in that spirit. The Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has never specifically declared that a prosecuting attorney must be fair; and Katzmann’s successor, five years later, would be cynically flippant on the subject. When it was pointed out how Katzmann had concealed the witnesses Kelly and Kennedy from the defense, because they said that Vanzetti was not in the bandit car, Katzmann’s successor would argue before Judge Thayer, as one lawyer to another lawyer: “I wonder if Mr. Thompson has not an exaggerated and too ethical notion of the functions of a district attorney.”

But nothing like that now! To this jury Mr. Katzmann was the lover of truth, the noble-minded, upright friend of justice. Also he was the patriot; when he came to the end of a four-and-a-half-hour tirade, exhausted, dripping with perspiration in the heat of a crowded court-room, he remembered that the prisoners were wops, while the jurymen were Yankees. His final words were a call to local solidarity:

“Gentlemen of the jury, do your duty. Do it like men. Stand together, you men of Norfolk!”

XVI

Next day was Bastille Day in France, and a new Bastille was built in America. “Web” Thayer mounted his throne and delivered his charge to the jury. The throne was banked round with flowers, gifts from admirers of law and order; and “Web’s” discourse began in a lofty and emotional strain, as if affected by the intoxicating perfumes. “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts called upon you to render a most important service. Although you knew that such service would be arduous, painful and tiresome, yet you, like the true soldier, responded to that call in the spirit of supreme American loyalty. There is no better word in the English language than ‘loyalty’.” Thus again he related the trial with the dead bodies brought back from France, and the patriotic exercises going on all over the country. In the copy he gave out to the newspapers he added the sentence: “Keep courage, gentlemen, in your deliberations, such as was typified by the American soldier boy as he fought and gave up his life upon the battlefields of France.”

The judge was supposed to be guiding the jury through the mazes of technicalities, explaining the law, what they were to decide and what not. He took two hours for his oration, and used more than half of it in legal generalities and moral exhortations. He talked about God and country, state and fellowmen, and the highest and noblest type of true American citizenship “than which there is no grander in the entire world.” He talked about the pure waters of the government, “the grandest and noblest in the civilized world,” and he talked about “the day that little band of Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.” He used up so much time in that way that when he came to the mass of identification testimony, he could deal with it only briefly and in abstract terms. To the alibi testimony of the two defendants he gave only a couple of paragraphs, and without mentioning any witness specifically.

But he found time for an elaborate discussion of “motive” in connection with crime. In great detail and at great length he explained that the motive in the South Braintree crime was robbery--something never disputed by the defense, and therefore needless to mention. The question was, not if the South Braintree murderers had committed murder, but whether Sacco and Vanzetti had been at South Braintree. When the judge proceeded to deal with the wrong issue, it was plain enough that he was throwing dust into the jury’s eyes.

And then the “consciousness of guilt,” upon which Thayer was to hammer during the next six years of the case! He had deliberately obscured this issue, by blocking the testimony about Salsedo and Elia; and now he proceeded to give more than one-fifth of his time to explaining to the jury what might have been in the minds of two men who lied to the police when they were arrested. The judge who had not mentioned a single alibi witness now found time to deal, point by point, and in great detail, with the testimony of the arresting police officers, and of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, to whose place Boda and Orciani, Sacco and Vanzetti, had come on the night of the arrest. His charge called up the most dark and sinister images. “If a person is willing to use a deadly weapon such as a revolver upon an arresting officer in order to gain his liberty, what would you naturally expect would be the quality of the crime of which such person would be consciously guilty?”

And then the testimony about the bullet. Did the judge know about the catch in Captain Proctor’s testimony? Solemnly and definitely he told the jury that the captain of the State Police had testified: “It was his (Sacco’s) pistol that fired the bullet that caused the death of Berardelli.” Two years later Web Thayer would be twisting and turning and wriggling like one of Vanzetti’s Christmas eels, to make people think he was denying that he had said that to the jury; but there were his words, and they were false, and they sealed the fate of the two anarchist wops. Had not the great Mr. Katzmann told them, only the afternoon before: “You might disregard all the identification testimony, and base your verdict on the testimony of these experts.” To exhausted and bewildered jurymen, looking for a life-line, this was something to hang onto; and they grabbed it. Headed by their flag-saluting foreman, who had said, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyhow!” the twelve good Yankees and true retired to the jury room to deliberate.

XVII

A hot summer afternoon; the jury locked in its room upstairs in the court-house; the prisoners back in their cells in the jail; the judge in his chambers; the lawyers, the court officials, the reporters sitting about the grounds, under the heavy shade trees--the two sides, prosecution and defense, keeping rigidly apart, a miniature war.

Cornelia went to her room in the hotel. She could not sit up; but then she could not lie down; she would get up and pace about, doing odd things, aimlessly. Impossible to read, impossible to think consecutively; if any one spoke, you started; if the telephone rang, you went faint. No one had eaten; the very thought of food made your stomach uneasy. Betty would sit by the bedside and try to comfort her grandmother; she would start to talk about something, and then realize that she was not being heard; they would look, and discover fear in the other’s eyes.

How long did juries usually take? Anywhere from an hour to two or three days, said those who had experience. The longer they took, the better, from the point of view of the defendants; so you must not be impatient! But there ought to be some way provided by which the mind could be put to sleep through such an ordeal. But then, no one could say for how long the sleep should be!

“Betty, don’t you suppose we ought to see Bart?”

“Nonsense, Grannie dear,” said the girl. “You wouldn’t know what to say to him, any more than you know what to say to me. Let me teach you the Russian alphabet.”

At six o’clock they went out, and strolled toward the court-house. The jury room was dark--Judge Thayer had ordered the twelve taken to supper. Swenson and Moore were sitting on the grass--in their shirt sleeves, something shocking to the proprieties of this staid New England town. Workingmen might do such a thing, but never gentlemen--unless they came from the wild and woolly west; it was almost enough to convict their clients. They put on their coats and stood up when they saw the ladies coming; they discussed the rumors, which had begun to fly--how the jury looked, what a court officer had been heard to whisper. Lee held Cornelia’s arm. “Keep a stiff upper lip, Nonna! There are many legal tricks--this isn’t the end!” “Oh, Lee! then you think--” “I don’t think--I wait! But prepare for anything.”

The jury was back again from supper. The lights were shining in the upstairs room, the shades down. Now and then a shadow moved across. Irresistibly your fancy was drawn to that room; impossible to be in any other place, to think of any other thing. The twelve good Yankees and true would be arguing; now and then they would take a ballot; they would question the ones who disagreed, find out what was troubling them, argue again, cite this detail and that, seeking to change the doubters--but which way? Surely in all that group there must be some who could think--some who could realize the hazardous nature of the evidence--the almost complete lack of proof concerning Bart! But no, Mr. Katzmann had told them that the reason the defense had concentrated its arguments on Sacco was because they considered the case of Vanzetti hopeless! He had said--

“What were you saying, Lee?” The lawyer had made a remark about the swallows; they didn’t have that kind in the west. Yes, he was trying to help her, to distract her mind! It was kind of him; he was one of the kindest of men. She said: “Do they fly all night, Lee? Or does the judge order them to bed?” And she did not know that he smiled.

XVIII

It was five minutes to eight o’clock. Suddenly one of the little groups in front of the court-house began to melt and flow into the building. One, and then another. People were going inside! Then loungers about the square began to notice it, people in the corner drug-store; like magic the word spread--the jury was ready! One of the guards condescended to tell the lawyers--the sheriff had telephoned to bring the prisoners over. It took about ten minutes to fetch them; and in that time the court-room was crowded, and half the town of Dedham thronged outside. The doors were locked, the armed policemen guarding them.

The prisoners in their cage; Vanzetti tense, anxious, his brows knitted; Sacco pale, almost green. A deep silence; then came the jury filing in. One glance was enough; every man had his eyes fixed on the floor. Lee Swenson made a gesture of despair. Cornelia saw it; and caught Betty by the arm.

The jury was polled; they answered faintly to their names. Said the judge to the clerk, “You will please take the verdict.” Said the clerk, “Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon a verdict?” Said the foreman, “We have.”

The jurors rose; the prisoners rose; they stood facing one another. “Nicola Sacco!” said the clerk, “hold up your right hand. What say you, Mr. Foreman, is the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty,” said the flag-saluting foreman. “Damn them, they ought to hang anyhow,” added a voice from within him; but the clerk did not hear that.

“Of murder?” said the clerk.

“Yes.”

“Murder in the first degree?”

“Yes.”

“On two indictments?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“Bartolomeo Vanzetti, hold up your right hand. What say you, Mr. Foreman, is the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty.”

“Of murder?”

“Yes.”

“Murder in the first degree?”

“Yes.”

“On two indictments?”

“Yes.”

A look of incredulity was on the face of Vanzetti. He could not realize that this had happened to him. He stood with his hand still in the air, like a statue. The dead, expressionless face of the old judge was gray. “Gentlemen of the jury, as I did this morning, I again offer you thanks for the services you have rendered. You may now go to your homes, from which you have been absent for nearly seven weeks. We will now adjourn.”

The bailiff began his familiar formula: “Hear ye! Hear ye!” But now Sacco realized what had been done to him; he shouted above the bailiff: “Sono innocente!” And then to the jurors, who were filing from the court-room, “Two innocent men! You kill two innocent men!”

Mrs. Sacco had been close behind the cage. At her husband’s cry she leaped to her feet and rushed to him, and flung her arms about his neck. “You bet your life!” she cried--the only way she knew of being emphatic in this strange tongue. “Oh, Nick! They kill my man!” Her shrieks rang through the room--a terrible moment; women began to weep.

Sacco stood, caressing his wife, trying to comfort her; Vanzetti still like a statue--not a sound from him. But Rosina’s shrieks rose louder and louder; she fought away the lawyers who tried to disengage her hands; she was a wild thing, possessed of more than human strength; she thought they were going to take Nick away and electrocute him that night, and the lawyers tried to explain to her the refinements of American law--the appeals and technicalities, the infinitudes of red tape, the millions of words to be printed and the hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent. But she only shrieked the louder, “They kill my man! I got two children--what I do?”

Until at last the stern policemen pulled her hands away, and forced her back, and formed a ring with Rosina outside. Quickly they locked the handcuffs upon the prisoners--an old story to the police, American efficiency. Snappy orders, “All ready! March!” Through the door they went, guards outside closing about them, twenty-five men in a solid bunch, guns ready. “Stand back! Out of the way there! Forward, march!” The sheriff’s men flung a line across the street, holding the curious onlookers, while down the street into the twilight went prisoners and escort, tramp, tramp, tramp! Anarchists, who do not believe in organization, learn a lesson from the grimly efficient Commonwealth!

XV. THE WHISPERING GALLERY

Sacco and Vanzetti were back in their cells: the former in jail in Dedham while his appeals were heard, the latter in Charlestown State Prison, working at his old sentence of fifteen years for the Bridgewater crime. Nick, as usual, had nothing to do all day--a cruel form of punishment; it required tact and sympathy on the part of visitors to persuade him that it was worthwhile to stand on his head and walk on his hands, as a means of not going mad. Bart was now making license plates for automobiles: the one industry which the Commonwealth had been able to save from the grasp of private capital, and which therefore could be used to keep state convicts from wholesale madness. It was not happy work, for it involved the touch and smell of acids, which gradually undermined Vanzetti’s health, and made more difficulty for those who lived with him in sympathy.

A black hour for the world, testing the souls of idealists. Famine in Russia; the notorious inefficiency of communist bureaucracy had caused the rains to stop falling--so it was reported by correspondents and explained by editorial writers of capitalist newspapers. Throughout Europe the White Terror enthroned; in Italy banded assassins in the pay of banks and industrialists, murdering the leaders and rooting out every trace of social protest, turning the country over to that ultimate product of natural selection, the beast with the brains of an engineer. Sacco and Vanzetti sat in their cells, and read of these events, and stretched out their hands to the future, whose children they were.

Each in his own way, they would learn to make their appeal to that future. Bartolomeo Vanzetti, dish-washer, ditch-digger and fish-peddler, would learn to write; he would labor all day at a stubborn and hostile language, and conquer it, and shape it to his ends. He, whose schooling had ceased at the age of thirteen, would make himself a master of letters; he who had never seen the inside of a college building, would write such prose as no living graduate of Harvard had ever achieved; he who was to die as a common criminal, would defend his faith in words of elemental eloquence, outranking anything produced by an American since Lincoln’s second inaugural.

It would take long practice. Locked up alone in his cell, Bart would write letters: letters to his lawyers, to members of the committee and friends of the defense; letters to strangers who wrote to him, letters to his anarchist comrades of Mexico, France, Russia. The rules of the institution allowed only two letters a month, but they did not prevent Bart’s handing a packet of manuscript to his lawyer.

At first his efforts would be crude; he would be looking up long words in the dictionary, and stringing them together, a kind of Babu English. He would use Italian words literally translated, producing novel effects. He would concoct strange polysyllables, apparently of his own imagining; you would start to smile, until it occurred to you that it might be a new kind of poetry. To Cornelia he wrote: “Even if we will be killed at once by the carnefice, or little by little by the confinement, you remain to hold light the banner of the human vindications, and to accomplished redemption.”

And again: “Do not desperate, comrade, of the cruelty of the human events. Out of every little doctrine all too small and inadequate, out of every party, petty and inefficient for the great problems of the human justice and freedom--will ripen the historical nemesy and the inevitable palingenesy.”

He began translating passages from Italian books into English, things which interested him, and which he wanted Cornelia to understand; he would take her criticisms and study them, and then try again--a correspondence course in composition, having the added excitement of a race with the executioner. He wrote:

“I was very beneficiated by your last visit and English-lesson. In a letter received to-night, one Friend tells me that my English is not perfect. I am still laughing for such a pious euphension. Why do not say horrible? Nevertheless, I can made a better translation than the one in argument. I did it as I did for an experiment, to prove if an almost letterally translation is intelligible. I show it to some friends, asking them if they understand it. The answer was ‘yes,’ while it should have been ‘no,’ that I might have remade the work with much profit and better result.

“Of course, as the writing is beautiful in its original, and as I labored very much at the dictionary, so I was thinking to have accomplished something worth, and the disillution was, as almost all disillatin, rather cruel. But when a poor one is surrounded by many great difficulties, the small ones appear always a joke to him, and after your visit I found myself in the best of the mood--that is, I was decided to do in the future as much more good than the much bad I did in the past. I analized attentively the original--it is almost impossible intellectual pleasure--which for hours has made me forget myself, the cell, and the other sorrowy things.”

Cornelia’s contribution to the defense was to be a pamphlet telling the story of the case, and summarizing the evidence of the two trials. The procedures that she had watched with horror in Plymouth and Dedham she would now set down in black and white, so that her friends could take them home and study them. In the apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill sat the little old lady all day, her shoulders stooped over a volume of typewritten testimony, and sheafs of pencil-notes scattered over the vacant places in the room.

Betty and Joe came to help, and they sorted and classified and compared, and argued over this detail and that: identification testimony relating to Sacco, relating to Vanzetti, relating to both and to neither; alibi testimony, and refutation thereof; testimony relating to Sacco’s cap and to Vanzetti’s pistol--where was it Bart had said he had never fired the gun with which he had been arrested? Where was it that Katzmann asked him his reason for concealing the price he had paid for the gun? Betty would search, and Joe would search, and they filled note-books with lists of cross-references. The half-dozen thick volumes of typewritten testimony began to show signs of wear, and had to be bound more tightly. Precious objects they were, having cost the defense two or three thousand dollars of hard-begged money.

Cornelia was finding that as she grew older she wanted less and less sleep. Life was becoming more precious as its supply ran out, and nature was trying to save every moment. She would awaken at three or four o’clock in the morning, and the details of the pamphlet would come swarming into her mind, she would wonder about this point and that, and presently decide she might as well get up and go to work. So Betty would find her working by electric light, having failed to notice the coming of day. Betty would scold, and try to put her to bed again. Betty would threaten to get up early too, and Cornelia would have to scold. The pamphlet grew to the size of a book, and would have become an encyclopedia if they had let it. Then began the painful process of cutting down and summarizing; and every time they left out a point, it seemed that the life of Bart and Nick hung upon the decision.

Lee Swenson was retiring from the case: he had done his best, he said, and failed, now let some one else have a try. There were tears in the eyes of both when he said good-by to Cornelia. They promised they would never forget each other--little danger of the promise being broken! “Don’t worry about the past, Nonna,” said Lee; “you did your best.” She didn’t know what to answer; she didn’t know what to think about the questions that haunted her. What would have happened if she had done what Lee wanted? Would she have done it, if she had foreseen the present situation? And what was going to become of a country in which the law was a cheat, and dreamers of justice its predestined victims?

Fred Moore was taking over the case; a lawyer less hated by the authorities, it was hoped--though this proved a delusion. He was younger than Swenson, an Irishman and a fighter, wrapped up in the labor cause; a strange combination of emotional temperament and keen analytical brain; a man who suffered deeply--as all men did who took up the cause of the underdog in America. He, like Swenson, had witnessed dreadful things, and told Cornelia stories of savagery and corruption that made her shudder.

It was Moore’s task to prepare the appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court from the various rulings of Judge Thayer at the Dedham trial. To this end there must be drawn up what was known as a “bill of exceptions” in the case: that is to say, a list of the objections which the defense had made to the judge’s rulings, together with the testimony concerned. It amounted to a summary of the case, giving the essentials which the higher court would need; and it was necessary that the defense, the prosecution and the judge should agree to every word. The three parties had to sit day by day at a table, with a copy of the testimony before them, marking the passages to be recopied, and phrasing summaries of the rest. A long, slow job, for which Judge Thayer had allowed from the middle of July to the first of November.

Thayer, Moore and an assistant district attorney did the work. Thayer disliked Moore, but in the course of time he came to hate the assistant district attorney, and to like Moore by comparison, so he chose Moore to talk to about the case. A curious episode: one hot summer afternoon, the assistant district attorney had left the room, and the old judge looked up over the piles of papers and wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and shook his head sorrowfully. “Moore, there are mountains of perjury on both sides of this case!”

“Maybe so, Judge,” said the lawyer. “But your side has the most.”

The old man did not bother to resent this way of putting it. “I know,” he said, “you think those fellows are innocent!”

“I do, Judge.”

“Well, I know they are guilty.”

“How do you know it?”

“Never mind how--but I know.” It was the formula of ruling-class Massachusetts, which for six years they would repeat; not in print, not for the public, but in the smoking-rooms of the clubs, in homes or offices, wherever one tried to pin them down and get the facts. “Never mind how--but I know!”

III

It was going to cost eighteen thousand dollars to print the “bill of exceptions”--two elaborate volumes; to say nothing of lawyers’ fees, and office expenses, and the cost of raising the money. You got lists of names--members of radical organizations, subscribers to liberal papers, contributors to charity organizations, members of women’s clubs--anybody who might have either a heart or a conscience; you got typists and had envelopes addressed, and prepared a begging circular and mailed it, and then with the money that came in you got more lists and more typists and more circulars--it was the wheel of life.

But the returns did not come fast enough. The case was lagging, threatening to die. The men were in jail, and they stayed there, and the public wanted to go to sleep and forget them--the usual way. Look at Mooney and Billings out in California, exclaimed the young radicals--men whom everybody knew to be innocent, yet they stayed in prison, forgotten--several years already, and it would be many, many more. The friends of the defense were not content to have lawyers pore over the testimony and appeal to a court without a heart; they wanted to dramatize the case, to find new evidence, to break down the witnesses of the government, above all to catch the real criminals, who had done the murders. They wanted to have mass-meetings in the cities, to have the story of this Massachusetts “frame-up” told to labor audiences. Naturally, it occurred to them, what an impression if a lady of Mrs. Thornwell’s respectability and prestige would take the platform! They wanted Cornelia to go to New York and address a meeting; and when she realized that there was no other way to get the indispensable money, she consented.

So then, more distress among the Thornwell clan. They had thought the limit was reached when the head of their family defended “anarchy” at home; but to go outside the Commonwealth, and attack its courts among strangers--that was really treason. Deborah came and protested with all her dignity; when that was in vain, Alice quit her “rest-cure,” and threatened to go completely insane; when this too failed, there was a family conference, fully as agitated as those of war-time. Great-uncle Abner insisted upon being brought. Because it was no longer possible to make him hear a word, they had to write out the proceedings for him; and every now and then he would punctuate the debate with his booming formula: “Lock her up!”

They turned the matter over to Henry Cabot Winters, because of his sense of humor, which they did not understand or like, but which they knew was the only hope. Rupert would put the information department of the Pilgrim National Bank at Henry’s service, and would himself call upon the representative of the Federal secret service in Boston. Henry would see the district attorney, and all together they would make a real effort, and pull the poor distracted old soul out of this mess.

Henry went to the telephone and called up Cornelia, who was not supposed to know about this conspiracy, but could guess. When she heard that her son-in-law wanted to be invited to dinner about a week from now, she laughed. “Are you going to bring that information you have been promising?”

“If it isn’t too late, Mother. I know, I have neglected you--but I’ve been so frightfully busy! Now we’ve got another extension on the Jerry Walker case, so I have a little breathing space. If it’s not too late, I really would like to take a week off and see what I can find out about your friends and their problem.”

“That’s very good of you, Henry; but you know we have no way to pay for such distinguished legal services.”

“You pay with your company, Mother. We are growing some dewberries on our place that are as long as your thumb, and I will send you a supply in the morning, and you can have them made into a short cake or a cobbler or whatever you fancy; and I’ll bring a bottle of Madeira--the real thing, because I am the only person that knows the combination to the vault!”

Cornelia did her own shopping. She got a live and lively lobster, done up in a strong paper bag, with two holes in it so that he might breathe; like a condemned man, he must be kept alive till the moment of his execution. She got a small chicken, and some green peas, and a head of lettuce, and climbed the hill with them in a little basket, smiling to herself--it was old, old “Boston”! The Negro maid was a-flutter, and Cornelia was a-flutter--treating Henry as if he were royalty. The remarkable dewberries had been brought by the chauffeur, each wrapped separately in tissue paper, to keep it from a bruise; they now reposed in whipped cream and sugar, on top of a thin flaky cake.

Exactly at the moment of seven-thirty came the great lawyer, dressed as if he were the principal orator at a banquet of the bar association. Treating Cornelia as if she were royalty; and yet smiling at himself, and at her--it was a game you played, and you did not take it too seriously, yet you must take it seriously enough; it was a way to make life worth living, to save yourself from beastliness, cruelty, and despair--the latter, especially, always reaching after you. Cornelia did everything a perfect hostess must do, and thinking to herself, “I have not escaped from the family! I never will escape from the family!”

Henry liked a good dinner, just enough to make it worth while to fix it for him, yet not enough to be gross. He praised everything, purposely while the maid was in the room, so that she stood, transfigured into a double row of shining white teeth. It was picturesque to have a mother-in-law who lived in a tenement; it was elegant to know that she was just as completely a lady, and served just as good a dinner, as if she were on the other side of Beacon Hill. All this stayed in the background of your thoughts, and upheld you in the hours when you thought about your hysterical wife, and your son who had the constitution and structure of a marshmallow, and your money-making, which brought you law-suits and scandals.

They sipped the real Madeira, and gossiped about amusing aspects of family life. Quincy Thornwell, incorrigible bachelor, had been smitten by the widow of a banker, killed in the war; would she have him, and what would they do with her three children, and what about the family, the new cousins and “in-laws” that would be added to the Thornwell clan? Andrew Alvin had been thrown from his polo-pony and got a broken shoulder; a man in his forties, Andrew’s one idea of happiness was to ride a horse as crazy as himself; they had made him master of the hunt in one of the suburban towns, where the smart set dressed themselves in pink coats and shiny leather boots, and rode at daybreak on autumn mornings to the music of horns, and paid enormous bills for damages to farmers’ crops. A certain fast-riding young lady was “setting her cap” at Andrew; her father had made many millions out of war-contracts, and now they were trying to “break in” upon the blue-bloods. Would Andrew condescend or wouldn’t he? It was typical blue-blood conversation.

With Madeira warming his stomach and the smoke of a cigar warming his head, Henry Cabot Winters sat by the open window, the sound of children shouting in the street below helping to make privacy for conversation. “Well, Mother, I have been making a few inquiries about those adopted sons of yours. I’ve brought some documents.” He pointed to a leather brief-case, stuffed to capacity, which lay upon the sofa.

“Well, Henry, what did you find?”

“They had a cache of dynamite, and on the night of the arrest they were getting Boda’s car to move the stuff to a safer place.”

“How did you learn that, Henry?” Cornelia tried to keep her tone playful.

“Needless to say, men who make and plant bombs to destroy their enemies do not invite me to their meetings. I have no first-hand knowledge of the fact--”

“Let’s cut short the preliminaries, Henry. You have been talking to the police, and that is what their under-cover agents have brought them. Did they tell you that Rosina Sacco once had her husband in court for failure to support her?”

“No.”

“That’s another of the stories they are circulating; I can tell you a dozen, if you’re interested. They say the fifty dollars poor Bart sent to Tresca to help pay Salsedo’s lawyer was part of the loot of the South Braintree crime. But I happened to know that Bart had saved up about four hundred dollars out of his fish business. Tell me, do your police friends know what became of the sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars those bandits got?”

“They tell me it went to Italy, Mother.”

“I see! When they started out, they were sure it was in Coacci’s trunk. When they didn’t find it there, they decided it was buried in Sacco’s garden. Now, they say it went to Italy. Have they given you any real evidence about it?”

“No, Mother.”

“Well, then, the situation is this: all the resources of state and Federal secret service have been used, and they have never been able to find that the group or any individual connected with the group has had any unusual amount of money, or has spent much money for anything; they have not one trace of a clew. Poor little Boda, whom they call a payroll bandit, had a car that was in hospital all winter--”

“That wasn’t the car he drove, Mother.”

“Can you prove that he drove any other car?”

“There is reason for believing it.”

“Well, it wasn’t a good enough reason to be put before a jury. Web Thayer threw Boda out of the case--but now you bring him back! I knew him well, a friendly little fellow, a salesman of macaroni--”

“Is that what he told you, Mother? He was a salesman of whisky.”

“Really? Well, that explains one mystery in the case--why Mike Stewart couldn’t find any of Boda’s macaroni customers! That was why Mike became suspicious. But now we have a perfectly respectable explanation--surely you, Henry, cannot blame Boda, since you buy whisky!”

“Not Boda’s kind, Mother!”

“Well, you haven’t come to argue about prohibition, so let me see what you’ve got in your brief-case.”

There was a reading lamp on the table beside Henry Cabot Winters, and it threw strong shadows on his fine dark features and thin, sensitive hands. Cornelia noticed that the hands trembled as they drew out the documents. Was it the toll the competitive game was taking from the great lawyer? Or was it that he cared so especially about rescuing his mother-in-law from a career of crime? Cornelia watched with curiosity what came out of the brief-case: quantities of typewritten stuff bound together, reports and correspondence. Henry would no doubt be able to get access to secret service records; or Rupert would get them for him. Would it be ethical to ask him for answers to some of the problems which had been tormenting the defense?

Cornelia saw some red-bound pamphlets, then a red-bound book. “Is that some of the literature Vanzetti had? Or some they got at Sacco’s house?”

“They didn’t get much at Sacco’s, Mother; somebody had burned most of it. I am told the defense lawyers wanted some, and all they could find was a four-volume technical work on the chemistry of explosives. Is that so?”

“You have come to bring me things, Henry, not to get them.”

“Yes, but you ought to meet me half way. You don’t really want to be fooled, do you?”

“Not in the least, Henry. I want all the real knowledge I can get.”

“Let me ask you, did you ever sit down and think seriously and honestly whether it might be possible that these men had connections with the fighting crowd?”

“Are you talking about bombs now--or about banditry?”

“Let us begin with bombs.”

“I have lain awake many a night debating it with myself. About Sacco I have to say that I don’t know; I never knew him well enough--and of course I can’t find out now; one does not talk about such things to him or to his friends. But I really knew Bart, and I try to imagine him committing an action that would destroy human life. He would have done it in a moment of rage against social injustice; he talked violently, and he would have fought the police on the picket-line, I am sure, and killed them. But to prepare in cold blood to blow a man up with a bomb--I try to imagine it, and it simply cannot be done--it is not my Bart any longer. I never knew a man who had more tenderness and pity.”

Said Henry, searching among the papers, “I have a curious document, a letter from Vera Figner, the Russian terrorist, in her own handwriting; I can’t read it, of course, but there’s a translation attached. She is telling about her days in the Schlues-selburg Fortress, and how she walked with another girl prisoner in the courtyard, and noticed that this girl would turn aside now and then from the path. When Vera Figner asked her why, the answer was that she could not bear to step on the bugs and other creatures in the path. Is that your Bart?”

“It might be.” Cornelia smiled.

“Yet this girl had blown up human beings with bombs, and had done other acts of desperate cruelty. She did them for the cause.”

“Yes--and I have to remember that Bart had seen just as dreadful evidence of class tyranny in America as that girl had seen in Russia. So I say: ‘It might have been. I cannot be sure.’ But you know, Henry, I lived in a crowded little place with him for over a year, and I never heard--”

“Your hearing was handicapped by the fact that you didn’t understand his language, Mother.”

“That is true. I learned to understand simple things, but not political discussions, of course.”

“Did you read his literature?”

“No, only what he translated to me.”

“In other words, what he considered proper for you to know--the sentimental and idealistic part. Did you ever see a book called ‘Faccia à Faccia col Nemico’--that is to say, ‘Face to Face with the Enemy’?” And Henry held up a thick book, bound in red paper covers.

VII

The little room in the apartment on the north side of Beacon Hill vanished, taking with it two years and a half of tragic history. Bart was a free man, selling fish in Plymouth, and Cornelia and Betty were paying him a visit, a few days before Betty’s sailing for Europe. There came two Italians with a motorcycle and a side-car, Coacci and Orciani, bringing a heavy package which Bart showed to Cornelia, with a twinkle in his dark eyes, saying that it was a bomb. He opened it, and showed her what he called “mental dinnameet.” “I take heem queek, I get him distriboot, never let polissman get heem, giammai!”

“Yes, Henry,” said Cornelia, “I have seen that book.”

“Bart’s group were the publishers of it, were they not?”

“Yes.”

“But you never read it?”

“No, Mr. Katzmann!”

“Mr. Katzmann is relieved to hear you say so. It is a dreadful book, Mother.”

“I know that it contains the life-stories of various anarchist martyrs. They were fighting for liberty in Europe, Henry--”

“Yes, if you insist--for liberty of a sort. But the point to get clear is, they were fighting with bombs and the assassin’s dagger. Without exception, they were men who did such terrorist acts; and all of them were idealists--many of them men of fine personal morality--who wouldn’t eat meat, or would step aside to avoid killing a bug. They correspond in every way to your boys--with the single exception that they admitted their guilt, and boasted of it.”

“A considerable difference, Henry.”

“Not when you consider the special circumstances. There is no hope for a revolution in America, but there is hope in Italy--or there was two years ago; so America is the place where money is collected, and Italy the place where it is spent.”

“You are talking about banditry again, now?”

“I am talking about both; for they are mixed up together in this book. I felt sure you hadn’t read it, so I had some translating done; a few passages that are crucial I took the trouble to verify myself, looking up word after word in the dictionary, so that I could assure you I wasn’t being fooled by the police.”

“That was very patient of you, Henry.” She saw the deep anxiety on the face of her son-in-law, and understood that he had come to wrestle with the powers of darkness for her soul.

“Here, for example, is a passage from the introduction. It tells us that these martyrs are worthy of emulation, and that we must not let the world’s disapproval influence or frighten us. Listen:

“‘To the latest critics of anarchism Ravachol appears a detestable degenerate; Caserio an epileptic or a paranoiac; Bresci a desperate self-destroyer.... But to the modern free people the enormous importance of individual acts of revolt remains unchallenged as a promise and a symptom.... Such acts are the thousand year stones of the great revolution; the first abrupt, short-lived sparks which the ashes of indifference easily cover and preserve, to be revived stronger than ever by, and added to, the great fire of freedom.’

“Now, Mother, why do men write and print and circulate words like that, unless they mean what they say? Read the book, and you discover that Ravachol was a bandit-anarchist; he made a business of robbing the rich and giving the money to the poor. He was scrupulous about it, never keeping a penny for himself.”

“I never knew Ravachol, Henry, but I do know Bart and Nick, and the idea does not fit them--it is unthinkable.” And she added: “I am arguing against violence on both sides, Henry; and neither will pay attention to me. Which side do you think ought to begin--those who have everything they want in life, or those who suffer misery and outrage?”

VIII

Henry Cabot Winters was not interested in pacifism; he was turning over the pages of the red-bound book. He got up and came over and laid it on the arm of the Morris chair in which his mother-in-law sat. “Look at that!” he said. “A diagram of one of the bombs used by the assassins. Is that strictly historical information? Or is it literary? Don’t you think it possible that the men who printed that picture might have had in mind that bombs could still be made that way? There are nearly five hundred pages of such stuff, Mother.”

“My guess about the matter would be this, Henry: that Vanzetti was the despair of his group--he could not follow along. He would have been torn between rage and pity--just as I am.”

“Here is ‘Fight for Your Lives.’ Here is the leaflet, ‘Plain Words’--an outrageous thing, widely circulated. I am told, Mother, that when Swenson and Moore went over Vanzetti’s anarchist books to get some exhibits for the jury, they had to reject many because they were too violent. They ventured to use others, only because the jury couldn’t read them. Maybe you know if that is true.”

“Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t, Henry.”

“Don’t worry, Mother. This is a family matter.”

“Go ahead and tell me what you know.”

“I know that those fellows were up to some devilment the night they were arrested. They told a tangle of lies to the police--”

“You must know what had happened to Salsedo and Elia, Henry.”

“Yes, and it was a good reason for lying that night. But why go on lying for a year afterwards, when they knew what they were arrested for, and knew their lies had all been nailed down? Why go on lying to their own lawyers? I am told that Swenson and Moore couldn’t get the truth out of them at any time--and we don’t have to rely on police spies for that, Mother, it is in the record. Were you there the day Tom McAnarney cross-examined the couple--what were their names?-- Sacco and Vanzetti came to their house the night of the arrest.”

“The Johnsons. Yes, I heard that.”

“Well, the cross-examination aimed to show that the Johnsons weren’t sure about recognizing the men. In other words, Sacco and Vanzetti were going to deny they were there, and only after the trial started did they decide on the other story--that they had been hiding anarchist literature. I am told that the men’s own lawyers know they were hiding dynamite--the men have admitted it.”

“All I can tell you, Henry, is this--if it’s true, the lawyers haven’t told me.”

“They wouldn’t. But here’s another story--that Lee Swenson tried every way he knew to get you to make an alibi for Vanzetti; he didn’t give up until the very last day of the trial. Is that true?”

“I told you I wasn’t going to answer questions, Henry.”

The other smiled. “That is answer enough, Mother. But don’t worry--nobody is going to get anything out of me. And don’t imagine I am being shocked--I know the game of criminal law.”

Said Cornelia, “I have heard that some of our blue-blood lawyers have been known to frame testimony.”

“Yes, Mother, I have done it, more than once--when I was good and sure the other fellow was doing it. I am not after Lee Swenson--I am just trying to convince you that those two adopted sons of yours are not sentimental pacifists and saints.”

“I never thought that of them, Henry.”

“Well, it’s what your literature is telling the public. You are collecting money on that basis, from persons who wouldn’t give it on any other.”

“I am telling the public I believe the men to be innocent of the crime of which they have been convicted; that I attended both trials, and consider them travesties of justice. That is all I can tell, because it is all I know.”

“Not quite all, Mother--if you will pardon me for reminding you. Will you tell the public what doctrine these men taught? Will you say they circulated books calling for bombings, and giving diagrams of bombs?”

There was a long silence. At last Cornelia said: “The public is ignorant. It believes that men who had anything to do with dynamiting would be apt to engage in banditry, and ought to be executed anyhow. To admit the possibility of dynamite means death. But surely, Henry, a lawyer can distinguish. Also you can see that it is impossible for me to establish a negative--to prove the men’s innocence. It is not enough for you to show a possibility--even of dynamite! You must bring real proof.”

Henry smiled. But then, noting a tear on the old woman’s cheek, his tone became gentler. “You don’t like to hear that your anarchist friend may have deceived you, Mother?”

“No, my son, not that at all. I know Vanzetti so much better than you could imagine--it is as if he were sitting in this room, listening to the conversation, and explaining matters to me. When I face the idea that he may have associated with terrorists, then I think, not that he deceived me--of course he would have had to deceive me, for his friends’ sake, if not for his own. What I think is, how he must have suffered--more even than I guessed!”

“The persons who were blown up with bombs also suffered, Mother.”

“Yes, I know, and that is what the world thinks of, inevitably. The bombs were aimed at members of our class, and they were highly inconvenient. But you see, I have been trying to understand both sides; to find out, not merely how bombs are made, but how bomb-makers are made. While you hear dynamite exploding, I hear policemen’s clubs falling on strikers’ heads. Don’t forget, I was on the picket-line, and heard that sound, I saw such crimes committed, I said to myself: ‘Never again will I blame these workers for anything they do!’ I said ‘anything,’ Henry--and now I don’t forget that I said it.”

“I know, Mother--”

“You don’t know! You haven’t the remotest idea! You cannot dream what it feels like to be down there in the social pit, stamped upon by the hob-nailed boots of policemen, and the iron-shod hoofs of horses! To have clubs splitting your skull, or beating your flesh black and blue! Remember, I saw Vanzetti carry a half-conscious man off the picket-line, I sat by while he bathed the broken head, I saw him weeping, I heard him babbling like a child, incoherent, hysterical, with mingled grief and rage. He has that temperament, he suffers more than either you or I do--he cares--that is the difference, he really cares! You and I care whether we have our dinner in proper style, whether the Madeira is real or not, whether the lobster was alive or not, whether the chicken is the right age and the salad dressing sufficiently solid, whether we have got on the right costume and the right tie, whether we hold our knives and forks the right way, whether we make a sufficient display of worldly cynicism, whether we are sufficiently skeptical about all enthusiasms, sufficiently dead to faith, hope and charity--”

“Now, Mother!”

“I know, you bring me facts, Henry--take a few in return! I could go over our conversation point by point, every remark we made about other people and about life, and that would be it. Last week it was Quincy sitting there, and he told me all the latest from Mrs. Jack’s sickroom; they came to ask for a contribution to the Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary of Boston, and she said, ‘I didn’t know there was a charitable eye or ear in Boston.’ That is our wit, Henry, the tone of our world. We are raising our young people on it--and then wonder why they are going to the devil!”

“You are setting me a large problem now, Mother.”

“No problem at all! We are living off the labor of these wops whom we despise, and hold in order with clubs and bayonets. Think of it, Henry--that man whose head I saw split open was getting nine dollars a week to keep a family on, and his crime was that he was asking twelve. We women were getting six dollars a week, and our crime was that we were asking eight--and Vanzetti’s crime was helping us! There was the greatest and richest cordage concern in the country--their net profits that year were nearly three million dollars! Think of the families we know who are living off those profits, doing nothing else, unless they choose! Think of the imbecilities--one collecting butterflies and one collecting pottery, several getting drunk, one doing charity--God save his soul, he is running a mission for newsboys just down the street here, and keeps it in a place over a pool-room, a hangout for pickpockets and pimps, where every now and then they hold a prizefight! But if you talk to cordage stockholders about going among their working-people and living with them, becoming real leaders and guides and friends, spending the surplus product upon a system of training in self-government, so that industry may become democratic without revolution and violence--if you should talk about that, they would say you had very bad taste, and stop inviting you to their dinner-parties!”

The little white-haired old lady had got up from her chair during this stump-speech. She was walking about, and had made several gestures--a consequence of having been so much among the wops. The poor soul was bound to be humiliated, having the truth pointed out to her; she would have to excuse herself, and blame somebody else--it was human nature. Henry Cabot Winters understood psychology, and sat patiently, waiting for the storm to blow over.

Cornelia began telling the story of Sacco, as Sacco had told it to her. He had been in the Milford foundry strike, and had been knocked down on the picket-line, and then thrown into jail. The police had followed their usual tactics of knocking down wholesale, for the purpose of breaking the courage of the workers; it was all that anybody in New England knew or thought about industry, it was the “American plan”--so said the widow of the late Governor Thornwell, pouring out her bitterness. “And remember, Henry, while you are bringing your indictment against these wops, they learned their anarchism right here in New England. Nick was a perfectly ignorant working-boy when he came, and Bart was a religious dreamer, slightly touched with utopianism. If they became militants and terrorists, we taught it to them!”

“They learned it in a foreign language, Mother; and certainly they followed foreign models.”

“That is true enough. But men don’t act upon what they read in books, they act upon the realities of their daily lives. The principal fact in Bart’s life for the past few years has been the war. The capitalist system was trying to put him into a uniform and send him out to kill his fellow-workers; and he was resisting with all his power. To abolish the slaughter of workingmen for the profit of masters--that has been his leading thought, ever since I have been his friend.”

“Does he expect to stop war by blowing people up with bombs?”

“Militant anarchists do; they think that if enough workers would resist, forcibly, to the death--if enough of them were willing to be martyrs--the capitalist class would lose its pleasure in exploitation. Whether that is right or wrong is another question--but that is what the militant anarchist thinks. And watching the thing as I have done, it seems that you men who are running our country want to prove him right, because you shut off every avenue of redress and hope. You corrupt politics, so that it is a piece of rusty junk instead of a running machine. You make the law into a net of red tape, in which the worker is tied hand and foot. You make the newspapers a mess of falsehood and sensation. Your colleges are busy turning young men into quick climbers. Your churches have no time for social justice--they are turning prayer-wheels and saying magic words--”

“In short, Mother, there is nothing left but dynamite!” There was a touch of acid in the great lawyer’s tone; it was getting to be a very long stump-speech.

“There are two things for the rebel, Henry; one is to die suffering, and the other is to die fighting. I try to persuade them that the former is more effective in the long run, but I can’t always get them to see it. Sometimes I imagine there is a pleading look in Bart’s eyes, as if he would like to tell me that he wishes he had taken my advice.”

“Yes, I know,” said Henry, “we are familiar with the fact that men are militants until they get caught, and pacifists afterwards. It is the purpose of jails to effect that transformation.”

This duel of moral forces continued until the arrival of Betty and Joe, who had been to a theater, and then walked home. Betty had been told that her uncle was coming, and she had had no trouble in guessing what for. When she and Joe entered the living-room, and saw the little white-haired old lady in the Morris chair, looking so anxious and strained, and the great lawyer completely surrounded by an array of documents, it seemed to Betty that the combat was one-sided. “Well, Grannie dear, has he succeeded in convincing you that our boys are bandits? Or is it dynamiters they are, Uncle Henry?”

“Henry,” said Cornelia, “these young persons are so clever I cannot keep anything to myself.”

Said Betty, “The efforts of my family to keep me in the nursery at the age of twenty-three are mysteriously unsuccessful! I suppose Father and Uncle Henry have been interviewing the police, and getting all the dirt on Bart and Nick. Let me tell you some, Uncle Henry--I understand that Captain Proctor interviewed all the witnesses, and told Mike Stewart he had got the wrong men, and wouldn’t have any more to do with the case. Is that true?”

“I haven’t talked with Proctor,” said the lawyer.

“Well, you could help us so much, if you only would, Uncle Henry. I’m told that Chief Gallivan of South Braintree says the whole thing was a frame-up. Make him talk! Make Katzmann give us the address of Roy Gould, the man who got a bullet through his overcoat. And those witnesses that Mike Stewart had at the Brockton police station--surely our good uncle who loves us ought to get their names!”

The “good uncle” continued to wear the genial smile which was part of his stock in trade as man of the world. He was interested in the phenomenon known as the “new generation.” He looked at this vision in pale blue chiffon, with a little basket of blue straw turned upside down on her hair cut like a boy’s; her cheeks shining from a long walk, apparently without the artificial aids which were coming to be the fashion, even among the blue-bloods. An amazing thing that a girl with such charms, who might have gone anywhere, should be devoting herself exclusively to Bolsheviks!

Said Betty, as fast as her thoughts: “Grannie, you look tired; you have been worrying! Is it because the police say the money went to Italy, to make an anarchist revolution? Or have they found out how Bart and Nick were hiding dynamite the night they were arrested?”

“You seem to be well informed, my dear niece,” said the lawyer.

“Some day, Uncle Henry, after our boys are on the street--or in their graves, whichever it is--I’ll tell you what I know about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and you’ll think you are listening to the memoirs of Mata Hari, the international spy. Your dear niece has become the super-sleuth of the social revolution--if the movie people knew what I have, Hollywood would be a deserted village, and studios would rise on the shores of the Back Bay. It is my job, when the police send a new spy, to get him alone and remind him that he is an Italian, and get him to tell me what he has told the police. Do you know how they found the maps of Sacco’s buried treasure in Lee Swenson’s trash-basket, and had three men digging in Mr. Kelly’s garden one whole night?”

Henry Cabot Winters still wore his smile; but it was not in his voice as he said, “My niece does not seem to be much horrified at the idea of blowing people up with bombs.”

“Uncle Henry, to be blown up with a bomb seems to me a nice clean experience, compared with things I saw in Europe, caused by the greed of elderly statesmen whose shirt-fronts were entirely covered with ribbons and decorations.”

“So then, because statesmen blundered--”

“Blundering had no part in it, Uncle Henry--they knew exactly what they wanted, and they took it. It is the organized greed called patriotism that I’m talking about. And while I’m sick of all kinds of killing, it is the men who kill for greed that I am out to get. Those who kill for a cause, no matter how mistaken--those who risk their lives for the good of the workers--seem to me to shine with a bright light in comparison.”

“That halo extends to bandits, my dear niece?”

“I will answer you, Uncle Henry, that small bandits break the law and are punished, while big bandits make the law and go free.”

Cornelia thought that conversation had gone far enough. She knew exactly what Betty had in her mind--the Jerry Walker case. In a minute more, the child would be referring to it! “Betty dear, if you love me--”

“Love you, Grannie? I love you enough to let you think your own thoughts and live your own life, which is more than anybody else will do for you. I love you so much that I will suppress my combative impulses, and show respect to my elders. Uncle Henry, you want to know if I think Sacco and Vanzetti ever did a job of banditry. If I knew, I would tell you; but of course, nobody really knows, except the men who did the job. The spies who bring tales to the police are earning their livings by pretending to know what they only guess, and the evidence they bring is not fit to hang a dog on. I can only estimate the chances. I have tried with all my might to picture Bart and Nick committing such a crime, and I cannot do it--the idea is preposterous and unthinkable. And this much I really do know--this I would die for--they never were proved guilty, and their trials were a shameful and wicked farce. Now, is that a respectful answer, Grannie?”

“Yes, dear--”

“All right; and if it won’t be presuming, you look very tired, and I think we ought to adjourn and talk about something cheerful. May I tell them the news, Joe?”

Joe Randall, who realized that he did not have even the status of an “in-law” in this family, had retired to a corner of the room and lighted a cigarette. “It’s all right with me,” he said.

“Well, Joe has a telegram advising him that the divorce decree has been made final, so to-morrow we are going to be married, and the shadow of the great scandal will be lifted from the family, and we shall no longer get poison-pen letters in our mail, and Joe won’t have to go off to his own place when he brings me home from the theater, for fear one of my relatives will be shocked by the sight of him staying here.”

Henry Cabot Winters rose with his most courtly manner. “Permit me to be excused, and not inconvenience you!”

“No, no, Uncle Henry, it’s an old story to us, we have been a scandal for so long that we shall miss it. At least I shall--Joe will be relieved, because at heart he is an old-fashioned Virginia gentleman--look at him blushing!”

Yes, Joe was blushing! It made him cross as the devil that Betty insisted upon placarding their love affairs before the family. He knew why she did it, of course--she was determined not to be ashamed of what she was doing--she would not let them put her on the defensive--her love was just as true as if it had been blessed by a clergyman. But all the same, no man likes to be made to blush!

Henry Cabot Winters behaved with the extreme of gallantry. “Permit me to offer my congratulations,” he said, and held out his hand to the bridegroom. The family solidarity was going to be preserved, in spite of everything!

Cornelia had her Bolshevik granddaughter in her arms, and was weeping on her shoulder in orthodox family fashion. Betty too had tears shining in her eyes--a reaction from the strain they had just been under. Women, who have been but a short time emancipated, do not defy and insult the mighty males of their clan without terrific inner disturbances. They wouldn’t admit it, of course; they would pretend they were crying over the end of a trial marriage! “There, there, Grannie!” said the trial bride. “Our scandal is over, and it wasn’t half as bad as you imagined. Joe and I have had all our domestic quarrels in advance, so we can have the fun of a wedding without any of the grief.”

XII

The marriage of Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin to Joseph Jefferson Randall did not take place in Trinity Church in the City of Boston, and there were no little flower-girls strewing roses in the aisles, nor bridesmaids with large drooping hats, companioned by stern-faced ushers from Harvard. Not all the influence of the Thornwells could have persuaded the rector of Trinity to marry a man who had allowed his former wife to divorce him without that scandal which Episcopal Church ordinances require; neither would the rebel Betty have consented to be made into what she called a “holy show.”

The event took place in what was known as the “Community Church,” a gathering place of eccentric persons who worshiped the ideal of brotherhood embodied in the personality of “Comrade Jesus.” As this ancient Hebrew agitator had been born in a stable, his followers had purchased an old garage on Beacon Hill, and made it over with whitewash and lively red and blue paint, with stairs going up the side, and a gallery running all the way round, leading to offices from which spiritual dynamite was mailed out to the indignant respectability of the Back Bay. The pastor was a new style Christian with a sense of humor, willing to marry a young couple whose scandals did not conform to canon law.

So, on a warm afternoon of early autumn there appeared several automobiles in front of Number 6 Byron Street, and there entered Betty and Joe and Cornelia, with half a dozen other rebels old and young, and as many wide-awake and observant young men, who came to make certain that a member of their profession did not marry the daughter of the most powerful banker in town without a proper front page send-off. Some of them carried black boxes, and the “Red” bride and groom were lined up with the “Pink” pastor in the center, and there was a clicking of shutters, and a cry of “Once more, please!” A distressing scene to relatives of the bride, who had come in a vain effort to confer respectability upon the occasion.

An extraordinary moment for the Community Church: the president of the Pilgrim National Bank and his wife in attendance, dressed exactly as if for a real wedding, and holding themselves sternly erect, unaware of the existence of newspaper photographers. Also the older sister of the bride, Mrs. Priscilla Alvin Shaw, descending carefully from her motor car, clad in the voluminous garment known as a “maternity gown.” Also Aunt Clara Scatterbridge--without even having been invited, but determined to do her part to maintain family solidarity, and hush the voice of scandal. This wedding, while unorthodox and unesthetic, was legal; so the horrible black shadow would be lifted from the Thornwells! No more poison-pen letters, no more whispers in Back Bay drawing-rooms! The escutcheon would be wiped clean--and the family was so relieved, it would accept any kind of performance, in any kind of made-over garage.

The bridegroom being a newspaper man, his colleagues would be loyal to him; those who happened to know that he had had a former wife, would not mention it. They would “play up” the note of social drama--the press agent of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense marrying into the sacred Brahmin caste! The young couple were going to spend their honeymoon in a factory, getting first-hand information as to the lives of the workers; the daughter of the most powerful banker in Boston had actually got a job in a paper-box factory, at a little less than two dollars a day, and promised to live on it for a year!

When the reporters actually got upon the scene, and witnessed the big shiny limousine of the Alvins, with a chauffeur in uniform, and an equipage equally costly for the bride’s sister, and yet another for an aunt--only then did they realize the explosive power of the story. This wasn’t merely a local story, this was an “A.P. story”! The reporter for the Hearst paper had an inspiration: it was a “sociological marriage”! A Hearst reporter would not hesitate to tackle Jehovah himself, if he could get into heaven; so he walked up to the great banker and asked him for a comment upon his daughter’s honeymoon. The haughty Rupert looked straight over the young ruffian’s head--he was tall enough to do that. But alas, the mother of the bride, being less trained in the wiles of “Hearst men,” committed the mistake of opening her mouth. “Mr. Alvin makes it a rule not to be quoted in newspapers.” The reporter, seizing his golden opportunity, explained, “I just wanted to know, Mrs. Alvin, if your husband agrees with his daughter’s ideas on social questions.” The great lady replied, haughtily, “My husband does not agree with any of his daughter’s ideas!” So, of course, the whole town had a hilarious laugh next morning.

In fact, the story “took” so well that the word went forth to follow it up. The reporters tracked the bride to the paper-box factory, and took pictures of her at work. They tracked her to the little apartment where the “sociological honeymoon” was to be passed, and published her in a fifty-cent apron, frying her first supper of bacon and eggs; they gave the price of all the ingredients, and a schedule of the “sociological budget.” They interviewed the ardent young lady propagandist on every subject with which her father could fail to agree: trial marriages, love and freedom, birth control, social justice, the banking system, capital and labor, the Lucy Stone League. Nor did they fail to call up the palace on the North Shore, and ask if Mrs. Alvin would come to the phone, and hear a summary of her daughter’s opinions, and say whether her husband would agree with them!

XIII

One of the McAnarney brothers, attorneys for the defense, got into conversation with old Mr. Ripley, the flag-saluting foreman of the jury, and was told, quite casually, how this foreman had had revolver cartridges, similar to the ones which had been found upon Sacco, and how Ripley had marked them, and taken them into the jury room and shown them to some of the jurors, comparing them with the exhibits of the prosecution. A thrill of excitement ran through the Sacco-Vanzetti defense; here, as in the Plymouth trial, was evidence improperly introduced, never seen by the defense. As fate willed it, Ripley died before his testimony could be taken. But the jurors were interviewed, and several swore that they had seen the cartridges; also Ripley’s widow had seen them.

It was the first of a series of motions for a new trial, which were to entertain the friends of the defense for a period of six years. The “Ripley motion,” and then the “Daley motion”--Daley being the friend of Ripley’s, who told of the conversation at the railroad station, when Ripley said that he was on the way to report for jury duty in the case of a couple of “guinneys” accused of banditry, and, “Damn them, they ought to hang anyhow.”

And then a letter from Frank Burke, the exhibitor of glass-blowing, telling how he had run into Roy Gould, the salesman of shaving-paste. The mystery of the man with the bullet-hole through his overcoat solved at last! Gould had been up in Nova Scotia all this time; now he was in Portland, Maine; and Fred Moore jumped onto a train, and the friends of the defense got the greatest thrill yet. For it was just as they had been told--Gould had been within five or ten feet of the bandit who was supposed to be Sacco, and this bandit had fired at him and pierced his overcoat. Gould came to Dedham jail and looked at Sacco, and said that he had never seen him before, and that he bore no resemblance to the bandit.

So the Boston papers broke into headlines, “New Evidence in Sacco Case,” and hope sprang to life in every heart. Surely there would be a new trial now! Surely it would not be possible to execute a man, when it was known that evidence of such importance had been deliberately withheld from the jury! For that was what had happened--the salesman of shaving-paste had given his name to a police officer, and this officer made affidavit that he had turned it in to both the local and the state police. Captain Proctor had had it!

To ardent young radicals that seemed a scandal of major proportions, and they proceeded to send out press items and to print leaflets and mail circulars--only to discover that nobody was interested except ardent young radicals. The great Commonwealth was content to leave the matter to what it called “the orderly processes of law”--which meant precisely this and nothing else: that affidavits would be typed out and sworn to, and submitted in a motion to Judge Thayer, who would take a year to study over them, and would then produce one of his famous decisions, in which the defense position would be misrepresented, and arguments of the defense would be met by answers to other arguments which the defense had never thought of!

In this case the old judge’s decision was such as to cause people to wonder whether his hatred had not driven him insane. He gave his reason for denying the motion in the following words: “The affiant (Gould) never saw Sacco, according to his affidavit, from April 15th, 1920, the day of the murder, until November 10, 1921, when he went to Dedham jail at the request of Mr. Moore. In other words, the affiant must have carried a correct mental photograph in his mind of Sacco for practically eighteen months, when he only had a glance in which to take this photograph on the day of the murder.” “Web” Thayer actually wrote those words, and read them from the bench, and caused them to be printed in the law-books--along with the affidavit of Gould, which stated in the plainest possible words, not merely that Gould had not seen Sacco on April 15th, 1920, but that Gould had never seen Sacco in his life until the occasion when he saw him in Dedham jail, eighteen months after the crime, and three months after the conviction!

XIV

And then the “Pelzer motion.” Louis Pelzer was the bewildered Jewish shoe-worker, who had made such a spectacle of himself on the witness-stand, claiming to identify Sacco upon seeing him many months after the crime, and at the same time admitting under cross-examination that he had lied to an investigator for the defense. Now Pelzer made an affidavit to the effect that his identification of Sacco was false, and that the words, “his dead image,” had been put into his mouth by the assistant district attorney, Mr. Harold Williams, whom the august Commonwealth was soon to make into a superior court judge.

And then the “Goodridge motion.” Here was the star witness of the prosecution, whose criminal record had been kept from the jury by the perfect team-work of those expert basketball players, Messrs. Katzmann and Thayer. Now the defense got onto the trail of the several-times-convicted crook, and obtained all his record, the jail sentences, the numerous wives, and the warrant for horse-stealing in New York State, which would have meant a long sentence, as a third conviction. Fred Moore and another man ran their quarry down in the little town of Vassalboro, Maine, and saw his wrists held out for the handcuffs. Moore was naïve enough to be surprised that the authorities did not want this crook any more--neither in Maine, nor in New York, nor in Massachusetts could the machinery of exact and impartial justice be prodded into action. Moore, being an Irishman, and emotional, was emphatic with his victim, and brought down upon his head a stern rebuke from the just and upright Mr. Justice Thayer for his method of procedure. Which was all that came of the “Goodridge motion”!

And then the “Andrews motion.” The son of “Fainting Lola” was discovered, also living among the “Mainiacs.” He consented to come to meet his mother, who was working as a waitress. He reminded her of various emotional dramas in which she had played a rôle; with the result that Lola had more hysterics, and broke down and admitted that her testimony against Sacco had been “framed.” In the presence of two well-known labor leaders she signed an affidavit, declaring that her reason for swearing Sacco’s life away was that “the Commonwealth was in possession of facts relative to the private life of the affiant which the affiant was not desirous of having brought out on the witness stand,” and that by threats based on that knowledge she was “coerced and intimidated.” She named the four men who had done this; one was Mike Stewart, inventor of the “theory,” another was Brouillard, a police officer, the third was Mr. Harold Williams, soon to be a judge, and the fourth was District Attorney Frederick G. Katzmann.

Another thrill ran through the little band of defenders. For Lola Andrews had been the other star witness of the prosecution--it was she of whom Katzmann had said with such intense solemnity to the jury, “I cannot recall that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews.” Even the capitalist newspapers were moved to protest now; the Boston American declared that either Lola was crazy, “or else some one in the district attorney’s office at that time ought to be arrested and tried for attempted murder.” Upon reading that, the police authorities of the august Commonwealth got busy--not to arrest themselves for attempted murder, but to compel Lola and Louis to sign new affidavits, declaring that their previous affidavits were false, and had been obtained by threats from the defense lawyers.

The Great Novelist who makes up history was desirous of making a perfect melodrama, and also a perfect demonstration of class justice, out of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. To that end it was necessary to provide an answer to the question: what would happen in the pious Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts if a rich man were to commit a murder? While Sacco and Vanzetti were in jail, awaiting trial, a poor devil of a Swede by the name of Johnson, having a wife and two young children, but no job, and no food in the house, and no coal in the month of January, went into some woods on a private estate, with a saw and wheelbarrow, for the purpose of gathering dead wood, which was lying in profusion on the ground. The aged owner of this estate was a Cunningham, a name of great honor in the fashionable town of Milton; and in the pride of his name and great possessions he took a rifle and shot the unarmed Swede. He fired without aiming; the victim had just got over a fence, escaping. The killer was arrested and brought to Dedham jail, and spent eight days in a cell near Sacco, and then was politely bailed out.

Cornelia, in her thinking about Massachusetts justice, had imagined a rich person committing murder, and had guessed that such a person would be declared insane. But the case of Commonwealth vs. Cunningham showed her that she had expected too much from the law. The blue-blood families keep their insane members hidden away in remote wings of old mansions, and do not permit the stigma to be put upon them in public proceedings. For thirteen months the killer of John Johnson did not even have to make a plea. At last he was brought to trial in Dedham Court House, where Sacco and Vanzetti had faced the jury. Public feeling had cooled off; and no evidence was produced to prove that he was either an anarchist, an infidel, or a draft dodger. So the stern Mr. Katzmann became gracious and mild; the crime was called “justifiable homicide,” and the killer was acquitted.

Also it was necessary to the perfection of the Sacco-Vanzetti melodrama that the victims should have continual evidence of the venality of their persecutors. The Great Novelist arranged it that three more times during the next six years emissaries should come to the defense, pointing out the folly of spending so much money upon lawyers’ fees and circulars, when the small sum of fifty thousand dollars, slipped to the right lawyers, would set their two friends “on the street.” And lest the young radicals should be unable to believe that these emissaries really possessed the power they claimed, the Great Novelist caused what was known as the “Coakley-Pelletier scandal” to break into continuous explosion, after the fashion of Chinese firecrackers strung on a line all the way along a city street. For months the newspapers were filled with picturesque details about the crimes and sexual misadventures of Boston millionaires, and the prices they had paid to politicians and officials.

Dan Coakley was a Democratic lawyer, who had run the city of Cambridge for some twenty years: a lively personality who had begun life as a street-car conductor and had given up his job when the company installed machines to register fares. He had his license as a conductor, signed by the superintendent of the company, with the words scrawled across it: “Discharged for neglect of duty.” It had amused Dan to frame this document, and hang it in his law office, while he was preparing damage suits which cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Needless to say, he was an ardent patriot; he had paid the expenses of the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic convention in San Francisco, so that they might vote for the Quaker attorney-general, who was so heroically smashing the Reds. For years, if you wanted to get out of trouble in either Middlesex or Suffolk County, the password was, “See Coakley.”

The district attorney of Suffolk County, which includes the city of Boston, was “Joe” Pelletier. (All Massachusetts statesmen go by their pet names, unless they have a great deal of money.) “Joe” likewise was an ardent patriot, and never lost a chance to deliver an oration for God, country, and the pope. He was National Advocate for the Knights of Columbus, which is the political auxiliary of the Catholic Church; he had been knighted by the pope; and it was his job to drop charges against wealthy criminals, after they had paid proper retaining fees to the proper lawyers.

This had been going on for so many years, under the protection of the flag and the crucifix, that the ring had got bold, and had taken to “framing” cases against victims. That was all right when it was a couple of anarchist “wops,” but it was a different matter when it meant sending women to lure rich blue-bloods into bed, and have detectives smash in the doors and take photographs of them. The “ring” had a regularly paid staff of women, and three apartments in the Back Bay. In one case they had gone so far as to have the woman hidden in a closet, unknown to the victim, and in this way they had got an enormous sum from a terrified old railroad president--an Adams, and a “right” one! In another case they had collected forty thousand dollars from a man on his deathbed.

XVI

It was after the trapping of Josiah Thornwell Winters that the blue-bloods decided to smash this “ring.” Councils were held in the Union Club, and a citizen who had no scandals was found--the head of the Watch and Ward Society--and persuaded to the dangerous job. Godfrey L. Cabot was his name, and before he got through, it was a well-known name to the readers of Boston newspapers. For of course the ring knew what he was doing before he knew it himself, and was setting traps for him after a fashion too fantastic for anything but reality. Mr. Cabot got a dictaphone in Coakley’s office, and hired a spy to hire himself to Coakley and arrange to bribe Pelletier. But presently the spy was arrested, and Godfrey L. Cabot was indicted for hiring a man to offer bribes. The climax of hilarity came when it was revealed that it was Dan who had hired the spy, to get himself hired by Godfrey to come and hire Dan to bribe Joe!

Impossible to imagine more melodrama than this scandal provided for the readers of Boston newspapers through the better part of a year! Underworld ladies trapped into telling their stories, with stenographers hidden behind screens; elderly blue-bloods “railroaded” into lunatic asylums for their money; hotel proprietors forced to part with their property for a small part of its value; the “badger game” and the “shakedown,” the “girl with the dimpled nose,” a “visiting actress,” “the Egyptian mystic, Omar Kaldah”! Hardly a day without a new millionaire in the pillory, or a “scion of wealth” relieved of his patrimony! A series of sensational trials, with witnesses “grilled” and “broken” by great lawyers who “thundered” and “stormed.” United States Senator “Jim” Reed, endowed with the voice of a bull, defending his Democratic colleague, “Joe”:

“Does this diabolical persecution spring from religious prejudice? Is that the thing which inspires Cabot and his crew; that makes them gather witnesses from the four quarters of the earth; that gives protection to the criminal and the near-criminal? I do not know, but this I boldly say, that I have never seen such digging in the catacombs of the past, such raking of the dust of time, such malicious ingenuity, such fixed determination as we have witnessed.”

And then the attorney-general, answering the bull-voiced senator, and describing the “national advocate” of the Knights of Columbus in metaphors taken from classical oratory:

“The sword of justice was placed in his hands and he made of it a highwayman’s club. He used the scales of justice to weigh the price of corrupt favors. He has bartered the powers of his great office to the highest bidder. For personal ends he has protected the criminal and oppressed the innocent. He has so far forgotten his honor and his oath that he has brought reproach upon the fair name of the Commonwealth, has allowed her mantle to be dragged in the mire, has debauched his high office for his own selfish ends, and like Esau of old, has sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.” No wonder the life of the attorney-general was threatened, and guards had to protect his home!

Also Dan Coakley was indicted and tried. The blue-bloods employed no less than thirty-six detectives to guard the jury; when Dan was acquitted, the blue-bloods wished they had hired more of them. However, Dan was disbarred from practice; and “Joe” Pelletier, National Advocate for the Knights of Columbus and hero of all Catholic patriots, was removed from office and disbarred. But not until he had gone up and down the county telling what he knew about his enemies. He announced himself as candidate for mayor--Democratic Catholic “Joe,” friend of the common man, persecuted by holier-than-thou exploiters and wholesale bribe-givers. The common man thought that sounded very good; to him the victims of the blackmail ring were millionaire degenerates, preying upon his daughters; and since the law could not get them, let Joe take their money, and give part of it to the church, to be expended for orphan asylums and altar cloths!

But what a shudder in blue-blood circles, when this man who knew all secrets got up on the stump and started reciting names, places and dates. Stopping not at the most exalted offices! When he discussed the Supreme Judicial Court, he said things of interest to the friends of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were making such expensive appeals to the supreme judicial virtue of that great tribunal:

“Go up some day and watch the justices of the Supreme Judicial Court file down to the Union Club. Whom do they eat with? The capital interests, the corporation lawyers for the street railway cases, the gas cases, the light cases. These are the men that break bread with them. That may not mean anything to you. If so, bless you for your innocence! I confess to being more suspicious by nature.”

Thus people’s friend “Joe,” soon to be tried by that same tribunal!

XIII. TRIAL BY JURY…

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